Since several decades, feminist scholars have debated and challenged traditional boarders and dichotomies focusing of the gendered body, performance, emotions and lately the human and non-human in terms of nature/culture, biology/social and matter/mind, material/semiotic etc. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of how meaning and matter, nature and culture, human and non-human are entangled in an inseparable way in social interaction and what implications it might have for social and feminist studies.
The new material feminists´ notion of agency of non-human forces has seminal precursors from Heidegger to contemporary philosophers of science such as Latour, Haraway and other scholars elaborating post-human questions. This paper will argue that, and how, the intra-actions (in the Baradian sense) of meaning and matter, nature and culture, human and non-human concretely are co-constructed as an effect of human interaction not only in the space between humans, but how they inscribed and invested in our bodies and especially our brains and down to the cell and molecule level .
To do so, Karen Barad’s posthuman thinking is co-read with insights from two other different wide-ranging transdisciplinary traditions; the field of bio-semiotics and neurology. Insights from the bio-semiotics are read to explore how non-human actors (from microbes, cells to systems/organs) are part and parcel of the way meaning-matter are entangled. The semiotician biologist Jesper Hoffmeyer´s notion of semiosphere – a global system of signs/meaning – contributes to elucidate how the material and the way all living organisms, non-humans as well as humans interpret the world are entangled in their intra-acting process. Insights from the recently reoriented neurological research of what has been called “the social brain” are involved to understand how the cells in the brain and meaning are entangled in material-semiotic practices substantialized as the neurological material-semiotic networks inside the human brain. The impact to gender and social studies of the rethinking of disciplinary boarders and the suggested material-semiotic approach are finally discussed in terms of agency, gender construction, social power and change.

Jessika Grahm, PhD student, Human Ecology/Environmental Social Sciences, School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University. She questions traditional epistemology organizing the human being and world in two ontologically separate realms, thereby challenging ontological, disciplinary and categorical borders still prevalent in feminist approaches. The global aim of her thesis is contributing to integrative ways of understanding human/women/men that could be acknowledged and made applicable to the social/humanities as well as the natural sciences.
Published/ongoing publications on the current theme:
Body, power and meaning: how is power/knowledge inscribed in the very flesh of our bodies? (ongoing paper)
Grahm Jessika/Nina Lykke 2016 Ontologi och epistemologi i feministisk teori in Hedenus/Björk/Shmulyar Gréen (ed) Feministiskt tänkande och sociologi: teorier, begrepp och tillämpningar. Studentlitteratur. Lund
2009 Wo/man – a social construction of meaning and matter. Steps to an ecological framework integrating the human body and mind. In Folkmarson Käll Lisa (ed) 2009 Normality/Normativity, Crossroads of Knowledge, Uppsala University.

Jessika Grahm, PhD student, Human Ecology/Environmental Social Sciences, School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University e-mail: jessika.grahm@yahoo.com