Page 119 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

Individually, the books are entertaining, fascinating, quirky, sometimes funny,

bleak, poignant, chock full of scientific information you would never ordinarily

come across. Gathered together, they represent some new imperative, some

compelling drive in the human collective that is trying to bend us toward a new

consciousness. For these authors, the old religion of human domination is a

crumbling wall, and each of them bulldozes a section of the Great Divide hoping

to liberate us from the tyranny of our dreadful histories and practices, if not from

our very selves as humans. Along with an air of urgency, there is human

loneliness, outrage, alienation, grief, desire, humor, and love in these books,

along with a hunger for new understanding, if not for reconstructing our human

nature, our natureculture as some would say

Everyone needs to eat and food is on everyone’s mind these days. Food

preferences, something humans share with other-than-humans, is where things

get interesting. Donna Haraway is a multispecies feminist theorist. When Species

Meet is a wide-ranging riff on species-related topics. Like Mary Daly, Haraway

wants to forge a new language for our times. Language structures how humans

think and what we can think. Haraway’s word for our times is not Anthropocene

or Capitalcene, but Chthulucene. This epoch, Haraway explains, requires a

completely different kind of thinking, new concepts and language, so we can

“stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth . . . [in a

way that] will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the

means to building more livable futures.” Some of the concepts Haraway plays

with are: entanglement, messmates at the table, companion-species, becoming-

with, co-evolving.

Haraway takes into account all the practices and perversions that occur when

species meet. She does not judge anyone’s food choices, but she might question

a penchant for purity. She is pragmatic, generous, and profoundly inclusive. She

has tasted a fresh human placenta and eaten wild boar at a recent faculty

barbeque. She’s omnivorous in her appetite and thinking, doesn’t mind blood