Stacy Alaimo | University of Texas at Arlington (original) (raw)

Papers by Stacy Alaimo

Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space, 2000

This essay introduces how the concept of "nature" has been a vexed site for feminism, tracing ho... more This essay introduces how the concept of "nature" has been a vexed site for feminism, tracing how different feminist theories have reconceptualized nature in robust and profound ways, particularly in science studies, material feminisms, and feminist posthumanisms.

Ecofeminism without Nature? QUESTIONING THE RELATION BETWEEN FEMINISM AND ENVIROMENTALISM STACY A... more Ecofeminism without Nature?
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

Ecotheory beyond Green, 2013

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science, edited Bruce Clarke with Manuela Rossini, 2011

Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 2014

The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, 2014

Feminist Studies, 1994

... nature/cul-ture divide. Mystically, poetically, Griffin emerges into the world of na-ture, le... more ... nature/cul-ture divide. Mystically, poetically, Griffin emerges into the world of na-ture, leaving language behind, thus reinforcing the vision of nature as an 143 Page 12. Stacy Alaimo unsullied, distant realm. Octavia Butler, in ...

Configurations, 2010

... THE TRANSPARENT BODY A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging byJOSÉ VAN DIJCK GENERATING BODIE... more ... THE TRANSPARENT BODY A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging byJOSÉ VAN DIJCK GENERATING BODIES AND GENDERED SELVES The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England by EVE KELLER THE EMERGENCE OF GENETIC RATIONALITY Space, Time ...

International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2008

... Niamh Moore takes on an important issue within ecofeminism and feminist theory generally th... more ... Niamh Moore 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. ...

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 1996

... of brine and carbon suggest another way of en-visioning nature that neither engulfs it within... more ... of brine and carbon suggest another way of en-visioning nature that neither engulfs it within a romantic vision nor severs it from ... Greta Gaard insightfully critiques my discussion of Anyanwu&#x27;s consump-tion of the dolphin by explaining that &quot;the whole ecofeminism-deep ecol-ogy ...

Configurations, 2007

ABSTRACT Robert Markley’s Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination and the DVD-ROM Red P... more ABSTRACT Robert Markley’s Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination and the DVD-ROM Red Planet: Scientific and Cultural Encounters with Mars (co-authored with Harrison Higgs, Michelle Kendrick, Helen Burgess, Jeanne Hamming, Dan Tripp, and Jeannette Okinczyc) offer an intellectual feast of ideas about the scientific and popular fascination with Mars over the last three centuries. Both works offer significant contributions to science studies, science fiction studies, cultural studies, and environmental humanities as they chart the intersections among science, literature, and popular culture. Dying Planet is an impressive achievement—its historical scope, disciplinary range, and exhaustive research are stunning. It begins with an examination of Mars within sixteenth- and seventeenth-century astronomy, and concludes with NASA’s plans to launch a mission to the planet in 2011. The bulk of the book, however, focuses on scientific and literary texts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book is extensively researched, engaging theoretical quandaries within recent science studies scholarship, while analyzing centuries of scientific debates, interviews with scientists and writers, and a multitude of science fiction novels. The chapter on the canal controversy alone emerges from an examination of over 200 entries published in Nature between 1894 and 1916, tracing the interconnections between this infamous scientific controversy (i.e., if there are “canals” on Mars, did intelligent Martians construct them?) and its social, philosophical, theological, and ecological contexts. The next chapter argues that as scientists were speculating about the existence and meaning of “canals” on Mars, science fiction writers were using the planet as a site for speculating about “the interactions among a hostile environment, evolution, and intelligent beings—human or inhuman—forced to cope with an ecological catastrophe” (p. 115). These fictions manifest profoundly different, and sometimes disturbing, environmental–political conceptions, from evolutionary theories dressed in anthropocentric and Eurocentric clothing, to Orson Welles’s Darwinian “anti-teleological materialism” in which Martians are superior to earthlings, to the (ironically) “fervent anti-environmental ethos” of Alexander Bogdanov’s utopian socialism in which the natural world “becomes a reservoir of potential value awaiting capital and labor” (p. 141). The study as a whole establishes Mars as a rich site for investigating the question of the role of speculation in science, the relations between science fiction and science proper, and the relations between ecological and socio-political ideas. Markley’s readings of the scientific debates are especially notable for the way in which they demonstrate the force of such ostensibly nonscientific values as narrative coherence and aesthetics. He explains, for example, that even as “the ‘best’ interpretations for scientists are the simplest” (p. 16), the notion of simplicity itself is bound up with “larger conceptions of order—aesthetic, philosophical, and theological as well as ‘purely’ scientific,” and “[e]mploying Occam’s razor . . . requires unpacking a whole shaving kit” (p. 17). Most of the book is organized chronologically, pairing chapters on science and science fiction within different historical periods. Ironically, the structure seems to mirror that of the primary relation under investigation—the sense of Mars and Earth as separate though (imaginatively) parallel planets. The structure itself implicitly raises questions about methodology within science studies, and, especially, the study of literature and science. Markley calls the project “cross-disciplinary” (p. 2) (rather than interdisciplinary), as it “draws on work in planetary astronomy, the history and cultural study of science, science fiction, literary and cultural criticism, ecology, and astrobiology” (p. 2). Anticipating questions about the structure, perhaps, he explains that its purpose “is not to divide ‘science’ from ‘fiction’ but to pursue the internal logic of developments in each genre as well as to explore the ways in which their concerns overlap and interpenetrate” (p. 23). Interestingly, this structure is consonant with one of the central ideas of the book—that of the “limits of analogy.” As centuries of speculative science and scientifically oriented fiction sought to understand Mars through analogies with Earth and vice versa, they met with the material and epistemological limits inherent within the structure of analogy. By 1970, for example, the search for life on Mars results in a disappointingly “nonbiological nature” (p. 238). Both scientists and fictional characters, it seems, encounter the limits of analogy. Thus in the concluding...

