Milking economies: Multispecies entanglements in the infant formula industry

In 2016 the Chinese infant formula company Feihe International signed a deal with the Canadian Dairy Commission (CDC) to process Canadian cows’ and goats’ milk for infant formula export to China. Our purpose in this paper is to understand how this deal – and the new Feihe formula factory located in Kingston, Canada – is underpinned by a series of multispecies entanglements across cow, human and goat mothers in China and Canada. To do so, we analyse official correspondence between the CDC, Feihe and City of Kingston; market reports for the dairy, goat and infant formula industries; and news articles about the Feihe infant formula plant. Conceptually, we develop an anti-colonial, multispecies entanglement framework to chart the violent inclusions, exclusions and typologizations that make milk and formula economies possible. We are specifically interested in how the Feihe–CDC deal (re)configures entanglements across species, nation, race, science and motherhood. To understand these relations, we heuristically imbricate two different sets of entanglements that underpin this deal: milk drinking, empire and genetic purity across race, breed and species; and motherhood, science and technology across humans, goats and cows. We use our threefold entanglement framework to better understand the violence of these imbrications and to work towards a multispecies feminist ethic in the infant formula industry.

Unwieldy Desires

Reading Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A History of My Brief Body and Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal against the backdrop of the COVID-19 crisis, I suggest that a feminist ethic of care emerges from the authors writing of queer performativity. Against a neo-liberal model of care that individuates and isolates, Belcourt and Robertson offer theories of the self as historical and multiple. Following a brief close reading of their work, I argue that the overlapping crises of the present require a politics of decision. Precisely because caring for oneself as a protective gesture against social contagion does not scale up in the ways that the uneven distribution of life chances bears down on subjugated communities, Belcourt and Robertson suggest we must decide when to abandon the narrative enclosures of the self-as-isolation and embrace the radical exposures of collectivity.

Beyond the Coronavirus: Understanding Crises of Social Reproduction

From a feminist political economy perspective, the unfolding of the coronavirus is a further reminder of the fundamental contradiction between a capitalist system that prioritises profits, and a feminist ethic that prioritises life-making or social reproduction. This article argues for a more systematic understanding of crises of social reproduction under capitalism, stressing the difference between such crises for labour and those for capital. The coronavirus crisis represents an extraordinary example of a crisis of social reproduction for capital, but this article examines crises of social reproduction for capital and labour that arise from the more ordinary workings of capitalism. The focus is on unfolding such crises in the Global South, using the case of India to illustrate the usefulness of such an analysis. KEYWORDS: social reproduction; gender; labour; political economy; India

Rhetorical Evolution in Crisis Times

In this self-investigation, a first-year writing teacher explored her rhetoric before and after the shift to remote learning, which occurred as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, during the Spring 2020 semester. Based on scholarship in situational rhetoric and feminist ethic of care, the author investigated her written communications to the second language writers in her classes. Specifically, she scrutinized the course policies and procedures outlined in the course syllabus and in her written announcements posted in the course's learning management system (LMS). Grounding her discussion in extant literature, the author explored the implications of her rhetorical evolution on her future teaching and speculated on how the evolution would guide her instructional responses to future educational crises.

The Feminist Ethic of Care: Mothering Among Sex Workers in Mumbai

The majority of sex workers are mothers. Although participation in sex work is primarily driven by the prioritization of their children’s needs over their own, mothers are stigmatized, subject to poorer health, and lack access to quality health care and social services. Interviews with 25 mothers in Mumbai, India, were analyzed using theory-driven coding to reexamine participation in sex work in context of Gilligan’s three-stage ethic of care, a feminist theory of moral reasoning. Stage 1 (decision making focused on self) themes were (a) sex work served as a means to survival and (b) exploitative and unfulfilling relationships required a focus on self. The transition from Stage 1 to 2 theme was language of selfishness versus responsibility. Stage 2 (selflessness is goodness) themes characterizing the majority of narratives were (a) sex work is justified, (b) duty to prioritize care of others, and (c) self-sacrifice to achieve aspirations for children. The transition from Stage 2 to 3 had one theme: consideration of self. While Stage 3 represents women taking holistic care of themselves and others, the data did not reflect this. Reframing mothers’ participation in sex work using the ethic of care framework may support destigmatization, decriminalization, and security of human rights.

Conclusion

The conclusion first shows that the dynamics of femonationalism should be explained while taking into account feminists’ political subjectivations, and the link between feminist whiteness and nationalism. It also explores how a feminist ethic of responsibility enables us to go beyond the critical question of the foundation of feminism—that is, who the “we” is in the name of which feminists make their claims. A feminist ethics of responsibility implies redefining the subject of feminism as relations among feminists rather than a “we women,” and defining the feminist project as a project of treating other feminists equally. Finally, the conclusion revisits the question of agency and emancipation. It argues that a feminist ethic of responsibility can help define emancipation outside of the liberal vocabulary of agency.