Glossary
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Agency / Agential Matter
Building on Karen Barad, agency is not an inherent ability exclusive to human beings, but arises from interactions in which all matter participates. Thus, agential matter encompasses non-human, more-than-human, and technological entities, dissolving conceptions of anthropocentric privilege.
Critical Posthumanism vs. Popular Posthumanism
Critical Posthumanism signifies a philosophical approach and offers methodologies for decentering human exceptionalism. This differs from a Popular Posthumanism understanding which is often portrayed as a techno-utopian transcendence of human condition through technological advancements.
Deleuzian Virtuality
Based on Gilles Deleuze’s ontological conception of virtuality as “not actual, but as such possesses a reality”, the virtual is not opposed to the physical, but is real insofar as it has the ability to actively shape processes in the material world.
Virtual Fashion
The phenomenon of virtual fashion – approached through the Deleuzian notion of virtuality – may appear immaterial insofar as its garments have no physical substance, yet it exerts tangible effects on the material world, on fashion practices, and on the imaginaries of contemporary fashion systems.
Virtual (Fashion) Bodies
This is a proposed terminology in the context of virtual fashion practices for the virtual bodies involved in the processes. Virtual (fashion) bodies, although not fleshy, are understood as agential matter that are fundamental to the materialization of virtual garments and cannot be reduced to mere objects.