Species Panic: Interspecies Erotics in Post-1900 American Literature
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Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 8-23-2018 10:00 AM Species Panic: Interspecies Erotics in Post-1900 American Literature David Huebert The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Schuster, Joshua The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in English A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Doctor of Philosophy © David Huebert 2018 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Huebert, David, "Species Panic: Interspecies Erotics in Post-1900 American Literature" (2018). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 5646. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/5646 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract This project elaborates a concept of “species panic,” a severe and often violently-charged reaction to the notion that one’s privileged species status as a human being is under threat. In this project’s post-1900 American literary archive, species panic is often provoked by nonhuman eros, which provokes and threatens the fantasy of human exceptionalism. Theoretically, this project yokes animal studies and posthumanism (Donna Haraway, Dominic Pettman, Kathy Rudy) with queer theory and critical race studies (Mel Y. Chen, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Alexander Weheliye) as its central driving forces. This theoretical backdrop informs my reading of American authors Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Philip K. Dick, Toni Morrison, Linda Hogan, and Joy Harjo. Species Panic is divided into five chapters, each of which organizes around a particular species of nonhuman animal: dogs, bulls, androids, cows, and horses. While this project’s first three chapters deal with the yoked constructions of masculinity and (straight white male) humanity, the fourth and fifth chapter dramatize the unique and different experiences of female authors depicting human-animal erotic relations. What I add to the analysis of animal studies thinkers such as Donna Haraway is a sustained focus on interspecies erotics as a cultural driving force, manifested in the panicked literary case studies I explore. Cumulatively, the texts I analyze show an American literature still threatened by Darwin’s radical intervention in the history of science. In its conclusions, Species Panic reveals a threatened human clinging to the husk of species exceptionalism as the closet of animality looms loudly in the backdrop. What my research reveals is that interspecies eros is a central and under-analyzed component of thinking around nonhuman animals. I i do not, however, suggest that rejuvenated attention to interspecies and nonhuman eros will rehabilitate human-nonhuman relations. Instead, I simply suggest that interspecies eros—in all its prickly complexity—must become a central factor in how we think about nonhuman animals. The erotic, this study insists, is a central component of how we interact with, conceive, and construct nonhuman life. But that eros is not an intrinsic source of redemption; interspecies erotics remains complex, multifaceted, and mired in panic. Keywords: American literature; Animal studies; posthumanism; ecocriticism; queer theory; the novel; poetics; Jack London; Ernest Hemingway; Philip K. Dick; Toni Morrison; Linda Hogan; Joy Harjo. ii Acknowledgements My first and biggest thank you goes to my supervisor, Dr. Joshua Schuster. Josh is a dazzling thinker and an energizing intellectual mentor. I couldn’t have asked for a more supportive, generous guide through the process of thinking and writing this project. To my parents and first teachers, Ron Huebert and Elizabeth Edwards: thank you for the crucial advice and unwavering support you’ve offered throughout my entire intellectual life, including throughout the completion of this PhD. I’d also like to another early teacher: my sister, Rachel Huebert, along with her lovely family. To my family: Natasha and Rose—thanks for listening, humouring, inspiring, laughing, wrestling for covers, rejuvenating and sustaining me with daily love. Parts of Chapter Three and Chapter Five of this project were published as articles in Transgender Studies Quarterly and International Studies in Literature and Environment, respectively. Thanks to the editors, staff, and volunteers. No dissertation is an island, and this one’s just one humble node of an archipelago. So thanks to all my colleagues, peers, and advisers. Thanks, finally, I’d like to thank my committee members. I’ve known Dr. Pauline Wakeham and Dr. Matthew Rowlinson since my first term at Western, and they’ve both been thoughtful readers, tactful advisers, and generally kind human beings through all stages of this degree. University examiner Dr. Servanne Woodward and External Examiner Dr. Molly Wallace have both offered robust and generous readings of this dissertation, and I am deeply grateful to both for their sensitive and generative feedback. iii Table of Contents Abstract………………………………………………………………………………..….ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………iv Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………....v Introduction: Species of Panic……………………………………………………………1 Part I: Manimalities, Animaladies………………………………………...…………….47 Chapter One: Homo-Canine Exceptionalism on Jack London’s Great White Male Frontier……………………………………………………………………….….48 Chapter Two: Anal-Animal Eroticism in Hemingway’s Corrida………………………75 Chapter Three: Human Continuums, Trans Andys, and Cyberotic Triangles in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?....................................................................114 Part Two: The Anxious Interface………………………………………………………143 Chapter Four: Lactic Panic and the Erotics of Dairy in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.……144 Chapter Five: The Equine Erotopoetics of Linda Hogan and Joy Harjo………………199 Conclusion: Climate Climax, Planet Panic………....…………………………...…….230 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………237 Curriculum Vitae………………………………………………………………….……267 iv 1 Introduction: Species of Panic Nonhuman eros is a cross-cultural imaginative force that is central to human psychic and sexual self-understanding. At least as far back as the cave paintings in Chauvet, France (31,000 BP),1 animals have throbbed hotly through the human imaginary.2 Interspecies eroticism has also been a longstanding driver of human literary and symbolic poesis. If, as John Berger claims, “the first metaphor was animal” (253), that first animal metaphor was surely encoded with eros. Sex and desire have long been species-transgressive urges, siren songs beckoning from the far side of the human. Just as love, in Dominic Pettman’s words, “makes us both more and less than human” (Creaturely Love xi), so too have sex and desire long been species-transgressive. In addition to serving as actual sex and relationship partners (bestiality and zoophilia will be discussed in detail shortly), animals have historically provided a way for many cultures to understand human sexuality. Ancient Greek myth is rife with sexy sirens and centaurs and lecherous fauns, riddled with swans and Ledas, bulls and Europas. The menagerie of Greek myth already tells us that nonhuman eros is both violent and enticing, fearful and compelling. But this is not a uniquely Western phenomenon. According to Hani Miletski, interspecies erotics is important to Hindu tradition and “portrayals of human-animal sexual contacts frequently appear in temple sculptures all over India” (Understanding 10). Likewise, “Tantrism often portrays man 1 In their 1996 book Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave, Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel Deschamps, and Christian Hillaire explain that “statistical estimates” based on radiocarbon dating of the Chauvet paintings identify a “timespan of 1300 years, centered on 31,000 years ago” (122). Almost twice as old as the famous Lascaux caves, this discovery was enormously surprising when it was made in 1993. 2 In this study I generally use the term “animal” as a shorthand for “nonhuman animal.” I tend to use the clunkier “nonhuman animal” only when it is necessary for highly technical distinctions. 2 as a rabbit, bull, or horse, and the woman as a doe, or mare, or female elephant” (Miletski, Understanding 10). The Ancient Chinese story of the silkworm horse describes a girl who marries a stallion before turning into a silkworm after her father skins the horse (Birrell 199). A cautionary tale, this story simultaneously indulges the fantasy of and prohibits the act of interspecies coupling—this doubleness turns out to be endemic to the species panic genre. The Indigenous traditions of Turtle Island are also rife with interspecies eros. Take, for example, the Tlingit story of “The Woman Who Married the Bear” or the Skidi Pawnee story of a man who marries and reproduces with a “deer-maiden” (Snyder 171; Dorsey 280).3 One need not dig too deep through the weeds of contemporary popular culture to locate the pulse and throb of nonhuman eros: think King Kong, Grizzly Man, Twilight, The Little Mermaid. Still not satisfied? If you dare, behold the thousands and thousands of examples at your fingertips in the great collective sexual unconscious of websites like Pornhub and Xvideos. There you’ll find vast menageries of toon porn, tentacle porn, monster porn, creature porn, robot porn— enough interspecies erotics