Taking Turns is an open forumfor brief and rapid assessments of changes emerging in the field, an... more Taking Turns is an open forumfor brief and rapid assessments of changes emerging in the
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

Scientific, journalistic, photographic, and artistic accounts of the effects of the BP oil and di... more Scientific, journalistic, photographic, and artistic accounts of the effects of the BP oil and dispersant on specific ocean creatures, systems, and processes are cnrcial for rendering the ocean not as an alien or immaterial domain, but as a complex and dynamic environment that is significantly different from, yet interconnected
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.

If, as Jacques Rancière argues, “politics is an intervention into the visible,” is it possible th... more If, as Jacques Rancière argues, “politics is an intervention into the visible,” is it possible that the current “bloom” of jellyfish images opens up space for gelata and other non-mammalian sea creatures to provoke posthuman modes of environmental concern? Do these watery creatures, barely distinguishable
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?

Rather than contemplating distinct objects as separate from the self, this essay proposes that we... more Rather than contemplating distinct objects as separate from the self, this essay
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.

At the start of the twenty- fi rst century, the linguistic turn in the humanities has been contes... more At the start of the twenty- fi rst century, the linguistic
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?

Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space, 2000

Ecotheory beyond Green, 2013

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science, edited Bruce Clarke with Manuela Rossini, 2011

Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 2014

The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, 2014

Feminist Studies, 1994

Configurations, 2010

International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2008

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 1996

Configurations, 2007

Trans-corporeality is a posthumanist mode of new materialism and material feminism. Trans-corpore... more Trans-corporeality is a posthumanist mode of new materialism and material feminism. Trans-corporeality means that all creatures, as embodied beings, are intermeshed with the dynamic, material world, which crosses through them, transforms them, and is transformed by them. While trans-corporeality as an ontology does not exclude any living creature, it does begin with the human, in order--paradoxically perhaps--to disrupt Western human exceptionalism. The figure/ground relation between the human and the environment dissolves as the outline of the human is traversed by substantial material interchanges. Mapping those interchanges across all species and at all scales is the prelude to trans-corporeal ethics and politics. Trans-corporeality contests the master subject of Western humanist individualism, who imagines himself as transcendent, disembodied, and removed from the world he surveys. The trans-corporeal subject is generated through and entangled with biological, technological, economic, social, political and other systems, processes, and events, at vastly different scales. Trans-corporeality finds itself within capitalism, but resists the allure of shiny objects, considering instead, the effects they have, from manufacture to disposal, while reckoning with the strange agencies that interconnect substance, flesh and place. It does not contemplate discrete objects from a safe distance, but instead, thinks as the very stuff of the ever-emergent world (Alaimo 2016).

Several years ago, before there was much engaging literature on climate change available, I inclu... more Several years ago, before there was much engaging literature on climate change available, I included Mark Lynas’s 2004 non-fiction travel narrative, High Tide:The Truth about Our Climate Crisis in several undergraduate environmental literature and film courses. In the prologue Lynas explains that while he understood the science behind climate change, he found it all “a bit too abstract” and “difficult to connect to [his] everyday reality” (Lynas, p. xxix). So he embarks upon a three year journey across five contents, “searching for the fingerprints of global warming,” interviewing “Mongolian herders, Alaskan Eskimos, Tuvaluan fishermen, American hurricane chasers and a whole Army of scientists” (ibid., p. xxxiii). While students found much within High Tide to be thought-provoking, as well as disturbing, one section in particular stood out. Explaining that there are “serious practical reasons why natural ecosystems can’t simply move with a shifting climate,” Lynas gives this example:“The great crested newt couldn’t move north even if it wanted to—it can’t cross the M4 motorway.” Somehow it was this sentence—the predicament of one English newt—that had the strongest impact on students in this particular environmental literature course in north Texas. Indeed, it could be said that the newt switched off the classroom lights for the rest of the semester (see Figure 3.1).
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.

