Heart cracked open: from personal loss to radical mourning

ABSTRACT

In this article, I consider the point that grief is politically potent because it seeks connections through a recognition of shared embodied precariousness and suffering. Bereavement, as is well-documented, can be transformative; it can bring about personal growth, but it can also create bonds with others in a similar situation, rallying communities into political action through shared grief or injustice. In a world where some lives are considered more grievable than others, as Judith Butler argues, what is far less explored is the way personal loss can unfold and expand into a politics of radical mourning for lives culturally choreographed as ‘ungrievable’. To untangle this grief experience, I draw on autobiographical material and scholarly concepts from bereavement studies and critical animal studies. I argue that the experience of witnessing human suffering and dying can sensitise the bereaved to ontological commonalities across the so-called species divide, triggering ‘anti-anthropocentric’ mourning that compels the mourner to embody the world anew and take action against injustice.

KEYWORDS:

• Bereavement
• embodied relationality
• political mourning
• suffering and injustice
• animal rights activism
• autobiography

Acknowledgments

I want to express my respect and gratitude to all the animal rights activists who are fighting for the voiceless and ‘ungrieved’. My love and gratitude to my sister, with whom I shared the intimate and difficult journey of Mum’s dying and death. And my thanks to Brad Pedersen, Patricia Morgan, kylie valentine and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Even the death of pets hovers between grievable and ungrievable. The popularity of pet cemeteries reveals a desire to commemorate beloved companion animals, yet it is not seen as socially appropriate to openly grieve the deaths of dogs or cats (DeMello, 2016; Schuurman & Redmalm, 2019). Feeling sad for circus animals, captive cetaceans, endangered species, poached wildlife, and other animals removed from our everyday lives and consumption habits is fleetingly permitted, usually on social media as a conspicuous display of our social justice credentials and care. Live animal export is another ‘legitimate’ source of distress and sadness over the suffering of animals destined for the dinner plates of ‘other’ people. To invoke Ahmed (2004, p. 192), singular stories of suffering allow grief to be extended, but they are also what allow the erasure of the broader context of everyday, routinised deaths and injustices, and thus their perpetuation.

2. The footage we show includes some of the legal practices involved in the production of meat, dairy and eggs in Australia, such as pigs suffering painful deaths in gas chambers, calves being taken from their mothers, male chicks being macerated (ground up) alive in their thousands soon after birth, castration and teeth/tail cutting of piglets and de-beaking of chickens without pain relief, and so forth. All the footage we show come from the documentary film Dominion, released in 2018. https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch.

3. https://qz.com/835076/leonard-cohens-anthem-the-story-of-the-line-there-is-a-crack-in-everything-thats-how-the-light-gets-in/.