MISFITS, POWER, AND HISTORY: RETHINKING ABILITY THROUGH AN ANIMAL LENS

Abstract

In this article, we construct a critical history of “ability” by focusing on the specific case study of dark-dwelling animals and the ways in which they have been understood over the course of modernity. Such creatures were frequently the subjects of assumptions and judgments about what they could and could not do. Dark places have historically been imagined as extreme environments and as home to equally strange beings. We argue that discourse relating to dark-dwellers—from bats and hedgehogs to deep-sea creatures—reveals that ability, in the animal context, relates to several connected ideas and phenomena. Not least, these include ideas around specialization, adaptation and adaptability, the concentrated interrogation of “special” sensory organs and neurological pathways, and the idealized coherence between a body and its wider environment. We also show that the idea of ability became increasingly inseparable from notions of vulnerability, resilience, and care especially in the context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century environmental change. The concept of ability, then, was a shifting constellation of many different ideas, and our study underlines how big ideas such as ability are far from homogenous in character but instead are complex, multilayered, and of their time. Reconceptualizing these kinds of ideas about “ability,” particularly as they manifested across diverse contexts, is crucial for understanding how people understood themselves and other beings across time and space. Such an approach to the history of ability matters. It points to the urgency of interrogating the roots of a seemingly everyday idea, one that appears commonplace and apparently unproblematic but that has material consequences for all living beings, human and animal, across a wide range of environments.