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Body Worlds is a hugely popular exhibition that claims to offer a reverential and educational experience of the 'real human body' through the display of plastinated dead human bodies. However, because they are posed, staged, and composed of significant nonhuman artifice, plastinates are ambivalently 'real' as human bodies, let alone 'real' as humans. Plastinates are as much nonhuman as human, and neither category fully accounts for them. In this article, I discuss the consequences of this for feminist theory. Approaches in feminist theory that reify, either implicitly or explicitly, a human/nonhuman binary framework are challenged by plastinates. I show that locating plastinates within either ontological category, though not fully accounting for them, enables feminist critiques of the exhibition; however, these categories also paradoxically permit forms of violence with which feminists are typically concerned. In this way, I argue that plastinates force feminist thought to the very interface of the human/nonhuman divide. When applied to Body Worlds, these concepts at best form a heuristic ontological hinge whose angle is determined by ethical and political commitments, illustrating the ways in which key ontologies should be seen as political strategies more or less amenable to feminist goals, but not more or less true. I argue that what lies at the crux of this hinge, in the case of plastinates, is death, and suggest that Body Worlds demands that the interface of death with life become a key feminist concern.

US foreign aid to Bolivia during the period 1952 -- 64 helped transform the Bolivian Revolutionary Nat'list Movement (MNR) from a radical popular front to an ally of the US aid mission to an isolated gov toppled by a military coup. In 1952 a popular uprising during an econ crisis ousted the Rc of tin barons & latifundios & brought to power a coalition of rightist reformers (seeking to establish bourgeois democracy), pragmatic nat'lists, (advocating "modernization") & revolutionary socialists (committed to a worker-peasant gov). The actual direction of development efforts in Bolivia, the poorest nation in Latin America, was largely controlled & channeled by US foreign aid, not by popular support for alternative programs or internal pol'al power struggles. US leverage took the following forms: (1) expropriated mineowners had to be compensated for their losses, (2) aid from socialist countries or the UN had to be refused, (3) Bolivian petroleum codes, written by Amer's, had to provide for large depletion allowances, (4) a favorable investment climate for foreign investors in a free market had to be created. These policies split the coalition gov & paved the way for a rightist coup by a military junta in 1964. In retrospect then, US pre-conditions for foreign aid & the econ control that resulted from the specific nature of the aid distorted & redirected the Bolivian revolution, from socialist exp'tion to capitalist development, which under pressure hardened into US supported militarism as "the only non-Communist force with the necessary power & experience to control the country." A. Karmen.

"Drawing on contemporary events, fictional accounts of fossil fuel apocalypse, and ethnographic work on the fracking and pipeline boom in West Virginia, this book explores how private property, a primary political economic and emotional structure of settler colonial capitalism, enables extractive industry, constrains individual agency, and impedes environmental justice."

Explores fracking's dual impact on settler colonial culture and sustainabilityThrough meticulous research and poignant storytelling, Land of Extraction unravels the complex web of relationships between humans, places, and the environment, all bound by the concept of private property. It presents a thought-provoking analysis of how settler colonial culture imposes limits on environmental politics.Drawing on real-life events, fictional portrayals of fossil-fuel driven apocalypses, and firsthand ethnographic accounts of the fracking and pipeline boom in West Virginia, Rebecca R. Scott argues that the American dream's promise of empowerment through property ownership actually restricts action against extractive industries and hampers the progress of environmental justice coalitions.As the ever-expanding reach of natural gas and pipeline industries takes its toll on communities, the book reveals the fractures in landowners' reliance on private property, opening the door to more sustainable futures. A powerful call to reevaluate our perspectives and challenge the status quo, this book will leave readers questioning the foundations of our society and the possibilities that lie ahead

"Drawing on contemporary events, fictional accounts of fossil fuel apocalypse, and ethnographic work on the fracking and pipeline boom in West Virginia, this book explores how private property, a primary political economic and emotional structure of settler colonial capitalism, enables extractive industry, constrains individual agency, and impedes environmental justice"--

An ethnography of coal country in southern West Virginia.