Astrida Neimanis
“Weathering: Feminist Approaches to Climate Catastrophe”
What does it mean to claim that climate change is a feminist issue? Drawing on the action-concept of "weathering" (Neimanis and Hamilton, 2018), this lecture examines the intersection of climate catastrophe and feminist thinking/practice. We will explore the proposition that a fulsomely feminist approach requires us to understand climate change and the other crises that subtend it as embodied phenomena, where "the weather" is always more-than-meteorological. We will also ask about how understanding weather as a commons can generate feminist insights into questions of difference, solidarity, proximity, strangeness and intimacy, all as part of the fraught project of belonging. To pursue these questions, we will examine feminist, Black, decolonial, crip and queer theories, artworks and non-academic texts.
Reading list
Neimanis, A. “The Weather Underwater: Blackness, White Feminism and the Breathless Sea” Australian Feminist Studies, 2019.
Neimanis, A. and Walker, R. “Weathering: Climate Change and the Thick Time of Transcorporeality” Hypatia, 2013.
Neimanis, A. and Hamilton, J. “Weathering” feminist review, 2018.
Neimanis, A, Hamilton, J. and Zettel, T. “Feminist Infrastructure for Better Weathering” Australian Feminist Studies – forthcoming.
Ensor, S. “Queer Fallout: Samuel Delaney and the Politics of Cruising” Environmental Humanities, 2017.
Berlant, L.. “The Commons: Infrastructure for troubling times” EP&D: Society and Space, 2016.
Sharpe, C. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke.
Simmons, K. Settler Atmospherics. Cultural Anthropology Fieldsights.
Verlie, B. Learning to Live with Climate Change, Routledge, 2021.
Chen, Mel Y. “Feminisms in the Air.” Signs Journal (Special Issue on COVID-19, 2020)
Rankine, C. “The Weather” New York Times Review of Books, 2020.
Renée Valiquette
“Anthropocenic Reckoning in the Age of Otherness”
The temptation for many scholars and activists responding to worsening ecological crises is to advocate for "better" evolutions of Western modernity, to build more muscular environmentalisms that scream and push for unilateral solutions. Such approaches prolong and exacerbate colonial and patriarchal forms of power and politics. Feminist and anti-colonial engagements with the Anthropocene, by contrast, expose the vanity, hostility and profiteering of the “modern” project, administered by a form of “agency that outstrips its capacity to manage itself, which wrecks, pillages, loots, and destroys, that has very little idea what it is doing” (Bird Rose 2013, 3). Through a feminist, anti-colonial lens, the Anthropocene becomes an “Age of Otherness,” a period of necessary undoing, unsettling and reckoning. Ontologically and phenomenologically speaking, feminist notions of otherness better describe the disjunctures, disruptions and unpredictability of current ecological conditions. A posthuman feminist otherness also helps engender better Anthropocenic ethics by emphasizing humility, relinquishment and openness to other(ed) ways of being, thinking and relating. And finally, feminist, anti-colonial otherness nourishes the speculative imagination in order to “breathe in the fire,” to fathom and conjure joyful multi-species relationality in and for ruinous times. In recognizing and safeguarding the inalienable othernesses of our present and future, even with all the known destructions and injustices under and on the way, something better remains possible.
Reading list:
Catriona Sandilands, Not Just Pussy Hats on the Climate March: Feminist Encounters with the Anthropocene.
Joanna Zylinska, The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (78 pages)
Jemma Deer, Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World (224 pages)
Julietta Singh, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (216 pages)
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Resisting the Power Structures That Keep Colonialism Alive
Redi Koobak
“What Might it Mean to “Know Well”? Introduction to Feminist Visions of Collaborative Survival”
Inspired by a growing body of work that reconsiders ecofeminist interventions and proposes that we think in terms of newer posthuman futures, this introductory lecture will examine the role of discourses on nature in shaping the situated and site-specific understandings of gender, sexuality, class, and race. We will map out some of the ways in which feminist and queer academics have approached the possibilities and challenges of thinking gendered, sexualised, and raced bodies in and through the environment. We will discuss how these ideas might help us envision ways of “knowing well” (Code 1991) in order to work towards justice and “collaborative survival” (Tsing 2018).
Required readings
Seager, Joni. 2003. “Rachel Carson Died of Breast Cancer: The Coming of Age of Feminist Environmentalism.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3): 945-972. (27 pages)
Mann, Susan A. 2011. “Pioneers of U.S. Ecofeminism and Environmental Justice.” Feminist Formations 23(2): 1-25- (25 pages)
Tuana, Nancy. 2008. “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina.” In: Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (eds) Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 188-213. (25 pages)
Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 1-25. (25 pages)
Tsing, Anna, Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, pp. vii-43. (49 pages)
Recommended readings
Sandilands, Catriona. 1999. “Introduction. Mothers, Natures and Ecofeminists.” and “A Genealogy of Ecofeminism.” The Good-natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, pp. xi-27. (36 pages)
Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona and Erickson, Bruce. 2010. “A Genealogy of Queer Ecologies.” In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, ed. Catriona Mortimer- Sandilands and Bruce Erickson. Indiana University Press, pp. 1-47. (47 pages)
Gaard, Greta. 2014. “Indigenous Women, Feminism, and the Environmental Humanities.” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 1(3). (15 pages)
Barad, Karen. 2008. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” In: Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (eds) Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 120-154. (34 pages)
Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”. Feminist Studies 14(3), pp. 575-599. (24 pages)
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
