Description
Book SynopsisThis book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.
Water is the element that, more than any other, ties human beings in to the world around them from the oceans that surround us to the water that makes up most of our bodies. Exploring the cultural and philosophical implications of this fact, Bodies of Water develops an innovative new mode of posthuman feminist phenomenology that understands our bodies as being fundamentally part of the natural world and not separate from or privileged to it.
Building on the works by Luce Irigaray, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, Astrida Neimanis's book is a landmark study that brings a new feminist perspective to bear on ideas of embodiment and ecological ethics in the posthuman critical moment.
Trade ReviewFor the last couple of decades, feminist theory has been immersed in a new materialist wave that has produced among the most innovative and capacious ways to think and to respond critically--ontologically, ethically, and politically--within the depths of the ongoing ecological crises. If hardly any field of philosophy, cultural studies, or science studies has been as well-equipped to think the posthuman turn as feminist approaches have, Astrida Neimanis's
Bodies of Water brilliantly synthesizes, illustrates, and continues this feminist ebullition. * Hypatia *
To read Astrida Neimanis’s Bodies of Water is to immerse oneself in a fluid poetics, contemplating the teeming, virtual infinity of lifeforms for which water, in its myriad incarnations, supplies the medium of connection and dispersal; of gestation and differentiation through space-time. Through its feminist posthuman phenomenological lens, this work recasts the intertextual net eloquently and generously, re-inflecting a polyphony of feminist, philosophical, poetic, and scientific voices to address our planetary emergency in the wake of ecocidal extractionist and consumerist practices. -- Marion May Campbell, Deakin University * Swamphen Journal *
[Neimanis] does however, offer some important and somewhat revolutionary concepts to environmental educators and researchers in both her analysis of what she terms watery embodiment and in her intentional melding of posthu-man feminist theory with phenomenology. Neimanis is immediately frank about the reasons why embracing both of these concepts is crucial in these times, citing increasing Anthropocenic global water crises as an obvious instigator of the need to reconsider how we understand, and act on, the impact of our human bodies on our surrounding ecology. -- Lisa Siegel * Australian Journal of Environmental Education *
Table of ContentsINTRODUCTION: Figuring Bodies of Water Bodies of Water (A Genealogy of a Figuration) Posthuman Feminism for the Anthropocene Living with the Problem Water is What We Make It The Possibility of Posthuman Phenomenology
CHAPTER ONE: Embodying Water: Feminist Phenomenology for Posthuman Worlds A Posthuman Politics of Location Milky Ways: Tracing Posthuman Feminisms How to Think (About) a Body of Water: Posthuman Phenomenology Between Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze How to Think (As) a Body of Water: Access, Amplify, Describe! Posthuman Ties in a Too-Human World
CHAPTER TWO: Posthuman Gestationality: Luce Irigaray and Water's Queer Repetitions Hydrological Cycles Elemental Bodies: Irigaray as Posthuman Phenomenologist? Love Letters to Watery Others:
Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche Gestationality as (Sexuate) Difference and Repetition The Onto-Logic of Amniotics (Queering Water’s Repetitions) Bodies of Water Beyond Humanism
CHAPTER THREE: Fishy Beginnings Other Evolutions Dissolving Origin Stories Carrier Bags and Hypersea Wet Sex Waters Remembered (Moving Below the Surface) Unknowability as Planetarity (Or, Becoming the Water that We Cannot Become) Aspiration, That Oceanic Feeling
CHAPTER FOUR: Imagining Water in the Anthropocene Prologue / Kwe Swimming into the Anthropocene Learning from Anti-Colonial Waters Water is Life? Commodity, Charity and Other Repetitions Material Imaginaries and Other Aqueous Questions
REFERENCES NOTES INDEX
