“And are we not all bodies of water? In Marine Lover, while Irigaray’s descriptions highlight woman’s aqueous embodiment, she posits no clear separation of the man’s body from the amniotic waters he too readily forgets. Irigaray’s male interlocutor in this text is birthed in and by a watery body - yet this water is also an integral part of his own flesh: “Where have you drawn what flows out of you?” And, while what her lover thinks he fears is drowning in the mother/sea, Irigaray subtly reminds him that what he should really fear is desiccation, drought, thirst. No body can come into being, thrive, or survive without water to buoy its flesh.”

Wilder reads "Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water" by Astrida Neimanis

Astrida Neimanis is an Australian cultural theorist working at the intersection of feminism and environmental change. Her research focuses on bodies, water, and weather, and how they can help us reimagine justice, care, responsibility and relation in the time of climate catastrophe. Her most recent book, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology is a call for humans to examine our relationships to oceans, watersheds, and other aquatic life forms from the perspective of our own primarily watery bodies, and our ecological, poetic, and political connections to other bodies of water. 

Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water appears 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.

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This is the fourth item of a selection of texts sent to us by Wilder Alison. Wilder Alison (b.1986, Burlington, VT) is an interdisciplinary artist whose recent work includes painting and works on paper.

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