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A Feminist Menagerie

Abstract

This paper appraises the role of critical-feminist figurations within the environmental humanities, focusing on the capacity of figures to produce situated environmental knowledges and pose site-specific ethical obligations. We turn to four environments—the home, the skies, the seas and the microscopic—to examine the work that various figures do in these contexts. We elucidate how diverse figures—ranging from companion animals to birds, undersea creatures and bugs—reflect productive traffic between longstanding concerns in feminist theory and the environmental humanities, and generate new insights related to situated knowledges, feminist care-ethics and the politics of everyday sensory encounters. We also argue, however, that certain figures have tested the limits of theoretical approaches which have emerged as the product of dialogue between feminist theory and environmental studies. In particular, we explore how particular figures have complicated ethical questions of how to intervene in broad environmental threats borne of anthropogenic activities, and of who or what to include in relational ethical frameworks.

Acceptance Date Apr 28, 2017
Publication Date Apr 1, 2018
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Feminist Review
Print ISSN 0141-7789
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan
Pages 61-79
DOI https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-018-0103-1
Keywords figuration, more-than-human, companion species, ethics, care, animal
Publisher URL https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-018-0103-1

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