Outlines how eighteenth-century historians emphasized the use of nature as a precondition for cultural progress. Discusses such things as climatic theories, and stadial theories.
Through a range of vivid examples drawn from scientific research (from social amoebas to lightening), Barad lays out how nature itself is queer, how it models queer communication through a performative rather than represnetative mode. Barad expands…
Remains, even after half a century, the most comprehensive serious general survey available of the development of intellectual and scientific attitudes toward nature in the history of western civilization from antiquity up to the end of the…