Stacy Alaimo
https://www.stacyalaimo.com
I am Professor of English and Distinguished Teaching Professor, at the University of Texas at Arlington. I research, write, speak, and teach on topics in the environmental humanities, animal studies, posthumanism, science studies, new materialism, gender theory, cultural studies, and multicultural American literatures. I focus on the sites where theoretical problems intersect with ethical and political matters, where scholarly questions collide with everyday life. I pursue cross-disciplinary modes of inquiry that allow the unexpected to emerge. Books: Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (2000); Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010); Material Feminisms (2008, edited with Susan Hekman); Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times ( 2016), and a book in progress, "Composing Blue Ecologies: Science, Aesthetics, and the Creatures of the Abyss."
I am Professor of English and Distinguished Teaching Professor, at the University of Texas at Arlington. I research, write, speak, and teach on topics in the environmental humanities, animal studies, posthumanism, science studies, new materialism, gender theory, cultural studies, and multicultural American literatures. I focus on the sites where theoretical problems intersect with ethical and political matters, where scholarly questions collide with everyday life. I pursue cross-disciplinary modes of inquiry that allow the unexpected to emerge. Books: Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (2000); Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010); Material Feminisms (2008, edited with Susan Hekman); Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times ( 2016), and a book in progress, "Composing Blue Ecologies: Science, Aesthetics, and the Creatures of the Abyss."
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QUESTIONING THE RELATION BETWEEN FEMINISM AND ENVIROMENTALISM
STACY ALAIMO
University of Texas at Arlington, USA
A b s t r a c t ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The essay ‘Eco/Feminism, Non-Violence and the Future of Feminism’ takes on an important issue within ecofeminism and feminist theory generally – the relationship between maternalism, pacifism, ecofeminism, and essentialism – arguing for new ways of reading ‘eco/feminist’ activism as an engaged mode of theory. Ironically, even though the purpose of the peace camp in Clayoquot Sound was to protest the logging of the rainforest, this essay does not examine the meaning of nature or environ- mentalism for the protestors. Nature becomes a mere background for the gendered human drama that unfolds. It is crucial that we interrogate the grounds, purposes, and consequences of linking environmentalism and feminism, by analyzing specific articulations within particular places and contexts. Whether or not it is beneficial to merge feminism and environmentalism remains an open question. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ K e y w o r d s feminism, environmentalism, gender, nature, ecofeminist activism, feminist theory
field, and its discontents. In this series, we invite both Nordic and non-Nordic scholars to
present their take on contemporary challenges for feminist scholarship and gender research.
In this issue, we are handing the baton over to Stacy Alaimo, Professor of English at the
University of Texas, Arlington, USA. Dr Alaimo’s research interests include nineteenthand
twentieth-century multicultural American literatures; critical theory; feminist theory;
cultural studies, green cultural studies; science studies; environmentalism and feminism;
environmental health, environmental justice, environmental ethics; emerging theories of
materiality in environmental feminism, corporeal feminism, and science studies; science,
literature, and art of sea creatures. Her first book, Undomesticated Ground: Recasting
Nature as Feminist Space (Cornell, 2000), explores the work of North American women
writers, theorists, and activists from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth
century, arguing that “nature” has been a crucial site for a wide range of feminist cultural
interventions. Material Feminisms, edited with Susan J. Hekman (Indiana UP, 2008),
charts emerging models of materiality in feminist theory, bringing together environmental
feminism, corporeal feminism, feminist science studies, and disability studies. Her most
recent book, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and theMaterial Self (Indiana UP,
2010), argues that focusing on “trans-corporeality”—the movement across human bodies
and non-human nature—profoundly alters our sense of human subjectivity, environmental
ethics, and the individual’s relation to scientific knowledge. Her next book, Sea Creatures
and the Limits of Animal Studies: Science, Aesthetics, Ethics, will explore
with, the landscapes humans inhabit. Ocean creatures call on us to stretch our ability to cuceptralize life itselt so that we will be more mindful and protective of environments that barery register on anthropocentric horizons as living places.
Rather than projecting outer-space fantasies onto the deep seas, or using them as the proving ground for xenobiology, we need to remain-with the assistance of deep sea submersibles and other scientific and technological apparatuses-in the Gulf of Mexico and in other oceanic places around the grlbe in order to assess the
avalanche of anthropogenic damages and to construct the most effective methods, policies, and social movements to minimize further harm. It may not be possible to cultivate meaningfur modes of cornection to oceanic creatures that arc so far removed
from human rives-a jellyfish is an unlikely candidate for a companion species"s-but we could at least stop indulging in magical thinking that the ocean is impervious to human harm. Staying focused on the lives or sp""in" animarsrather
than evoking the ocean as a vast void-may be a way to ioster movementsfor ocean conservation, movements that, despite the dreadfui state of ocean health, are not at all inevitable.
from their surroundings, suggest the need for a more aquatic environmentalism to emerge, not only from a global mapping of toxic flows and the ravages of industrial extractions but also from some scarcely possible engagement with the heretofore unknown and still barely known if not potentially unknowable forms of life that inhabit the depths?
proposes that we think as the stuff of the world. Thinking as the stuff of the world is a
mode of thought that embeds theorists, activists, and artists within material substances,
flows, and systems. This posthumanist mode of being and knowing in which transcorporeal
subjects grapple with “environments” that can never be external is indebted
to feminism and understood through science studies theories of material agencies and
disclosure. It surfaces in Eva Hayward’s stunning figuration of the “trans-speciated self.”
