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    Hydrofeminism

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    997 views11 pages

    Hydrofeminism - Astrida Neimanis

    Uploaded by

    Lobo Mau
    Hydrofeminism

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
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    of 11
    ‘The Many Dimensions of Chinese Feminism by Frches Chen Rossa in Drag: Deconstructing Gender boy Rosanne Terese Kennedy Undusfid Dangers New Directions i Reminist Thought and Practice Cate by Henriette Gunksl, Cheysanchi Nigianni, and Fanny Soderback Unputirut DaucuTers New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice Edited by Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni, and Fanny Séderbiick palgrave macmillan ‘Copyright © Heniette Gunko,Chrysanth Ngan, and Fanny Soderback 2012 Albright reserved Cover art: 1271-07 © Viky Colombet Fist plished in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States—a dvsion of St. Martin's Pres LC, ‘TTSFith Avenue, New York, NY 10070, ‘Where tis books distributed inthe UK Europe and the est ofthe worl this is by Palgrave Macllan, a division of Maclay Publishers Limited registered in Erland, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke Hampshire RG21 8X. Palgrave Macmillan ete aba academic Imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives tnoughout the wor Falgrave® and Macmilan® are registred trademarks in the Unitod States, ‘the United Kingdom, Europe and other counties. IsBN:978-0-230-11831-7 brary of Congress Catloging-n-Pbllcation Data LUndutfl daughters: new dections in feminist thought and practice / edited by Henriette Gunkel Chyysethi Niglann- and Fanny Sider. p-cin— [Breaking feminist aves) |SBN 978-0-230-11831-7 1.Feminism—History-21stcontury | Gunkal, Herre I Nigian ‘Cheysanth I Soderbich, Fanny, 1978 11551547 2012 308423 zorz01044o ‘catalogue record of the books avalable from the British Library Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (Ltd, Chennal Indl. Fist ection: September 2012 woe7ss432t Printed inthe United States of Amer, ConTenTs Series Foreword Preface: The Society of Undutiful Daughters Rosi Braidotti Acknowledgments Part 1 New Concepts Introduction: A Politics of Polyphony Fanny Siderbiick 1. The Future of Feminist Theory: Dreams for New Knowledges Elizabeth Grose Notes Toward a Scene of Anachronism Red Chidgey 3. The Interruptive Feminine: Aleatory Time and Feminist Politics Emanuela Bianchi 4° Ecriture Futuriste 1M, E, Simone Roberts Part IL New Bodies and Ethics Introduction: A Politics of Displeasure Chrysanthi Niginnni 5 Feminist Extinction Claire Calebrook 6 Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water Astrida Neimanis 2 The Need for the New in Feminist Activist Discourse: 1B 23 35 49 65 7 85, vi ® contents 7 The Breathing Body in Movement Davina Quinlivan 3 Incubators, Pumps, and Other Hard-Breasted Bodies Katie Lloyd Thomas Part II New Subjectivities Tatroduction: A Politics of Visibility Henriette Gunkel 9 Rethinking Sexual Difference and Kinship in Juliet Mitchell's Prychoanalysis and Feminism Jusith Butler 10. Transgenres and the Plane of Gender Imperceptiility Jami Weinstein 11 Primal Scenes, Forbidden Words, and Reclaimed Spaces: Voice, Body, and Poetic Form in Recent South African Writing, Gabebu Baderoon 12 Going Gaga: Dissent, Refusal, and Feminism Jack Halbersiam 13 (Un)naming the Third Sex After Beauvoir: ‘Toward a Third-Dimensional Feminism Kyoo Lee Lise of Contribuzors index 101 aE 129 141 155 169 183 195 209 215 Series Foreworp Breaking Feminist Waves is a series designed to rethink the conven: tional models of what feminism is today, its past and future crajecto- ries, For more than a quarter of a centuty, feminist theory has been presented as a series of ascending waves, and this has come to repre sent generational divides and differences of political orientation as ‘well as different formulations of goals. The imagery of waves, while connoting continuous movement, implies a singular trajectory with an inevitably progressive teleology. As such, it constrains the way we understand what feminism has been and where feminist thought has appeared, while simplifying the rich and nuanced political and philo- sophical diversity that has been characteristic of feminism through: out. Most disturbingly, it restricts the way we understand and frame new work ‘This series provides a forum to reassess established constructions