American Quarterly Speciesracesex PDF

This issue is provided by
the Johns Hopkins University Press Journals Division

and powered by Project MUSE®
Terms and Conditions of Use
Thank you for purchasing this Electronic J-Issue from the Journals Division of the Johns
Hopkins University Press. We ask that you respect the rights of the copyright holder by
adhering to the following usage guidelines:
This issue is for your personal, noncommercial use only. Individual articles from this J-
Issue may be printed and stored on you personal computer.
You may not redistribute, resell, or license any part of the issue.
You may not post any part of the issue on any web site without the written permission of
the copyright holder.
You may not alter or transform the content in any manner that would violate the rights of
the copyright holder.
Sharing of personal account information, logins, and passwords is not permitted.

Editor’s Note | v
Editor’s Note
“S
pecies/Race/Sex” is a special issue that taps into many intertwining
theoretical and political trajectories in current American studies
scholarship. The fields of animal studies and critical animal studies
are profoundly interdisciplinary, and we have witnessed in the past decade a
burgeoning and innovative body of scholarship that focuses on issues that cross
the human/non-human animal divide. More aptly put, this volume addresses
the co-constitutive formation of species of being in and through race, sex,
and other social configurations. Yet, this special issue of AQ is not simply an
important addition to the growing body of work. As the editors, Claire Jean
Kim and Carla Freccero, point out in their introduction, this is a collection of
work that disrupts, intervenes, and contributes to a truly intersectional under-
standing of (critical) animal studies. Because of the insistent intersectionalities,
tensions, and contradictions between and within species, race, and sex, this
volume represents a particular American studies take on these fields, and will
work as a guide for emerging American studies scholarship in this area.
As the editors point out in the introduction, the discipline or field of “Ani-
mal Studies” is already one that resists definition; indeed, the co-editors of this
volume approach the field in different ways, with their different personal and
intellectual histories, methodological stakes, and investments. Scholarship that
focuses on non-human animals can take a variety of shapes; it can lean toward
activism, empiricism, interpretative analysis, comparative analysis, and so on.
The editors don’t always agree with each other regarding the definitions of the
field, but these disagreements, provocatively captured in the conversational-
style introduction, depict what is so exciting and important about the deep
interrelationships between species/race/sex. It is the refusal of a definition the
resistance to categorization that is at the heart of this special issue and at the
heart of an American studies engagement with animal studies.
In the introduction to this volume, Kim identifies the entanglements be-
tween and within species/race/sex as important “crossings” which shape our
ways of being. These crossings, as she points out, “shake things up, test limits,
expose fault lines, illuminate contradictions.” One thing is clear, however, as
Kim points out, the animal, and her/his relationship to race and sex, is excit-
ing to think with. As someone who’s new to the field of animal studies, I find
©2013 The American Studies Association

vi | American Quarterly
that the authors of this volume raise fascinating questions: How do human
relationships with non-human animals articulate both empire and the national-
isms formulated against it? How do non-human animals aid in the vision and
revision of the (neo)liberal state?
The essays in this volume each approach the intersectionalities of species/
race/sex in unique ways, but they all share the co-editors’ commitment to his-
torical specificity; they retain political and ethical investments; they recognize
overlaps in vectors of oppression. As Freccero states in the introduction, this
volume is an exercise in thinking about social change, and in this way it is
about: “the degree to which some [humans] have been harmed by their asso-
ciation with non-human species, and the ways thinking species alongside sex,
gender, race and ability can effect analytical, social and political changes not
only for the benefit of humans, but also for those non-humans most severely
affected by the speciesisms that hierarchize suffering and injury.” In other
words, species, and speciesisms, intimately organize our everyday lives. Our
scholarly contributions must be attentive to these hierarchies of being if we
wish to affect social and political discourse.
One of the great strengths of this special issue is the optimism embodied in
the work, or what Freccero might describe as the “pragmatic-utopian” character
of the essays. The essays are sharply analytical, but they also move beyond cri-
tique and engage in a project of imagination, the imagination of an alternative
way of being and knowing. This process of imagining is also reflected in the
refusal by the editors and authors to claim a righteous and universal politics
or code of ethics in their analytical approaches to species/race/sex. Rather, the
essays each insist, and to varying extents, on ambivalence; that is, the work
of each author reframes many of our assumptions around categories of differ-
ence and reconfigures our conceptions of hierarchy. We have been tasked, as
American studies scholars, to think through the intersections of species, race
and sex and to put this thinking into practice. As Kim asks, “How to make
the leap from explicating coconstitution on the pages of an academic journal
to challenging actually existing forms of domination in the real world?” This,
of course, is always the challenge for scholars, and this special issue offers a
guidance on how to think through these difficult questions.
This issue contains eleven essays by scholars from a range of disciplines,
including anthropology, law, media studies, ecology, literature, and more. It
also includes an artist and a fiction writer. These contributions further extend
our engagement in the project of imagination. I believe this is the first time
AQ has published a work of fiction, and I am thrilled that Karen Joy Fowler’s
“Us” opens this special issue.
Editor’s Note | vii
As with every issue, this special issue wouldn’t be possible without the tire-
less energies of the AQ managing editor, Jih-Fei Cheng. He has greatly assisted
not only in the timely production of the volume but also in gathering media
materials for the print edition and accompanying webpage for special issues,
“Beyond the Page” (found on the AQ website, americanquarterly.org). This will
be the last special issue that Jih-Fei will help produce, as his term as managing
editor comes to a close. I can’t thank him enough for his steady guidance over
the past three years; this journal has benefited tremendously from his impressive
organizational skills, intellectual contributions, and compassion.
This volume will also be the first special issue for the incoming managing
editor, Nic John Ramos. He has already hit the ground running (quite literally)
and I look forward to the year ahead with him.
We were fortunate to have the help of editorial assistants provided by the
American Studies master’s program at the California State University, Fullerton.
We are thankful to Michael Steiner and Erica Ball who supplied us with two
volunteer interns each school term. In the last year, they included Danielle Bar-
raza, Jamal A. Batts, Monica Duboski, Sophia Islas, Justyna Kuzniar, Joseph B.
Meyer, Tatiana Pedroza, Casey Ratto, Diann Rozsa, and George Gregory Rozsa.
Paula Dragosh, the copy editor for AQ, remained patient and attentive
throughout, and never lost her good cheer. Our gratitude also goes to Kris-
topher Zgorski and Brian Shea at the Johns Hopkins University Press for the
time and care they have invested in the production of the journal issue and
the management of our website.
We are thankful to the USC Dornsife College of Arts and Sciences, the
Department of American Studies and Ethnicity, and the Annenberg School
for Communication and Journalism for their support.
Sarah Banet-Weiser
Editor
Introduction: A Dialogue | 461
Introduction: A Dialogue
Claire Jean Kim and Carla Freccero
W
e open this special issue with a dialogue of sorts between us about
the entanglements of species/race/sex. We thought this format
might help convey some of the contingency and uncertainty of our
thinking on these issues, as well as the contingent and open-ended nature of
these entanglements themselves. We write this in the spirit of opening things
up rather than neatly pinning them down. Our exchanges are organized
around a series of questions we developed together, after which we introduce
the essays in this volume.
Where do you situate yourself with regard to disciplines/fields and how has this
positioning helped/complicated your work on species/race/sex?
Claire Jean Kim: My home disciplines are political science and ethnic studies,
which share a relentless focus on power, whatever their other incommensura-
bilities. Species/race/sex are three salient taxonomies of power whose crossings
and entanglements profoundly shape our ways of being in the world. Such
crossings are revelatory: they shake things up, test limits, expose fault lines, il-
luminate contradictions. They are not the exclusive provenance of any particular
discipline, so taking them seriously means maintaining an ongoing openness
to myriad epistemologies, ways of reading and seeing, and types of knowledge.
The animal—and his or her relation to race and sex—is not only good but
exciting to think with. My own work in this area is avidly interdisciplinary,
combining critical analysis of discourse, culture, and meaning with attention
to the dynamics of organized movements, political institutions, and the law,
and drawing on literatures in ethnic studies, political science, law, sociology,
anthropology, women’s studies, (critical) animal studies, American studies,
geography, cultural studies, environmental ethics, and more. My forthcoming
book, Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cambridge University
Press, 2014), which looks at impassioned disputes over how racially marginal-
ized groups (Chinese immigrants, Native Americans, and African Americans)
use animals in their practices, is situated at the crossroads of ethnic studies,

462 | American Quarterly
(critical) animal studies, environmental studies, and American studies. The

contributors to this special issue of American Quarterly hail from numerous
fields, including literature, law, American studies, film and media studies, sci-
ence studies, women’s studies, disability studies, and environmental studies.
Of course, disciplines and fields, as taxonomies in their own right, can be as
constraining and distorting as they are productive. One race scholar asked me
“Are you still working on that animal volume?” when this special issue is about
species and race and sex and the relationship among the three. The parsing of
human inquiry into “studies” is not unrelated to the parsing of various human
and animal bodies into categories of being. It is this classificatory, rationalist,
systematizing drive that the scholars in this special issue, each in his or her
own way, set out to scrutinize and disrupt.
Carla Freccero: My disciplinary training is literary and historical, although I

have never comfortably inhabited any of the disciplines I nevertheless call mine.
I also do cultural studies, which includes being able to analyze and critique US
cultural formations around gender, sex, class, race (and now species) in popular
and mass-mediated representations. I don’t have any a priori ties to American
studies, except by way of the critique of American exceptionalism, which I’ve
had the pleasure to participate in with my colleagues in literature at UC Santa
Cruz, some of whom are in fact in American studies. As for animal studies
(I am always uncomfortable with the nomenclature around this loosely orga-
nized field that includes activism in the interests of animal freedom, our own
and those of us not human; animal “rights”; animal research; posthumanism;
ethology; biology; anthropology; and cultural critique), I’ve been thinking of
myself as “doing animal theory,” that is, theorizing as an animal about animal
being. I also have an activist sort of inspiration when it comes to species; not
only do I wish for more freedom and less suffering for all the creatures whose
experience of aliveness involves both freedom and suffering, but I also align
myself with efforts to try to think healing for the planet and conscious evolu-
tion for humans (one of these efforts is, for me, importantly represented by
Marxism). It’s been important for me in working on this special issue to work
with a social scientist, albeit an atypical one, I think, because I tend to venture
into poiesis, sometimes at the expense of practical strategies (or are they tactics?)
of how to analyze toward the goal of (human social) change, and the social-
scientific dimension of this work brings me back, over and over, to thinking
about what matters, how it matters, and what can be done to ameliorate the
lethal nexus of species, sex, gender, race, and ability as it operates in some of
our cultures and histories, and not just ours. At the same time, as I was work-
ing on this special issue, I continued to experience a longing for joyfulness

and for new ways to think productively, and so I was especially delighted to
find so many essays that combined powerful and acerbic critique with sober,
quasi- or semi-utopian—can we call it pragmatic-utopian?—and, at times,
downright hopeful alternative imaginings of what it might mean that species,
sex, gender, race, and abilities are intimately interwoven, both materially and
semiotically, in their beings and their meanings. My deliberate disciplinary
homelessness (except for my disciplinary dedication to language’s ability to
say—in exactly that way—what has not been said and to do so intelligibly
and beautifully, which marks me deeply as a literary scholar) has been helpful
to thinking through the complex interplay of these categories in the several
fields in which they arise, because I haven’t had an orthodoxy to fall back on.
There really isn’t one where species, sex, gender, ability, and race are concerned,
since in order to examine these phenomena as they are historically, culturally,
ideologically, legally, politically, and literarily entwined requires interdiscipli-
narity at each and every turn.
CJK: It can’t be a coincidence that both Carla and I inhabit our disciplines
uncomfortably, that our intellectual selves have taken shape largely at the
margins of these formations. Because disciplines exert a centripetal force and
impose a kind of normativity, this is not the path of least resistance, but it
does allow a different kind of seeing, a critical vantage point on disciplinary
orthodoxies. For the most part, my home disciplines of political science and
ethnic studies resist thinking about animals on the grounds that they are “only
animals” and that taking them seriously would be a form of category mistake,
a way of “equating” them with humans. Putting aside the question of whether
we want to quantify and mathematicize questions of moral worth and standing
(and whether it’s even possible), the very objection signifies an a priori refusal
to think through the fact that “the animal” was made and not born. Although
I am relatively new to American studies, I am struck by how ready this field
is—this field that focalizes the skein of domination woven out of racism, sex-
ism, homophobia, imperialism, neoliberal capitalism, and so on—to seriously
engage the question of the animal, not in isolation, but precisely in relation
to these standing concerns. Animal studies, as an emergent field, is alive with
energy and zeal. Already there is a critical animal studies that has defined itself
against animal studies proper. Progressives have a storied tendency to split off,
and there is something amusing and maybe alarming, too, about this tendency,
but differentiation is often necessary. Animal studies conferences contain an
unsettling hodgepodge of those commenting on animal practices (sometimes
in a celebratory spirit, sometimes matter-of-factly) and those who want to

critique and end those practices. Those who would use animals for the sake of
improving theory sit jowl to jowl with those who would use theory to improve
the lives of animals. What defines critical animal studies is that it is fiercely,
unapologetically political. Critical animal studies scholars aim to end animal
exploitation and suffering and have little patience for work that just happens
to be about animals. If animal studies has not yet taken on questions of race,
sex, sexuality, disability, and so on in a systematic way, critical animal studies
has done so quite explicitly. We can and should argue about the form of this
engagement—is analogizing to the Holocaust and slavery a good thing to
do?—but it is engagement.
CF: I am never quite sure what “animal studies” is when it gets invoked. Like-
wise, I am never quite sure who or what “critical animal studies” is critiquing;
sometimes it’s the “liberalism” of welfarist or gradualist arguments, sometimes
it’s the elision of race and human social oppression in other “animal studies”
work. Right now I think it’s too soon to consolidate the field. Studies that
are about actual nonhumans are what they are: empirical research that assists
us in understanding the lifeworlds of nonhumans; sometimes it is advocacy
work (Marc Bekoff comes to mind, and Barbara Smuts, too), sometimes it is
“simply” empirical, or rather doesn’t intend its work as explicitly performing
human comparative advocacy.1 When “animal studies” refers to the humanities
and social sciences, it is often about a comparative relation, and resembles new
social movement–type work focusing on socially and historically minoritized
human communities and identities (of the “hidden from history” genre, or
“recovering x”), or it examines the underestimation and/or persecution of
groups of nonhumans, also, in some ways, by analogy with humans. I guess
I am referring to disciplines such as history, sociology, philosophy, and litera-
ture, not so much anthropology, which often reaches toward environmental
or ecological frameworks in locating many species within a mutually interac-
tive environment—here I am thinking of Eduardo Kohn and Anna Tsing, for
example.2 But—or and—I think there’s a lot of really exciting work out there,
and I have only begun to scratch the surface in my reading and writing. I think
it’s still difficult, conceptually, to figure out ways to undo analogical thinking
and to treat multiple categorical or identitarian subject (and sometimes object)
positionings (see, I am having trouble even trying to describe them!) in a way
that takes into account the entirety of the framework and all its categorical
analytics along the spectrum of the non-, the infra-, the sub-, the a-, human,
not to mention its more hegemonic utopian fantasy, the super- or the supra-
human. Posthumanism—that interesting philosophical development nicely
surveyed by Cary Wolfe—works both ways: it’s a “progressive” philosophical
deconstruction of the privileging of the human, on the one hand, and, in
another vein, it can represent the aspiration of humans toward superhuman
or greater-than-human status, whether through prosthetics, nanotechnology,
genetic engineering, or artificial intelligence.3
Why intersectionality, coarticulation, coconstitution? What is achieved by these

concepts, and what, specifically, is achieved by articulating species with race, sex,
gender, sexuality, ability, and so on?
CJK: These concepts have the great virtue of helping us to see the trees and
the forest at the same time. By spotlighting the particularity of each axis of
power while also illuminating the structural relationships among axes, they
deepen our understanding of the complexity, multidimensionality, messiness,
and intractability of domination. The analytic purchase of these concepts is
real: to get beyond sweeping bromides about domination to the historical
specificity of various dimensions, to take seriously this specificity while resist-
ing the temptation to enshrine any one dimension of oppression as the most
central, urgent, fundamental—these are not small feats. There are clear ethical
and political stakes here as well. If these concepts, together or individually,
are on to something, and I think that they are, then the common notion that
marginalized groups are engaged in a zero-sum competition with one another
is missing the point: whatever competition may be written into micro-contexts
of various sorts, if we step back and look at the big picture, it starts to look an
awful lot like a situation of linked fates, to use Michael Dawson’s phrase.4 It
starts to look like various supremacies (racism, speciesism, sexism, homopho-
bia, etc.) are so closely intertwined in thought and deed that they will persist
together or be interrupted together, not singly. Persistent anthropocentrism
has kept some progressives from recognizing the articulation of species with
other classification systems they take more seriously (the “holy trinity” of
race/gender/class), but species meanings have played a momentous role in
underwriting and energizing various categories of human difference over the
millennia, and they are starting to become more visible as products of human
labor. Intersectionality and similar concepts can help bring the animal into
fuller visibility, even as they can remind animal studies scholars of speciesism’s
imbrication with other forms of domination.
CF: Ever since Kimberlé Crenshaw argued for “intersectionality” as a way to

address the interlocking and related vectors of identitarian oppression experi-
enced by citizen-subjects in a given legal framework (the United States), critics
and scholars have been productively deploying and modifying the method and
the terminology involved.5 “Intersection” restricts us to one specific place or site
where otherwise unrelated vectors of oppression meet, and of course everyone
recognizes that this is not how the facets of identity or categories of identi-
tarian oppression work. And so we come up with terms such as interlocking
(still pretty static), coconstitutive, and coconstituting (still too attached to an
originary narrative for my taste), and coarticulating, which has the advantage,
at least, of referring to the discursive fields in which these identitarian oppres-
sions play themselves out. I wouldn’t normally approach the question of the
relation among species, sex, gender, race, and ability this way, in part because
gender, sex, and race are anthropocentric conceptual categories that do not
have extended histories or theorizations for nonhumans; indeed they make no
sense when referring to nonhumans among themselves, especially as vectors of
oppression (one can easily say sex is relevant to nonhumans, certainly, but in a
way that differs significantly from the meanings and deployments of sex and
sexuality among humans). However, this issue is really about thinking with
humans about social change: the degree to which some have been harmed
by their association with nonhuman species, and the ways thinking species
alongside sex, gender, race, and ability can effect analytic, social, and political
changes for the benefit of not only humans but also those nonhumans most
severely affected by the speciesisms that hierarchize suffering and injury. That
is why, I think, these axes of power, as Claire calls them, need to be thought
together, for the sake of human change primarily, but with the hope of benefit-
ing nonhumans as well. When Jacques Derrida, in The Animal That Therefore
I Am, argues that we can find commonality with the living in general through
our vulnerability and our “not-being-able-ness,” our mortality, I think he gets at
something about species, ability, and injury that could guide us in our thinking
about structures of categorical oppression.6 The vulnerability is planetary; it
always has been. I see this special issue, then, as part of the effort “to evolve,”
supposing, for the moment, that evolution is something we humans might
consciously and collectively deliberate about and effect/affect.
CJK: Each of the concepts in question poses certain difficulties, so perhaps it

is best to think of them as provisional guides, as Sherpas who ascend only to
the first elevation of the mountain with you. That sort of Sherpa might not be
much of a Sherpa, but a concept can still be a perfectly good concept even if it
doesn’t provide all the answers and in fact poses certain kinds of tensions and
contradictions for us to grapple with, even if they are irresolvable. Concepts
such as intersectionality present but cannot resolve the tension between similar-
ity and difference: by positing linkages, they inevitably compromise specificity.
Yet specificity alone doesn’t get us very far either, intellectually or politically.
The question then becomes, how do we understand the connections among
dimensions of oppression without simply reducing them all to instances of a
larger phenomenon? How do we hold the interlocking structure in our minds
while remaining open to what particular historical moments have to teach us
about what mattered? The answer must lie in viewing these concepts as good
at starting things off and opening things up rather than wrapping things up.
The invocation of Derrida’s observations about shared “not-being-able-ness”
brings to mind Judith Butler’s recent discussions of “precarious life.”7 Being
embodied, being vulnerable, being mortal—these are shared conditions, com-
mon denominator conditions, which might provide a basis for recognizing
each other, but they are also unevenly experienced conditions, as Ruth Wilson
Gilmore reminds us with her notion of racism as “the state-sanctioned or
extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability
to premature death.”8 Once again, how do we manage the tension between
commonality and differentiation as we seek to understand domination and to
pursue social and political change?
CF: I wonder what gets elided in our pursuits of social and political change
and what can be charted, measured, calibrated “objectively.” For example,
how does one “do justice to” psyches, subjectivities, the unconscious, affect,
desire, and so on? What about the undecidabilities—cognitive, theoretical,
political—that inevitably arise? Donna Haraway often reminds animal lib-
erationists about the question/problem of abortion in women’s reproductive
rights—there is no “pure” political position to occupy when “rights to life” are
at issue.9 There are moral/ethical and political undecidables, yet this does not
and cannot stop decisions from being made and actions from being taken. I
am always suspicious of any discourse that tastes of righteousness, even though
there’s no question but that righteousness can be affectively alluring. There is
a risk in committing to the future, committing to action, a risk that one takes
in moving in any direction at all.
What do these concepts fail to do? What do they leave out? What can be problematic
about using them?
CF: What I also think might be missing when the analytics are about vectors
of oppression are explorations of alternative fashionings of modes of being and
modes of sociality. That is why I was particularly pleased to see that, along with
strong critiques of these interlocking and/or coarticulating modalities of op-
pression, there were so many essays that addressed ways to think about species,
sex, gender, race, and ability that offered salutary or imaginative and produc-
tive affirmations of the interrelation of these in communities of multispecies
sociality. What sometimes gets left out, as well, is an analysis of the specificity
of each of these categories and their asymmetrical relation; species, sex, race,
gender, and ability are not analogous formations; they each have their discrete
historical, social, naturecultural formation and genealogy, and they each have
specific and particular instantiations depending on place and time, geopolitical
location, and historical era. They often have dissimilar modes of appearance,
and I don’t think they are everywhere altogether operative.
CJK: The principal danger I see is the tendency of these concepts to flatten dif-
ferences among differences and create false equivalences among them, to treat
each form of domination as a standardized unit that interlocks with others—as
in Anne McClintock’s satirical comment about “armatures of Lego.”10 And
here’s the rub. Concepts such as coconstitution or coarticulation are helpful in
part because they encourage us to recognize multiple forms of domination and
resist the centering of a single form, but they are less helpful if they encourage
us to think of all forms of domination as somehow always and everywhere
fully comparable or fungible. As Carla points out, it’s all in the details. Take
the Jim Crow South. If we think about race and sex as articulated categories,
it helps us to grasp how the experiences of Black men, Black women, white
men, and white women were powerfully shaped by these (and other) catego-
rizations. So far, so good. But if we make a different move and say that race
and sex are comparable, equivalent taxonomies of power, and claim therefore
that white women were subordinated in comparable ways to Black men dur-
ing Jim Crow, then we’re running off the road and into a deep lake. So there
is a tension in play with these concepts, a tendency to presumptively flatten
that should be resisted vigorously in favor of a spirit of open inquiry into what
actually happened and a willingness to say when and how certain forms of
domination can be more in play than others—more salient, more pressing,
more devastating than others—not everywhere and always necessarily, but in
a given time and place.
What are some of the sources of resistance to these concepts?
CJK: Resistance to the conceptual linking of species/race/sex usually comes

