Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self
    Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self
    Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self
    Ebook197 pages474 hours

    Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self

    By Stacy Alaimo

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIndiana University Press
    Release dateOct 25, 2010
    ISBN9780253004833
    Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self

    Read more from Stacy Alaimo

    Related to Bodily Natures

    Related ebooks

    Philosophy For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      We Think The Forest Is Out There, But It’s Inside Us

      Oct 15, 2020

      Milano July 2020 not an ontological relativism but rather promoting a sort of double simultaneous movement Stefano Boeri Centennial scientist James Lovelock recounts his insight into Gaia as he investigates the possibility of a human species tra

      6 min read

    • Article

      Art In The Anthropocene

      Mar 12, 2019

      Art In The Anthropocene
      7 min read

    • Article

      Body Of Evidence

      Jul 23, 2019

      Body Of Evidence
      3 min read

    • Article

      Transgression Has Become So Banal: Chris Kraus and Jarett Kobek in Conversation

      Aug 24, 2017

      We’re all living in a word that comes after Kathy Acker. The post Transgression Has Become So Banal: Chris Kraus and Jarett Kobek in Conversation appeared first on The Millions.

      11 min read

    • Article

      Bhanu Kapil

      Mar 15, 2019

      Everything is red. The trees look like they’re bending over. The lorry is approaching the village. Nurpur. Don’t tell anyone it was Nurpur. Just say it was any old village. A motorbike was coming from the opposite direction. The driver of the motorbi

      5 min read

    • Article

      Hydrocartography: Mapping with Waters

      Dec 15, 2021

      Traditional, arid cartography—say, a typical school world map—could be belittingly described as the science of imposing continents and demarcated grounds onto the irrelevant in-betweenness of the world’s oceans. Waters are depicted as adverse obstacl

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care by Anne Boyer

      Sep 15, 2020

      Anne Boyer understands that “pain doesn’t destroy language: it changes it.” As a poet, Boyer follows this maxim within the body of her latest book, The Undying, writing through the ways her recent experiences of pain surrounding triple-negative breas

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Case for Abolition

      Jun 19, 2019

      Our belief in abolition is first and foremost philosophical. It grew from watching, experiencing, and opposing decades of reliance on concrete and steel cages as catch-all solutions to social problems. We want a society that centers freedom and justi

      3 min read

    • Article

      No Planet, No Pride: Why Climate Justice Is LGBTQ+ Justice

      Feb 18, 2022

      Look out of the window; the climate crisis is already happening. Winters are getting shorter, flowers are blooming months earlier than they should, and insects are being wiped out en-masse. The picture is apocalyptic, which is why it can be tempting

      10 min read

    • Article

      Pollution Is Colonialism

      Jun 3, 2021

      Max Liboiron Duke University Press “WASTE IS A PRODUCT of a larger system,” Max Liboiron said in a waste symposium this spring. And that larger system, in short, is colonialism. But pollution isn’t colonialism’s side effect—it’s an “enactment of ongo

      1 min read

    • Article

      Our Voices: Indigeneity And Architecture

      Mar 9, 2020

      Our voices: Indigeneity and architecture begins as its title signals, calling to its reader in chapter-long verses that share research findings, practice observations, lived experiences and creative modes at the confluence of Indigeneity and architec

      5 min read

    • Article

      Living Memory

      Jun 23, 2021

      Living Memory
      18 min read

    • Article

      What’s the Story?

      Sep 22, 2017

      I KNOW THAT EXPLORING the harmonies between science and religion is not the kind of subject your average literary magazine might focus on for an entire issue— and maybe that is why I am particularly excited about this issue of Creative Nonfiction. Lo

      4 min read

    • Article

      E.O. Wilson Saw the World in a Wholly New Way

      Jan 5, 2022

      I first met Edward O. Wilson in 1971 when I was a student in an ecology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Wilson, a famous Harvard professor, was sitting in on the student project reports. After I reported my ex

      12 min read

    • Article

      Let Us Walk Together

      Jun 1, 2021

      WHEN I WAS YOUNG my dad often took me to the woods. He is a person who believes in hugging trees — and not in a metaphorical way. If a tree was too big to fully embrace, he’d stretch out his arms and press his body, head turned to one side, against t

      2 min read

    • Article

      Rachel Carson

      Aug 4, 2020

      Caring about the environment seems like common sense to most of us today, but can you imagine what it was like to be one of the first people to speak up on behalf of nature? That’s what Rachel Carson did – and she had a hard fight to make others unde

      2 min read

    • Article

      She Reasons

      Oct 4, 2020

      She Reasons
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Bodily Natures

    4/5

    7 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Be sure to read this book's other Goodreads review, by user sdw: it's excellent. Also read Levi Bryant's appreciation.

