Myra J. Hird

The origins of sociable life : evolution after science studies

Introduction After War Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Thinking (With) Bacteria Evolutionary Theory and its Discontents Microontologies of Self Microontologies of Sex Microontologies of Ecology Eating Well, Surviving Humanism Bibliography

The Corporeal Generosity of Maternity

Feminist analyses have made important contributions to the sociocultural experiences of pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding. This article draws upon recent theorizing within science studies to focus on the mattering of these processes. Specifically, the article expands upon Mausss notion of the ‘gift’, which Diprose develops through the idea of ‘corporeal generosity’. I am interested in corporeal generosity insofar as it circumvents descriptions of relationships in terms of a closed economy in which resources are exchanged without excess or remainder. Corporeal generosity refers to the often missed but nevertheless inescapable debt that a body owes to other bodies. At the same time, this embodied ‘gifting’ is both unpredictable and intrusive – there is as much possibility of threatening the integrity of bodies as there is of opening new possibilities.

Indifferent Globality Gaia, Symbiosis and ‘Other Worldliness’

Nigel Clark’s ‘ex-orbitant globality’ concerns the incalculability of other-than-human forces we typically fail to acknowledge, yet which haunt all considerations of environmental change. This article considers Gaia theory as a useful heuristic to register the ubiquity of bacteria to environmental activity and regulation. Bacteria are Gaia theory’s fundamental actants, and through symbiosis and symbiogenesis, connect life and matter in biophysical and biosocial entanglements. Emphasizing symbiosis might invoke the expectation of a re-inscription of the human insofar as the ubiquitous inter-connectivity of life ultimately connects everything to the human. I want to argue toward the opposite conclusion: that bacterial liveliness suggests a profound indifference to human life. As such, symbiosis does not efface difference, nor its vigorous refusal to be absorbed within human formulations of world-remaking, including environmental change. Bacterial indifference’s radical asymmetry suggests the need for non-human centred theories of globality.

Feminism theorises the nonhuman

We are pleased to offer this Special Issue on the subject of feminism and the nonhuman. Invoking feminism and a nonhuman together raises significant questions for feminist theory and praxis, and each contribution in this issue offers thought-provoking responses to these questions, often inciting further queries. The issue has three parts: an interchanges section, a conversation and articles. The three interchanges pieces – by Eleanor Casella and Karina Croucher, Debra Ferreday, and Nicole Vitellone – resulted from a workshop held in the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies at Lancaster in July 2010 on ‘Feminism and the Non-Human’. Speakers presented short papers and participants debated the significance of the nonhuman to feminist theory. This workshop also generated a list of questions, which we then sent to two leading scholars, Elizabeth A. Wilson (author of Affect and Artificial Intelligence, 2010) and Vicki Kirby (author of Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large, forthcoming) for consideration. The questions they reflected upon in their ensuing conversation focused on the nature of contemporary critique, the significance of issues pertaining to women and sex/ gender in relation to the nonhuman, and the status of scientific knowledge within feminist theory. We also asked Kirby and Wilson to situate their responses in relation to their most recent work. Finally, the articles published here by Tora Holmberg, Sarah Kember, Rebecca Scott, and Lucy Suchman, resulted from a Call for Papers on feminism and the nonhuman. We thank all the reviewers of these exchanges, conversations and papers, and especially Jackie Stacey whose insights and expertise were invaluable to this project throughout.

Making waste management public (or falling back to sleep)

Human-produced waste is a major environmental concern, with communities considering various waste management practices, such as increased recycling, landfilling, incineration, and waste-to-energy technologies. This article is concerned with how and why publics assemble around waste management issues. In particular, we explore Noortje Marres and Bruno Latour’s theory that publics do not exist prior to issues but rather assemble around objects, and through these assemblages, objects become matters of concern that sometimes become political. The article addresses this theory of making things public through a study of a small city in Ontario, Canada, whose landfill is closed and waste diversion options are saturated, and that faces unsustainable costs in shipping its waste to the United States, China, and other regions. The city’s officials are undertaking a cost–benefit assessment to determine the efficacy of siting a new landfill or other waste management facility. We are interested in emphasizing the complexity of making (or not making) landfills public, by exploring an object in action, where members of the public may or may not assemble, waste may or may not be made into an issue, and waste is sufficiently routinized that it is not typically transformed from an object to an issue. We hope to demonstrate Latour’s third and fifth senses of politics best account for waste management’s trajectory as a persistent yet inconsistent matter of public concern.