in one of two forms. The first (broader) set of resisters denies that patterns
of domination are a problem to begin with. Embracing some version of the
American Dream, they view US society as a free and open space where the
hardworking individual can fashion his or her own destiny. Structural inequali-
ties are acknowledged but located carefully in the past through a triumphalist
reading of history: we had slavery, but now we are postracial. Claims of racism
are cast as misguided and self-serving, and claims of coconstitutive forms of
domination are cast as exponentially more misguided and self-serving—how
dare those lazy, parasitical minority groups (forgive the redundancy!) band
together and make common cause in assailing the nation, asked Representative
Tom Tancredo at the 2011 Tea Party convention. The second (narrower) set
of resisters wants to center a single axis of domination over others in a com-
prehensive, universal way. There are advocates of every stripe—race advocates,
feminists, animal activists, disability activists, LGBT activists—in this camp of
folks who systematically foreground their own issue and background others.
For them, concepts that emphasize articulations are anathema because they
threaten to decenter the axis they believe is most salient. As I suggested above,
this anxiety is reasonable and demands an answer.
CF: What she said! The resistances I have most often encountered either take
the form of a youthful newly converted rage about the “plight” of nonhumans
that, in its fervor, excludes all other considerations, or righteous indignation
about someone wanting to take species oppression as seriously as the various
forms of human oppression; or, finally, the flat-out trivialization of nonhumans
tout court, as though, like objects, they deserve no consideration in any terms
resembling the human except insofar as they “serve” human needs and ends,
except, in other words, insofar as they are instrumentalized for human benefit.
I think that it’s true that, in some cases, pro-animal, pro-earth proponents
have a certain disregard (disgust?) for humans, along the lines of “humans
have brought us to this pass!” and this can be destructive in coalition-building
efforts to combat multiple vectors of oppression. But I also think that the
move to hierarchize injury and suffering won’t get us to a better world, and
it will continue to carve out a domain of exclusion that will remain available
for deployment against those at the borderlands of inclusion. Finally, I don’t
know whether one can call this resistance, but it is very difficult to analyze all
these categories in their interrelation, and few of us are well trained to do so
adeptly. So sometimes the resistance is a resistance to difficulty and a resistance
to having to do the work of developing unfamiliar analytic skills.
CJK: I am reminded of the tensions I encounter when I try to persuade race

scholars to take animals seriously and when I try to persuade animal people
to take race seriously (beyond recruiting faces of color into the movement).
Some race scholars voice resistance and frustration at the “elevation” of animals
not only because they are reminded of the historically fraught associations of
racialized minorities with beasts but also because the mostly white animal
movement’s racial blindness strikes them as an example of the “new racism”
that conceals itself in nonracial guises (think of the terms eco-racism and eco-
imperialism). So they pull the human card even when their own work is about
exposing how exclusionary this concept is at its core. Animal people often
make a comparable move, claiming speciesism as the fundamental oppres-
sion and casting all humans as privileged beneficiaries of human supremacy.
This could be construed, following Jared Sexton, as a willful nonrecognition
of the fact that human groups have participated very unevenly in the status
and benefits of being “human.”11 And indeed the animal movement’s use
of moral extensionist arguments and Holocaust and slavery analogies does
reproduce a troubling triumphalist narrative about the overcoming of racism,
anti-Semitism, and so on. Oppression creates an embattled state, and when
you are fighting a war where survival is at stake, anyone who isn’t an active ally
and who may complicate your position can easily come to be seen as an enemy.
Can concepts such as coconstitution and intersectionality persuade people to
reenvision the possible enemy as a possible friend? Or will these concepts be
seen as effacing power differentials and thus constituting part of the problem
they purport to address?
CF: June Jordan once said, “Let the issues configure the politics,” by which I
understand her to have meant that, in the local immediate context of political
organizing and action, the challenge is to define “the” issue (the local, concrete,
targeted issue), and then to find the coalitional link that enables a group of
people to engage in a political action to address it.12 I am also tempted to
respond here with the refrain from a Heart song, “What about love?”13 More
on that in a bit.
Where is scholarship on these issues going? What work needs to be done? What are
the particular challenges—and how does the special issue fit in?
CF: I think that a particular challenge in this convergence of fields is to move

beyond critique and toward new or newer ways of envisioning alternative con-
ceptualizations of being and knowing; in other words, I think we need more
expansive and complex ontologies and epistemologies. These days I am eager to

hear about such work, work that makes me imagine different kinds of worlds
or “worldings” that might clear space for a politics that gets us closer to some
of the places we want to go. I wonder about the “we” there: where are those
places that cultural workers doing antispeciesist, antiracist, antisexist work want
to go? More and more, I read work that is able to address the convergences of
species, race, gender, and ability in ways that seem less forced, more holistic
or organic to their analytic frames. I think, too, the emergence of work in en-
vironmental humanities, especially that branch of environmental humanities
that takes a “planetary” perspective, has the potential to develop theoretical and
analytic frameworks or discourses capable of speaking to the social, political,
and ethical multiplicities of identitarian, coconstitutional, coarticulated and
coimplicated modes of living and being in ecosystems striated by geopolitical
(national, regional, both local and global) divisions and forces.14
CJK: Feminists in particular have done pathbreaking intersectional work on

animals, but there are still fewer works than one would like that explicitly
theorize race and species, or species/race/sex. This special issue jumps into the
(relative) void. Its strength, in my view, is that it is an assemblage of varied
stories from varied perspectives, which together make the point that species
articulates with race and sex in complex and profound ways across time, space,
language, and culture. Patterned dynamics of power stitch together these wildly
disparate stories about wolf girls, chimpanzee sanctuaries, fighting dogs, were-
wolves, abolitionists, fish children, freaks, and antivivisectionists. Together,
the essays help build a foundation of empirical-historical knowledge about
species/race/sex, and many of the essays push the envelope theoretically as
well, asking us to reimagine how we might be and act in a multispecies world.
I think Carla is right that a looming question for future scholarship is how to
move beyond critique—which is not to say that we should put critique aside,
but that we should give it shape and purpose by pairing it with a vision and a
pathway. How to make the leap from explicating coconstitution on the pages
of an academic journal to challenging actually existing forms of domination
in the real world? And how to recognize proposed visions and pathways that
may reproduce domination in the name of dismantling it? I have in mind
some “worlding”-type discussions that romanticize specific relational practices
between human and animal as harmonious and mutual when these practices
bear the unmistakable and ineluctable traces of domination. It seems very,
very important to distinguish whatever communion happens in the mind
of the zoophile academic, the dog trainer, and the falconer from meaningful
challenges to the architecture of animal suffering around us—whether in in-

dustrial farming, scientific research, or entertainment and sport. What is the
role of scholarship in defining and pressing these challenges? What role can the
written word aspire to play in encouraging the reimagining of the human and
the refashioning of material practices built around our notion of the human?
CF: I am not sure I agree; why is it so important to distinguish the love of

nonhuman animals from “challenges to the architecture of animal suffering”?
It seems to me that one important task would be to make the connection
between the two. So many of the political causes I have joined or adopted
or enlisted in have been the result of just such an affective connection and
the intellectual and affective movement from the singularity of the love of a
specific being to the generalization of a social, political condition. And I think
that scholarship can help work through that connection. But I also want to
stress that I reject the hierarchization of “action” over “contemplation” (politics
over thought). One important characteristic of many if not most historical
revolutionary movements is the study group. It’s about praxis and theory!
And sometimes theory will be in the service of praxis and sometimes it will be
the other way around. There needs to be a patient, quiet, indeed even passive
place for thinking and feeling even as one acts. I have been taken to task for
this position (articulated at the end of Queer/Early/Modern), but I would be
operating in bad faith as an intellectual and university academic if I disavowed
the so-called vita contemplativa.15
CJK: Love is indeed the force that moves many of us into social justice causes.
Love as the desire to protect, love as the ability to feel for, love as the dream
of something better. It is not that one must choose between affective ties and
programmatic politics but rather that love is not enough—or, more precisely,
that love requires more of us than sitting quietly and feeling. With respect
to animals, it is far too easy for us to confuse what feels good to us emotion-
ally—becoming with, bonding with, communing with an animal, whatever
language one chooses—with acting in such a way as to respect and honor that
being in the fullness of his or her being, in the fullness of his or her needs,
desires, and interests. Jockeys say they love their mounts, dogmen their pit
bulls, cockers their roosters, but that is a use of the word love I will dispute
until I take my last breath. The rationalization of domination over animals as
love puts me in mind of the ideologies of color blindness and liberal feminism:
all of these sound good (and a good deal better than some alternatives), but
they are not getting to the root of the problem—indeed, they are covering up
the root of the problem. Let me end on a personal note about love. From the
age of seven, I loved horses and therefore rode them (strenuously taxing the
means and patience of my Korean immigrant parents). I believed riding to be
a practice of love, never mind the saddle, bit, spurs, and whip (external signs
of the total control humans exercise over every aspect of the lives of domes-
ticated horses). Then, several years ago, the horse I was learning dressage on,
Dai, developed an arthritic condition called ringbone and became useless. My
Finnish trainer, who had raised him from a foal, said pointedly she could get
$800 for him if she sold him for meat. So I offered up the $800 and stopped
riding. That decision point, and the years of caring for Dai afterward until
he was killed in an accident, taught me something about love. So, yes to love,
but love understood how? I am no longer a horse “lover.” I am an antiracist,
feminist, animal person.
What has the process of co-editing this volume taught you, both about working
with another person on other people’s texts and about what work is being done on
species/race/sex?
CF: I was eager to work with Claire, whose friendship has been a delight and
a challenge. I think her social sciences formation and my literary one—not to
mention our respective love for the nonhuman among us—complement each
other, and we have concomitantly brought these concerns to the process of
reading and editing our contributors’ work. The outside readers of the essays
have been tremendously helpful in making me think through broader issues
and concerns related to these fields, and I was grateful for their careful atten-
tion to the submissions. I was also pleased at how much work is out there that
opens American studies up to broader transnational historical and geopolitical
perspectives; likewise, many of the essays also take up and take on the concerns
of a wide range of disciplines, from anthropology and ecology, to geopolitics,
law, political theory, social history, media studies, and literature. I was espe-
cially happy we were able to include the work of an artist and a fiction writer,
since I think that the ways of reimagining our analytics will require discursive
exercises of all kinds, from critical analytic and expository argument to visual,
verbal, and other kinds of world imagining.
CJK: I was eager to work with Carla both because I admire her work and
because I anticipated we would have productive disagreements as coeditors
because of our different disciplinary backgrounds and intellectual trajectories.
Our disagreements, though fewer than I expected, have indeed been produc-
tive. We didn’t always agree about which essays were good, which to include,
which were ready—and those moments forced me to step back and look and
think again, to read the essays in a new light, which improved the quality of
the volume in the long term. Working on the volume gave me a much clearer
sense of how much interesting and provocative work is being done out there
on these issues by scholars in multiple fields and at multiple stages in their
careers. We are pleased that the contributors here include senior scholars as
well as several junior scholars just starting out in their careers. While a few of
the contributors are in American studies, most are not, and since the field as
a whole has yet to engage species/race/sex fully, publishing this special issue
of American Quarterly feels like an important thing to do. My hope is that
the volume will advance conversation on these issues within American studies
and beyond.
Our special issue begins with a fictional piece, “Us,” by Karen Joy Fowler,
whose most recent novel explores the potential for transspecific love and cru-
elty occasioned by one girl’s unusual familial configuration.16 The haunting
short story included here, invoking the role played by “us” in the lives of other
species, brings Ursula K. Le Guin’s shattering tale “Mazes” to the twenty-first
century and suggests the disturbing dynamics at work between dominant and
subordinate beings in both interspecies and intrahuman relating.17 It is an
apt piece with which to open our series of essays on the complex and fraught
nexus of species, sex, and race.
In “Animal Humanism: Race, Species, and Affective Kinship in Nineteenth-
Century Abolitionism,” Brigitte Nicole Fielder examines abolitionist children’s
literature that uses cross-species comparisons between slaves and household pets
to build sympathy for the former, thus departing from the abolitionist con-
vention of scrupulously dissociating slaves from animals. Drawing on famous
nineteenth-century literary texts as well as relatively unknown ones, Fielder
complicates our understanding of abolitionism, literature, and discourses of
animality by arguing that this new model of sympathy aspired to something
important—the achievement of sympathy and feelings of kinship across ac-
knowledged difference instead of just in instances of sameness—even if it also
risked reproducing paternalistic and racist ideas about slaves.
Maneesha Deckha’s “Welfarist and Imperial: The Contributions of Anticru-
elty Laws to Civilizational Discourse” argues that anticruelty laws in England
and many of its former colonies, including the United States and Canada, are
an expression of an imperialist impulse inasmuch as they emerge out of and
reinforce a civilizational discourse targeted toward the uplift of racial, cul-
tural, or religious minorities. In an analysis that is wide-ranging in time and
space, and which draws on a variety of materials from parliamentary speeches
in nineteenth-century England to recent Canadian appellate court rulings,
Deckha raises troubling questions about anticruelty legislation, its civilizing
or domesticating function, and its tendency to selectively target the practices
of marginalized groups while ignoring the comparably cruel practices of the
majority.
Janet M. Davis’s “Cockfight Nationalism: Blood Sport and the Moral Politics
of American Empire and Nation Building” looks at the politics of cockfighting
as a crucible of colonial contestation in three sites of the US Empire at the
turn of the twentieth century: the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Davis
draws on archival sources to demonstrate the intertwining of the emergent
US animal welfare movement and projects of American nation-building and
civilizational uplift in these places. Showing that cockfighting became a hotly
contested matter of law and policy to the extent that it became fraught with
meanings about race, gender, nation, sovereignty, citizenship, civilization, and
belonging, Davis deepens our understanding of how the protection of animal
others became conjoined with the domestication of national/racial others in
the context of the US Empire.
Jeannette Vaught’s “Materia Medica: Technology, Vaccination, and Anti-
vivisection in Jazz Age Philadelphia” examines the activism of early twentieth-
century antivivisectionists in Philadelphia against vaccination. Drawing on
archival material, Vaught argues that antivivisectionists were, despite their
progressive positions on race and immigration and animals, above all concerned
with protecting the purity and whiteness of the American body from mixture,
penetration, and contamination. Thus they made the surprising speciesist move
of condemning the animal serums used in vaccination as threatening bodily
contamination while also racializing vivisection as comparable to cacophonic
jazz music threatening sonic penetration. Vaught’s critique reminds us of the
ideological contradictions that beset advocacy organizations in their culturally
constrained quest for change.
In “Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies,” Greta Gaard calls for
a new intersectional field of inquiry that brings together the various insights
of feminist studies, food studies, animal studies, and postcolonial studies to
illuminate the subject of milk—a subject that signifies the shared corporeality
and mammalian nature of human and cow and that constitutes the mother–
offspring bond as well as providing the occasion for its rupture. A feminist
postcolonial milk studies would allow us, Gaard argues, to grasp the complex,
global, power-laden connections among the experiences of cows in modern
industrial dairy farming, Western women who are institutionally and socially
discouraged from breastfeeding, third-world women who have been coerced
into substituting their own breast milk with cow’s milk products exported
from the United States, and people of color who have been pathologized and
misled about their inability to digest the milk sugar lactose.
Julietta Hua and Neel Ahuja’s essay, “Chimpanzee Sanctuary: ‘Surplus’ Life
and the Politics of Transspecies Care,” combines anthropology and oral history
to examine the relationship between Foucauldian discourses of biopower and
“care of the self ” under neoliberalism and the lived experiences of transspecific
care workers, as reported by them, in relation to overarching frames—including
race, gender, and species—that constrain the lives of workers and chimpanzees
alike. Walking a delicate, even precarious line, between critique and affirmation,
these coauthors help us think better about what it means to negotiate among
multiple constraints, eschewing the utopian optimism of either discourses of
“animal rights” or those of humanism.
Megan H. Glick’s “Animal Instincts: Race, Criminality, and the Reversal of
the ‘Human’” analyzes US culture’s fashioning of human and animal subjects
as a form of “necropolitics”; the term, from Achille Mbembe, for a regime of
terror “in which the spaces and moments of everyday life are marked by the
sign of constant death.” Tracking the convergence of discourses of race, gen-
der, and species in the case of NFL player Michael Vick’s condemnation for
dogfighting and dog abuse (in the press and the public but not in court), she
examines the politics of human and animal “unequal life” as it travels through
both the discourses that condemn Vick and those that have rehabilitated him.
In his piece on imaginary interspecies and paraspecies racializations in the
television series True Blood, “‘Of Course There Are Werewolves and Vampires’:
True Blood and the Right to Rights for Other Species,” Dale Hudson speculates
about the historico-racial subtexts of the series and helps us understand how
imagining alter-worlds can assist in the intersectional analyses required for
better accounts of race, sex, and species. His imaginative exploration of visual
culture’s configurations of werewolves and vampires contributes to a richer
understanding of US history, culture, and the popular imagination as these
converge in figures of condensed racial/species being, where the actual prob-
lematics of species, sex, and race are played out in speculative narrative form.
Harlan Weaver, in “‘Becoming in Kind’: Race, Class, Gender, and Nation in

