Feminist Duration Reading Group: Hydrofeminism

5 December 2017

Tue 5 Dec, 7-9pm
SPACE Mare Street
Free & all welcome

The next Feminist Duration Reading Group will focus on writings by Astrida Neimanis on Hydrofeminism. Water is the element that, more than any other, ties human beings in to the world around them – from the oceans that surround us to the water that makes up most of our bodies. Exploring the cultural and philosophical implications of this fact, Hydrofeminism develops an innovative new mode of posthuman feminist phenomenology that understands our bodies as being fundamentally part of the natural world and not separate from or privileged to it.

‘Hydrofeminism: or on Becoming a Body of Water’ was published in 'Undutiful Daughters: Mobilizing Future Concepts, Bodies and Subjectivities in Feminist Thought and Practice', eds. Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni and Fanny Söderbäck. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ‘Bodies of Water, Human Rights and the Hydrocommons' was published in Topia 21, Spring 2009.

Building on the works by Luce Irigaray, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, Hydrofeminism brings a new feminist perspective to bear on ideas of embodiment and ecological ethics in the post-human critical moment. Neimanis writes: "Watershed pollution, a theory of embodiment, amniotic becomings, disaster, environmental colonialism, how to write, global capital, nutrition, philosophy, birth, rain, animal ethics, evolutionary biology, death, storytelling, bottled water, multinational pharmaceutical corporations, drowning, poetry. These are all feminist questions and they are mostly inextricable from one another."

We will read out loud, together, on the evening. Please bring copies of the reading with you. Download here & here.

The Feminist Duration Reading Group focuses on under-known and under-appreciated feminist texts, movements, groups and struggles from outside the Anglo-American feminist tradition. Started at Goldsmiths, University of London, in March 2015, since July 2015 it has met at SPACE, 129 – 131 Mare Street in Hackney.

The group generally meets on the first Tuesday of the month at 7pm and is open to people of all genders. 

If you would like to join the Feminist Duration Reading Group mailing list, or propose a focus for a subsequent session, please email feministduration@gmail.com.