Part of the reason that this idea of agency of matter being a break from Western tradition is that is harks back Indigenous linguistic practices - more specifically of indigenous people like the Ojibwe. In Anishinabemowin (or Ojibwemowin), the language of the Ojibwe people, nouns are sorted by whether or not they are viewed as animate. In this case, animate takes on a much broader meaning to include any nouns that is thought about as able to hold spirit regardless of whether it would be traditionally considered an animal or animate. This animacy is similar to how many romance language sort feminine and masculine nouns and this animate vs. inanimate distinction determines how which verbs are used around that noun and how those verbs are conjugated.

 Ojibwe Understandings of Animacy

This idea of breaking down brain-body and logic-emotion binaries also serves to counter ableist messaging often these binaries are contrary to disabled experiences. Disabled, especially chronically ill, bodyminds know that stress can set of flares and affect physical symptoms just as much as isolation from inaccessible social spots can affect mental health. Many individuals within Mad studies counter the idea of logic-emotion binaries when mental illness is weaponized against people to say they are not rational or capable of complex thought. 

Material Rhetorics and Challenging Ableism

Scholars Jennifer Clary-Lemon and David M. Grant posit that material rhetorics,  in challenging the Western idea that the human is the ultimate source of knowledge, brings into conversation the agency of matter - from animals, to things often considered inanimate, to forces like the weather - and unseating Western norms that separate the body from the mind, culture from nature, and logic from emotion.

Material Rhetorics challenges the assumptions that:
- humans are the most important agent of knowledge
- Western logic that focuses on human senses and cognition is the ultimate source and arbiter of knowledge
- nonhuman things can be reliably understood and observed by humans

Assumptions Material Rhetorics Challenges

Price, M. (2024). Crip Spacetime. Duke University Press.

Crip Spacetime

Clary-Lemon, Jennifer, and David M. Grant. 2022. Decolonial Conversations in Posthuman and New Material Rhetorics. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

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