Stacy Alaimo

Trans-corporeality

Forthcoming in The Posthuman Glossary
Edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova

[1600 words]

Glossary terms referenced:

Feminist Posthumanities
New Materialism
Posthuman Ethics
Nonhuman Agency
Bodies Politic
Anthropocene

Trans-corporeality is a posthumanist mode of new materialism and

material feminism. Trans-corporeality means that all creatures, as embodied

beings, are intermeshed with the dynamic, material world, which crosses

through them, transforms them, and is transformed by them. While trans-

corporeality as an ontology does not exclude any living creature, it does begin

with the human, in order--paradoxically perhaps--to disrupt Western human

exceptionalism. The figure/ground relation between the human and the

environment dissolves as the outline of the human is traversed by substantial

material interchanges. Mapping those interchanges across all species and at all

scales is the prelude to trans-corporeal ethics and politics. Trans-corporeality

contests the master subject of Western humanist individualism, who imagines

himself as transcendent, disembodied, and removed from the world he surveys.

The trans-corporeal subject is generated through and entangled with biological,

technological, economic, social, political and other systems, processes, and

events, at vastly different scales. Trans-corporeality finds itself within capitalism,

but resists the allure of shiny objects, considering instead, the effects they have,

from manufacture to disposal, while reckoning with the strange agencies that

interconnect substance, flesh and place. It does not contemplate discrete objects

from a safe distance, but instead, thinks as the very stuff of the ever-emergent

world (Alaimo 2016).

Thinking as the stuff of the world has a long feminist history, due to the

way women, along with racially marked and disabled peoples, have grappled

with being subjects often categorized and systematically treated as objects.

Trans-corporeality, along with other theoretical concepts within feminist

posthumanities, suggests a new figuration of the human after the Human, which

is not founded on detachment, dualisms, hierarchies, or exceptionalism, and

which does not, in Val Plumwood’s terms “background” nature (1993). Like Rosi

Bradotti’s transversal subject outlined in The Posthuman and other works, the

“trans” of transcorporeality insists on multiple horizontal crossings, transits, and

transformations. As Braidotti contends, “The challenge for critical theory is

momentous: we need to visualize the subject as a transversal entity

encompassing the human, our genetic neighbors the animals and the earth as a

whole” (2013: 82).

I developed the concept of trans-corporeality while editing the collection

Material Feminisms (2008) with Susan J. Hekman and while writing Bodily Natures:

Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010). In an earlier essay about

architecture and environmental ethics, I had drawn upon feminist theories of

corporeality, including the “intercorporeality” of Gail Weiss, which, she notes,

emphasizes that “the experience of being embodied is never a private affair, but
is always already mediated by our continual interactions with other human and

nonhuman bodies” (1999: 158). Donna Haraway’s work, starting with Primate

Visions (1989), has long influenced my writing; her argument for “situated and

embodied knowledges” and against “various forms of unlocatable, and so

irresponsible knowledge claims” (1991: 191) as well as her insistence on

nonhuman agencies and the material-semiotic no doubt permeated my

conception of trans-corporeality. Trans-corporeality is developed in Bodily

Natures by drawing upon Karen Barad’s notion of intra-action (2007) as well as

other new materialist theories of nonhuman agency, particularly those from

science studies. Bodily Natures argues that the trans-corporeal subject emerges

from environmental health and environmental justice movements, which must

discern, track, and negotiate the unruly substances that move across bodies and

places. Racism becomes materialized, in multiple and interconnected ways,

when, for example, in Percival Everett’s novel Watershed (1996) the African-

American protagonist reckons with his own blood as a marker not of an

essentialist or contained racial identity but as a trans-corporeal conduit marking

the history of racist medical experiments, his own experiences with police

brutality, and the environmental racism of the U.S. military against Native

American lands, which may have resulted in his cross-species contamination

with the Anthrax virus. Science, medicine, history, law enforcement, and the

military are all entangled in the racism, environmental degradation, and

epistemological quandaries that course through the protagonist’s very blood.

(Alaimo 2010: 64-70).

Trans-corporeality is not a mystical, spiritual, phenomenological or

experiential sense that “everything is connected;” it requires a radical rethinking

of ontologies and epistemologies; it involves science, science studies, citizen

science, feminist theory, environmental theories, critical race studies, disability

studies, literature, art, and everyday activism. Thinking the subject as a material

being, subject to the agencies of the compromised, entangled world, enacts an

environmental posthumanism. The subject cannot be separated from networks of

intra-active material agencies (Karen Barad: 2007) and thus cannot ignore the

disturbing epistemological quandaries of risk society (Ulrich Beck: 1992). Trans-

corporeality, as it reckons with material agencies that traverse substances,

objects, bodies, and environments, entails reckoning with scientific captures,

even as the data is always already “mangled“ (Andrew Pickering: 1995) by social

and economic forces. Scientific information, produced by experts or “ordinary

experts” is necessary for trans-corporeal mappings, which circulate through

popular culture, politicized communities and subcultures, such as that of people

with multiple chemical sensitivity (Alaimo 2010).

