New Release Books by Nina Lykke

Vibrant Death links philosophy and poetry-based, corpo-affectively grounded knowledge seeking. It offers a radically new materialist theory of death, critically moving the philosophical argument beyond Christian and secular-mechanistic understandings. The book''s ethico-political figuration of vibrant death is shaped through a pluriversal conversation between Deleuzean philosophy, neo-vitalist materialism and the spiritual materialism of decolonial, queerfeminist poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldua. The book''s posthuman deexceptionalizing of human death unfurls together with a collection of poetry, and autobiographical stories. They are analysed through the lens of a posthuman, queerfeminist revision of the method of autophenomenography (phenomenological analysis of autobiographical material). Nina Lykke explores the speaking position of a mourning, queerfeminine ”I”, who contemplates the relationship with her dead beloved lesbian life partner. She reflects on her enactment of processes of co-becoming with the phenomenal and material traces of the deceased body, and the new assemblages with which it has merged through death''s material metamorphoses: becoming-ashes through cremation, and becoming-mixed-with-algae-sand when the ashes were scattered across a seabed made of fiftyfive million-year-old, fossilized algae. It is argued that the mourning “I”''s intimate bodily empathizing (theorized as symphysizing) with her deceased, queermasculine beloved life partner facilitates the processes of vitalist-material and spiritual-material co-becoming, and the rethinking of death from a new and different perspective than that of the sovereign, philosophical subject.

In this book, feminist scholar Nina Lykke highlights current issues in feminist theory, epistemology and methodology. Combining introductory overviews with cutting-edge reflections, Lykke focuses on analytical approaches to gendered power differentials intersecting with other processes of social in/exclusion based on race, class, and sexuality. Lykke confronts and contrasts classical stances in feminist epistemology with poststructuralist and postconstructionist feminisms, and also brings bodily materiality into dialogue with theories of the performativity of gender and sex. This thorough and needed analysis of the state of Feminist Studies will be a welcome addition to scholars and students in Gender and Women’s Studies and Sociology.

This book includes interviews with astrologers, wilderness guides, dolphin trainers and academic staff of space agencies from both Russia and the US. It illustrates how all three icons partly reproduce and partly alter the earlier, colonial self-other dichotomy of woman, native, nature against the civilized masculine self. It thus forms an excellent introduction to feminist cultural studies as well as shedding new light on the culture of the space race.