Philosophy has traditionally associated the feminine with matter, implying passivity. Why? And to what ends?

In our previous episode on materialism (Season 6, Episode 83), we came to see that in more recent years, two, often related, forms of materialism have been developed: “new materialism” and feminist materialism. New materialism tends toward a philosophical reflection on advances in science, particularly neuro-science and biology, but feminist materialism is not so easy to define, as it takes many forms.

There is, however, one unique issue that feminist materialists must contend with: the way that the tradition of philosophy in the West has associated “the feminine” with “matter” and contrasted matter with form, reason, and structure, evidencing yet another way in which the masculine has been privileged throughout the history of philosophy in the global North and West.

This week, we are joined by Dr. Emanuela Bianchi (Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, NYU), expert in ancient philosophy and feminist philosophy, to find out what’s the matter with “matter”?

In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers/ideas/texts/etc.:

• How many R’s are there in the word “strawberry”? Check out the TikTok video by yallwatcthis to see how ridiculously hard that is to determine for AI!
• Emanuela Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos (Fordham UP, 2014)
• NYU Prison Education Program
• Fermented hot sauce
• Our HBS Season 6, Episode 83 episode on “Materialism”
• Etymology of “matter”
• Plato, Timaeus
• etymological fallacy
• Aristotle’s “Four Causes”
• ontogenesis
• Aristotle, Physics
• Aristotle, History of Animals
• Hélène Cixous 
• Luce Irigaray
• Psychoanalytic feminism
• New materialism
• Jane Benett on matter
• Margaret Cavendish
• Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
• Thales as first philosopher
• Karen Barad
• Richard A. Lee, Jr., The Thought of Matter: Materialism, Conceptuality and the Transcendence of Immanence (2015)
• Hortense Spillers
• Alexander Weheliye
• Charles T. Wolfe and John Symons (Eds), The History and Philosophy of Materialism (forthcoming, 2025)