Recensione a R. Gruisin (ed.), Anthropocene Feminism. Between human/non-human valorization and the notion of difference, University of Minnesota Press 2017

RECENSIONI / Mariaenrica Giannuzzi /


Anthropocene Feminism

This recent anthology Anthropocene Feminism commits itself to «an experiment in collective theorizing» in liaise with Anglophone feminist voices around this eco-political controversy.

The anthology consists of eight contributions, an introduction and a conversation. Its project was established in the fall 2013 with Rebekah Sheldon, Emily Clark and Dehlia Hannah (Arizona University, Synthesis Center – who is here in conversation with artist Natalie Jeremijenko’s New Experimentalism) while designing the 2014 annual spring conference at the Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) University of Winsconsin-Milwaukee – which then Gruisin directed. The anthology displays well-known names together with names that may sound less popular, those latter being an opportunity to get to know the landscape of feminist materialism ‘in America’. Most of the scholars in this collection, in fact, have variously worked on the historico-natural composition of bodies in philosophy, literature and science. So, the landscape is flourishing. And its most general continuity is challenging Foucauldian biopolitics with the urge to tell how to act differently and how the scale of difference appears.

Geologist Jill Schneiderman originally illustrates a story of the controversial epoch in the eighth essay The Anthropocene Controversy. Schneiderman pushes back its theoretical outset in order to connect with an analogous example, The Great Devonian Controversy in the 1830s (pp. 169-196). What was then at stake was the semantic coal-bearing layer named after Devon, England (where rocks from this economically significant time between 416 and 358 millions years ago in the Paleozoic era were first studied), after Welsh tribes, or after a toponomy which belonged to the Roman Empire, i.e., the Cambrian, a classical name for Wales, or those Ordovician and Silurian, named after Welsh tribes (p. 173). Recalling Sandra Harding’s empiricism and Londa Schiebinger’s history of science, Schneiderman argues how «names given to all episodes of geologic time are based on social decisions» (p. 175) hence those decisions are gendered – like Linneus’ decision of naming «warm-blooded, hairy animals, Mammalia, even though mammae are not a pronounced unifying characteristic of this group […]. Milk-producing mammae function only on half of these animals (the females), and only then for part of the time when they are lactating» (pp. 172-175).

More than accepting an order of things that would have featured a human group with hair, three ear bones or a four chambered heart in continuity with ungulates, sloths, bats, sea cows and apes, all sharing the same characteristics, this reduction of human species to female features, and the female function to motherhood, of course, «underscored eighteenth-century women’s position as nurturing caretakers» (Ibid.). Why did Linneus not choose then ‘Pilosa’ (the hairy one) or ‘Aurecaviga’ (the hollow-eared ones)? Schneiderman uses Schiebiger’s feminist study Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science to envision those cultural forces and pressing political trends, which molded Linneus’ view of nature as well as the present controversy (Ibid.).

A conflict of names has been forecasted, in fact, in two counterfactual proposals to the category of Anthropocene: Capitalocene, used, among others, by Rosi Braidotti – referring to informational data of biocapital – and Donna Haraway’s Chuthlucene, which addresses a technological collective unconscious, more than a geologic epoch. The conflict of names thus reveals a set of pressing cultural and political trends that compete both for defining scientific objects and for defining universal history, after the globalist enthusiasm of the Nineties.

If in her study on mammalia Schiebiger proved a spontaneous ethico-political process of naming otherness, newness, unknown and hypothesis, more after difference (and sexual difference as an icon), then after identity, the question of gender within the Anthropocene controversy remains thus the question of feminism in relation to geologic time. How can we understand the personal (a political singularity or a social self which is ‘more than one’) on a geologic timescale? And which are political implications of such a move? Beyond the battlefield of names, moving from a gendered history of names to further philosophical contributions means to reexamine the complex of time and difference.

The collection presents contributors who may be already well known to a feminist European audience, because of some engagement with Spinozian feminist new-materialism – such as the matriarch of Utrecht Rosi Braidotti; or Elizabeth Povinelli, who published her reflections on abandonment as one of the main strategies in the financialization of economics and, more recently, her proposed hermeneutic tactics for trumpism in e-flux magazine (E. Povinelli, Geontologies: The Figures and the Tactics, in «e-flux Journal» http://www.e-flux.com/journal/78/81514/geontologies-the-figures-and-the-tactics/). Braidotti and Povinelli are both present here with essays in the shape of statements. The first delivers Four Thesis on Post-Human Feminism, the second designs The Three Figures of Geontology which are the desert, the animist and the terrorist.

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