Astrida Neimanis

feminist subjectivity, watered

Responding to Rosi Braidottis 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 Richs 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.

On collaboration (for Barbara Godard)

28 May 2012: I am somewhere above the North Sea, returning home from the third annual New Materialisms conference in Linköping. And I’m wondering about the uncharacteristic headache that has been plaguing me for half a day. Yesterday, I suspected it was the extended Swedish daylight, interacting with my suprachiasmatic nuclei: was this protracted contact goading my circadian rhythms into a quietly painful revolt? Perhaps the less-than-average communication between caffeine and my central nervous system was to blame. Then again, it could be that the outdated prescription of those rediscovered sunglasses was simply provoking an unhappy reaction from a retina that had long since moved on.

Fathoming chemical weapons in the Gotland Deep

At the end of World War II, tens of thousands of tons of chemical warfare agents – mostly mustard gas – were dumped in the Gotland Deep – a deep basin in the middle of the otherwise shallow Baltic Sea. Decades later, these weapons are being reactivated – both literally (perhaps on the faces of dead seals, and in fishermen’s nets) and also in our imaginations. In this story that recounts the beginning of our research into this situation, militarization meets with environmental concern: the past floats into the present, where humans and non-humans are equally implicated, where the sea itself conditions the kinds of questions we can ask, and answers we might get, and where terms like ‘threat’ and ‘risk’ remain undecided. After spending time on Gotland Island – the closest terrestrial site to these weapons dumps – we ask what kinds of research methods might be adequate to these tangled, underwater tales that we find so difficult to fathom.

Post-humanist Imaginaries

This chapter proposes that climate imaginaries are a vital part of governance. In the particular context of the Anthropocene, there is a need to consider the kinds of orientations that an Anthropoc ...

Gut Feminism by Elizabeth A. Wilson (review)

How would you describe rumination? As regurgitation and chewing? Or as mulling something over? Elizabeth Wilson would argue it is hardly a coincidence that these two seemingly contrary activities—the messy business of food, saliva, and bile, and the lofty heights of ideation—find a common home in a single word. Indeed, at the core of Gut Feminism is the claim that “the gut is minded.” Mentation and digestion; the psyche and the soma; brain and belly; neurological and biological—each of these seeming dualities is for Wilson thrillingly entangled in ways that critically reboot how we think about bodies and how they work in the world. At its core, this book thus makes a major contribution to one of feminist philosophy’s key concerns: theories of embodiment. In Gut Feminism, the key site for exploring these entanglements is depression. Depression is a ubiquitous social and political concern that clearly demands the attention of feminist analyses. (While one in ten Americans will experience some form of depression, women are twice as likely to be afflicted in comparison to men, while people of color also report higher rates of depression [healthline.com].) Of more interest to Wilson, however, is the way that depression is a particularly charged site for aggression, conflict, and partisanship, which also implicates a wild congeries of bodily organs and processes. Rather than aiming to neutralize this conflict or straighten out these tangles, Wilson finds here potent matter for feminist rumination.

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

due to the limited space of the book review, but will definitely generate much discussion. For example, Trinh’s conception of the materiality and openness of walking, water and tear in relation to the constraint of language and vision, could be situated within current debates between feminist poststructuralist and feminist new materialist theorisations. The transformative potential granted to the blank space could also be productively brought into conversation with for example postcolonial theorisation of the missing or the invisible (see, e.g. Bhabha 1994), as well as new materialist conception of nothingness (see, e.g. Barad 2012; Hinton 2017). However, what I find most interesting is the ways in which the notion lovecidal might enable a new set of questions that compel us to reconsider established political and ethical orientations. It seems that Trinh ultimately opposes and prefers the healing power of heart and love to that of division and oppression. But if love, as difference, as relationality, unavoidably and incessantly destructs and constructs itself, howmight it informmodes of feminist politics that refuse to refuse through taking seriously the puzzle of beginning and ending, as well as the possibilities and impossibilities of lovecidal.

A Feminist Deleuzian Politics? It’s About TimeGrosz, Elizabeth. 2004. In the Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

A Review of: Grosz, Elizabeth. 2004. In the Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.