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Abstract
We focus on the expressive performative eruptions that often mark interactive and embodied humanature events, on the discourses that surround and entangle them, and on ways such extra-discursive communicative moments might point us to new understandings about the intersections of nature, culture, and the body. Using the frameworks of tourist as spectactor, notions of transcorporeality and intersubjectivity, and environmental communication concepts about material-symbolic mediation of humanature relations, we explore how whale tourism and elective ultrasounds at times appear to rupture Western human–nature binaries and notions of contained human bodies, yet also provide surveilled and disciplined moments in which particular cultural constraints are reinscribed. We envision ways such rapturous-rupturous experiences can help inform a transcorporeal environmental ethic centered on vulnerability and openness, arguing such moments must be paired with embodied, constitutive, and structural recontextualization to allow for ecocultural transformation.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank editor Stephen Depoe and the two anonymous reviewers for their excellent feedback and guidance.
Notes
1. Plec's (forthcoming) concept of internatural communication opens up ways of envisioning communication as that which takes place within and among natural communities and nature classifications.
2. The exclusive nature of these spaces is readily seen in our whale case in which tourists must pay to reach the whales’ international island region and, if on tour boat, must pay another average $85 each. The argument, however, can also be extended to elective fetal ultrasound imaging, which ranges from about $100 to more than $300.
3. The Southern Resident Killer Whales are the most sought after cetaceans in the area by the tourism industry and are the first orca community in the world to receive endangered status. They are designated as endangered in both Canada and the USA.
4. Whale insiders who used the term included tour boat naturalists and captains, park rangers, whale researchers, island locals, and marine monitors of the tourism industry.
5. While all of the couples present in the observed ultrasound sessions were heterosexual couples, the notion of the heteronormative nuclear family may extend to LGBTQ couples as they also may be expected to engage in performances framed as appropriate “motherhood” and “fatherhood” performances.
6. Carbaugh (1996) argues that comparative case studies such as these enable assessment of available means for conceiving of, and evaluating, humanature situatedness and meanings, and “the attendant attitudes that these cultivate, and constrain” (p. 55).
7. For instance, as top oceanic predator, orca endangered status is due to unsustainable transcorporeal conditions in which humans perceive: (1) oceans and rivers as resource and decimate salmon populations orcas prey upon (Morton, Citation2002), (2) Earth as dumping ground and pollute with deadly persistent chemicals that orcas bioaccumulate to toxic waste levels (Ross, Citation2006), (3) and ocean habitat as playground and highway and interrupt orca biorhythms with excessive vessel traffic (Noren, Johnson, Rehder, & Larson, Citation2009).