Cultures of Dog Rescue and Dogfighting,” argues from within the framework
of constraint to explore what legislation around so-called dangerous breeds has
to do with race in the United States and what funny kinds of love converge in
interspecies companionship. Combining a personal narrative that charts chang-
ing affective relations between himself, as he transitions, and his pit bull–type
companion, with a study of breed legislation and the discourses emerging on
breed and race in the wake of Michael Vick’s conviction for charges related to
dogfighting, Weaver offers us thoughts on forging new modalities of being and
becoming-with that might herald a more just and caring multispecies world.
Ángeles Donoso Macaya and Melissa M. González give us a counterintuitive
reading of an Argentinian author’s novel about queer love, narrated by a dog,
in “Orthodox Transgressions: The Ideology of Cross-Species, Cross-Class, and
Interracial Queerness in Lucía Puenzo’s Novel El niño pez (The Fish Child).”
Understood as a novel that treats interspecies becoming, or at least the con-
vergence of species-alterity, race, and gender/sexuality in some interesting and
innovative queer ways, the authors argue, instead, that Puenzo’s novel reinstates
both homonormativity and anthropocentric humanism. They demonstrate,
through close reading and interpretation, the difficulty of effectively subverting
normative boundaries of species, race, and sexuality, as the novel introduces but
ultimately forecloses the radical potential of its interspecies queer relationships.
Sarah Dowling’s study of an experimental prose poem, “They Were Girls:
Animality and Poetic Voice in Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal,” works between the
anthropologically and psychologically informed “original” story of two “Bengali
wolf girls,” Kamala and Amala, and Kapil’s “voice” as the poet reworks that
story into a multispecies narrative of shared bodily vulnerability and female
becoming. Situating Kapil’s work within an American poetic bestiary tradi-
tion and contemporary poetry’s representation of the “nonsubject,” Dowling’s
close reading of the archive and its resonances in Kapil’s poem bring to the
fore discourses of girlhood, “civilization,” progress, coloniality, and animality
as they inform the fashioning of a hybrid “humanimal” voice.
Our special issue closes with Sunaura Taylor’s “Vegans, Freaks, and Animals:
Toward a New Table Fellowship.” This intensely personal piece reflects on how
cultural authorities engage in the “enfreakment” of various bodies that look or
act in nonnormative ways, including vegans, the disabled, and animals. Taylor
uses her recent uncomfortable experience at a particular speaking engagement
to start thinking through the articulations of disability, species, race, and
sex—and more specifically, the shared embodied suffering and ostracization
of bodies marked as different—in ways that suggest the task that lies ahead for
all of us: the reenvisioning of the human, the animal, and nature in a moment
of ecological peril.
Once one starts down the road of a certain kind of intersectionality—a
“being responsible toward” the constructions of categorical differences and
their interrelations—one assumes, with alacrity, an openness to the emergence
of other categories whose relevance is pressing. For this reason, we wanted to
end this volume on species/race/sex with an essay that links disability to these
issues. Derrida argues that what humans share with the living in general is a
certain inability or nonpower with respect to a shared mortality, which is how
he interprets Jeremy Bentham’s injunction to consider “shared suffering” in
the adjudication of rights, rather than capacity or ability. In this respect, then,
“disability,” or rather, “not-being-able-ness,” becomes another way to think
through the present and futures of questions of species, race, sex, and power.18
Notes
The editors have many people to thank, including Sarah Banet-Weiser, Jih-Fei Cheng, Paula Dragosh,
and everyone at AQ who worked on this issue; we also thank the contributors—those who ultimately
appear in this volume and those who do not—for their good hard thinking and the readers for their
careful attention to the work; thanks, too, goes to those who contributed to this web site. Each of us
has support networks that held us while we worked on this volume, and we thank the people, human
and not, who saw us through.
1. Marc Bekoff has written numerous books about nonhuman animals, among them Minding Animals:
Awareness, Emotions, and Heart (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007); Bekoff, Animals Matter:
A Biologist Explains Why We Should Treat Animals with Compassion and Respect, rev. ed. (Boston:
Shambhala, 2007); The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow,
and Empathy and Why They Matter (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2008); and, with Jessica Pierce,
Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Barbara Smuts,
a psychologist, is best known for Sex and Friendship in Baboons (1985; rpt. New York: Aldine, 2009),
but has also written extensively on both dolphins and dogs.
2. Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2013); Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2005).
3. Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
4. Michael Dawson, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (Princeton, N.J.:
5. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence
against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991): 1241–99.
6. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2008), especially 27–28.
7. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006).
8. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
9. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
10. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York:
Routledge, 1995).
11. Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
12. Jordan discusses the challenges of intersectional thinking and coalitional organizing in “Report from
the Bahamas,” in On Call: Political Essays (Boston: South End, 1985), 39–49 ; see also Bernice Johnson
Regon’s essay, “Coalition Politics, Turning the Century,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology,
ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 356–59.
13. Heart, “What about Love?,” lyrics by Brian Allen, Sheron Alton, and Jim Vallance, Heart, Capitol
Records, 1985.
14. For “planetarity,” see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2005).
15. Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 104. For a critique,
see Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007), 151–52.
16. Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely beside Ourselves (New York: A Marian Wood Book/G.P.
Putnam’s Sons, 2013).
17. Ursula K. Le Guin, Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (New York: ROC/The Penguin Group,
1990), 69–76.
18. Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 2nd ed., 1823, chap. 17,
fn. 122, www.econlib.org/library/Bentham/bnthPML18.html#a121 (accessed June 9, 2013). Here
Bentham explicitly uses the language of rights to discuss both slavery and nonhuman animals.
Us | 481
Us
Karen Joy Fowler
W
e’re not the record keepers you are. When we find your records,
we eat them.
Some of us think you carry a grudge about that, but you’ve made
good use of our hunger over the years. On our side, there’s no ill will. We’re
in this together, always have been.
Many believe you once admired us; some say there was even a time you liked
us best of all. You thought we brought you luck, called us clever, resourceful,
and resilient. Friendly and popular, you said. Inquisitive, industrious.
But also selfish, which is so like you. No one else so often mistakes a mirror
for a window.
Diaspora
In those dim and distant days, when famine came, it was a shared privation. If
it settled in, meant to stay, then we took off together, boarded your ships and
sailed in all directions. Our DNA is a map of your migrations.
And even you, who so like numbers, couldn’t say how many of us were lost
at sea, ending up in the belly of some unblinking fish who’d never imagined
such a creature before swallowing one. Someone dies and someone eats. It’s
the way of the world. (Though you’re working on that. We’re helping.)
Those of us who survived had children and they had children and so on
and so on. The ship was all we knew until we dropped anchor on a green shore
or white sand or wet rocks. The unexpected gift of fixed earth, of trees and
grasses, fruits and grains. A rain of insects. A roof of leaves.
It takes our breath away to imagine it. We ourselves have never seen, never
eaten these things. Many among us are waiting for a world like that, a world
beyond the world.
Sometimes, in these new lands, we found others of our kind. This might
mean war. Or sex. Or both.
You understand.

Plagues
You hosted us on your ships, mostly uninvited, though sometimes you planned
to eat us. We hosted even smaller uninvited creatures, and these carried a sick-
ness from one place to another, delivering it into your new worlds like mail
from home. Generation after generation of intermittent and incomprehensible
torment followed.
We all suffered. Death insatiable, bodies collecting faster than they could
decay, some of them yours, more of them ours. You’d have to have been crazy
not to go crazy. We all went crazy then.
Any admiration you’d ever felt for us vanished. You spoke of infestations.
Swarms. Eradications. You killed us in your stories, danced us to our deaths
with songs.
That time has passed. There is no reason to say more about it.
You and Your Records
Some of your records are not to our taste.

In 1823, a terrier named Billy set a record by killing one hundred of us in
five minutes at the Paris Dog Show, an average of one death every 3.3 sec-
onds. The coliseum had been fitted with mirrored walls so the view was never
blocked and there was no traction, no chance of escape. Still, we did our best.
An earlier match had left Billy blind in one eye. The hero who achieved that
had no name.
Your papers referred to this Parisian event as a feast of delight for the raticide
enthusiast. Billy was awarded a silver collar. His record stood for almost forty
years until Jacko, a black-and-tan bull terrier, finally bested it by two seconds.
Decade after decade of necks snapped by your dachshunds, your airedales,
your west highland whites.
But in the end, it all worked out for the best. We saw you with your dogs;
we saw the advantages. You found it easier to breed the numbers needed for
the ring than to catch them. Domesticity works both ways.
The century turned. Rat matches were illegal and dog shows became beauty
contests. By then, we, too, came in many pleasing colors—white, which you’ve
always liked, and piebald. Champagne, amber, cinnamon, and Russian blue.
Fancies, you called us and petted us, brought in veterinarians when we didn’t
eat, cried when we died.
Still no mercy, though, for our brethren who came wild into your attics
and walls. For them, the traps and poisons. For them, the professionals to take
their bodies away without you having to see.
Us | 483
We are not those rats.

We’ve learned that it’s best to please you. You like us tame better than wild,
docile better than savage. You like us fast and clever in the mazes, but not in
the sewers. We like the dark, but you don’t, so we’ve learned to sleep in the
light. You prefer us white to brown, and never, never black—you want us to
look as little like the rats that carried the plague as possible. Those rats are still
in your nightmares. Filthy. Vermin.
We are not those rats.
We don’t bring disease. We fight it. Now we are your partners in the great
and final battle on the frontiers of medical progress.
The Berkeley Rats
It surprises us that, among your many sporting events, you don’t include the
mazes; you seem to be such enthusiasts.
Our own feelings are mixed. For years there was evidence, unscientific and
anecdotal, of two schools and two schools of thought. At Yale, you said the
rats had no interest in the mazes. They responded only to food cues, did no
spontaneous exploration, never learned the paths. They had to be kept hungry
to work at all. You considered them rather dim, their behaviors easily explained
with the simple stimulus–response model you already favored.
In contrast, we Berkeley rats could be fed a fine meal first and still wander
the maze with interest. We explored our surroundings in logical ways, all the
right-hand passages first, for example, or always moving downward. Later,
we could be set back inside at any random point and still find our way easily.
You began to talk about our cognitive maps, the scientific ways in which we
worked, as if we were testing out hypotheses.
Vicarious trial and error (VTE) is what you called the hesitant, looking-
about behaviors we evidence before moments of decision. You wrote papers
about our remarkable VTEs.
And then you made us better. Mated the best with the best, shipping us
out to labs all over the world. We were the rats everyone wanted. We prided
ourselves on our performance, our abilities, our discipline.
Now recent studies suggest that the single factor most predictive of our suc-
cess is you. Tell a student he has a Berkeley rat, and whoever he has will try to
perform accordingly. While you were noting our VTEs, we were noting yours.
Our desire to please you has wreaked havoc with your data, which displeases
you. You prefer data to animals.
This is a maze with only one way through.
The International Genetic Standard Rat
We have become data.

Our path is one of standardized breeding, standardized handling. Genetic
variation has been minimized in the attempt to eradicate the noise of indi-
vidual personality. The ideal laboratory rat is an apparatus in today’s modern
lab, a test tube.
“We are more than just animals,” your advertising says on our behalf.
“We are research friendly.”
“Guaranteed uniformity for the research community.”
In your ads we are drawn dressed in lab coats or business suits, or else
photographed, no sign of our cages, our fur gleaming, our eyes bright. We are
clean and willing.
And now a new adventure for us: “Rats enlist in the war against bioterrorism!”
Yet, in the United States, you excluded us, along with birds, from the Animal
Welfare Act, arguing that the extra paperwork of enforcing laboratory guidelines
would drive up the cost of research. In the end, the consumer would suffer.
No one wants that.
“So important in reaching an understanding of ourselves,” you say about
us, because we are so like you and you’ve always known it.
Yet we must be, and at the very same time, so different that nothing matters
less than what happens to us.
We can do that! We are more than animals now and also less. We are mod-
els. We are mathematics. We are information. Cross-sections of our brains are
archived in downloadable rat-brain libraries.
We are an icon of modernization.
The path through the maze ends in the future.
The Post-Rat
OncoMouseTM was your first patented animal. She was created as a geographic
space, a place to put a human gene that reliably produces breast cancer. The
lab is the natural habitat for OncoMouse. No one knows, because no one cares
to know, what her natural behaviors are.
But mice are not so similar to you as we are, with their herbivorous diets and
their tiny brains. It took another thirty years to clear the way for the creation
of the genetically engineered us. This didn’t happen until 2008.
2008. Our most recent Year of the Rat. A reminder of those past and happy
times, that long-ago when you thought us lucky, clever, resourceful, and resil-
ient. Friendly and popular. Industrious and selfish.
Us | 485
Among our new partners: the Knockout Rat Consortium—a group of in-
dividuals and institutions dedicated to creating at least one of us with a single
gene disruption (the knockout) for every gene in our genome.
But first, the hybrids: us, only with a bit of you thrown in. Millions currently
in production. From SAGE labs, the commercial client can already purchase
disease models for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, hypertension, and diabetes. Comes
in its very own rat-case.
You keep us in quarantine now, isolated from most human contact, because
the more of your DNA we carry, the more fragile we are. Your filthy presence
threatens us with fatal infections. We hope you see the irony.
Our job is to sicken and die, but only in useful ways.
The walls of our world are opaque, because you don’t like it when we look
at you. Still you hear us, incessantly gnawing on our own teeth. The nails on
our feet tick like clocks as we move about on the steel floors of our homes. In
your eternal light, we ask ourselves philosophical questions. What happens
next? How much human DNA does it take to make a human? What are you
like in the wild? Despite our uniformity of production, we find we disagree
as to the answers.
Someday we’ll save you from disease and maybe, finally, from death itself.
What will be our reward? It must be very good to eat. It must be better than
anything any of us, past or present, has ever eaten before. We try to imagine
this thing we can’t imagine. We wait for it.
Till then, we are, apparently, team players. We are your surrogates, your
disease-eaters.
Your martyrs. We are turning finally, just as you do in your suffering, to faith.
We believe that someday you’ll take us again on great ships to new worlds. We
dream of long, dark nights and a landing in a place where we will live together
forever, neither of us infecting the other. Our fur shiny. Our eyes bright. We
dream of trees and grasses, fruits and grains.
A rain of insects. A roof of leaves.
But maybe immortality will turn you careless, make you forget all about us.
Perhaps, by then, we’ll have taken on enough of your DNA to have become
you. That would certainly make any aggrieved discussion of what we once did
to you or you to us nonsensical.
We would like to think this: that in the end it is ourselves we are saving.
Already we don’t know if this is our thought or yours.
But it sounds like you.
the end
Race, Species, and Affective Kinship in Nineteenth-Century Abolitionism | 487
Animal Humanism: Race, Species, and

Affective Kinship in Nineteenth-Century
Abolitionism
Brigitte Nicole Fielder
I
n the antebellum United States, attempts to exclude nonwhite people from
the category of the human illustrated why humanist arguments, such as
the iconic antislavery question “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?,” became
necessary to combat racism and slavery.
Figure 1.
“Am I Not a Man and a Brother?,” title page, The Life and Adventures of Oaudah Equiano (New York:
Samuel Wood & Sons, 1829). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

As abolitionists were well aware and historians have shown, comparisons

between people of African descent and nonhuman primates were often made
in arguments meant to justify enslavement and imperialism.1 Proponents of
scientific racism held black people to be closer than white people to nonhu-
man primates in the Linnaean “Great Chain of Being,” closely intertwining
hierarchies of race and species.2 Countering the “animalization” of enslaved
black people, abolitionist arguments frequently insisted on the humanity of
the enslaved, often by likening them to free white people and answering the
rhetorical question “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” with an emphatic “Yes.”
Asserting the similarity of enslaved black people to free white people thus be-
came a prominent tactic of abolitionist literature, which used this stipulated
sameness as an assertion of interracial national kinship and an imperative for
feeling across racial lines.
However, even as nineteenth-century discussions emphasizing the humanity
of black people served as arguments against their enslavement, other abolitionist
arguments employed animals as points of familiar reference, in cross-species
comparisons that were also meant to garner interracial sympathy.3 Some aboli-
tionist children’s literature, especially, deployed this strategy, using domesticated
animals to mediate their readers’ sympathy for enslaved people. This model
of sympathy, which is not dependent on articulations of sameness, is a more
progressive model for affective sympathy and kinship because (unlike the other
prominent models of abolitionist sympathy) it has the potential for promot-
ing such affective relationships across acknowledged positions of difference.
Kelly Oliver has recently noted that stranded “Katrina dogs” received
more sympathetic attention in US media coverage of Hurricane Katrina than
African Americans similarly stranded in New Orleans, “seemingly because
many white Americans can feel more sympathetically toward dogs than they
can toward African Americans.”4 The problem Oliver and others have noted
in this apparently misplaced sympathy lies in the question of whether this
affective prioritization amounted to a valuation of dogs over black people. I
contend that the problem is more complex than this explanation allows. The
question of valuation, though legitimate, works against the abolitionist model
of humanistic sympathy-through-sameness described above. Sympathy for
nonhuman animals (particularly for nonprimates) is not dependent on same-
ness alone. Rather, I argue that this sympathy has more to do with notions of
proximity or familiarity. If some white people felt more keenly for the dogs
than they did for the African American people who were displaced by Katrina,
this was not necessarily because they believed the dogs to be more similar to
themselves than to black people. The problem is not that some white people
cared about Katrina dogs. It is that they did not also care about poor, African
American people. To be clear, the prioritization of Katrina dogs over the hu-
man residents of New Orleans is a problem inflected by racism and classism.
However, the widespread popular sympathy for Katrina dogs indicates that
perceived similarity is not a prerequisite for sympathy, as many popular aboli-
tionist texts assumed. For this reason, sympathy that can be transferred across
species difference also has the potential to be transferred across racial difference,
even though it was not in the case Oliver discusses.
In the antebellum United States, the apparent similarity of enslaved black
people to free white people was most prominently emphasized through depic-
tions of mixed-race heroes and heroines. Believing that their audience would
find such characters inherently more sympathetic to their white (predominantly
Northern) readers by virtue of their resemblance to them, popular abolitionist
writers such as Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and William Wells
Brown employed mixed-race characters to garner white sympathy. The par-
ticular horror of “white slavery” in the enslavement of people who resembled
white ideals of physical appearance, speech, and Christian education illustrated
the potential danger of enslavement for people who believed themselves to be
beyond the dangers of that race-based system.
While the enslavement of mixed-race (and especially visually “white”-look-
ing) people was a reality of the “peculiar” institution, this tactic has been long
critiqued for its model of how sympathy is conveyed. This strategy assumed
that characters who more closely resembled white people in these ways were
more likely to elicit sympathy from white readers than black characters who
did not. Literary critics have rightly acknowledged the problem with a model
of sympathy that made readers’ recognition of similarity or sameness a prereq-
uisite for sympathetic affect.5 A more progressive model of sympathy would
not depend on similarities but allow for sympathy’s transfer across positions
of clear difference. This essay examines antebellum abolitionist literatures in
which this more progressive model of sympathy—one that moves across ac-
knowledged positions of difference—becomes possible. Emphasizing enslaved
people’s humanity and their distinction from nonhuman animals was not
abolitionism’s only way of referring to animals, and not all abolitionist argu-
ments depended on a model of sympathy that necessitated the sympathizer’s
similarity to the enslaved. Abolitionist children’s literature published between
the 1830s and the 1860s, for example, often employed animals in comparison
with—rather than in distinction from—enslaved black people, with an effect
distinctly different from the comparisons of scientific racism.6 Although this
strategy is also present in abolitionist literature for adults, in the abolitionist
children’s literature discussed here, the affective rhetoric is prominent and

clear, remaining in the foreground rather than existing as an accompaniment
to other arguments against enslavement. I read abolitionist children’s literature
in which affective relationships are possible despite differences in race and spe-
cies in order to show how this difference-based model of abolitionist sympathy
worked against the more prominent sameness-based model.7
Unlike the prioritization of sympathy for mixed-race people, the model of
sympathy present in these animal-focused abolitionist stories and poems for
children is more in line with progressive notions of antiracism that appreci-
ate difference, rather than call for its erasure. The fact that sympathy might
sometimes be more easily felt across positions of difference than similarity (as
in the case of the Katrina dogs) discounts what some abolitionist writers as-
sumed about their white audiences. By examining this model of sympathy, we
might be able to understand why many white Americans had more sympathy
for dogs than for African American people affected by Katrina, while rejecting
the racist notion that dogs were necessarily better able to elicit white sympathy.
Additionally, understanding how sympathy may be conveyed across positions
of difference opens up possibilities for both antiracist discourse and human–
animal studies. When we ask for whom one can have sympathy, we must look
beyond comparisons between beings, and the hierarchies that accompany
them. I present abolitionism as one version of humanism, in its dependence
on the category of the human for an ethics of interracial relations, arguing that
comparisons of humans and other animals—primarily pets—have the potential
for a more productive discussion of sympathy.8 Despite their failings, the texts
I discuss present a model of sympathy that, by refusing to view difference as
foil to sympathy, has the potential to resist hierarchies of race and species.
Abolitionists and Animals
Theories of scientific racism provide one prominent racialized use of animals,

embedded in derogatory comparisons of nonwhite people with nonhuman
primates, especially. Neel Ahuja laments what he has deemed “the conflation
of race and species” in animal studies, which he claims “often assimilates
racial discourse into species discourse, flattening out historical contexts that
determine the differential use of animal (and other) figures in the process of
racialization.”9 For nineteenth-century American readers, however, popular
understandings of race were informed by theories of scientific racism, which
rendered race and species never fully extricable from each other. The evocation
of species in racialized discourse does not simply “assimilate race critique into
species critique, taking animalization as the generic basis of racism,” then, but
is evidence of an overlapping discourse of difference, which simultaneously
hierarchizes both race and species in a single “Great Chain.”10
The illustration comparing classical “Greek,” “Negro,” and “ape” profiles,
from Josiah Nott and George Gliddon’s 1854 Types of Mankind, demonstrates
the combined hierarchization of race and species in nineteenth-century tax-
onomies (see fig. 2).
Figure 2.
Josiah Nott and George Gliddon, Types of Mankind (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippencott, 1854). Courtesy of
the American Antiquarian Society.
In this brand of scientific race theory, made popular in the United States by
writers such as Nott, Gliddon, Samuel Morton, and Louis Agassiz, references
to animals in racialized discourse were not mere metaphor. Rather, this “ani-
malization” of racial others speaks to the very construction of race as a concept,
that is, as a mode of difference akin to differences in species. As this illustration
suggests, nineteenth-century scientists entertained questions of whether racial
differences constituted species differences. The ideology of chattel slavery,
therefore, depended on a theorization of racial difference akin to speciesism,
marking nonwhite people as evolutionarily different from white people.11
The rhetoric of scientific racism shows us why conventional humanist argu-
ments were necessary to reframe ideologies of racial difference. By comparing
the racial other to the animal other, human rights could be more easily denied
within Enlightenment scientific and philosophical hierarchies that prioritized
the category of the human. Abolitionist texts responded to the racialized
animalizations of scientific racism, invoking animals instead to articulate
humanist arguments about race and emphasizing the categorical difference
between slaves and animals.
Abolitionist arguments about enslaved people’s humanity had two main
parts. The first was a simple articulation of humanity: slaves are not animals,
but people. This point registers most iconically in the Josiah Wedgewood
antislavery medallion, but was also present in abolitionist children’s literature
of the antebellum period. A conversation from The Young Abolitionists; or Con-
versations on Slavery (1848) illustrates this point with a child who asks, “The
slaves are people, mother, are they not?,” and a mother who replies, “Yes, they
are men and women.”12 The mother’s expansion on this yes genders enslaved
people as “men and women.” By adding gendered specificity to the categories
slaves and people, she hints at the fact that enslaved people are not a homoge-
neous group. This gendering therefore signifies individualization. While the
categories men and women might create a problematic binary, the extent to
which enslaved black people were denied claims to any positive associations
of masculinity and femininity indicates how recognizing enslaved people as
“men and women” was a significant, humanizing gesture.
The second humanist abolitionist argument indicated animalization as a
particular mistake of enslavement: the American system of chattel slavery, by
definition, treated people as though they were animals, and this was one of its
many moral problems. Scenes in which the conditions of enslaved people are
compared with those of livestock abound in abolitionist literature, with the
implication that humans ought not to live under the same conditions as ani-
mals and ought not to be similarly commodified. In one popularly circulated
example, Sojourner Truth recounts that she and other enslaved people were
relegated to “sleeping on those damp boards, like the horse, with a little straw
and a blanket” and that later, when sold at auction for the sum of one hundred
dollars, that “she [had] an impression that in this sale she was connected with
a lot of sheep.”13 Children’s abolitionist literature made similar comparisons,
as can be seen in an analogy from Ann Preston’s antislavery collection, Cousin
Ann’s Stories for Children (1849). “Tom and Lucy: A Tale for Little Lizzie”
narrates the sale of a black, enslaved girl:
Her master took the trader’s gold;—