Toward a Sociology of Stammering

Conversation is one of the most fundamental of all human activities. While most people take this form of interaction for granted, people who stammer often approach it with fear and trepidation. This article identifies stammering as a distinctly social event and highlights the relative neglect of the issue within the discipline of sociology. Drawing upon the work of George Mead and Erving Goffman we suggest that a distinctly sociological approach offers specific insights into stammering as an effect of social interaction.We argue that the strategies that people who stammer employ when passing and covering and the accounting practices that all individuals use in social interaction to define the difference between stammered and non-stammered speech are of sociological interest insofar as they provide valuable insights into the interaction of self and society, the tenuous distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, and the conceptual boundaries of disability.

Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms

My recent writing has revolved around describing an ontopoetics of race that I name the sense of the brownness in the world. Brownness is meant to be an expansive category that stretches outside the confines of any one group formation and, furthermore, outside the limits of the human and the organic. Thinking outside the regime of the human is simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting. It is a ceaseless endeavor, a continuous straining to make sense of something else that is never fully knowable. To think the inhuman is the necessary queer labor of the incommensurate. The fact that this thing we call the inhuman is never fully knowable, because of our own stuckness within humanity, makes it a kind of knowing that is incommensurable with the protocols of human knowledge production. Despite the incommensurability, this seeming impossibility, one must persist in thinking in these inhuman directions. Once one stops doing the incommensurate work of attempting to touch inhumanity, one loses traction and falls back onto the predictable coordinates of a relationality that announces itself as universal but is, in fact, only a substrata of the various potential interlays of life within which one is always inculcated. The radical attempt to think incommensurate queer inhumanity is a denaturalizing and unsettling of the settled, sedimented, and often ferocious world of recalcitrant antiinhumanity. Queer thought is, in large part, about casting a pic-

Waste, Environmental Politics and Dis/Engaged Publics

Waste is a major global environmental issue that assembles socio-cultural and bio-geological processes in complex indeterminate relationships. Drawing on three case studies, this article explores the shifting environmental politics concerned with waste’s material, economic, political, and cultural ‘management’. The Canadian case studies – determining a new waste management technology in a mid-sized city in central Ontario, an open dump in a remote Nunavut community, and an abandoned gold mine in the Northwest Territories – suggest waste occasions particular material and political mobilizations. Landfill leachate, colonialism, disinterested publics, freezing arsenic, global corporate investments, country food, land claims, neoliberal governance, permafrost, ravens, and a host of other socio-material forces both empower and thwart ‘management’ politics. Through these case studies, this article explores Isabelle Stengers’s assertion that participating citizenship is an ‘Empty Great Idea’, and a provocation to consider the contexts in which waste may generate acquiescent or objecting publics.

Unidentified Pleasures: Gender Identity and its Failure

Feminist philosophical analyses have recently returned to psychoanalytic theorys insights into the origins of gender. Freuds exegesis on social development holds gender to be a matter of identification, as opposed to an ontological condition of being. This article considers Judith Butlers use of psychoanalytic theory to argue that homosexuality both precedes and conditions the formation of heterosexual gender identification. While convinced the processes of identification do involve loss and are grieved in some way, I am less convinced that the precedence of either heterosexuality or homosexuality can be logically sustained. I suggest that Butlers political commitment to subvert the hetero-normative gender system leads to a conflation of identification with desire, two distinct processes involving different psychic mechanisms. I want to argue that all gender is melancholic, as any restriction of pleasures entails loss; but the closer to the dominant heteronormative system the greater that failure.

