Terrestrial bodies

Abstract

As socio-ecological crises deepen, it is increasingly important that analyses of territory consider the other-than-human. Through a detailed engagement with a range of territorial currents, Gonin et al. do just this, introducing the idea of ‘terrestrial territories’ as a way forward, shifting the focus of analysis from the ‘Globe’ to ‘Gaia’. While we welcome the diverse engagement with non-Anglophone understandings of territory, in this commentary, we suggest that decolonial feminist work on Cuerpo-Territorio (body territory) may offer a more grounded, praxis-focused way forward. In particular, we argue that this focus on embodiment over the terrestrial is potentially better placed to address powerful feminist critiques of the Gaia hypothesis.

One of the main strengths and contributions of Gonin et al.'s (2025) paper is their detailed engagement with Francophone writing on territory, in particular the recent work of Latour. A vibrant current (see Antonsich, 2017; Del Biaggio, 2015), this work has often been overlooked in favour of either the typically dominant Anglophone literature (represented most famously the works of Stuart Elden, see: 2010, 2013b) or, more recently, Latin American readings of territory (see Halvorsen, 2019). Politically pertinent and theoretically generative, this latter work has proven to be a rich seam that, situated against-and-beyond Western/Northern territorial thinking (Clare et al., 2018), pushes back against implicitly statist readings of territory that reproduce a latent attachment to top-down visions of sovereignty, ultimately facilitated by Cartesian understandings of ‘the Globe’ (Gonin et al., 2025).

There are, however, potential concerns when this Latin American work is used simplistically to represent the non-Anglophone – or to put it another way: what happens when, rather than being an other geography (Oswin, 2020), Latin American territory becomes the other? Not only are important other territorial traditions marginalised (e.g. McGiffin, 2021; Ray, 2021) but, through the concomitant homogenisation of ‘Latin America’, important differences are flattened. Some of this engagement with Latin American territories can also cause a number of further issues. It can become synonymous with the decolonial in an unthinking and uncritical way. Not only does this fail to recognise the very colonial underpinnings of ‘Latin America’ as a region and render interchangeable a pluriversality of Indigenous territorial action and thought, but it also silences by failing to acknowledge the dominance of non-Indigenous, urban, and overwhelmingly male voices in this diverse canon (Halvorsen and Zaragocin, 2021). Driven by often-superficial conversation with the English-language work (original or translated) in this body of literature, this does a disservice to both the territorial and the decolonial. It is thus important to simultaneously engage more broadly and more precisely with territory. By skilfully weaving a narrative from a range of diverse territorial literatures, Gonin et al. manage to do just that. They push against efforts to do the history of territory (Elden, 2013a), with the paper highlighting instead the value of multiple histories and futures, moving, as it does, from the Globe to Gaia.

Central, we argue, to the best and most engaged writing on territory is a focus on praxis, for example work that examines the relationships between territory and subjectivity (Schwarz and Streule, 2024). The idea of ‘terrestrial territories’ carries with it this commitment, especially through its critique of work that fails to ‘sufficiently highlight…the role of planetary biogeochemical processes and entities such as climate or biodiversity in the making of territories’ (Gonin et al., 2024), a potentially catastrophic oversight as we navigate the Anthropocene/Capitalocene. The move from ‘Globe’ to ‘Gaia’ provides a neat framing, bringing the other-than-human yet further into discussion with territory (Usher, 2020), with a commendable desire to ‘contribute to a more ecologically grounded political theory with a more theoretically aware earth science’ (Gonin et al., 2025). That said, and returning to the above point, perhaps Gonin et al. could have developed this line of thinking further through more deeply embedding the pre-existing work (from Latin America and beyond) that has a similar purpose. For instance, the work of the late Carlos Walter Porto-Gonçalves comes to mind (a vast body of thought that, dos Santos (2024) notes, has been criminally overlooked by much of the discipline due to so little of it being translated into English). While Porto-Gonçalves's work is mentioned in the paper, a deeper engagement with it may have proved useful, especially given how much thought he gave to the links between territory and the other-than-human.

The paper also provoked in us some interesting scalar reflections. One notable absence in this paper is a discussion of Cuerpo-Territorio (body territory), an important decolonial feminist intervention and methodology from the ‘Latin American’ tradition (Zaragocin and Caretta, 2021) which connects the scale of the individual with the earth and politics of territorial reproduction. Dos Ventos Lopes Heimer (2021: 293) relates the idea to the political slogan Territorio Cuerpo-Tierra (Territory Body-Earth) used most famously by Indigenous Maya Q’eqchi’-Xinka activist Lorena Cabnal, showing how Cuerpo-Tierra (and thus Cuerpo-Territorio) ‘represents an ontological continuum between earth and bodies’. Sátizabal and Melo Zurita (2021: 268) develop these ideas further to ‘emphasise the relationality between territories, bodies and the Earth’ noting ‘the impossibility of separating territory, body and Earth/land struggles’. They ultimately use the idea of Territorio-Cuerpo-Tierra to critique ‘Masculine and Western imaginaries of territory [which] foreground the separation between territory and the experiences of being and living with and in dynamic and complex places’ (Sátizabal and Melo Zurita (2021: 271). Cuerpo-Territorio therefore provides an explicitly praxis-focused counterpoint to terrestrial territories that considers how territories are made by, and relationally embedded in, the other-than-human. We therefore ask here how the terrestrial and the embodied relate to each other. Put simply, what do we gain by scaling up rather than down, and what might we lose? Might a movement towards a humbler (Saville, 2021), more minor (Katz, 1996, 2017) theorising benefit territorial praxis? Again, while impossible to engage with the extant body of literature in its entirety, this is a notable absence in Gonin et al.'s piece and does speak to an underappreciated richness to the ‘Latin American’ work.

Feminist approaches like Cuerpo-Territorio connect to wider critiques of the concept of Gaia itself. While the paper does acknowledge the colonial underpinnings of Gaia, this part of the argument could have been developed more fully (the emphasis on retaining the specificity of different cosmologies is, however, important and well made). Similarly, although it is good to see the paper acknowledging the contribution of Lynn Margulis (all too often she is overlooked in favour of her more (in)famous male co-author James Lovelock), there is a need to consider the many, long-standing feminist critiques of Gaia in general (e.g. Rose, 1991), and Latour's use of it in particular (see Sagan, 2023; Sands, 2020). While this feminist work explicitly engages with the big questions that motivate Gonin et al., such as ontology (Pohl, 2020), agency (Müller, 2021) and sovereignty (Sands, 2015), there is also an explicit focus on praxis through discussion of things like care (van den Heuvel, 2023). Returning to the decolonial feminist ideas of Cuerpo-Territorio, we urge the authors to consider them in relation to their theorisation of Gaia, or else their construction of the other-than-human risks falling foul of the above feminist critiques.

This brings us back to the question of (territorial) praxis and how this is best served, a question we have typically answered through a focus on the everyday (Habermehl, 2021) and at the scale of the neighbourhood (Mason-Deese et al., 2019). But as the Earth becomes less habitable it is increasingly vital to consider the other-than-human. The idea of terrestrial territories provides tools to do just that and thus offers new perspectives in an increasingly crowded ‘territory of territory’ (Delaney, 2005). That said, we feel it is important to ask what intellectual and political work terrestrial territory does which Cuerpo-Territorio does not, and how do these concepts and practices overlap? We do wonder if a focus on Cuerpo-Territorio might, quite literally, offer a more grounded way into such debates and important struggles.