‘Dangerously Small Things’: Response to Iris van der Tuin

This essay responds to Iris van der Tuin’s, ‘Microaggressions as New Political Material for Feminist Scholars and Activists: Perspectives from Continental Philosophy, the New Materialisms, and Popular Culture’, by situating her interrogation as a performative intervention on the psychologisation of microaggression research. Her intervention thus expands the potential for feminist critical practice, and opens up the discourse to emergent political materials. In this vein, I offer two additional, but ‘small’, materials. First, because language plays a role in the exclusionary cuts through which all entities emerge, I encourage material feminism not to abandon linguistic entities as political materials. Second, by interrupting the false choice between individual and collective political action, I suggest a re-scaling of feminist political action for our neoliberal times.