New Literary History

Abstract:

Care is work, an attitude toward others, and an ethical ideal. The intimate and necessary labor required to sustain those who are dependent, it is a limited resource unjustly extracted from women and people of color. Care ethics provides robust arguments for recognizing human interdependency with and accountability to the environments in which we are embedded, however it often reaches an impasse when forced to determine hierarchies of need, especially when they expand their consideration to nonhuman lives. This essay takes those places of confounding blockage as an invitation to explore the messier and morally ambiguous domain of the arts. It considers works of literature, visual, and performance art that engage questions about care beyond the human, attempting to navigate with and through the impasses that so trouble moral philosophers. Thought provoking and deeply imperfect, these imaginative works attempt to expand the contours of dignified and just interspecies care but also to generate new perspective on the places where that project fails.