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Material Ethics of Entangled Bodies and Matter and Democratic Becoming-With in Times of Precarity: Judith Butler, Posthumanism, and New Materialist Ontologies in The Stone Gods

  • Cross-Cultural Studies
  • 2025, (), pp.163~204
  • DOI : 10.21049/ccs.2025...163
  • Publisher : Center for Cross Culture Studies
  • Research Area : Humanities > Literature
  • Received : October 31, 2025
  • Accepted : December 2, 2025
  • Published : December 31, 2025

Kim, Dae Joong 1

1강원대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This article reads the mass mobilizations in South Korea surrounding President Yoon Suk-yeol’s December 2024 declaration of martial law alongside Judith Butler’s Seoul lecture, “Democracy and the Future of the Humanities,” to theorize democracy as an embodied, affective, and materially mediated practice under conditions of precarity. I argue that the candlelight tradition’s recent iterations—light-stick assemblies, K-pop sing-ins, and the “Kisses Protesters” wrapped in foil blankets—stage what Butler calls the politics of appearance: plural bodies amassing without prior credentialing, making vulnerability legible as a mode of political agency. Extending Butler with posthuman and new materialist thought, I mobilize Karen Barad’s concepts of intra-action, response-ability, and diffraction to show how materials (blankets, barricades, logistics) are not mere props but co- constitutive agents of assembly. Donna Haraway’s notion of “staying with the trouble” further clarifies cohabitation as multispecies, multi-technical living-with in damaged worlds. To widen this ethico-political frame, the essay turns to Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, reading its recursive, exoplanetary plots as speculative laboratories for Butlerian performativity and Baradian agential realism. The novel’s queer human-robot alliances diffract normative binaries of human/nonhuman and male/female, while its necropolitical landscapes (corporate militarism, tokenized economies) illuminate contemporary precaritization. Across Seoul’s streets and Winterson’s worlds, iteration names both the reproduction of domination and the possibility of repeating differently. The article concludes by situating recent U.S. campus crackdowns (including the naming of scholars in federal inquiries) within this global scene of contested assembly, and by proposing a feminist lieu-commun for coalition: an archipelagic convergence of gender theory, new materialism, and posthumanism oriented to livable life. In this conjuncture, imagination is not ornament but infrastructure—an affective- material capacity to keep futures open.

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This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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