Abstract

Human-automobile relationships are explored to address issues related to environmentalism and material culture regarding comfortable identity narratives favoured for negating the violence and suffering associated with those relationships. Focus is placed on popular ethical positions such as hedonism, egoism, and individualism in relation to narratives presented through automobile commercials. The automobile is a technology that traverses key events in history significant for framing current ideologies such as individualism. These connections point to the powerful bonds we have with technologies; and the discrepancies between the narratives that surround these relationships and the violence that is also a part of them. Donna Haraway’s ethical perspective of “shared suffering” is paralleled with human-automobile relationships as a device for reflecting on popular comfort narratives and associated ethics that are suggested to be a way of diminishing the discomfort of empathy. Comfort narratives are contrasted with Haraway’s call for a direct view to suffering caused in relationality.