Ecologies and Technologies of Feminist Posthumanities

The big question of our time concerns action, what to do, when all forms of action seem tainted, contaminated. What are the possibilities for considerate and curious measures of co-existential care in such a situation? What types of engagement might guide us in this era of environmental degradation, species loss, mediatization, and political polarization where options are increasingly hard to fathom? Is there even hope in futures-to-come at all in this age of the Great Acceleration (Steffen et al. 81)? What can we do as researchers invested in better futures of togetherness and diversity?

I argue that the efficacy of present and future feminist scholarship will depend on its ability to address, in a synergistic mode, the entangled challenges of rampant social injustice, environmental change, and loss of biological diversity in the context of an understanding of the ways in which science, media, and technology are embedded in society, our bodies, and ourselves. To me, that is what matters most: the integrative capacity of feminist knowledge practices in situ, in a world of both enormous estrangement and potential for fulfilling the needs for a new sense of belonging. Instead of pitching the human against either technology or the naturalized world, I assume here that various types of human activities (gender, art, language, and science) are always technical, social, and always already material: part of emerging or existing ecologies. The argument here is for versatile feminist research that can respond with relational, contextual, and “transcorporeal” (as Alaimo termed it) insights, descriptions, and political propositions for how to consume, cohabit, and think better, together, within various types of such Anthropocene ecologies. I want to argue for a kind of feminist research that can be both as responsive to change as the world that it purports to analyze and grounded and situated. This means reimagining feminist scholarship in the open-ended and synergistic registers of minor posthumanities.¹ Such posthumanities or more-than-human humanities name a widespread and growing effort to rework the role of the humanities at large, and their relation to science, technology, art, other species, and human differences (Wolfe 2; Åsberg 265). This is exemplified by various forms of “new” humanities (Braidotti 143): for instance, environmental humanities, multispecies humanities, posthuman humanities, technohumanities, feminist, and anti-colonial posthumanities. But it is also evident in a range of speculative turns toward ontological, epistemological, and ethical issues in feminist theory per se, such as new materialisms and posthumanisms. These feminist posthumanities follow in the footsteps of scholars like Sylvia Wynter, Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway, and others before them, who have argued for “the elaboration of a new science,” or a new “science of the World” (Wynter 328). It entails refusing the division of labor between science “doing” nature and humanities “doing” culture. In the responsive forms of feminist posthumanities that matter most to me right now, theory meets practice, science meets art, and a transformational sense of ecological humanity meets the people.

As written about previously in a sister journal (Åsberg and Lykke 300), the theoretical concepts underpinning this new configuration of knowledge often come from the Anglo-American field that I “grew up” with in Sweden, feminist STS, or feminist cultural studies of science and technology in society. My scholarly trajectory over the last two decades marked Gender Studies’ own coming of age story in Sweden as a “postdisciplinary discipline” (Lykke 137; Åsberg, 2005 86). It has been shaped by queer feminist theory, cultural studies, human-animal studies, STS, continental philosophy, and intersectionality debates in such a way that what counts as social science or humanities became indistinguishable. Societal relevance is key, but without giving in to the crude utilitarianism of academic capitalism and new public management.

It is clear to most of us today that the classical humanities, grounded in Euro- and andro-centric traditions and built upon the normative figure of the Universal Man, has failed to adequately address urgent social, cultural, environmental, ethical, and political problems. Traditionally, the humanities and social sciences have approached the climate, environment, nonhuman species, technologies, and even society as “mere” objects for human use. It is striking how similar the human sciences are to the natural sciences in their imperial modus of colonizing and territorializing the world. In response to this, environmental or ecological humanities and posthumanities of all kinds have emerged in feminist research practices. They are interconnected forms of critical “rewriting” (Lyotard 24) or revising of conventional humanities, which have traditionally been anchored in the hegemonic notion of the autonomous and bounded human subject. Collaboration, or rather co-labor-ation, as experiments in working together, is the signum of such feminist posthumanities.

In contrast to traditional and disciplinary humanities, where the lone thinker is the competing star of the game, what I have come to term feminist posthumanities refer to diverse emerging inter-, post- or even extra-disciplinary approaches that challenge a human-centered view of the universe and individualism at large. It invites a careful and curious consideration of humans in their different positions to power and human status, as always already entangled in relationships with a multitude of other beings (animal, vegetal, digital, and geological) and the ways they affect one another. In its collaborative practices and with different analytical emphases, feminist posthumanities expand our social and theoretical imaginations, welcoming a multitude of ongoing discourses into play.

Feminist posthumanities try to respond to different forms of anti-colonial, ecological, feminist, and critical and creative forms of new humanities without excluding those thinkers that do not feel quite comfortable with either the posthuman or the traditional humanities. Feminist posthumanities thrive outside comfort zones too and welcome the uncomfortable as it tries very hard to “stay with the trouble,” as Haraway taught us (1). It hopes to transform and connect knowledge, knowledge holders, and knowledge practices; it is thus anti-foundational vis-a-vis the human, the humanities, and disciplinarity at such. This in turn makes it hard to practice in most academic settings.

