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The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics
In Beyond Animal Rights , Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams introduced feminist "ethic of care" theory into philosophical discussions of the treatment of animals. In this new volume, seven essays from Beyond Animal Rights are joined by nine new articles-most of which were written in response to that book-and a new introduction that situates feminist animal care theory within feminist theory and the larger debate over animal rights. Contributors critique theorists' reliance on natural rights doctrine and utilitarianism, which, they suggest, have a masculine bias. They argue for ethical attentiveness and sympathy in our relationships with animals and propose a link between the continuing subjugation of women and the human domination of nature. Beginning with the earliest articulation of the idea in the mid-1980s and continuing to the theory's most recent revisions, this volume presents the most complete portrait of the evolution of the feminist-care tradition.
392 pages, Paperback
First published November 29, 2007
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About the author
Josephine Donovan
39 books20 followersJosephine Donovan is the author of twelve books of nonfiction and the editor of four. A complete list of her publications is available on her web site:
http://english.umaine.edu/people/jose.... Her fields of specialization include animal ethics, feminist criticism and theory, American women’s literature (especially nineteenth-century), and early modern women’s literature. Her work has been translated into seven languages (Japanese, French, Turkish, Swedish, Greek, German, and Chinese).
Her most recent books are: Animals, Mind, and Matter: The Inside Story (2022); The Lexington Six: Lesbian and Gay Resistance in 1970s America (2020), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Aware; and The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). Recently published: a second, revised edition of Women and the Rise of the Novel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2013) St. Martin’s, 1999; paperback, 2000). It was termed “a work of extraordinary significance” by the Choice reviewer, who wrote, “Donovan has defined the field clearly, forthrightly, often brilliantly. All future discussion of the subject begins here” (October 2000). Also recently published was European Local-Color Literature: National Tales, Dorfgeschichten, Romans Champêtres (Bloomsbury, 2010), a work in comparative literature.
Donovan’s best-known book, Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions, first published in 1985, is now in its fourth edition (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012) Amazon.com notes, “this book has established itself as the classic survey and analysis of the roots and development of feminist theory.” A selection of other reviews of Donovan’s books may be found on her web site.
Two of her books, Sarah Orne Jewett and Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Evil, Affliction, and Redemptive Love have recently been reprinted in revised editions on-line and in “print-on-demand” form by Cybereditions.
Born in Manila in 1941, Donovan was evacuated from the Philippines with her mother a few months before Pearl Harbor. Her father, a Captain in the U. S. Army, remained in the Philippines where he was captured by the Japanese in 1942, remaining a P.O.W. for the duration. His memoirs, edited by his daughter, were recently published as P.O.W. in the Pacific: Memoirs of an American Doctor in World War II.
She graduated, cum laude, from Bryn Mawr College in 1962 with a major in history, after spending her Junior Year in Europe. After graduation she worked as a Copy Desk clerk at The Washington Post and Time Magazine and as a general assignment reporter on a small newspaper in upstate New York. During this period she completed a course in Creative Writing at Columbia University.
She received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1967 and 1971, respectively. She has held academic positions at several universities and worked for a time as a Copy Editor for G. K. Hall in Boston. She is Emerita Professor of English at the University of Maine.
http://english.umaine.edu/people/jose.... Her fields of specialization include animal ethics, feminist criticism and theory, American women’s literature (especially nineteenth-century), and early modern women’s literature. Her work has been translated into seven languages (Japanese, French, Turkish, Swedish, Greek, German, and Chinese).
Her most recent books are: Animals, Mind, and Matter: The Inside Story (2022); The Lexington Six: Lesbian and Gay Resistance in 1970s America (2020), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Aware; and The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). Recently published: a second, revised edition of Women and the Rise of the Novel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2013) St. Martin’s, 1999; paperback, 2000). It was termed “a work of extraordinary significance” by the Choice reviewer, who wrote, “Donovan has defined the field clearly, forthrightly, often brilliantly. All future discussion of the subject begins here” (October 2000). Also recently published was European Local-Color Literature: National Tales, Dorfgeschichten, Romans Champêtres (Bloomsbury, 2010), a work in comparative literature.
Donovan’s best-known book, Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions, first published in 1985, is now in its fourth edition (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012) Amazon.com notes, “this book has established itself as the classic survey and analysis of the roots and development of feminist theory.” A selection of other reviews of Donovan’s books may be found on her web site.
Two of her books, Sarah Orne Jewett and Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Evil, Affliction, and Redemptive Love have recently been reprinted in revised editions on-line and in “print-on-demand” form by Cybereditions.
Born in Manila in 1941, Donovan was evacuated from the Philippines with her mother a few months before Pearl Harbor. Her father, a Captain in the U. S. Army, remained in the Philippines where he was captured by the Japanese in 1942, remaining a P.O.W. for the duration. His memoirs, edited by his daughter, were recently published as P.O.W. in the Pacific: Memoirs of an American Doctor in World War II.
