Viral Eve – scraps for an ecofeminist compost ethic & transpecies reproductive justice 

It was raining on the day the book arrived, which is why I didn’t go out – a mistake, on my part, and a lesson to learn. One should go out even in the rain, at least to witness how the earth greets it. It was raining, I didn’t hear the doorbell, and the dogs were outside. When I did, eventually, step into the mud and puddles just a wall away from me, I found it: not the book itself. But the package in which it had been wrapped, and then pieces of it. So many! Small bits of pages, wet and ripped. As I was picking them up, I was upset at the postman (a kind man who, usually, even calls when there’s mail), the rain and the dogs. I also found it strangely accurate: if any other book would have been modified like this, by human & non-human entities, it would have felt like it’s broken. But not this one. This one, it just felt more alive. A book about making transpecies reproductive justice, about how we’re made up of viruses and bacteria, about responding to climate and ecological disaster with cyborg-feminist care? This is a book that, when met by rain, its dampness becomes a form of argumentation. When chewed by companion species, it archives part of its transpecies desires. 

Composting ecofeminist knowledges

“Eva virale – La vita oltre i confini di genere, specie e nazione” by Angela Balzano, which I could translate from Italian as “Viral Eve – Life beyond the borders of gender, species and nation” is written across genres, mingling feminist critical theory with case studies, essay-form writing with activist accounts. Published by Meltemi in the “Culture radicali” (Radical cultures) collection in 2024, this is Balzano’s second book, continuing the stride she had already begun making with her first “Per farla finita con la famiglia” (“Doing away with the family” – about which I previously wrote here). Both of her writings begin by being positioned in Italy, specifically the South, and don’t assume universality even when making big arguments, such as those for making posthuman kin instead of reproducing the nuclear, white, human family. Balzano’s desire, with this second book, is made clear early on:

I want to imagine a compost ethic for planetary health and against unlimited growth of capital, a politics that might find a place for/after the human in the humus that we come from. (/20) 

And what is a compost made of, if not scraps? Balzano thinks with figures as different as Baruch Spinoza, lobularia maritima, Lise Meitner, diatoms, Lynn Margulis, and sperm whale Siso. To read her, I took all the wet paper scraps I found and I laid them down on a table so they could dry – the same table I use now for drying mint, lemon balm, pot marigold and rosemary. Luckily, it had mostly been footnotes, and only the first and last pages, those that the dogs preferred. Then I waited, it was time’s turn to work. After the paper scraps dried, I could start the work of re-composing the book, just like a puzzle, sometimes sticking together three or four small pieces by guessing which word might come after the last one. What better way to be convinced of Balzano’s affirmation that “Knowledges are always wet, material and relational.”(/99)?

The undoing of binary hierarchical thinking is at the base of Balzano’s philosophical inquiries. Not only must we renounce anthropocentrism and seeing the Human as above all else, we must also deeply question gendered and racial hierarchies, as well as the idea of putting productive labour above reproductive labour, or intellectual labour above so-called non-intellectual (manual) labour. The reproductive degrowth she argues for is informed by long-standing feminist considerations, such as those made by Donna Haraway & Adele Clarke in “Making kin, not population”, but make no mistake, it is a generative proposal for more care, more equally distributed, rather than less. It doesn’t do away with humans, as Balzano writes, “There is no reason to believe that the end of human privilege coincides with its extinction. We will see that the opposite is true: supremacism and capitalism go hand in hand and trigger lethal short circuits for humans themselves.” (/20). To survive the upcoming climate destruction, and to dream of living better, we must consider changing our ways of living and, for Balzano, that starts with our desires. 