This focus on interconnectivity, bonds made and unmade, has allowed an upsurge of creative and critical approaches unearthing the complexity of the specific problems that we are currently facing. For example, the issues of environmental health and environmental justice, such as climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, are rooted in the interrelation of human and nonhuman beings in a globalized world. A set of actions on the part of (mostly privileged) humans has led to massive ecological disruption, disease, suffering, and death on a planetary scale. Yet, we are all complicit in the changes ahead. Solutions to such tentacular problems may only be found in new ways of fostering collaboration and respect among different fields of expertise, critical and creative insights, and nuanced in situ understandings that do not, by force or by habit, continue to privilege a select set of humanistic ideals over those marginalized others, human and nonhuman alike. In a similar vein, socio-political problems linked to the massive expansion of new technologies and media will never find suitable and sustainable solutions if we continue to approach these issues from a human-centered mind-set of traditional humanities. Or from the individualism of contemporary academic practice. We need feminist posthumanities to better understand the complexity of the multispecies and technologically mediated world and ourselves. Our idea of the human is certainly reaching its limits and changing. This requires reinventing and retooling the idea of the diversified human situated in, and part of, a more-than-human world with more-than-human ethics, epistemology, and esthetics. It re-tools the humanities, art, and the social and natural sciences with integrative approaches and synergistic transformation.

Various indigenous systems of knowledge, for instance, the contemporary practice of Two Eyed Seeing² or theory practices of understanding how nonhuman others make us human (Reid 243; Rose 48), have refined traditions of ethical co-existence with the environment. Some of them share with contemporary feminist epistemologies, such as those of Haraway and Barad, a commitment to the idea that knowledge transforms the holder and that the holder bears a responsibility to act on that knowledge. A particularly lively site of feminist posthumanities, the art world, is also teeming with efforts to ethically integrate the more-than-human and with creative fervor to expand our all too narrow social imaginations on anything from AI to algae. Creative and artistic practices are, alongside indigenous and scientific ecologies, increasingly integrated into environmental humanities and various posthumanities. Feminist theory plays a surprisingly crucial role in all these domains (Barad 132; Haraway 161; Tsing 62).

Think of the transformative works of Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich, Bell Hooks, Chela Sandoval, Mel Chen, Stacy Alaimo, and Judith Butler. Right from the outset, inventive practitioners of feminist science studies, like Lynda Birke and Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, Nina Lykke, Sarah Franklin and Jackie Stacey, have insisted on the importance of attending to the reciprocal constitution of subjects and objects, nature and culture, humans and nonhumans, and science and society. Ecofeminist philosophies, like those of Val Plumwood and her Australian thinking communities, have contributed generously with critiques of modern illusions of mastery and domination and to the imperative of feminist posthumanities to engage with environed embodiment and embodied environments, along with pioneering work by N. Katherine Hayles, Haraway, and Braidotti, Barad, and Anna Tsing. Feminist theory-practices at large and in their respective emphases mark a particularly salient form of more-than-human humanities, evidenced in contemporary posthumanities, environmental humanities, and in more established forms of interdisciplinary studies (such as science and technology studies, gender studies, cultural studies, geography, and sociology).

We are currently witnessing a genuine proliferation of new feminist or pro-feminist work on posthumanities, in art and research, in Sweden as in other corners of the world. What matters most to me as a feminist scholar is the synergy and new conversations within feminist theory, and what they can do. Reinventing the humanities today can no longer signify the relaunching of a school of thought, style, or theory with a hegemonic vocation. It must entail the very recomposition of disciplinarity, theory, and everyday doing. Feminist posthumanities testify not to any crisis of the content, rigor, or intellectual liveliness of the humanities and adjacent social sciences, but to its sociability in the more-than-human domains. Feminist posthumanities, with its mixed origin stories and foremothers, are to me the becoming minoritarian of collective academic insight, and it comes with both its perks (great networking, new experiences, fun, failures, and situated insights), and setbacks (this type of research is not easily funded, often short-lived, and project-based). It is needed more now than ever, as we need communities that work together, across the ecologies and technologies of the postnatural condition we often simply call the Anthropocene.

Notes

¹ Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s multi-minoritarian approach, the artist and scholar Mirko Nikolic defines a minor ecology that I find most instructive for the practices of feminist posthumanities (Nikolić i).

² Two-Eyed Seeing (Etuaptmumk in Mi’kmaw) embraces “learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of mainstream knowledges and ways of knowing, and to use both these eyes together, for the benefit of all,” as envisaged by Elder Dr. Albert Marshall (qtd. in Reid 243).