This chapter analyses material collected from scientific podcasts about allergies, scientific articles on the matter, and six interviews conducted in 2019 with people living with conditions that are commonly known as allergies. Using, on the one hand, feminist new materialist theories about the body as a material process of becoming with human and nonhuman others, and intersectionality on the other, it is argued that allergic bodies are situated socio-material trans-corporeal contact zones. In other words, bodies are enacted differently and become debilitated in these contact zones as social structures of power such as gender and economic conditions meet the materiality of the body and the world. The chapter contributes to nonanthropocentric understandings of intersectionality that engages with notions of gender, debility, and the body as always already enacted through material encounters with nonhuman others and situated in social structures as individuals experience their allergic bodies. 

In 2020, the editors of this volume, Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, Milla Tiainen, Taru Leppänen, and Tara Mehrabi, decided to dedicate one of the volume’s chapters to a discussion concerned with the main aim of the book, namely: exploring the potential and challenges of working with feminist new materialist and posthumanist theories and intersectionality studies through one another. This aim is reflected in the subtitle of the volume, making middles matter. It is in relation to this aim that the current chapter takes the form of an emergent written discussion between Maneesha Deckha and Liu Xin, two prominent scholars who have, in their respective fields of research, indeed explored and worked with feminist new materialism (FNM) and posthumanities theories and intersectionality studies through one another for several years. 

This chapter calls for mutually enriching encounters between intersectionality studies and feminist new materialisms (FNM), encouraging feminist and gender studies scholars to seek a transversal position between these areas. It is argued that intersectional and FNM approaches, including the overlapping of the latter with posthumanities, necessitate each other in research concerned with the current societal and environmental challenges. Instead of erasing the differing genealogies and existing frictions between FNM and intersectionality studies, the chapter advocates response-able research of complex realities by embracing these fields’ co-constitutive impact while ‘staying with the trouble’ entailed by their ongoing differences. The chapter explores the intersections of intersectional and FNM perspectives by expanding on the concept of ‘the middle’. It is proposed as a productive onto-epistemological notion and methodological orientation which enables simultaneous attention to the socially situated, yet constantly and even situationally emergent, nature of intersectional differences, and to the role of material, more-than-human agencies in their formation. 

In this chapter, we contribute to the discussions on necropolitics, killability, and death during the COVID-19 pandemic in Iran. We take an ‘intra-active’ approach to necropolitics as an ongoing process of ‘spacetimemattering’ with three outcomes: (1) It queers death by moving beyond the normative understanding of death, which implies that death is the ‘final’ outcome of a sovereign’s excessive power. Instead, thinking with Iran/US relations, we articulate death and its politics as an intra-active dynamism that is materialised out of internal/external political agendas, propaganda, and sanctions, space-ing uncertainties that bring about premature death. (2) We queer death as we show how an epistemic orientation towards the past blurs the boundaries between life and death through justifying deaths as a means to ensure the flourishing future upon which a nation’s life depends, hence queering the chrononormative futurity that shapes modern narratives of life and death. (3) Lastly, staying with the agency of both the vaccine and the corpse, we queer death by queering the passive/active binary that marks living bodies as agential against dead matter as passive. Together, these three aspects queer, decolonise, and posthumanise the necropolitics of death in terms of Barad’s ‘spacetimemattering’.

New Materialism and Intersectionality advances the interplay of intersectionality theories and feminist new materialisms, arguing that co-constitutive influences between these fields will provide feminist and gender studies scholars with improved tools to analyse markers of difference and identity in 21st-century realities. In exploring the intersection of new materialisms and intersectionality studies, this volume puts forward a concept of "the middle". It refers to the situation-bound mutual impact of material, social, human, and more-than-human elements in the formation of differences, identities, subject positions, and power relations. The chapters elaborate this understanding of the middle in empirical research concerned with the relational emergence of differences in various social, cultural, artistic, and ecological settings. The middle is also proposed as a verb, whereby researchers who practise "middling" cultivate a capacity to account for the open-ended processes and relationships through which intersectional and materially lived differences unfold and reconfigure in particular contexts. This concept of the middle enriches understandings of how intersectional differences exist and can be studied, and what ethical and political implications they involve. The volume will interest scholars and students working with intersectionality, feminist new materialist, and posthumanist theories across the humanities and the social sciences. 

I explore human and transgenic fruit fly relations in everyday waste management practices in laboratories. I rely on ethnographic material collected from one year of participatory observation in an Alzheimer’s laboratory in Sweden, where scientists work with Drosophila Melanogaster, commonly known as fruit flies. Grounding myself within new materialism, posthuman theories and queer theories, I explore queer ecologies of death in the lab as a material-discursive phenomenon. I discuss how heteronormative and humanistic ideologies about ‘purity’ and ‘pure Nature’ shape the space of the laboratory and regulate waste management practices. However, as I present, the materiality of the living and dead matter problematises such fantasies of purity and pre-described categories of laboratory waste. Flies’ bodies, living and nonliving, cross the boundaries between inside and outside, natural and unnatural/artificial, safe and hazardous waste, and life and death, creating queer ecologies of death. Queer ecologies of death suggest new modes of thinking about agency, (non)human and (non)living within the context of laboratory waste management beyond human exceptionalism and modernist hierarchical binary logic that is essential to and constitutive of the notion of purity and the imaginary of a pure nature out there.

This Handbook aims to provide a comprehensive, international cartography of Queer Death Studies, offering broad, in-depth insights into the field and its emergence through tentacular transdisciplinary networking. Taking research and art-making on death, dying, mourning, and afterlife into new directions, it explores the multiple effects of contemporary necropolitics and the proliferation of death-worlds during the current period of Earth's history, 'The Anthropocene' or 'the Age of Man'. Informed by queer, critical posthumanist, decolonial, and feminist approaches, the Handbook presents a unique variety of both critical and affirmative reflections upon the world's intersecting necropowers, and ethico-political potentials for social and environmental change. Contributors speculate on ways to reimagine life/ death-relations as vibrant entanglements. They also investigate modes of mourning differently, resisting necropolitical regimes that deem human and non-human individuals and populations to be disposable and non-grievable when they differ too much from the normative modern subject, Universal Man, in terms of intersections of gender, racialisation, class, sexuality, embodiment, embrainment, geopolitical positioning, or species. A thought provoking read, this Handbook is intended for broad global audiences of researchers, artists, teachers, students, death-professionals, (health)careworkers, activists, and NGOs interested in tools to rethink and reimagine death, dying, mourning, and afterlife from intersections of queering, decolonising, posthumanising, and feminist perspectives.