The Study of Zoo Animals
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QUEER(ING) NATURECULTURES: THE STUDY OF ZOO ANIMALS by Marianna Szczygielska Submitted to Central European University Department of Gender Studies In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate in Comparative Gender Studies Supervisor: Professor Hadley Zaun Renkin CEU eTD Collection Budapest, Hungary 2017 Abstract My PhD project aims at exploring how the concept of “Nature” is constructed in relation to sexuality. More specifically, I analyze both popular and scientific discourses on gender variant nonhuman animals and same-sex sexual behavior amongst animals in zoological gardens. I am interested in the process by which the zoo becomes a site equipped with a set of “technologies” that, through discourses on nature and animals, shape identities and politics. I go as far back as the late eighteenth century when the zoo underwent transformation from a private menagerie to the modern enterprise of a public zoological garden, which involved scientific, economic and political goals. I look closely at evolutionary discourses emerging at that time. Following Foucault, I argue that sexuality plays a central role in scientific truth- making. With my research I also show that the category of the nonhuman animal is crucial in negotiating the boundaries of humanness and that this process necessarily happens through the mapping of sexual, gendered, racial, and classed subjectivities. I do this by focusing on contemporary cases of “queer zoo animals” that have become centers of public debates on naturalness of homosexuality and gender in the Euro- American context. Through my project I aim to reveal that we have always inhabited an interspecies world, where “nature” is never a politically innocent category and the specific implications for current thinking about sexuality and gender, and sexual politics of discourses about queer zoo animals. CEU eTD Collection ii Copyright Statement I hereby declare that this dissertation contains no materials previously accepted for any other degree in any other institution and no materials previously written and/or published by another person, except where the appropriate acknowledgement is made in the form of bibliographical reference. This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognize that its copyright rests with its author and that no quotation from the thesis and no information derived from it may be published without the author’s prior consent. Marianna Szczygielska CEU eTD Collection Table of contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................. vi List of figures .......................................................................................................................... ix Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 1 Sex Discourse in the Zoo .................................................................................................. 1 Research questions ............................................................................................................ 7 Method: On Visiting the Zoo ............................................................................................ 8 Taxonomizing and Trafficking: Theoretical Concepts ................................................... 13 Chapter Summaries ......................................................................................................... 16 PART 1. TAXIDERMIC TAXONOMIES: A GENEALOGY OF QUEER ANIMALITY IN THE ZOO ...........................................................................22 The Heterotopic Entanglements at the Zoo .................................................................... 22 Space ........................................................................................................................................ 23 Temporality .............................................................................................................................. 23 (Dis)Order ................................................................................................................................ 24 Chapter 1. Space .................................................................................................................... 27 The Aesthetics of the Collection ..................................................................................... 30 Queer Urban Ecology ..................................................................................................... 36 Architectural Associations .............................................................................................. 41 Immersed in Nature ........................................................................................................ 47 Human Zoo and the Erotics of Gazing ........................................................................... 52 Chapter 2. (Dis)Order ........................................................................................................... 62 On the Origin of Queer Species ...................................................................................... 66 Botanical Sex .................................................................................................................. 71 Sexual Taxonomies: Thinking through Deviance ........................................................... 78 Degenerate Lovers and Nonhuman Others ..................................................................... 83 What is Species? ............................................................................................................. 93 Chapter 3. Temporality ......................................................................................................... 97 Display and Its Time-Spaces ........................................................................................ 100 The New Secular Time ................................................................................................. 105 Time of Queer Beasts ................................................................................................... 109 From Hagenbeck to Hediger: the Zoo’s Conservation Turn......................................... 112 Reproductive Futurism and Animal Sex in Public ....................................................... 116 CEU eTD Collection Zoological Compulsory Heterosexuality ...................................................................... 120 Time of Extinctions ...................................................................................................... 125 Into the Wildness .......................................................................................................... 129 PART 2. TRAFFIC IN HUMANIMALS: DESIRING QUEER ANIMALS ........132 Chapter 4. Penguins and Captive Sexualities ................................................................... 134 Family Penguins ........................................................................................................... 138 iv Gay Penguins ................................................................................................................ 145 Lesbian Penguins .......................................................................................................... 151 Pink-washed Penguins .................................................................................................. 154 Hooligan Cocks ............................................................................................................ 160 Resisting Penguins ........................................................................................................ 166 Chapter 5. Hyenas and Hormones: Transpecies Encounters .......................................... 172 Museum Darkroom: First Encounter with the Hyena ................................................... 172 Hyenas and their Scientists ........................................................................................... 175 Colony Collapse ............................................................................................................ 183 Hormonal Trans-Speciations ........................................................................................ 188 Transpecies Intimacies .................................................................................................. 193 Hyena’s Laughing ......................................................................................................... 198 Chapter 6. Pandas and the Reproduction of Race and Heterosexuality in the Zoo ...... 204 Panda Pact ..................................................................................................................... 207 Cuteness Combat .......................................................................................................... 211 Untangling Reproductive Desires ................................................................................. 217 Sojourner Pandas .......................................................................................................... 224 Panda Symbolism ......................................................................................................... 238 Conclusions .........................................................................................................................