Writing-with feminist materialist and posthumanist qualitative inquiry

This chapter will explore what it means to write qualitative inquiry from a feminist materialist and posthumanist perspective. Initially it will define the key philosophical perspectives of feminist materialist and posthumanist inquiry touching on the immanent, affective, indisciplined and speculative nature of the methodologies employed and the ‘data’ that are produced. These methodologies are connected and relational in nature and open up possibilities for enacting different ways of knowledge making that are geopolitically informed and contest humanist understandings of position and power. Drawing on a number of key theoretical principals the chapter will explore how writing from a feminist materialist and posthumanist perspective produces new, diffractive and dynamic thinking-doing practices that are partial, situated and move beyond linear modes of thinking and writing. Ethics are a key feature when writing feminist materialist and posthumanist inquiry and these are articulated by working with concepts such as response-ability, ethico-onto-epistemology, relationality and by the careful crafting of texts – every word and inflection matters. The chapter will conclude with an exploration of the authors’ own individual and collective writing experiences. There will be a discussion on the affordances offered by writing in novel ways such as: post-authorship; ecriture feminine; the use of maps, images and diagrams; poems; disaggregated text; and how writers can use enabling constraints as part of the writing process. These types of writing provide the opportunity to explore what is produced by following connections, entangling with knots, and thinking with the sympoietic stories presented by, and revealed in, ‘data’.