How Towels Came to Matter – on Discursive-Material Reconfigurings of Gender in Academia

Abstract

This article seeks to develop a non-reductionist understanding that highlights how both material and discursive elements are involved in the doing of gender. It is presented as a piece of auto-ethnography, in which the author experienced how her own ‘stabilised and neutral academic gender’ suddenly became destabilised (and thus revealed to be material-discursive) when transferred to another material setting – specifically, a hamam in Istanbul. Although the author’s social relationships with the male participants involved were unaltered, the gendered body came to matter in a new way when it was enacted or ‘measured’ in a different apparatus. Following the plot of this autoethnography, the article investigates how a performative approach could deal with materiality, moving from J. Butler’s perspective and to a performative version of STS, particularly the concepts put forward by K. Barad.