Preface: After the "Speculative Turn"

Recent forms of realism in continental philosophy, habitually subsumed under the (not always coherent) category of “specula-tive realism,” have provided grounds for the much needed cri-tique of social-constructivist approaches in gender theory and of the authority with which various forms of post-structuralist critique have dominated feminist theory for decades.1 But the interest in realism and in the possibility of a universalism that would still remain post-metaphysical displayed in most of the feminist (speculative) realist or (new) materialist writings I have read so far has been purely epistemological. There is no political motivation in those writings and they have most certainly not been directed against cultural theory per se vis-à-vis its domina-tion over questions of gender, sexual difference and other forms of social philosophy discourse.