Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self

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According to Alaimo, the prior chapters in the book "dramatize that one of the central problematics of trans-corporeality is contending with dangerous, often imperceptible material agencies" (146).

Citing Judith Butler, Alaimo further argues that "critique" embodies reflexivity between the self and Foucault's "regimes of truth.Alaimo encourages scholars to re-examine race's materiality because, since language is rarely sufficient to understand "invisible matters" such as toxins, genes, atoms, bacteria, etc. Consequently, the worker's body is an ideal subject for understanding trans-corporeality, especially since industry has often treated workers' bodies as natural resources. The selective effect of the image of a hand on visuotactile interactions as assessed by performance on the crossmodal congruency task. This Collection incorporates a series of papers that demonstrate the inextricable relationship between body and self. And, like Hawks, Fe undertakes environmental detective work to determine that the risk has been there all along, but, unlike Hawks, she has potentially harmed the environment by pouring the chemicals down the drain, which more than likely has polluted the community water supply.

Interaction of linear vestibular and visual stimulation in the macaque ventral intraparietal area (VIP). Experimental changes in illusory self-identification with a fake or virtual body are associated with changes in touch and pain perception, as well as physiological changes. As Alaimo convincingly argues, to make the posthuman matter, in/as disciplinary practice, requires us to make matter matter.navelgaze-y, and many of the other environmental justice works I've read so far have felt more grounded in experiential and historical knowledge over literary analysis, which Alaimo focuses on. Alaimo contends with the fact that we live in a world of “simulacra and slick public relations campaigns” that cause us to be more focused on image rather than substance (18). To support her critique of genetic engineering as a catch-all remedy for environmental risk, she demonstrates how Greg Bear's science fiction novels, Darwin's Radio and Darwin's Children, downplay the gene as a universal determinant of life, instead wrapping within their narratives multiple (and competing) origin stories that feature a proto-Darwinist human ancestor, the role of non-human bacteria in creating life, and a mysterious SHEVA virus that creates a new posthuman species, "virus children," through female human bodies.