ISSN 1904-6022 www.otherness.dk/journal Volume 8 · Number 1 · March 2021 Welcoming the interdisciplinary study of otherness and alterity, Otherness: Essays and Studies is an open-access, full-text, and peer-reviewed e-journal under the auspices of the Centre for Studies in Otherness. The journal publishes new scholarship primarily within the humanities and social sciences. ISSUE EDITOR Dr. Matthias Stephan Aarhus University, Denmark GENERAL EDITOR Dr. Matthias Stephan Aarhus University, Denmark ASSOCIATE EDITORS Dr. Maria Beville Coordinator, Centre for Studies in Otherness Susan Yi Sencindiver, PhD Aarhus University, Denmark © 2021 Otherness: Essays and Studies ISSN 1904-6022 Further information: www.otherness.dk/journal/ Otherness: Essays and Studies is an open-access, non-profit journal. All work associated with the journal by its editors, editorial assistants, editorial board, and referees is voluntary and without salary. The journal does not require any author fees nor payment for its publications. Volume 8 · Number 1 · March 2021 CONTENTS Introduction: Challenging Norms and Representing Diversity 1 Matthias Stephan 1 Where “Beasts’ Sprits Wail”: 13 Rosenberg, Sassoon, and the Emergence of Animal Philosophy J.A. Bernstein 2 The Collapse of Responsibility: 37 Staging Fragmented Communities in State-of-the-Nation Novels Alice Borrego 3 The Dance of Bones: 61 Tomioka Taeko’s Stage of Reprobates Veruska Cantelli 4 Queer Kinship: 77 “Exposed to the Other as a Skin is Exposed to What Wounds It” Belkis González 5 “All art is quite useless”: 105 The Gothic Doubling of the Portrait in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray Marshall Lewis Johnson 6 Unmasking the Übermensch: 129 The Evolution of Nietzsche’s Overman from David Bowie to Westworld Siobhan Lyons 7 The Sex That Didn’t Matter: 155 Structural Violence in the Giuliani Administration’s Redistricting of New York City Rachel Narozniak 8 Organization, seduction and the othered senses: 175 The erotic ear and the poisonous tongue Eva Pallesen 9 Deformed, Neanderthal, and Thoroughly Alien: 201 Exploitation of the Other in Asimov’s “Ugly Little Boy” Sara Schotland Abstracts 227 iii Volume 8 · Number 1 · March 2021 CONTRIBUTORS J. A. Bernstein is Director of Graduate Studies in English and an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. His academic articles have appeared or are forthcoming in The Conradian, Conrad and Nature, Conrad and Ethics, and Western American Literature, and won the Harkness Young Conrad Scholar Award from the Joseph Conrad Society of America. He is also the author of four published or forthcoming volumes of creative writing, including a novel, Rachel’s Tomb (New Issues, 2019), which won the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Award Series Prize and the Hackney Prize. He completed his doctorate at the University of Southern California and would like to thank Joseph A. Boone for his mentoring and help with this article. Alice Borrego is a PhD candidate at Paul Valéry University, Montpellier 3 under the supervision of Professor Christine Reynier. She is a former student of the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. Her research focuses on the correlation between the aesthetics of fragmentation and the notion of responsibility in British state-of-the-nation novels of the 20th and 21st centuries. She is interested in the relationship between form and ethics, as well as in the representations of the British body politic in contemporary fiction. Veruska Cantelli is an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Champlain College. Previously she was an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Interdisciplinary Studies at the Center for Global Communication Strategies at the University of Tokyo. Her area of focus is Feminist Studies, her most recent works explores Japanese feminist writers in relation to food and performativity and feminist responses to contemporary conflicts. Her translation and edited volume of Diane di Prima’s collection of poetry Revolutionary Letters is forthcoming with Le Lettere, Florence and her co-edited volume Insurgent Feminisms will be published by The Mantle in 2021. She studied modern and contemporary dance at the Mary Anthony Dance Studio and at the Trisha Brown Studio in New York and she has performed with the Human Kinetics Movement Arts. She leans on clay to explore wabi-sabi aesthetics. Belkis González is Assistant Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College of the City University of New York, where she teaches composition and Latinx literature. She has also taught at New York University and the University of South Florida. She holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from New York iv University. Her research focuses on theories of gender and sexuality, notions of kinship, queer