Bodies Matter

Bodies matter, and so does matter in Stacy Alaimo’s groundbreaking and thoroughly readable Bodily Natures. In the wake of her recently published and equally noteworthy volume on Material Feminisms (co-edited with Susan Hekman, 2008), Alaimo once again materializes our bodies—both human and more-than-human—within places and in relation to all forms of matter around us, and she does so with panache. Bodies are permeable and “trans-corporeal,” or open to the world and environmental flows around them, and they are also our material selves living enmeshed with their environments: “Imagining human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the morethan-human world, underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment. ’” Alaimo successfully links her work to environmental justice movements, feminisms, disability studies, queer studies, risk theory, and science, and thereby demonstrates that bodies are relevant not just as discursive constructions but as material “stuff. ” She stresses a “trans-corporeal materiality, a conception of the body that is neither essentialist, nor genetically determined, nor firmly bounded, but rather a body in which social power and material/geographic agencies intra-act. ” With the term “intra-act,” Alaimo builds on Karen Barad’s notion of material agency that highlights the coemergence of all things (including all forms of matter, bodies, and environments) so that the world around us is active and participatory rather than merely a stage for human action. Instead of “inter”-actions “between” things or beings, Barad and Alaimo thus see “intra”-actions of all matter and bodies emerging alongside each other. What makes Alaimo’s book so noteworthy in the broad spectrum of thinkers challenging the delineations between body and nature, body and environment, and nature and culture is her compelling insistence on the physicality of the body that may be constructed but still remains grounded in the biological. Furthermore, she links environmental justice issues to her scientific, cultural, and literary analyses without falling prey to the typical tendency among similar thinkers to relish the power of discourse, or the potentially liberating aspects of re-constructing gender and race, or the wonders of the high-tech cyber-world. For example, Alaimo builds on Donna Haraway’s cyborg, highlighting the celebrated figure that “blurs the bounds between humans and technology,” but noting also that most analyses of the cyborg overlook its “fleshy” body in favor of its technological constructions: “Disturbingly, the critical reception of the cyborg as technological but not biological insinuates a transcendent cyber-humanism that shakes off worldly entanglements. ” Living bodies, entangled in their environments, in other words, are the matter at hand, though they have all too often been dismissed as immaterial by thinkers on all sides. The cultural constructivists, for example, eagerly erase their “matter” in the “linguistic and cultural turn. ” As Alaimo asserts, “[w] hat has been most notably excluded by the ‘primacy of the cultural’ and the turn toward the linguistic and the discursive is the ‘stuff’ of matter. ” On the other hand, Alaimo also critiques the fact that much of the medical field as well as civil rights discussions assume that bodies are, indeed, matter, but are “bounded entities,” impermeable and closed to the world. She notes that “[c]ivil rights, affirmative action, and identity politics models of social justice— all of which assume that individuals are bounded, coherent entities—become profoundly altered by the recognition that human bodies, human health, and human rights are interconnected with the material, often toxic, flows of particular places. ” The idea that human bodies are trans-corporeally linked to each other, cultural flows, and their physical surroundings, all of which “intra-act” with different forms of “agency,” offers a profoundly environmental model wherein the human, more-than-human (or animal), and natural world all “matter. ”