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Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self
How do we understand the agency and significance of material forces and their interface with human bodies? What does it mean to be human in these times, with bodies that are inextricably interconnected with our physical world? Bodily Natures considers these questions by grappling with powerful and pervasive material forces and their increasingly harmful effects on the human body. Drawing on feminist theory, environmental studies, and the sciences, Stacy Alaimo focuses on trans-corporeality, or movement across bodies and nature, which has profoundly altered our sense of self. By looking at a broad range of creative and philosophical writings, Alaimo illuminates how science, politics, and culture collide, while considering the closeness of the human body to the environment.
193 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2010
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586 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 7, 2022
This was really well written but I feel conflicted about the works that Alaimo chose to analyze? I feel like, when I was looking up many of them for myself, a lot of them were more controversial and less environmentally radical than she described (Darwin's Radio, MCS, etc). But I think her overall argument for transcorporeality was well established and defended in terms of rhetoric, though I wish there were more real world examples. Academia often feels so... navelgaze-y, and many of the other environmental justice works I've read so far have felt more grounded in experiential and historical knowledge over literary analysis, which Alaimo focuses on. There were sections I liked but nothing super wowed me... I'd give it a 3.5 if Goodreads did half stars.
April 13, 2025
Everything is so intimately connected, man!
Stacy Alamo takes us on a deep-dive into the material connections between the human body and our natural world. They study the relationships that have formed throughout scientific development in the West to argue the human body can be seen as a direct reflection of the landscape we inhabit. Their book is an excellent tool in recognizing the extension of the human body into the natural world and vice versa.
Stacy Alamo takes us on a deep-dive into the material connections between the human body and our natural world. They study the relationships that have formed throughout scientific development in the West to argue the human body can be seen as a direct reflection of the landscape we inhabit. Their book is an excellent tool in recognizing the extension of the human body into the natural world and vice versa.
June 16, 2011
Wow! Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures is one of the most exciting books I’ve read in a long time. She argues that we need to reassert a consideration of matter and the materiality of human bodies and the “more-than-human” world into our analysis. She advances “trans-corporeality” as the basis for a post-humanist environmental ethics which understands the human as “always intermeshed with the more-than-human world” (2).
She argues that dealing with matter and bodies is necessary to feminism’s successful attack on biological determinism. In this way I could see a direct line from Alaimo’s arguments in her earlier work Undomesticated Ground. In Undomesticated Ground, Alaimo argues that rather than separate women from nature (reinforcing a separation of culture and nature), many feminists have negotiated and contested an essentialized relationship between women and nature from the space of nature, seeing it or using it as an undomesticated place from which to escape gender confines and create new ways of being. Here, she argues that rather than oppose the material and the cultural, we need to grapple with the material in a way that undermines the very line between them and instead recognizes the interconnections between them.
I thought Alaimo did this most convincingly in her first chapter which looks at class, the body, and environmental justice to interrogate the possibility of a “proletarian lung.” She offers a passage from Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins’s Biology under the Influence that I found incredibly compelling: “Racism becomes an environmental factor affecting adrenals and other organs in ways htat tigers or venomous snakes did in earlier historical epochs. The conditions under which labor power is sold in a capitalist labor market act on an individual’s glucose cycle as the pattern of exertion and rest depends more on the employer’s economic decision than on the worker’s self perception of metabolic flux. Human ecology is not the relation of our species with the rest of nature, but rather the relations of different societies, and the class, genders, ages, grades, and ethnicities maintained by those social structures. Thus, it is not too farfetched to speak of the pancreas under capitalism or the proletarian lung “(Alaimo 27-28). In this chapter she looks at the writing of leftist authors Meridel Le Sueur and Muriel Rukeyser.
She then looks at the role of the expert and the environmental justice advocate in a risk society to read invisible threats in works such as Ana Castillos So Far From God and Percival Everett’s Watershed.
Her fourth chapter takes up what she calls the “material memoir” to look at writing by authors like Audre Lorde and Sandra Steingraber by suggesting the way the self (and the material self) is transformed by the toxic interchange between our bodies and the environment. As she explains, “rather than dismissing Lorde’s insistence on the actuality of her own flesh as essentialist, it may be more revealing to examine how she traces her bodily immersion within power structures that have real material effects” (86). I especially loved the way Alaimo took the work of Conevery Bolton Valencius and Linda Nash on nineteenth century understandings of bodies and the environment to argue that in a post-Silent Spring world we have begun to recognize the permeability of our bodies with the environment.
