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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, this book 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

Cover -- Halftitle Page -- Title Page -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: 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 -- 1. 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 -- 2. 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 -- 3. 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 -- 4. Imagining Water in the Anthropocene -- Prologue/Kwe -- Swimming into the Anthropocene -- Learning from anticolonial waters -- Water is life? Commodity, charity and other repetitions -- Material imaginaries and other aqueous questions -- Notes -- References -- Index -- Imprint.

AbstractHow can we cultivate an underground multispecies justice with beings whose lifeworlds are unknown and unknowable? This article examines this question through a consideration of stygofauna: miniscule deep-time creatures who make their home in the watery seams of the earth. Taking a cue from these critters—many of whom have evolved without eyes to make their way differently in the darkness of their watery subterranean homes—the article troubles the assumption that knowledge, care, and justice must be predicated on a kind of knowing that insists that humans literally bring other worlds to light. Through a specifically situated exploration of stygofaunal worlds, knowledge, and mining in Australia, the article asks, How is knowledge-as-illumination complicit with complex regimes of knowledge where knowing in the name of justice is tangled up in knowing as a further (colonial, speciesist, ableist) violence? Refusing purity politics, the article's first aim is to demonstrate our complicity with extractive knowledge regimes even in a quest to care for underground worlds. Second, the article insists that knowing otherwise is both possible and already at work. It argues that to know stygofauna otherwise, one cannot eschew science or knowledge altogether. Instead, it proposes that multispecies justice depends on two moves: first, on safeguarding a mode of unknowability that the article refers to as estrangement, and second, on recognizing and cultivating knowledge practices that can cultivate nonextractive relations with subterranean species, even if imperfectly. It concludes with a short overview of several examples of knowing otherwise that push readers to think differently about knowledge as a practice of care and justice.

Is representation always colonisation? This question has high stakes for feminist, anticolonial and environmental justice projects alike, where in each case, technologies of representation trace a fine line between the much-needed redress of injustice done unto others, and the various violences that accompany speaking for them. At the same time, some ecofeminist and postcolonial positions concur that while perhaps impossible, representation might nonetheless be necessary. My objective here is to assess and extend these discussions in order to suggest the possibility of posthuman representation of non-human natures – in other words, a representation without representationalism, where the notion of a pre-representational reality as ontologically distinct from its representation is rejected. This kind of representation would remain concerned with the urgent need to advocate for the interests of non-humans, but also with the risk of capture and appropriation that runs alongside the impetus to 'speak for others' that feminist and postcolonial debates highlight. Linking the problem of representation specifically to a tenacious nature/cultural dualism, I draw specifically on posthuman feminist theories, and the work of Vicki Kirby. At the same time, I argue that attention to the lessons of anticolonial feminism can guide a concerted ethics of response. What we need is a technics of representation that espouses a flat ontology, but firmly rejects the notion of a flat ethics.

Responding to Rosi Braidotti's call for more 'conceptual creativity' in thinking through contemporary feminist subjectivity, this paper proposes the figuration of the body of water. It begins with a critical materialist enhancement of Adrienne Rich's concept of a politics of location, followed by a schematised description of the various 'hydro-logics' in which our bodies partake. The ways in which these logics already inform diverse modes of feminist scholarship are then explored. The objective of this paper is to locate, at the confluence of these discourses and descriptions, an invigorated figuration of the feminist subject as body of water. This subject is posthumanist and material, both real and aspirational. Most importantly, she is responsively attuned to other watery bodies—both human and more-than-human—within global flows of political, social, cultural, economic and colonial planetary power.

In the dominant "climate change" imaginary, this phenomenon is distant and abstracted from our experiences of weather and the environment in the privileged West. Moreover, climate change discourse is saturated mostly in either neoliberal progress narratives of controlling the future or sustainability narratives of saving the past. Both largely obfuscate our implication therein. This paper proposes a different climate change imaginary. We draw on feminist new materialist theories—in particular those of Stacy Alaimo, Claire Colebrook, and Karen Barad—to describe our relationship to climate change as one of "weathering." We propose the temporal frame of "thick time"—a transcorporeal stretching between present, future, and past—in order to reimagine our bodies as archives of climate and as making future climates possible. In doing so, we can rethink the temporal narratives of climate change discourse and develop a feminist ethos of responsivity toward climatic phenomena. This project reminds us that we are not masters of the climate, nor are we just spatially "in" it. As weather‐bodies, we are thick with climatic intra‐actions; we are makers of climate‐time. Together we are weathering the world.

Taking into account intersecting trends in political, academic, and popular engagements with environmental issues, this paper concerns the development of environmental humanities as an academic field of inquiry, specifically in this new era many are calling the Anthropocene. After a brief outline of the environmental humanities as a field, we delimit four problems that currently frame our relation to the environment, namely: alienation and intangibility; the post-political situation; negative framing of environmental change; and compartmentalization of "the environment" from other spheres of concern. Addressing these problems, we argue, is not possible without environmental humanities. Given that this field is not entirely new, our second objective is to propose specific shifts in the environmental humanities that could address the aforementioned problems. These include attention to environmental imaginaries; rethinking the "green" field; enhanced transdisciplinarity and postdisciplinarity; and increasing "citizen humanities" efforts. ; Please note, I have emailed a parallell publishable copy over designated emailadress to you. ; The Seed Box: An Environmental Humanities Collaboratory