The Politics of Everyday Lives: A Feminist Perspective on What Counts as Political
Maneesha Deckha (University of Victoria, Canada)
In their kickoff contribution, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka provide an overview of their argument that animals should be regarded as political agents and deserve human recognition of such agency through a variety of categories according to the particular places where animals live and the extent to which they are embedded in human societies. The authors are aware that it will challenge many trained and exposed to the Western political tradition to imagine that animals have the capacity for politics. Yet, the reasons and examples they give as to why gradations of citizenship and self-rule should be extended to animals are compelling. Some will prefer a refusal of, or more detached association with, state citizenship regimes, noting the built-in and colonial dynamics (both interhuman and interspecies) associated with human recognition of animals and extension of nation-state entitlements. My own views align with Donaldson and Kymlicka’s preference to extend recognition and further pluralise citizenship. They are right that the violence humans inflict on animals is “almost unimaginable”. Extending protective political entitlements to cede or share power with animals, which would also allow for refusals to engage, is the type of anti-anthropocentric initiative that our present planetary situation requires us to develop.
The Personal is Political
In this contribution, I support the core argument and objectives but also wish to press further regarding the concept of the “political” in Donaldson and Kymlicka’s account. I do so through feminist insights on how politics, including citizenship, is enacted. Probing the conceptual boundaries in this way, I submit, highlights another reason to regard animals as political agents and as capable of holding citizenship in particular.
In a paragraph summarising their book’s arguments for why animals “are political beings with a right to politics,” Donaldson and Kymlicka discuss evidence from ethology about the decisions animals make to get along in a collective or at least organise group life with less conflict. They note that this political agency is scaffolded by social and psychological processes such as social and emotional learning, including self-regulation. The authors close this summary of their book’s examples and the relationship they highlight between political action and other processes by noting that “(e)very day new research is revealing this web of animal politics, sociality and psychology”.
Donaldson and Kymlicka are surely correct about the continually augmenting nature of scientific knowledge regarding these three elements of animals’ lives. Yes, this particular way of drawing connections amongst these three elements may suggest that even as all three elements are entwined, the social and psychological processes are primarily “underlying” and thus partly distinct from the political processes of group decision-making and peace-making. This differentiation might intimate a compartmentalisation between politics, sociality and psychology that sits somewhat uneasily with a central feminist insight about politics, namely that “the personal is political”.
This mantra of second-wave feminism encouraged women (and those in power) to see their individual actions and choices in the everyday – typically within the domestic sphere that women occupied as homemakers, wives, and/or mothers – as politically structured and relevant. A central component of feminist agendas then and now is to contest the public/private binary that is so determinative to the gendered nature of our lives, but invisibilises, trivialises, and exploits the work women do in the home. In trying to destabilise the binary view that animals operate according to biological instincts in contrast to humans who create their cultures, politics and worlds, and in drawing upon feminist views of a relational self, I do not read Donaldson and Kymlicka’s argument as invested in reinforcing any other long-standing and oppression-producing binaries. However, that might be the inadvertent effect of situating sociability and psychological development in animals (as in humans) as preceding politics. A public/private divide also seems to emerge through the examples Donaldson and Kymlicka give in their contribution, involving, as they do, larger collectives (such as that exemplified by the amazing baboon case study Donaldson and Kymlicka discuss) or extended families.
A focus on more individualised and smaller family life decision-making seems a lost opportunity to further demonstrate the soundness of Donaldson and Kymlicka’s proposal to award political recognition to animals. This is precisely because the feminist insight that the “personal is political” applies to all of us. Greater emphasis on how social learning and norm generation in the everyday acts that comprise animals’ decision-making and lives are also political acts in and of themselves may resonate more with those wary of associating animals with politics in the first place. After all, it is difficult to contest that animals are social beings, given the mounds of scientific evidence demonstrating this, as the authors note and also the shared interspecies experiences with companion animals that sceptics might have. Moreover, so much of animal decision-making occurs at the level of family life, a phenomenon that countless nature documentaries, films, television shows, and children’s literature narrate for us. Those who are dismissive of Donaldson and Kymlicka’s core argument that animals operate as political actors would not have much to draw upon to support their position if, for example, everyday animal caregiving for their offspring was viewed as a political act.