      Profs, if, for some reason, your students need a handy illustration of "cultural studies," Bodily Natures will work perfectly: Alaimo ranges through high modernist fiction and poetry (Meridel Le Sueur and Muriel Rukeyser), postmodern and magical realist fiction (Watershed and So Far From God), self-published MCS memoirs, the individualist, anti-environmental politics of amniocentisis, science fiction (Greg Bear's Darwin series), the sociobiological discourse of the gene as 'master', and a host of other works and genres and ways of life. The opening chapter is a masterful, generous background on criticism of the body and on materialist feminisms: it deserves a place in any intro to theory course that has its eye on the 21st-century.

      I've only a few complaints: Alaimo almost exclusively concentrates on the harm done by our being implicated in this shifting world (eg, "Multiple chemical sensitivity may well be the quintessential example of what I'm calling trans-corporeality"): cancers, chemical sensitivity, silicosis. I don't recall anything on the peculiar ways humans can live better through yogurt or sunlight or color, etc. To be sure, Alaimo's strong interest in environmental justice means that she's seeking out wrongs, and I know she's resisting the 'anything goes' approach of nonmaterial constructivism (and what looks like a postethical embrace of extinction in E. Grosz), but a more expansive posthumanism means looking, as well, at the advantages we can derive from our material connections.

      The other complaint is the final bit, which aims to further the opening chapter's discussion of trans-corporeal ethics: I wasn't convinced. It's far too short for its importance, and Alaimo's frequent appeal to Karen Barad, I think, fails her here, as Barad speaks in praise of "vitality" and "flourishing." Fine language, that, but cui bono? Not all flourishings are good for me (see my paragraph, above). I'm being provincial here, of course, but it would be a cop-out to say, well, we all--humans, viruses, frying pans--gotta be -centrist. But still, I don't think flourishing can be a universal good. What's good for me isn't good for a lot of other things, and so on for others.

      Some favorite bits follow:

      "Perhaps the only way to truly oust the twin ghosts of biology and nature is, paradoxically, to endow them with flesh, to allow them to materialize more fully, and to attend to their precise materializations."

      "Environmental justice movements epitomize a trans-corporeal materiality, a conception of the body that is neither essentialist, nor genetically determined, nor firmly bounded, but rather a body in which social power and material/geographic agencies intra-act."

      "The most important difficulty for the material memoir, a difficulty that is simultaneously political, epistemic, and generic, is that autobiography by definition surfaces from one individual person, yet at present it is not feasible to trace the exact causes of cancer or other environmentally generated illnesses within an individual."

      "The things-you-can-do-at-home-to-save-the-earth movement has become, in part, things-you-can-do-at-home-to-save-yourself. Sadly, many of these things involve the consumption of more products and more energy, thus contributing to further environmental degradation and climate change."

      "Whereas green consumerism privatizes our response to widespread environmental degradation, the practices of the citizen-expert may foster political awareness of the relations between power and knowledge as well as between science and capitalist enterprise."

      " Interestingly, despite his emphasis on textuality, [Timothy W.] Luke offers one of the most tangible and disturbing depictions of what it is to live in risk society. After explaining that environmental risk management routinely calculates such things as “for every A, B, or C benefit of this chemical or material, X people per 10,000, Y people per 100,000 . . . will be harmed by ill health, genetic mutation and/or death,” he states: “[i]n modern society, everyone tacitly consents to the crippling and painful execution of many of their fellow consumers every time they spray herbicide on lawns, fill their gas tanks with high-test, buy pressure-treated lumber, and purchase plastic housewares”

      "The messy, multiple, material origins of this posthuman may suggest an environmental ethics that begins from the movement across—across time, across place, across species, across bodies, across scale—and reconfigures the human as a site of emergent material intra-actions inseparable from the very stuff of the rest of the world"

    Book preview

    Bodily Natures - Stacy Alaimo

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1