relationality, and representations of undocumented immigrants. She is currently at work on a book chapter on constructions of family in accounts of detention at the US–Mexico border. Marshall Lewis Johnson is interested in Irish and British fiction, particularly how experimental narration reflects a critique of western power structures. His current project, The Smooth, the Striated, and Ulysses, is a post-structuralist examination of the shifting narrative styles in Ulysses. Johnson is interested in how Joyce’s work can speak to the current crisis of the rise of the Alt-Right in the West, contextualized as his work is in a moment in Irish history when a new nation was being created through a variety of forms of nationalism that were, in many cases, xenophobic. Work from that project has appeared in Critical Theory and the Humanities in the Age of the Alt-Right, from Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. This piece on Dorian Gray is from research begun with his Master’s thesis. Siobhan Lyons is a scholar in media studies based in Sydney, Australia, where she was awarded her PhD in 2017. Her books include Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and Death and the Machine: Intersections of Mortality and Robotics (Palgrave Pivot, 2018). Her work has also appeared in Understanding Nietzsche, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2019), Westworld and Philosophy (Wiley, 2018), and Philosophical Approaches to the Devil (Routledge, 2016), among other books. Rachel Narozniak, after graduating with her Bachelor’s degree in English literature with English Honors from Rutgers University in 2017, went on to pursue her Master’s degree in English at The George Washington University. Narozniak’s literary theory work has previously been published in California State University, Long Beach’s Watermark academic journal. Her research interests include Victorian literature, Queer Theory, and Women’s and Gender Studies. Eva Pallesen has a background as MSc in Political Science and a PhD from Copenhagen Business School. She works as a Docent in Center of Management and Experience Design at University College Absalon, Denmark. Her research focuses on the intersection of entrepreneurship and public sector management. She works within the field of organization and management theory as well as with multidisciplinary approaches drawing on art, music and literature. Pallesen has published in international journals such as Organization Studies, Technology Innovation Management Review and Methodological Innovations. Sara Schotland, Ph.D., J.D teaches Disability Studies at Georgetown University and Justice Issues in Dystopian Literature at American University. She earned her v B.A. at Harvard College, her law degree at Georgetown University Law Center, and her PhD. in Literature at University of Maryland College Park. Dr. Schotland's doctoral dissertation addressed Disability in Dystopian Literature. Several of Dr. Schotland's publications deal with individuals with disabilities or anomalous bodies, such as writings on Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, Ray Bradbury 's "The Dwarf," and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. She has also addressed outsider fiction in her scholarship, including articles addressing the legal and cultural position of immigrants as reflected in American literature. vi Introduction: Challenging Norms and Representing Diversity by Matthias Stephan We all find ourselves in trying times these days, in the middle of a global pandemic, and with a changing political landscape that rather than drawing us together in the promise of globalization, has resulted in an ever more polarized society. Even with a common threat, the imagined promise of a coming together often found in utopian and dystopian discourses alike, has not materialized. Rather, we are faced with increasing diversity, nationalism, and global divides between regions that have and those that do not. Nations have divided over religion and access to increasingly scarce resources, the Global North and South debate the efficacy of providing vaccines and to whom they should be first distributed. The world has debated individual responsibility and freedom, often rejecting or even Othering those with whom they disagree. This increasing tension has only exacerbated an already fertile landscape for considering the concept of Otherness, the discourses that contribute to its construction, and the processes by which people are Othered, use and even weaponize Otherness, and the consequences of those actions. Otherness: Essays and Studies Volume 8 · Number 1 · March 2021 © The Author 2021. All rights reserved Otherness: Essays and Studies 8.1 As political tensions run high, and violence erupts in hotspots across the globe – from the farmer’s strikes in India, to