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Feminist scholarship has increasingly turned towards the ocean as a conceptual apparatus in which to think through the complex philosophical and ethical dilemmas of the Anthropocene. Responding to the ebbs, flows and transformations of the oceanic turn, our article outlines our interactions with four decorator crabs. It begins by situating our experience of thinking-with these crabs as a feminist practice of care within the conceptual context of the ocean. Our article then draws on the knowledge that arose out of our fertile entanglements with the crabs to propose that: 1) the aquarium, with its colonial histories of subjugation, is a fertile space to re-image human–aquatic relationalities, revealing the fallacy of human control over ‘nature’ and emphasising the agency of marine worlds; 2) Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality is a powerful way to think through the consequences of an acidifying ocean, both for ourselves and for our shelled companions; and 3) remediation is a radical approach to taking seriously the materiality of watery worlds. The objective of the article is to craft a practice of material feminism that entangles our more-than-human bodies to learn-with decorator crabs. In doing so, we show that the aquarium is a potent space of transformation that allows us to imagine new and distinctly feminist entanglements that dismantle hierarchies. We show that thinking-with the materiality of marine worlds is a series of remediations, both material and discursive, that dissolve the boundaries between entities, creating an embodied environmental ethics that is necessary as a feminist challenge to the Anthropocene.

Literary stories as a means of communication highlight the deep connection between human and non-human entities and the association of matter and mind. Ahmad Alhokail's Turq wa Mudan/Roads and Cities, a contemporary Saudi novel published in 2019, elucidates the idea of \"storied matter\" and the creative and narrative agency of non-human entities. This work draws a narrative map of stories that trace the physical map of Riyadh and the neighboring villages of northern Najd. This map aims to connect culture to nature and thus gives insights to the dynamic relationship between places (non-humans) and their inhabitants (humans). Drawing on material ecocriticism, Barad's agential realism and the question of creativity, this study attempts to investigate the human and non-human \"intra-actions\" and highlight the narrative agency of places encountered throughout the novel as well as the storied bodies of traditional poetry and storytelling. It maintains that places and nature are vibrant, agentic matter that have the capacity to embody the history, memories and traditions of the inhabitants of Najd region.

Foregrounding the disabled and vulnerable bodies in British writer Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People (2007), this article contends that the disability and vulnerability of the human body provides an approach for re-thinking the relationship between the human and non-human world in the Anthropocene. The article seeks understandings about how conceptions of corporeal disability are intertwined with ideas about the non-human world; it also analyzes the vulnerability of the human body to toxic environments. “Disabled and vulnerable bodies in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People” offers a close reading of various disabled and abnormal bodies in Animal’s People through material ecocriticism to question dualisms that pervade our thinking about corporeality and to suggest that the differences between human and nonhuman are not as great as we like to pretend in the Anthropocene.

Ecohorror represents human fears about the natural world—killer plants and animals, catastrophic weather events, and disquieting encounters with the nonhuman. Its portrayals of animals, the environment, and even scientists build on popular conceptions of zoology, ecology, and the scientific process. As such, ecohorror is a genre uniquely situated to address life, art, and the dangers of scientific knowledge in the Anthropocene. Featuring new readings of the genre, Fear and Nature brings ecohorror texts and theories into conversation with other critical discourses. The chapters cover a variety of media forms, from literature and short fiction to manga, poetry, television, and film. The chronological range is equally varied, beginning in the nineteenth century with the work of Edgar Allan Poe and finishing in the twenty-first with Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro. This range highlights the significance of ecohorror as a mode. In their analyses, the contributors make explicit connections across chapters, question the limits of the genre, and address the ways in which our fears about nature intersect with those we hold about the racial, animal, and bodily “other.” A foundational text, this volume will appeal to specialists in horror studies, Gothic studies, the environmental humanities, and ecocriticism. In addition to the editors, the contributors include Kristen Angierski, Bridgitte Barclay, Marisol Cortez, Chelsea Davis, Joseph K. Heumann, Dawn Keetley, Ashley Kniss, Robin L. Murray, Brittany R. Roberts, Sharon Sharp, and Keri Stevenson.

This article examines M. R. Carey’s 2014 zombie apocalypse novel The Girl with All the Gifts through the ecofeminist concept of trans-corporeality as defined by Stacy Alaimo in Bodily Natures. Carey’s heroine Melanie showcases how humans can re-conceptualize their relationship to a more-than-human, or natural, world that is both exterior to the self and always-already a part of the self through fungal agency. Indeed, the novel continuously engages in intimate human-environment interconnections that, in their horrific capacities, are meant to inspire readers to reflect upon their own enmeshment in a larger, material world. The novel’s use of the real fungus Ophiocordyceps as the more-than-human agent that inspires the transformation of humans into zombies provides a vision for how humans can more ethically relate, in posthuman manners, to a more-than-human world. Finally, this article considers the novel as a depiction of slow horror, or a gradual descent into apocalypse.

