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a feminist menagerie

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Feminist Review

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.

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Notes

  1. For uses of figurations for other purposes, see Couldry and Hepp (2016).

  2. The reference to the ‘domestication’ of Haraway’s cyborg was made by Niamh Moore (2016).

  3. An accusation Haraway (2008, p. 20) levels at Jacques Derrida, arguing that he ‘failed a simple obligation of companion species; he did not become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him in looking back at him that morning’.

  4. Revive & Restore, ‘Passenger pigeon project’, http://reviverestore.org/about-the-passenger-pigeon/ [last accessed 23 January 2018].

  5. Haraway explicitly notes the difference in spelling between her ‘Chthulu’ and Lovecraft’s ‘Cthulhu’.

  6. The term ‘bug’ is used here for two reasons. Firstly, while ‘bug’ formally denotes an insect of the order Hemiptera (‘true bugs’), it is also ‘applied loosely to … any insect or small animal’ (The Chambers Dictionary, 2003). Secondly, the ‘small animals’ covered by the ‘bug’ umbrella go beyond insects to include microbes, nematodes and so forth—think of the phrase ‘I’ve got a stomach bug’. It is the informal, inclusive, sense of the term which is used here.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Media, Communications & Culture, Humanities General Office, Keele University, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG, UK

    Eva Giraud

  2. Department of Sociology & Social Policy, University of Leeds, Social Sciences Building, 11.30, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK

    Greg Hollin

  3. Department of Culture, Film & Media, University of Nottingham, B41 Trent Building, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK

    Tracey Potts

  4. School of Geography, University of Nottingham, C20 Sir Clive Granger, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK

    Isla Forsyth

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  1. Eva Giraud
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  2. Greg Hollin
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  3. Tracey Potts
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  4. Isla Forsyth
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Correspondence to Eva Giraud.

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Giraud, E., Hollin, G., Potts, T. et al. a feminist menagerie. Fem Rev 118, 61–79 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-018-0103-1

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