It swirls together ontology, epistemology, scientific disclosures, political contestation,
posthuman ethics, and environmental activism. Thinking as the stuff of the world
entails grappling with the strange agencies of ordinary objects that are already part of
ourselves, as well as considering what it means for other creatures to contend with the
environments they now inhabit.
turn in the humanities has been contested by various positions thatcould be called the nonhuman turn. Thing theory, affect theory, object oriented ontology, speculative realism, new materialisms, material feminisms, animal studies, biopolitics, and posthumanism jostle together, merge, and diverge. Whereas some strands of the nonhuman turn leave the rational human knower intact, others, such as biopolitics,posthumanism, material feminism, and my own conception of “transcorporeality,”
radically reconceive of humanity as animal, biological,
material— shaped by evolutionary, environmental, and technologicalforces as well as by politics and economics. As scholars consider what is at stake in how these theories develop and how they are defi ned, it may be useful to consider the work of Charles Darwin, along with two nineteenth- century writers, Antoinette Brown Blackwell and Eliza Burt Gamble, who employed evolutionary arguments to forward women’srights. Darwin’s 1871 Descent of Man may well be the founding text of posthumanism, insisting, as it does, that the human is, of course, an
animal, a particu lar sort of animal that just happened to happen, asthe others happened to happen, an animal that shares a “community of descent” with other creatures, an animal that is, in fact, always itself comprised of the vestiges of other creatures. As Matthew Rowlinson points out, “For Darwin the crucial problem posed by natural selection was not that it left no room for God, but that it left no room for what he termed ‘man.’ ”1 The human, as such, becomes a tenuous category when all species distinctions are revealed to be rather arbitrary. Did Darwin’s sense of the human as always already animal, or, indeed, as part of an
ever- transforming material world, extend into late nineteenth- century texts, practices, and ethical modes? And, like the vestiges of our evolutionary ancestors, do Darwin’s ontologies inhabit twenty- fi rst- century posthumanisms, material feminisms, and other new materialisms?
QUESTIONING THE RELATION BETWEEN FEMINISM AND ENVIROMENTALISM
STACY ALAIMO
University of Texas at Arlington, USA
A b s t r a c t ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The essay ‘Eco/Feminism, Non-Violence and the Future of Feminism’ takes on an important issue within ecofeminism and feminist theory generally – the relationship between maternalism, pacifism, ecofeminism, and essentialism – arguing for new ways of reading ‘eco/feminist’ activism as an engaged mode of theory. Ironically, even though the purpose of the peace camp in Clayoquot Sound was to protest the logging of the rainforest, this essay does not examine the meaning of nature or environ- mentalism for the protestors. Nature becomes a mere background for the gendered human drama that unfolds. It is crucial that we interrogate the grounds, purposes, and consequences of linking environmentalism and feminism, by analyzing specific articulations within particular places and contexts. Whether or not it is beneficial to merge feminism and environmentalism remains an open question. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ K e y w o r d s feminism, environmentalism, gender, nature, ecofeminist activism, feminist theory
field, and its discontents. In this series, we invite both Nordic and non-Nordic scholars to
present their take on contemporary challenges for feminist scholarship and gender research.
In this issue, we are handing the baton over to Stacy Alaimo, Professor of English at the
University of Texas, Arlington, USA. Dr Alaimo’s research interests include nineteenthand
twentieth-century multicultural American literatures; critical theory; feminist theory;
cultural studies, green cultural studies; science studies; environmentalism and feminism;
environmental health, environmental justice, environmental ethics; emerging theories of
materiality in environmental feminism, corporeal feminism, and science studies; science,
literature, and art of sea creatures. Her first book, Undomesticated Ground: Recasting
Nature as Feminist Space (Cornell, 2000), explores the work of North American women
writers, theorists, and activists from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth
century, arguing that “nature” has been a crucial site for a wide range of feminist cultural
interventions. Material Feminisms, edited with Susan J. Hekman (Indiana UP, 2008),
charts emerging models of materiality in feminist theory, bringing together environmental
feminism, corporeal feminism, feminist science studies, and disability studies. Her most
recent book, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and theMaterial Self (Indiana UP,
2010), argues that focusing on “trans-corporeality”—the movement across human bodies
and non-human nature—profoundly alters our sense of human subjectivity, environmental
ethics, and the individual’s relation to scientific knowledge. Her next book, Sea Creatures
and the Limits of Animal Studies: Science, Aesthetics, Ethics, will explore
with, the landscapes humans inhabit. Ocean creatures call on us to stretch our ability to cuceptralize life itselt so that we will be more mindful and protective of environments that barery register on anthropocentric horizons as living places.
