Dr. Sofia Savage
As a philosopher, my favorite haunt is the place of the excluded middle; I am fascinated by the liminal and the uncanny, and by all those hybrid forms of being that make monsters out of men.
I come from humble beginnings in America’s heartland, where mom-and-pop shops were eaten alive by big-box corporations — “L’Amérique profonde” is what the French call it sardonically, but there really is something existentially deep about the place, a strange temporality which, even as a child, always struck me as bittersweet. To quote from Sinclair Lewis, the nation’s first Nobel Laureate:
This is America — a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves. The town is, in our tale, called “Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.” But its Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere . . .
Most Midwesterners live and die quietly in the same place they were born. Yet, from the notes of their wayward sons, a rich literary tradition has sprung; I count myself as one such seedling, bringing salt to the ivory tower, and from the unsecured genuineness of Iowan life, I made every face a neighbor’s. Like many of my intellectual forebears, the themes of my work have been largely agrarian, focusing on the relationship between humans and farmed animals. Perhaps on account of my gender, however, and experiences of sexism, I’ve explored these ideas through a feminist lens, and, most often, an ethic of care.
Feminist care ethics saw its inception in the 1970s, and took the mother-child relationship as being in many ways morally paradigmatic; operating from the premise that the self is relationally-constituted and, for that reason, never fully formed, its ethico-political being born out in a continual process of becoming, care theory is abundantly hospitable to the relatedness of persons and sees moral responsibility, not as something freely entered into, but as emerging from accidents of fate. However, because of its emphasis on such traditionally feminine virtues as empathy, nurturing, and responsiveness, care ethics has been rejected by many feminists as a form of “slave morality.” Thus, I developed a Nietzschean bent, to show how these values could be life-affirming, depending from whence they came.
Growing up in the Corn Belt, I was no stranger to Christianity, and had often attended Catholic mass despite never being baptized. Quite the opposite, my immigrant mother was Muslim, which afforded me the unique perspective of a religious interloper. I observed my surroundings with a kind of anthropological fascination, and saw how the church brought God to life through rites and pageantry. Most especially, I was struck by the libido of it all, and the low-lying thrum of sex and blood behind every hosanna on high. These thoughts were irreverent, yes, but delectably so, and proved formative for my conscience, for in the words of one Mr.James Baldwin,“this is the truth which it is very difficult for the theater to try to deny, and when it attempts to do so the same thing happens to the theater as happens to the church: it becomes sterile and irrelevant, a blasphemy, and the true believer goes elsewhere – carrying, as it happens, the church and the theater with him, and leaving the form behind.”
Despite his religious disaffiliation, Baldwin’s upbringing left marks that no amount of apostasy could erase, so that when he quit the ministry, the gift of tongues went with him; and so, too, it was for Nietzsche, a man who, while being so contemptuous of pity, was rumored to have thrown himself over the neck of a horse being beaten by his driver. A similar scene found in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment provides an almost exact script for the Turin event, the veracity of which continues to be debated among Nietzsche scholars. Be that as it may, the story does have a ring of truth to it, for it was Nietzsche who said that Dostoevsky was the only psychologist from whom he had anything to learn.
When I told one member of my dissertation committee that, in my treatise on domestication, I was trying to square Nietzsche’s ethics with feminist care theory, she looked at me quizzically from down her hooked nose (which I had always found so charming). Strange though it may have seemed, however, I found myself in good company, from Judith Butler to Hélène Cixous to Luce Irigaray. By masking his radical philosophy in metaphors of women and gender, Nietzsche (perhaps inadvertently) handed a weapon to the very iconoclasts seeking to upend patriarchal power structures . . . Yet, I am skeptical that Nietzsche's utility to feminist thinkers was entirely accidental. Indeed, I contend that he was far more sympathetic to women's historical situation than standard critiques suggest and, therefore, continue to employ a Nietzschean lens in my work on the feminist tradition in animal ethics, to demonstrate how women in their caring capacities have uniquely embodied the very aristocratic virtues he prized.