Why Mourning for Minks Matters: Rebellious Grief as Practice of Solidarity

Abstract

The paper advocates the idea of grief as a key emotion for transformation. Following Judith Butler’s concept of grievability, it agues that a critical reflection on who (or what) is mourned reveals the normative orders of a society as well as its possible blind spots. As a particularly telling case, the mass culling of Danish minks that took place in 2020 as a preventive public health measure in the Covid-19 pandemic is examined. The response to the case sheds light on the various barriers of broadening the moral community. The paper explores some of the reasons for the practical disability to mourn for animals bred for use and argues that it is part misleading to focus on the species-line. Rather, it is a question of selective moral responsiveness which is dependent on the specific cultural context and way of life. In the last part of the paper, it is suggested that ecological grief work is a means to move from grief to empathy and solidarity and finally resistance. When others are discovered as grievable, they are acknowledged as vulnerable fellow beings which have to be morally considered. Grief, then, can be understood as a disruptive emotion which questions the current understanding of normality.