Natalie Corinne Hansen

Michigan Feminist Studies 15

“Rethinking Cross-Species Relations: Feminist Interventions”

Abstract

This paper argues for the importance of engaging the problem of species difference within feminist theory and practice. Arguing that Western humanist definitions of the liberal subject rely on differentially valenced deployments of species categories that influence other critical categories of difference, this paper proposes a critical dialogue between feminism and animal studies, exploring the ways species difference intersects with and informs hegemonic social, political, and economic ideologies and practices. Feminist/animal studies collaborations also offer a pathway for feminist interventions into ecocritical considerations of contemporary local and global environmental concerns, where the stakes are high for non- normative subjects, nonhuman animals, and non-animal entities. Offering a variety of approaches to conceptualizing a differential ethics focused on interdependence and responsibility, feminist/animal studies collaborations have the potential to draw ethical thinking and practice beyond rearticulations of liberal humanism and the primacy of the humanist subject in law, politics, and social relations.

Rethinking Cross-Species Relations: Feminist Interventions

Artist Deborah Butterfield captures both the immediacy and other-world- liness of encounter in her equine sculptures, figuratively and in their concrete presences: “[H]ere is this being that is so large and powerful, and yet somehow so potentially gentle and interested in communicating. 16 “Rethinking Cross-Species Relations” Michigan Feminist Studies 17

It’s like having someone from another planet wanting to get to know you” (139). Butterfield’s comment, and the way her work translates horses representationally, aligns a number of themes relevant to feminist considerations of cross-species relations. The materials that Butterfield uses in constructing her oversized sculptures of horses range from driftwood and wood scavenged from her Montana ranch to scrap metal and salvaged machine parts. In their imposing size, the sculptures represent the physical space and volume that horses’ bodies occupy, thus emphasizing the potential danger horses pose to the comparatively slight and fragile human body. Simultaneously, in the stillness of their sculptural forms, the horses invite human viewers to engage through the invitation of their body postures. The extension of a muzzle into space seems to request an interaction. The supine forms of a group of mares invites the viewer to join the herd. The horses, in Butterfield’s intention, are transformative: “I feel like I want you to wear them like a costume, some ceremonial costume in which you are given the opportunity to let go of the way you are now. To step into something else and try it on and look from the inside out at another way of looking at things” (Butterfield 136). Butterfield’s sculptures, while emphasizing horses’ essential and radical difference from humans, depict the domestication of human-horse relations and, significantly, the way horses enter our imagina- tions, interacting with culturally specific histories and fantasies of horse- human relations.

What do the stories humans tell about horses and the ways that horses appear in human lives reveal about what it means to be human and what it means to be horse? Regarding signification, horses generally work “as a site of ideological production” (Dorré 9). As in any consideration of human representations of nonhuman animals, horses’ signifying functions intersect with the living, individual horse’s active influence on the signification process and are shaped by how and where horses appear in individual and cultural experiences. Evaluating practices and ideologies that shape representations of and interactions with nonhuman animals is one of the central projects of contemporary work in animal studies and is not without its own paradoxes, including the paradox of recognizing and imagining Michigan Feminist Studies 17 being other-than-human, of thinking outside the boundaries of species identity. Critical examination of the construction and negotiation of species difference has important ideological implications for feminist theory and practice, particularly in challenging liberal humanist assumptions of what it means to be human. While feminisms have challenged differential access to power and privilege among humans, animal studies asks a further question: from what source does human privilege arise? As with other categories of difference, species difference is constructed to benefit specific actors: Homo sapiens. Left unexamined, assumptions of species privilege justify many levels of inequality, from the dehumanization of “enemy combatants” to globalized predations on natural resources.

