Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times

In Stacy Alaimo’s latest full-length study, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, Alaimo continues her interests in ecofeminism and material ecocriticism and expands that to include posthumanism. The author of an early important ecofeminist study entitled Undomesticated Grounds (2000) (in which she reappraised the ideological ties between women and the so-called natural world that were being denigrated by other poststructuralist thinkers), Alaimo catapulted to become a major force in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities at large with her term transcorporeality. Now a keyword in ecocriticism, trans-corporeality first gained widespread attention in Alaimo and Susan Hekman’s edited anthology, Material Feminisms (2008) and Alaimo’s monograph Bodily Natures (2010) .

Alaimo is a prolific writer whose work has appeared in such distinguished journals as Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA) and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE), the outlet journal of The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) (one of the most important associations for ecocritics in North America). Committed to poststructuralist ecofeminist and material ecocritical deconstructions of mainstream, heteronormative thinking, Alaimo emphasizes and defends the work of environmental activists who speak for the rights of and show compassion for other beings besides human beings, what the ecofeminist Greta Gaard calls humans’ “earthothers.”

In her past projects, in committing to both kinds of ecofeminism and material ecocriticism—academic and activist—Alaimo focused on environmental health and environmental justice movements, indeed the main concern of Bodily Natures. In Exposed, she adds to and pulls away from that cynosure. She ecocritically surveys such diverse topics as landscape art, performance art, naked protesting, marine conservation, plastic activism, and “scientific and popular encounters with ‘queer’ animals’” (2). While she continues to engage with trans-corporeality, or the recognition that “human bodies are not only imbricated with one another but also enmeshed with nonhuman creatures and landscapes” (67), she broadens her theoretical and activist trans-corporeal arguments. She focuses in particular on activist performance art as well as other activist art that highlights gender, the relationship between environmentalism and queer nonhuman and human animal identities, and the apocalyptic escalation of acidity and plastic waste in the oceans and other aquatic environments as a result of “carbon-heavy masculinities” (94). By that, Alaimo means identities and behaviors dependent upon economic, political, and philosophical frameworks of “heteronormativity,”which legitimize patterns of “aggressive consumption” (94, 108).

In addition, as the title, “Part I. Posthuman Pleasures,” of the first section of the book makes clear, Exposed is aimed at mitigating the potential fallout of students, scholars, and other readers of environmental and cultural theory who are disinclined to further invest in environmental commitment (the pursuit of environmental studies or environmental activism,the commitment to environmental responsibility in the workplace, and so forth) because they perceive that that action is devoid of pleasure. Alaimo emphasizes environmentalism’s barely recognized let alone studied erotic and other felicities. For example, in the first full chapter in Part I, she describes three kinds of homes or inhabited spaces according to how they can usher in “new delights” (either retrieved from the past or newly forged) as well as “new ethics” in a time when legitimized levities and leviathan laws effectively deny to both human populations and nonhuman species subjectivity, rights, agency, and, most of all, capacity for seeking and recognizing pleasure (26).

Particularly salutary about Exposed is the contribution that it has made to ecocriticism that propels past dominant heteronormative approaches to environmental advocacy. Thus,for example, in the second chapter, “Eluding Capture,” Alaimo summarizes the scientific evidence for the “staggering expanse of sexual diversity” among plants and nonhuman animals (50). Just as in the human species, it is common in other species for members“to engage in or display same-sex acts, same-sex child-rearing…intersexuality, multiple‘genders,’ ‘transvestism,’ and transsexuality” (43). Another example, in Chapter Three,“The Naked World,” concerns forms of environmental “naked protest” activism. Such disrobings, in “momentarily cast［ing］ off the boundaries of the human…dramatize how the material interchanges between human bodies, geographical places, and vast networks of power provoke ethical and political actions” (89).

Exposed also reflects the recent turn in ecocriticism to interest in aquatic environments.The final, third section, “Strange Agencies in Anthropocene Seas,” begins with a discussion of “oceanic origin stories” and then moves on to the grave environmental problems of marine pollution from household waste (plastic) and industrial waste (inclusive of mercury) and rising sea levels as a result of human-caused global warming. In the two chapters that make up the book’s third section, Alaimo also discusses the work of activist-artists. For example, in Chapter Six,the second and final chapter of the third section, Alaimo reads the work of photographer David Thomas Smith against Anthropocene studies scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History.” She also devotes content to a discussion of the problem of the acidification of the oceans,natural carbon sinks that are estimated to have absorbed up to one-third of human produced carbon dioxide, which breaks down easily in seawater to form bicarbonate ions and hydrogen ions, the latter of which make seawater more acidic (162). The seventh and concluding chapter, “Thinking as the Stuff of the World,” catalogues the weaknesses in the endemic discourse of “sustainability.”Here, Alaimo also catalognes the environmental insensitivities in the work of Object Oriented Ontology scholars even as she respects how that theory has usefully challenged traditional constructions of the privileged human subject and debased nonhuman object. In its entirety,Exposed is about environmental acts that are hostilely criticized for being unnatural, perverse, and obscene under institutionalized heteronormative utilitarian beliefs about all that lies outside the human. Alaimo shows how and why those acts speak for caring for, creative coexistence with, and,capacious ethical acknowledgement of other-than-human beings in the world.