of feminism and of feminist theory. It provides a starting point to redefine feminism as a configuration of intersecting movements and concems, with political commitment but, perhaps, without a singular center or primary track, The generational divisions among women do not actually correlate to common interpretive frameworks shaped by shared historical circumstances, but rather to a diverse set of argu- ‘ments, problems, and interests affected by differing historical con- texts and locations, Often excluded from cultural access to dominant modes of communication and dissemination, feminisms have never been uniform nor yet in a comprehensive conversation. The genera- tional division, then, cannot represent the dominant divide within feminism, nor a division between essentially coherent moments; there are always multiple conflicts and contradictions, as well as dif ferences about the goals, strategies, founding concepts, and starting premises, Nonetheless, the problems facing women, feminists, and femi- nisms are as acute and pressing today as ever. Featuring a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, Breaking Feminist Waves provides a forum for comparative, historical, and interdisciplinary CHAPTER 6 Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water Astrida Neimanis fe are all bodies of water. To think embodiment as watery belies the understanding of bed- s that we have inherited fiom the dominant Western metaphysical ition, As watery, we experience ourselves less as isolated entities, more as oceanic eddies: J am a singular, dynamic whorl dissolving 1a complex, fluid circulation. The space between ourselves and our ‘is at once as distant asthe primeval sea, yet also closer than our skin—the traces of those same oceanic beginnings still cycling igh us, pausing as this bodily ching we call “mine,” Water is tween bodies, but of bodies, before us and beyond us, yet also very sently this body, too. Deictics falter. Our comfortable categories of ht begin to erode. Water entangles our bodies in relations of fe, debt, theft, complicity, differentiation, relation. What might becoming o body of water—ebbing, Huvial, dripping, ising, traversing time and space, pooling as both matter and saning—give to feminism, its theories, and its practices? 86 @ ASTRIDANEDMANIS Hypro | Locics Our ells are inflated by water, our metabolic reactions mediated in agucows solution. David Suen ‘The oceans are in constant motion...tbermobaline circula- ion... occurs deep within the acean and ucts like a conveyor bel Environmental Literacy Cone The land biota bas bad to find ways to carry the sea within itand, ‘morcover, to construct watery conduits from “nade” t0 “nade.” Mark and Dianna McMenamin Somewhere at the bottom of the sem, shere must be water that sink from the surface dole “Little Toe Age” shres cenvuries ‘ago... The ocean remerbe Robert Kandel Sixty to ninety percent of your bodily matter is composed of water. ‘Water in this sense, is an entity, individualized as that relatively stable thing you call your body. But water has other logics, other pattern- ings and means of buoying our earthly world, too, Not least, water is a conduit and mode of connection. Just as oceanic currents con- vey the sun’s warmth, schools of fish, and islands of degraded plastic from one planetary sea to another, our watery bodies serve as material media. In an evolutionary sense, living bodies are necessary for the proliferation of what scientists Mark and Dianna McMenamin call Hypersea, which arose when life moved out of marine waters and by necessity folded a watery habitat “back inside of itself” Today, ‘when you or I drink a glass of water, we amplify this Hypersea, as we sustain our existence through other “webs of physical intimacy and fluid exchange.” In this act of ingestion, we come into contact with all of our companion species” that inhabit the watershed from which that water was drawn—book lice, swamp cabbage, freshwater mussel But we connect with pagsedimentation tanks, and rapid-mix floc culators that make thier drinkable, and the reservoir, and the rainclouds, too, Hypersea extends to include not only terrestrial flora and fauna, but also technological, meteorological, and geophysical bodies of water Hvpaovenunism & 87 Even while in o{GJJant motion, water is also a planetary archive of ‘meaning and matter. To drink a glass of water isto ingest the ghosts of bodies that haunt that water. When “nature calls” some time