[title photo: Powerline]

What was Hacking the Anthropocene? (Or, why

the Environmental Humanities needs more
Feminism)
Jennifer Mae Hamilton and Astrida Neimanis

Welcome to the Anthropocene! Although this geological era is still to

be officially included in the Chronostratigraphic Chart, members of
the Anthropocene expert working group agree that we humans are
interfering in planetary systems in consequential and irreversible
ways. As a result, many are thinking about the current geological
epoch as the Age of Man [sic].

None of this is news. Some have, hopefully, been sobered by the

idea of the Anthropocene. The concept raises important questions
about the impact of human activity on the earth and offers an
apocalyptic image of a planetary future in which the only trace of
human existence is a curious and toxic layer of rock and chemical
sediment. The flipside of sobriety is, of course, intoxication. And,
just as the idea can be humbling or cautionary, it can also lead to
celebration of an exceptional human capacity to transform the earth
in violent and unsustainable ways.

Taken in the latter sense, the Anthropocene presents as the twenty-

first century version of the Man versus Nature binary. In this
iteration, rather than understanding Nature as a canvas upon which
Man paints his culture, the whole earth is a medium that the genius
human can master and mould.

Thus, many scholars are starting to ask: If the Anthropocene is the

material mark of a human exceptionalist approach to life, can we
really mend our ways with a concept that puts humans right back at
the centre? Moreover, even if the concept suggests an entangled
relation between nature and culture, what further human incursions
geoengineering, for examplemight Anthropocene-talk
problematically welcome? i

For decades, feminists have challenged the binary imaginaries of

nature/man or nature/culture because of the ways in which they
promote various forms of oppression, exceptionalism, and exclusion.
A key feminist response has been to emphasise continuity across
these binaries (humans are also animals, for example) but just as
importantly, to pay keen attention to difference within categories
such as the human. One of the central problems with the
Anthropocene is its gathering of all humans back into one lump.
Thus its widespread uptake crosses out decades of academic and
social justice work that refuses such pretensions to a singular
concept of Man as the only subject of history. As feminist
geographer Kathryn Yusoff points out, the Anthropocene both re-
performs this spatial dislocation of others (once again alienating
marginalized people from writing their own histories) while also
naturalising the we of Western culture.ii In this regard, the
Anthropocene is not a check on human hubris, but notched up as a
win for an exclusive mode of human exceptionalism. Welcome to the
#Manthropocene!

Dont reject it, just hack it.

Were not suggesting getting rid of the Anthropocene conceptiii as a

potential future stratigraphic layer, no matter how problematic and
universalising the anthropos- prefix. After all, there is no unmaking
the bores, new metals, rocks, chemical transformations in the ocean
and the human hubris that materially constitutes the new epoch.
Like it or lump it, our suggestion is that we must in the very least
hack it. In one sense, this means we need to find ways of coping
with or enduring these Anthropocenic marks that cant be undone.

But we are also saying it needs to be hacked into. That is both

spliced, broken down, reimagined, torqued, turned on its head and
accessed and reprogrammed by unauthorised or seemingly other
voices, historically excluded from the humanist hegemony. Given
the urgency of many of the challenges presented by the
environmental crisis, we also want to suggest that many of the tools
and resources for thinking, making, doing an alternative future
might already exist in the scholarship and activism of those
historically excluded from the hegemony named by the
Anthropocene.

Just as many had to hack (read: endure) the rise of a dominant

white, masculinist, heteronormative modernity, so too they hacked
(read: torqued and reprogrammed) into it via protest, critique,
deconstructive analysis, community building, creative production,
and policy making. So, in this regard, we suggest that the ecological
challenges we face will be better served when addressed not as an
issue discrete from extant human challenges, but taken as another
dimension in an ongoing tradition of inclusive feminist critiques of
power, violence, inequality and injustice.

Methods for Hacking

In April 2016, the Sydney Environment Institute (with additional

support from SOPHI and The Seed Box) hosted Hacking the
Anthropocene: Feminist, Queer, and Anticolonial Propositions
(Hacking). Rather than offering up a series of papers that
presented critiques of the idea from different discourses or
standpoints, this non-traditional symposium brought together
scholars, artists, and writers to intervene in and offer up methods
for remaking the dominant Anthropocenic imaginary.

[PHOTO: PIPELINE MAP]

Donna Haraway, a central figure in the environmental humanities

and long serving feminist, has argued that our job is to make the
Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each
other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish
refuge. Right now, the earth is full of refugees, human and not,
without refuge (2015: 160). Elsewhere, she has argued that
planetary survival depends on us bipeds finding a relationship to
nature other than reification, possession, appropriation, and
nostalgia (2004: 126). Hacking demonstrated that we need not
look far for strategies for living differently with each other and
having a new relationship with the more-than-human world. Indeed,
we do not need to invent high-tech solutions for more extreme and
intentional forms of geoengineering. The most useful logics are
already located within the embodied and lived experience of people
today; they just need to be taken up. Thus the participants in
Hacking were not scholarly experts on stratigraphy or the
Anthropocene, and most were not even theorists of the short-history
of its cultural uptake. They were thinkers and practitioners already
hacking into its paradoxical premises.

How, for example, can art-making and creative engagement with

non-human worlds invite us to contemplate different strategies for
getting on with our worldly companions, in all of their diversity? The
symposium opened with Love Letters to Other Worlds, an evening
event in a community space in Newtown, where US-based artist
Kathy High invited participants to contemplate how our own bodies
inner ecologies are important sites for earthly survival. Meanwhile
Perth-based artist Perdy Phillips facilitated communication with the
underworlds of termites. Hacking here is less about critiquing the
Anthropocene as a concept, and more about prying open this space
to how our own human lives are tethered to bodies and places we
rarely consider.

[PHOTO: Termite Ouija]

Or how might fiction spur us to imagine indigenous sovereignty and

multispecies futures? Opening the symposiums second day, Ellen
van Neerven, author of Comfort Food (2016), read from her debut
collection of stories Heat and Light (2014) and wove this into
reflections on life as a writer and Murri woman. Participants
gathered around her feet and were offered access to a different kind
of human-nature relation represented in her novel. We learned
about a contemporary love affair between a human protagonist and
plant-person, troubled by genocidal government policy. Her work is
neither magical realism, nor merely fiction, but a description of
and creative response to the experience and politics of survivance
as an indigenous person today.

[PHOTO: Ellen van Neerven]

Van Neerven was followed by sixteen small hacks offered by

scholars from all stages of their careers, from Professor Vicki Kirby
(whose body of work sustains a critique of the nature/culture
dualism) to Sydney University Masters candidate in Gender and
Cultural Studies Majidi Warda (whose project involves rethinking
human relations with fire). These writers, theorists and artists
offered up a range of possible points of departurefrom sexuality,
senses and animal politics to urban infrastructure management,
mining, and military food stuffsfor imagining an Alter-
Anthropocene.

At the end of the day, two keynote speakers presented more

extensive ideas for different ways of approaching and intervening in
the large-scale material, conceptual and political problem of the
Anthropocene. As keynote speaker and self-professed cyborg
feminist Cecilia sberg suggests, we need to hack a thousand tiny
anthropocenes; and even so, we have to live with the fact that we
might not get out of this geological or biotic or climatological
situation alive.iv This means living with and as Naturewhatever
that might bein non-innocent and situated ways. A thousand tiny
anthropocenes remind us that the world is not homogenous, this
Age of Man is variously produced and differently felt across bodies,
species, times, and places, and that this is the only world there is.
As sberg noted, we dont need to reinvent the wheel, so to speak;
clues for this kind of other-worlding can be found in long-established
feminist theory and practice.

Not only do these feminist roots need to be acknowledged, as

Kathryn Yusoffs keynote demonstrated, they need to be critically
expanded. Critiques of Anthropocene Man demand, for example,
more attention to how such human avatars have always been
racialised:

Moving Towards the idea of a black Anthropocene would re-

centre that which is already centred in the Anthropocene
raceand would move against the implicit structural
whiteness of the Anthropocene in its current formation,
potentially towards other more accountable, decolonised,
geosocial futures.

As Yusoff highlighted, simultaneous to the celebratory universal

concept of the Anthropocene is both a systematic hardening of
geopolitical borders and a destatification of the economy. The
concept of the Anthropocene might (productively, even) elide
geopolitical borders while emphasising other lines, matters, marks
made on the earth. Yet, for some bodies living on the wrong side
of the immaterial border, that border is still a wall. Yusoffs notion of
a Black Anthropocene thus tangles the deep-time geological
provocations of the stratigraphic concept with hard contemporary
political questions about how to actually produce just, decolonised
and sustainable futures.

Towards an Inclusive Feminist Environmental Humanities

The question that animates work in the feminist environmental

humanities is thus: how might our resources to address current
environmental challenges be enhanced by feminist, queer and
anticolonial perspectives that for decades have already been
producing incisive critique of and creative responses to various
kinds of humanist domination? Our aim is to build a politics of
citationv within the environmental humanities that doubles forward
and back. In this, feminist environmental humanities builds on and
expands earlier and ongoing ecofeminist work and work in feminist
science and technology studies (STS). In these citational practices,
we also insist upon a feminist acknowledgment of critical race and
anticolonial work that subtends much work in the posthumanities.

At the same time, we call upon the environmental humanities as a

field to acknowledge these critical precursors. Acknowledgement
(like tolerance, and diversity) is an imprecise placeholder; it
suggests that all we need to do is make room for others in an
already-established club. This is neither our point, nor our goal.
Rather, we want to stress that hacking the environmental
humanities, much like hacking the Anthropocene, is about making
different kinds of conversations possible. We want to hack how we
narrate where we come from, and how we imagine where we are
going.

The reproductive power of origin storiesvi pertains not only to how

we narrate the Anthropocene, as Kathryn Yusoff reminded us in her
talk at Hacking, but also to the broader field of environmental
humanities itself. Put otherwise, we suggest that feminist and
related approaches are what give the field of environmental
humanities its critical purchaseseven what makes it possible.

The point of Hacking is, in Yusoffs words, a desire to agitate or

trouble those origins to generate new future possibilities and modes
of responsibility in the present. What kinds of alternative futures
could be activated if the full force of feminist, anticolonial and queer
analysis were welcomed?

This was cross-posted on the SEED BOX blog

i See for example Eileen Crist, On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature
Environmental Humanities 3 (2013): 129-147; Andreas Malm & Alf Hornborg,
The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative The
Anthropocene Review 1.1 (2014): 62-69; Astrida Neimanis, Cecilia sberg and
Johan Hedrn, Four problems, four directions for environmental humanities:
Toward critical posthumanities for the anthropocene. Ethics and the
Environment, 20.1 (2015): 67-97.
ii Kathryn Yusoff, Towards the Idea of a Black Anthropocene Feminist, Queer,
Anticolonial Propositions for Hacking the Anthropocene (Sydney: Sydney
University, April 8, 2016), Keynote Lecture.
iii Although some have suggested the Capitalocene instead: See Donna
Haraway, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making
Kin Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159-165 and Jason W. Moore (ed)
Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism
(Oakland: PM Press, 2016).
iv Cecilia sberg, A thousand tiny anthropocenes: Worlding troubles from
Swedish feminist environmental humanities perspectives Feminist, Queer,
Anticolonial Propositions for Hacking the Anthropocene (Sydney: Sydney
University, April 8, 2016), Keynote Lecture.
v We plan to explore the question of politics of citation in feminist
environmental humanities further, but for now, have a look at Sara Ahmeds
fantastic blog post for some reflections on why citational practices are political.
https://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/
vi For more on the feminist politics of citation see this blog post from Sara Ahmed
https://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/