UC Berkeley

After decades of being driven by social constructivism, a sea change is occurring in feminism. Feminists have declared that, “language has been given too much power.” This phrase has become a mantra of feminism as it tries to “bring the material back in.” This dissertation examines the emergence of new material feminism and its attempt to revive materiality by “turning” toward science. One of the many questions that motivates this dissertation is how has this “material turn” in feminism come about? And why now? Why is it that after years of critiquing the gendered practices of science are feminists suddenly drawing on the sciences, and for what purpose? One of the central motivations for this turn toward science has to do with a more general tendency in the theoretical humanities and social sciences to move away from textual practices. Many theorists argue that language-focused criticism has led to a privileging of “the social” and its human-centered practices at the expense of the material world studied by the sciences. This privileging has created a gulf between humanistic and scientific research. Part of their project, then, is to rebuild connections between the sciences and humanities.

For new material feminists in particular, quantum physics has become a crucial touchstone. Part of this turn is motivated by the work of theoretical physicist and feminist, Karen Barad. One of the challenges of this dissertation is to try to figure out how quantum physics is being used by Barad and other feminists: is it merely metaphorical? Or does it function as a general analytic for a new kind of feminism? And if so, what’s at stake in merging the concepts and methodologies of physics with feminist theory and practice? Are these feminists calling for a new kind of scientism, or are they calling for something far more subtle, akin to the study of experimental practices in science and technology studies? And furthermore, are these feminists sacrificing any of the hard-fought victories from earlier feminisms? Perhaps most crucially, when feminists champion quantum physics, what aspects of this challenging work are they using, and what are they leaving out? How do language and meaning, for example, figure in this new quantum feminism? Are they made irrelevant in order to embrace the physics? In essence, what this dissertation concerns itself with is how quantum physics has come to have such a hold on the imagination of feminists.

My argument in this dissertation is essentially that new material feminists have a very selective reading of quantum physics. I will show how they valorize the notions of entanglement and diffraction, which have come to be synonymous with connectivity, inclusivity, and becoming. For feminists, this has opened up a whole new intellectual genealogy, which links quantum physics to theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, Bruno Latour, and Alfred North Whitehead. While these are productive “inclusions” that get feminism out of language-centered modes of criticism, they are very often guilty of a cursory reading of the science of entanglement that elides the much more difficult and controversial aspects of the concept. In particular, I demonstrate how measurement and decoherence are unresolved problems for quantum physics, and thus render entanglement a much more complicated set of practices than new material feminists make them out to be. What I endeavor to do then, is to bring decoherence into sharper focus for new materialism. In particular, I want to explore what a new material feminist writing practice that is attentive to the decoherent aspects of entanglement would look like.

To do so, this dissertation has four chapters that take up different aspects of the feminist appropriation of quantum physics. Chapter 1 evaluates new material feminism’s great faith in the work of Barad to “save feminism” from the effects of the linguistic turn. The chapter begins by outlining her theory of agential of realism, which contributes to both science and feminism. Barad critiques current social theories that she argues are grounded in Newtonian principles and harbor three basic assumptions that severely limit our ability to think through the problems we face today: individualism, humanism, and representationalism. Expanding on Donna Haraway’s figuration of “diffraction” as a new optics, Barad develops a new critical method of diffraction, one that utilizes concepts from quantum mechanics to resituate feminist theory as specifically material. In the last several years, Barad’s diffractive method has gained traction in many disciplines, including education, anthropology, comparative literature, film and new media studies, sociology, and theology. Exploring the ways in which diffraction is taken up as a method, I find that four basic tendencies emerge: diffraction as a metaphorical framing for thought, diffraction as a reading practice that produces real effects in the world, diffraction as affirmative critique, and diffraction as an ambiguous “between” space that challenges boundaries. Barad’s theory of agential realism is grounded in quantum physics, and yet I find that diffraction is deployed in terms of classical physics. This refusal to notice the difference between classical and quantum diffraction, I argue, keeps new material feminism tethered to the very Newtonian assumptions they are trying to avoid. New material feminists blame the linguistic turn for the development of “anti-biologism” in feminism, and thus “reject” language from their material concerns. I argue however, that new material feminists must not turn away from language, but rather, engage with it more “real-istically” in order to develop non-representational modes for feminist theory that could align more effectively with Barad’s quantum insights.

Given that the prospect of a specifically “quantum” method of diffraction has yet to be explored, Chapter 2 provides a preliminary sketch of what this sort of method might look like. Nobel prize winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman declares that classical and quantum physics are “impossibly different,” so in order to unpack those differences, I open the chapter by examining the science. First, I present experiments from the early twentieth century that led to two important discoveries in quantum mechanics: particle-wave duality and electron spin. These experiments serve to demonstrate the relevant differences between classical and quantum diffraction, as well as introduce useful quantum concepts, such as interference, superposition, complementarity, inseparability and decoherence. Although it is assumed in new material feminist discourse that “exclusions matter,” very little attention is paid to the precise nature of those exclusions, and none is paid to specifically “quantum” exclusions. On the contrary, diffractive readings often privilege the quantum term “entanglement,” but deploy it in terms of a wave metaphor from classical diffraction that implies connectedness and inclusivity. In other words, I argue, despite the claim that “exclusions matter,” the diffractive method has largely excluded exclusions from its practice.

Therefore, and second, I bring exclusions back into the diffractive method through an explanation of the mysterious Measurement Problem in quantum physics. Although physicists don’t agree on how to solve this so-called problem, they (mostly) agree that measurement interference is crucial to the transition, or “drop,” from indeterminacy to a determined state. This is called “decoherence.” The universe is not “everywhere connected,” or simply and universally “entangled;” rather, “measurements matter” because decoherence is the crucial transition from indeterminacy to determined state. Applied to the quantum method of diffraction, then, the privileging of entities that only “combine and overlap” is necessarily insufficient; any quantum mode of diffraction, I argue, must also account for the exclusionary practices that operate to produce representations, intelligibility, and knowledge. New material feminism can account for its exclusion for decoherence, and thereby put it to use. I conclude the chapter by asserting that a quantum diffractive method cannot simply be an “affirmative” reading practice that interprets texts; rather, it is a genealogical practice that traces out the invisible representational practices involved in producing intelligibility which ground a given textual interpretation.

Moving beyond the interpretive strategies of diffraction that visualize ever more entangled relations, Chapter 3 focuses in on decoherence as an exclusionary practice that matters for new material feminism. New material feminists are keen to “undo dualisms,” especially the lingering one between language and reality, but their “de-constructive” attempts, I argue, maintain the ontological separation of language and reality. Language, I suggest, is a problematic field that requires a creative response. Therefore, following the critical assessment of new material feminist diffractive methods in Chapter 1, and the demand to incorporate decoherence into a proposed quantum diffraction method in Chapter 2, I am led in Chapter 3 to map some new conceptual territory. I turn to the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in order to render visible the surprising relations between their work on rhizomatics and the measurement apparatus in quantum physics. There is a conceptual parallel, I contend, between two separate occlusions in these two discourses. First, rhizomatics was conceived as a general analytic, and consequently left out the specific guidelines on writing. Although numerous scholars remark on Deleuze and Guattari’s “preoccupation with the book” in A Thousand Plateaus, writing is utterly neglected in the commentary. Second, the diffractive method has privileged the notion of connection in quantum entanglement, and consequently, has left out decoherence from diffraction. This chapter reclaims both omissions—“the book” and “decoherence”—and draws them together. Following on what Deleuze and Guattari have to say about diagrammatic writing as an alternative to the literary text, I theorize an experimental and non-representational practice of writing for diffraction that I call “decoherent writing.”

Chapter 3 shows how writing was excluded from rhizomatics and decoherence was excluded from the diffractive method. Carrying this idea of constitutive exclusions over into Chapter 4, I offer a genealogical investigation of particular exclusions that produce diffraction as a “new optics” for new material feminism. In other words, I use the idea that writing practices make necessary exclusions to understand the conditions of possibility for new material feminism to exist as a material writing practice. Their “new diffractive optics” involves the dismantling of negative critique in favor of an affirmative form of critique. This new affirmative criticality has become a hallmark of new material feminism. In this chapter I demonstrate how an affirmative reading practice can only exist on the condition that language and poststructuralism are excluded. I pay special attention to the very specific rhetorical techniques that make this constitutive exclusion possible. What is and must be excluded are the invisible conditions of possibility for these new materialist modes of viewing. In the end, I argue that new material feminism excludes exclusions in order to promote affirmation. Engaging with the quantum concept of decoherence offers a way to highlight and account for the constitutive exclusions of feminist writing practices.