A greater or perhaps equivalent attention to norm enculturation and social learning that occurs at a more intimate level, versus only a collective or group level, can also more fully introduce the feminist-generated concept of “everyday citizenship” into the co-citizenship account for animals. “Everyday citizenship” resists state centred models of citizenship that normalise the public sphere as the sphere where citizenship is performed. The alternative of viewing citizenship as enacted in the private sphere of family life has been meaningful in recognising women’s foundational contributions to society as civic acts. This was particularly vital to recognise women’s contributions to society as mothers. From a feminist perspective, this was not to value them as breeders or teachers for the next generation of the state’s citizens, a valuation that has been normative in colonial, anti-colonial, and nation-building projects the world over. Instead, everyday citizenship is a concept that validates membership in the political community simply through mothering, caregiving, and worldmaking in the domestic sphere. This understanding of citizenship has been particularly important against a background of denying women formal state citizenship and an enduring unequal household division of labour.
Animal Families and Interspecies Justice
Attending to acts of “everyday citizenship” can also be productive for how we pay attention to animal decision-making. It aligns with Donaldson and Kymlicka’s important emphasis that our politics with animals should happen at a “local scale”, as well as larger ones, and that “(a)nimal political cultures are emplaced and embodied”. As in the feminist context from which it emerged, it also helps us highlight differences among animals themselves, including gendered ones and the implications for power-sharing arrangements. It is, of course, essential that humans learn to share power with animals or cede it altogether, as Donaldson and Kymlicka argue. But it will also be important to consider the distribution of power amongst animals themselves, including within animal species, where we see female animals in mammalian species undertaking the vast majority of caregiving for children. More attention to the political life of animals within family units, whether small or extended, can also be attentive to the power distributed to animal children, as their lives might be overdetermined by their parents.
Given Donaldson and Kymlicka’s long-standing body of work attending to power differentials within human communities, including considering the rights of children, the suggestion is not that the current account would necessarily overlook these differentials. However, bringing family life and everyday citizenship more visibly into the meaning of politics could temper the possibility that positioning “the agora (as) the real heart of politics” would eclipse the civic life within the family unit.
Pressing the concept of politics in this way would likely raise the profile of animal families in general in Donaldson and Kymlicka’s account. This should be welcomed as a positive development all around given the sheer devastation to animal families human violence inflicts that the authors note in their monograph. Part of stopping this type of family destruction, especially when it comes to political change, may lie in visibilizing that animals exist in animal families (and not just as companion species in ours). Although, as mentioned above, this family socialisation and togetherness is difficult to deny for wild animals, given our media exposure, for farmed animals, the reality is concealed and obfuscated by industries that depend on animal family destruction. Situating animals as family members might hold potential to generate compassion for animals. And for the reasons canvassed above, it should align with the project of surfacing the political nature of animal lives.
Bodies and Minds: a Politics Based on Embodied Decision-making
Finally, although it is not explicitly clarified in the contribution, I would invite consideration on a different point: the specific adjective of “minded” that Donaldson and Kymlicka have selected to challenge the characterisation of animals as forever driven by instinct. From the perspective of contesting the view that animals “follow fixed biological scripts”, this choice to signal that they are in fact actively deciding how to live in community now and in the future makes a lot of sense. But there is reason to reflect whether the term “bodyminded” or something similar would be more suitable, given the relational and embodied dimensions of animals’ politics that the authors wish to stress.
Perhaps more importantly, such a term might also do more to helpfully distance the account from the contentious focus within animal studies on whether and how much to emphasise animals’ reasoning capacities. This larger concern queries whether to prioritise the capacity to reason as the basis for animals’ entitlement to coveted protections, and not something less marked by a discriminatory history in terms of rationales for social hierarchies in general. A term that more clearly signals the embodied nature of reasoning and decision-making that the authors intend can indicate simultaneously that animals are not simply driven by instinct while validating their embodied decision-making.
Ultimately, the new valence to politics that Donaldson and Kymlicka propose is the type of intellectual imaginary the present moment requires.