Desires as world-making

From her first book, Balzano latches upon the notion of desire as capable of change-making. As capitalism shapes our desires to consume in a specific way so as to grow itself, so must we respond by desiring differently, something else but the “reproduction and regeneration of the same”. In Eva Virale, after underlining how bacteria helped make our DNA and viruses our beings as mammals, after making it clear that we are part of Nature and that Nature, whatever “it” is, is neither easy to grasp, nor to describe universally, Balzano goes back to the concept of desire. Here, she’s considering desires that empower and desires that disempower. For someone who lives in the South of Italy, near the sea, certain things are clear: the micro-plastics that fill the waters come from all consumers, but especially tourists; the private flights of the rich who enjoy their vacations make up an enormous percent of CO2 emissions; and the racist, nationalist discourses and actions of the government end up destroying the lives of those who seek refuge by crossing the seas. So then, it is clear that certain “desires” destroy, while others can nourish:

We can say that a desire is empowering when its functionality is socially shared, meaning collective, for more than one species. (/101) 

We shall look “not for transcendence, but immanence”. And quickly, for the planet we live on might change faster and harsher than we imagine. For example, while subtropical regions where algae die will become bluer, regions closer to the pole will become green. The author asks: “This Planet that we’d better call Water, what color will it be in 100 years”? (/82). Before reading this, it had never occurred to me that something so intrinsic to how we picture the Earth could change in my lifetime – no matter what disasters might hit our continents, I didn’t realize that the tiny blue dot, lost in a dark space, might become green, signaling just how radically human societies can affect it. Only a mingle of trans-disciplinary, non-anthropocentric, feminist knowledges rooted in place, always conversing with activist movements, can guide us away from these destructive transformations, back to the brown soil and the blue waters. 

On science, power and transpecies justice

“Cyborgfeminism teaches us to refuse any theology masked as biology” (/65), and to refuse to see science as neutral, while grasping the importance of systematically looking at the world from wherever we are (always, always recognizing partiality). As reiterated from her first book, “biology and generally technoscience are giant cases of mansplaining”; these two are domains in which, quite often, who is non-male, non-white or non-human is exploited, extracted from, and rarely given back to (see medical animal experimentation, see the lack of general knowledge on the “female” reproductive system and its forms of sexual pleasure, see how gynecology as science was built on violence against Black women). So then, the quest is not against science in the abstract, but against Science as domination and towards knowledge-making as a situated endeavour. Towards cross-pollinated sciences that recognize the agency of non-human others! 

If biocapital means “the expropriation of generative transpecies power”, we shall try asking what would it look like if this power were used to sustain life across species, nations and genders? For one, it is certain that labour would be differently distributed and recognized. This is a key issue for Balzano, well-argued in her first book, in which she affirms that we should focus on the reproduction of good lives, rather than constant production. In this second book, the author argues for the term “transpecies justice” instead of “multispecies”, to underline that we are already made of non-human entities, and that it is simply not enough to see that they play a role – we are so profoundly in this together, there is no way out but collectively. And so we can start to see ourselves more like viral Eves, rather than homo sapiens, and ask “Why is it that some things we already have, others will never have? Why is it that what we have hurts others?”. To take it a step even further, to compost/feed/nurture transpecies alliances, we can choose to “put the human in the service of reproducing other species, who themselves are capable of connecting to the reproduction of other species” (for example, by researching & sustaining the capacity of diatoms to produce oxygen).

We are already multiple, already viral

I browse through the underlined book, full of sticky-notes and bound together by tape, with a make-shift cover that’s blue, just like the original one that was completely absorbed into the soil of my garden. I see this piece of writing as a continuation of Balzano’s previous work, a use of language to express what it must mean to see your region afflicted by pollution and touristification and your country upended by far-right politicians, yet still write as an act of care in a world that looks down on care work and care ethics. It’s a compost heap: it puts together many seemingly disparate things, doing the feminist work of showing their connections. It doesn’t have all the answers, and it certainly raises more questions. If capitalism produced our desires, can we really change them under these same systems? Does it make sense at all to begin with desire? Can we really make such bold, transpecies demands, when there’s not even access to basic conditions of living for many of those considered human (barely)? But ultimately, the point is that we are already viral Eves, made up of others, consuming some to extinction just to feed certain rich individuals beyond all limits. Whether we start from desire or not, whether we ask for transpecies reproductive justice or call it something else, we must, at some point, grapple with these questions, if we are to truly change how things are done, for more of us to be able to live and die well.

In “Eva Virale” Balzano invites us to try to collectively re-write the limits of the Human. A task no one can do alone, but nonetheless, one that must be done, before the massive suffering that comes with worsening climate chaos eats up our very conditions of existence. Before this Blue Planet loses its color. Will you take up the challenge?