scholarly journals Academic “Dirty Work”

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rhoda Wilkie
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Dirty Work ◽  
Mixed Species ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Personal Challenges

Human-Animal Studies (has) is an innovative field, tarnished by its politicized mixed-species subject matter. This paper considers how nonhuman animal scholars may also be tainted, for different reasons and to varying degrees, because of the academic “dirty work” they perform withinhas. As the field matures, tensions are emerging among this disparate scholarly group. These tensions are associated with the rise of Critical Animal Studies (cas), the extent to which animal scholars should engage in emancipatory-type scholarship and the appearance of the “animal as such–animal as constructed” axis withinhas. This paper draws on these intrafield tensions to form a potential framework that maps scholarly labor withinhas. As scholars begin to debate what counts as “good” and “bad” human-animal scholarship, this may engender the appearance of academic-moral havens. It is suggested that such enclaves may partly mitigate the personal challenges and professional stigma of working in a tarnished academic field.

English and Mexican Dogs: Spectres of Traumatic Pasts in Virginia Woolf’s Flush and MarÍa Luisa Puga’s Las Razones Del Lago

2020 ◽  
pp. 267-281
Author(s):  
Lourdes Parra-Lazcano
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Stray Dogs ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
The Third ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Past Experiences

This chapter offers a comparative analysis of the English Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933) and the Mexican María Luisa Puga’s Las razones del lago [The Reasons of the Lake] (1991). It aligns the spectre of the traumatic past experienced by the dog Flush with those of the dogs Novela [Novel] and Relato [Story], based on their differing social and cultural contexts. The first section introduces the notion of spectres of traumatic past in nonhuman animal studies. The second establishes a comparison between Flush as a pet and Novela and Relato as semi-stray dogs to show how in each story a traumatic past of confinement has impacted the dogs’ lives. The third section discusses how the dogs’ spectres are associated with their violent past experiences, and the chapter concludes by addressing the human-animal empathy between these dogs and the voices of the writers.

The Struggle for Compassion and Justice through Critical Animal Studies

2015 ◽  
pp. 188-207
Author(s):  
Carol Gigliotti
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Environmental Damage ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Human Animal

Critical animal studies (CAS) is a critical approach to human-animal relationships and explicitly committed to a global justice for animals, humans, and the earth. This essay argues that the global animal industrial complex, as well as the increasing global cultural push to eat meat, are inordinately causing calamitous current conditions of human-caused climate change and species extinction, as well as increasing poverty, hunger, disease, environmental damage and unprecedented animal misery and slaughter. Influenced by critical theory from the Frankfurt School and feminism, among other sources, CAS specifically critiques capitalism and globalization in its role in the domination of people, animals and the earth, but also sees the intersections of all oppression anywhere and for whatever reason as motivation for employing the powerful forces of compassion and social justice.

Bestiarium Judaicum

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Geller
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Heinrich Heine ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Close Textual Analysis ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Human Animal

Given the vast inventory of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals (pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes, etc.) disseminated for millennia to debase and bestialize Jews (the Bestiarium Judaicum), this work asks: What is at play when Jewish-identified writers employ such figures in their narratives and poems? Bringing together Jewish cultural studies (examining how Jews have negotiated Jew-Gentile difference) and critical animal studies (analyzing the functions served by asserting human-animal difference), this monograph focuses on the writings of primarily Germanophone authors, including Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Gertrud Kolmar, H. Leivick, Felix Salten, and Curt Siodmak. It ferrets out of their nonhuman-animal constructions their responses to the bestial answers upon which the Jewish and animal questions converged and by which varieties of the species “Jew” were depicted. Along with close textual analysis, it examines both personal and social contexts of each work. It explores how several writers attempted to subvert the identification of the Jew-animal by rendering indeterminable the human-animal “Great Divide” being played out on actual Jewish bodies and in Jewish-Gentile relations as well as how others endeavored to work-through identifications with those bestial figures differently: e.g., Salten’s Bambi novels posed the question of “whether a doe is sometimes just a female deer,” while Freud, in his case studies, manifestly disaggregated Jews and animals even as he, perhaps, animalized the human. This work also critically engages new-historical (M. Schmidt), postcolonial (J. Butler and J. Hanssen), and continental philosophic (G. Agamben) appropriations of the conjunction of Jew and animal.

Sexual Difference, Gender, and (Microscopic) Animals: A Commentary on Ebeling’s “Sexing the Rotifer”

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 316-322
Author(s):  
Cecilia Åsberg
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Feminist Science Studies ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Human Animal

AbstractIn this commentary, the microscopic animals of the genus Rotifera, or “rotifers,” emerge as a theory-provoking nonhuman animal. Rotifers embody otherness in ways that may intrigue scholars within both Human-Animal Studies and feminist science studies. In their encounter with rotifers, such fields of research (and others) might also engage each other in new, unexpected, and fruitful ways, as is here argued.

Inner Animalities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Daryl Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Theological Anthropology ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Gregory Of Nyssa ◽  
Constructive Work ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Wolfhart Pannenberg ◽  
Critical Conversation

Inner Animalities analyses the human-animal distinction as a discursive theme running ubiquitously through Christian theological anthropology. Arguing that historically pervasive disavowals of human animality create ineradicable contradictions within accounts of human life and also install an anti-ecological impulse at the heart of Christian theology, this project constructively imagines a theological anthropology centered upon human commonality with fellow creatures. This constructive work perceives divine grace at work in human instincts, desires, and enmeshment in quotidian relations (rather than in rationality, language, and transcendence). The broadest arc of the book’s argument is that only a thickly articulated self-understanding rooted in creaturely commonality can provide an adequate basis for responding to ongoing ecological degradation. The conjunction of Critical Animal Studies with constructive theology in this study, then, aims to generate a new approach to ecological theology. The book’s analysis places ancient Christians such as Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus along with contemporary theologians such as Karl Rahner and Wolfhart Pannenberg in critical conversation with theorists of human-animal relations from Jacques Derrida and Kelly Oliver to Valerie Plumwood and Giorgio Agamben.

