Staying with the Trouble

In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene, as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices. The Chthulucene, Haraway explains, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures. Theoretically and methodologically driven by the signifier SF--string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far--Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway's reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time.

List of Illustrations  ix Acknowledgments  xi Introduction  1 1. Playing String Figures with Companion Species  9 2. Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene  30 3. Sympoiesis: Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the Trouble  58 4. Making Kin: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene  99 5. Awash in Urine: DES and Premarin in Multispecies Response-ability  104 6. Sowing Worlds: A Seed Bag for Terraforming with Earth Others  117 7. A Curious Practice  126 8. The Camille Stories: Children of Compost  134 Notes  169 Bibliography  229 Index  265