I especially enjoy doing things that pollute the water and chew up more than my share of resources. Thirdly, I feel guilty because I am constantly doing really environmentally damaging things. And yet, I can imagine the ethics of this book by Neimanis much better than I can enact them. Also, I’m a female, feminine-ish, a mother and a feminist historical separations of brain and body have never done my kind any good. I know my brain is of my body and my guts fire with emotion. (Ironically, I think ‘staying with the trouble’ – Haraway’s term – in this instance means worrying for at least a moment on guilt.) Secondly, I’m guilty because I’m not supposed to perpetuate a distinction between the psychic and the material. Two of my intellectual heroes shun guilt Donna Haraway eschews the quest for purity because empirical senses of right and wrong thwart rigorous politically oriented scholarship, and Eve Sedgwick finds shame a less moralising and more critically generative affect. I feel guilty, in the first instance, because I’m not supposed to feel guilty. I cannot live the majesty of this watery-world as I would dearly like to. Or, more particularly, my bad.Īfter reading Bodies of Water I find myself stalled somewhere between psychic and the material. So instead of merely singing the praises of this book, I want to focus on the bad. But I would say this Neimanis is my colleague and collaborator. In this regard, Bodies of Water is a convincing, lyrical and philosophically complex description of the world. And universalist scientific understandings of water as ‘H20’ are reined into their Anthropocene context, to allow for thinking in greater detail about waters’ plurality. Trans-epochal imaginings of planetary flows are reworked in a queer rendition of the ‘aquatic ape’ theory of evolution. Then, intergenerational narratives are liquefied into an anti-essentialist feminist rethinking of amniotic fluid and breast milk. The book considers such complexity in the following ways: first, we are prompted to consider the site-specificity of waters as producing an aquatic ‘politics of location’. At the same time as thinking about difference, however, Bodies of Water also challenges us to think relationally. ![]() How is the water in which I wade both different from and the same as yours? How is the water in which I was gestated similarly multivalenced? Infusing the watery world with difference offers a new way into thinking our present ecological and political situation. The book’s point of departure is that waters connect us all as such, the more difficult and vexing problem tackled therein is to think rigorously and critically about the particularities of those relations. Its author, Astrida Neimanis, challenges us to reimagine how individual human bodies - constituted of approximately 70 per cent water - are thoroughly implicated in the planetary hydrocommons. If it is the job of a phenomenologist to describe conscious experience, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology does so in a way that collapses the distinction between one’s psychic life and one’s material situation. As we shimmied into the square concrete opening, we learned that a drain is not simply a drain.
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