Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781628926224
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

Practicing grief

Urging that we come to terms with death and dying is not an endorsement of the way things are or a retreat to quietism that allows the status quo to continue. But it is an expression of humility and an acknowledgment of the limitations of good intentions. There are genuine moral dilemmas, perhaps fewer than some would think, but there are times in which whatever we do there is some moral “remainder,” something that is lost. Acknowledging loss helps us to recognize what Judith Butler has called the “precariousness of life”—a precariousness that is at the core of community. Because we can suffer and be killed, we can recognize relations and kinship. As she writes, “there is no life without the conditions of life that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not the discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interdependency of persons, involving reproducible and sustaining social relations, and relations to the environment and to non-human forms of life” (Butler 2009, 19). To recognize our precariousness, and our vulnerability, is to not only recognize our interdependence or entanglement, but also, as Stanescu has suggested, to honor our animality.

Living with other animals requires paying more attention to grief, mourning, and maybe shame. This is doubly difficult today as acts of mourning human loss are increasingly sequestered. Sandra Gilbert recounts the ways that both death and grief have been relegated to social margins and illustrates how mourning has been pathologized.

Given that every healthy mourner is potentially an unhealthy melancholic, it oughtn’t be surprising that those who are bereaved feel embarrassment, anxiety, even shame … That neither the mourner herself nor her comforters are able to draw upon any culturally agreed-upon procedures for grieving intensifies her embarrassment even while it may further shape her shame. (Gilbert 2006, 257)

Mourning is also feminized, considered a private activity that must be kept at home. Since keeping grief in the closet and not dwelling on death is an expectation in the human case, even acknowledging the death of animals, let alone mourning those deaths, leads us into the realm of either the comic or the crazy.

But if we follow common norms of grieving and turn away from mourning, from the fact that we are in fatal interactions with other animals, we are not just making their lives unintelligible but are also foreclosing an appreciation of what it means to live with other animals, many of whom have life spans that are shorter than our own. It’s not easy to turn our attention to this underside of living with animals; it is painful and it requires courage in speciesist societies, but doing so may allow us to develop new ways of finding meaning in our fleeting relationships. It can also help us in thinking through some of the dilemmas that we currently face in our non-ideal, troubled relationships with animals. This is especially important for animal advocates who work on the front lines of animal care in sanctuaries and shelters.10

The practices

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