Defining who qualifies as human and how the human differs from the nonhuman is fundamental to western intellectual and experiential practices, and categorical separations between human and nonhuman permeate our thinking and language and shape our individual and cultural behaviors. In the words of Jacques Derrida, the animal “institutes what is proper to man, the relation to itself of a humanity that is above all careful to guard, and jealous of, what is proper to it” (“The Animal That Therefore I Am” 274). The humanist legacy, with its proper subject “man,” has engaged various ways of safe-guarding man’s humanity, including constructing “a range of others to the entity ‘man’”: “These ‘others’ were either subject to the privatized enclosures of domestication (women in the home, children in nurseries, the mad in hospitals, dogs in their kennels, sheep in enclosed pastures) or banished to the edge of civilization (noble savages)” (Schiesari 57). Engaging the question of what is “human” is thus fundamental to exposing and disentangling the relations of power that hinge on this concept: If species difference, the concept of the animal, is constitutive of the human, and if his or her access to the moral law and the paternal function is determined by this binary opposition, the ethical questions that follow cannot be merely critically philo- sophical. They will entail an intervention at the level of the fundamental fantasy of being human. (Seshadri-Crooks 112) 18 “Rethinking Cross-Species Relations” Michigan Feminist Studies 19

This intervention must begin with the recognition that “human” and “animal” are no more “natural” categories than are categories such as “woman” or “man,” “black” or “white,” each of which has been subject to de-essentializing analysis by feminist and antiracist theorists. Human and animal are constructs, marked by temporal and spatial conditions that require stable categories in order to accomplish specific goals and to justify unequal distributions of resources.

As Diana Fuss argues, the human is “a sign whose history has rarely been examined, [it] is a linguistic, cultural, and sociopolitical construct of comparatively recent date” (Fuss 1). Fuss emphasizes that the word “human” has a history, and only in the eighteenth century did it arrive at what it continues to mean for us today: “a metaphysical predicate to ‘man’” (Fuss 1). She argues that theorists should be working “not to broaden the category of the human to include previously abjected and excluded others, but to engage in a more radical interrogation of the process by which the human comes to mean in the production of cultural difference” (Fuss 2; italics in original).

Addressing the categorical disjunctions of human versus nonhuman and the ethical implications of these disjunctions, Cary Wolfe asks, “what does it mean when the aspiration of human freedom, extended to all, regardless of race or class or gender, has as its material condition of possibility absolute control over the lives of nonhuman others?” (7). His point is that the system, the structure, the institutions of humanism itself—all that underlies concepts such as justice, equality, liberation, identity, subjectivity, and freedom—rest on flawed foundational assumptions: [A]s long as this humanist and speciesist structure of subjectiv- ization remains intact, and as long as it is institutionally taken for granted that it is all right to systematically exploit and kill nonhuman animals simply because of their species, then the humanist discourse of species will always be available for use by some humans against other humans as well, to countenance violence against the social other of whatever species—or gender, or race, or class, or sexual difference. (Wolfe 8) Michigan Feminist Studies 19

Here, Wolfe identifies the vital connections that exist between various forms of critical inquiry and their implications for theorists and activists committed to social justice. What animal studies can offer feminism and other critical practices are re-conceptualizations of human relationships with other-than-human beings along with the radical potential for reshaping ideologies and practices, re-thinking difference in terms of interdependence and responsibility.

Among the many shifts necessary in reassessing relations of power and disempowerment between humans and nonhumans is the need to recognize the multiplicity and specificity that is contained within the generalized category “animal.” Derrida explains the importance of recognizing the multiplicity and singularity of animal lives as follows: I would like to have the plural of animals heard in the singular. There is no animal in the general singular, separated from man by a single indivisible limit. We have to envisage the existence of “living creatures” whose plurality cannot be assembled within the single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity. (Derrida “The Animal That Therefore I Am” 415) Attending to the specificity of individual species categories, differentiating between “the animal” and the diversity of animals, is a first step in desta- bilizing the universalizing categories of “animal” and “human,” powerfully revealing the ideological work of the human-animal binary: “The instability [within the human-animal binary] arises not just because of species diversity, but because its obvious supposed unimportance makes us realize that these terms are, to put it bluntly, metaphysical categories requiring all sorts of police work, and not simply useful conceptual tools, biological general- izations, etc.” (Wood 16).