Raven, Dog, Human: Inhuman Colonialism and Unsettling Cosmologies

As capitalism’s unintended, and often unacknowledged, fallout, humans have developed sophisticated technologies to squirrel away our discards: waste is buried, burned, gasified, thrown into the ocean, and otherwise kept out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Some inhuman animals seek out and uncover our wastes. These ‘trash animals’ choke on, eat, defecate, are contaminated with, play games with, have sex on, and otherwise live out their lives on and in our formal and informal dumpsites. In southern Canada’s sanitary landfills, waste management typically adopts a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to trash animals. These culturally sanctioned (and publicly funded) facilities practice diverse methods of ‘vermin control.’ By contrast, within Inuit communities of the Eastern Canadian Arctic, ravens eat, play, and rest on open dumps by the thousands. In this article, we explore the ways in which western and Inuit cosmologies differentially inform particular relationships with the inhuman, and ‘trash animals’ in particular. We argue that waste and wasting exist within a complex set of historically embedded and contemporaneously contested neo-colonial structures and processes. Canada’s North, we argue, is a site where differing cosmologies variously collide, intertwine, operate in parallel, or speak past each other in ways that often marginalize Inuit and other indigenous ways of knowing and being. Inheriting waste is more than just a relay of potentially indestructible waste materials from past to present to future: through waste, we bequeath a set of politically, historically, and materially constituted relations, structures, norms, and practices with which future generations must engage. Introduction As capitalism’s unintended, and often unacknowledged, fallout, humans have developed sophisticated technologies to squirrel away our discards: waste is buried, burned, gasified, thrown into the ocean, or otherwise kept out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Despite efforts to 1 Waste studies scholars distinguish between terms such as waste, trash, discards, garbage and so on, and use them differently in different contexts. See, for example, Gay Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006) and Zsuzsa Gille, From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007). Here we use the terms synonymously. For further Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/7/1/169/252001/169Zahara.pdf by guest on 07 December 2018 170 / Environmental Humanities 7 (2015) disgorge ourselves of waste, millions of people live with, and on, consumption’s cast-offs. Additionally, an undocumented number of ‘trash animals’—gulls, ravens, pigeons, raccoons, rats, mice, dogs, polar bears and so on—eat, defecate, play games with, have sex on, and otherwise live out their lives in our dumpsites. Culturally sanctioned and publicly funded modern facilities in southern parts of Canada practice diverse methods of ‘vermin control,’ legitimated within discourses of public hygiene and safety. In the Eastern Canadian Arctic, waste and wasting exists within a complex set of historically embedded and contemporaneously contested neo-colonial regulations, policies, and formal and informal practices. Within Inuit communities of Canada’s North, ravens rest on open dumps by the thousands, and sick polar bears may be killed out of respect. In this article, we reflect upon why animals are ‘managed’ at modern landfills sites across southern Canada, and left to scavenge on open dumps sites in northern Canada. It is not, we will argue, simply a matter of modern versus outdated waste disposal technologies and practices—although this is a central way in which waste issues in the North are framed by government officials and the media. We will explore the ways in which historically and culturally embedded practices inform particular relationships with the inhuman. Canada’s North, we argue, is a site where differing cosmologies variously collide, intertwine, operate in parallel, or speak past each other in ways that often marginalize Inuit ways of knowing and being with animals and landscape. In this article, we examine how encounters with the inhuman have been, and continue to be, discussion see Myra J. Hird, “Knowing Waste: Toward an Inhuman Epistemology,” Social Epistemology 26, no.3-4 (2012): 453-469; and Myra J. Hird “Is Waste Indeterminacy Useful? A response to Zsuzsa Gille’s, Social Epistemology 2, no.6 (2013): 28-33. 2 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006), 124. 3 Kelsi Nagy and Phillip David Johnston III, eds., Trash Animals: How We Live with Nature’s Filthy, Feral, Invasive, and Unwanted Species (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). This collection of essays written by scholars, artists, and journalists examines what it means to live with those inhuman urban companions that are often associated with ‘trash.’ Animals written about in this collection include magpies, pigeons, starlings, prairie dogs, coyotes, and more. 4 Kelsi Nagy and Phillip David Johnston III, “Introduction” in Trash Animals, ed. Nagy and Johnston III, 3-8. 5 We use the term ‘inhuman’ to refer to living and nonliving entities that are not included in the species Homo sapiens, and to emphasize that the classification itself is an evolutionary creation of an unfathomable diversity and population of microorganisms that literally make up ‘the human.’ Furthermore, doing so is more in line with Inuit and other Indigenous cosmologies, which readily challenge the human/nonhuman binary. For detailed discussion see Myra J. Hird, “In/Human Waste Environments,” GLQ 21, nos.2-3 (2005): 213-215; Myra J. Hird “Meeting with the Microcosmos,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (2010): 36-39; and Myra J. Hird The Origins of Sociable Life:Evolution After Science Studies (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Press, 2009). 6 This paper is primarily based on archival analysis involving government documents, media, and academic literature. Our research is also informed by participant observation and semi-structured interviews that were conducted in Iqaluit over a three month period in 2014. This research was generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant program. Details concerning the theoretical framework and methodological practices are beyond the scope of this article but are included in Alexander R. D. Zahara, “The Governance of Waste in Iqaluit, Nunavut” (MES Thesis, Queen’s University, 2015). Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/7/1/169/252001/169Zahara.pdf by guest on 07 December 2018 Zahara and Hird: Raven, Dog, Human / 171 integral facets of the northern Canadian colonial project. We begin with a short history of Inuit culture prior to colonial contact, and the profound changes that took place as Canada, the United States, and other nations claimed increasing trade, resource, military, and sovereign interests. We argue that the pursuant historical and contemporary record of managing Inuit peoples, animals, and the northern landscape, is a direct outcome of the anthropocentric neoliberal capitalist venture that forefronts Canadian state sovereignty. 7 This mapping of capitalist venture and neocolonial governance is followed by a discussion of the burgeoning interest in those inhuman creatures who survive through relations with human debris. This literature points to the complex and often contradictory Western understandings of animals as ‘companion species,’ whose lives are variously cherished, pampered, used as labor, abused, discarded, and killed. Our attention then turns to two particular animals—ravens and sled dogs—whose iconic presence in the North of Canada exemplifies the complex and often contradictory understandings of the inhuman within this particular neo-colonial landscape. Ravens and sled dogs feature in Inuit cosmology, hunting, and culture, and both have endured—however tentatively—a rapidly and profoundly changing status in Canada’s North. This change has occurred, in part, because waste and its inhuman associates are ‘othered’ within neo-colonial governance practices. Across Nunavut, this has contributed to the displacement of ravens as Creator to nuisance pests scavenging from open dumpsites, and the killing of thousands of Inuit sled dogs, whose deaths have forever changed the way Inuit experience human/nature relations. Using the Canadian North as a case study, we explore the ways in which waste and associations with waste inform the neo-colonial present. We argue that inheriting waste is more than just a relay of potentially indestructible waste materials from past to present to future: through waste, we bequeath a set of politically, historically, and materially constituted relations, structures, norms, and practices with which future generations must engage. ‘Trash Animals’ and the North As Donna Haraway’s path-breaking work argues, capitalism’s technoculture structures particular relationships with the inhuman. From agility training, medical and hygiene practices, to the selection of financially lucrative genes, we encounter our inhuman companions as “lively capital.” 10 Even shepherding and livestock dogs, whose companionship—both as laborers and as family members—has historically been requisite for the survival of many 7 Throughout the article, we refer to ‘southern’ and ‘northern’ as political designations. Southern refers to regulations, policies and practices associated with so-called modern waste management that developed within the context of a neo-colonial capitalist framework. The differentiation roughly corresponds to a dichotomy between landfills and other waste management practices found in southern Canadian urban centres, and so-called pre-modern open dumping consistently found