15 - Embodied morality and performed relationships

Summary

“What matters to wombats?” I still remember clearly the first few months when I began to contemplate this question, and the closely related question of “What matters to hedgehogs?” (G. Harvey 2005a). What I remember about these months of contemplation is a feeling. I felt awkward. The question felt “wrong”. This feeling of wrongness did not arise because of any logical inconsistency between the question and other ideas I have about the world. Rather, the sense of “wrongness” was more like the feeling I have when I use a word in a grammatically incorrect way. I cannot explicitly articulate many of the grammatical rules of contemporary Australian English, but I know how to write grammatically correct sentences. The question “What matters to wombats?” felt problematic for me, as an English-speaking Australian of mongrel European heritage, because habit and deeply ingrained etiquettes prohibit such questions in the same way that they proscribe incorrect grammar.

One way to change grammatical practice and the etiquette of relationships is to start doing things differently in public fora. In my PhD, for example, I use “they” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. My examiners didn't like it, but they didn't ask me to change it. In my lectures to first-year students I began including a discussion of animism, and posing the question “What matters to wombats?” It was a strange, enlightening and transformative experience.