Stacy Alaimo

"This impressively researched and vigorously argued study will be of the first importance to all environmental humanists, especially for its deeply informed and subtle account of the 'trans-corporeality' of the human self."-Lawrence Buell, Harvard University "Alaimo does a fabulous job of thinking through how a trans-corporeal understanding of matter provides a more robust and more adequate basis for appreciating issues of environmental health and environmental justice."-Nancy Tuana, Pennsylvania State University How do we understand the agency and significance of material forces and their interface with human bodies? What does it mean to be human in these times, with bodies that are inextricably interconnected with our physical world? Bodily Natures considers these questions by grappling with powerful and pervasive material forces and their increasingly harmful effects on the human body. Drawing on feminist theory, environmental studies, and the sciences, Stacy Alaimo focuses on trans-corporeality, or movement across bodies and nature, which has profoundly altered our sense of self. By looking at a broad range of creative and philosophical writings, Alaimo illuminates how science, politics, and culture collide, while considering the closeness of the human body to the environment.

Science, Environment, and the Material Self

Bodily Natures

Susan J. Hekman

Susan Hekman

Acknowledgments p. xi Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman p. 1 Part 1 Material Theory 1 Darwin and Feminism: Preliminary Investigations for a Possible Alliance Elizabeth Grosz p. 23 2 On Not Becoming Man: The Materialist Politics of Unactualized Potential Claire Colebrook p. 52 3 Constructing the Ballast: An Ontology for Feminism Susan Hekman p. 85 4 Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter Karen Barad p. 120 Part 2 Material World 5 Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms Donna J. Haraway p. 157 6 Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina Nancy Tuana p. 188 7 Natural Convers(at)ions: Or, What if Culture was Really Nature all Along? Vicki Kirby p. 214 8 Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature Stacy Alaimo p. 237 9 Landscape, Memory, and Forgetting: Thinking Through (my Mother's) Body and Place Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands p. 265 Part 3 Material Bodies 10 Disability Experience on Trial Tobin Siebers p. 291 11 How Real Is Race? Michael Hames-Garcia p. 308 12 From Race/Sex/Etc. To Glucose, Feeding Tube, and Mourning: The Shifting Matter of Chicana Feminism Suzanne Bost p. 340 13 Organic Empathy: Feminism, Psychopharmaceuticals, and the Embodiment of Depression Elizabeth A. Wilson p. 373 14 Cassie's Hair Susan Bordo p. 400 List of Contributors p. 425 Index p. 429.

Material Feminisms

Opening with the statement "The anthropocene is no time to set things straight," Stacy Alaimo puts forth potent arguments for a material feminist posthumanism in the chapters that follow. From trans-species art and queer animals to naked protesting and scientific accounts of fishy humans, Exposed argues for feminist posthumanism immersed in strange agencies and scale-shifting ethics. Including such divergent topics as landscape art, ocean ecologies, and plastic activism, Alaimo explores our environmental predicaments to better understand feminist occupations of transcorporeal subjectivity. She puts scientists, activists, artists, writers, and theorists in conversation, revealing that the state of the planet in the twenty-first century has radically transformed ethics, politics, and what it means to be human. Ultimately, Exposed calls for an environmental stance in which, rather than operating from an externalized perspective, we think, feel, and act as the very stuff of the world.

Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times

Exposed

From "Mother Earth" to "Mother Nature," women have for centuries been associated with nature. Feminists, troubled by the way in which such representations show women controlled by powerful natural forces and confined to domestic space, have sought to distance themselves from nature. In Undomesticated Ground, Stacy Alaimo issues a bold call to reclaim nature as feminist space. Her analysis of a remarkable range of feminist writings—as well as of popular journalism, visual arts, television, and film—powerfully demonstrates that nature has been and continues to be an essential concept for feminist theory and practice. Alaimo urges feminist theorists to rethink the concept of nature by probing the vastly different meanings that it carries. She discusses its significance for Americans engaged in social and political struggles from, for example, the "Indian Wars" of the early nineteenth century, to the birth control movement in the 1920s, to contemporary battles against racism and heterosexism. Reading works by Catherine Sedgwick, Mary Austin, Emma Goldman, Nella Larson, Donna Haraway, Toni Morrison, and others, Alaimo finds that some of these writers strategically invoke nature for feminist purposes while others cast nature as a postmodern agent of resistance in the service of both environmentalism and the women's movement. By examining the importance of nature within literary and political texts, this book greatly expands the parameters of the nature writing genre and establishes nature as a crucial site for the cultural work of feminism.

Recasting Nature as Feminist Space

Undomesticated Ground

Recasting Nature As Feminist Space

Opening with the statement “The anthropocene is no time to set things straight,” Stacy Alaimo puts forth potent arguments for a material feminist posthumanism in the chapters that follow. From trans-species art and queer animals to naked protesting and scientific accounts of fishy humans, Exposed argues for feminist posthumanism immersed in strange agencies and scale-shifting ethics. Including such divergent topics as landscape art, ocean ecologies, and plastic activism, Alaimo explores our environmental predicaments to better understand feminist occupations of transcorporeal subjectivity. She puts scientists, activists, artists, writers, and theorists in conversation, revealing that the state of the planet in the twenty-first century has radically transformed ethics, politics, and what it means to be human. Ultimately, Exposed calls for an environmental stance in which, rather than operating from an externalized perspective, we think, feel, and act as the very stuff of the world.

Stacy Alaimo

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