Interspecies Ethics and the Limits of Epistemic Authority in Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Karen Joy Fowler's 2013 novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves explores the intimate violence of Cold War-era state-supported research on chimpanzees and its connection to contemporary corporate and globalized research and consumption practices that make animals killable. It does so through the story arc of a woman named Rosemary and a chimpanzee named Fern who were raised together as part of a science experiment in the 1950s. Yet the central character of the story is plural: Rosemary/Fern and Fern/Rosemary. By depicting an interspecies subjectivity that reconfigures the terms of the experimental apparatus that produced them, the novel imagines the possibilities and limits of becoming-with, drawing attention to the multivocal and embodied traces of this becoming, the distributed agency of multispecies knowledge production, and the limits of speaking for the nonhuman animal.