There is a moral imperative to examining and imagining lives and beings other than our human selves, regardless of the inherent limits in our abilities to do so. Acknowledging the limits of our always partial perspective, and accounting for how such limits affect our understanding of and interactions with nonhuman beings, is one step toward challenging an acceptance of animals as “raw material or mere life adapted to purely human purposes” 20 “Rethinking Cross-Species Relations” Michigan Feminist Studies 21

(LaCapra 159). Contemporary work in animal studies addresses how exclusions of animals as subjects and agents are integral to the constitution of the modern subject. Reassessing this subject’s autonomy and insular coherence, animal studies argues for an understanding of subjective co-becoming in which “[h]uman and nonhuman, all entities take shape in encounters, in practices; and the actors and partners in encounters are not all human, to say the least” (Haraway “Cat’s Cradle” 64). Encounters with nonhuman subjectivities underscore a fundamental obligation to honor the claims of others as these claims exceed anthropocentric moral and legal frameworks. Feminist/animal studies alliances aim, most powerfully, toward imagining ways of thinking and living that reorient human actions away from “the worst kinds of violence, that is, the purely instrumental, industrial, chemico-genetic treatment of living beings” (Derrida “Violence” 73).

COMPANION SPECIES

As Linda Vance points out, “Tradition is not found in obscure corners. Tradition is the commonplace, the banal, what ordinary people know and recognize” (122). Humanist traditions that have defined human-animal relations in the Global North for the past four to five centuries reflect patriarchal ideologies of human dominion. Part of changing the stories we tell about our relationships to others is allowing alternative narratives to be heard, and part of making new traditions is making new practices. Both acts – changing stories and practices – require thinking that breaks with convention: “We can look at prevailing definitions of reality and ask the essential questions: who benefits from the definition? Who loses?” (Vance 125). Humanism is an ownership model of conservatorship that rests on the humanist subject and is articulated in humanist discourses of “rights and obligations” that are inextricably linked to both “patriarchy and capitalism” (Vance 131).

In arguing for the importance of intersecting interests between animal studies and feminist theories and practices, I draw on Vance’s model of Michigan Feminist Studies 21 ecofeminism as “understanding, interpreting, describing, and envisioning a past, a present, and a future, all with an intentional consciousness of the ways in which the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature are intertwined” (126). Work in animal studies has emphasized an understanding of interactions between humans, nonhuman beings, and the environment as dynamic and mutually constitutive. In this way, animal studies is in dialogue with ecocriticism as the latter evolves in the twenty-first century to respond to local and global environmental degradations caused or exac- erbated by human activities. Ecofeminism (and related work in feminist science studies) draws attention to the ideological assumptions implicit in discourses about animals (human and nonhuman) and about nature (along with its alter-ego, culture), discourses that shape and reflect human practices: “The ideology of ecofeminism demands opposition to domination in all its forms, and a rejection of the notion that any part of the world, human or nonhuman, exists for the use and pleasure of any other part” (Vance 133-34). It no longer suffices to think about oppressions as uniquely suffered by humans.

How do we balance human needs with the needs of the other-than-human actors with whom we coexist and on whom we depend? Certainly, contextual- izing, situating, and recognizing interdependencies are strategies to get us started. Critical questions to ask include, “Is some party to this relationship disadvantaged vis-à-vis the other(s)? If so, can that disadvantage be embraced within a larger vision of nonviolence, diversity, cooperation, and sustainability? If not, how can the relationship be changed? And, finally, what is the relationship between this and other forms of dominance?” (Vance 134).

We need to recognize who the silent/silenced partners are in our relationships, what their silence signifies, and how we might make their voices, and their silences, heard. Narratives that represent the intersecting lives of humans, animals, and the environment in terms of “diversity, interdependence, sustainability, cooperation, and renewal” (Vance 134) point to the work being done and the work left to do. 22 “Rethinking Cross-Species Relations” Michigan Feminist Studies 23

Feminisms in their plural incarnations arrive in the twenty-first century arguing for intersectional understandings of oppressions: Feminism is no longer required to look only inward, at the conditions and effects of subjectivity, desire, pleasure, at the interpersonal networks and oppressive impingements of institutions on socially subordinated groups; it is now also urgent that it direct its gaze outward, not only at the social and historical conditions of patriarchy, but also to the larger material and natural forces at play in the social, the historical, and the sexual. (Grosz 183) The work of redefining our relationships to other humans and to all that is other-than-human includes the kind of reexamination of the subject that has occurred within feminist, queer, antiracist, and postcolonial studies. What does animal studies have to add? Rosi Braidotti suggests that challenges to humanist ontological and epistemological frameworks need to address the default of human-centered understandings, regardless of whether they are expressed by using the animal to define the human or by grafting the human onto the animal, neither of which change the terms of discourse nor the ideologies that inform practices. Change requires mov- ing away from anthropomorphic (and anthropocentric) understandings of other-than-human animals in order to recognize their specificities apart from and autonomous with the human. Animal studies challenges humanist ideologies and practices by pushing against these barriers: We need to move beyond anthropocentrism altogether, rather than to extend humanism to the formerly exploited others. Humanism in this context is only the prelude to possessive individualism and the extension of individual rights to non-human actors. As such it also leads to commercialization and commodification. (Braidotti 107) What other organizations of thinking and doing might we seek in acknowledging animals as subjects? Is moral and ethical responsibility confined to the rule of law and its pivot around the subject? Michigan Feminist Studies 23

Shifting our ideas about how we relate to nonhuman animals requires differentiating between engagements that perpetuate ontologies and epistemologies that rely on the humanist subject and those that challenge this subject. From a broad understanding of humanist philosophy, Derrida identifies our postmodern challenge as the need to relinquish the idea of the singular subject: “The singularity of the ‘who’ [the subject] is not the individuality of a thing that would be identical to itself, it is not an atom. It is a singularity that dislocates or divides itself in gathering itself together to answer to the other, whose call somehow precedes its own identification with itself” (“Eating Well” 261). The conventional humanist relation to nonhuman animals fails to account for other-than-human beings because this relation works only in one direction, humanizing humans by dehumanizing animals. This distinction fails by denying the mutual transformation that the relationship itself instigates: “The point is to see the inter-relation human/animal as constitutive of the identity of each. It is therefore a relation, a transformative or symbiotic relationship that hybrid- izes, shifts and alters the ‘nature’ of each one” (Braidotti 107-08). This relation is not necessarily transparent; it is more likely to be opaque and to involve “conditions of essential uncertainty and, in a sense, incoherence” (Smith “Animal Relatives” 14). The challenge here is to imagine new organizations of relations that delink subjectivity from the humanist subject and from requirements such as human consciousness, language, and theories of mind, all of which effectively reflect the humanity of the human subject by using the mirror of the animal other.

Concepts of morality and ethics are tied to the figure of the humanist subject and, as such, are inherently limited in their application to individuals who exist outside the paradigm of contractual rights. How can morality and ethics be conceived of if not based on the legal subject? Derrida’s sug- gestion of “maximum respect” (“Violence” 73) involves “responsibility” (“Eating Well” 273). Donna Haraway links “respect” to the act of recognition (Haraway When Species Meet 19). Cary Wolfe suggests an “ethics of compassion” (29). Julie Ann Smith suggests “performative ethics” (183, 192), wherein relationships are based neither on equality nor 24 “Rethinking Cross-Species Relations” Michigan Feminist Studies 25 paternalism, focusing on “performances rather than behavior,” which are “transactional” (194) and thus always negotiable, subject to revision (196). In their introduction to The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams describe “the feminist care ethic,” which “has rejected abstract, rule-based principles in favor of situational, contextual ethics, allowing for a narrative understanding of the particulars of a situation or an issue” (2). Such an ethics acknowledges the contingency of both situational relations and narrativization, the con- tingent and contextual stories we tell in making sense of our experiences. As Haraway clarifies, the stories we tell, the ways we figure our relations with others, enact material relations: “Figures are not representations or didactic illustrations, but rather material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings coshape one another” (Haraway When Species Meet 4). We can find models for ethical practices in narratives of cross-species relations that articulate human-animal “co-constitutions,” where “partners do not precede the meeting” (Haraway When Species Meet 4), where bodies and selves make sense only in the dynamics of interaction with others. Asking “Whom and what do we touch” (Haraway When Species Meet 5) when we touch an other, animate or inanimate, acknowledges the interactional subjectivity of the other (the “who”) and the work of engaging this other, both conceptually and relationally (the “what”).

The kind of shift in ethical principles that intersectional thinking requires is exemplified in Alice Walker’s essay “Am I Blue?”. In this story, spe- ciesism, sexism, and racism come together in the moment when species meet, the “contact zone,” which allows for the emergence of an ethic of compassion through the practice of attention. Recalling childhood experiences with horses, Walker describes her encounter with a horse named Blue as partly a recovery of memories from her childhood: “I had forgotten the depth of feeling one could see in horses’ eyes” (4). While attending to their neighborly relations, as Blue requests delivery of apples from across the fence-line, Walker recognizes the feeling communicated in Blue’s eyes as loneliness: “Blue was horribly lonely and bored” (5). The surprise Walker acknowledges is not only about the creaturely isolation Michigan Feminist Studies 25

Blue is subject to but is also surprise about recognizing, by way of remembering, the accessibility and profundity of feelings shared or sharable across species differences: “I was shocked that I had forgotten that human animals and nonhuman animals can communicate quite well” (5). Her practice of attention is to notice this other being to whom she has no formal obligation, to notice what he communicates in his expression and in his behaviors.

In his presence, Walker asks, in her own way, what she is touching when she touches, literally or imaginatively, this horse. She interrogates the various histories that intersect in their immediate proximity to one another. She asks specifically how her interest in Blue’s individual experience aligns with her own experience as an African-American woman and her knowledge of racism and the exploitation of women. Walker compares the dismissal of sentimental bonds between children and caregivers with a similar dismissal of attentional and nurturing bonds between children and nonhuman animals. Thinking about Blue triggers thoughts “about slavery: about white children, who were raised by black people, who knew their first all-accepting love from black women, and then, when they were twelve or so, were told they must ‘forget’ the deep levels of communication between themselves and ‘mammy’” (5). Privileged adulthood involves growing up and out of affective relations across boundaries of difference.

Walker’s story about Blue ends with her realization that the animal, in this case, the sentient and sensate being that is Blue, becomes, in the adult mind, an abstraction, an “image” or figure that signifies only within an all-too-human frame. In the separation maintained by the abstraction of signification, animal bodies exist for humans as repositories of meaning divorced from the reality of their actual experiences as individuals, opening them up to exploitation: “we are used to drinking milk from containers showing ‘contented’ cows, whose real lives we want to hear nothing about, eating eggs and drumsticks from ‘happy’ hens, munching hamburgers advertised by bulls of integrity who seem to command their fate” (Walker 8). These narratives of commodification, with their figures of domesticity and compliance to human desires, erase nonhuman subjectivity and specificity. 26 “Rethinking Cross-Species Relations” Michigan Feminist Studies 27

Walker realizes that such depersonalization in the name of exploitation is analogous to the dehumanization and exploitation of her slave ancestors, for whom “freedom and justice” for all seemed not to apply (Walker 8). This realization dissolves the opacity of cultural mythologies that veil and uphold human power-over nonhuman others. The vital conclusion to this story demonstrates how Walker’s realization turns into active resistance: “As we talked of freedom and justice one day for all, we sat down to steaks. I am eating misery, I thought, as I took the first bite. And spit it out” (Walker 8).

Like feminism, animal studies is a political engagement that examines the ideological roots that inform symbolic and empirical human relations to nonhuman beings. Shifting away from discourses about rights, which center on the singularity of commodified individualism for human actors, toward the relationality implied in responsibility, respect, compassion, and attention offers a different conceptualization of relations between human and other-than-human beings. Donna Haraway gestures to this other type of relationality in her concept of “companion species,” drawing out the various meanings of species to clarify what is involved in attending to others in all the various intimacies of shared living and dying: To hold in regard, to respond, to look back reciprocally, to notice, to pay attention, to have courteous regard for, to esteem: all of that is tied to polite greeting, to constituting the polis, where and when species meet. To knot companion and species together in encounter, in regard and respect, is to enter the world of becoming with, where who and what are is precisely what is at stake. (Haraway When Species Meet 19; italics in original) This recognition of the other in her/his specificity describes the quality of responsibility involved in human-animal relationalities. Recognizing such responsibility also involves risk: “to bring to life the other and to bring to life one’s self in front of him/her, constitutes the space of ‘becoming with,’ creating the conditions of intersubjectivity expressed as the relation within which two beings make the wager, always risky, of comprehending Michigan Feminist Studies 27 each other” (Despret & Porcher 71). The risk is of a recognition that, while bringing two beings together, also involves giving up some aspect of individual autonomy and self-determination.

