Anthropocene Feminism

2017

Richard Grusin, Editor

A stunning experiment in thinking of the Anthropocene through feminism and queer theory

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.

These insights are extremely important. Moreover, they go a long way toward creating a more sophisticated feminist ecology.

Los Angeles Review of Books

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.

Richard Grusin is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He is author of Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 and Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America’s National Parks and editor of The Nonhuman Turn (Minnesota, 2015).

These insights are extremely important. Moreover, they go a long way toward creating a more sophisticated feminist ecology.

Los Angeles Review of Books

It is certainly a volume that due to its richness I will no doubt regularly return to and use as a point of reference.

Leonardo

What the authors in Anthropocene Feminism do collectively is foreground alternative timelines, histories, locations, and speculations for the Anthropocene, refiguring it as provocation for what remains to be done.

Glasgow Review of Books

Anthropocene Feminism anthologizes nine major thinkers in feminist theory whose work engages the current ecological crises. The book stages a rich transdisciplinary exchange among its contributors.

Signs Journal

Contents
Introduction. Anthropocene Feminism: An Experiment in Collaborative Theorizing
Richard Grusin
1. We Have Always Been Post-Anthropocene: The Anthropocene Counterfactual
Claire Colebrook
2. Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism
Rosi Braidotti
3. The Three Figures of Geontology
Elizabeth A. Povinelli
4. Foucault’s Fossils: Life Itself and the Return to Nature in Feminist Philosophy
Lynne Huffer
5. Your Shell on Acid: Material Immersion, Anthropocene Dissolves
Stacy Alaimo
6. The Arctic Wastes
Myra J. Hird and Alexander Zahara
7. Gender Abolition and Ecotone War
Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr
8. The Anthropocene Controversy
Jill S. Schneiderman
9. Natalie Jeremijenko’s New Experimentalism
Dehlia Hannah in Conversation with Natalie Jeremijenko
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index