Care, Toxics and Being Prey: I Want To Be Good Food for Others

ABSTRACT

In grappling for ways to respond to existence within permanently polluted worlds, this article asks: what does it mean to be good food for others? Where do all the chemicals and heavy metals go? What are the distributed effects? How might we hack legacies of toxic inheritance? What alternative practices and values are needed? This article explores the ways in which artists complicate death/food relations and nourishment through their express acknowledgement of chemically burdened bodies. In doing so, it draws on and extends Val Plumwood’s analytic of viewing humans as ‘being prey’ in the context of a feminist ethics of care and what Maria Puig de la Bellacasa refers to as ‘more caring affective ecologies’. Ultimately, it suggests that speculating on becoming prey and wanting to be good food for others – whether this is for a crocodile, fish, mushrooms or microbes in the soil – can propose new ways of configuring our relationships with human and more-than-human others in terms of toxicity and care.

KEYWORDS:

• Care
• prey
• toxic embodiment
• pollution
• feminist environmental humanities
• art

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank both Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer Mae Hamilton for the care they have put into composting feminist environmental humanities and the fertile soil this has created. Particular thanks for inviting me to take part in the symposium ‘Feminist, Queer and Anticolonial Propositions for Hacking the Anthropocene III: what do we WANT?’ that cultivated this article and for their astute and care-full comments on various iterations of this article. Thanks also to other readers involved in the symposium who provided feedback on an early draft. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who each offered clear and concise feedback to strengthen the argument. That said, I take full responsibility for the article and any shortcomings.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Susanne Pratt is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Transdisciplinary Innovation at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). Her creative work has been internationally exhibited in various forms, including digital storytelling, convergent media installations, site-specific sound works, urban design proposals and participatory events. As a researcher, educator, feminist, artist and techno-scientific muser, she explores how creative practice can foster social and environmental responsibility, with an emphasis on improving environmental health and collective flourishing.

ORCID

Susanne Pratt http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4148-5337

Notes

1 See also Derrida (1991) on ‘eating well’, which brings together discussions of eating in a moral and material sense, and questions boundaries between humans and other animals to explore nourishing means of relating.

2 For feminist scholarship on milk and toxics across different species see Gaard (2013).

3 Astrida Neimanis, one of the editors of the special issue on Feminist Environmental Humanities, relayed critiques circulating at the Unsettling Ecological Poetics symposium (October 2019, University of Sydney).

Additional information

Funding

The symposium, ‘Feminist, Queer and Anticolonial Propositions for Hacking the Anthropocene III: what do we WANT?’ funded by the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSSHARC) supported the initial stages of this article.