Earthly Encounters

Sensation, Feminist Theory, and the Anthropocene

Stephanie D. Clare

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781438475882, 9781438475875
• eBook ISBN: 9781438475899
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

A feminist approach to the Anthropocene that recovers the relevance of sensation and phenomenology.

Earthly Encounters develops a fuller account of the lived experience of racialized gender formation as it exists on this planet, earth. It analyzes sensations: the chill of winter, the warm embrace of the wind, the feeling of being immersed in water, and a stifling sense of containment. Through this analysis in settler colonial and colonial contexts, in twentieth-century North America and Africa, Stephanie D. Clare shows how sensation is unevenly distributed within social worlds and productive of racial, national, and gendered subjectivities. From revealing the relevance of phenomenology, especially in the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Frantz Fanon, to debates concerning new materialism and affect theory, Clare shows how the phenomenology of race and gender must consider both the production of the body-subject and the environment. She concludes by making a case for the continued significance of sensation in the context of the Anthropocene.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One Feeling Cold: Phenomenology, Spatiality, and the Politics of Sensation
• Two Locating Affect, Swimming Underwater
• Three “Being Kissed by Everything”: Race, Sex, and Sense in Bessie Head’s A Question of power
• Four Psychic Territory, Appropriation, and “Geopower”: Rereading Fanon, Foucault, and Butler
• Five Location, Sensation, and the Anthropocene
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover