Tien, J. (2024). ‘The Cenote as Material Feminist Figuration: From the Holocene to the Halocline’. Australian Feminist Studies 38(117), 248–266. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2024.2315422
Cenotes are naturally occurring freshwater sinkholes that are formed when limestone bedrock erodes, exposing subterranean water. They are visually striking: cavernous, circular holes in the ground that drop down to the shimmer of bright blue water. Building on the genealogy of feminist figures, this article argues that cenotes are rich feminist figurations that can assist us in thinking through the complexities of ecological crises in the Anthropocene. I utilise scuba diving in cenotes as a method of bodily enquiry, drawing on fieldwork conducted at eight cenotes in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico to demonstrate how thinking with the rich material-discursive composition of cenotes can question and undermine normative approaches to the Anthropocene. Cenotes are spaces of rupture and affective possibility, transitional zones that privilege fluidity over categorisation. By analysing cenotes and their unique hydro-geological formations as a distinctly feminist figuration, I argue that the binary onto-epistemologies implicit in the Anthropocene can be challenged and re-thought through the radical liminality of the cenote. I propose that thinking-with cenotes engenders an understanding of what I call a hydro-geologic corporeality and subjectivity that emphasises the liminal boundaries between the body (bios), the water (hydro), and the geologic (geos)
Read at Australian Feminist Studies
Tien, J., Kenny, K., Broom, A. (2024). ‘Lung Cancer After the Genomic Turn: From the Biopolitics of ‘Lifestyle’ to the Transcorporeality of Breath’. The Sociological Review 72(6), 1373–1392. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261241279641
The lungs serve as a site of interchange between the bodily and environmental, an interface between the internal and external world, enacted through breath. We draw on the primacy of this exchange to explore the complexities of living with lung cancer amidst the enduring social challenge of stigma and the advent of ‘targeted therapies’ at the cutting edge of precision medicine. Lung cancer’s association with smoking and resulting stigmatisation of those with lung cancer has been well documented – positioning those with lung cancer as failed subjects of a biopolitics of lifestyle. However, recent developments in ‘precision medicine’ have drawn attention to alternate, genetic causes of lung cancer, disrupting easy equivalences between deviant cells (malignancy) and deviant conduct (smoking). Despite this, and drawing on interviews with 32 people receiving targeted therapy for lung cancer in Australia, we identify enduring resonances of deviance and stigma which still foreground individual lifestyle and blame, even for those – like many participants in this study – who have never smoked. Even in the context of uncertain causal origins and genetic mutations, the stigma of lung cancer and the figure of ‘the smoker’ as an object of abjection and disavowal persists. We find Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality instructive for moving away from this biopolitics of lifestyle, toward greater recognition of the collective, though unequal, conditions of ‘carcinogenic capitalism’ in which we all must live and breathe. In turn, our analysis of the specificities of lung cancer may inform broader sociological approaches to tackle stigma at a structural level.
Read at The Sociological Review
Read at The Sociological Review
Read at Swamphen: A Journal of Cultural Ecology
Tien, J., & Florence, E. (2022). ‘Geology as Somatechnics: Re-Imagining Human and Technology Entanglements in Geologies of the Future’. Somatechnics 12(1–2), 54–72. https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2022.0377
In this article we offer a textual analysis informed by feminist framings of the geologic as a somatechnic research practice. The turn to geology in recent feminist scholarship responds to the explosion of discourse on the Anthropocene (itself a geologic term) interrogating the power relations implicit in geology as a seemingly objective research practice and epistemology. We use this theoretical standpoint on geology to analyse two literary representations of geologies of the future – Dawn by Octavia Butler and Earth After Us by Jan Zalasiewicz. In Earth After Us, aliens of the future mine the depths of the earth to understand humans’ relationship with the planet and planetary annihilation. In Dawn, aliens mine the geology of human flesh and genetics to understand the same thing. Through our analysis we demonstrate the ways that geology, as a specifically Western epistemology and research practice, relies on the distinction between the body – ‘bio’ – and nature – ‘geo’ – that Povinelli has termed ‘Geontopower’ (2016). Geontopower traces the ways that the research practices and epistemologies of geology are built from Western perspectives, that in turn are built on the backs of bodies – the slave power that built empires, as well as the long fossilised bodies that have powered capitalism. Through a feminist lens we demonstrate how these text’s representations of future geologies articulate a somatechnics in which bodies and technologies are intertwined. We argue that thinking geologically is a somatechnical research practice that reveals the extractive epistemologies implicit in ‘the White Geology of the Anthropocene’ ( Yusoff 2018). We conclude by offering a somatechnic geology in which the entangled relationships between bodies and systems of colonialism and capitalism are acknowledged as imbricated in the layers of flesh of humans and the planet alike, in order to imagine more just futures in an era of ecological urgency.
Read at Somatechnics
Tien, J., & Burmann, E. (2022). ‘Thinking-with Decorator Crabs: Oceanic Feminism and Material Remediation in the Multispecies Aquarium’. Feminist Review, 130(1), 78–96. https://doi.org/10.1177/014177892110660
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.
Read at Feminist Review
Read at Feminist Review