Feminist theorists (Western and not) have a history of critiquing “the Subject” (the Subject as Universal Man) and the “gendered objectification” that has historically been that Subject’s agenda (Asberg et al. 5). Offering a needed intervention to the larger philosophical project of object-oriented ontology (OOO), Katherine Behar explains in her collection Object-Oriented Feminism that yes, there is a such thing as object-oriented feminism (OOF), and it twists the philosophy “toward more agential, political, embodied terrain. Object-oriented feminism turns the position of philosophy inside out to study objects while being an object oneself” (3). Behar further writes that there are three important aspects of OOF: politics, which engages with the Western history of already treating some people as mere objects and others as agential subjects; erotics, which makes use of humor and unseemly entanglements of things; and, most important, ethics, or a “welcoming wrongness” by which OOF “refuses to make grand philosophical truth claims, instead staking a modest ethical position that arrives at being ‘in the right’ even if it means being ‘wrong’” (3). This “polyamorous” approach to object-oriented thought “prioritizes feminist intersectionality, which ontological framings, hinging on totality and exclusivity, would seem to overwrite” (Behar 4).

The specter of “anti-correlationality” in OOO writ large serves as a trouble spot in terms of politics. As Behar points out, “withdrawn objects suggest an end to affiliation as such, and with it the neoliberal imperative to network individuals into populations. This ambiguity should give us pause” (5). Does object withdrawal make things “more or less susceptible to regimes of control” (Behar 6)? What are the politics and ethics of OOO? Behar argues that notwithstanding Timothy Morton’s claim of the anarchic potentialities of OOO, “the self-proclaimed radicality of OOO’s discursive intervention was not matched by a radical politics” (6). Speculation needs a more material turn than object-oriented “materiality” has offered, in terms of the objectivity/objectification of politicized, raced, gendered, classed humans/objects within human/nonhuman ecologies. And it’s here that another arm of the speculative turn—new materialism—might be of use (in conjunction with OOF). As Behar explains, OOF and new materialism share a “penchant for experimentation over speculation” (13). She writes that “Where an ontologist might speculate, describing the world ‘This is the way things are,’ object-oriented feminists and feminist new materialists engage in the world using experimental praxis, ‘This is a way of being with things.’ Or more simply, ‘This is a way of being things’” (13).