Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self

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She analyzes the “pink washing” done by the pink ribbon campaign to “raise awareness” about breast cancer, which is often adopted by companies whose products add to the epidemic (18-19). Thinking about the anthrax that might be in his own blood impels us to consider the larger associations among blood as an image of racial identity, as a historic marker of racial discrimination (Endicott references the syphilis experiments on black men in Tuskegee), as a signifier of violence and environmental racism. However, although the medical industry has a long history of "breaching corporeal boundaries with surgery, injections, transplants, dialysis, and other procedures" (119), it has often failed to examine the relationships between the biological and environmental causes of disease. Alaimo uses Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals and Sandra Steingraber's Living Downstream: A Scientist's Personal Investigations of Cancer and the Environment to argue their value. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Distinct visual perspective-taking strategies involve the left and right medial temporal lobe structures differently. Bodily self-consciousness depends on three factors: self-identification with the body, self-location and the first-person perspective.Role for human posterior parietal cortex in visual processing of aversive objects in peripersonal space.

Sadly, many of these things involve the consumption of more products and more energy, thus contributing to further environmental degradation and climate change. She loves to hike, bike, kayak, scuba dive, free dive, swim, practice Ashtanga and other forms of yoga, and plant native and other plants for birds, butterflies, and other insects.

Beck suggests that we all live in a "risk society" where the absolute probability of harm to us cannot be easily calculated. John Bruni “Persist in Folly”: Review of Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973.

This acceptance that we cannot control the environment would be difficult for the ecophobic,as defined by Simon Estok, to handle. Furthermore, when trans-corporeality occurs, consent from affected individuals is rarely procured, so Alaimo urges environmental activists to use photography and other forms of new media to produce new forms of evidence to remedy environmental injustices. Science, however, offers no steady ground, as the information may be biased, incomplete, or opaque and the ostensible object of scientific inquiry-the material world-is extremely complex, overwrought with agencies, and ever emergent. Out-of-body experience, heautoscopy, and autoscopic hallucination of neurological origin: implications for neurocognitive mechanisms of corporeal awareness and self-consciousness.Chapter Five takes up multiple chemical sensitivity and Chapter Six takes up genetic discourses in contemporary science fiction. Alaimo's nuanced analysis of Todd Hayne's Safe revisits her critique of environmental self-reliance, exposing "the New Age psychobabble in which patients are led to blame themselves-not the toxins, not the lax government regulations, not the industries-for their illness" (137). The implications of Barad and Beck's theories for an environmental ethics unwind over the course of the book. Along with phenomena of altered states of self-consciousness in neurological patients and electrophysiological data from non-human primates, these findings may form the basis for a neurobiological model of bodily self-consciousness. Alaimo positions X-rays as an important embodiment of trans-corporeality because X-rays are "texts" read by individuals that convey an array of meanings about science, corporate malfeasance, gender, race, and biology.

The author is supported by grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SINERGIA CRSII1-125135), the European Science Foundation (FP7 project VERE) and the Bertarelli Foundation. Where there was once a clear, bounded human subject, there is now a material self that is tangled with outside networks that are “economic, political, cultural, scientific, and substantial” (20). In that article, Alaimo builds upon her important 2010 monograph, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, which won the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Award for Ecocriticism in 2011 and articulates her theory of trans-corporeality, a bellwether in the field of material ecocriticism. Beginning his review by reflecting on the book's cover art, John Bruni speculates that a punk aesthetic runs throughout Alaimo's posthuman environmentalism. A tattooed female with rifle belts across her chest glares at us, a figure rendered in hot pink and set against a lime green background.In Undomesticated Ground, Alaimo argues that rather than separate women from nature (reinforcing a separation of culture and nature), many feminists have negotiated and contested an essentialized relationship between women and nature from the space of nature, seeing it or using it as an undomesticated place from which to escape gender confines and create new ways of being. To Alaimo, self-determining how toxins in the body got there, by, say, visiting a dairy farm is not a "look back toward origins"; instead, it is an avowal of "an environmental ethic that understands world and self to be coextensive" (98). Stacy Alaimo has long been passionately concerned about environmental politics, animal ethics, and social justice, writing from places where those concerns intersect and sometimes collide. To make this argument, she draws upon Sandra Harding's theory of "strong objectivity" and Haraway's "situated knowledges" to interrogate science's presumed objectivity.