Chapter Five takes up multiple chemical sensitivity and Chapter Six takes up genetic discourses in contemporary science fiction. It is in this final chapter that Alaimo most directly makes her argument for the posthuman environmental ethics based on transcorporeality.
She argues that dealing with matter and bodies is necessary to feminism’s successful attack on biological determinism. In this way I could see a direct line from Alaimo’s arguments in her earlier work Undomesticated Ground. In Undomesticated Ground, Alaimo argues that rather than separate women from nature (reinforcing a separation of culture and nature), many feminists have negotiated and contested an essentialized relationship between women and nature from the space of nature, seeing it or using it as an undomesticated place from which to escape gender confines and create new ways of being. Here, she argues that rather than oppose the material and the cultural, we need to grapple with the material in a way that undermines the very line between them and instead recognizes the interconnections between them.
I thought Alaimo did this most convincingly in her first chapter which looks at class, the body, and environmental justice to interrogate the possibility of a “proletarian lung.” She offers a passage from Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins’s Biology under the Influence that I found incredibly compelling: “Racism becomes an environmental factor affecting adrenals and other organs in ways htat tigers or venomous snakes did in earlier historical epochs. The conditions under which labor power is sold in a capitalist labor market act on an individual’s glucose cycle as the pattern of exertion and rest depends more on the employer’s economic decision than on the worker’s self perception of metabolic flux. Human ecology is not the relation of our species with the rest of nature, but rather the relations of different societies, and the class, genders, ages, grades, and ethnicities maintained by those social structures. Thus, it is not too farfetched to speak of the pancreas under capitalism or the proletarian lung “(Alaimo 27-28). In this chapter she looks at the writing of leftist authors Meridel Le Sueur and Muriel Rukeyser.
She then looks at the role of the expert and the environmental justice advocate in a risk society to read invisible threats in works such as Ana Castillos So Far From God and Percival Everett’s Watershed.
Her fourth chapter takes up what she calls the “material memoir” to look at writing by authors like Audre Lorde and Sandra Steingraber by suggesting the way the self (and the material self) is transformed by the toxic interchange between our bodies and the environment. As she explains, “rather than dismissing Lorde’s insistence on the actuality of her own flesh as essentialist, it may be more revealing to examine how she traces her bodily immersion within power structures that have real material effects” (86). I especially loved the way Alaimo took the work of Conevery Bolton Valencius and Linda Nash on nineteenth century understandings of bodies and the environment to argue that in a post-Silent Spring world we have begun to recognize the permeability of our bodies with the environment.
Chapter Five takes up multiple chemical sensitivity and Chapter Six takes up genetic discourses in contemporary science fiction. It is in this final chapter that Alaimo most directly makes her argument for the posthuman environmental ethics based on transcorporeality.
October 27, 2025
Only read the introduction. Matter matters.
October 21, 2017
"Trans-Corporeality and Environmentalism Because trans-corporeality brings the human body into focus, it is possible to charge that it reinstalls anthropocentrism. Jhan Hochman, for instance, would probably condemn trans-corporeality as another sort of “creeping metonymy,” in which “culture invades nature by calling itself natural or part of nature” (171). Hochman asserts that “what nature needs is not a bond with culture but a separation or divorce, some autonomy, at last some protection through ‘shelters’ (preserves), offering sanctuary from culture’s constant battering and stalking”
July 19, 2023
really great ideas here, though some of the repetition of the same quotes from sources got in the way of me finding alaimo’s throughline. but her ideas have definitely become mainstays in envs, so the book felt like a timely review of where some of those ideas came from/emerged out of.
Read
July 15, 2025Read the introduction as part of Rochelle Johnson's class on Thoreau's _Walden_, summer '25 at Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English.
Clear and fascinating! I'd be interested in reading the whole book. Also, wtf! The cover of this book is so badass!
Clear and fascinating! I'd be interested in reading the whole book. Also, wtf! The cover of this book is so badass!
March 14, 2019
Introduction.
tbz
July 9, 2025Recommendation from Alexa; she has a copy I can borrow
May 28, 2012
Be sure to read this book's other Goodreads review, by user sdw: it's excellent. Also read Levi Bryant's appreciation.