Such wicked things they do;
Just like a calf was Lucy sold,
Though she was good as you.14
The poem seeks to break down racial hierarchies in comparisons that would
treat a black child “like a calf ” (i.e., saleable), instead comparing enslaved
black children to free white children. “Tom and Lucy” makes this comparison
a matter of valuation, telling its readers that Lucy “was [as] good as you” and
implicitly indicating the problem of her sale by assuming that its readers would
recognize the immorality of selling white children like themselves.
To counteract the prominence of racist comparisons between animals and
nonwhite people, abolitionist literature was fairly saturated with examples like
these. It therefore seems that comparisons of enslaved people with animals
might counteract the abolitionist project of humanizing the enslaved. Common
household pets, however, offered a point of recognition for Northern, white,
child readers, most of whom were likely to have had little or no interaction
with either enslaved or free black people. Because pets had become common by
the nineteenth century, certain kinds of domesticated animals—most notably
cats, dogs, and birds—were familiar to many middle-class white children.15
I turn next to the rhetorical moments in which abolitionist texts emphasize
similarities between animals and the enslaved, a genre in which animals and
enslaved people appear interchangeable. I am concerned with how compari-
sons of animals and enslaved people can mediate across, not simply substitute
for, lines of race and species. But first we must examine the possibilities and
limits of substitution.
A commonly held belief that still persists about animal cruelty is that it
might easily slip into violence toward humans. In the antebellum period, this
belief resulted in similar—sometimes simultaneous—instruction of children
in kindness toward animals and people.16
Children’s literature against animal cruelty and children’s abolitionist litera-

ture are related both historically, through the overlapping social movements for
abolitionism and animal welfare in the United States and England, and generi-
cally, in their shared sentimental approaches to evoking readerly sympathy.17
Before the animal welfare movement reached full speed in the late nineteenth
century, the similarities of abolitionist and animal welfare rhetorics were vis-
ible in antebellum texts that emphasized the relation between how people treat
animals and how they might treat other people.
An episode in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin il-
lustrates popular beliefs about the connections between cruelty—and sympa-
thy—toward animals and the enslaved.18 We observe this in Stowe’s model of
white, Northern, middle-class womanhood, Mrs. Bird. While Mrs. Bird was
“generally the most indulgent and easy to be entreated of all mothers,” we
read that “still her boys had a very reverent remembrance of a most vehement
chastisement she once bestowed on them, because she found them leagued with
several graceless boys of the neighborhood, stoning a defenceless [sic] kitten.”19
Stowe does not recount this episode to explicitly promote animal welfare but
rather to illustrate Mrs. Bird’s capacity for interracial sympathy. Her sympathy
for the kitten provides a partial explanation for her sympathy for Eliza Harris,
an enslaved woman who has emancipated herself and her son, Harry, whom
Mrs. Bird harbors in defiance of her legal obligation (by virtue of the Fugitive
Slave Act) to assist in their reenslavement.
Mrs. Bird’s protection of the kitten and of Eliza and her son are rendered
comparable by the juxtaposition of these similar reactions to “anything in the
shape of cruelty.”20 While pairing Mrs. Bird’s sympathy for the kitten and for
the enslaved indicates both her similarly directed humanity and the shared
histories of the antislavery and animal welfare movements, it also serves as an
example of abolitionist comparisons of enslaved people and animals. Although
elsewhere Stowe’s text prioritizes mixed-race characters such as Eliza and Harry
as particularly able to garner white sympathy by virtue of their resemblance
to white people, the episode of Mrs. Bird and the kitten does not suggest that
her sympathy for the animal is dependent on this kind of likeness to herself.
Stowe’s juxtaposition of Mrs. Bird’s interspecies and interracial sympathy
was not unique in the nineteenth century. The logic of this kind of literature,
as Colleen Boggs explains, allows “animals [to] mediate liberal subjectivity”
through a “didactic ontology” invested in “the practice of teaching children
how to be human by teaching them to be humane.”21 A similar example of
this ontology in abolitionist children’s literature is Mary Martha Sherwood’s
1831 The babes in the wood of the New World, which depicts a child’s similar
instruction in kindness toward dogs and slaves. The child narrates an adult’s
preparation for seeing enslaved people for the first time: “Then they told me
that I should see some people behaving very cruelly to them [slaves], but that
they hoped I would try to shew [sic] them every kindness in my power; and
my aunt Lucy reminded me of the blow which she had once given me because
I had hurt a poor dog.”22 Here previous instruction against hurting a dog is
meant to show that unkindness to slaves is similarly immoral (and, perhaps,
that it would be similarly punished).
This story, like Stowe’s episode, indicates that both animals and enslaved
people might be read as objects of readerly sympathy and that both inspired
similar action. In this respect, the rhetorics of abolitionism that promote the
freedom of certain kinds of animals and those promoting the freedom of en-
slaved people look remarkably similar. In effect, enslaved people and captive
animals become interchangeable in certain stories. To illustrate the extent of this
interchangeability, it is worth noting that, while some abolitionist stories (like
Stowe’s and Sherwood’s, above) present instruction in how one ought to treat
animals as a model for learning to treat the enslaved, others used abolitionist
rhetoric to indicate how one ought to treat certain animals.
With the historical connections between abolitionism and animal welfare in
mind, it is easy to understand how the cause against animal cruelty appropri-
ated the genres and rhetorical structures of abolitionism. However, explicitly
abolitionist literature for children already contained the roots of animal welfare
literature in its common slippages between enslaved people and captive animals.
This slippage is apparent in another poem from Preston’s Cousin Ann’s Stories
for Children, about a young boy keeping a squirrel as a pet. “Howard and
His Squirrel” reads as an anti–animal captivity story framed by the explicitly
abolitionist language of slavery and freedom:
But Howard thought he should not like

A little slave to be;
And God had made the nimble squirrel,
To run, and climb the tree.
......................
A bird or squirrel in a cage
It makes me sad to see;
It seems so cruel to confine
The creatures made so free.23
In Eliza Cabot Follen’s Hymns, Songs and Fables, for Children (1831), more
explicitly abolitionist texts such as “Remember the Slave” and “The Little
Slave’s Wish” are accompanied by the “Soliloquy of Ellen’s Squirrel, on Receiv-

ing his Liberty;—Overheard by a Lover of Nature and a Friend of Ellen.” The
squirrel tells Ellen that
The thought that you have set me free,

That I can skip, and dance like you,
To your kind, tender heart, shall be
As pure a joy as e’er you knew.24
The idea that certain kinds of animals ought not to be kept captive abounds
in Northern antebellum children’s literature, and the similarities between
abolitionist and anti–animal captivity stories make texts like this one and Fol-
len’s “Billy Rabbit to Mary,” also included in this volume, look very much like
other abolitionist writing. Presented as a letter written by a self-emancipated
rabbit to the child who had tried to domesticate him, Billy Rabbit muses on
his joyful freedom:
To him, who a hole, or a palace inhabits,

To all sorts of beings, to men, and to Rabbits,
Ah, dear to us all, is sweet Liberty,
Especially, Mary, to you and to me.25
While these poems might very well be read as animal welfare literature,
they have been commonly regarded as abolitionist texts.26 The animals in
these poems stand in for, or appear interchangeable with, enslaved people:
their condition of captivity alludes to the similar condition of enslaved African
Americans in the 1830s and 1840s, although they contain no direct reference
to or representation of enslaved people. “Howard and His Squirrel” appeared
in the same collection alongside “Tom and Lucy,” implying that, while some
animals might be sold “like a calf,” others are wrongly held captive. Follen’s
“Soliloquy of Ellen’s Squirrel” and “Billy Rabbit to Mary” were accompanied
by “The Little Slave’s Wish,” in which an enslaved boy compares his condi-
tion with that of animals who are free, wishing he was a bird, a butterfly,
or a deer, rather than an enslaved person.27 These poems’ publication in an
abolitionist collection and their clearly abolitionist rhetorics indicate not only
the relatedness of the animal welfare and abolitionist movements and their
respective bodies of literature but also constitutes a slippage between the two.
Put simply: these poems read like other abolitionist texts, but slaves have been
replaced with animals.
Moreover, similarities between how animals and enslaved people appear in
these texts rendered stories about kindness to animals and kindness to enslaved
people uncomfortably similar.28 As Leslie Ginsberg acknowledges, children’s

stories about the emancipation of animals also countered proslavery arguments
that sentimentalized relations between slaveholders and enslaved people figured
as beloved pets.29 Still, comparisons of people and pets also risked reinscribing
racist arguments about enslaved people’s dependence on white benevolence
and the necessity of interracial stewardship.
A story by Louisa May Alcott in the juvenile periodical Our Young Folks
illustrates these problems. In “Nelly’s Hospital” (1865), a young girl endeavors
to nurse sick or injured animals. The story is reminiscent of Alcott’s Hospital
Sketches or the well-known “My Contraband / The Brothers” (1863), as Nelly
frees a black fly from a spider’s web:
Nelly had heard much about contrabands, knew who they were, and was very much inter-
ested in them; so when she freed the poor black fly, she played he was her contraband, and
felt glad that her first patient was one that needed help so much. Carefully brushing away
as much of the web as she could, she left small Pompey, as she named him, to free his own
legs, lest her clumsy fingers should hurt him; then she laid him in one of the soft beds with
a grain or two of sugar if he needed refreshment, and bade him rest and recover from his
fright, remembering that he was at liberty to fly away whenever he liked, because she had
no wish to make a slave of him.30
Later we learn that “the winged contraband had taken Nelly at her word, and
flown away on the journey home.”31 While young Nelly’s play seems innocent
enough, there remains something unsettling about the comparison of a black
fly—an animal generally considered a pest—and a black “contraband” soldier.
Still, the comparison inserts into this story an antislavery sentiment that seems
extraneous to the text, but on which Nelly’s treatment of the fly is predicated.
“Nelly’s Hospital” displays an attitude toward creatures found in the wild
similar to the stories of Preston’s and Follet’s freed squirrels and rabbits: the
belief that animals, like people, ought not to be held in captivity against their
will. At face value, these comparisons do not evoke the necessarily derogatory
associations that scientific theories of racism create through their hierarchical
taxonomies of humans and animals—or, at least, they do not seem deroga-
tory to the same extent. In these stories, neither animals nor nonwhite people
are portrayed negatively, exactly, though both serve as vehicles to instruct
the assumedly white, middle-class children who read these depictions. Such
animal–human comparisons function within the space between abolitionism’s
tendency to insist on the necessity of white benevolence for emancipation and,
as “Nelly’s Hospital” suggests, the project of positioning animal welfare as the
next frontier of white, middle-class social justice movements.
Animal–Human Mediation
These uncanny resemblances between stories about animals and abolition-

ism were not lost on nineteenth-century readers. On the contrary, some
abolitionist texts depended on these resemblances to make comparisons very
different from those of scientific racism. Rather than reduce nonwhite people
to the lower status of animals, they used the particular status of beloved ani-
mals—family pets—to compensate for what they viewed as a potential failing
of white, Northern sympathy: the inability to feel across racial lines. While
some of the most popular antebellum abolitionist writers have been criticized
for their use of mixed-race characters to garner sympathy from white readers
who may or may not have been incapable of sympathizing with dark-skinned
African American characters, some abolitionist writers did not rely on enslaved
characters’ resemblance to white readers for sympathy. Not simply displac-
ing figures of enslaved people and replacing them with anthropomorphized
animals (as Ellen’s Squirrel and Billy Rabbit do), the stories discussed below
used the familiarity of family pets to mediate readers’ sympathy across lines
of both race and species.
The Lamplighter Picture Book is an 1855 revision of Maria Susanna Cum-
mins’s 1854 sentimental novel The Lamplighter. The Lamplighter Picture Book
reframed Cummins’s novel (which is not generally viewed as an abolitionist
text) for a younger audience and reoriented it toward an abolitionist cause.
Composed of selections from Cummins’s original text interspersed with an-
tislavery poetry, the picture book centers on the story of young Gerty, who
is orphaned, unloved, and abused by her guardian until a kindly, Christian
lamplighter rescues her.32 The book’s introductory stanzas first present the
overarching abolitionist ambition of the text: “Not alone by little Gerty / Is
the telltale muse inspired.”33 The story of Gerty’s suffering is framed in parallel
to the suffering of enslaved people, as an early poem asks that
Ye who sigh as from these pages

Gerty’s sorrows you may learn,
Ne’er forget the bondman’s sadness,
Never from his pleadings turn.34
Throughout the book, one reads about and sympathizes with Gerty, and in
the accompanying poetry is invited to compare her position as an abused
child with that of enslaved and self-emancipated people. Gerty falls just short
of making this comparison, herself, in another poem, “Gerty in the Wood
Yard,” where we read,
At times a snow-white sail she spied,

Far out upon the sea,
And queried if a soul on board
Was sorrowful as she;
She knew not that there might be slaves,
For freedom sighing or their graves.35
Although Gerty does not know that the ships she sees may be carrying hu-
man cargo, the comparison between herself and these unknown passengers is
implied, as the reader might surmise that the enslaved were, indeed, “sorrowful
as she.” One might expect that the text’s initial comparison of the orphaned
child to the enslaved person would continue, explicitly associating Gerty with
enslaved black people. But no enslaved characters venture closer to Gerty than
when she spies the “snow-white sail . . . far out upon the sea.”
Moreover, this cross-racial comparison is complicated by another—cross-
species—comparison in the text. Also in the wood yard, Gerty first encounters
the stray cats with whom she sympathizes and with whom the narrative also
identifies her. The cats are described as “frightened looking creatures, who, like
Gerty herself, crept or scampered about, and often hid themselves among the
wood and coal, seeming to feel, as she did, great doubts about their having a
right to be anywhere.”36 Gerty’s position in relation to the cats—and the slaves,
I will show—changes, when the kindly lamplighter, Uncle True, gives Gerty the
present of a kitten. We read of her taking the kitten home, sheltering him, and
sharing her food with him despite the danger in which this puts Gerty vis-à-vis
her guardian. Gerty comes to cherish her pet, but he is soon killed when her
guardian flings the kitten into a pot of boiling water. Glenn Hendler’s analysis
of this scene in Cummins’s original novel is indebted to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
discussion of mediated sympathy. Hendler explains that, while “Cummins
may have been asking the reader to pity the cat—briefly,” the animal merely
mediates the sympathy meant for Gerty herself.37 In the abolitionist version
of Gerty’s story, though, the figure of the slave further complicates how that
sympathy is mediated in the text.
The Lamplighter Picture Book presents interracial sympathy mediated
through an animal as the story of Gerty’s kitten is reframed in abolitionist
rhetoric. As in the novel, Gerty decides to keep the kitten, even though she
knows she will have to struggle to feed him and hide him from her guardian.
But the picture book transforms this act into an explicit reference to the 1850
Fugitive Slave Act, as the poem “Gerty’s Little Kitten,” explains that
Thus kind are some good persons, oft,

When slaves for aid are asking;
Right deeds, they know, whate’er the law,
Will make God’s favor lasting.
And thus good people often give

The fugitive a lodging,
Ne’er fearing those, intent on gain,
About his pathway dodging.38
Unlike Ellen’s and Howard’s squirrels, and Billy Rabbit, this cat never actually
stands in for an enslaved person, but exists as the victimized animal in an anal-
ogy that explains relations of sympathy. Gerty’s identification with the cat—
who is then identified with the fugitive slave—mediates white sympathy for
black people through a supposedly more familiar sympathy with domesticated
animals. Put another way, cross-racial sympathy, here manifesting in the desire
to harbor the fugitive, is compared to a more familiar act of sympathy—the
desire to care for a stray kitten.
Framed as an analogy, Gerty has sympathy for the kitten just as the abolition-
ist has sympathy for the enslaved. The logic of the abolitionist text demands
that the reader take up this model: “and thus, good people often give / The
fugitive a lodging.” The instructive nature of this poem is clear: young readers
are meant to read the story of Gerty and her kitten, and transfer the sympathy
that they share with her through the animal, to the racial other—an other
whom the text simultaneously distances from its assumedly white readers, even
as it mediates interracial sympathy. Regarding Gerty as a model for abolitionist
sympathy, the reader is meant to identify with her in the text—though never
with the cats or with enslaved people. Although Gerty is initially positioned
as somehow “like” her fellow-sufferers, the cats in the wood yard and the sor-
rowful slaves on the faraway ship, she is soon transformed from the object of
sympathy to its subject, repositioned as the giver rather than the elicitor of
sympathy. Her sympathy is not dependent on this likeness in the text or the
supposed likeness of the assumed readers to cats, slaves, or orphaned children,
but is mediated through these various positions of difference. Through her
relation to the kitten, Gerty becomes a model for readerly sympathy, aligned
not with the enslaved but with the abolitionist.
The identification of the potentially abolitionist reader with Gerty works
only as a parallel, analogous model though, rather than a literal one. Gerty
does not show us how to be an abolitionist. Her sympathy remains one step
away from sympathy for fugitive slaves, who appear in abstracted form in the
picture book’s poetry but never enter into Gerty’s narrative. The story compels
the reader to take the abolitionist’s position, which it presents in parallel to
Gerty’s position. Thereby, it presents slaves and kittens as similarly parallel.
The kitten and the slave are not, however, interchangeable in this structure.
The Lamplighter Picture Book does not quite go so far as to argue that slaves
are like cats, but it does offer a model of sympathy that allows Gerty’s story to
function as a model for abolitionism. To understand this structure of sympathy,
we must look to the story’s assumptions about cross-racial and cross-species
sympathy, and about how and to whom that sympathy might be transferred.
Domestic Proximity and Animal Kinship
Why do we need the story of Gerty and her kitten to convey abolitionist
sympathy for the enslaved? The answer lies in the text’s assumptions about
its potentially abolitionist, assumedly white readers. Cummins’s picture book
shows that comparing the relative sympathy white people might have for ani-
mals and for African American people is not a new phenomenon. This model
of sympathy is ruled by a similar logic to that which regarded the mixed-race
characters of abolitionist literature as particularly able to garner white sympathy
because of their supposed similarity to white people. However, in these com-
parisons between cats, enslaved people, and Gerty, we see objects of sympathy
who are not dependent on the reader’s supposed similarity to or identification
with them. On the contrary, the reader is meant to feel for each of these figures
despite his or her position of difference from them.
The presence of animals in this text helps us understand how this model of
sympathy does not depend on sameness but works, rather, despite difference.
Boggs notes the “double sense of identification and disidentification” with
animals in literary narratives, writing that “because the animal is like them
[people], they are asked to extend kindness, but the kindness they extend makes
them human steward of the animal and marks their separation from it.”39 This
is a more complex structure than stewardship, however. When animals are
depicted as proximate to humans, familiar to them, or when their position as
objects of sympathy is relied on to mediate sympathy between humans, that
sympathy is figured across notions of difference, as both animal and human
others are positioned as somehow proximate to, but not necessarily like, the
sympathizer. What I call animal–humanist sympathy is dependent on this
understanding of proximity, rather than distinction. A notion of domestic
proximity may produce what Oliver calls “an ethics of relationality,” allowing
sympathy to be transferred across positions of “difference or alterity,” rather
than necessitating “sameness” for ethical behavior.40 We might understand

certain animals as proximate to humans (though not necessarily “like” them)
by virtue of their presence in domestic spaces. Relations between people and
other animals can therefore be understood, in part, as constructed through
their domestic proximity to one another, rendering them more likely objects
of sympathy by virtue of their familiarity.
Since, as Amy Kaplan has shown, domestic spaces have national implications
in the nineteenth century, proximity works on multiple geographic scales in
these stories.41 The characterization of domesticated animals as familiar, here,
might also be understood as familial—that is, as figured in affective kinship rela-
tions or through larger notions of national kinship and belonging—by virtue
of their proximity to humans in domestic spaces. In the dual understanding
of the word domestic, which renders the home a microcosm for the nation,
we see how certain kinds of animals figure as members of a (white) American
national family. The iconic presence of cats and dogs in nineteenth-century
depictions of white, middle-class domesticity illustrates this point.42
If we put aside notions of sameness and difference in The Lamplighter Pic-
ture Book in favor of notions of domestic proximity, we see that domesticated
cats appear here closer to Gerty than enslaved people do. Rather than assume
that sympathy must be conveyed across notions of perceived sameness (as
abolitionism’s “whitewashed” mixed-race literary figures are often employed),
this text assumes that sympathy is more easily conveyed across positions of
domestic proximity that render cats familiar to Gerty and, presumably, to the
(white, Northern) readers of the picture book. Gerty and the kitten are not
simply “like” one another in the text, but they share domestic spaces. This is
true in the literal sense of Gerty’s respective physical proximity to the cats in
the wood yard and the slaves “far out upon the sea.” Further, Gerty’s and the
cats’ physical proximity to one another and their similarly precarious positions
of “seeming to feel . . . great doubts about their having a right to be anywhere”
locate both the child and the cats on the margins of this domestic space, but
still within a frame that might be recognizable to the reader.43
As The Lamplighter Picture Book blurs differences between interspecies and
interracial relationships, it suggests that the proximity of potentially abolition-
ist white readers to familiar, domesticated animals—like cats—is closer than
their proximity to enslaved people. The analogy “Gerty is to the kitten as the
abolitionist reader is to the fugitive slave” works because of the assumed famil-
iarity of this first pairing. Put another way, the act of caring for a pet kitten is
assumed to be familiar to the book’s readers, and therefore it serves as a suitable,
recognizable model for how white people ought to act toward enslaved or self-
emancipated people, who may be less familiar. If, as The Lamplighter Picture
Book and the case of the Katrina dogs assume, white sympathy is mediated
more easily across species than race, it seems that this sympathy is necessar-
ily limited. Mediating cross-racial sympathy through familiar domesticated
animals figures racial others and animals in parallel relations to white people,
rendering enslaved black people sympathetic to white people—rather ironi-
cally—only in the historical familiarity of their subordinated domestication.
In one sense, the often paternalistic rhetoric of abolitionism retains hierarchies
of both race and species in the subordination of both animals and enslaved,
black people to white people.
However, when we more closely examine the model of sympathy provided
by Gerty and her kitten, we find a relation not simply dependent on either
likeness or subordination but forged out of proximity and familiarity, open-
ing up a more progressive model for ethical behavior. When we take into
account nineteenth-century theorizations of race and difference as (literal
or metaphorized) differences in species, we cannot pose animal difference as
necessarily outside “the possibility of ethical relations.”44 The blurring of lines
between animals and humans in nineteenth-century texts calls into question
the differentiation itself. As arguments for racial hierarchy are also dependent
on the hierarchization of humans over other animals, when we call into ques-
tion the nature of animal–human difference, the comparison of animals and
nonwhite people is reframed.
The animal-mediated interracial sympathy of The Lamplighter Picture Book
models a form of humanism that is dependent on the nonhuman as referent.
The animal referent in this model of animal-mediated interracial sympathy
(i.e., the cats in this text) is not simply posed in opposition to humans but
figures in proximity to both the white human sympathetic subject and to the
nonwhite human objects of sympathy (i.e., slaves). The shared sense of their
mutual marginalization facilitates Gerty’s association with her pet kitten, for
The child loved “Kitty” all the more

