Grinding the Souls: Politics of Interspecies Pity and the Labor of Care in a South Korean Animal Shelter

Abstract

This essay shows how the labor of interspecies care at Animal Rescue in Action (ARA), an animal shelter in South Korea, invites two divergent interpretations. On the one hand, this labor embodies gendered exploitation by being vulnerable to the co-optation of the moralizing politics of “interspecies pity.” On the other hand, it becomes a site for intra-and inter-species entanglements, that are irreducible to the logic of exploitation. The activities of ARA become not only sustainable but also bound by the politics of interspecies pity, which translates the labor of care into selfless affection and grace, thus reproducing gendered exploitation. At the same time, however, everyday entanglements in ARA shelters still create affective excesses that are not entirely subsumed by the politics of pity and generate new forms of care and sociality. Overall, I suggest seeing not only the co-constitutiveness of social inequalities and interspecies relations but also the possibility of new, simultaneously open terrains.