Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times by Stacy Alaimo (review)

"The anthropocene is no time to set things straight," begins Stacy Alaimo's Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. As this playful opening sentence suggests, Exposed resists environmentalism's earnest pieties, immersing itself instead in the complex and often provocative regions where environmental activism, performance art, material feminism, queer studies, posthumanism, and New Materialism overlap. "Immerse" here is no idle word choice; not only does the book's culminating section extend Anthropocenic questions to oceanic realms (Alaimo herself describes the rest of Exposed as "what happened to me while I was trying to get to the sea" [13–14]), but the work as a whole develops a seemingly aqueous methodology that resists "floating perspectives" (129) and "dry, detached assertions" (10) in favor of "immersive practices and methodologies" (10). The result is an ambitious, irreverent, original, wide-ranging, and sometimes disorienting call for a politics of exposure that heeds the entanglement of human bodies with the material world and inhabits a mode of agency that "emerges from the perceived loss of boundaries and sovereignty" (5).

Over the course of its six chapters, Exposed critiques various practices and postures of impermeability—ranging from the hypermasculine performance of "coal rollers" to the proclaimed safety of domestic enclosure to the epistemological separateness of the sovereign Western subject. If this list seems potentially dizzying in its range, that is part of the point; Exposed is not a monograph but a collection of disparate essays. Its "motley mix of topics" (2) ultimately helps Alaimo develop a critical methodology that—much like the disanthropocentric environmental ethic that also emerges from these pages—is corporeal and entangled, eschewing any pretense of scientific objectivity in favor of "embedded epistemologies" (129) and "lively relationalities" (133).

I emphasize approach rather than argument because Exposed's primary contribution to ongoing environmental and philosophical conversations often seems methodological. The book is unified by implicit animating questions: What kind of criticism is called for in posthuman times? What does philosophy look like when practiced in a disanthropocentric mode? If the Anthropocene is no time to set things straight, then it is also, Alaimo insists, "no time for transcendent, definitive mappings, transparent knowledge systems, or confident epistemologies" (3). What this means in practice is that Exposed privileges examples over conceptual scaffolding, ultimately building a remarkable compendium of non-normative, oft pleasurable, always embodied modes of inhabiting our material entanglements with other beings on a warming, increasingly toxic planet.

After a brief introduction, Exposed unfolds in three sections of two chapters each: "Posthuman Pleasures," "Insurgent Exposure," and "Strange Agencies in Anthropocene Seas." "Posthuman Pleasures" begins, somewhat counterintuitively, with human gestures of domestication. Chapter 1, "This is About Pleasure: An Ethics of Inhabiting," counters human habitation's tendency to "wall out" and maintain security with texts (ranging from the poems of Linda Hogan to Octavia Butler's Kindred to the low-budget film Habitat) that "imagin[e] alternative visions of [a] home" (22), "envision[ing] it as a lively place of surprising pleasures" (26). The resulting readings enable Alaimo to answer affirmatively the chapter's animating question: "Is it possible . . . to reenvision the home—a place constructed of literal and metaphorical walls—as a liminal zone, an invitation for pleasurable interconnections?" (22). As this chapter ends, domestic walls recede more literally, as the discussion moves to nonhuman habitats and multispecies art, querying, "what [it] would . . . mean to recognize the claim of nonhuman animals on human territories" (22). The second chapter, "Eluding Capture: The Science, Culture, and Pleasure of 'Queer' Animals," turns more concretely to questions of bodily pleasure and sexuality. Here, wonder again is emphasized; however, the "walls" that dissolve this time are the "domesticating modes of categorization" (60) and paradigms of "'ecosexual normativity'" (56) that animals who engage in same-sex behavior (or "display . . . multiple 'genders'" [43]) confound. Chapter 3, "The Naked Word: Spelling, Stripping, Lusting as Environmental Protest," traffics once again in unclothed bodies—not of queer...