Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self

It is easy to see why Bodily Natures earned the 2011 ASLE Book Award in Ecocriticism. Building on her environmentalist–feminist epistemologies in Undomesticated Ground and her notion of “trans-corporeality” in Material Feminisms, Alaimo further develops her theories about the relationship between materiality (of both bodies and environments) and knowledge (both subjective, corporeal knowledge and scientific/medical expertise). Alaimo broadens the range and theoretical sophistication of environmental justice (EJ) ecocriticism by bringing feminist theory, environmental phenomenology, and science and disability studies to bear on a wide range of texts, from the photography of global EJ activist websites to Muriel Rukeyser's Book of the Dead and Sandra Steingraber's Having Faith. These texts reveal that “the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world,” and Alaimo reads them as a call for a trans-corporeal environmental ethic (2). Such an ethic assumes that “matters of environmental concern are always ‘here,’ as well as ‘there,’ simultaneously local and global, personal and political, practical and philosophical” (15). Trans-corporeality therefore reframes bodily experience within broader structures. For instance, “green consumerism” and the “things-you-can-do-at-home-to-save-the-earth movement” are troubling because they “privatize” our responses. In contrast, the epistemological “practices of the citizen-expert,” as modeled in the texts she analyzes, “may foster political awareness of the relations between power and knowledge as well as between science and capitalist enterprise” (94).