Conceptualizing relationships as mutual and interdependent generates different models for human-animal interaction, as well as for how animals (human and nonhuman) exist within and engage the non-animal environment: The ideal political model does not consist of the society of humans among themselves, in spite of the fact that it is this latter that is the target, nor in that of animals among themselves, as in systems of natural morality, but rather in the relation that the animal him/ herself, actively, accepts to create with the human. Thinking difference, in this way, is thinking how one is different ‘with’ and not, as is usually done thinking difference, against. (Despret & Porcher 79-80) The idea of difference as a being “with” instead of a being “against” is critical to reorienting human-animal relations as it displaces the opposi- tionality of human versus animal, redefining “difference” as relational in the sense of mutually constituted being and becoming. The emphasis on “being-with” (Despret “The Body” 128-31) shifts the category of “being,” existentially, from one that belongs exclusively to humans to one that is constructed within relationships, be these between humans, between humans and animals, or between these various actors and their environments.

KINSHIPS

Together, feminism, in its various formats, and animal studies can pro- ductively unsettle conventionally drawn boundaries between human and animal bodies, which will in turn offer alternative paradigms for engaging in social and political relations with human and nonhuman actors. Counter- readings of human-animal domestic relations help us imagine alternative perspectives from which to view old stories, while suggesting more pro- 28 “Rethinking Cross-Species Relations” Michigan Feminist Studies 29 ductive models for evaluating such relations. Re-imagining kinships, be these between human and animal or between human and human, can offer new directions for developing social, political, and economic structures that account for animal agency and subjectivity apart from conventional humanist paradigms of the individual, the family, and the state: If we understand kinship as a set of practices that institutes relationships of various kinds which negotiate the reproduction of life and the demands of death, then kinship practices will be those that emerge to address fundamental forms of human dependency, which may include birth, child-rearing, relations of emotional dependency and support, generational ties, illness, dying, and death (to name a few). (Butler “Kinship”15) Human-nonhuman relations are readily incorporated into Butler’s list of mutual dependencies, particularly those of “emotional dependency and support” in our relationships with nonhuman companions and those relationships of death and dying that are indivisible aspects of food production and of other practices that support our day to day existence. This inclusive model of kinship formulates relationality as “a kind of doing, one that does not reflect a prior structure but which can only be understood as an enacted practice” (Butler “Kinship” 34). Such an “enacted practice” requires that we shift our understanding of what constitutes the “human,” looking for “the human where we do not expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense. We would have to interrogate the emergence and vanishing of the human at the limits of what we can know, what we can hear, what we can see, what we can sense” (Butler Precarious 151).

This radical challenge has many consequences for how we interact with all that is other-than-human, including at structural, economic, and institutional levels. I take hope in Derrida’s guardedly optimistic reflection about the potential concrete outcomes of this radical reassessment of the human: “A large-scale disorganization-reorganization of the human earth is under way. One can expect the best and the worst from it, of course. … On the scale of the centuries to come, I believe there will be veritable Michigan Feminist Studies 29 mutations in our experience of animality and in our social bond with other animals” (“Violence” 71). Such reorganization must necessarily include legislation to minimize animal exploitation and suffering, enforcing a cultural recognition of nonhuman sentience as a fundamental criterion for justice. In our social and kin relations, we, as individuals, can work to become more attentive, better practitioners of “being-with,” in our encounters with our other-than-human compatriots, resisting culturally predetermined prejudices and their inherent inequalities of power and privilege. Feminism offers important tools for shaping such realignments with its long history of identifying and renegotiating ideological and lived inequalities. Alliances between feminist theories and practices and critical work in animal studies can move us toward recognition of the negotiations, interdependencies, and shared agential participations that are required to live “with” others, human and otherwise.

Works Cited

Braidotti, Rosi. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2006. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. NY: Verso, 2006. ---. “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13.1 (2002): 14-44. Butterfield, Deborah. Deborah Butterfield, L.A. Louver Gallery. Venice, CA: L.A. Louver Gallery, 2009. Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Critical Inquiry 28.2 (2002): 369-419. ---. “Violence against Animals.” For What Tomorrow ... A Dialogue. Ed. Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco. Stanford, CA: Stanford U P, 2004. 62-76. 30 “Rethinking Cross-Species Relations” Michigan Feminist Studies 31

