Anthropocene Feminism

by Richard Grusin (Editor), Stacy Alaimo (Contributor), Jill S. Schneiderman (Contributor)

What does feminism have to say to the Anthropocene? How does the concept of the Anthropocene impact feminism? This book is a daring and provocative response to the masculinist and techno-normative approach to the Anthropocene so often taken by technoscientists, artists, humanists, and social scientists. By coining and, for the first time, fully exploring the concept of “anthropocene feminism,” it highlights the alternatives feminism and queer theory can offer for thinking about the Anthropocene. 

Feminist theory has long been concerned with the anthropogenic impact of humans, particularly men, on nature. Consequently, the contributors to this volume explore not only what current interest in the Anthropocene might mean for feminism but also what it is that feminist theory can contribute to technoscientific understandings of the Anthropocene. With essays from prominent environmental and feminist scholars on topics ranging from Hawaiian poetry to Foucault to shelled creatures to hypomodernity to posthuman feminism, this book highlights both why we need an anthropocene feminism and why thinking about the Anthropocene must come from feminism. 

Contributors: Stacy Alaimo, U of Texas at Arlington; Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht U; Joshua Clover, U of California, Davis; Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State U; Dehlia Hannah, Arizona State U; Myra J. Hird, Queen’s U; Lynne Huffer, Emory U; Natalie Jeremijenko, New York U; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Columbia U; Jill S. Schneiderman, Vassar College; Juliana Spahr, Mills College; Alexander Zahara, Queen’s U.

Genres: Feminism, Gender, Theory, Nonfiction, Climate Change

248 pages, Paperback

First published March 21, 2017

About the author

Richard Grusin is Professor of English at University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. His research fields include: media, cinema, history of representation, as well as the environmental, cultural, and American studies.

Reviews

[Nóra Ugron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some essays are intriguing and thought-provoking, in depth analysis, but some, for me, miss the point, the task of envisioning feminist thought in so called Anthropocene times. I'd 3,5, not 3, though. I warmly recommend Stacy Alaimo's chapter to everyone!! (Also Braidotti's, but that is not so different from her other works, which are very widely known.) I also like Claire Colebrook's approach and the presentation about Canadian colonialism in the Arctics by Myra J. Hird and Alexandra Zahara. To understand the discussion around a new geological epoch from a geological point of view, Jill S. Schneidermann's text could help. And I was also happy to read about visual art in Natalie Jeremijenko's and Dehlia Hannah's discussion, even though I didn't always find it enough elaborate.
So all in all, it is a varied and interesting book, worth reading it for sure, but the concept of Anthropocene feminism wasn't in the end very well developed. Which is not a problem from the point of view of interesting individual contributions, but on a whole.

[Kai · Rating 2 out of 5]

i was at this conference in 2014, and presented what would become my first published paper there (self promo: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full...). like any conference it had its own highs and lows, but overall it was crucial to my still-quite-plastic thought process. what i remember most are the conversations at its margins, over dinner and beer and cigarettes, when finally a whole range of my friends and comrades were in the same place at the same time. it's hard to capture that in a book!

like any edited volume, this one is kind of a mixed bag. the choice of who to include is, i would not say suspicious. but it should be seen as having a necessary supplement in this issue of philoSOPHIA (http://www.sunypress.edu/p-6284-philo...), which also contains a few of the presentations from the conference. kathryn yusoff's paper there is probably my single favorite essay and performance piece of the last five years.

but to return to Anthropocene Feminisms, i was writing this review bc Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr's chapter "Gender Abolition and the Ecotone War" is a really helpful meditation on autonomist and anti-work feminisms and their critical importance to understanding the ecological crisis! as they write, "we should expect, indeed *demand*, of our moment a flowering of marxist-ecological thought equivalent to the moment of marxist feminism. similarly we should demand of our marxist feminism an attention to the ecological."

that's like the baseline expectation now. you don't get to write marxism anymore that doesn't speak to the ecological; liberal feminism is done, as is dude-centric or gender-absent marxism of the past. not saying we can't draw on the tools of the past, but it's our time to shine now and we're refusing such facile separations. anyway, end rant.

[Sarah Bezan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book of essays is a worthwhile read, but disappointing in some respects. As always, Claire Colebrook offers a thought-provoking critique of the Anthropocene. Rosi Braidotti rehearses familiar territory in her essay, which may be useful to newcomers to the subject, and Elizabeth Povinelli's essay foregrounds her key arguments from her book-length work on the subject. Essays by Myra Hird, Stacy Alaimo, and Lynne Huffer are all original and well-considered in scope. The introduction by Richard Grusin doesn't offer much in the way of a theory or a fully-developed hypothesis for the subject, and might have been more useful to scholars in this area if it had provided more than a literature review and a series of research questions for consideration. Overall, though, there are at least a handful of very good essays that scholars in the field might find useful and illuminating.