Feminist scholarship has increasingly turned towards the ocean as a conceptual apparatus in which to think through the complex philosophical and ethical dilemmas of the Anthropocene. Responding to the ebbs, flows and transformations of the oceanic turn, our article outlines our interactions with four decorator crabs. It begins by situating our experience of thinking-with these crabs as a feminist practice of care within the conceptual context of the ocean. Our article then draws on the knowledge that arose out of our fertile entanglements with the crabs to propose that: 1) the aquarium, with its colonial histories of subjugation, is a fertile space to re-image human–aquatic relationalities, revealing the fallacy of human control over ‘nature’ and emphasising the agency of marine worlds; 2) Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality is a powerful way to think through the consequences of an acidifying ocean, both for ourselves and for our shelled companions; and 3) remediation is a radical approach to taking seriously the materiality of watery worlds. The objective of the article is to craft a practice of material feminism that entangles our more-than-human bodies to learn-with decorator crabs. In doing so, we show that the aquarium is a potent space of transformation that allows us to imagine new and distinctly feminist entanglements that dismantle hierarchies. We show that thinking-with the materiality of marine worlds is a series of remediations, both material and discursive, that dissolve the boundaries between entities, creating an embodied environmental ethics that is necessary as a feminist challenge to the Anthropocene.

In this article we offer a textual analysis informed by feminist framings of the geologic as a somatechnic research practice. The turn to geology in recent feminist scholarship responds to the explosion of discourse on the Anthropocene (itself a geologic term) interrogating the power relations implicit in geology as a seemingly objective research practice and epistemology. We use this theoretical standpoint on geology to analyse two literary representations of geologies of the future –  Dawn by Octavia Butler and Earth After Us by Jan Zalasiewicz. In Earth After Us, aliens of the future mine the depths of the earth to understand humans’ relationship with the planet and planetary annihilation. In Dawn, aliens mine the geology of human flesh and genetics to understand the same thing. Through our analysis we demonstrate the ways that geology, as a specifically Western epistemology and research practice, relies on the distinction between the body – ‘bio’ – and nature – ‘geo’ – that Povinelli has termed ‘Geontopower’ (2016). Geontopower traces the ways that the research practices and epistemologies of geology are built from Western perspectives, that in turn are built on the backs of bodies – the slave power that built empires, as well as the long fossilised bodies that have powered capitalism. Through a feminist lens we demonstrate how these text’s representations of future geologies articulate a somatechnics in which bodies and technologies are intertwined. We argue that thinking geologically is a somatechnical research practice that reveals the extractive epistemologies implicit in ‘the White Geology of the Anthropocene’ ( Yusoff 2018 ). We conclude by offering a somatechnic geology in which the entangled relationships between bodies and systems of colonialism and capitalism are acknowledged as imbricated in the layers of flesh of humans and the planet alike, in order to imagine more just futures in an era of ecological urgency.