Introduction: The End of the Animal – Literary and Cultural Animalities

Animalities ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Lundblad
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The One

The introduction to this volume calls for the end of “animal studies” broadly conceived as an umbrella term encompassing such diverse fields as animality studies, posthumanism, human-animal studies, critical animal studies, and species critique. While these fields attempt to move beyond the human in various ways, they often have rather different ends in mind, if not explicit conflicts with each other. Lundblad thus argues that this range of work can be characterized more productively as falling under the three general categories of human-animal studies, posthumanism, and animality studies, with a common focus on what he calls “animalities”: texts, discourses, and material relationships that construct animals, on the one hand, or humans in relation to animals, on the other hand, or both.

Displacing Drug War Violence onto Nonhuman Imaginaries

2020 ◽  
pp. 103-124
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Drug War ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Mexican State ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Drug Lord ◽  
Organized Crime Groups

This chapter broaches the limits of the human from two entwined angles, examining the intersection of necropolitical violence and nonhuman animal tropes in Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos’s 2010 novella Fiesta en la madriguera. Villalobos’s novella is an influential text from the emerging narconarrative corpus in Mexico. The novella has received criticism from prominent critics and writers such as Oswaldo Zavala and Jorge Volpi who have charged that the text inflates the myths surrounding organized crime groups that have been perpetuated by the Mexican state. Drawing on previously unexplored influences from Latin American literary history, and marshalling theories of bio- and necropolitics, postcolonialism, and critical animal studies, this chapter advances a different reading of Villalobos’s text, averring that the author mobilizes the severed head of a highly symbolic animal (the hippopotamus) to launch a nuanced deconstruction of the figure of the drug lord and to recontextualize drug war violence by calling attention to the ways it is immanent to the drive of capitalism and (biopolitical) modernity (rather than outside of these broader processes).

Über LiteraTier

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 137-140
Author(s):  
Joela Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Human Animal

Dieses Heft mit dem Titel ,,LiteraTier“ beschäftigt sich mit literarischen Tieren und Tieren in der Literatur. Ob als Protagonisten oder Statisten, Erzähler oder Symbolfiguren, Tiere jedweder Spezies finden sich überall in der literarischen Landschaft. Dort bleiben sie manchmal im Rahmen ihres gattungsspezifischen Verhaltens, aber gehen oft darüber hinaus, denn die Literatur erlaubt ihnen mehr, als die Natur ihnen zugesteht. So finden sich sprechende Hunde und hybride Mischwesen im vorliegenden Themenheft, jedoch auch ornithologische Studien und Überlegungen zur Höchstbelastung von Zugpferden. All diese Tierbezüge stammen aus deutschsprachigen Texten vom 19. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart und reflektieren eine Fülle historischer, kultureller und literarischer Entwicklungen. In Close Readings analysieren die deutsch- und englischsprachigen Beiträge dieses Hefts Mensch-Tier-Beziehungen und ihre tierischen Welten, Umwelten und Mitwelten. Dabei spielen historische, kulturelle und formelle Aspekte eine Rolle, jedoch liegt das Hauptaugenmerk auf einer textintensiven Auseinandersetzung mit den tierischen Figuren und ihrer poetologischen Darstellung im Sinne der Tierstudien, die sich in Deutschland vor allem im Umfeld des Literary and Cultural Animal Studies-Netzwerks um Roland Borgards entwickelt haben. Jedoch ist dieser Zugang ein eindeutig internationaler und interdisziplinärer, denn mit Animal Studies, Human-Animal Studies oder Critical Animal Studies beschäftigt sich im neuen Jahrtausend eine Vielzahl an Wissenschaftlern mit verschiedensten Schwerpunkten. Entsprechend kommen die chronologisch geordneten Beiträge zu diesem Heft von Germanisten in den USA, der Schweiz und Indien und haben zum Ziel, vor allem bisher weniger beachtete Tierbezüge oder neuere Texte vorzustellen und mit Fokus auf das Tier die Schranken der Nationalphilologien auch zu überschreiten.

On the Origins of Animalist Marxism

2018 ◽  
pp. 22-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Stache
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Human Animal

In human-animal studies and critical animal studies, the most influential treatment of animalist Marxism and Marxist animalism has been developed by Ted Benton on the basis of his interpretation of Karl Marx's work. This article focuses minutely on Benton's argument and Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (or Paris Manuscripts), refuting Benton's contentions point by point and forcefully challenging the idea that Marx's work was speciesist in orientation.

scholarly journals The State of Human-Animal Studies

2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margo DeMello ◽  
Kenneth Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Current Economic Crisis ◽  
Interdisciplinary Nature ◽  
College Programs ◽  
Animal Welfare Science ◽  
Human Animal

AbstractThe growth of human-animal studies (HAS) over the past twenty years can be seen in the explosion of new books, journals, conferences, organizations, college programs, listserves, and courses, both in the United States and throughout Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. We look as well at trends in the field, including the increasing popularity of animal-assisted therapy programs, the rise of new fields like transspecies psychology and critical animal studies, and the importance of animal welfare science. We also discuss the problems continuing to face the field, including the conservative culture of universities, the interdisciplinary nature of the field, the current economic crisis, and general anthropocentrism within academia. We end with a discussion of the tension between the scholarly role and the role of animal advocate, and offer some suggestions for HAS to continue to grow.

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