Questioning Empathetic Responsiveness to Nonhuman Animal Vulnerability

Noninnocent Relations and Affective Motivations in the Animal Turn in Religious Studies

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12901262
AutoresWendy Mallette (0009-0007-5100-7842, Yale University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2021
Volumen15
Número2
Páginas177-203
Fecha de publicación2021-08-06
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal for the Study of Religion Nature and Culture (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1749-4907 • E-ISSN: 1749-4915
EditorialEquinox Publishing (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1558/jsrnc.42010
OpenAlexW3190005280
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas38

The author uses critical theorizations of empathy, compassion, and epistemology in order to draw out the limits of appeals to respond to nonhuman animal gazes in religious studies. Taking Aaron S. Gross’s and Donovan O. Schaefer’s recent works as exemplary, the author argues that empathetic postures towards vulnerability deny the potential violences of empathy and inadvertently reproduce the scholar as an ethical, conscious, and knowing subject. Instead, noninnocent framings of the relation of a scholar to her objects of study might allow religious studies to think more critically about the affective motivations of our desires to recognize the nonhuman animal and our epistemic limitations—especially in ways that do not presuppose the human/animal binary as a master binary whose collapse will entail the demise of racism, sexism, and colonialism

Compassion · Demise · Empathy · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Political science · Relation (database · Sociology · Subject (documents · Vulnerability (computing · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · Theological Perspectives and Practices