"There is no such thing as dry land. Wetness is everywhere to some degree. It is in the seas, clouds, rains, dew, air, soils, minerals, plants, animals. The sea is very wet; the desert less so. So, when we experience ‘water’ on the other side of a line that allegedly separates it from ‘land’, we know it to be by design, design that articulates a surface for habitation. This surface has served as a ground for experience, understanding and knowledge."
–Anuradha Mathur & Dilip da Cuna
"We could also tell the story this way: water connects bodies across times and spaces, through various complex movements and cycles to other bodies and beings in diverse exchanges, gifts, thefts, and forsaking. We could think of this work of water as flow, or more specifically, as a logic of connection or communication."
–Astrida Neimanis
Evolutionarily, we arose from the sea, and so we folded water within ourselves. Everything touched by water is connected: bodies of flora, fauna, technology, meteorology, geology, and beyond. Bodies of water can be energy, life, habitat, and spirit.
Our bodies are a fundamental part of the natural world, neither separate from it nor privileged above it. Biologically, this may seem self-evident, yet ever since technology became a defining tool of humankind, we have positioned ourselves apart from nature. Water surrounds us in forms such as oceans and rain, nourishing everything we feed on. Since all living beings consist, at least in part, of water, whether animal or plant, all life is a body of water. In this sense, we share a fundamental kinship even with the smallest plankton.Environmentalism starts with the acknowledgment that the human consists of the same material as the material world.
Alaimo, Stacy, Bodily Natures. Science, Environment and the Material Self, Bloomington: Indiana University Press (2010)
"The problematic nature of this relation is becoming increasingly clear in contemporary water crises and the suspect ways in which we are managing this planet’s water resources. While these crises have led to international calls for recognizing water as a human right, an ontologic of amniotics requires us to rethink this ecopolitics; I suggest that the promotion of a hydrocommons might be better suited for negotiating the interbeing of bodies of water on this planet."
–Astrida Neimanis
Neimanis, Astrida, Bodies of Water, Bloomsbury Academic (2019), p. 163
Environmental consciousness means being aware of the diversity of perceptions. There is no certain order; human-scaled perception is only one among billions. We may never fully escape an anthropocentric understanding of the world. Yet it is essential to recognize that we will never be self-sufficient.
Morton, Timothy, Hybride Ökologien, diaphanes (2020), p.112
Score: Drink three-quarters of a liter of water within 5 minutes. Then wait for 30 minutes. Observe during this time how your body feels. Can you feel the amount of water in your stomach? Do you feel it moving? What else do you feel? What thoughts do you have? When the 30 minutes are up, go to the toilet. Notice your urine - how it smells, looks, and any other perceptions. Observe how your body feels now and what thoughts you have. Score by Stephanie, HSLU Lucerne 6/12/23
Philosophy and Sciences make use of the concept of the holobiont, to describing all entities on the planet as an interdependent whole, rather than isolated units. It becomes important to acknowledge objects and substances not as separate entities, but to recognise their ongoing intra-actions and effects within human and non-human lives and ecologies, on both private and planetary scales.
Lynn Margulis, de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holobiont, accessed 9 August 2021
This politically oriented onto-epistemology can be described through the lens of transcorporeality: understanding humans and humanity less as isolated entities and more as "oceanic eddies" (Astrida Neimanis), in order to overcome borders and segregation, and to expand our sense of what requires care.
Perceiving things as fluid rather than solid, as transition rather than state, everything becomes vibrant and everything becomes matter. Water is circulating, everything is too. Ecology itself is not localised; it is fluid and migrating, circulating and transforming like water. The glass of water we drink comes from the tap, has been filtered, originated in a spring or rainfall. It will return there again, after we digest it, as it moves through systems, eventually streaming toward the nearest ocean.
Circulation is not only a question of place, but also of time.
a philosophical framework that combines the study of being (ontology) with the study of knowing (epistemology). Knowing and being is inseparable and co-constitutes one another. (Karen Barad "agential realism")
Alaimo, Stacy, Bodily Natures. Science, Environment and the Material Self, Bloomington: Indiana University Press (2010)
"To drink a glass of water is to ingest the ghost of bodies that haunt that water."
–Astrida Neimanis
Neimanis, Astrida. Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water spacestudios.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/hydrofeminism_or_on_becoming_a_body_of_water.pdf, accessed 07 January 2024
Water circulates, and so do biological, cultural, and symbolic systems. But when do these flows become gift, and when do they become extraction or theft? Such distinctions require careful attention in order to differentiate between natural and enforced streams.
Already in the 18th century the global cycling of water was compared with the circulation of blood in an animal body. Today, our bodily flows find parallels in ways of thinking, writing, and being. The watery body is not only a metaphor, but a material reality and influence. Also menstruating bodies can be understood as one visible articulation of such fluid processes.
