Tactile thinking as an encounter between the corpus of analysis and the body of the writing: Donna Haraway’s contributions from posthuman feminism

Abstract

Using the example of Donna Haraway’s work and, from the framework of a feminist and posthuman epistemology, in this essay I inquire into the practice of academic writing for the study of the relations between body and image, as an inherent instance of the process of “objectification” of the world. To be precise: in dialogue with my field of work on the relations between the body of the image and the image of the body, I approach the relations between corpus of analysis and body of writing as an encounter that occurs in terms of a tactile exploration. In tactile thinking, the gaze that touches the body/image does not recognize it, does not identify it or discover it, because it does not presuppose it: it shudders, entering into a dynamic of mutual adjustments and arrangements. Thus, if the theoretical framework is a modulation of touching that asserts a sensibility, feminist writing would be a stylization of con-tact with creative power.