Rather than projecting outer-space fantasies onto the deep seas, or using them as the proving ground for xenobiology, we need to remain-with the assistance of deep sea submersibles and other scientific and technological apparatuses-in the Gulf of Mexico and in other oceanic places around the grlbe in order to assess the
avalanche of anthropogenic damages and to construct the most effective methods, policies, and social movements to minimize further harm. It may not be possible to cultivate meaningfur modes of cornection to oceanic creatures that arc so far removed
from human rives-a jellyfish is an unlikely candidate for a companion species"s-but we could at least stop indulging in magical thinking that the ocean is impervious to human harm. Staying focused on the lives or sp""in" animarsrather
than evoking the ocean as a vast void-may be a way to ioster movementsfor ocean conservation, movements that, despite the dreadfui state of ocean health, are not at all inevitable.
from their surroundings, suggest the need for a more aquatic environmentalism to emerge, not only from a global mapping of toxic flows and the ravages of industrial extractions but also from some scarcely possible engagement with the heretofore unknown and still barely known if not potentially unknowable forms of life that inhabit the depths?
proposes that we think as the stuff of the world. Thinking as the stuff of the world is a
mode of thought that embeds theorists, activists, and artists within material substances,
flows, and systems. This posthumanist mode of being and knowing in which transcorporeal
subjects grapple with “environments” that can never be external is indebted
to feminism and understood through science studies theories of material agencies and
disclosure. It surfaces in Eva Hayward’s stunning figuration of the “trans-speciated self.”
It swirls together ontology, epistemology, scientific disclosures, political contestation,
posthuman ethics, and environmental activism. Thinking as the stuff of the world
entails grappling with the strange agencies of ordinary objects that are already part of
ourselves, as well as considering what it means for other creatures to contend with the
environments they now inhabit.
turn in the humanities has been contested by various positions thatcould be called the nonhuman turn. Thing theory, affect theory, object oriented ontology, speculative realism, new materialisms, material feminisms, animal studies, biopolitics, and posthumanism jostle together, merge, and diverge. Whereas some strands of the nonhuman turn leave the rational human knower intact, others, such as biopolitics,posthumanism, material feminism, and my own conception of “transcorporeality,”
radically reconceive of humanity as animal, biological,
material— shaped by evolutionary, environmental, and technologicalforces as well as by politics and economics. As scholars consider what is at stake in how these theories develop and how they are defi ned, it may be useful to consider the work of Charles Darwin, along with two nineteenth- century writers, Antoinette Brown Blackwell and Eliza Burt Gamble, who employed evolutionary arguments to forward women’srights. Darwin’s 1871 Descent of Man may well be the founding text of posthumanism, insisting, as it does, that the human is, of course, an
animal, a particu lar sort of animal that just happened to happen, asthe others happened to happen, an animal that shares a “community of descent” with other creatures, an animal that is, in fact, always itself comprised of the vestiges of other creatures. As Matthew Rowlinson points out, “For Darwin the crucial problem posed by natural selection was not that it left no room for God, but that it left no room for what he termed ‘man.’ ”1 The human, as such, becomes a tenuous category when all species distinctions are revealed to be rather arbitrary. Did Darwin’s sense of the human as always already animal, or, indeed, as part of an
ever- transforming material world, extend into late nineteenth- century texts, practices, and ethical modes? And, like the vestiges of our evolutionary ancestors, do Darwin’s ontologies inhabit twenty- fi rst- century posthumanisms, material feminisms, and other new materialisms?
The plight of the newt who couldn’t cross the road provoked the students to insist that we conduct class in such a way as to minimize our impact on the climate, which suddenly seemed to be the newt’s climate. We turned off the lights when we entered the room, pulling up the long, dusty shades and letting the daylight, or the cloudy ambiance, in. Admittedly, this may seem a ridiculously minute incident, a pedagogical moment that would be better served as an anecdote for the pub rather than as an essay. But consider that many of the pedagogical, epistemological, and political challenges of climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene are, precisely, about scale and the human inability to shift between, connect, and make sense of multiple, interconnected dimensions.
exposure, it is crucial to point out that ideological and discursive categories position bodies differently and have material effects. For feminists, LGBTQ people, people of color, persons with disabilities, and others, thinking through how corporeal processes,
desires, orientations, and harms are in accordance with or divergent from social categories, norms, and discourses is a necessary epistemological and political process. For some people this is a matter of survival.The practice of thinking from within and as part of the material world swirls together ontology, epistemology, scientific disclosures, political perspectives, posthuman ethics, and environmental activism. There is no position outside, no straight path, no belief in transparent global systems of knowledge, only modest protests and precarious pleasures, from within compromised locations shadowed by futures that will surely need repair.
Drawing on examples from film, fiction, poetry, scientific writing, art, and activism, Alaimo considers the role pleasure has played and could play in various environmentalisms and environmental engagements. Though it bridges and contributes to scholarly work in the fields of environmental studies, feminism, materialism, and posthumanism, this book is much more than a theoretical exploration; it calls on us to rethink what it means to be human and act accordingly. Alaimo demonstrates interconnections between queer animals, naked protesters, melting glaciers, and interested scholars while providing thoughtful guidance on how to understand and respond to the environmental predicaments to which we are all, to varying degrees, exposed."