An example of oceanic cosmologies as inspiration and transformation is Drexciya, a myth around the African slaves who drowned on their routes toward the American continent and who are said to now live on the seabed as aquatic beings. And while this Afrofuturist water race is fictional [...], Drexciya has helped inspire a new movement that is very real indeed: namely, proposals to create an ocean memorial to the victims of slavery.
Whilst this fictional narrative deals with the trauma of slavery, the seabed presents a place of peace and the ocean becomes a protective womb for the unrequited deaths.
Neimanis builds her concept of hydrofeminism upon the poetic and philosophical writings of Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. Écriture féminine is both feminist philosophy and literary theory, closely linked to poststructuralism, French feminist deconstruction, and psychoanalysis. It distinguishes itself from male-dominated modes of thinking and speaking, proposing alternative forms of expression and practice. Today it can be understood as a mode of searching. It is political, transgressive, and exceeds fixed gender categories. It can be described as a form of embodied writing, inseparable from lived experience.
Irigaray and Cixous associate writing with motherhood (“white ink” as a metaphor for maternal milk), which sits in tension with their critique of restrictive gender roles. Yet, their intention is to explore alternative feminine modes of writing and speaking, in order to develop a positive sexual identity for women and, from there, a more intersubjective relationship between genders.
Helen Scales, Drexciya: how Afrofuturism is inspiring calls for an ocean memorial to slavery, theguardian.com (accessed 9 August 2021)
Score: Think about your most dramatic situation that you connect with water. Personal or a story that touched you. Write it down. Take 15 Minutes to look for a feminist writer you can connect to this story. Take a quote.Merge the two quotes, free floating. Give the text to another person. Read it loud. Score by Phila, HSLU Lucerne 6/12/23
Bodies of water seem to be differentiated more by how they move than by what they are. Viscosity draws attention to sites of resistance and friction rather than suggesting an undifferentiated flow of open possibilities. Still, every body requires membranes in order not to be swept out to sea entirely, because there is always a risk of flooding.
In acknowledgment of this corporeally connected, aqueous community, the distinction between human and more-than-human begins to blur. Hydrofeminism proposes a renewed ontological understanding of body and community.
The aqueous understanding
Neimanis, Astrida. Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water, in Undutiful Daughters: Mobilizing Future Concepts, Bodies and Subjectivities in Feminist Thought and Practice, eds. Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni and Fanny Söderbäck. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, p.107
of interbeing is not to become another appropriation of non-human existences.
Hydrofeminism is not intended to expand existing biases, but to unsettle and reconfigure them. It incorporates an understanding of intra-active material agencies and therefore calls for forms of scientific inquiry that are always already interwoven with economic, social, and political power structures. As material media, waters are individualised and should not be understood as a homogenised substance.
Haraway, Donna J., Staying with the Trouble, Duke University Press (2016)
"We are all bodies of water in the constitution and the geographical sense."
–Astrida Neimanis
Neimanis, Astrida. Bodies of Water, Human Rights
and the Hydrocommons spacestudios.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Bodies-of-water-copy.pdf, accessed 07 January 2024
Bodies of water are fluid, constantly in motion and exchange. Water within bodies acts as a communicator between bodies and facilitates bodies coming into being. Gilles Deleuze proposed the image of a virtual world in which every actualisation of objects is a nexus of virtualities that are never fully resolved but continuously intra-act. The idea of the nexus becomes important in hydrofeminist theory when bodies of water are imagined as closed bodies. However, every body consists of something like a membrane that holds it together without preventing constant flow and intra-action with other bodies, a nexus-like liminal space. These liminal spaces appear clearly, for example in forms such as deltas, where river and ocean merge, as well as in biological gap junctions, where cells connect.
Fluvial corporealities can diminish biases such as ego- and omniconsciousness, as well as distinctions between diversity and commonality. The simple recognition of our entanglements within this world already challenges the assumption that political matter is solely human matter.
In any case, bodies of water re-corporealise in response to one another. The boundaries between inside and outside become blurred, and a chain of unpredictable actions is set in motion, indicating that all acting and re-acting bodies are part of a political system with the capacity to transform itself.
Holistic theories can easily be considered as speculative or overly abstract. By centering perception of our surroundings around water, they would not only provide an illustrative framework, but also support a more spiritual and sensorial understanding that science and philosophy have largely neglected.
The abstraction of nature and humanity can be one way to gain new perspectives and deeper understanding. However, abstraction does not mean devaluation. The arts can draw attention to seemingly remote problems, reframing them not as something that happens elsewhere, but as something that is always already happening here.
In the context of climate change and the accelerating pace of ecological transformation, attuning perception through sensory practices becomes methodical: mutation in visual and auditory perception, in breathing, communication, and interspecies relation.
In this sense, the sea already carries the image of a whole, and the land becomes its extension. If we understand the ocean as a self-contained system, we must also acknowledge that all bodies of water are part of it.
