Biography
Sarah is second-year ThD student at Duke Divinity School focusing on Christian ethics and literature. Her research interests include environmental ethics, theological anthropology, speculative fiction, literary theory, and the role of emotions in moral formation. She is especially interested in how descriptions of causality, temporality, and relationship in novels shape our ability to attend and relate to others and the environment. Sarah has MDiv from Duke Divinity School and a clinical Master of Social Work from UNC Chapel Hill.
Paper Abstract
"It matters," writes Donna Haraway, "what stories we tell to tell other stories with. It matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions." Haraway's work, among others, demonstrates an important turn in Anthropocene conversations: not only to entanglement as descriptive of creaturely life, but even prior, to description itself as an ethically-charged category upon which we cannot passively rest strategies of survival. It matters what descriptions describe descriptions because the starting place of our assumptions will inform our ends. However, to describe life as entangled is not enough. In this paper, I aim to show that while "ontological relationality" (Axelle Karera) does matter – as much as it provides a more accurate description of reality than logics that pretend autonomous human subjects live against nature's described inertness – relationality does not go beyond description in its efficacy for Anthropocene ethics. Relationality, as the condition of creaturely life, is the hinge by which both actions towards communal flourishing and towards systemic exploitation takes place. This paper examines the fictional, neurological disability of "hyperempathy" in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Charlotte McConaghy's Once There Were Wolves as it is taken up in conversations about ethics. The way that hyperempathy is taken up by critics reveals a pattern of hope that entanglement might act as an ethical panacea in the Anthropocene, binding us one to another at the level of physical and neurological "empathy." Against this reading, I aim to show how entanglement, while an appropriate and helpful description of creaturely life, is not an ethical norm but rather the condition from which we must undo historically self-reifying relationships of exploitation. This paper offers first a distinction between description and normative ethics, and second, an exploration into the value of this distinction for literature's use in environmental ethics.