Embodied Violence Towards Nonhuman Animals in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey

Aware of her pupil’s plans to torture and kill a nest of birds, and with no authority to stop him based on her class, gender, and professional positions, the governess-heroine of Anne Brontë’s (2010/1847) Agnes Grey kills the nonhuman animals to keep them from needless suffering. Building on Brontë scholarship as well as animal studies understandings of violence and embodiment, this article considers expectations that Victorian sympathy will be a simplistic and pretty play on reader emotions to argue that nineteenth-century sympathetic feeling was more theoretically and ethically complex than we might imagine. Agnes Grey demonstrates how human-animal violence was thought to be an acceptable expression of middle- and upper-class masculinity, while proper women were expected to be complicit with this treatment of nonhumans. By looking at the close relationship between wanton and merciful embodied violence, the article shows how grotesque Victorian human-animal sympathy could be.

The Process of Coming and Going in this World: Conversation About Interspecies Collaboration, Domestication, Sound

The Process of Coming and Going in this World is a four-channel, site-specific installation by artist Ruth Burke. The work incorporates its audience, including nonhuman collaborators. While dependent on time and place, it has been preserved in audio recordings and photographs. In this interview between the artist and art historian Jessica Landau, they discuss the installation’s use of sound, time, and place to evoke interspecies relationships based on collaboration and co-constituted domestication. While using the installation and subsequent sound recording of it as a starting point, the conversation looks at the ways our relationships with animals on farms involve notions of time and place, companionship, and coevolution.

Activist as Symptom: Healing Trauma within a Ruptured Collective

Animal activists serve as symptom-bearers for trans-species collective trauma within Western-industrial society. Findings from literature on traumatology and nonhuman animal activism, contemporary discourse, and the voices of ten activists currently in the field suggest that many animal activists suffer some form of trauma. Activist trauma arises through overlapping, complex relational processes of intersubjective attunement with nonhuman animals and embeddedness within a human social context that disavows nonhuman suffering. In understanding activist trauma as a symptom of a dysfunctional system, I depathologize activist suffering and view activists as integral members of a whole society that seeks healing.

“Is it gonna be fun?”: Lolabelle, Dog Pianists, and Musical Réussite

This article examines historical dog pianists and the pianistic training of Lolabelle the rat terrier to explore a musical question beyond structure and intention: what might musical encounters between human and nonhuman animals make possible? Reviewers of Laurie Anderson’s film Heart of a Dog, in which some of Lolabelle’s performances appear, rarely center either Lolabelle or her pianism and frequently distance themselves from indicating belief in the musicality of the activity. The tone of this reporting is consistent with that of other Western reporting on dog pianists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While piano-playing dogs have historically strengthened the human-animal divide by reinforcing dogs’ status as never-human, the frames for anthropomorphic acts are what strengthen this divide rather than something inherent in the anthropomorphic activity itself.

Emerging with Oddkin: Interdisciplinarity in the Animal Turn

The Animals and Society Institute facilitates an annual interdisciplinary meeting of emerging scholars from around the world, encouraging attendees to interrogate what it means to be a scholar, with an emphasis on animal studies within our respective disciplines. In that vein, we assess what it means to be an emerging animal-studies scholar in three interconnected but distinct academic disciplines: anthropology, sociology, and social work. We elaborate on three dominant themes: (1) the place of animals or the “animal turn”; (2) our subjectivity and how we find unorthodox networks or what Donna Haraway refers to as our “oddkin”; (3) and our inherent roles as interdisciplinary scholars and the liminal positions we occupy, as we address complex social problems like climate change. By reflecting on how we have encountered barriers and overly strict binaries collectively and as individuals, we can begin to deconstruct these obstacles and create opportunities.

Factors Affecting Human-Directed Aggression Resulting in Dog Bites: Contextual Aspects of the Biting Incidents

Using a web-based questionnaire with 29 close- and open-ended questions about 400 self-reported dog-biting incidents in Slovenia, this research investigated the contexts of dog bites, focusing on characteristics of the dogs and the descriptions of the situations to identify the main risk factors for the occurrence of dog bites. Even though it has been suggested that most dog bites occur during initially non-aggressive interactions with the dog (e.g., during petting, playing), in our study we discerned a wide variety of contexts, including those in which the person did not intend to interact with the dog. Most victims reported unprovoked bites during fast movements near the dog, while coming into close proximity, and during incidents without a reason. These incidents more likely occurred in public than private places and were associated with purebred dogs with a history of aggression.