She graduated, cum laude, from Bryn Mawr College in 1962 with a major in history, after spending her Junior Year in Europe. After graduation she worked as a Copy Desk clerk at The Washington Post and Time Magazine and as a general assignment reporter on a small newspaper in upstate New York. During this period she completed a course in Creative Writing at Columbia University.
She received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1967 and 1971, respectively. She has held academic positions at several universities and worked for a time as a Copy Editor for G. K. Hall in Boston. She is Emerita Professor of English at the University of Maine.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 21, 2009
I'm deeply embarrassed to say that my own work with critical animal theory has just ignored or assumed CAT's debts to feminism. I'd be more embarrassed if I couldn't say the same thing about a lot of the CAT: Corporeal Compassion, Zoographies, Tyler, any number of the various anthologies on the subject (Killing Animals, Representing Animals), and, as Haraway points out in When Species Meet, Derrida. Only Cary Wolfe, whose first chapter in Animal Rites engages with ecofeminists like Deborah Slicer, escapes the charge.
"Care" is throughout contrasted to the "rights & reason" model of Singer and Regan, which is, justifiably, accused of uncritically perpetuating subject/object distinctions (and all this implies) and of ignoring the ugly history of the category "reason." I'm in full sympathy with the "care" model, and am happy to add these thoughts to Levinas's infinite demands of the Other, Derrida's deep suspicions about reason, the law, and the 'good conscience,' as well as Leonard Lawlor's observations about the 'minimal violence' required to single something out for care. Given the training of the essayists here, it wouldn't really be fair to demand they know all this other work, but it is fair, I think, to take them to task for not showing any knowledge of cognitive science's advances in discovering the intelligence of emotion and (concomitantly) that a purely 'reasonable' brain is a pretty stupid thing.
Some essays (Marti Kheel's most of all) have aged badly; many would benefit from engagement with the intellectual traditions and thinkers who have ignored them (and of course vice versa: only Carol Adams engages with Derrida); some strike me as supererogatory (the first Donovan and Kelch essays); but many of the essays--Josephine Donovan "Attention to Suffering: Sympathy as a Basis for Ethical Treatment of Animals"; Thomas G. Kelch "The Role of the Rational and the Emotive in a Theory of Animal Rights"; Catherine MacKinnon "Of Mice and Men: A Fragment on Animal Rights"; Cathryn Bailey, "On the Backs of Animals: The Valorization of Reason in Contemporary Animal Ethics" [note the world of difference between "Rights" and "Ethics"!)--are essential reading for CAT and, being outside the abstruse rhetorical traditions of continental philosophy (for better and worse), could be very useful in a classroom setting.
"Care" is throughout contrasted to the "rights & reason" model of Singer and Regan, which is, justifiably, accused of uncritically perpetuating subject/object distinctions (and all this implies) and of ignoring the ugly history of the category "reason." I'm in full sympathy with the "care" model, and am happy to add these thoughts to Levinas's infinite demands of the Other, Derrida's deep suspicions about reason, the law, and the 'good conscience,' as well as Leonard Lawlor's observations about the 'minimal violence' required to single something out for care. Given the training of the essayists here, it wouldn't really be fair to demand they know all this other work, but it is fair, I think, to take them to task for not showing any knowledge of cognitive science's advances in discovering the intelligence of emotion and (concomitantly) that a purely 'reasonable' brain is a pretty stupid thing.
Some essays (Marti Kheel's most of all) have aged badly; many would benefit from engagement with the intellectual traditions and thinkers who have ignored them (and of course vice versa: only Carol Adams engages with Derrida); some strike me as supererogatory (the first Donovan and Kelch essays); but many of the essays--Josephine Donovan "Attention to Suffering: Sympathy as a Basis for Ethical Treatment of Animals"; Thomas G. Kelch "The Role of the Rational and the Emotive in a Theory of Animal Rights"; Catherine MacKinnon "Of Mice and Men: A Fragment on Animal Rights"; Cathryn Bailey, "On the Backs of Animals: The Valorization of Reason in Contemporary Animal Ethics" [note the world of difference between "Rights" and "Ethics"!)--are essential reading for CAT and, being outside the abstruse rhetorical traditions of continental philosophy (for better and worse), could be very useful in a classroom setting.
April 11, 2024
There were some really good chapters in this books.
“The new understanding of life must be systematic and interconnected. It cannot be linear and hierarchical, for the reality of life on earth is a whole, a circle, an interconnected system in which everything has its part to play and can be respected and accorded dignity” —Elizabeth D. Gray
“The new understanding of life must be systematic and interconnected. It cannot be linear and hierarchical, for the reality of life on earth is a whole, a circle, an interconnected system in which everything has its part to play and can be respected and accorded dignity” —Elizabeth D. Gray
February 8, 2014
A bunch of women (and one man) who think that their learned submissiveness needs to be expanded and politicized, rather than challenged.
Ethic of care = female ghetto pride.
Ethic of care = female ghetto pride.
December 2, 2009
Various authors talk about compassion, empathy vs sympathy and why animals should no longer be considered property. Made me feel like a conservative, scoffing at the bleeding heart liberals, which is saying a lot.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews