Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times

by Stacy Alaimo

Opening with the statement “The anthropocene is no time to set things straight,” Stacy Alaimo puts forth potent arguments for a material feminist posthumanism in the chapters that follow. From trans-species art and queer animals to naked protesting and scientific accounts of fishy humans, Exposed argues for feminist posthumanism immersed in strange agencies and scale-shifting ethics. Including such divergent topics as landscape art, ocean ecologies, and plastic activism, Alaimo explores our environmental predicaments to better understand feminist occupations of transcorporeal subjectivity. She puts scientists, activists, artists, writers, and theorists in conversation, revealing that the state of the planet in the twenty-first century has radically transformed ethics, politics, and what it means to be human. Ultimately, Exposed calls for an environmental stance in which, rather than operating from an externalized perspective, we think, feel, and act as the very stuff of the world.

Genres: Nonfiction, Theory, Environment, Cultural Studies, Feminism, Ecology, Grad School

252 pages, Paperback

Published October 15, 2016

Reviews

[Ruby · Rating 4 out of 5]

a lot of this is kind of like a collage of thoughts and ideas and artworks, rather than the rigorous analysis/criticism in bodily natures, so i was about to give this 3 stars, but the conclusion is so good!

[Mesoscope · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book contains a diverse collection of essays organized around the useful concept of "trans-corporeality," a notion that humans and other life forms are necessarily inscribed within and constituted by social, political, ecological, and technological networks, to name a few, and that they cannot be considered as abstract entities that exist independently in the world. This is an appealing concept - it provides a framework for considering living things that disallows from the get-go various conceptual errors which, Alaimo argues (and I agree), reify and perpetuate the mechanisms of exploitation and injustice that have led to the current terrible state of the biosphere.

For my purposes, the book was at its best in analyzing and motivating this idea, as it did especially in the introduction and the fifth chapter. Alaimo uses the concept to examine various ways that living things evade naive categorization and demonstrate reciprocal influences and exposures that are not necessarily immediately visible.

I planned to write a longer and rather more favorable review of this book, but I have to say the author completely lost my sympathies in the last chapter, where she snidely attacks the major climate researchers Will Steffen, John McNeil, and Paul Crutzen, the latter of whom won the Nobel prize for his work on atmospheric ozone depletion. She refers to their discussion of environmental degradation in a major journal article as “hand-ringing” and claims that their warnings that human activity have impacted the biosphere “appear coated with a veneer of species pride.”

[natasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

“If we cannot laugh, we will not desire this revolution.” - Stacy Alaimo

I often find that books with a collection of essays have a couple of less strong or relevant discussions, but that is not something I experienced here. Each essay had a point and each was connected by the thread of trans-corporeality. I would even read this again just to reach the conclusion a second time. Lots of great theories, valuable deconstruction of others, and, of course, masterful research.

[6655321 · Rating 2 out of 5]

This feels like a bunch of interesting *sketches* for arguments that end up going in circles without making any tangible arguments just mashing a series of texts together before jumping to another point.

[Bill Brydon · Rating 4 out of 5]

notes are visible
"We are not accustomed to thinking about pleasure as ethical—political, perhaps, but not ethical. Yet, if ascetic practices frequently enforce corporeal boundaries or encourage a denial of or transcendence from nature and place, pleasurable practices may open up the human self to forms of kinship and interconnection with nonhuman nature."

[Tallon Kennedy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some wonderful essays thinking through our current environmental dilemmas and the culture that has produced them. I especially enjoyed the last chapter.

B+