NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 131whether key distinctions between what might be called “natural” and “social”
approaches to the body (Pitts- Taylor 2008; Shilling 2003) remain.
14 This literature mostly draws from the middle work of Michel Foucault (e.g., 1975,
1979), and the early work of Judith Butler (1990, 1993). In this vein, my previous
books explored how body practices reveal the body’s semantic instability — its
multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings. In my previous books I exam-
ine the cultural contests generated over the body and its modification (Pitts
2003; Pitts- Taylor 2007, 2008). In this vein, the specifically neurobiological body
can be understood through the discourses and practices that infuse it with nor-
mative meanings, including gender and racial bias (Metzl 2003, 2011; Upchurch
and Fojtová 2009) and neoliberalism (Martin 2000; Pitts- Taylor 2010; Rose
2007).
15 Although illness can be seen as saturated with symbolism, as Susan Sontag
(2001) argued, and as a social construction, as many medical sociologists see it,
there are many examples of feminists calling for realist approaches to illness and
the ill body (Anzaldua 2002; Bost 2008; and Malabou 2012, to name a few).
16 I am thinking of a broad range of work in feminist and queer phenomenology
and affect theory that takes up the experiential subject as well as the population
(Ahmed 2006; Alcoff 2006; Berlant 2000; Butler 2010; Puar 2008; Saldanha
2006).
17 Disability studies scholars have criticized the medical model of the body for its
individualizing and reductive account of disability, and its assumption that all
bodies should meet normative ideals. Many disability scholars propose a social
constructionist model that accounts for disability in terms of social barriers
to full recognition and participation — biases, built constraints, stigmas, and
ableism. However, some have argued for a “realist” attitude about the physical
body and its capacities, which neither individualizes disability nor effaces the
material, physical aspects of bodily variance. See also Lane 2009; Scully 2008;
Siebers 2001.
18 In the 1990s Haraway (1991), Elizabeth Grosz (1994), Anne Fausto- Sterling
(1992), Linda Birke (1999), and others argued against the separation of the social
and the biological; their views are being affirmed in materialism.
19 I am ambivalent about this moniker, since in fact feminist theorizing of biology
as entangled with the social isn’t “new.” But the term materialism on its own
often suggests an uncritical engagement with the natural sciences, and the term
feminist materialism is exclusive to feminist thought. The term neo- materialism
can be used to describe contemporary modes of engagements with the natural
sciences in both feminist and nonfeminist fields of inquiry, modes that stress the
dynamism, flexibility, complexity, and plasticity of nature. See Alaimo and Hek-
man 2008; Cheah 1996; Colebrook 2000; Coole and Frost 2010; Davis 2009; Hird
2009; Kirby 2008, 2011; Stengers 2010; E. Wilson 2010.
20 For example, on physics, see Barad (2007); on dynamic systems biology see
Oyama (2000a, 2000b); on epigenetics see Landecker (2011), Davis (2014) and