Trans-corporeality is a posthumanist theory that argues all living beings are interconnected through dynamic material exchanges that transform both the being and its environment. It contests Western ideas of detached human subjects and instead proposes that human identities are entangled with biological, technological and environmental systems. Trans-corporeality has been applied across disciplines like archaeology, law, and literary criticism to understand embodied experiences and ethics in an interconnected world.

1. Stacy Alaimo
Trans-corporeality
Forthcoming in The Posthuman Glossary
Edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova
[1600 words]
Glossary terms referenced:
Feminist Posthumanities
New Materialism
Posthuman Ethics
Nonhuman Agency
Bodies Politic
Anthropocene
Trans-corporeality is a posthumanist mode of new materialism and
material feminism. Trans-corporeality means that all creatures, as embodied
beings, are intermeshed with the dynamic, material world, which crosses
through them, transforms them, and is transformed by them. While trans-
corporeality as an ontology does not exclude any living creature, it does begin
with the human, in order--paradoxically perhaps--to disrupt Western human
exceptionalism. The figure/ground relation between the human and the
environment dissolves as the outline of the human is traversed by substantial
material interchanges. Mapping those interchanges across all species and at all
scales is the prelude to trans-corporeal ethics and politics. Trans-corporeality
contests the master subject of Western humanist individualism, who imagines
himself as transcendent, disembodied, and removed from the world he surveys.
The trans-corporeal subject is generated through and entangled with biological,
technological, economic, social, political and other systems, processes, and

2. events, at vastly different scales. Trans-corporeality finds itself within capitalism,
but resists the allure of shiny objects, considering instead, the effects they have,
from manufacture to disposal, while reckoning with the strange agencies that
interconnect substance, flesh and place. It does not contemplate discrete objects
from a safe distance, but instead, thinks as the very stuff of the ever-emergent
world (Alaimo 2016).
Thinking as the stuff of the world has a long feminist history, due to the
way women, along with racially marked and disabled peoples, have grappled
with being subjects often categorized and systematically treated as objects.
Trans-corporeality, along with other theoretical concepts within feminist
posthumanities, suggests a new figuration of the human after the Human, which
is not founded on detachment, dualisms, hierarchies, or exceptionalism, and
which does not, in Val Plumwood’s terms “background” nature (1993). Like Rosi
Bradotti’s transversal subject outlined in The Posthuman and other works, the
“trans” of transcorporeality insists on multiple horizontal crossings, transits, and
transformations. As Braidotti contends, “The challenge for critical theory is
momentous: we need to visualize the subject as a transversal entity
encompassing the human, our genetic neighbors the animals and the earth as a
whole” (2013: 82).
I developed the concept of trans-corporeality while editing the collection
Material Feminisms (2008) with Susan J. Hekman and while writing Bodily Natures:
Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010). In an earlier essay about
architecture and environmental ethics, I had drawn upon feminist theories of
corporeality, including the “intercorporeality” of Gail Weiss, which, she notes,
emphasizes that “the experience of being embodied is never a private affair, but

3. is always already mediated by our continual interactions with other human and
nonhuman bodies” (1999: 158). Donna Haraway’s work, starting with Primate
Visions (1989), has long influenced my writing; her argument for “situated and
embodied knowledges” and against “various forms of unlocatable, and so
irresponsible knowledge claims” (1991: 191) as well as her insistence on
nonhuman agencies and the material-semiotic no doubt permeated my
conception of trans-corporeality. Trans-corporeality is developed in Bodily
Natures by drawing upon Karen Barad’s notion of intra-action (2007) as well as
other new materialist theories of nonhuman agency, particularly those from
science studies. Bodily Natures argues that the trans-corporeal subject emerges
from environmental health and environmental justice movements, which must
discern, track, and negotiate the unruly substances that move across bodies and
places. Racism becomes materialized, in multiple and interconnected ways,
when, for example, in Percival Everett’s novel Watershed (1996) the African-
American protagonist reckons with his own blood as a marker not of an
essentialist or contained racial identity but as a trans-corporeal conduit marking
the history of racist medical experiments, his own experiences with police
brutality, and the environmental racism of the U.S. military against Native
American lands, which may have resulted in his cross-species contamination
with the Anthrax virus. Science, medicine, history, law enforcement, and the
military are all entangled in the racism, environmental degradation, and
epistemological quandaries that course through the protagonist’s very blood.
(Alaimo 2010: 64-70).
Trans-corporeality is not a mystical, spiritual, phenomenological or
experiential sense that “everything is connected;” it requires a radical rethinking