Reading Thomas Day’s Seven Seconds to Become an Eagle (2013), this article shows how the human body distinguishes itself from the nonhuman and then how the nonhuman turn inaugurates the emancipatory imagination in the Anthropocene. Many studies of the Anthropocene have approached the problem from a global and universalizing perspective, overlooking problems of race, sex, and class. Few have looked at the material agency of nature or animism. Current ecological crises have revealed the vulnerability and permeability of the human body. Day’s stories reveal trans-corporeality and deconstruct ontological divisions between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, in the process showing the human failure to control nature. Most strikingly trans-corporeal in his stories is the hybridity of the animal skin and the human blood. This article argues that animism is a powerful theoretical weapon not only for deconstructing human exceptionalism but for re-imagining human and nonhuman relationships.

Women’s trans-corporeality is essential in appreciating interconnectedness in the Anthropocene, as Ruth Ozeki shows in her 1998 novel My Year of Meats. Through a detailed analysis of the novel, it becomes clear that corporeality and commodification are intertwined. By ignoring the interconnectedness of human beings, nonhuman beings, and the environment, as patriarchal society quickens climate change and environmental devastation by enabling multinational corporations free range in their pursuit of wealth. Fully industrialized culture has thrived in part by forgetting the materiality of our bodies; nevertheless, we are living in a world whose chief characteristic is interdependence and interconnectedness. Current civilization depends upon science and technologies too much, but considering all the issues we face in the Anthropocene, it is certain that what we need is not an expansion of our exercise of control but a recognition that the agencies outside of us interpenetrate our bodies: My Year of Meats demonstrates through a detailed focus on women’s bodies that without such recognition, the corporeal implications for humanity (and indeed for the rest of the planet) are actually grim.

Medicine uses body fluids for the construction of medical knowledge in the laboratory and at the same time considers them as potentially infectious or dirty. In this model, bodies are in constant need of hygienic discipline if they are to adhere to the ideal of the closed and clean organism without leakage of fluids. In contrast, psychoanalytical feminist body theory by Julia Kristeva (1982), Elisabeth Grosz (1989) and Margrit Shildrick (1999) has deconstructed the abject body and its fluids in Western culture and medicine. While postmodern feminism has often focused on discourses about bodies and illness to the neglect of their materiality, more recently, material feminism has drawn particular attention to lived material bodies with fluid boundaries and evolving corporeal practices (Alaimo and Hekman 2007). Stacy Alaimo has developed a model of the trans-corporeal body that is connected with the environment through fluid boundaries and exchanges (2010, 2012). Influenced by these trends in feminist body theory, illness narratives, often based on autobiographical experiences of female patients or their caregivers, have increased in recent decades in the West (Lorde 1980; Mairs 1996; Stefan 2007; Schmidt 2009; Hustvedt 2010). Such narratives often describe explicitly the material and affective aspects of intimate bodily experiences. In this article, I analyze two German quest narratives of illness: Charlotte Roche’s pop novel Feuchtgebiete (2008) and Detlev Buck’s German-Cambodian film Same Same But Different (2010) that is based on the memoir Wohin Du auch gehst by German journalist Benjamin Prüfer (2007). In both narratives, the protagonists and their partners struggle in their search for love and identity with illness or injury in relation to body fluids, including hemorrhoids and HIV. I argue that Feuchtgebiete and Same Same But Different not only critique medical and cultural discourses on body (fluids) and sexuality but also foreground a feminist trans-corporeal concept of the body and of body fluids that is open to fluid identities and material connections with the (global) environment. At the same time, the conventional and sentimental ending of these quest narratives undermines the possibilities of the trans-corporeal body and its fluid exchanges.

What kind of remedy or redress can literature and other forms of counterfactual imagining offer in the face of environmental injustice? This epilogue draws together from the book’s previous chapters insights about consumerism, citizenship, enclosure, and exposure in order to contemplate this question. Pivoting from The Yes Men Fix the World (a 2009 documentary about the culture-jamming pranksters, the Yes Men) to Chinua Achebe’s reflections on the difference between “beneficent” and “malignant” fiction, the epilogue argues that we should understand all such fictions as risky: unpredictable in how their causes and effects work themselves out across time and space. Such risks entail not only exposure to the possibility of harm, but also leaps of faith into the unknown and the as-yet unrealized, as well as the prospect that the innocence we tend to imagine about ourselves might be countered with a newfound sense of complicity, entanglement, or even self-reflexive solidarity.