Syllabus
a detailed syllabus will be distributed at the beginning of the semester. weekly topics include queer ecologies, ecoheteronormativity and anthropcentrism; anthropocene, plantationocene and planthropocene; extinction, petrocultures, companion species; care for the more than human world; mutltispecies resistance; indigenous analytics and epistemologies; indigenous energy futurism.
* Compulsory: ALAIMO, S. ‘Insurgent vulnerability and the carbon footprint of gender’, Women, Gender & Research 3-4, 2009.� HIRD, M. ‘Sex diversity in nonhuman animals’, in Sex, Gender, and Science’, Basingstoke: Palgrave: MacMillan, 2004.� GROSZ, E., ‘Feminism and Darwin: Preliminary investigations into a possible alliance’, In Time travels: Feminism, nature, power, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.�ROSE, D., B., ‘Death and grief in a world of kin’, in Graham Harvey (ed.) The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, pp. 137-147, London: Routledge, 2013. * Elected: PLUMWOOD, L. ‘Mechanism and mind/nature dualism’, in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, New York: Routledge, 1993.� BIRKE, L., BRYLD, M., LYKKE, N. ‘Animal performances’, Feminist Theory 5(2), 2004.� HARAWAY, D. Sympoiesis: symbiogenesis and the lively arts to staying with the trouble in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chtulucene, Durham, MA: Duke University Press, 2016.� BERRINGTON, C., ‘Life cycle of a common weed’, in Eben Kirksey (Ed.) The Multispecies Salon, Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.� TSING, A. ‘The art of noticing’, in Mushroom at the End of the World, Durham, Duke University Press, 2015.
Annotation
Annotation In this course we explore the entanglements of gender, nature and culture that have been at the heart of feminist theory and activism. These concerns have gained renewed feminist attention in the era some call the Anthropocene where human activities irreparably have impacted on geological, biotic and climatic processes. What does it mean to live in the ruins of capitalism and what life and specifically feminist and queer politics can be generated when there is no simple cure or going back to pre-industrial times? These questions will take us to theories of racism and colonialism as much as gender and queer studies and human animal studies.The course will proceed through engaging case studies, as well as an exercise of creative ‘energy writing’ that will take us out of the classroom to expand our always more than human sensorium, train our writing skills and attune us the environment. Topics
1. Welcome to the Anthropocene
2. Thinking with Natureculture Entanglements
3. Queer Animals? Thinking Trans* with Nonhuman Animals
4. Nonlinear Biology and Sympoeisis
5. Queer Ecologies and Politics
6. Petro- and Plastic Capitalist Cultures
7. (Non)Western Ontologies: Querying Life and Nonlife & Midterm Review
8. Expanding the Human Sensorium: The Art of Noticing & Fieldtrip
9. Caring for Nonhuman Kin
10. Agential Realism
11. Nuclearity: Memory, Affect and Politics of Nonhuman Witnessing
12. The Politics of Waste & Review of Concepts
13. The Politics of Nature: an (Eco)Cosmopolitan Proposal & Roleplay