This chapter argues that contemporary openings to utopian thinking are confronted by an array of different temporal frameworks that afford radically different possibilities for human agency and cohere with radically different political and ethical demands. These include, on the one hand, the geologic time scale of the Anthropocene, the long historical time informing social activism and social justice movements (e.g., the perspectives afforded by the histories of slavery, genocide, and colonialism), and the utopian perspective of hope or what Ernst Bloch calls anticipatory illumination. These must confront, on the other hand, the cyclical time of economic growth and recession, the exigent time of electoral cycles, and the frozen time of “capitalist realism.” This chapter explores conceptual and fictional responses to this matrix of possibilities, especially in narratives by Cormac McCarthy, Donna Haraway, Nisi Shawl, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

This chapter explores future orientations for gender and sexuality in anthropology. After a brief incursion into anthropological engagements with future-making, modernity, and the straightness of settler time, the chapter turns to queer and feminist science and technology studies work on the projection of anthropocentric understanding of gender and sexuality onto natural worlds. Despite the exuberance of nonhuman sexualities, sexual reproduction is still seen as the apex of evolution and the social sciences still struggle to fully think gender and sexuality outside (biological) reproduction. The chapter then turns to a discussion of Haraway’s and Clarke’s call for a multispecies reproductive justice that takes on the vexed question of overpopulation. This call, while important in its quest to free kinship from chrono-hetero-normative reproductive imperatives, leverages apocalyptic futurisms and overlooks the myriad ways Indigenous and Black communities have long been in relation with human and more-than-human kin. It concludes with reflections on the importance of resisting grand explicative gestures characteristic of patriarchal logics and technological solutions, positing livable future as the capacity to thrive and regenerate through the heinous violence that continues to mark the world. It invites anthropologists to ponder what futures the work they do perpetuate or make possible.

The interdisciplinary field of animal studies owes much to Darwin’s work, particularly in the Descent of Man, where he claims that mental and emotional capacities ranging from an ability to reason to an aesthetic sense exist in other animals besides humans. This chapter examines the significance of Darwin’s work for animal ethics, the science of animal behavior, theories of companion species, and the age of mass extinction. Activists, scientists, humanists, and environmentalists continue to find new uses for Darwin’s work as they pursue greater knowledge about the animal kingdom and more just ecological communities.

In Chapter 16, “The Nature of Animality,” Michael Lundblad explores how questions of animal (and human) nature animate the contemporary interdisciplinary fields of posthumanism, multispecies ethnography, science and technology studies, animality studies, and human-animal studies. The chapter examines how animality has long defined how humans think about each other and how rejecting a fundamental distinction between humans and animals enables us to see the intertwined “becomings” of different beings. The chapter constructs a genealogy of prominent theoretical responses to questions about animals and animality by Jacques Derrida, Erica Fudge, and Donna Haraway, among others. Theories of animality, Lundblad demonstrates, challenge how we think about history, periodization, and culture, and breathe new life into old debates within literary studies such as questions of agency, character, and perspective.

This chapter argues that speculative fiction is an important tool for the posthumanism project of deconstructing and critiquing the default “man” of western humanism. The genre’s techniques of defamiliarization and literalizing metphor find parallels in works of posthumanist theory, and I argue that this fiction is a form of everyday theorizing of the same questions that inform posthumanist theory. Like posthumanist theory, science fiction questions what it means to be human, and often attitudes agency and cognition to nonhuman entities. This chapter reviews the genre’s contributions to posthumanism in the areas of transhumanism and smart systems, genetic engineering and synthetic biology, the Internet of Things, and climate change and ecological sustainability. It argues that there is a reciprocal exchange between imaginative visions and material practice, making sf a discourse of world transformation.

The fraught histories of both animal studies and posthumanism as intellectual formations help to explain why ongoing, creative syntheses are proving especially necessary for the wellbeing of humanities scholarship. Maintaining a laser focus on the machine-human hybrid arguably has aided the development of postanthropocentric at the expense of anti-speciesist impulses in posthumanism. At the same time, while a distinct field of study has coalesced around concerns pertaining to nonhuman animate life, debates about what to call it—animal studies, human-animal studies, critical animal studies, etc.— often turn on what role posthumanist theory plays in its genealogy. With an eye toward new developments in and across these discussions, this chapter explores how various posthumanist perspectives on humans, animals, and human-animal relationships themselves foster productive ambivalences, though not without controversy, and points to some promising cross-fertilizations taking shape in fiction (especially sf), plant studies, and what some are calling postanimalism.

This chapter provides an overview of the volume’s purposes and describes why various chapters and critical perspectives have been included in it. It connects the wider project of various ways of thinking “after the human” to the inadequacy of western liberal theoretical perspectives in the face of contemporary challenges: climate change, growing economic inequality, ongoing injustices originating in colonialism and racialization, and espeiallly new developments in science and in STS scholarship that undermines distinctions once made between humans and other organisms, and between organisms and manufactured systems. It explains that the “post” of posthumanism has a range of meanings to different research communities, and argues that it is important that the volume collects perspectives that do not all align with one another, given that dissatifcation with “the human” can be traced, by multiple pathways and to multiple conculsions, to its false claims for universality. Posthumanism, thus, does not label a single new way of thinking about agency and being, but describes a process by which negotiate multiplicity within politics of affinity.

The Anthropocene is the new designation for our current geological epoch in which human activity has decisively altered earth ecosystems and the fossil record in ways that will be measurable by the geologists of our uncertain future. This chapter investigates the relationship between feminist thinking and the Anthropocene, establishing the gendered dimensions of environmental crisis, and considering how feminist thinkers have approached a range of ‘environment’ topics, including feminised constructions of ‘Nature’; the masculinism of capitalism, technology, science, and environmentalism; and the colonial erasures of the ‘Anthropocene’. This critical work is part of a long-tradition of intersectional environmental activism, which intersects with wider gender-rights campaigns, including reproductive rights and health, autonomy and equality, representation and participation, struggles against class oppression and racism, and feminist and queer critiques of militarisation, extractionism, and colonialism. Ultimately, new feminist understandings of the Anthropocene investigate and further intersectional ecological activism and seek to improve the material conditions of women’s lives.