This paper approaches care work through a multispecies and interspecies lens, and challenges readers to expand both their analysis and their ethical considerations in order to include animals. First I present a conceptual framework to help illuminate and unpack the care work animals do in the wild, in homes, and in formal workplaces. I then highlight the complex ways animals' bodies, minds, and families are involved in the production of commodities for human consumption, and the implications of such practices for animals' own forms of caregiving. Unfortunately, the fact is that for many animals, their primary experiences of care work are its repression. As a result, in the final section, I offer food for thought about the potential for care work to not only involve more empathetic embodied interactions and labour processes, but to be a springboard for expanded visions and projects of social justice which include humane jobs and recognize that "the social" is multispecies.
This study centers on equestrian show culture in Ontario, Canada, and examines how horses are entangled symbolically and materially in socially constructed hierarchies of value. After examining horse-show social relations and practices, the paper traces the connections among equestrian culture, class, and the social constructions of horses. Equestrian relations expose multiple hierarchical intersections of nature and culture within which both human-horse relations and horses are affected by class structures and identities. In equestrian culture, class affects relations within and across species, and how horses are conceptualized and used, as symbols and as living animal bodies.
Keywords•'-_ animals and class -animal work -equestrian culture -nature/labor -social construction of horses Across space and time, horses have been valorized, loved, worked, exploited, and slaughtered. Given the diversity of human-horse relations, horses have, not surprisingly, often been associated with nobility, wealth, and rule (e.g. Ritvo, 2010;Kelenka, 2009), but also with manual work and working class people's livelihoods
All forms of human labour performed with and/or for animals are gendered, although not always tidily. Here we focus on animal cruelty investigation work, a particularly complicated gendered occupational case. Drawing on survey, interview and focus group data, we focus on a regionally based workforce's gendered specifics. In keeping with feminist political economy and labour process theory, we highlight both material and experiential dimensions, examining physical and psychological risks, and rewards. We argue that the gendered and multispecies entanglements of the work and the victims coalesce in the compounding feminization of cruelty investigation labour. We raise questions about the implications of the gendered and multispecies interconnections for the women and men involved, and for the animals dependent on their work.
This article contributes to our understanding of the production of neoliberal policies and political culture by offering an anthropological analysis of women, poverty policy, and Third Way politics in Ontario, Canada. After tracing the history of neoliberal politics globally and in Ontario, I consider two examples of women's attempts to shape poverty policy drawn from ethnographic research in the legislature. The first centers on a social assistance recipient who was unexpectedly thrust into the media spotlight, thus given a chance to speak publicly about Ontario's welfare policies. The second focuses on a consciously planned challenge to policy by a coalition of feminist researchers and frontline workers. These cases illuminate the challenges facing feminists who seek to shape Third Way government policy, as discussion of gender and socioeconomic inequality is actively avoided by politicians, and women's experiences of poverty and demands for action are ignored, obfuscated or re-packaged.
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