ABSTRACT

Over the last three decades it has become commonplace in critical scholarship to regard materialism as a discredited theoretical tradition which has been superseded by postmodernism, social and linguistic constructionism, and what is often referred to as ‘the cultural turn’. This narrative of eschewal is familiar and closely linked to the widespread rejection of ‘totalizing’ theoretical projects, usually described in pejorative terms as ‘grand theory’ or ‘metanarratives’.1 In turn this stance is associated with critiques of Marxism, and to a lesser extent, radical feminism. However, the scope of anti-materialist denunciation is often wider, encompassing all forms of structuralism, modernism, or any adherence to the notion of objective access to a real/natural world or to the divisibility of language and reality (Alaimo and Hekman 2008: 2).