Because she was in danger,
And braved Nan’s wrath some milk to gain
To feed the little stranger.45
Gerty’s own othering sets her apart from the text’s other white characters. In
fact, Gerty is compared only to the cats and to enslaved black people in the
picture book. Her marginalized position makes the transfer of sympathy across
positions of difference a necessity, as Gerty is not “like” any other human char-
acters. While animal-mediated sympathy may indicate a limited sympathy in

the sense that the animal is positioned as somehow necessary for facilitating
interracial sympathy, this model of sympathy is also not dependent on notions
of sameness for ethical behavior, but allows sympathy to be transferred across
acknowledged positions of difference—that is, even to a “stranger.”
Gerty’s ability to sympathize across difference therefore offers a more progres-
sive model for interracial and interspecies relationships. Insofar as they evoke
sympathy across acknowledged positions of difference, I argue, domesticated
animals are familiar, rather than similar here. They also figure as potentially
familial in their relations of care and belonging in shared domestic spaces.
Proximity seems to be one marker of relationality, in which sympathy—and
possibly feelings of kinship and belonging—might be mediated across differ-
ence. The case of Gerty and her kitten is one example of such relationality
to animals. The relation of Gerty to the kitten is not simply one of speciesist
domestic subordination but, in her similar state of subordination, one that
more closely resembles ties of affective kinship. We might view the kitten Gerty
cares for as her sole kinship relation at this point in the text. The kitten is a
fellow-creature whom she welcomes into her domestic world with the hope for
love and companionship—importantly, in the absence of any such sentiment
from her human guardians. In this, the familiar and the familial are blurred
within the shared domestic space that Gerty and the kitten both inhabit.
Understandings of familial belonging are doubly relevant here because they
also reflect on nineteenth-century discourses of race and slavery. In John Neal’s
short story “The Instincts of Childhood” (1842), we read an animal–slave com-
parison that is essential to the story’s abolitionist argument and that hinges on
parallel models of family. Closely resembling the narratives of “wild” animals
such as squirrels and rabbits kept as pets and then given their liberty, stories
about children who decide to free birds from cages also abound in nineteenth-
century children’s literature. In Neal’s story, young Margaret keeps a family
of birds in cages, where she believes they have everything they could need or
want. However, because she has placed the father bird in a cage separate from
the mother and babies, the birds are upset, though she fails to recognize why.
Her father asks how she would feel were he separated from their family, and
she understands the connection. She wonders, though, who would take care
of the birds if she did not. Her father explains that the birds can care for them-
selves, or else God will provide for them. Margaret ultimately frees the birds.
Later, Margaret’s parents are complaining about an enslaved woman who is
distraught because her husband has been sold away. Margaret makes an easy
connection to the earlier conversation about the birds and points to the cage.
Her father then makes a paternalistic argument in support of slavery: black

people are better off enslaved than having to take care of themselves. Finally,
Margaret asks, “Who feeds the young ravens, father? Who takes care of all the
white mothers, and all the white babies we see?” to which he replies, “I know
what you are thinking of, but then—there’s a mighty difference, let me tell
you, between a slave mother and a white mother—between a slave child and a
white child!”46 Although Margaret is persistent, her father remains unconvinced
at the end of the story.
What Margaret learned about the birds has unintentionally taught her
something about enslaved people. Although her father is unwilling to make
the connection between caged birds and enslaved people, the daughter uses
this connection, hinging on the father’s initial comparison of the birds to their
own white family. What the daughter realizes, with her true child-abolitionist
instincts, is not simply that slaves are like birds but that, when it comes to ques-
tions of freedom and captivity, both birds and slaves are like white people, and
that the model of family with which she is familiar might be applied to both.
The abolitionist political cartoon “Pointing a Moral” (fig. 3) provides a
similar comparison of families, further evidencing the limitations of animal–
human comparisons for abolitionist logic while also using the rhetoric of
family for its ultimate humanist argument. The conversation accompanying
the illustration reads as follows:
Little Sis—“Oh, par, look how miserable poor Pussy is since you sent all her kittens away!”
Par (who is an ardent Abolitionist)—“Yes, my darling! Now you can form some idea of what
the poor black slave’s mother suffers when her little ones are taken from her.”
Little Sis (eagerly)—“Does black peoples have all their little kittens taken away from them?”
In short, the “moral lesson” exposes the fundamental problem of the equa-
tion “kittens are like slaves” by showing that slaves do not have “all their little
kittens” but their human children “taken away from them.” If we are to take
selling enslaved children as worse than dispensing with a cat’s kittens (which
this humanist argument assumes is the case for its potential readers), the ex-
ample that this father gives his child is logically insufficient, in a way that the
proto-abolitionist child recognizes. The lesson here is that enslaved people
are less appropriately compared to cats than to white people. This text also
outlines the difference between human and animal families: cats are to kittens
as human mothers are to human children.
What the child’s articulation of this difference explains, and what the
mother in the background of the image also suggests, is that slave families
Figure 3. are not, in fact, just like cat families but like
“Pointing a Moral,” Frank Leslie’s
white human ones. The cartoon assumes the
Budget of Fun, No. 62, May 1863.
similarity of human families to one another
Courtesy of the American Antiquar-
ian Society.
across racial lines, which can, perhaps ironi-
cally, be shown by comparison with animal
families. If we are to grasp the moral, which demands that we think of cats and
enslaved people differently, we must also assume some degree of homogeniza-
tion among human families. The mother in the background reminds us of the
more appropriate equation: the relation of enslaved, black mothers and their
children is equal to that between free, white mothers and their children. This
equation requires a more radical realization than the first, and this realization
is the subtext of the lesson. The fundamental assumption here, of course, is
that we ought to prioritize human children over kittens, and the resounding
reason for this prioritization has to do with perceptions of kinship, that is,
who counts as family.
Abolitionist articulations of humanity were sometimes paired with more

specific definitions of who counts as family, as abolitionists extended argu-
ments about enslaved people’s humanity to imply notions of Christianized
or national kinship with free, white people. The question “Am I Not a Man
and a Brother?” is a rhetorical one. By answering yes, we also must take into
account its conjunction of humanity with kinship—the phrase a “man AND
a brother” suggests not only recognition of humanity but membership in some
form of universally construed national or human family. As Follen has it in
an 1846 poem from The Liberty Cap, this condition of belonging in kinship
is sufficient for inclusion in the category of humanity:
He asks, Am not I man?

He pleads, Am not I a brother?
Then dare not, and hope not you can
The cry of humanity smother.47
Similarly, the idea of Christian kinship shared across racial lines is assumed
by most abolitionist rhetoric. As The Slave’s Friend (1838) asks and answers,
“What! is the slave a brother or sister to those who hold them in bondage?
Yes. All men are the children of God.”48 This argument about brotherhood
or sisterhood is as much an articulation of religiously or nationally construed
familial obligation as it is a response to pseudoscientific theories that pose racial
differences as differences of species.
After Charles Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859,
the British anatomists Richard Owen and Thomas Henry Huxley deliberated
about evolutionary relatedness. Their main debate during the early 1860s
concerned the comparative brain structures of humans and apes, and the ques-
tion of what differentiated humans from other primates.49 The poem “The
Gorilla’s Dilemma” from Punch (1862) takes up arguments about humanity
and brotherhood, in a demand to assess evolutionary relatedness in terms of
kinship relations:
Say am I a man and a brother,

Or only an anthropoid ape?
Your judgment, be’t one way or ‘tother,
Do put into positive shape.
Must I humbly take rank as quadruman
As OWEN maintains that I ought?
Or rise into brotherhood human,
As HUXLEY has flatt’ringly taught?
For though you may deem a Gorilla

Don’t think much of his rank in creation,
If of feeling one have a scintilla,
It glows to know “who’s one’s relation”—
Apes and monkeys (now crowding by dozens
Their kinship with us to have proved),
Or an OWEN and HUXLEY for cousins,
Though, it may be, a little removed.50
In short, Huxley supported Darwin’s theory of common descent and the trans-
mutation of species on the basis of similarities in brain structures among pri-
mates, while Owen argued for the separateness and uniqueness of humankind.
“The Gorilla’s Dilemma” conflates notions of evolutionary proximity and
kinship, falsely positing that brotherhood necessarily follows from humanity.
Scientific race theory is embedded in the evolutionary debate, as the question of
one’s “rank in creation” applied to the scientific taxonomies of writers like Nott,
Gliddon, and Thomas Henry Huxley, whose theory of evolution also included
nine classifications of race and the belief that “Negroes” were evolutionarily
located somewhere between apes and European people.51 In the context of
evolutionary science, the question of “who’s one’s relation” is present not in
spite of but because of an allusion to racial difference as also evolutionary. The
poem later confirms this by asking “What are ‘Cures,’ Nigger-dances and jibes
/ To the black spider-monkey’s contortions?” in a move that reminds us of other
contemporaneous—and derogatory—comparisons of humans and animals.52
This juxtaposition of race and species is rendered even more apparent by
the appearance of “The Gorilla’s Dilemma” on the same page of Punch as a
short poem titled “Black Ingratitude.” The latter is a commentary on aboli-
tion and racism, and ends with the line “Our black friend’s much more Free
than Welcome.”53 Despite “Liberty’s benignant spell,” abolition fails to fully
include black people in white structures of national and familial belonging.54
While “The Gorilla’s Dilemma” juxtaposes differences of race and species, its
ultimate inconclusiveness (“Had I better be monkey or man, / By enlightened
self-interest’s suggestion? / Say you-for hang me, if I can”) leaves the question
of animal–human kinship unanswered, and unsurprisingly so, given similarly
inconclusive discourses on race, humanity, and kinship.55
The overlapping discourses of nineteenth-century scientific and social justice

debates on race and species and the shared, fuzzy spaces within which differ-
ences in each were defined do not necessarily indicate that these differences
are of the same kind or degree. However, the shared rhetorics of similarity and
social obligation in race and species discourse show how these categories were
similarly conceived in nineteenth-century literary and scientific conversation.

Another poem from Punch inspired by scientific evolutionary theory, “Mon-
keyana” (1861), also alludes to the iconic abolitionist question “Am I Not a
Man and a Brother?” and is as inconclusive as “The Gorilla’s Dilemma” in its
answer.56 More emphatic than the details of the scientific debate this poem
outlines is the accompanying image that brings abolitionist rhetoric to bear
on evolutionary science.57
Taken apart from the poem, this image might be read as racist commentary
just as easily as evolutionary commentary about species difference.
Figure 4.
“Monkeyana,” Punch, No. 40, May 18, 1861. Courtesy of the Division of Rare
and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
The visual and associative anthropomorphism of the illustration is accom-

panied by a reference to humanity and kinship, as the gorilla’s sign poses a
similarly rhetorical question to that of the antislavery medallion, with a slight
syntactical difference (“Am I” rather than “Am I Not”). This rhetorical differ-
ence suggests that a negative answer might follow more easily here than from
the abolitionist image, hinting—in contrast to the coupling of humanity and
kinship in “The Gorilla’s Dilemma”—that the inclusion of nonhuman primates
in evolutionary proximity to humans does not, in fact, necessitate their inclu-
sion in notions of human kinship. This proximity—unlike that of Gerty and
her kitten—may not be sufficient for humanist notions of kinship. If this is
its evolutionist assumption, one wonders what the image suggests about race.
These forceful examples of intertwined discourses of race, species, and kin-
ship demand not only that we acknowledge their shared historical discourse
but that we rethink the function of difference defined by this discourse. The
abolitionist texts discussed above illustrate the limitations of humanist rheto-
rics that depend on familiar animals to evoke cross-racial sympathy. But they
also allow us to reevaluate the role of similarity and difference for producing
sympathy—and even feelings of kinship and belonging. This reevaluation
demands an alternative model of sympathy that deprioritizes notions of
sameness, acknowledging that even humanist sympathy can function across
relations of alterity.
Notes
I am grateful to the editors of this special issue for attending to a much-needed topic, and to the editors
and anonymous readers of American Quarterly for their helpful feedback. Research for this essay was
completed while on a Jay and Deborah Last Fellowship in American Visual Culture at the American
Antiquarian Society. I have benefited from both the time to write and the engaging community of
scholars who helped me refine these ideas at the Animals and Society Institute/Wesleyan Animal Studies
Human–Animal Studies Fellowship. Thanks to the Futures of American Studies Institute and Cornell
University’s Nineteenth-Century American Reading Group, where early versions of this essay were
presented and received useful feedback. Special thanks to Alex W. Black, Harlan Weaver, and Jonathan
Senchyne, whose shared research, conversations, and multiple readings contributed significantly to
my writing and thinking. Thanks always to my parents, Sue Ann and Stephan Fielder.
1. See Winthrop Jordan, “The Apes of Africa” and “Negroes, Apes, and Beasts,” in White over Black:
American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1968), 28–32 and 228–34. Thomas Jefferson’s discussion of “the preference of the Oranootan for
the black women over those of his own species,” arguing for the fundamental importance of racial
difference, is one prominent example (Notes on the State of Virginia [London: John Stockdale, 1787],
230).
2. Carl Linnaeus’s 1735 text, Systema Naturae, was revised throughout the eighteenth century, and his
system of taxonomy was the basis for many other systems of scientific classification that followed.
For a brief history of scientific racism in the West, see Ali Rattansi, “Beyond the Pale: Scientific Rac-
ism, the Nation, and the Politics of Colour,” in Racism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford
3. Different kinds of animals register differently in conversations about race and species, however.
Comparisons between enslaved people and “wild” creatures who were sometimes domesticated (such
as birds, squirrels, and rabbits) do not suggest the same things as comparisons of black people with
nonhuman primates (the most common comparison in scientific theories of racism) or with livestock
(whose condition of labor was often likened to the condition of enslaved “chattel”). Further, humans’
experiences of animals are often heterogeneous and racialized encounters. See Sara E. Johnson, “You
Should Give Them Blacks to Eat: Waging Inter-American Wars of Torture and Terror,” American
Quarterly 61.1 (2009): 65–92. Critiques of the philosophical binary constructed through the hu-
man–animal distinction are useful, but in the texts I discuss, the specificities of both animals and
humans seem more important than this binarism, even where it exists. By acknowledging both the
specificities of species and the heterogeneity within them, I mean to resist making broad claims about
“the animal” or “humans.”
4. Kelly Oliver, “Ambivalence toward Animals and the Moral Community,” Hypatia 27.3 (2012): 4.
5. Sterling Brown is generally cited as the earliest literary critic to discuss mixed-race characters used to
garner white sympathy in nineteenth-century literature. See Negro Poetry and Drama, reprinted in The
Negro in American Fiction (Washington, DC: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1937), 133; and
Black and White in American Culture, ed. Jules Chametzky and Sidney Kaplan (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1969), 339. Later critics who note this problem include Carolyn L. Karcher, “Rape,
Murder, and Revenge in ‘Slavery’s Pleasant Homes’: Lydia Maria Child’s Antislavery Fiction and the
Limits of Genre,” in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century
America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 72; Werner Sollors, Neither
Black nor White yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1997), 223–25; and Eve Allegra Raimon, The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited: Race and
Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2004), 14–15.
6. I turn to abolitionist children’s literature in particular because, as Deborah C. DeRosa acknowledges,
its rhetorical strategy is to present sentimental or affective antislavery arguments that still allow for the
politicization of sentiment. See Deborah C. DeRosa, Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature,
1830–1865 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 10. DeRosa argues for the predomi-
nant use of three main images in domestic abolitionism: the victimized slave child, the abolitionist
mother–historian, and the young (white) abolitionist. I want to add another image to this framework:
the victimized domesticated animal, who is used similarly to the victimized slave child, though with
a difference. Not necessarily replacing the figure of the victimized slave in these texts, the relationship
between animals and slaves is complex and exhibits a more progressive model of sympathy than that
evinced by the mixed-race characters so prominent in popular abolitionist literature for adults.
7. The abolitionist children’s literature I discuss all falls within the realm of what DeRosa calls “domestic
abolitionism,” antebellum literature written primarily by Northern, middle-class white women for
Northern white children. DeRosa discusses white women’s authorship of abolitionist children’s litera-
ture in her introduction to Into the Mouths of Babes: An Anthology of Children’s Abolitionist Literature
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005) and in the first chapter of Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature,
1830–1865.
8. My use of the term humanism highlights a prioritization of the human—often critiqued by animal
studies theorists—rather than the philosophies of either religious or secular humanism. I situate my
discussion most closely in conversation with human–animal studies in its focus on the relationship
between human and nonhuman animals, or with what Michael Lundblad distinguishes as “animality
studies, a field distinguished from animal studies in its prioritization of questions of human politics
. . . in relation to how we have thought about human and nonhuman animality at various historical
and cultural moments” (“From Animal to Animality Studies,” PMLA 124.2 [2009]: 497).
9. Neel Ahuja, “Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World,” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 557–58. While
Marjorie Spiegel’s study The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery (New York: Mirror
Books/I.D.E.A., 1997) has often been cited in discussions of race and species, this text does little
more than juxtapose particular instances of oppression without regard for the very specific contexts
in which they occurred. Although Spiegel evokes very basic similarities between the enslavement of
African Americans and the oppression of certain kinds of animals, I am more interested in connections
that pay close attention to historical and geographic contexts and discuss relations between different
kinds of oppression without simply equating them. Texts that acknowledge and analyze the nuanced
relations between the oppression of animals and people and the important heterogeneities at stake in
both of these generalizing categories include Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living
World (New York: Norton, 1995); David Nibert, Animal Rights/Human Rights: Entanglements of Op-
pression and Liberation (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); Nigel Rothsfels, Savages and Beasts:
The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); and Timothy
Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2011).
10. Ahuja, “Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World,” 558.
11. This understanding of racial difference can be seen, for example, in Arthur de Gobineau’s discussion
in The Inequality of the Human Races, trans. Adrian Collins (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915;
original in French, 1853–55), 23–35, 205–12.
12. Jane Elizabeth Jones, The Young Abolitionists; or Conversations on Slavery (Boston: Wm. E. Edwards,
1848), 5.
13. See Sojourner Truth’s 1850 narrative, as recounted to Olive Gilbert, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth,
ed. Margaret Washington (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 4, 14.
14. “Tom and Lucy: A Tale for Little Lizzie,” Cousin Ann’s Stories for Children (Philadelphia: J. M. McKim,
1849), 17.
15. For a history of pet keeping in the United States, see Katherine C. Grier, Pets in America: A History
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and Grier, “Animal House: Pet Keeping
in Urban and Suburban Households in the Northeast, 1850–1900,” in New England’s Creatures:
1400–1900, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University, 1993), 108–29.
16. These connections were made, for example, in texts written for mothers’ instruction of young children.
See Mrs. [Lydia Maria] Child, The Mother’s Book (Boston: Carter and Hendee, 1831), 6–8; and Mrs.
L[ydia] H. Sigourney, Letters to Mothers (Hartford: Hudson and Skinner, 1838), 37–40.
17. For a discussion of the historical relations between the antislavery and animal welfare movements
(including prominent participants in both movements, such as Henry Bergh, William Wilberforce,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Lydia Maria Child), see Diane L. Beers, “A Movement Takes Shape: The
Origins of Animal Advocacy,” in For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights
Activism in the United States (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 19–38. American writers such
as Stowe and Child wrote both abolitionist and animal welfare literature for adults and children. For
a discussion of the similar historical connections between children’s welfare and animal welfare, see
Susan J. Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
18. While Stowe’s novel is most often discussed as a text read by adults, Barbara Hochman argues that
Uncle Tom’s Cabin may also be counted among abolitionist literature for children, both for its many
adaptations for younger children as well as in its original form. See Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading
Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851–1911 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2011). For discussions of Stowe’s novel as abolitionist children’s literature, see especially pages
21–22 and chapters 4 and 7.
19. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: Norton, 2010), 72.
20. Ibid. For a discussion of Stowe’s use of animals in her postbellum children’s fiction and how this might
help us understand the race and gender politics behind her writing, see Jennifer Mason, Civilized
Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850–1900 (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 95–118.
21. Colleen Glenney Boggs, “Emily Dickinson’s Animal Pedagogies,” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 536.
22. Mrs. (Mary Martha) Sherwood, The babes in the wood of the New World (New York: Mahlon Day,
1831).
23. Ann Preston, “Howard and His Squirrel,” Cousin Ann’s Stories for Children, 13–14.
24. Eliza Follen, “Soliloquy of Ellen’s Squirrel, on Receiving his Liberty;—Overheard by a Lover of Nature
and a Friend of Ellen,” Hymns, Songs and Fables, for Children (Boston: Carter, Hendee, and Babcock,
1831), 34.
25. Eliza Follen, “Billy Rabbit to Mary,” in Hymns, Songs and Fables, for Children, 41.
26. See DeRosa, Into the Mouths of Babes and Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature. The overlap
between abolitionist and animal welfare texts can also be seen in places in which enslaved people are
depicted as being kind to animals, as evidence of their humane goodness. Preston’s Tom and Lucy,
for example, “never hurt the butterflies / Nor pelted frogs away.” See Preston, Cousin Ann’s Stories for
Children, 17.
27. Follen, Hymns, Songs and Fables, for Children, 69–70.
28. In addition, the logic of these stories implies a similar misdeed in keeping human beings and only
certain other kinds of animals captive (i.e., they were not written about more commonly domesticated
pets, such as cats and dogs). Hence such stories leave hierarchizations of species intact, raising questions
about which kinds of animals ought not to be held captive and which may. Rabbits and squirrels are
generally not deemed appropriate pets in these poems, and the freedom of birds was widely promoted,
but we might surmise that most nineteenth-century readers felt differently about more commonly
domesticated animals. For a more extensive history of specific pets and how common they were, see
Grier, Pets in America.
29. See Lesley Ginsberg, “Of Babies, Beasts, and Bondage: Slavery and the Question of Citizenship
in Antebellum American Children’s Literature,” in The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader,
ed. Caroline Levander and Carol J. Singley (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003),
85–105.
30. Louisa May Alcott, “Nelly’s Hospital,” Our Young Folks, April 1865, 272.
31. Ibid., 275.
32. DeRosa argues that Sarah Josepha Hale was possibly the author of the poetry in The Lamplighter Pic-
ture Book, also revising Cummins’s text for a younger audience. See Domestic Abolitionism in Juvenile
Literature, 52–53. Because the author of the poetry is unclear, and for the sake of simplicity, I have
chosen to refer to the picture book’s author as Cummins. For more on the publication history of The
Lamplighter Picture Book, see Susan S. Williams, “‘Promoting an Extensive Sale’: The Production and
Reception of The Lamplighter,” New England Quarterly 69.2 (1996): 179–200.
33. Maria S. Cummins, The Lamplighter Picture Book (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1856), 3.
34. Ibid., 4.
35. Ibid., 8.
36. Ibid.
37. Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 4.
38. Cummins, Lamplighter Picture Book, 10.
39. Boggs, “Emily Dickinson’s Animal Pedagogies,” 536.
40. Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human (New York: Columbia University Press,
2009), 21.
41. My bipartite understanding of the simultaneity of the domestic spaces of the home and the nation
derives from Kaplan’s notion of “Manifest Domesticity.” See Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in
the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
42. Mason discusses such a domestic scene in Civilized Creatures, 13–16.
43. This text positions both the child and the cats as needing protection from adult violence.
44. Oliver, Animal Lessons, 5.
45. Cummins, Lamplighter Picture Book, 10.
46. John Neal, “Instincts of Childhood: A Dialogue in Two Parts,” in The Anti-slavery Picknick, ed. John
A. Collins (Boston: H. W. Williams; New York: American Antislavery Society, 1842), 22.
47. Eliza Lee Follen, The Liberty Cap (Boston: Leonard C. Bowles, 1846), 9. The differently gendered
alternative to this question, “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?” was also posed. See American Anti-
Slavery Society, Slave’s Friend 3.6 (1838): 1.
48. Slave’s Friend, 1.
49. Owen and Huxley’s argument was part of an ongoing debate known as the “Great Hippocampus
Question.” For a discussion of the intricacies of their dispute, see Christopher E. Cosans, Owen’s Ape
and Darwin’s Bulldog: Beyond Darwinism and Creationism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2009).
50. “The Gorilla’s Dilemma,” Punch, October 18, 1862, 164.
51. See, for example, Josiah Nott, George Gliddon et al., Types of Mankind, or Ethnological Researches
based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures and Crania of Races, and upon their Natural,
Geographical, Philological and Biblical History (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1854); Thomas
Henry Huxley, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1863); and
Huxley, “On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind,” Journal of the
Ethnological Society of London 2 (1870): 404–9.
52. “Gorilla’s Dilemma,” 164.
53. “Black Ingratitude,” Punch, October 18, 1862, 164.
54. Ibid.
55. “Gorilla’s Dilemma.”
56. “Monkeyana,” Punch, May 18, 1861, 206.
57. While this choice of slogan could be no coincidence, it is worth noting that Josiah Wedgewood, the
activist associated with the antislavery medallion’s production, was the grandfather of Charles Darwin.
Welfarist and Imperial: Anti-Cruelty Laws and Civilizational Discourse | 515
Welfarist and Imperial: The Contributions

of Anticruelty Laws to Civilizational
Discourse
Maneesha Deckha
T
he human–nonhuman binary exerts tremendous influence in West-
ern societies where social, cultural, and legal orders have taken shape
through a species divide that values humans above all other beings.
Although the human–nonhuman distinction and anthropocentric value-system
are formative to Western societies, it would be a mistake to read their effects
in isolation. Human problematizations about nonhuman beings are rarely
ever just about the nonhuman, but mediated by other circuits of difference.
This intersectional claim that ideas of species difference and nonhumans are
affected by other hierarchies of difference is relatively new to intersectionality
theory, which has taken human lives as its focus in showcasing the interrelated-
ness of gendering, racializing, and other difference dynamics.1 Nevertheless,
more and more scholars are attending to the connections between speciesism,
racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression.2 For many, demonstrating
these connections is a way to represent animal exploitation as a serious issue
to an audience typically immersed in humanist epistemologies. Rather than
merely argue, however—as prominent animal ethics theories have previously
done3—that speciesism is like racism and sexism, intersectional posthumanist
theory goes farther to reveal how these logics of domination are intertwined.
The intersectional claim about species brings animals and their experiences into
the zone of ethical regard and justice within critical theoretical frameworks.
I seek to add to the strength of this intersectional claim by unpacking the
racialized, religious, classed, and gendered dimensions of anticruelty legislation
both in their genesis and in their current forms. By “anticruelty legislation” I
am referring to statutes that either as a whole or through specific provisions
prohibit certain uses and activities involving animals, violations of which con-
stitute a criminal or regulatory offense, and/or incorporate a generic offense
against the “unnecessary suffering” or “inhumane” treatment of animals (or
words to similar effect). In the United States, all fifty states have these types

of anticruelty statutes or provisions as part of their criminal law.4 Despite the

variation in specific wording and content, two of the hallmark features of US
anticruelty legislation (similar to their historical antecedents and international
counterparts) are (1) the outlawing of animal neglect and abandonment and
certain forms of animal fighting and baiting; and (2) a generic provision that
makes unnecessary or otherwise unwarranted or inhumane suffering an of-
fense.5 It is these elements of anticruelty legislation that come under close
scrutiny here. To discuss US federal initiatives in this area, my reference to
“anticruelty laws” also reaches beyond their traditional location in criminal
law to include subject-area specific statutes at the federal level that seek to
ensure “humane” standards and thus regulate animal suffering involved in a
particular activity.6
My aim is to showcase how laws against animal cruelty create proximity
in the social constructedness of various forms of difference. Specifically, laws
directed at cruelty to animals have helped sustain a discourse of civilization
that cuts across and animates hierarchical logics of race, religion, class, and
gender. Such laws can be impugned for their imperial contributions. This
analysis, then, underscores a different problem with anticruelty laws than what
animal law scholars have emphasized. This more familiar critique, inspired by
the influential work of the American law professor Gary Francione, stresses the
inefficacy of these laws in preventing animal suffering, labeling them “welfarist”
because of their mandate to regulate animal exploitation rather than prevent
it. My argument seeks to add to the important work that Francione has done
in pointing out the severe shortcomings of anticruelty laws by focusing here
on the imperial underpinnings of these welfarist laws.
I begin by discussing the emergence of anticruelty statutes in the common
law and their impact in the colonial project. Legislation targeting animal cruelty
first emerged in the United States and England in the nineteenth century; simi-
lar statutes soon spread throughout the United States and the British Empire.
Far from representing concerted action to uproot violence against animals,7
legislation instead reinforced civilizing missions with respect to both domestic
and colonial populations through a legislative purpose that can be properly
understood only by reference to race, religious, class, and gender dynamics.
I then reveal how the civilizing purposes of anticruelty statutes continue to
shape contemporary anticruelty jurisprudence. These laws are still used to
domesticate populations marginalized by race, class, culture, and religion, and
to signal civilizational superiority.8
In tracing the contributions of anticruelty laws to civilization discourses
that have and still do stratify humans along multiple grounds, the analysis
highlights the selective register by which these laws function, namely, effec-
tively targeting minoritized practices and immunizing majoritarian ones. By
minoritized practices I am referring to those uses and treatment of animals that
are perceived to transgress dominant cultural norms; at times, such practices
are represented as the deviant actions of aberrant individuals within the ma-
joritarian society, and at other times they are attributed to ethnically, racially,
religiously, or class-based subcultural groups within society.
In advancing this argument, my claim is not that civilizational thinking
was the only rationale for these statutes or that genuine concern about animal
suffering was absent from the motivations of legislators in voting on bills or
amendments or of judges in interpreting these laws. Nor do I wish to discount
the roles played by individual political personalities in the rise of anticruelty
legislation in different common law jurisdictions and those members of the
dominant cultural elite who went against majoritarian sentiment and advocated
for better, more comprehensive protections.9 Instead, I wish to excavate the role
anticruelty statutes played in civilizational thinking both in the metropole and
in the colonies, and the residual impact of their early civilizational rationale
in contemporary jurisprudence.
The Genesis of Anticruelty Statutes
Contemporary anticruelty statutes are a product of the Enlightenment and

the contested ideas about difference and natural hierarchies that materialized
in that formative era in Western political and cultural thought. Exploring
the genesis of anticruelty legislation reveals the variety of social currents and
individual personalities that played a part in enacting and amending these
laws over almost two centuries in different continents and countries. One
such social current—civilizational ideology steeped in power relations of class,
gender, religion, and race—helped mobilize these statutes into being in the
United Kingdom and settler societies.10 In particular, the literature indicates
several factors that were critical to the instigation of anticruelty statutes. These
related to changing societal attitudes about the role of domesticated animals
and civilizing missions centered on discourses of class, race, and religion. Before
discussing the influence of these factors more fully, it is useful to recall the legal
context in which the statutes arose and their legal effects.
Legal Instantiations
Prior to the enactment of anticruelty legislation, common law (i.e., judge-made
law as opposed to statutory law) did not provide any specific protections against
cruelty toward animals.11 The only legal actions available before legislation ap-
peared in this area were actions based on infringing another’s property rights
or relating to other charges such as nuisance, mischief, or disturbing the public
peace.12 As David Favre and Vivien Tsang comment in their review of the rise
of these statutes in the United States during the nineteenth century, the law
permitted men to treat their animals, along with their wives and children,
as they wished;13 property rights and attendant ideas about the importance
of the sanctity and privacy of the home for male property owners precluded
state intrusion either through legal regulation or through judicial attention.14
The legal concept of cruelty toward animals crystallized through legislation.
The first major anticruelty statute in English jurisprudence was Martin’s Act in
the UK in 1822; it was limited to animals considered “cattle” (predominantly
cows and other major farm animals) and covered other domestic animals only
in 1835.15 In the United States, the first state anticruelty statute appeared a
year earlier in Maine in 1821, but it is the New York law enacted in 1828 that
is typical of US statutes enacted during this part of the nineteenth century.16
As Favre and Tsang point out, like many of its counterparts, the New York law
contained two divergent clauses: prohibiting interference with one’s animals
through acts that “kill, maim or wound,” but also enjoining anyone, including
the owner, from “cruelly” beating or torturing these animals.17 The first clause
replicated the preexisting “malicious mischief ” laws directed at stopping third
parties from damaging owners’ interests in their property; by incorporating the
second type of clause, anticruelty statutes were regarded as different from the
earlier “malicious mischief ” provisions represented by the former clause.18 Thus,
on their face, anticruelty laws began to shift from the singular preoccupation
with third-party interference with ownership rights in animals by including
provisions against cruelty regardless of whether the animal at issue was owned
by the accused or by someone else (wild animals, which were excluded from
malicious mischief laws, continued to be excluded from anticruelty statutes).19
Anticruelty laws, however, were still primarily directed at “cattle,” a category
that included cows, sheep, and other economically significant farm animals.20
Various other states followed the 1828 New York law by enacting similarly
worded legislation over the next thirty years, also restricting their applica-
tion to this select group of animals.21 With their focus on cattle, these early
statutes prioritized economically significant animals and were meant to target
the behavior of third parties that would diminish the value of a major source
of owners’ assets.22 Even where these statutes made it an offense for owners to
beat and torture their own animals, the rationale for these types of provisions
was to express “concern . . . for the moral state of the human actor, rather than
the suffering of the non-human animals.”23 The offense was understood as an

assault on public morals and not a direct harm to the animal.24
Anticruelty statutes continued to apply only to animals that held economic
value for almost the next forty years in the United States.25 It was only in 1867,
as part of a set of substantive amendments,26 that the scope of the New York law
was broadened to include other domestic animals.27 Favre and Tsang observe
that the 1867 legislation was a milestone for animals, as its purpose was to
address animal suffering rather than protect the value of commercially coveted
animals.28 Yet it is critical to note that these statutes were still motivated by
anthropocentric interests (to elevate humans and public morals)29 and con-
tained offense parameters that made it difficult to prosecute offenses.30 Further,
when the underlying enforcement and interpretation of these latter statutes
are probed, the property priorities become apparent.31 As Francione shows in
his generative study of American case law in this field, when judges came to
interpret the legislation, they typically inquired into the necessity of the animal
suffering to determine the presence of “cruelty.” In the calculation of what is
“necessary” suffering and thus not “cruel,” the property and other culturally
accepted interests of humans always outweighed the interests of animals to
justify the suffering as “necessary.”32 Francione calls this structural aspect of
anticruelty legislation “legal welfarism”33 and identifies it as the reason that
anticruelty statutes were so ineffective in protecting animals and, conversely,
so reliable at securing anthropocentric interests.34
Although anticruelty statutes did not protect animals from the bulk of
the routinized violence inflicted on them—a situation that continues today,
given that these laws in the United States and elsewhere closely resemble their
historical antecedents35—they were effective in communicating norms about
what constituted appropriate human behavior toward animals. As Francione
concludes from his review of American anticruelty cases, “the vast majority of
cases in which defendants are found to have violated anticruelty laws involve
the neglect of domestic animals, rather than the commission of affirmative
acts”;36 in these situations it is mostly farm animals and the “socially unde-
sirable destruction of property” through neglect and abandonment that the
law impugns.37 Where actual affirmative acts are at issue, it is only “socially
undesirable” behavior seen to be “deviant” and unrelated to socially acceptable
pursuits, traditions, and identities (most notably, the maximization of social
wealth and economic efficiency) that triggers these statutes.38 Anticruelty laws
do not affect customary practices that are part of the social fabric or part of
accepted institutional use of animals.39 As Francione emphasizes at the close
of his study, “Legal welfarism provides for a level of animal welfare—and only
that level of welfare—that is consistent with the efficient exploitation of the

animal given the particular use involved.”40
I want to build on Francione’s analysis of legal welfarism by exploring the
discourses of difference embedded in the legal welfarist classifications of violent
human behavior toward animals, between what is acceptable and what, in con-
trast, is not because the behavior transgresses public morals and undermines
human character. In this section I uncover the influence that discourses of
civilization exerted in advancing ideas about what were proper public morals
in the British context.
Human Character, Public Morals, and Civilization Standards
Postcolonial feminist scholars have generated a rich literature on how certain
perceived gendered practices were harnessed as evidence of the cultural back-
wardness of colonial groups and used to justify colonial legal interventions as
part of the overall civilizing mission.41 Less examined as part of law’s role in
civilizing missions is the similar deployment of anticruelty legislation in the
colonies and its related effects in the metropole.42
Cultivating Civilized Tastes at “Home”—a New Attitude toward (Some)
Animals
A gradual shift in societal conceptualizations of the human–nonhuman animal
relationship during the Enlightenment influenced the development of anti-
cruelty sentiment, helping to set the stage for eventual legislation. This shift
evolved through class, race, religion, and gender identifications that material-
ized amid urbanization. Upper-class Victorian society, and then, as wealth
spread, middle-class constituencies, embraced romanticism and sentimental-
ity—highly gendered and class-based concepts43—with regard to animals they
kept at home as companions.44 Even lower-class families began the practice of
keeping animal companions for affection purposes,45 resulting in unparalleled
and unconventional proximity to animals by many in society. Corwin Kruse
articulates how this overall societal shift in sensibilities affected the animal
advocacy movement as follows: “Victorians no longer viewed animals as com-
modities or tools, but as companions and even members of the family. For
many, animals became objects of sentimentality rather than [simply] utility.”46
Having animals in such close quarters provided the opportunity to relate to
them as individuals, observe their personalities, and enable a questioning of
the prevailing “dominant Christian” representation that animals were vastly
different from humans and lacked the capacity to feel.47
Further, as Victorian society entrenched the gendered and classed division

of society into public and private spheres, certain companion animals, like
upper-class women, came to occupy a distinct leisurely role to denote appropri-
ate class status.48 Indeed, the popularity of “ladies lap dogs” demonstrates the
gendered associations animals conveyed that contributed to the domesticity
of the home,49 a space idealized as “the refuge (for men) from work in all its
negativity.”50 Women and children, but also animals, were critical to the con-
struction of this refuge and the patriarchal “cult of domesticity” that prevailed
within it.51 This new signification of space led to anthropomorphization and
the glorification of companion animals,52 but also facilitated a partial recon-
ceptualization of how humans ought to treat nonhuman animals in general.
At the same time as proximity to animals in the home prompted a rethink-
ing of human–animal relations more broadly, imperialism and the need to
maintain a “civilized” identity vis-à-vis colonized peoples provided a further
incentive to target certain violent practices in the metropole toward animals as
“cruel.” Their condemnation and eventual prohibition could then bolster the
claim to a more civilized and progressive “home” culture and nation. As Grace
Moore notes, “While for Victorians the city was the epitome of civilization
and progress, cruelty to animals had become a sign of the metropolis’s savage
underbelly and a dangerous reminder of the perils of backsliding.”53
The twin civilizing rationales for anticruelty reform—to cultivate a civil-
ized status vis-à-vis the countryside and the colony—worked in tandem to
shield the animal-based, and very violent, practices associated with the upper
classes from the ambit of reform. By targeting instead the practices associated
with the lower classes at the domestic level, the superior “national” identity of
England could be articulated vis-à-vis colonial societies without jeopardizing
Victorian animal-based practices.54 As a result, the early anticruelty statutes
targeted what were seen to be lower-class abuses in blood sports55 and indus-
try,56 while sidelining other activities, such as foxhunting, associated with the
upper classes.57 In part, this appears to be pragmatic, as some animal welfare
organizations received their central funding and support from upper classes.58
Upper-class blood sports such as hunting, however, were also justified by
nationalist gendered and imperial rhetoric suggesting that too much caring
about animals threatened the “good old British fighting spirit” that defined
cultivated British masculinity.59
The civilizing focus on lower-class abuses is also reflective of the Benthamite
philosophical influence that criticized the suffering of animals but not their
exploitation,60 as well as the evangelical teachings that stressed that a primary
benefit of these statutes would be their ability to elevate human morals.61

