Thinking permeable matter through feminist geophilosophy: Environmental knowledge controversy and the materiality of hydrogeologic processes

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that encounters with hydrogeologic processes encourage feminists to rethink the permeable surfaces between human bodies, ecological systems, and political events. Contemporary geographical accounts of environmental knowledge controversies are insufficiently attentive to how geologic processes exceed and undermine instrumental deliberative political solutions to environmental problems. Through a mobilization of feminist geophilosophy, I argue instead that the limits of instrumental knowledge are not merely produced by uncertainty or lack of evidence, but by the inhuman forces that condition feminist thinking itself. An investigation of a controversy surrounding the permeability of underground materials near a proposed in situ recovery uranium mine in South Dakota demonstrates that subterranean spaces have the ability to heighten a sense of the openness of our bodies to geological forces. Public and expert testimony of the hydrogeology of the region creatively extended scientific accounts to draw conclusions about the meaning and force of geology for the politics of uranium extraction. This essay contributes a unique account of environmental controversies in which materiality does not become instrumental or experiential knowledge but instead produces a creative understanding of permeable geologic materials which provokes feminist thought.