Matter may appear to be a strange topic for a volume within a series of handbooks on gender. The ... more Matter may appear to be a strange topic for a volume within a series of handbooks on gender. The scientific definition of matter—something with mass and volume that occupies space— would suggest that matter is a category for physics, not for gender and sexuality studies. Even our everyday sense of matter and materiality as pertaining to objects and substances—the physical world, rather than the linguistic, cultural, social, ideological, or political landscape—would appear to place matter far from gender and sexuality studies. Matter may seem removed from or too mundane for social theory. It may also seem like a rather apolitical topic for scholarship committed to social justice. And yet matter and materiality have recently received a great deal of attention in gender theory. As gender studies scholar Victoria Pitts- Taylor puts it, ‘‘Attention to matter, and mattering—matter’s ongoing processes of self- generation—is transforming feminist thought’’ (2016, 1).

Exposure then, is terribly uneven, across such simultaneously social and material categories as c... more Exposure then, is terribly uneven, across such simultaneously social and material categories as class, race, and the disparities between the global North and the global south. And while much of this book has emphasized the material dimensions of the
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.

Katie McKeown writes, "Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman ... more Katie McKeown writes, "Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) is a provocative reflection on environmental ethics, politics, and forms of knowledge. Through a range of examples as broad as the theoretical scope of the book, Alaimo analyzes political responses to climate change, ocean acidification, deforestation, and plastic pollution, as well as the epistemologies that have shaped our understanding of these crises. Simultaneously, this series of essays also explores the intimacies and entanglements of human and non-human subjectivities in the Anthropocene, arguing for a new materialist engagement with the world. Despite the gravity of her subject matter, Alaimo’s examples and writing are often playful. This not only echoes the complexity and occasional contradictions of environmental politics but also makes Exposed a very enjoyable read.

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."

"In her book, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Indiana University Pre... more "In her book, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Indiana University Press, 2010), Stacy Alaimo approaches the concepts of “science, environment, and self” in an extremely novel and inventive way. The central concept in Alaimo’s work is that of “trans-corporeality” which she describes as a way of theorizing the relationship between humanity and the world at large as not being clearly delineated and separate, but as fluid. As this relates specifically to nature and the environment, Alaimo’s intention is for the reader to reimagine questions of environmental ethics and environmental practices as not isolated issues but rather deeply personal as the environment and our material selves are bound up with one another in a deeply intimate manner. I found Alaimo’s central approach with “trans-corporeality,” theorizing the human as being “already in the world,” extremely refreshing when compared to the idea of human agency in postmodern studies. In this way, Alaimo provides an alternate framework for conceiving of human agency, and thus an “out” of sorts, a release, from the bounds of postmodernism’s isolated and castrated human agent. Alaimo calls this novel direction, “New Materialisms.” With this concept, Alaimo offers new insights into feminist thought and theory. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self is sure to appeal to many students and scholars of literary studies and critical theory."

This chapter begins by considering whether or not MCS can be understood within the frameworks of ... more This chapter begins by considering whether or not MCS can be understood within the frameworks of environmental justice, which were explored earlier in this book. The rest ofthe chapter develops the theoretical positions outlined in chapter r, regarding emerging models of materiality and the possibilities for trans-corporeal conceptions of the human, by exploring MCS as it is revealed and portrayed in science, cultural theory autobiography, photography, and film. Multiple chemical sensitivity may well be the quintessential example of what I m calling trans-corporeality, as those who are chemically reactive experience their selves as coextensive with the material world-an ever-emergent world of risky knowledges, mangled practices, and disturbing, potentially deviant material agencies.

Conversation with the fabulous Stacy Alaimo, Professor of English at the University of Texas-Arli... more Conversation with the fabulous Stacy Alaimo, Professor of English at the University of Texas-Arlington and author of the celebrated Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Indiana U, 2010). We discuss her new book, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (U Minnesota 2016), in light of her thinking about trans-corporeality and ethics in the Anthropocene. Stacy shares her concerns that an abstract sense of species identity and pride is too often smuggled into the Anthropocene concept and explains why she thinks material feminism and feminist science studies have become such important resources for understanding our present condition. We discuss why the turn toward materiality and material agency demands that we engage science in new ways. We talk about the unruly agency of xenobiotic chemicals, deep sea creatures, epigenetics, and how to remake human sprawl to take other creaturely interests into account. Stacy explains that she is not in the hope business but that she does support ecodelics—the mind altering exercise of trying to imagine and feel the Anthropocene from nonhuman perspectives. Stacy’s German Shepherd, Felix, kindly helps us grasp this last point and he shares his thoughts on squirrel metonymy and his unease when the postman cometh.