Abstract:
Informed by discourses of bodily becoming and feminist new materialist methodologies, my research looks at the embodied nature of young womanhood. In this close-up look at young women's bodily self- becoming (Rice 2014), I consider women's bodies as complex assemblages that cut across natural and cultural domains and could be seen as flows of becoming (Braidotti 2011). In new materialist feminist thinking, human and more-than-human bodies matter, not just in the workings of power (Barad 2003), they also have an agentive role in their own iterative materialisation (Barad 2007). I take up this understanding and ask how women's body parts, flesh and bones, organs, hormones, desires, aggregated affects and affective flows matter in the continuous production of socio-material worlds. To look at this question, I follow critiques of methodocentrism in social science and turn to mobile methods and their potential for bringing the fleeting, the dynamic, uneven and open-ended elements of embodiment to the foreground. In this paper, I propose creative, playful, open-ended movement as a research method to be a political, ethical, practical act of resisting fixation, whilst contributing to possibilities for being otherwise. To this end, I 'listen' to moving/dancing bodies attuning to flows of affect that come to be in facilitated encounters of dancing female bodies. The data I will work with in this paper comes from performance ethnography conducted with a group of Melbourne University students interested in creative methods and feminist issues. As a group of non- dancers, we danced to produce and explore feelings, thoughts, ideas, sensations and/or creative artefacts about embodied womanhood, in order to, potentially, open up the affective economy (Claugh 2010) of our bodily beings.