Profs, if, for some reason, your students need a handy illustration of "cultural studies," Bodily Natures will work perfectly: Alaimo ranges through high modernist fiction and poetry (Meridel Le Sueur and Muriel Rukeyser), postmodern and magical realist fiction (Watershed and So Far From God), self-published MCS memoirs, the individualist, anti-environmental politics of amniocentisis, science fiction (Greg Bear's Darwin series), the sociobiological discourse of the gene as 'master', and a host of other works and genres and ways of life. The opening chapter is a masterful, generous background on criticism of the body and on materialist feminisms: it deserves a place in any intro to theory course that has its eye on the 21st-century.
I've only a few complaints: Alaimo almost exclusively concentrates on the harm done by our being implicated in this shifting world (eg, "Multiple chemical sensitivity may well be the quintessential example of what I'm calling trans-corporeality"): cancers, chemical sensitivity, silicosis. I don't recall anything on the peculiar ways humans can live better through yogurt or sunlight or color, etc. To be sure, Alaimo's strong interest in environmental justice means that she's seeking out wrongs, and I know she's resisting the 'anything goes' approach of nonmaterial constructivism (and what looks like a postethical embrace of extinction in E. Grosz), but a more expansive posthumanism means looking, as well, at the advantages we can derive from our material connections.
The other complaint is the final bit, which aims to further the opening chapter's discussion of trans-corporeal ethics: I wasn't convinced. It's far too short for its importance, and Alaimo's frequent appeal to Karen Barad, I think, fails her here, as Barad speaks in praise of "vitality" and "flourishing." Fine language, that, but cui bono? Not all flourishings are good for me (see my paragraph, above). I'm being provincial here, of course, but it would be a cop-out to say, well, we all--humans, viruses, frying pans--gotta be -centrist. But still, I don't think flourishing can be a universal good. What's good for me isn't good for a lot of other things, and so on for others.
Some favorite bits follow:
"Perhaps the only way to truly oust the twin ghosts of biology and nature is, paradoxically, to endow them with flesh, to allow them to materialize more fully, and to attend to their precise materializations."
"Environmental justice movements epitomize a trans-corporeal materiality, a conception of the body that is neither essentialist, nor genetically determined, nor firmly bounded, but rather a body in which social power and material/geographic agencies intra-act."
"The most important difficulty for the material memoir, a difficulty that is simultaneously political, epistemic, and generic, is that autobiography by definition surfaces from one individual person, yet at present it is not feasible to trace the exact causes of cancer or other environmentally generated illnesses within an individual."
"The things-you-can-do-at-home-to-save-the-earth movement has become, in part, things-you-can-do-at-home-to-save-yourself. Sadly, many of these things involve the consumption of more products and more energy, thus contributing to further environmental degradation and climate change."
"Whereas green consumerism privatizes our response to widespread environmental degradation, the practices of the citizen-expert may foster political awareness of the relations between power and knowledge as well as between science and capitalist enterprise."
" Interestingly, despite his emphasis on textuality, [Timothy W.] Luke offers one of the most tangible and disturbing depictions of what it is to live in risk society. After explaining that environmental risk management routinely calculates such things as “for every A, B, or C benefit of this chemical or material, X people per 10,000, Y people per 100,000 . . . will be harmed by ill health, genetic mutation and/or death,” he states: “[i]n modern society, everyone tacitly consents to the crippling and painful execution of many of their fellow consumers every time they spray herbicide on lawns, fill their gas tanks with high-test, buy pressure-treated lumber, and purchase plastic housewares”
"The messy, multiple, material origins of this posthuman may suggest an environmental ethics that begins from the movement across—across time, across place, across species, across bodies, across scale—and reconfigures the human as a site of emergent material intra-actions inseparable from the very stuff of the rest of the world"
Profs, if, for some reason, your students need a handy illustration of "cultural studies," Bodily Natures will work perfectly: Alaimo ranges through high modernist fiction and poetry (Meridel Le Sueur and Muriel Rukeyser), postmodern and magical realist fiction (Watershed and So Far From God), self-published MCS memoirs, the individualist, anti-environmental politics of amniocentisis, science fiction (Greg Bear's Darwin series), the sociobiological discourse of the gene as 'master', and a host of other works and genres and ways of life. The opening chapter is a masterful, generous background on criticism of the body and on materialist feminisms: it deserves a place in any intro to theory course that has its eye on the 21st-century.
