Water is the element that, more than any other, ties human beings in to the world around them – from the oceans that surround us to the water that makes up most of our bodies. Exploring the cultural and philosophical implications of this fact, Bodies of Water develops an innovative new mode of posthuman feminist phenomenology that understands our bodies as being fundamentally part of the natural world and not separate from or privileged to it.

Building on the works by Luce Irigaray, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, Astrida Neimanis's book is a landmark study that brings a new feminist perspective to bear on ideas of embodiment and ecological ethics in the posthuman critical moment.

Introduction: Figuring Bodies of Water
1. Thinking as Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology
i. Feminist Bodies After Humanism
ii. How to Think (About) A Body of Water: Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze
iii. How to Think (As) A Body of Water: Attunement, Feminist Technoscience, and Imaginary Worlds
2. Luce Irigaray and Water's Queer Repetitions: Posthuman Gestationality
i. Hydrological Cycles
ii. Irigaray as Posthuman Phenomenologist?
iii. Water, Ambiguity and Sexual Difference
iv. (Sexual) Difference and Repetition
v. Queering Water's Repetitions: Posthuman Gestationality
3. Dissolve (an Epistemology of Unknowability)
i. Fishy Beginnings: Wet Evolutions on a Hypersea Planet
ii. Aquatic Apes, Becoming-Cetacean
iii. Moving Below the Surface: Unknowability and Dissolution
iv. Planetarity (Or, Becoming-Water That We Can Never Become)
4. Imagining Water in the Anthropocene
i. Swimming into the Anthropocene
ii. Floating the Idea of “Global Water”
iii. The Commodification of the Hydrocommons (Another Repetition)
iv. “Water is Life”: Water is Life
Bibliography
Index