Naming without Claiming? Feminist citational practice in the Environmental Humanities

From the nature/culture binary to the notion of situated knowledges, feminist conceptual labours are arguably foundational to contemporary environmental humanities scholarship. Yet, while names like Donna Haraway and Val Plumwood may make their way into bibliographies, most field-defining texts in environmental humanities do not consider how the feminism of such thinkers is integral to their concepts. Based on research conducted with former Seed Box Postdoctoral Fellow Jennifer Mae Hamilton, this talk considers the stakes of naming feminist figures without claiming their feminist commitments in the process of field formation; it concludes by suggesting how an explicitly feminist environmental humanities might be enacted.

ASTRIDA NEIMANIS writes mostly about bodies, water and weather, in an intersectional feminist mode. She is co-author with Jennifer Mae Hamilton of the piece ‘Weathering‘ in Feminist Review‘s themed issue on Environment. Her most recent monograph is Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). She is also Associate Editor of the journal Environmental Humanities, and scientific director with The Seed Box: Environmental Humanities Collaboratory based in Linköping University, Sweden. Currently, Astrida is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, on Gadigal land, in Australia.