Compassion toward animals, which centered on the utilitarian notion that
killing is justifiable given the ends but “prolonged suffering” was not, conveyed
a civilized, Christian sensibility.62 Exhibiting such kindness toward sentient
animals confirmed one’s middle-class status and Christian identity; through
adopting this orientation the lower classes acquired a way of thinking and feel-
ing that would counter not only cruelty to animals and humans but a range of
social ills produced by urbanization to which they were thought to be prone.63
Anticruelty proponents at that time sought to popularize compassion toward
animals to a resisting public through two religious rationales: first, that humans
should be kind to animals over whom they have dominion, and this models
the relationship that God has with humans; and second, that compassion is a
virtue that should extend (albeit in hierarchical order) to all God’s creations,
and it is the duty of the British, at the apex of human civilization, to widen
its circle of compassion (or “of inclusion”).64
As intimated above, the evangelical-based animal advocacy at this juncture
operated in the context of a national urge to improve public morals in general
that in turn led to intense philanthropic motivation for a variety of causes
aimed at addressing moral vices associated with the poor.65 Civilizing and
religious rationales used to promote animal reform efforts were also present
in campaigns against child labor and for women’s rights in the metropole, and
connections between the subordination of such human groups and animals
were drawn.66 These campaigns advanced in part by exploiting British fears
that the British could not legitimately distinguish themselves from the foreign
populations they were colonizing, and thereby justify their civilizing missions
that turned, in part, on narratives about how poorly women and children were
treated, if they themselves did not treat women and children better.67 Upper-
class Victorians thus began to associate superiority along class and racial lines,
at home and abroad, with the inability to tolerate certain forms of suffering,
thereby providing a frame of reference into which animal suffering could enter
and resonate.68 Education against animal cruelty during childhood was viewed
as a productive way to cultivate kindness in general so that those seen as most
inclined to cruelty—lower-class men—would learn self-discipline against all
forms of depravity.69
We can see then how multiple social phenomena (urbanization and the rise
in companion animal–keeping, the idealization of domesticity, Evangelical
concerns about cultivating kindness and morality, political concerns to dis-
tinguish the metropole from the colonies) all prompted a broad rethinking of
how humans should relate to animals. These class, gender, religious, and race
discourses together contributed to an overarching sense of civilizational order
central to which were ideas about the type of human–animal relations a properly
civilized society should model in the metropole. This sense of how humans
should behave toward animals pivoted on a double standard. Christianity, as
a religious doctrine espousing human dominion over animals, and Victorian
thinking, in its promotion of a highly class- and gender-conscious regime of
morality, created a domestic animal anticruelty discourse with similar biases.
Nationalist discourses of what was important to Britain’s identity and what
threatened its civilizing image were similarly selective.
Benthamite utilitarianism, as a social theory built on classist and colonial
prejudices, was not sufficient as a secular theory to expose the contradictions
above even when religious justifications started to fall out of favor in the latter
part of the eighteenth century and the Victoria era came to its close.70 The
colonial expansion that was occurring simultaneously instead ensured that the
problematic multilayered discourse of species, race, class, gender, and religious
differences reached new audiences.
Advancing the Colonial Civilizing Mission—Animal Markers of Civilizational
Superiority
While the upper-class and refined middle-class scrutiny fell on lower-class prac-
tices at home, the attention of the nation overall extended abroad to instigate
reform in the colonies.71 The civilizing impulse is particularly pronounced in
the colonial context where class, race, gender, and Christian discourses shaped
colonial law reform.72 Christianity was particularly significant as it linked
evangelical zeal with empire.73 Brett Shadle’s extensive analysis of how anti-
cruelty discourse circulated in Kenya illustrates how these discourses worked
together.74 Although bourgeois sentiments about what constituted barbarism
and savagery in Kenya relied on several sources of “evidence,” perceptions
about animal cruelty were formative to consolidating colonial identity and
justifying the civilizing mission overall.75 Interestingly, whereas the British
used corporal violence to motivate Kenyans to change other perceived cultural
practices deemed unacceptable, the campaign against animal cruelty in Kenya
was unique in trying to cultivate empathy through educational materials.76 The
corporal violence, of course, helped the overall colonial project of subjugation
of colonized peoples.77 The appeal to Kenyans’ empathy in relation to changing
their behaviors toward animals, however, directly aligned with the mission to
cultivate new morals of compassion and kindness in relation to animal suffer-
ing as a mark of civilized thinking.78 Both methods of civilizing (masculinized

violence and feminized empathy) indicate that the focus on animal cruelty
was primarily about legitimating colonialism rather than addressing animal
suffering in its multitude of forms.79
Pratik Chakrabarti illustrates a similar picture of the difference-laced dimen-
sions of anticruelty statutes in British colonial India. Notably, he shows how
the first Act for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals passed in 1869 centered on
the distinction between the colonized and colonizer: “It was restricted to draft
and sport animals used by Indians and did not refer to the use of animals in
research or those used in British sports.”80 Chakrabarti discusses how animal
experimentation was seen as integral to the masculine virtue of the British
contrasted with the animal-worshipping, vegetarian Indian.81 Although this
is not a point that Chakrabarti makes himself, others have noted the British
perception of Indian vegetarianism as proof of the effeminate nature of Hindu
masculinity.82 We may thus understand that the colonial dichotomy represented
by British support for animal experimentation, but disavowal of Indian animal
practices, was even more pronounced in its gendered significations. Similar
to how nationalist struggles and colonial agendas marshaled women’s bodies
discursively to advance their positions, Chakrabarti notes how animals became
potent symbols of colonial and anticolonial forces: the British used attitudes
toward animals as part of a rationale to justify colonial rule, while Hindu seg-
ments of the colonized mobilized resistance to British rule through organizing
for cow protection.83 What both Shadle and Chakrabarti illustrate is how the
discourses about anticruelty statutes in colonial contexts were imbricated in
civilizing missions as opposed to primarily addressing animal suffering.
Legislative Purposes Revealed
The combination of race, religious, class, and gender thinking in informing the
rise of anticruelty legislation at home and abroad is perhaps no more apparent
than in the records of legislative debates surrounding anticruelty bills in Britain.
An examination of these debates reveals how the main proponents of these bills
in Parliament incorporated the notions of dominion and Christian ideals that
were so critical to the social discourse about cruelty to animals and connected
these to civilizing rationales.84 An examination of the landmark and passionate
speech Lord Erskine gave introducing the first bill to the House of Lords in 1809
reveals the religious civilizing animus for the law behind his genuine concern
about working animals and the ubiquitous daily suffering they could endure.
It leaves no doubt about his invocation of dominant Christian ideology about
the dominion granted to man over “the lower world” to persuade his peers,
promoting the view that with this power comes a moral duty to treat animals
kindly. Lord Erskine insists that the bill wholly corresponds to this Christian
duty, ensuring that although there is nothing in the law that challenges man’s
ability to use animals, the moral trust inherent in this God-given right to use
animals demands that humans treat them kindly, given their equal capacities
to suffer. In fact, this benevolence will better secure man’s dominion, the real-
ization of which is the goal of “the whole moral system.”85
The speech also makes evident that while Lord Erskine believes all of Brit-
ish society can benefit from education about this moral duty of all men, the
messaging is most directed to the “lower orders” in society. The explicit and
unabashed attribution of animal cruelty to the lower classes by members of Par-
liament during the readings of animal cruelty bills is a feature of the legislative
debates that continued for over a century after Lord Erskine’s 1809 speech.86
In addition to this class bias, the legislative debates also reveal the imperial
legislative intent behind the bills. We can apprehend the view that the enact-
ment of domestic statutes would foster Britain’s imperial ambitions in several
passages from Lord Erskine’s 1809 speech where he expresses the belief that
outlawing animal cruelty will elevate moral sentiment, allow other nations to
model “the highest state of refinement and civilization,”87 cause humans to
treat each other better, and thereby raise the prospects for global peace “under
the dominion of enlightened man, the lord and governor of all.”88
As Chien-hui Li notes, “This hope of a universal acceptance of Christian-
ity and mercy toward animals was to evolve into the familiar British pride of
empire.”89 This questionable pride still persists in former colonies of the British
Empire. As the next section reveals, anticruelty statutes continue to be a reposi-
tory of civilizational meaning for their domestic legal systems and societies and
continue to demand no more than minimal behavioral modification through
their textual scope and judicial interpretation.
Contemporary Anticruelty Statutes—the Civilizing Mission Continues
The common law as a whole was critical to the establishment of British na-
tionalist identity and empire building.90 As the discussion above evinces, the
specific laws addressing animal cruelty reinforced the overall imperial ideology
about civilizational hierarchies as well as the need for moral elevation “at home”
among certain lower-class populations. Although different in its precise con-
tours given different historical and cultural contexts, the interrelation between
anticruelty laws and civilizing mind-sets has not disappeared but circulates
today in jurisdictions where anticruelty legislation continues to operate. We
can see this in two main ways.
Dominant Practices Immune
First, anticruelty law continues to selectively target minoritized practices as
“cruel” while immunizing the vast range of normalized acts of violence against
animals. Most notably, anticruelty legislation does not engage the institutional-
ized and routinized violence against animals in the food and research indus-
tries. In fact, these sites are almost always excluded from the purview of any
applicable statutes by explicit exclusions. American legislation is illustrative.91
Federal law ensuring “humane” treatment in industrial agriculture does not
address how animals are raised.92 Even then the standards are minimal, and
the legislation specifically excludes chicken from its ambit.93 Of the ten billion
animals slaughtered for human consumption in the United States annually,
chickens and other poultry account for 92 percent of that body count.94 We
find the same kind of exclusion at the federal level in the realm of research.
The Animal Welfare Act,95 a statute providing for minimal standards for the
treatment of animals in research laboratories, excludes rats, mice, and birds,96
which together account for 95 percent of all animals used in research.97 The
statutes are already weak in substance, and the explicit exclusions render them
almost impotent in their power to protect animals.
Where explicit exclusions do not exist, implicit exclusions deliver the same
effect. Judges generate these implicit exclusions through their interpretations of
the legislation, concluding that they are not meant to impugn socially accept-
able institutional practices.98 As noted above, most often, it is the individual
animal abuser whose aberrant actions (torturing cats, beating dogs) are targeted
or individual owners who do not maintain adequate shelter, food, or veterinary
care for their animals through gross neglect (horses found starving, hoarding
of cats, exposing animals to extreme temperatures, etc.).99 Industrial practices
and dominant cultural and economic uses of animals are largely immune, ir-
respective of the level of violence against animals.100
Francione has documented this differentiation in the enforcement of state
anticruelty laws.101 A sampling of some of the legislation illustrates Francione’s
argument. Returning to New York, a jurisdiction whose original anticruelty
statute was generative for so many other states, we see that its current anti-
cruelty statute states that “torture” or “cruelty” includes every act, omission,
or neglect, whereby unjustifiable physical pain, suffering, or death is caused
or permitted.102 The New York law states, among other offenses, that anyone
who “unjustifiably injures, maims, mutilates or kills any animal, whether wild
or tame, and whether belonging to himself or to another,” commits a misde-
meanor.103 While the contemporary law includes wild animals in its purview,
it still relies on the familiar trope of associating “cruelty/torture” only with
suffering that is “unjustifiable.” Without explicit statutory guidance for defin-
ing what is or is not “unjustifiable,” judges may easily inscribe the term with
anthropocentric meaning. What is more, the statute exempts “any properly
conducted scientific tests, experiments or investigations, involving the use of
living animals, performed or conducted in laboratories or institutions, which
are approved for these purposes by the state commissioner of health,”104 mak-
ing it clear that such use of animals is clearly justifiable.
New York also has a separate offense for “aggravated cruelty.” The provi-
sion states:
A person is guilty of aggravated cruelty to animals when, with no justifiable purpose, he or

she intentionally kills or intentionally causes serious physical injury to a companion ani-
mal with aggravated cruelty. For purposes of this section, “aggravated cruelty” shall mean
conduct which:
(i) is intended to cause extreme physical pain; or
(ii) is done or carried out in an especially depraved or sadistic manner.105
Again, the concept of unjustifiable is used to qualify what will count as “ag-
gravated cruelty” even where, as per subsection (ii), the conduct is “carried
out in an especially depraved or sadistic manner.” Recall that acts determined
sadistic are one of the few types of acts that trigger anticruelty convictions.
The New York law, then, is an example of current anticruelty legislation that
condemns socially aberrant behavior, but claws back even this minimal scope
of protection to allow a person to avoid the application of the statute if the act
has a “justifiable purpose.” Again, the assessment of what is or is not “justifi-
able” will turn on interpretation, and it is at this interpretive moment that the
wider social and cultural context will apply to construe a legislative meaning
that accords with community norms.106 Moreover, the offense of aggravated
cruelty is also narrowed by explicit exemptions. Paragraph two of the provision
states that nothing in the section is meant to interfere with lawful hunting,
trapping, fishing, research, and other human uses.107
The highly qualified and exempting structure of the New York law is not an
anomaly. One of Francione’s central points in Animals, Property, and the Law is
the similarity to each other of anticruelty laws in this regard.108 The numerous
exemptions in anticruelty statutes excluding institutional and normalized uses

of animals “are not exceptional, but, rather, are the rule when dealing with
commodified animals.”109
The Racialized and Religious Underpinnings of Contemporary Cruelty
Standards
Glen Elder, Jennifer Wolch, and Jody Emel have built on Francione’s legal
welfarist analysis by noting the racialized religious nature of practices that
prompt anticruelty concern in communities.110 An exemplar of this pattern
is the municipal ordinances that gave rise to the US Supreme Court case of
Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah,111 which the city of Hialeah,
Florida, passed to prevent the opening of a Santeria church and related organ-
izations.112 The planned complex and attendant activities would have involved
the ritual slaughter of animals, a practice that the Santeria petitioners claimed
was integral to their religion.113 Soon after the plans for the opening of the
church were announced, the city held a meeting at which it passed Resolution
87-66 affirming its wish to prohibit religious practices that were “inconsistent
with public morals, peace or safety.”114 Critical to the further legislative action
being contemplated was the prohibition on the ritual slaughter of animals not
raised specifically for food.115
Knowing that, as a matter of constitutional law, the municipality could not
pass any laws that were in conflict with state laws, the city sought legal advice
from Florida’s attorney general as to whether its intended ban on animal sac-
rifice would violate the state’s anticruelty statute, which banned “unnecessary”
suffering.116 As the court describes, the ensuing legal opinion from Florida
concluded that the “‘ritual sacrifice of animals for purposes other than food
consumption’ was not a ‘necessary’ killing and so was prohibited.”117 As the
court notes further, “The attorney general appeared to define ‘unnecessary’ as
‘done without any useful motive, in a spirit of wanton cruelty or for the mere
pleasure of destruction without being in any sense beneficial or useful to the
person killing the animal.’”118 Having received state clearance for an animal
cruelty-related ordinance, the city passed a series of ordinances—one of which
specifically incorporated the Florida anticruelty law119—that collectively out-
lawed animal sacrifice for ritual purposes.120 The church contested the ordin-
ances on the basis of the First Amendment’s free establishment clause but lost
in the District Court and Court of Appeals.121 The church succeeded, however,
at the US Supreme Court, which ruled that the ordinances violated the free
exercise of religion and was not justified by a compelling government interest.122
The Supreme Court, to its credit, recognized the arbitrariness of the munici-
pal ordinances in their collective prohibition of ritual slaughter where animals
are not deliberately raised for food purposes (thus excluding kosher slaughter,
licensed killing establishments, as well as any unlicensed killing of animals for
food consumption). In a rare instance of judicial recognition of the discretion
incorporated into an anticruelty statute and the discriminatory effects it can
lead to, the Court writes:
The problem . . . is the interpretation given to the ordinance by (the City) and the Florida
attorney general. Killings for religious reasons are deemed unnecessary, whereas most other
killings fall outside the prohibition. The city, on what seems to be a per se basis, deems hunting,
slaughter of animals for food, eradication of insects and pests, and euthanasia as necessary.
. . . Respondent’s application of the ordinance’s test of necessity devalues religious reasons
for killing by judging them to be of lesser import than nonreligious reasons. Thus, religious
practice is being singled out for discriminatory treatment. (internal citations omitted)123
The Court underscores the distinction drawn between religious and secu-
lar reasons for killing. In comparing the other nontargeted killing that is still
allowed in the city, including the acceptance of the killing of live rabbits in
greyhound training,124 the Court’s reasoning conveys a sense of the arbitrari-
ness of the distinction and its underlying basis in dominant values. Indeed, the
Court notes that the ordinances do not condemn “killings that are no more
necessary or humane in almost all other circumstances.”125 The Court also
discusses the actual record of public comments made at the initial city meet-
ing where Resolution 87-66 was passed, which reveals repeated expressions of
the view that Santeria practices must be banned, as they were in opposition
to dominant Christianity and American values.126
Moreover, later in the judgment, when the Court discusses the “general
applicability” of the ordinances—a second doctrinal step in the constitutional
analysis mandated by the jurisprudence on the free exercise clause that examines
whether the contested law applies equally to all religions—the Court highlights
the underinclusiveness of the ordinances and the value-laden selectiveness of
the laws.127
The city concedes that “neither the State of Florida nor the City has enacted a generally ap-
plicable ban on the killing of animals.” It asserts, however, that animal sacrifice is “different.”
. . . According to the city, it is “self-evident” that killing animals for food is “important”; the
eradication of insects and pests is “obviously justified”; and the euthanasia of excess animals
“makes sense.” These ipse dixits do not explain why religion alone must bear the burden of
the ordinances, when many of these secular killings fall within the city’s interest in prevent-
ing the cruel treatment of animals.128
The passage is a rare and thus remarkable moment of judicial recognition of

some of the double standards that attend human cultural attitudes about the
acceptable use of animals that lay bare the city’s reliance on a majoritarian
pattern of unexplained “common sense” to legitimate the underinclusiveness
of the ordinances.129
The Supreme Court’s judgment in Church of Lukumi Babalu places anti-
cruelty laws under close examination to reveal the value judgments that are
inherent to determinations of cruelty. The judgment provides a clear example
of how anticruelty laws are still heavily implicated in discourses of difference
in the present day that legitimate majoritarian practices and target minori-
tized ones. Although the Supreme Court denounces the hypocrisy of the
majoritarian purposes of the anticruelty ordinances, it would be a mistake to
consider the decision as a welcome development for animals for this reason
alone. Church of Lukumi Babalu turns on the religious infringement, that is,
the human constitutional right violation; it does not turn on the protection
of animal interests.130
The Corporate Underpinnings of Contemporary Majoritarian Standards about
“Cruelty”
National Meat Association v. Harris (Attorney General of California) arose from
the aftermath of an undercover video shot by the Humane Society of the United
States in 2008.131 The video showed footage of animals at a California slaugh-
terhouse who were unable to walk on the kill floor—referred to by the industry
term of downer animals—being subjected to painful treatment to motivate
them to stand up so that they could proceed to slaughter.132 The video’s release
prompted widespread concern; some of which was about animal welfare, but
most of which was related to the health and safety of humans who consume
injured and ill animals once they are rendered as “meat.”133 The public outcry
resulted in the largest animal flesh recall in United States history.134 California
responded by passing California Penal Code 599 to prohibit the slaughter for
consumption of nonambulatory animals, thereby creating a legal counter to
industry practices to make nonambulatory animals move toward slaughter by
any means possible to maximize profits.
Given this encroachment in revenue, the National Meat Association sued
California, claiming that the state provisions were preempted by the federal
statute on meat inspection that applied to slaughterhouses in California.135
Under the Federal Meat Inspection Act,136 animals must be classified into one
of three different categories at the slaughterhouse prior to slaughter by the
Federal Meat Inspection Act (FMIA) inspectors.137 If animals present with

a condition on a list of condemned conditions, they must be slaughtered
separately from their peers, and no part of the dead body may be used for hu-
man consumption.138 If animals are not suffering from one of the condemned
conditions but are nonambulatory, they are classified as “US Suspect,” and,
if their condition does not improve, they are slaughtered separately.139 Here,
however, the body awaits a further inspection to see what parts of the carcass
are fit for human consumption.
The National Meat Association argued that the new California law contra-
dicted the FMIA inasmuch as it treated the second category of animals differ-
ently: whereas federal law adopted a “wait and see” approach to nonambulatory
animals, state law precluded their slaughter altogether. As the FMIA contained
a clause that invalidated any state law that established a different regulatory
regime than that provided for under the FMIA,140 the National Meat Associa-
tion argued that California’s prohibition on the slaughter of nonambulatory
pigs for human consumption conflicted with the FMIA’s specific preemption
clause.141 The Supreme Court agreed, holding that the California regulatory
scheme varied from the federal one.142
According to Justice Elena Kagan, who delivered the unanimous judgment
for the Court, the FMIA “regulates the inspection, handling, and slaughter
of livestock for human consumption.”143 Because it referentially incorporates
the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act of 1958 (HMSA), the Court also
accepts that it addresses the “humane handling of animals”144 and that the
mandate of the administrative agency charged with enforcing the FMIA, the
Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, includes
“humane slaughter.”145 In fortifying its reasoning that the FMIA is concerned
with animal welfare, the Court also highlights a regulation under the FMIA
itself that is related to “humane treatment” by directing that “slaughterhouse
employees may not drag conscious, nonambulatory animals” and may move
them only with “equipment suitable for such purposes.”146 The Court further
notes “employees must place nonambulatory animals, as well as other sick and
disabled livestock, in covered pens sufficient to protect the animals from ‘ad-
verse climatic conditions.’”147 These characterizations of both statutes and their
regulations appear at the outset of the judgment and are reinforced later as well
in response to the Humane Society’s argument that the California provisions
address anticruelty provisions, whereas the scheme of the FMIA does not.148
As David Cassuto argues in his critical appraisal of the judgment, the Court’s
reading of the HMSA (incorporated, as noted above, into the FMIA) as a guar-
antor of “humane” treatment during slaughter is overdetermined.149 Cassuto

