Oceanic Origins, Plastic Activism, and New Materialism at Sea

The fifth chapter analyzes the poetry of Linda Hogan, the science writing of Rachel Carson, Neil Shubin and others, and the scholarship of Stefan Helmreich, Mark McMenanmin and Dianna McMenamin with the texts and films of plastic pollution activists and artists. This chapter considers the cultural work of narratives and figurations that connect human bodies to the sea. Even though the long evolutionary arc that ties humans to their aquatic ancestors may evoke modes of kinship with the seas, formulations that end with the human as a finished product of that process conclude too soon. A more potent marine trans-corporeality would submerge the human within global networks of consumption, waste, and pollution, capturing the strange agencies of the ordinary stuff of our lives.

Your Shell on Acid

The sixth chapter critiques the prevailing visual and theoretical models of the anthropocene from a material feminist perspective. It shifts the book’s focus from geological formations to the acidification of the ocean, insisting that the anthropocene must be thought with the countless sea creatures that will dissolve in mind.

Eluding Capture

The second chapter explores how, although scientists and cultural theorists have denied or dismissed the sexual diversity of nonhuman animals, they are important for new materialism, animal studies, and queer, green politics. The wonder, awe, and pleasure of contemplating the countless modes of nonhuman sexual diversity, which pulse with desire and erotic ingenuity, may generate environmentalisms that are already fabulously queer.

Dwelling in the Dissolve

The introduction of Exposed briefly lays out the methodology, theories, arguments, and central questions of the book. It argues that a material sense of exposure and pleasure fosters ontologies, epistemologies, ethics, and politics that interconnect the human with the nonhuman, the inhuman and the more than human. As a cultural studies project, Exposed takes activist and other “low” practices seriously, as potent modes of political contestation.

Thinking as the Stuff of the World

The conclusion of Exposed critiques substantial paradigms by the ways of new materialism. It critiques object-oriented ontology by ways of material feminisms. It argues that there is no positions outside, no straight paths, no transparent global systems of knowledge, but only modest protests and precarious pleasures from within compromised locations shadowed by futures that will surely need repair.

Climate Systems, Carbon-Heavy Masculinity, and Feminist Exposure

The fourth chapter investigates the significance of gender in relation to global warming, arguing that a feminist response to climate change must not only challenge the ostensibly universal, transcendent perspective of big science and the hegemonic masculinity of impenetrable, aggressive consumption, but also the tendency within feminist organizations and NGOs to reinforce gendered polarities, heteronormativity, and the view of nature as a resource for domestic use. The chapter offers a politics of “insurgent vulnerability,” biodiversity, and sexual diversity as an alternative

The Naked Word

The third chapter examines the significance of naked protest movements, arguing that by disrobing, they momentarily cast off the boundaries of the human. This allows for the imaging of corporeality not as a ground of static substance but as a place of possible connections, interconnections, actions, and ethical becomings. Exposing themselves, they dramatize how the material interchanges between human bodies, geographical places, and vast networks of power provoke ethical and political actions.

This Is about Pleasure

The first chapter considers domestic space as the defining container for the Western “human,” a bounded space wrought by delusions of safety, fed by consumerism, and fueled by nationalist fantasies. It advocates instead, by way of poetry, science fiction, and landscape art an ethics of inhabiting that revels in the pleasure of becoming with that radical otherness known as “nature.”