encounter

I have chosen the word encounter to focus on individual casual engagements with everyday objects.

Dictionary definitions: encounter (noun):

A meeting with a person or thing, esp when casual or unexpected12 A hostile meeting; contest or conflict13 A meeting, especially one that happens by chance14 An occasion when people have sex, usually with someone they have not met before15 A meeting especially one that is sudden, unexpected or violent16 An incident in which police shoot dead a suspected criminal17

The word Encounter apparently comes from Vulgar Latin incotnrare (unattested) and from Latin contra (against, opposite).18

An encounter is a type of meeting or engagement. I do not want to focus on the adversarial component in the meaning of the word. But for the purposes of this exploration, I welcome the casual and unexpected, and the potential for sex and danger. I also welcome the unattested; the nameless; the unspecified; the undesignated; and the secret.

While remaining earthly and grounded in the material of encounters, we are looking discursively as well as sensuously beyond the mundane. My proposed sensual-encounter enters Stacy Alaimo’s theoretical site of Trans-Corporeality. She describes it as a “literal “contact zone” between human corporeality and more-than-human nature”.19 20

12 Collins English Dictionary. Copyright Harper Collins Publishers <https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/encounter> [accessed April 2020]. 13 Ibid. 14 Cambridge Dictionary < https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/encounter> [accessed April 2020]. 15 Ibid. 16 Oxford Dictionary < https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/encounter_2> [accessed April 2020]. 17 Ibid. 18 Collins English Dictionary. 19 Stacy Alaimo, Trans-corporeal feminisms and the ethical space of nature in Material Feminisms in Material Feminisms edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), p. 238. 20 Alaimo further qualifies that ‘the movement across human corporeality and nonhuman nature necessitates rich, complex modes of analysis that travel through entangled territories of the material and discursive, natural and cultural, biological and textual.’ Ibid. p238.