Posthumanist perturbations : feminist engagements with the human

In this chapter I take up with some of the difficult considerations of feminist posthumanist work regarding the nature of identity to ask what becomes of human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism when their coordinates and privileging cannot be easily displaced or overcome through posthumanist efforts. Working in detail with Vicki Kirby’s notion of “originary humanicity” and Karen Barad’s suggestions for a posthumanist performativity of phenomena, I ask how their thinking on the human comes to bear on our understanding of the “proper objects” of feminist political work. Rather than eschewing anthropocentrism and following Kirby and Barad, I will underscore the im/possibility of human exceptionalism and the non/closure of identity that informs the way a feminist politics might already operate, with the question of essentialism front and center.