I've only a few complaints: Alaimo almost exclusively concentrates on the harm done by our being implicated in this shifting world (eg, "Multiple chemical sensitivity may well be the quintessential example of what I'm calling trans-corporeality"): cancers, chemical sensitivity, silicosis. I don't recall anything on the peculiar ways humans can live better through yogurt or sunlight or color, etc. To be sure, Alaimo's strong interest in environmental justice means that she's seeking out wrongs, and I know she's resisting the 'anything goes' approach of nonmaterial constructivism (and what looks like a postethical embrace of extinction in E. Grosz), but a more expansive posthumanism means looking, as well, at the advantages we can derive from our material connections.
The other complaint is the final bit, which aims to further the opening chapter's discussion of trans-corporeal ethics: I wasn't convinced. It's far too short for its importance, and Alaimo's frequent appeal to Karen Barad, I think, fails her here, as Barad speaks in praise of "vitality" and "flourishing." Fine language, that, but cui bono? Not all flourishings are good for me (see my paragraph, above). I'm being provincial here, of course, but it would be a cop-out to say, well, we all--humans, viruses, frying pans--gotta be -centrist. But still, I don't think flourishing can be a universal good. What's good for me isn't good for a lot of other things, and so on for others.
Some favorite bits follow:
"Perhaps the only way to truly oust the twin ghosts of biology and nature is, paradoxically, to endow them with flesh, to allow them to materialize more fully, and to attend to their precise materializations."
"Environmental justice movements epitomize a trans-corporeal materiality, a conception of the body that is neither essentialist, nor genetically determined, nor firmly bounded, but rather a body in which social power and material/geographic agencies intra-act."
"The most important difficulty for the material memoir, a difficulty that is simultaneously political, epistemic, and generic, is that autobiography by definition surfaces from one individual person, yet at present it is not feasible to trace the exact causes of cancer or other environmentally generated illnesses within an individual."
"The things-you-can-do-at-home-to-save-the-earth movement has become, in part, things-you-can-do-at-home-to-save-yourself. Sadly, many of these things involve the consumption of more products and more energy, thus contributing to further environmental degradation and climate change."
"Whereas green consumerism privatizes our response to widespread environmental degradation, the practices of the citizen-expert may foster political awareness of the relations between power and knowledge as well as between science and capitalist enterprise."
" Interestingly, despite his emphasis on textuality, [Timothy W.] Luke offers one of the most tangible and disturbing depictions of what it is to live in risk society. After explaining that environmental risk management routinely calculates such things as “for every A, B, or C benefit of this chemical or material, X people per 10,000, Y people per 100,000 . . . will be harmed by ill health, genetic mutation and/or death,” he states: “[i]n modern society, everyone tacitly consents to the crippling and painful execution of many of their fellow consumers every time they spray herbicide on lawns, fill their gas tanks with high-test, buy pressure-treated lumber, and purchase plastic housewares”
"The messy, multiple, material origins of this posthuman may suggest an environmental ethics that begins from the movement across—across time, across place, across species, across bodies, across scale—and reconfigures the human as a site of emergent material intra-actions inseparable from the very stuff of the rest of the world"
September 8, 2017
I really like Alaimo's writing style. Her argument, that humans and animals and all other material organisms are intimately tied to nature, is not a new one. However, she explores the subject from various epistemologies, including psychological, feminist, biological, and ecological frameworks.
To me, there is a limit to the effectiveness of facts and statistics as ways to talk about (e)waste. I don’t think it helps. I think it creates fear, and fear exacerbates inaction. From this book, I am prompted to think about other ways of exposing toxic/chemical environments, environmental racism, and long-term health effects (social and personal). What can we do with all of this theory?
To me, there is a limit to the effectiveness of facts and statistics as ways to talk about (e)waste. I don’t think it helps. I think it creates fear, and fear exacerbates inaction. From this book, I am prompted to think about other ways of exposing toxic/chemical environments, environmental racism, and long-term health effects (social and personal). What can we do with all of this theory?
January 12, 2013
A must-read for anyone interested in the environment and/or environmental justice.
October 15, 2013
Alaimo's "trans-corporeality" is the backbone of my thesis on the chemical novel.
Read
July 3, 2015I give up.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews