Gender and Sexuality in Critical Animal Studies

Abstract

This work traverses an impressive terrain as it illuminates crucial links between the aims and methods of feminist/queer scholarship and animal advocacy. In her introduction, editor Amber E. George frames the collection as an attempt to retain the “moral values that support dignity, respect, and equity” without the “patriarchal and species-based oppression that keeps so many beings trapped in a perpetual cycle of abuse” (p. 3). Compiling essays that address literature, film, science and technology studies, pedagogy, ethology, animal reproduction, and the extremely fraught questions that accompany discussions of bestiality, this anthology is an exciting contribution to the growing body of work that sees the struggle for animal justice as an integral component of all liberatory movements.The collection excels when demonstrating how Western cultural presumptions regarding gender and sexuality are uncritically written onto the bodies of animals, often resulting in a kind of double oppression: the animals in question are culturally and materially denied the subjectivity and autonomy typically reserved for humans yet are classified or judged according to local norms of human gender and sexuality. Samantha Orsulak's investigation into honeybees is especially fascinating in this regard. Orsulak documents how the honeybee serves as a kind of palimpsest for human anxieties regarding the rewriting of gender roles throughout history—at times the queen is a “leader,” at others she is “lazy”; at times the workers are “emasculated,” at others, they are “providers” (pp. 102–109). As social and political concerns regarding gender and sexuality mutate, so too does the description of the honeybee. Similarly, Annika Hugosson's contribution details how the female hyena's external genitalia—an elongated, retractable clitoris capable of covering the vagina and which resembles the male hyena's penis (p. 92)—is viewed as an oddity, at best, or an abomination, at worst. Because her genitalia appear errant from the point of view of anthropocentric sexual dimorphism, and because the female hyena exercises some agency in her genitalia's visibility, she is depicted as “duplicitous” (p. 82), “conniving” (p. 83), “immoral” (p. 87). These descriptions ascribe intentional states typically reserved for beings supposed to possess a supreme command of rationality (i.e., humans), but the female hyena is denied the kind of subjectivity and autonomy that usually accompany such rational capacities. Thus, the female hyena is held within a kind of double bind: denied subjectivity in her own right but judged according to anthropocentric sexual normativity.These essays also productively engage broad questions regarding Western notions of subjectivity. In this regard, Anastassiya Andrianova's essay on bestiality, and a certain incoherence that accompanies discussions of animal consent, is worth special mention. As “property,” animals are typically denied subjective characteristics, and yet, while humans are allowed to artificially inseminate animals, force copulation, and kill and consume animals for pleasure, there is something about human-animal sexual interaction that seems almost intuitively verboten (pp. 181–182). Typically, secular prohibitions against such activity rely on an argument about an animal's inability to consent to such engagements (pp. 185–189), but their consent is all but worthless in the above-mentioned procedures. Andrianova minimally concludes that an honest and thoughtful analysis of prohibitions against bestiality “reveals inconsistencies in human thinking” that are the result of logocentrism (p. 196). I take Andrianova to mean that prioritizing consent on only some occasions demonstrates an inconsistency in thought, and this inconsistency is premised upon the belief that affirmative consent is understandable only in certain articulate beings.This conclusion seems plausible but, perhaps, incomplete. Andrianova quietly illustrates a subtle, often unarticulated but vital component of Western subjectivity. The general assumption holds that subjectivity is an all-or-nothing affair; one is either entitled to the rights and responsibilities indexed to subjecthood or they are not. But this assumption gives short shrift to the complex constellations that have produced partial subjects throughout history. The histories of colonialism and enslavement in the United States are testament to this capaciousness of subjectivity. Such practices treated humans as partial subjects insofar as the colonized and enslaved are simultaneously denied agency but also can be held liable before the law. A similar logic is employed in the case of animals and consent: when animals are caged, impregnated, vivisected, or hunted, their consent is of no consequence, but if anything sexual develops between a human and a nonhuman, consent is key. Thus, it may be reasonable to follow Andrianova where she sees “inconsistency” and potentially absurdity; however, rather than simple “inconsistency,” one may recognize this vacillation regarding consent as a feature of the structure of Western subjectivity—the creation of partial subjects whose interests and agency are always conditional. Consent, of course, is only one objection to bestiality, not least of which the bodily harm done to the animals involved.This volume educates readers on fascinating and significant histories of particular species and stages productive, critical engagements with the main tenets of Western modernity. There are, however, missed opportunities for engagement. In the interest of space, I will discuss one.There is little discussion of what it would mean to apply concepts like “heterosexism” and “queerness” to animal life. The essays in this volume—correctly and reasonably—critique the variegated ways human sexual norms are weaponized against animals, but a tension arises when authors approvingly use “queer,” “genderqueer,” or “LGBTQIA” to describe nonhuman animals. Does applying these concepts to animal life not unintentionally extend the anthropocentric frame that the anthology seeks to dismantle?In one instance, Amber E. George discusses the case of “Benjy ‘the gay bull’ from Ireland who was earmarked to be sent to slaughter because he refused to impregnate a farmer's cow” (p. 3). George includes Benjy within the LGBTQIA community and describes him as living in “a place where being queer can kill [him]” (p. 2). Thankfully, Benjy was saved by an international network of queer activists and moved to a sanctuary (p. 3).While it seems absolutely correct to recognize that the subordination of queer humans can have an impact on how some people may think or talk about “same-sex” activity in nonhuman animals, and, further, recognize that many animals who exhibit these behaviors are routinely killed for failing to reproduce, one may remain skeptical that a “gay bull” can reasonably be called “queer” or a victim of “homophobic” violence. Alternatively, it could be argued that the “gay bull” is doubly subjected to violent, coercive anthropocentrism: First, at a material level, by those who would eviscerate him for failing to reproduce—recognizing the bull as only a commodity that is not reproducing capital in the way it was intended. But second, at a conceptual level, by those who would tend to naturalize and extend human conceptions of sexuality (i.e., queerness), iterations of sexuality that emerged as part of particular political and historical processes. In sum, does reducing queerness to a set of sexual activities that many (likely a majority of) species partake in evacuate the particular affective and political dimensions of the term? Jess Ison comes closest to engaging this question when she concludes that “‘queer identity’ is a political term” as opposed to a biological one and that “extending queerness” might have detrimental impacts on queer humans who continue to face discrimination (pp. 215–216). Staging a more intentional discussion of this debate would have been a welcome addition to this first-of-its-kind anthology.