We  are  rather  fishy,  we  humans.  Right  back  to  the  first  signs  of  life  on  earth  at  least  3.9  billion  years  ago,  when  small  organic  proteins  likely  interacted  with  their  habitat  to  produce  the  first  bacterial  life  forms,  water  has  been  necessary  for  the  gestation  of  all  living  beings.  Our  earliest  ancestors  were  all  apparently  water  babies,  squirming,  scuttling  or  swimming  around  their  respective  watery  worlds.  Drawing  on  feminist  theory,  phenomenology,  evolutionary  biology,  and  some  other  queer  tales  of  obstinate  lungfish,  nostalgic  whales  and  aquatic  apes,  I  am  compelled  to  ask:  how  is  my  body  an  archive  of  these  other  watery  bodies,  anticipating  aqueous  paths  not  taken  and  remembering  wet  futures  yet  to  come?  These  speculations  are  more  than  mere  metaphor;  they  demonstrate  the  need  for  more  audacious  imaginaries  in  the  context  of  our  planet’s  current  growing  water  crises.  Experiencing  ourselves  as  bodies  of  water,  deeply  indebted  to  the  watery  milieus  which  bathed  us  all  into  being,  is  an  ethical  call  from  the  deep.      

Astrida Neimanis  joined  the  Gender  and  Cultural  Studies  Department  at  the  University  of  Sydney  in  2015  after  holding  various  teaching  and  research  positions  at  universities  in  Canada,  the  UK,  and  Sweden.  She  is  Associate  Editor  of  the  journal  Environmental  Humanities  (Duke  University  Press),  a  Key  Researcher  with  the  Sydney  Environment  Institute  and  co-­‐convenor  of  the  Composting:  Feminisms  and  the  Environmental  Humanities  reading  group  hosted  at  the  University  of  Sydney.  She  is  also  a  founding  member  and  University  of  Sydney  contact  faculty  for  The  Seed  Box:  A  MISTRA-­‐FORMAS  Environmental  Humanities  Collaboratory  (a  transnational  research  consortium  based  at  Linkoping  University,  Sweden).  Her  work  connects  feminist  theory  to  water,  weather,  bodies,  and other  environmental  matters.  Bodies  of  Water: Posthuman  Feminist  Phenomenologies  is  forthcoming  in  2016  (Bloomsbury).

Margaret Jolly  (FASSA)  is  an  ARC  Laureate  Fellow  and  Professor  in  the  School  of  Culture, History  and  Language  in  the  College  of  Asia  and  the  Pacific.  She  is  an  historical  anthropologist  who  has  written  extensively  on  gender  in  the  Pacific,  on  exploratory  voyages  and  travel  writing,  missions  and  contemporary  Christianity,  maternity  and  sexuality,  cinema  and  art.  She  chaired  the  Advisory  Committee  of  ECOPAS,  a  European  Union-­‐funded  consortium  aiming  to  put  the  ‘human’  back  into  climate  change  in  the  Pacific.  Her  recent  work  includes  research  into  deep  time  and  the  gendering  of  climate  change  in  Oceania.

Please register for this public lecture online.

This public lecture is sponsored by the ANU Gender Institute as part of the workshop ‘Gender, Science and Wonder’.

Inquiries: Dr Rachel Morgain

rachel.morgain@anu.edu.au

CAP Department of Gender, Media and Cultural Studies

Dr Trang Ta tx.ta@anu.edu.au

CASS School of Archaeology and Anthropology