later, ‘we retum to the cistern and the sea not only our antidepressants, our chemical estrogens, or our more commonplace exerctions, but also the meanings that permeate those materilities: disposable culture, " modicalized problem-solving, ecological disconnect. Just as the deep ‘oceans harbor particulate records of former geological eras, water retains our more anthropomorphic secrets, even when we would sather forget. Our distant and more immediate pasts are returned to ‘us in both trickles and floods. And that same glass of water will ciliate our movement, growth, thinking, loving. As it works its way down the esophagus, through blood, tissue, to index finger, clavicle, left plantar fascia, it ensures that our being is always a becoming, An alchemist at once profoundly ondrous and entirely banal, water guides a body from young to old, “from here to there, from potentiality to actuality. Translation, trans- formation. Phurality proliferates. __ Asa facilitator, water is the milieu, or the gestational clement, for other watery bodies as well! Mammal, reptile, or fish; sapling. or ds iver delta or backyard pond—all ofthese bodies are necessarily brought into being by another body of water that dissolves, partially 98 completely, to water the bodies that will follow. On a geological , We have all arisen out of the same primorelal soup, gestared by pecies upon watery species that have gifted their morphology to new ms and articulations. ‘On amore human scale, we gestate in amniotic waters that deliver us the nutrients that enable our farther proliferation. Our waste is removed by similar waterways, and we are protected from external tharm by these intrauterine waters, too, Gestational waters are also hhemselves (in) a body of water, and participate in the greater ele- nent of planctary water that continues to sustain us, protect us, and tire us, both extra- and intercorporeally, beyond these amniotic innings. Water connects the human scale to other seales of life, ‘unfathomable and imperceptible, We are all bodies af water, in he constitutional, the genealogical, and the geographical sense. Water as body; warer as communicator between bodies; water as facilitating bodies into being. Entity, medium, transformative and tational milicu. All of this enfolded in, seeping from, sustai d saturating, our bodies of water. “There ate tides in the b Virginia Woolf? We ebb and flow across time and space— dy, to body, to body, to body. Te ._ 88 ® ASTRIDANEIMANIS Feminism | Leaks We ourselves are sea, sands, corals, seaseeds, beaches, vides, swim mers, children, waves...seas and mothers, —Hiline Cixous and Catherine Clément” Woman's writing...dravs ite corporeal fluidity from images of water... Thiskeeping-alive and life giving water exists simultane. ously as the writer’ ink, she mother’s milk, she woman’ blood and Trinh T. Minbrba® In me everything isairendy flowing. —Luee Irigaray? ‘Thinking about embodiment in ways that challenge the phallogocen- tric Enlightenment vision of discrete, atomized, and self-sufficient Man has been a long-standing concern for feminist thinkers Particularly within the Brench feminist tradition of éerisure femi- nine, the fluid body of woman is invoked as a means of intermpting 4 philosophical tradition that both valorizes a male (morphological, psychological, symbolic, philosophical) norm, and clides the specific- ity of *woman” 0 an [At the same time, accounts such as Hélene Cixous's, Luce Irigaray’s, and Trinh 'T. Minh-ha’s have been criticized by other feminist think cers for their purported incarceration of women within a biologically cessentialist female and normatively reproductive morphology. Cixous and Clément’s “Sorties,” for instance, connects the female body to the sea, in that both are gestators of life Irigaray, in her love letter to Friedrich Nietesche, continuously admonishes him for forgetting the ‘watery habitat that birthed him, and to which he owes a great debt. Both Minh-ha in Women, Native, Other and Cixous in “The Laugh of the Medusa” invoke the ‘mother’s milk?" ot the “white ink,”!