For some time now, my colleagues and I at Labirinto (Labyrinth, Laboratory of Socio-anthropological Studies on Technologies of Life, State University of Campinas, Brazil) have been discussing and practicing feminist ways of doing academic research. For us, this goes far beyond prioritizing feminist readings. That’s important, but we’re trying to build practices that are articulated with what we believe politically and what we want for the university and the world. One important point is to create a welcoming working environment based on careful personal interactions that avoid as much as possible reproducing the classist, racist, and misogynist ways of working that are so common in the academic power structure. Another point is to think about how we can experiment with methodological proposals that are open to difference. Figuration, especially in Donna Haraway’s proposals, is one such experiment.
This is a do-it-yourself manual on how to create figurations and inhabit feminist STS research. It is the result of these discussions in the Labyrinth, and also of my doctoral thesis.
Handmade collage of clippings from old science encyclopedias. Psychedelic and visceral scene made from illustrations of parts of the human body. Credits: Clarissa Reche.
Figurations: Where They Come From
Figuration is a methodological procedure that consists of creating figures, or tropes. Tropes are figures of speech, such as allegory, hyperbole, metonymy, metaphor. Like Donna Haraway, many feminist theorists who developed critiques of science and technology in the late 20th century pointed out that the creation of tropes, especially metaphors, make up an important part of scientific practice itself, and are a privileged point of observation to understand ethical consequences of the theoretical and experimental speculations of science. For example, when using metaphors that refer to domination and violence to describe the objectives of research (explore, unveil, discover), the image that is constructed of nature is as something capable of being treated in such a way.
The methodological proposal of figuration, as described by Haraway, places us once again at the center of a basic procedure of technoscience, making us stay with the trouble. Furthermore, Haraway points to the origins of her interest in figuration in the influence of Catholic heritage on her thought (Haraway, 2006, p. 137). In the “semiotics of Western Christian realism,” the figure of Christ embodies both past prophecies and future apocalyptic hopes (Haraway, 2018, p. 9). Haraway’s proposal is to use figuration with the aim of engaging in a creative process to subvert this temporal logic. With figurations, we exercise a speculative dimension in our research, hoping to produce different thoughts, practices and worlds.
Figurations: What They Are
That which “figures” is that which “embodies”(Haraway, 2018, p. 9), i.e. what brings bodiliness, materiality, and situationality. Figurations are “entities” (ibid., p. 8) that connect different dimensions of knowledge, for example, the dimensions of imagination and the material. Figurations are “performative images that can be inhabited” (ibid., p. 11). Thus, the figurations are also:
- an obligatory worldification: “inhabiting it you can’t not get it ” (Haraway, 2006, p. 239);
- a map of worlds that we can contest: “we inhabit and are inhabited by such figures that map universes of knowledge, practice, and power” (Haraway, 2018, p. 11);
- places you travel to: “you get somewhere you weren’t before” (Haraway, 2026, p. 152);
- a specific time-space: “my cyborg figures inhabit a mutated time-space regime that I call technobiopower” (Haraway, 2018, p. 12).
Figurations: What They Are Not
Metaphors, tropes, figuration, and narration practices are “much more than literary decoration” (Haraway, 2018, p. 299). Therefore, when making figurations, we also need to be aware of what they are not:
- literal and self-identical: “figures do not need to be representational and mimetic, but they must be tropic” (Haraway, 2018, p. 11);
- innocent, always positive or negative: “It is not just about picking an entity in the world, some kind of interesting academic object. There is a cathexis that needs to be understood” (Haraway, 2004, p. 338).
Figurations: What They Do
As methodological tools for research, figurations produce roots and connections between people and the stories being told, allowing us to inhabit stories that we could otherwise easily simply condemn or celebrate (Haraway, 2004, p. 1). The work to create figurations is a work of opening possibilities for stories without a determined ending. In this way, figurations:
- stammer, stumble, break down: “they are creative. That is why you get somewhere you weren’t before, because something didn’t work” (Haraway, 2021, p. 152);
- are displacements towards uncertainties: “figures must involve at least some kind of displacement that can trouble identifications and certainties” (Haraway, 2018, p. 11);
- depart from apocalypse/salvation stories: “to read such maps with mixed and differential literacies and without the totality, appropriations, apocalyptic disasters, comedic resolutions, and salvation histories of secularized Christian realism” (Haraway, 2018, p. 11);
- are materialized assemblages, configurations, and reconfigurations: “for example, this family or kinship of entities, chip, gene, foetus, bomb, etc. (it is an indefinite list), is about location and historical specificity, and it is about a kind of assemblage, a kind of connectedness of the figure and the subject” (Haraway, 2004, p. 338).