---. “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject.” Points... Interviews, 1974-1994. Ed. Elisabeth Weber. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1995. 255-87. Despret, Vinciane. “The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-Zoo- Genesis.” Body & Society 10.2-3 (2004): 11-134. Despret, Vinciane and Jocelyne Porcher. Être Bête. Arles, France: Actes Sud, 2007. Dorre, Gina M. Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2006. Donovan, Josephine and Carol Adams, ed. The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader. New York: Colombia U P, 2007. Fuss, Diana, ed. Human, All Too Human. NY: Routledge, 1996. Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham: Duke U P, 2005. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. ---. “A Game of Cat’s Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies.” Configurations 2.1 (1994): 59-71. ---. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. NY: Routledge, 1991. Johnson, Barbara. The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U P, 1998. LaCapra, Dominick. History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence. Ithaca/London: Cornell U P, 2009. Nussbaum, Martha C. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. Schiesari, Juliana. “The Face of Domestication: Physiognomy, Gender Politics, and Humanism’s Others.” Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period. Ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker. London: Routledge, 1994. 55-70. Michigan Feminist Studies 31

Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana. “Being Human: Bestiality, Anthropology, and Law.” UMBR(a) Special Issue “Ignorance of the Law.” 1 (2003): 97-114. Smith, Julie Ann. “Beyond Dominance and Affection: Living with Rabbits in Post-Humanist Households.” Society and Animals 11(2). Web. 5 May 2009. Vance, Linda. “Ecofeminism and the Politics of Reality.” Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Ed. Greta Gaard. Philadelphia: Temple U P, 1993. 118-45. Walker, Alice. “Am I Blue?” Living by the Word. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1988. 3-8. Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Wood, David. “Comment Ne Pas Manger -- Deconstruction and Humanism.” Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life. Ed. Peter H. Steeves. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999. 15-35.

Notes For examples of Butterfield’s work see http://www.lalouver.com/html/butterfield_09.html There is debate among practitioners about the term “animal studies” versus “human-animal studies” (among other proposals). Kenneth Joel Shapiro of the Animals and Society Institute argues that the former is too easily confused with scientific work in animal science. Also see Lundblad, who distinguishes between animal studies and animality studies. Other terms proposed are “nonhuman animal,” which includes the human as a type of animal, and “other-than human,” which tries to displace the human as the central term. The trouble with any use of the term “animal” in an all- inclusive way is the concomitant reduction of the incredible diversity of nonhuman lives to a single term, a move that carries with it the power of exclusion insofar as the human is singular in its non-animality. 32 “Rethinking Cross-Species Relations” Michigan Feminist Studies 33

“Women” is another fraught category with a history of exclusions. Queer studies, LGBT studies, antiracist studies, postcolonial studies, and disability studies have demonstrated there are many types of bodies and ways of living in and with them. I would argue that ecofeminism is the important practice of applying feminist understandings of difference, including of sex, sexuality, and gender, to environmental activism and its academic counterpart, ecocriticism. The translations that appear in this section are my own. The original French reads: “faire exister l’autre et se faire exister soi-même face à lui, constituer un espace de ‘devenir avec’, créer les conditions de l’intersubjectivité entendue comme la relation dans laquelle deux êtres font le pari, toujours risqué, de se comprendre” (Despret & Porcher 71). “Le modèle politique idéal ne se constitue ni dans la société des hommes entre eux, quoi que ce soit celle-ci qui est visée, ni dans celle des animaux entre eux, comme dans les schèmes des morales naturelles, mais bien dans la relation que l’animal a lui-même, activement, accepté de créer avec l’humain. Penser la différence, dans ce cadre, c’est penser comment on est different ‘avec’ et, non, comme le veut usuellement une pensée de la différence, contre” (Despret & Porcher 79-80). This passage quote continues: “…But, without offering praise for some elementary vegetarianism, one can recall that the consumption of meat has never been a biological necessity. One eats meat not simply because one needs protein—and protein can be found elsewhere. In the consumption of meat, just as in the death penalty, in fact, there is a sacrificial structure, and therefore a ‘cultural’ phenomenon linked to archaic structures that persist and that must be analyzed. No doubt we will never stop eating meat—or, as I suggested a moment ago, some equivalent, a substitute for some carnate thing. But perhaps qualitative conditions will be changed, together with quantity, the evaluation of quantity, as well as the general organization of the field of food and nourishment….” (Derrida “Violence” 71).