[Review] Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology by Astrida Neimanis (2019)

To read Astrida Neimanis’s Bodies of Water is to immerse oneself in a fluid poetics, contemplating the teeming, virtual infinity of lifeforms for which water, in its myriad incarnations, supplies the medium of connection and dispersal; of gestation and differentiation through space-time. Through its feminist posthuman phenomenological lens, this work recasts the intertextual net eloquently and generously, re-inflecting a polyphony of feminist, philosophical, poetic, and scientific voices to address our planetary emergency in the wake of ecocidal extractionist and consumerist practices. Neimanis’s project seeks to ‘inaugurate’ new ‘ontologies [that...] are not only about correcting a phallologocentric understanding of bodies, but also about developing imaginaries that might allow us to relate differently’ (Neimanis 11).