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Eva Haifa Giraud deposited A Feminist Menagerie on Humanities Commons 3 years, 7 months ago
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.