De profundis

Ermergerd. There’s such a thing as “hydrofeminism.” Who knew??

Well not a “thing” so much, but a word, with at least one person using it as a word and saying words about it.

The mind reels. Mermaids? Transmermaids? Bints in ponds? Synchronized swimmers?

https://twitter.com/Docstockk/status/1272848332893937665

Hydrowhatnow?

Here you go:

Among those who are cognisant of our watery links to the wider world we find the small Copenhagen publishing house and curatorial platform Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology. The five curators behind the laboratory see water as ‘transnational, trans-species and trans-corporeal’.

The laboratory has just published a Danish translation of Astrida Neimani’s text “Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water” while also launching the exhibition project Hydra, which will unfold over the course of the spring at the edge of the water at Snekkersten north of Copenhagen. The group members themselves describe the project as an ‘exploration of watery worldings, trans-corporeal trauma and oceanic healing’.

Let’s learn more:

The meeting focuses on writings by Astrida Neimanis on Hydrofeminism. Water is the element that, more than any other, ties human beings in to the world around them – from the oceans that surround us to the water that makes up most of our bodies. Exploring the cultural and philosophical implications of this fact, Hydrofeminism develops an innovative new mode of posthuman feminist phenomenology that understands our bodies as being fundamentally part of the natural world and not separate from or privileged to it.

Where does the feminism come in?

Building on the works by Luce Irigaray, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, Hydrofeminism brings a new feminist perspective to bear on ideas of embodiment and ecological ethics in the post-human critical moment. Neimanis writes: “Watershed pollution, a theory of embodiment, amniotic becomings, disaster, environmental colonialism, how to write, global capital, nutrition, philosophy, birth, rain, animal ethics, evolutionary biology, death, storytelling, bottled water, multinational pharmaceutical corporations, drowning, poetry. These are all feminist questions and they are mostly inextricable from one another.”

How to write, global capitalism, storytelling, multinational pharmaceutical corporations – WHAT DO THEY HAVE TO DO WITH WATER? Apart from the obvious “well you can’t have any of them without water because humans can’t live without water” – which is surely a little too broad and obvious to be meaningful.

I can list things too. Potatoes, shoes, Calvinism, ballet, hair, the stock market, fleas, the Daily Mail, smallpox, Denali, tamanduas. DO YOU SEE HOW CONNECTED IT ALL IS?

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