® which seems to reductively connect the woman writer to a lactating, female body. Is not, then, the “fluid woman" just another way of invoking the phallogocentric fantasy of “woman as womb”? “The last century of (primarily Western) feminist thought has culti- vated the view that to reduce a woman to her (reproductive) biology is problematic, first, because of the troubling symbolic meanings— passive, empty vessel, hysterical, contaminating—that persistently imbue this biology. Moreover, within the social, political, and HYDROFEMINISM @ 89 economic contexts in which this thought has circulated, compulsory reproduction has generally foreclosed rather than facilitated mean- ingful participation of women outside of the domestic sphere. But ‘why should this history predetermine any appeal to biological mat ter as necessarily antifeminist or reductionist? The desire of water to ‘morph, shape-shift, and facilitate the new persistently overflows any attempt at capture, Ts not “woman” similarly uncontainable? After all, “woman’s” beings/becomings in these texts are not determined in advance—even as she may be, like water, temporarily dammed by dominant representations and discourse. As watery, woman is hardly (statically, unchangeably) “essentialist.” She too becomes the very matter of transmutation. In an effort to circumvent the trap of biological essentialism, the texts of Irigaray, Cixous, and Minb-ha have also been read as merely ‘metaphoric of gestation: women’s fluidity births new ways of think "ing, writing, being. But surely the watery body is no mere metaphor. ‘The intelligibility ofany aqueous metaphor depends entirely upon the teal waters that sustain 30t only material bodies, but material lan- guage, too.!” And ate we not ail bodies of water? In Marine Lover, While Irigaray’s descriptions highlight woman’s aqueous embodiment, posits no clear separation of the man’s body from the amniotic Waters he too readily forgets. Irigaray’s male interlocutor in this text is birehed in and by a watery body—yet this water is also an integral [part of his own flesh: “Where have you drawn what flows out of ou?”"* And, while what her lover thinks he fears is drowning in the mother/ea, Irigaray subtly reminds him that what he should really fear is desiccation, drought, thirst. No body can come into being, thrive, or survive without water to buoy its flesh. Similarly, Minh-ha suggests that woman's writing draws from the spring of her teproductively oriented fluid forces (menstruation, lactation) —yerall bodies have reservoirs to be tapped.” We might ask ifthe fluids of otherwise gendered bodies were acknowledged rather han effaced, how might such attentiveness amplify the creative— und cven cthical and political—potential of these bodies? Rather than ferting us to some “essentialist” difference between masculine and minine (or normatively reprosexual and nonreproscxual) embodi- tent, such aqueous body-writing might invite all bodies to attend ¢ Water that facilitates their existence, and embeds them within ing overlapping cycles of aqueous fecundity. ‘The fluid body is not specific to woman, but watery embodiment 4 feminist question, thinking as a watery body has the potential bathe new feminist concepts and practices into existence. What if 90 ASTRIDANEIMANIS a reorientation of ovr lived embodiment as watery could move us, for ‘example, beyond the longstanding debate among feminisms whereby commonality (connection, identifieation) and difference (alterity, tunknowability) are posited as an either/or proposition? Inspired by Trigaray, we will still affiem that the rhythms of the fluid woman belong to what Gayatti Chakravorty Spivak has called “the species of alterity”™" for this alterty also safeguards plurality). But Irigaray also reminds us that no body is self-sufficient in its fluvial corporeal swe have all come from the various seas that have gestated us, both ‘evolutionarily and maternally! Water, in other words, flows through and across difference. Water does not ask us to confirm sisher the irreducibility of alterity or material connection, Water flows between, as both: a new hydro-logic. What sort of ethics and politics could 1 cultivate if were to acknowledge that the unknowability of the other nonetheless courses through me—just as I do through her? “To say that we harbor waters, that our bodies? gestation, suste hance, and interpermeation with other bodies ate facilitated by our bodily waters, and that chese waters are both singular and shared, is far more literal than we might at first chink, Neither essentialist nor purely discursive, this watery feminism is critically materialist. Mempranz, Viscosity Probably she most important featire of a biomembrane is thar it ir fa selectively permeable rsructee.,. [which is] esensial for effecive suparacion. Wikipedia®

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