Beyond Development and Morality 153to the ways that masculinist models of modernity, rooted in transcendent
models of an ideal outside of life itself, has shaped our social discourses
and understandings of our behavior and cognition. While the feminist
project as a set of alternatives to masculinist models might well be read as
a form of dualism, my intention here is not to delineate a binary
opposition, but to trace an alternate epistemology and lineage of thought.
My project is to open binary configurations to difference, rather than an
either/or configuration of conceptual frameworks. In that regard, central to
these projects has been a concern with contesting reductive and essentialist
accountings of the complexity of life and lived experience.
Within the broad sweep of feminist theory, there has been a dual
assertion of the necessity to flee appropriation and to develop possibilities
that are responsive to the needs of living things. There has been an impetus
towards horizontal mappings of growth, entangled sets of ecological
relations, collectivist understandings of self, and idiosyncratic movements
across the lifespan. Feminist scholars have challenged the scission of
culture and nature. They have suggested that we expand our understanding
of our movement across space and time to include not just our individual
biology, but also the intricate interpositions of the infinite compositional
elements of the material co-evolutionary creation that produces us. I use
the term interposition in its psychological valence here as an overlapping
of objects that allows for depth perception. It is precisely this deepening of
perception beyond the abstract surfaces of capitalist code that is at stake
here. The ability to see the world anew and to re-imagine thought and
bodies within time as intricately entwined in, what Barad (2007) calls,
“space-time-mattering,” Anzaldúa (1987) calls “Coatlalopeuh,” or as
Stockton (2009) puts it “growing sideways.”
In a sense, the feminist revisioning of the mutagenic morphology of
bodies asks us to leave our conventional notions of development and
morality entirely behind and to entertain our relation to the world as
inseparable and without any outside. There is no dialectical relation in
which lack drives us forward progressively into the future. There is, in fact,
nothing lacking. We are not going anywhere. We cannot be measured