Knowing Some Figurations…
Cyborg
The cyborg is the figuration that populates the classic “Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (Haraway 1985). Born from postmodern and non-naturalist socialist-feminist theory, the cyborg also has in its genealogy the utopian tradition of imagining the world without gender, without genesis, and without end (Haraway, 1991, p. 150). Being a hybrid par excellence, the cyborg inhabits the dissolution of boundaries between human being and machine, human and animal, nature and culture. Staying away from pure technophobia/pessimism and pure technophilia/optimism, Haraway allies with the cyborg to outline possibilities for escaping the essentialism of fixed identities. The cyborg’s existence as fiction and lived experience changes what counts as “women’s experience” by asserting that identities are contradictory, partial, and strategic.
Polegarzinha
Polegarzinha (something near “Thumbelina” in Portuguese) has her head between her fingers. It is with her that we join hands to walk through Gabriela Paletta’s research (2019) and face the viscous world of menstruapps, cell phone applications for monitoring and controlling the menstrual cycle. In her dissertation, Paletta created the Polegarzinha figuration as a research methodology to approach and analyze some free and popular menstruapps. Paletta investigates how technology “incorporates” itself and “makes a body,” experimenting—with the help of Polegarzinha—how “menstrual cycle” and “menstruation” are being produced and performed on these platforms. Polegarzinha doesn’t have numb thumbs: this figuration of a young student has agile and precise thumbs. New counterparts from the world reach her. The worldification that Polegarzinha invites us to do is based on the possibility of a kind of contemporary resistance to the dampening that the digital has increasingly presented to us as a life practice.
Spotting
I ask for permission to tell you a little about my experience with figurations during the research I carried out in my PhD. I carried out ethnography together with anthropologists researching their experiences of menstruation during fieldwork, especially when they were in Indigenous territory (Costa, 2024). As you can imagine, these experiences were systematically suppressed from the academic knowledge that these anthropologists produced, even when they were valuable field inputs. This is because menstruation is often associated with a less productive body, and this is no different in academic work. To be able to move along with this sensitive topic, I created the “spotting” figuration. In interviews with anthropologists, the memory of menstrual blood spotting always appeared. Anyone who inhabits spotting knows what I’m talking about. And this sensitive and powerful communication was important for me to be able to safely navigate the complexities of menstruation.
Creating a Kinship Sticker Album: Some Questions to Get Started
When used as methodological strategies to provoke critical thoughts and practices, figurations generate an opening of horizons experienced “in the flesh.” For Braidotti, the figurations make up a creative project with the aim of stimulating a qualitative change in consciousness by being vehicles for glimpsing other modes of belonging (Thiele, 2021, p. 232). The figurations and their assemblages/reconfigurations work from within the stories that are being told, not from the outside in a disembodied critique, and, in this way, invite us to move, get closer, to look from other angles. The stumbling step is precisely in this movement: we are used to reflexive criticism that, looking in the mirror, reflects the same image that it observes.
Figurations are not mirrors. They are material-semiotic entities/creatures that help us complicate the way in which we feel and learn different dimensions of the world. They affect our senses, allowing us to be aware of concrete problems (Thiele, 2021, p. 231). Therefore, figurations are not innocent either. They collect hopes and fears, and show possibilities and dangers (Haraway, 2004, p. 1). The assemblages (or kinship groups) that figurations form go through lineages that defamiliarize them and propose new reconfigurations, which is also not ever innocent. There is a strong connection between whoever analyzes and writes, the object of writing, and the figurations produced. The implications of these links must be excavated, as these links are just a way of being in the world, and it is important to understand why these assemblages are being made and not others (Haraway, 2004, p. 338).
To close this DIY manual, I share some questions that can help you create your family sticker album. The questions below can be asked for each figuration you are creating, to help them take shape and become incarnated.
- Do you inhabit this figuration? How?
- Where did they make you travel?
- How does the world that this figuration maps look like?
- What is the time-space of this figuration?
Have fun!
References
COSTA, Clarissa R. N. da. Manchando: (o que) fazer (com) a menstruação. Estratégias e experimentos para vazar questões feministas através das tecnociências. Thesis (Doctorate in Social Sciences) – Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences, State University of Camṕinas, Campinas, 2024.
HARAWAY, Donna J. A cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In: HARAWAY, Donna. Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. New York: Taylor & Frances, 1991.
HARAWAY, Donna J. Modest _ Witness @ Second _ Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouseTM. Second Edition. New York: Routledge, 2018.
HARAWAY, Donna J. The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004.
HARAWAY, Donna. When We Have Never Been Human, What Is to Be Done? Theory Culture Society, n.23, 2006.
THIELE, Kathrin. Figuration and/as Critique in Relational Matters. In: HAAS, Annika Haas et al (org). How to Relate. Knowledge, Arts, Practices. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2021.
PALETTA, Gabriela Cabral. Menstruapps na era farmacopornográfica: aplicativos de monitoramento de ciclo menstrual e interseções entre corpos, máquinas e tecnopolíticas de gênero. Dissertation (Master’s in Sociology) – Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2019.
