Theorizing Race and Gender in the Anthropocene (original) (raw)
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Technoetic Arts, 2022
What does it mean to be human? This question has made a meteoric career for itself, becoming a focal point of almost every thread of the transhumanist debate. Significant as it is, the question eludes any definitive answer, since it directly engenders an array of related queries. This Special Issue questions our notions of the human being, human subjectivity, superiority and uniqueness, which tend to be underpinned by simplistic and simplifying dichotomies entrenched in western philosophy, science and art..... For more see here: https://ta.pubpub.org/20-1-2-dismantling-the-anthropocene
Introduction: Whiteness, coloniality, and the Anthropocene
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
In his essay 'The Souls of White Folk', written generations before the International Stratigraphy Committee would begin debating the Anthropocene concept, W.E.B. Du Bois (1920: 29) made an observation which remains as pertinent today as it was when he wrote it 1920. 'I am given to understand', he wrote, 'that whiteness is the ownership of the Earth forever and ever, Amen'. Although Du Bois' famous line is in reference to the imperial origins of the First World War, it nevertheless anticipates one of the core themes of this special issue on 'race' and the Anthropocene, that lurking just beneath the surface of the Anthropocene concept is a racialised narrative about white Earthly possession. The 'Anthropocene' is a term used in both popular and scientific discourse to designate a unit of geological time in which humanity, anthropos, is said to be leaving its own stratigraphic signature on Earth's geology. The recent popularisation of the term is credited to Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer and their article in 2000 in the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme Newsletter which Crutzen followed up with a piece in Nature in 2002. As Michael Simpson illustrates (p. 53), there is a longer discursive history of an 'age of man' within European scientific circles (see also Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016), but it was only after the publication of this article that the term would gain popular notoriety and come to be considered a credible epochal label. In 2008, the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was the first to recommend official consideration of the inclusion of the Anthropocene into the Geological Time Scale. The International Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was formed shortly thereafter to report to the International Union of Geological Sciences on this possibility. Throughout the 2000s the term entered popular discourse as a signifier of environmental crisis (see Kolbert, 2006),
Gender and Pan-Species Democracy in the Anthropocene
Religions, 2021
There are diverse historical trajectories in human societies’ relationships with the non-human world. While many small place-based groups have tried to retain egalitarian partnerships with other species and ecosystems, larger societies have made major transitions. In religious terms, they have moved from worshipping female, male or androgynous non-human deities, to valorising pantheons of deities that, over time, became semi-human and then human in form. Reflecting Durkheimian changes in social and political arrangements, movements towards patriarchy led to declining importance in female deities, and the eventual primacy of single male Gods. With these changes came dualistic beliefs separating Culture from Nature, gendering these as male and female, and asserting male dominion over both Nature and women. These beliefs supported activities that have led to the current environmental crisis: unrestrained growth; hegemonic expansion; colonialism, and unsustainable exploitation of the no...
Feminism’s Critique of the Anthropocene
2020
The Anthropocene is the new designation for our current geological epoch, in which human activity has decisively altered earth ecosystems, global natural processes, and the geological record in ways that will be measurable by the geologists of our uncertain future. This chapter investigates the relationship between feminist thinking and the Anthropocene, establishing the gendered dimensions of environmental crisis and activism, and considering how feminist thinkers have critiqued a range of ‘environment’ topics, including the feminised and othering constructions of ‘Nature’; the masculinism of capitalism, technology, science, and the environmental movement; and the colonial implications of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a title for our new age, informed by decolonial and critical race theory perspectives. This cultural and activist work can be seen as part of a long-tradition of intersectional environmental activism and ecofeminist thought, which both inevitably and intentionally intersects ...
The Anthropocene Event in Social Theory: On Ways of Problematizing the Non-Human
2018
Signaling that ‘humanity’ has radically changed the Earth’s environmental parame-ters, the notion of the Anthropocene currently generates debate across the socio-cultural sciences. Noticeably, neo-Marxist and new materialist approaches stand out for the argument that the Anthropocene obliges social theory to 'catch up' with new material realities. While sharing the conviction that the Anthropocene might institute a genuine event for social theory and practice, however, we discuss in this paper some unresolved issues of scientism and economic totalization which, we argue, ne-cessitates a search for alternative ways of 'dramatizing' our eco-political predica-ment. In search of such paths, we turn to science and technology studies (STS) and actor-network theory (ANT), whose long-standing focus on nonhuman agency is pro-longed by Isabelle Stengers’ forceful argument that we must “accept" the reality of Gaia's intrusion into collective historicity. Stengers’ challenge, we suggest, requires the development of an art of immanent attention to the politics of varied matters as they unfold across diverse ecologies of practice. Well beyond the present preoccupa-tions of Euro-American social theory, environmental history, activism and politics offer sites of resistance and experimentation whose political efficacies and conceptual capacities are far from exhausted. Slowing down theory sufficiently to learn from the-se multiple sites, we argue, should be the starting point for an approach adequate to the problems posed by the Anthropocene event, and an irritable, ticklish Gaia. Keywords: Anthropocene; Gaia; new materialism; neo-Marxism; science and technology studies (STS)
Can a Species Be a Person? A Trope and Its Entanglements in the Anthropocene Era
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The Question Concerning the Anthropocene (2016)
Public lecture delivered to a general audience at Yachay Tech, 3 March 2016. A second part is intended, and will hopefully follow in the next few days. It really represents the starting point of an argument that will be developed further in another, forthcoming text.