We need to treat thoughts as if they were material units. But how do we limit awareness without getting lost in the endlessness of coexisting worlds? Here again, the concept of the body of water becomes useful, with its fluvial membrane that holds it together without fully closing it off from its surroundings. The membrane, as a nexus, can adjust depending on individual and collective conditions, but it remains open to exchange.
We are not able, and perhaps should not attempt, to close ourselves off from external conditions and events. Understanding oneself as part of a community helps to perceive frustration as a shared condition rather than an isolated experience. This also allows attention to shift toward what is sustaining, desirable, and life-affirming.
Score: Think about the last time you felt like you were in the right place. What did you feel in that moment? Which senses gave you that cozy feeling? Take yourself back to that moment. Stay in it for the time that feels right for you. When you are back, think about how you can create such moments for yourself and possibly for other people. Score by Iris, HSLU Lucerne 6/12/23
Teaching what a desirable future may look like, rather than teaching oppositions or subjective pasts, can be a starting point for adjusting constitutions.
Bringing wetness into language. Language does not merely represent reality, but actively forms it through categorisation and differentiation, thereby shaping what can be perceived as real.
Score: Speak out the word "wet" aloud. Speak it slowly, then fast. Speak it again and keep hovering on the last letter, the "t". Extend the "t" of the word "wet" until you are ready to speak the word "turmoil". Repeat the procedure with the word "turmoil" until you are ready to speak a word starting with the letter "l". Repeat the procedure with words of your own and let the last letter of a word flow into the beginning of the next word, thus creating a song of wet and fluid language. Score by Sonja, HSLU Lucerne 6/12/23
Furthermore, we should approach historical consciousness differently. Instead of a linear model, we could understand transformation processes more fluidly, for example as a continuously everting donut: anti-chrononormative, non-linear, and recursive.
Our bodies appear as thresholds of both past and future.
Ann Cvetkovich suggests understanding trauma as a fascia that sutures pasts and presents, as a collective experience that can gather different forms of “we” rather than isolated individuals. In this sense, trauma can make certain publics possible, because it reveals the contours of structural and systemic social and political relations. Is the Anthropocene one such trauma?
Hydrofeminism can reshape our ways of archiving and thinking toward a more sustainable perspective, with water understood as a carrier of planetary life data. Astrida Neimanis builds on Ann Cvetkovich’s notion of trauma in her concept of an “archive of feelings.” Water circulates and moves not only through space, but also through time. Water remembers.
By including other water-binding forms as mediums of this archive, we could disrupt systemic structures that are able to persist across generations.
As Janine MacLeod describes it in terms of a “sea of memory,” water is not finite in the way human archives are; it does not forget, and it endures, enabling sensuous life. Bodies of water hold past, present, and future simultaneously.
Water could be understood as a queer archive, guiding us away from chronologically ordered and hierarchical schemas, without erasing the past, but instead enabling more collective forms of remembering.
Score: When you feel sad, per example when you face your trauma, take a bath and try to let your tears flow into the water. Think about sharing your pain with the world through the water. Try to feel what it does to your body and mind afterwards. Score by Natia, HSLU Lucerne 6/12/23
Hydrofeminism is a contemporary movement at the intersection of material eco-criticism, feminism, and vital materialism, aiming to think a world beyond the division of subjects and objects arranged in hierarchical relations.
"The political goal of a vital materialism is not the perfect equality of actants, but a polity with more channels of communication between members."
–Jane Bennett
Extending awareness toward what has so far been considered passive or instrumental is a core tenet of hydrofeminism. If we dissolve the subject–object binary, we can develop stronger ecological sensibilities and begin to experience relations between human and more-than-human materialities more directly. The challenge lies in finding modes of communication with non-linguistic participants within these systems, which might require an expansion of our perceptual and affective capacities.
Acknowledging that political action can emerge from all bodies of water, not only human bodies, introduces a significant shift in political understanding: materiality is experienced as a living force capable of animating more ecologically sustainable communities. In this framework, the categories of subject and object are replaced by those of actants and assemblages.
Ecosystems and political systems can thus be approached through similar logics of relation and interdependence, suggesting a shared capacity for transformation.
Latour, Bruno, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (2018)
"All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a commoning force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects."
–Cecilia Vicuña
Cecilia Vicuña e-flux.com/podcasts/407896/wet-togetherness-1-menstruating-cecilia-vicua-presented-by-shanghai-biennale, accessed 07 January 2024
This website is part of the artistic project wet together (since 2021) by Vanessa Bosch. It represents a hydrofeminist manifesto and evolves through it’s digital representation as this web page. Every ideas, thoughts and assosiations are welcome, in it’s original text form or as quotes. For quotations, please add the source. Every being, able to write and/or read is invited to participate in this ever-evolving pluri-vocal piece. To provide a safe and truthful environment, all edits will be reviewed before publication. Thank you for your understanding, patience and participation.
project idea by Vanessa Bosch
web design & development by Kim Kleinert
title font by Alexander Turovsky
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This document was last updated on xx.xx.2023