Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self

Notes

1. Bodily Natures 1. I allude to the remarkable conference “Nature Matters,” organized by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Megan Salhus of York University, held in Toronto during October 2007. I regret that a broken ankle kept me from speaking at this important interdisciplinary event. 2. See Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. 3. Shannon Sullivan, in Living across and through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism , and Feminism, also focuses on the relations between human bodies and their environments. She argues that, to think of bodies as “transactional” is to “conceive of bodies and their various environments as co-constituted in a nonviciously circular way” (1). She also argues for a “nonreductive recognition of the significance of bodily materiality to human lived existence” (2). Despite these striking parallels, I should note that Living across and through Skins focuses on pragmatism, bodily activities, and lived experiences, whereas Bodily Natures focuses on how the movement across bodies and environments necessitates engagements with scientific understandings of materiality. In a fascinating account of the reception of her book, Sullivan tells how she was surprised that the Library of Congress categorized her book under “ecology.” But, she then reflects, “one of the main things the book does is present an ecological ontology, and as ecological, it is an ontology that intimately concerns social, political, and ethical issues. It is an ontology in which organisms and their various cultural, political, and physical environments co-constitute one another in dynamic, ongoing ways” (Sullivan, “Pragmatist Feminism” 202). Sullivan’s work offers rich possibilities for environmental philosophy and material feminisms. 4. For more on queer ecologies, see Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, Queer Ecologies. 5. For a more extensive discussion of a wide range of material feminisms, see Alaimo and Hekman’s introduction to the volume Material Feminisms. See also, of course, the other essays in that collection. Notes 6. See, for example, the excellent collection of essays edited by Noel Castree and Bruce Braun, Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium, including their piece in that collection, “The Construction of Nature and the Nature of Construction.” 7. See Alaimo, “Discomforting Creatures: Monstrous Natures in Recent Films” and “Endangered Humans? Wired Bodies and the Human Wilds.” 8. This idea surfaced in conversation with Jeanne Hamming. 9. I discuss this in more depth in the essay “Insurgent Vulnerability: Masculinist Consumerism, Feminist Activism, and the Gendered Sciences of Global Climate Change.” 10. Notwithstanding the allied aims of our projects and the feminist epistemologies that inform them both, Bodily Natures interrogates material interchanges and material agency as they emerge within risk society, environmental health, and environmental justice movements, whereas Code applies the concept of “ecological thinking” more broadly to epistemological situations that are unrelated to ecology or environment per se. I regret that I do not have the space here to undertake a more thorough analysis of Code’s rich and provocative work, let alone to adequately chart the intriguing connections and divergences between her project and my own. It may be helpful to note one obvious difference, however: Code constructs a sustained philosophical elaboration of an epistemology, while my own work undertakes a more cultural studies analysis that explores the ethical and political ramifications of a jumble of theories, literature, cultural artifacts, activist sites, and scientific accounts. 11. See “Circulating Reference: Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Forest” in Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Against an ontology that assumes a “gap between words and the world,” Latour argues that phenomena within scientific practice are “what circulates all along the reversible chain of transformations” (24, 71). Latour emphasizes the long chain of mediations from matter to form. 12. After reading Mark Lynas’s High Tide: The Truth about Our Climate Crisis, the students in my spring 2009 Literature and Environment class had a keen sense of our collective complicity in climate change. The class periods subsequent to the discussion of that book were conducted without the benefit of electric lights. 13. Jeff Howard underscores the need for precautionary thinking by proposing the wonderful term “nasty surprise” to describe environmental catastrophe. 2. Eros and X-rays 1. For more on environmental justice, see Hofrichter, Toxic Struggles: The Theory and Practice of Environmental Justice; Bullard, The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution; Pellow and Brulle, Power, Justice, and the Environment : A Critical Appraisal of the Environmental Justice Movement; Shrader-Frechette, Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy; and Stein, New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and...