Trans-corporeality discourages fantasies of transcendence and

imperviousness that render environmentalism merely an elective and external

enterprise. Even though trans-corporeality emerged from environmental health

and environmental justice movements, which focus on (post)humans, the

concept extends toward all species who find themselves at the crossroads of

body and place. The posthuman ethics of trans-corporeality insists that even the

most routine human activities, such as purchasing plastics, impact human and

nonhuman lives across vast geographic and temporal scales, extending even to

the bottom of the sea. (Alaimo 2016). The bizarre enormity of the effects of the

most minute everyday actions underscores the urgent need for rethinking ethics
and politics in the anthropocene, an epoch in which human activities have

profoundly altered the planet. Cecilia Asberg, Redi Koobak, & Ericka Johnson,

contend that “Posthumanities as feminist analytical practices work for us to re-

tool the humanities so as to meet up with the on-going transformations of our

worlds.” (2001: 228). Trans-corporeality grapples with precisely how the

transformation of the world alters—or should alter--ontologies, epistemologies,

politics and ethics. While trans-corporeality was not conceived under the sign of

the anthropocene, it nonetheless epitomizes the sort of posthumanist ontologies

in which there is can be no “nature” outside the human. And yet the human is

hardly the master of his domain but instead, a site traversed by strange agencies

and immersed within entangled ethical and political relations. While toxic

chemicals, radiation, toxic e-waste from the global north dumped in the global

south, industrial agriculture, factory farming, and animal experimentation are

often overlooked in predominant visual, theoretical and popular accounts of the

proposed anthropogenic geological epoch, trans-corporeality, with its attention

to the disconcertingly extensive effects of seemingly benign consumerist

practices, underscores that they too are matters of concern for the anthropocene.

Since trans-corporeality involves unexpected transits and crossings, it may

be fitting to conclude with a brief account of how trans-corporeality has been

taken up by in divergent and perhaps surprising ways. Christina Fredengren,

“Posthumanism, the Transcorporeal and Biomolecular Archaeology,” employs

the concept in order to place archaeological data such as DNA and isotope

analysis “in a theoretical frame” that demonstrates “the entanglement between

the skeleton, the visceral parts of the body and the environment” (2013: 59).

Dayna Nadine Scott, a legal scholar, argues that “the theory of transcorporeality
directs us not only towards the permeability of the bodily boundary but also

towards the science/experience boundary;” thus a “negotiated empiricism,

attenuated by transcorporeality . . . puts forward the possibility that experiential

knowledge is robust because of its intersubjectivity, not in spite of it” (2015: 19,

20). Magdalena Gorska takes transccorporeality as a “key analytical apparatus”

of her dissertation, Breathing Matters, demonstrating how breathing “materializes

human embodied subjectivities as always-already dispersed” as she argues for

recalibrating “feminist analytical tools as onto-epistemological” (forthcoming,

n.p.). In the collection edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Prismatic Ecology: Ecology

Beyond Green, Robert McRuer critiques how “pinkwashing” obscures queer trans-

corporeal relations; Steve Mentz paints trans-corporeality brown because it

suggests “separation itself may be problematic” within the “brown interchange

of life and nonlife;” and Cohen reflects on the greyness of zombies, asserting that

“[m]onster, human, and world are transcorporeal” (2013: 70, 207 285). Tema

Milstein and Charlotte Kroløkke analyze the “climactic moment of encountering

the embodied other” such as that of the “’orcagasms’” of whale watchers, which

they argue are “intersubjective and transcorporeal events” (2012: 88). Mel Y

Chen, interprets transcorporeality as “affirming the agencies of the matter that

we live among,” such that: “the sentience of the couch, in our meeting and

communing, then becomes my own sentience as well” (2012: 182). Astrida

Neimanis and Rachel Lowen Walker in “Weathering: Climate Change and the

‘Thick Time’ of Transcorporeality” make the temporal, rather than spatial,

dimensions of transcorporeality “more explicit:”: “The claim that . . .

transcorporeal temporality belies a phenomenology of weathering, means that

the spatial metaphors we have historically used to frame our bodies are unable to
fully account for the co-creative relationship between bodies, whether bodies of

climate, water, soil, or bones” (2014: 566, 570) Jeffrey Jerome Cohen in Stone: An

Ecology of the Inhuman, also expands the temporality of transcorporeality in order

to bring the concept further along “its disanthropocentric path” (2015: 41).

Extending transcorporeality to a “geophilic Long Ecology,” Cohen writes:

“stone’s intimate alterity demands acknowledgement of more-than-human

temporal and spatial entanglement, so that ecology becomes Long Ecology, an

affectively fraught web of relation that unfolds within an extensive spatial and

temporal range, demanding an ethics of relation and scale” (2015: 41). With this

Long Ecology, and other matters, trans-corporeality has, rather appropriately,

developed beyond its origins.

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