Shared vulnerabilities: Feminist Ethics of Care and Interspecies Relationality in Anuradha Roy's Novel

Abstract

In recent feminist literary criticism, a major and expanding area of research looks into ecology, ethics and relationality. While contemporary Indian English fiction has produced a growing body of work relating to these aspects, many remain primarily anthropocentric, limiting feminist ethics of care to human and, most often, maternal contexts. Within this critical understanding, interspecies relations and the role of animals in the feminist debate remain underexplored. This study addresses this gap by examining Anuradha Roy’s fiction, The Folded Earth and The Earthspinner, to reframe feminist concerns through interspecies relations, grounded in care, vulnerability and coexistence. The paper explores the depictions of human-animal relationships in the narratives to reconceptualise feminist ethics of care as interspecies, thereby challenging the dominant anthropocentric framework and proposing a posthumanist approach to literary analysis. By avoiding the interpretation of animals as metaphors, symbols, or passive ecological backdrops in feminist studies, the paper aims to foreground their ethical presence within the narrative structure, shaping the understanding of displacement, loss and emotional precarity. Drawing from the theoretical frameworks of ecofeminism, posthumanism, and care ethics, the paper adopts a close literary analysis of narrative moments where animals emerge as witnesses, companions, and affective anchors in humanlives. This approach enables to investigate care as lived, shared, and embodied practice, rather than looking at it solely as an abstract moral principle. The paper highlights Roy’s attentiveness to animal lives, articulating an interspecies nature of care ethics that opens up alternative ethical modes of resistance to oppression and marginalisation. Such representations unsettle hierarchies, not only between humans but also between human and non-human lives, paving the way to comprehend care ethics as relational, rooted in shared vulnerability rather than dominance or control. Situating Roy’s texts within the feminist ecological discourse, this research contributes to feminist literary studies of Indian literature by extending care ethics through interspecies relationality, and demonstrating how literary narratives can expand feminist thought beyond anthropocentric limits, at the intersection of feminism, ecology and posthuman ethics.