4. of ontologies and epistemologies; it involves science, science studies, citizen
science, feminist theory, environmental theories, critical race studies, disability
studies, literature, art, and everyday activism. Thinking the subject as a material
being, subject to the agencies of the compromised, entangled world, enacts an
environmental posthumanism. The subject cannot be separated from networks of
intra-active material agencies (Karen Barad: 2007) and thus cannot ignore the
disturbing epistemological quandaries of risk society (Ulrich Beck: 1992). Trans-
corporeality, as it reckons with material agencies that traverse substances,
objects, bodies, and environments, entails reckoning with scientific captures,
even as the data is always already “mangled“ (Andrew Pickering: 1995) by social
and economic forces. Scientific information, produced by experts or “ordinary
experts” is necessary for trans-corporeal mappings, which circulate through
popular culture, politicized communities and subcultures, such as that of people
with multiple chemical sensitivity (Alaimo 2010).
Trans-corporeality discourages fantasies of transcendence and
imperviousness that render environmentalism merely an elective and external
enterprise. Even though trans-corporeality emerged from environmental health
and environmental justice movements, which focus on (post)humans, the
concept extends toward all species who find themselves at the crossroads of
body and place. The posthuman ethics of trans-corporeality insists that even the
most routine human activities, such as purchasing plastics, impact human and
nonhuman lives across vast geographic and temporal scales, extending even to
the bottom of the sea. (Alaimo 2016). The bizarre enormity of the effects of the
most minute everyday actions underscores the urgent need for rethinking ethics

5. and politics in the anthropocene, an epoch in which human activities have
profoundly altered the planet. Cecilia Asberg, Redi Koobak, & Ericka Johnson,
contend that “Posthumanities as feminist analytical practices work for us to re-
tool the humanities so as to meet up with the on-going transformations of our
worlds.” (2001: 228). Trans-corporeality grapples with precisely how the
transformation of the world alters—or should alter--ontologies, epistemologies,
politics and ethics. While trans-corporeality was not conceived under the sign of
the anthropocene, it nonetheless epitomizes the sort of posthumanist ontologies
in which there is can be no “nature” outside the human. And yet the human is
hardly the master of his domain but instead, a site traversed by strange agencies
and immersed within entangled ethical and political relations. While toxic
chemicals, radiation, toxic e-waste from the global north dumped in the global
south, industrial agriculture, factory farming, and animal experimentation are
often overlooked in predominant visual, theoretical and popular accounts of the
proposed anthropogenic geological epoch, trans-corporeality, with its attention
to the disconcertingly extensive effects of seemingly benign consumerist
practices, underscores that they too are matters of concern for the anthropocene.
Since trans-corporeality involves unexpected transits and crossings, it may
be fitting to conclude with a brief account of how trans-corporeality has been
taken up by in divergent and perhaps surprising ways. Christina Fredengren,
“Posthumanism, the Transcorporeal and Biomolecular Archaeology,” employs
the concept in order to place archaeological data such as DNA and isotope
analysis “in a theoretical frame” that demonstrates “the entanglement between
the skeleton, the visceral parts of the body and the environment” (2013: 59).
Dayna Nadine Scott, a legal scholar, argues that “the theory of transcorporeality

6. directs us not only towards the permeability of the bodily boundary but also
towards the science/experience boundary;” thus a “negotiated empiricism,
attenuated by transcorporeality . . . puts forward the possibility that experiential
knowledge is robust because of its intersubjectivity, not in spite of it” (2015: 19,
20). Magdalena Gorska takes transccorporeality as a “key analytical apparatus”
of her dissertation, Breathing Matters, demonstrating how breathing “materializes
human embodied subjectivities as always-already dispersed” as she argues for
recalibrating “feminist analytical tools as onto-epistemological” (forthcoming,
n.p.). In the collection edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Prismatic Ecology: Ecology
Beyond Green, Robert McRuer critiques how “pinkwashing” obscures queer trans-
corporeal relations; Steve Mentz paints trans-corporeality brown because it
suggests “separation itself may be problematic” within the “brown interchange
of life and nonlife;” and Cohen reflects on the greyness of zombies, asserting that
“[m]onster, human, and world are transcorporeal” (2013: 70, 207 285). Tema
Milstein and Charlotte Kroløkke analyze the “climactic moment of encountering
the embodied other” such as that of the “’orcagasms’” of whale watchers, which
they argue are “intersubjective and transcorporeal events” (2012: 88). Mel Y
Chen, interprets transcorporeality as “affirming the agencies of the matter that
we live among,” such that: “the sentience of the couch, in our meeting and
communing, then becomes my own sentience as well” (2012: 182). Astrida
Neimanis and Rachel Lowen Walker in “Weathering: Climate Change and the
‘Thick Time’ of Transcorporeality” make the temporal, rather than spatial,
dimensions of transcorporeality “more explicit:”: “The claim that . . .
transcorporeal temporality belies a phenomenology of weathering, means that
the spatial metaphors we have historically used to frame our bodies are unable to

7. fully account for the co-creative relationship between bodies, whether bodies of
climate, water, soil, or bones” (2014: 566, 570) Jeffrey Jerome Cohen in Stone: An
Ecology of the Inhuman, also expands the temporality of transcorporeality in order
to bring the concept further along “its disanthropocentric path” (2015: 41).
Extending transcorporeality to a “geophilic Long Ecology,” Cohen writes:
“stone’s intimate alterity demands acknowledgement of more-than-human
temporal and spatial entanglement, so that ecology becomes Long Ecology, an
affectively fraught web of relation that unfolds within an extensive spatial and
temporal range, demanding an ethics of relation and scale” (2015: 41). With this
Long Ecology, and other matters, trans-corporeality has, rather appropriately,
developed beyond its origins.
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