The ‘Turns’ of Feminist Time: Evolutionary Logic, Life and Renewal in ‘New Materialist’ Feminist Philosophy

Contemporary feminist philosophy classically tends to reject ideas of historical and biological progress as patriarchal and/or capitalist constructs of temporality. Lately, however, the new materialism in feminism attempts to ‘recover’ the writings of Charles Darwin and evolutionary science, constructing a non-teleological and anti-essentialist feminist theory of mutability, transversality and trans-species connection. Referring to the work of Elizabeth Grosz, Rick Dolphijn, Iris van der Tuin and Jane Bennett, this article critically analyses the new materialists’ reading of some key elements in evolutionary theory and the ‘newness’ of new materialism itself, in an attempt to explore the broader philosophical bases for their claims, and the theory of ‘life’ that appears as a consequence.