ICS Seminar Series - Astrida Neimanis

Date: Thursday 15 September 2016
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: EB.G.18, Western Sydney University, Parramatta South campus

Astrida Neimanis

(University of Sydney)

Water as a Planetary Archive of Feeling: Queer Ecologies and Reparative Readings for the Anthropocene

Abstract

From ice-cores to isotopes, cave art to chemical signatures, it is not uncommon these days to read 'nature' as an earthly archive of past worlds. If we take this metaphor seriously, however, elemental 'archive fever' should beg some additional questions. What are the modes of curation of these planetary archives, and what are their expectations of literacy? Who are the archivists, and who will be the future readers? And what has been left off of these pages? With stratigraphy's new found fame in the context of the Anthropocene, lithic archives have captured the dominant imagination, but my interest is instead in archival waters. As both a reservoir of memory but also a powerful solvent, working in many ways athwart terrestrial temporalities, water asks us to think earthly archives (and perhaps even the Anthropocene imaginary) differently. If waters are archives, these are archives of torqued times, latency, and forgetting, too.

To help me think these dissolutions, I turn to recent queer feminist work on affect and temporality. I suggest that Ann Cvetkovich's attention to "queer archives of feeling," together with Elizabeth Freeman's concept of queer time, Heather Love's "feeling backward," and Eve Sedgwick's call for reparative readings that attend to pasts we cannot disavow, offer a queer ecological way of living with/as Anthropocenic archives-in-the-making. Archives of feeling do not demand our subscription to a time of technophilic progress, nor to a conservative (and impossible) sustaining of the past. Instead, they encourage us to "see beauty in the wounds of the world and take responsibility to care for the world as it is" (Sandilands 2005) – where we find "time itself as a reparative affect" for queer survival (Wiegman 2014: 14). I also introduce three watery archives I am currently exploring – chemical weapons dumps in the Baltic Sea, the groundwater homes of Australian endangered stygofauna, and my Canadian home town's post-industrial wastelands/wetlands – and suggest how each gathers temporality and affect in queer ways that help us rethink our belonging in the Anthropocene.

Biography

Astrida Neimanis is a Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney and a founding member of the Seed Box: A MISTRA-Formas Environmental Humanities Collaboratory (based in Sweden). Her academic writings and artistic collaborations engage questions of water, weather, bodies and their intersections with feminist theory. Her monograph Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology is forthcoming in January 2017 with Bloomsbury's Environmental Cultures series. She is also co-editor of Thinking with Water (2013) and associate editor of the journal Environmental Humanities. Along with Jennifer Hamilton, she hosts the COMPOSTING Feminisms and the Environmental Humanities reading group at the University of Sydney – which you are welcome to join!