A discussion of Natania Meeker's new book, Illusive Materialisms: The Pleasures of Femininity in Eighteenth-Century France (Fordham University Press, 2026). The author will be joined in conversation by Andrew H. Clark (Fordham University) and Jessie Hock (Vanderbilt University), moderated by Neetu Khanna (USC). Registration is required. REGISTER HERE

About the Book: Illusive Materialisms brings a close attention to gender to bear on the philosophical and political argument that sensual pleasure, framed as a mode of feminine responsiveness, is the primary business of enlightenment. Ultimately, the book argues on behalf of a history of feminine speculation that resonates with contemporary feminist and queer efforts to recenter pleasure and its generative illusions in the necessary work of critique. Through its analysis of a materialism that is often hiding in plain sight, Illusive Materialisms explores different ways to cultivate delight in a world in ruin.

While most studies of materialism during the French Enlightenment focus on works by men, Illusive Materialisms foregrounds responses by women to the materialist currents that cut across the eighteenth-century canon and that aim to recast femininity as the privileged condition of the modern, enlightened subject. For the women writers examined here, femininity is both a form that is embodied and an art that is practiced, often with transformative effects.

Illusive Materialisms illuminates the crucial role played by femininity in a long history of materialist philosophy. At the same time, it uncovers a specifically feminine engagement with the materialist thought and practice of eighteenth-century France. The book shows how three women authors (Madeleine de Puisieux, Émilie Du Châtelet, and Françoise de Graffigny) rework, revise, and reuse materialist texts and ideas in order to craft an ethic of pleasure whose effects traverse their writing and their life. At the same time, it demonstrates that feminine forms, images, and persons lie at the heart of a tradition of materialist thought stretching from antiquity into the present day.

About the Author: Natania Meeker is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Voluptuous Philosophy: Literary Materialism in the French Enlightenment (Fordham, 2006), coauthor (with Antónia Szabari) of Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction (Fordham, 2020), and coeditor of Women Imagine Change: A Global Anthology of Women’s Resistance, 600 B.C.E. to the Present (Routledge, 1997).

Open to attendants outside of USC. An excerpt of the book will be made available to registered attendants. Registration before the event is required. 

This event is part of the Levan Institute for the Humanities' “Book Chats” series, conversations about new books published by USC scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. To see more events in this series, including recordings of past events, visit https://dornsife.usc.edu/levan-institute/book-chats/.