cites several weaknesses of the HMSA in protecting animals. He notes that the
statute, which was passed in 1906, was meant to regulate slaughterhouses to
better ensure the health and safety of the workers, not the animals.150 When
the text of the regulation is examined, one sees that workers are supposed to
minimize injury “as little as possible.”151 Such open-ended language, Cassuto
notes, conveys immense discretion and little incentive for the workers to self-
regulate in any meaningful way when facing pressures from superiors about
minimizing the number of animals not sent to slaughter.152 Another HMSA
provision indicates that all animals must be stunned before slaughter, but Cas-
suto notes that the intensely demanding pace of slaughter invariably entails that
stunning will not be effective in all cases and that some animals will proceed
through the process still conscious.153 In addition to noting the weaknesses of
the regulations as they apply to the animals covered by the HMSA, Cassuto
also reminds that the HMSA excludes 98 percent of animals sent to slaughter
in the United States from its purview by explicitly excluding birds (and thus
chickens) from its “protective” provisions.154
The Court overlooked all these important elements constituting the reality
of slaughter and simply assumed that the FMIA addresses “humane” slaugh-
ter.155 This characterization of one of the statute’s purposes was a critical move
in favor of the National Meat Association as it enabled the Court to reach the
conclusion that the California provisions violate the FMIA’s preemption clause
by addressing the same subject matter (“humane” slaughter) in a different way.
The finding that California Penal Code 599 triggered the FMIA’s preemption
clause invalidated California’s antislaughter regulatory scheme.156
The Harris judgment is a leading and recent example of judicial laxity in
upholding meaningful protective standards for animals and of deference not
only to industry arguments about the scope of humane laws but also to the
corporate industry norms that anticruelty laws implicitly incorporate into
definitions of acceptable and unacceptable animal treatment under these laws.
Despite the Court’s ability in Church of Lukumi Babalu to spot the hypocrisy in
how states define “cruelty” and interpret the meaning of what is necessary and
what is not under their anticruelty statutes, the Court is not able to translate
its critical acumen there into a judgment that detects the marginal influence of
animal welfare laws like HMSA and FMIA in protecting animals. The result
in both Supreme Court cases is less protection for animals.
Moreover, having reviewed the Court’s reasoning in Harris, we are now bet-
ter able to appreciate a point made earlier: had the city of Hialeah ordinances
banned all animal slaughter as “cruelty,” and thus avoided a constitutional
violation on religious grounds, the city would have been held to violate the
FMIA because of its preemption clause. It would, of course, also likely have
violated Florida’s anticruelty law that permitted the killing of animals. Both
state anticruelty laws and federal animal welfare law reflect dominant economic
and cultural norms about how animals can be exploited with minimal regard to
their welfare. What is telling with Harris is that here we have a state law from
California that sought to do more; it sought to institute a new standard for
the industry by banning the sale and thus consumption of all nonambulatory
animals. Because it is in its own minority and subordinate to federal position
in the overall landscape of the regulation of agricultural industry standards,
the existing corporate industry standards that enjoy majoritarian status prevail.
Under this type of community value-determined “cruelty” framework, it
is apparent how even the actions of institutional actors that try to circumvent
any industry standards that may exist about animal treatment will appear as
violations to the cultural and thus legal order. The contemporary operation
of anticruelty laws, like their historical counterparts, continues to privilege
practices accepted by the majority. Their protective radar falls, then, on min-
oritized practices within an industry or community. What comes across in the
legal texts examined here is an appetite to use anticruelty statutes as an agent
of civilization to outlaw practices a community deems immoral or “backward”;
as Church of Lukumi Babalu illustrates, these targeted practices are those con-
sidered aberrant or deviant by cultural elites, often because of racialized and
religious prejudices. Such “common sense” about what is civilized or not as-
sumes that long-standing dominant cultural (including economic) practices at
the slaughterhouse or elsewhere are beyond reproach. Both Church of Lukumi
Babalu and Harris attest to the influence that powerful political and economic
institutional actors exert in contributing to this largely unexamined common
sense about what a civilized society will tolerate.
Ongoing Relevance of Civilizational Discourse
Although written decisions addressing anticruelty statutes are relatively limit-
ed—a phenomenon related to the rate at which offenses come to light and are
prosecuted157—even the relatively few cases that do exist exhibit civilizational
discourse. Two appellate cases from the Canadian context demonstrate this.
The first is the leading Canadian case on anticruelty. The second is a recent
dissent that provides the most sophisticated and animal-friendly analysis to
date of anticruelty statutes. In both, civilizational discourse is evident.
In R v. Ménard,158 which continues to be the leading Canadian case on the
application of anticruelty legislation, the accused had a business capturing and
killing cats and dogs who lived outdoors and over whom no humans claimed
ownership.159 This was not the illegal part;160 what brought on the criminal
charges of cruelty toward animals was the method he used. Ménard constructed
a metal box where he would put the animal and to which he would hook up
a motor that emitted carbon monoxide fumes that would kill the animals.161
Their deaths were slow and painful, as the gas burned their skin significantly.162
The court found that Ménard had “wilfully caused to animals pain, suffering
or injuries”163 and that this pain and injury was not “inevitable taking into
account the purpose sought and the means reasonably available.”164
The case is notable and authoritative because of the extensive discussion
provided by Justice Antonio Lamer (who was later to become the Chief Justice
of Canada’s Supreme Court) as to the purpose and application of animal welfare
statutes. Justice Lamer’s reasoning reveals the anthropocentric and speciesist
biases of both the legislation and the judicial interpretation of cruelty toward
animals. His judgment also explicitly evinces the class, race, and gender di-
mensions of the dominant property paradigm that guides the judicial protec-
tion of animals. This occurs in his discussion of “necessity” and in his related
explanation of the place of animals in society, where it is transparent that the
legal conceptualization of “necessity” is tethered to the court’s appraisal of the
value of animals in the larger cultural order.
After reciting the legal precedents for this case—cases that, not insignifi-
cantly, were decided in the late 1800s and early 1900s—Justice Lamer engages
with the question of “necessity.” He finds that it is the court’s role to balance
the animal’s suffering against the necessity of the human endeavor that this suf-
fering advances.165 This framework presupposes the supremacy of humans, and
according to Justice Lamer, guards “against the danger of confusing compassion
with sentimentality.”166 Having oriented the decision on an anthropocentric
axis, where human needs can be fulfilled despite the animal suffering that
might result, Justice Lamer turns to justifying this with familiar civilizational
language. He writes:
The animal is inferior to man and takes its place within a hierarchy of the animals, and above
all is a part of nature with all its “racial and natural” selections. The animal is subordinate to
nature and to man. . . . This is why, in setting standards for the behaviour of men towards
animals, we have taken into account our privileged position in nature.167
Justice Lamer’s reasoning combines social Darwinist and anthropocentric

thinking to marginalize not only animals but also humans along racial and
gender lines. The term man is used unhesitatingly, and the quotations around
“racial and natural” do not adequately acknowledge the racist ideology inher-
ent to this harnessing of social Darwinist reasoning. Of course, counsel did
not tender evidence about these theories; rather, Justice Lamer simply takes
judicial notice of hierarchical ways of thinking about species, race, and gender
differences as normalized cultural precepts for his legal analysis.
He goes on to fortify his points, all but explicitly acknowledging the colonial
mentality from which he is working:
Thus men . . . do not renounce the right given to them by their position as supreme crea-
tures to put animals at their service to satisfy their needs, but impose on themselves a rule
of civilization by which they renounce, condemn and repress all infliction of pain, suffering
or injury on animals.168
Recall how the phenomenon of cruelty to animals was historically used to

gauge civilizational status and justify the civilizing mission. Responsiveness to a
particular type of animal suffering is again invoked in this more contemporary
case as a marker of civilization and cultural superiority. And similar to how this
animal-informed civilizational discourse circulated earlier, the court’s reason-
ing here implicitly relies on dominant Christian religious understandings of
man’s natural dominion over animals. The current reasoning also resembles
its historical counterpart by confirming human entitlement to exploit animals
as resources and thus exhibits a double standard as to what counts as cruelty.
Indeed, Justice Lamer even concedes a little later in the judgment that even
though consuming animals as food is not necessary, it is acceptable because
of species privilege.169
The Ménard decision was rendered in 1978, but its status as the highest-
level judicial pronouncement on the application of the federal anticruelty
provisions means that its civilizational explanations about the purpose, scope,
and application of anticruelty statutes continues to inform this area of law in
Canada. Even a recent appellate and progressive animal-friendly decision finds
the civilizational factor in Ménard a compelling enough point to affirm. In a
dissenting decision that is also remarkable for the posthumanist reading it gives
to anticruelty legislation—an interpretation of what the statute demands that
exceeds the usual tepid welfarist interpretation these statutes receive—civiliza-
tional discourse is still present. Chief Justice Catherine Fraser of the Alberta
Court of Appeal rendered a groundbreaking dissenting opinion in a 2011 case
involving Lucy, a captive elephant kept at a government zoo in Edmonton,
Alberta, who was suffering from social isolation and multiple chronic health
problems.170 The decision is unprecedented in Canadian law because of its
responsiveness to animal vulnerability in general, its sophisticated discussion

of the field of animal law, and its willingness to push anticruelty law beyond
its usual limited purview, particularly by virtue of its characterization of the
Alberta government’s failure to act to protect Lucy as a legal issue implicating
the rule of law.171 No other appellate-level decision in Canada or the United
States has delivered such an animal-friendly analysis of anticruelty law.
Despite these remarkable features, the decision incorporates Ménard’s civil-
izational language and, by implication, its contested civilizational ideology.
Indeed, Chief Justice Fraser stresses that anticruelty as a principle “continues
to be the norm in Canada today” and, citing the passage from Ménard above,
declares that it “is now so ingrained in our society that it is considered a rule
of civilization [footnotes omitted].”172 While she does not cite the Ménard pas-
sage reminiscent of social Darwinism in her decision, she nevertheless states
later in the judgment that a “reasonable regard for vulnerable animals” is a
trait “that a civilized society should show.”173 It may be too much to expect
that the chief justice would have problematized civilizational rhetoric in her
judgment, especially given all the other progressive insights of the analysis and
the legal issue at stake. It would also be unfair to criticize her for relying on
Ménard, given the importance of precedent to the common law method and
her overall purpose in reasoning to an end point that animal issues should be
taken seriously.
Yet it is still possible to observe that her incorporation of the civilizational
language from Ménard attests to the ongoing resonance of civilizational hier-
archy in anticruelty jurisprudence to situate one society as more advanced
than others. Chief Justice Fraser’s highlighting of legal doctrine that recognizes
anticruelty laws as a “rule of civilization” to advance Lucy’s interests rests on the
premise that Canada belongs to the realm of civilized countries and intimates
that other countries do not. A concern need not attach to every mention of
civilizational language, of course. But when civilizational discourse rests on case
law that exhibits clear civilizational ideology and forms part of an overarch-
ing jurisprudence in common law countries that gives explicit and implicit
legal immunity to culturally dominant violence toward animals, the language
confirms the contemporary participation of anticruelty laws in reinforcing
multiple hierarchies of difference.
Anticruelty statutes, then, continue to be shaped by the selective distinctions
drawn by their historical precursors. They still embody a double standard in
that a practice will be classified as “cruel” not because of the amount of suf-
fering involved but because of corporate and otherwise majoritarian views of
the legitimacy of the practice. As in Victorian times when these statutes first
started to gain traction, such majoritarian views are often heavily shaped by
class, religious, cultural, and/or racialized norms of how “civilized” humans and
societies should interact with animals. A second, less frequent, but nonethe-
less instructive way in which more recent anticruelty laws operate as civilizing
agents occurs through the explicit civilizational language that appears in some
notable anticruelty cases.
Conclusion
The primary critique that critical animal law scholars have lodged against
anticruelty legislation involving assessments of what is “humane” treatment of
animals is the latter’s welfarist scope. These scholars have noted that such laws
were not designed or interpreted to abolish routine human and institutional
violence against animals or disturb the property status of animals. Rather, they
were a legal attempt to elevate human morals; by promoting kind behavior
toward animals, these laws aimed to inculcate better public morals in general.
Anticruelty laws’ welfarist scope is not their only limitation. These laws are
also imperial to the extent that the behavior against animals that they typically
target corresponds with problematic ideologies of civilizational status. Not
only were the laws aimed at elevating public morals, but they were part of an
agenda to secure the “civilized” identity of imperial powers and justify their
power-laden civilizing missions vis-à-vis domestic and colonial populations.
Specifically, the onset of industrialization, religious revival, and the colonial
enterprise contributed to new mind-sets about how “civilized” humans should
interact with animals. In England, concerns about animal welfare gained in
importance as part of the evangelical moral surveillance amid urbanization
and the gendered romanticism and sentimentalism of the Victorian era. These
sensibilities served to denote a higher-class status and dominant Christian
values, and thus more civilized outlooks. These notions about civilizational
status and animal–human relations were also taken abroad and were visible in
colonial justifications for Christian civilizing missions. The anticruelty issue,
much like the colonizer perception of how women were treated in the colonies,
entrenched colonial ideas about racial and religious difference. Ideas about
class, race, religion, and gender thus centrally contributed to the emergence
and meaning of anticruelty legislation.
Anticruelty laws did not cease to be civilizing agents in the postcolonial
period. Contemporary legislation and jurisprudence in the United States and
Canada reveal the investment that anticruelty laws continue to make in civili-
zational discourse and ideologies. Current legislation is still effectively directed
at the practices of minoritized individuals and communities, while the normal-
ized institutional exploitation of animals continues unabated. Moreover, some
cases still explicitly identify the civilizing influence of anticruelty statutes as
one of their valuable purposes. For this reason, anticruelty laws merit criticism
not only for their welfarist limitations but also for their imperial implications.
Both grounds of criticism may be invoked to demonstrate the selective nature
of anticruelty laws and the limits of what may typically be achieved under
welfarist and imperial calibrations of “necessary” versus “unnecessary” suffering.
In excavating anticruelty law’s imperial features, my intent is not to excuse
the suffering visited on animals by minoritized communities or marginalized
individuals. As Claire Jean Kim has noted, resistive responses to mainstream
cultural surveillance through anticruelty initiatives have themselves “gone impe-
rial” in complaining about Western cultural imperialism while continuing to
assert their human superiority over animals.174 Nor should the present argument
entail a singling out of law reform efforts dedicated to animal advocacy. After
all, a similar critique about the civilizational origins and continuing marginal-
izing effects of human rights discourse and laws could also be made.175 Given
the incrementalist and conservative method of the common law, its historical
discursive and material participation in social stratifications of all kinds,176 and
the continued dominance of various masculinist, Christian, and classist under-
standings that ground its most basic norms (such as the reasonable person, the
concept of property and autonomy, etc.),177 almost every contemporary social
justice–seeking law reform effort could be impugned as extending the imperial
reach of problematic legal rhetoric. Indeed, the debate between critical legal
scholars and feminist and critical race theorists about the desirability of rights
discourse and the focus on rights in feminist and critical race advocacy pivots
on this line of critique.178
The reading offered here of the imperialist and welfarist dimensions to
anticruelty law can contribute instead to the debate in animal advocacy circles
between those who believe in animal welfare efforts and those who do not as
a productive means to end animal suffering. Currently, as stated at the outset,
the criticism of animal welfare laws has centered on their selective nature. It
is hoped that the additional insights here of how closely the selective nature
of the law has aligned with imperial agendas and continues to produce social
difference and reinforce existing power relations between humans and animals
as well as among humans will further indicate the urgent need to develop a
different legal framework to genuinely address and end animal suffering. At
the very least, the critique of anticruelty laws as welfarist and imperial can
underscore the need to fundamentally shift the interpretation these statutes
typically receive so that routine and everyday dominant institutional practices
that harm animals will come under the ambit of what is “unnecessary/unjustifi-
able/inhumane” human treatment of animals.
Notes
The author would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for generous
research support as well as Jasreet Badyal and Michelle Stimac for excellent research assistance.
1. Maneesha Deckha, “Intersectionality and Posthumanist Visions of Equality,” Wisconsin Journal of Law,
Gender and Society 23.2 (2008): 249.
2. For examples of this intersectional line of critique, see Cathryn Bailey, “We Are What We Eat: Feminist
Vegetarianism and the Reproduction of Racial Identity,” Hypatia 22.2 (2007): 39; Maneesha Deckha,
“Teaching Posthumanist Ethics in Law School: The Race, Culture, and Gender Dimensions of Student
Residence,” Animal Law 16.2 (2010): 287; Jody Emel, Chris Wilbert, and Jennifer Wolch, “Animal
Geographies,” Society and Animals 10.4 (2002): 407; Sarah Salih, “Filling up the Space between
Mankind and Ape: Racism, Speciesism, and the Androphillic Ape,” Ariel 38.1 (2007): 95.
3. See Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: New York Review, 1975); and Tom Regan, The Case
for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
4. For a detailed compendium that contains the general animal protection and related statutes, includ-
ing penalties, for all the states, principal districts, and territories of the United States and Canada, see
Animal Legal Defense Fund, “Animal Protection Laws of the United States of America and Canada,”
http://aldf.org/article.php?id=259.
5. Gary L. Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).
6. The Animal Welfare Act 7 USC 54, section 2149 states a violation of any section of the act is an of-
fense liable to a civil penalty of a maximum of $10,000 for each violation, and each day during which
a violation continues constitutes a separate offense. The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act 7 USC
1901-1907 in section 1902 states that any inhumane slaughtering or handling is in contravention
of the public policy of the United States and provides descriptions of particular treatment that is in
compliance with the act. Further, section 1907(c) states that a violation of a regulation made by the
secretary of agriculture providing for the humane treatment, handling, and disposition of nonambula-
tory livestock is subject to penalties provided under section 8313 of the Animal Health Protection Act
7 USC 8304, which contemplates both fines and imprisonment.
7. Most academics who challenge the place of animals in society contemplate the question of terminology.
For example, in their introduction to a special issue of Feminist Theory on nonhuman feminisms, the
editors Myra J. Hird and Celia Roberts write: “We need to ask from the outset what ontological fallout
ensues from our delineating a nonhuman referent. In other words, do we attempt to define the human
by what it is not, thereby instantiating the nonhuman within the human?” (“Feminism Theorises the
Nonhuman,” Feminist Theory 12.2 [2011]: 110). See also Gary L. Francione, “Reflections on Animals,
Property, and the Law and Rain without Thunder,” Law and Contemporary Problems 70 (2007): 9n1;
Tom Regan, Animal Rights, Human Wrongs: An Introduction to Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2003), 1; and generally Harriet Ritvo, “On the Animal Turn,” Daedalus 136.4 (2007):
118. In the present article I use the word animal to refer to nonhuman animals. This is problematic
because it perpetuates the animal–human binary and ignores that humans are one species of animal.
While recognizing the limitations of this term, I use it for simplicity.
8. My focus here is obviously on animals and is not meant to marginalize nonhuman actors that arguably
receive even less attention and value under anthropocentric orders. My own view is that a proper cor-
rection to anthropocentrism will have to recuperate the subjectivities of all nonhuman living beings.
For studies that focus on beings other than animals, see, e.g., Christopher D Stone, Should Trees Have
Standing? (Los Altos, CA: W. Kaufmann, 1974); Paul Warren Taylor, Respect for Nature: A Theory of
Environmental Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto
for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Social Feminism in the 1980s,” Australian Feminist Studies 2.4
(1987): 1; Kevin Warwick, “Cyborg Morals, Cyborg Values, Cyborg Ethics,” Ethics and Information
Technology 5 (2003): 131; Seth D. Baum, “Universalist Ethics in Extraterrestrial Encounter,” Acta
Astronautica 66.3–4 (2010): 617; Patrick Lin and Keith Abney, “Robot Ethics: Mapping the Issues
for a Mechanized World,” Artificial Intelligence 175.5–6 (2011): 942.
9. Kathryn Shevelow, For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement (New York:
Henry Holt, 2008). Shevelow gives many examples of both throughout her work. See, e.g., pages
10–11, 49, 177–81, 182–91.
10. It should be noted that I am refraining from using scare quotations around problematic terms such
as civilizing missions. This is for ease of reading as opposed to accepting these notions.
11. Francione, Animals, Property and the Law, 121; Jerrold Tannenbaum, “Animals and the Law: Property,
Cruelty, Rights,” Social Research 62.3 (1995): 565.
12. This is not to say that the actions were easily available. For example, Tannenbaum notes how several
states enacted malicious mischief acts that applied only if malicious intent was exhibited (“Animals
and the Law,” 551–64; see also David Favre and Vivien Tsang, “The Development of Anti-Cruelty
Laws during the 1800s,” Detroit College of Law Review 1 [1993]: 5). At common law, the definition of
personal property, or chattels, was established largely on the grounds of economically useful domestic
animals. Tannenbaum discusses how domesticated animals were the most valuable forms of personal
property and, thus, how they were integral to the definition of chattels. Chattels could be the grounds
for legal action, but remedies were limited to the value of the animal rather than the same animal.
This was based on the notion that animals were fungible. See Tannenbaum, “Animals and the Law,”
551–64.
13. Favre and Tsang, “Development of Anti-Cruelty Laws,” 6.
14. See, e.g., John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (Bury
St Edmunds: St Edmundsbury Press, 2007), 53–78; Corwin R. Kruse, “Gender, Views of Nature, and
Support for Animal Rights,” Society and Animals 7.3 (1999): 180–81.
15. Tannenbaum, “Animals and the Law,” 565. The earliest known laws in the UK and United States
were Ireland’s Thomas Wenthworth’s Act of 1635, which prohibited attaching ploughs to the tails of
animals and pulling wool off sheep instead of clipping or shearing, and the Massachusetts Body of
Liberties of 1641, which encouraged the humane treatment of animals. See Bruce A. Wagman and
Matthew Liebman, A World View of Animal Law (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2011),
149–50.
16. Favre and Tsang, “Development of Anti-Cruelty Laws,” 9. To be exact, the very first anticruelty law
was created in 1641 in what would become Massachusetts (Tannenbaum, “Animals and the Law,”
565). The 1828 law is cited in Tannenbaum, as New York Statutes, Pt. IV, Chapt I, Tit. VI. (1828).
Favre and Tsang cite the revised law: N.Y. Rev Stat. tit. 6, s. 26 (1829) (“Development of Anti-Cruelty
Laws,” 9).
17. Favre and Tsang, “Development of Anti-Cruelty Laws,” 9–10.
18. Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law, 124.
19. Favre and Tsang, “Development of Anti-Cruelty Laws,” 8; Wagman and Liebman, World View,
148–52; Shevelow, For the Love of Animals, 4–11; Luis E. Chiesa, “Why Is It a Crime to Stomp on a
Goldfish?—Harm, Victimhood, and the Structure of Anti-Cruelty Offenses,” Mississippi Law Journal
78 (2008–2009): 8–9; Paula J. Frasso, “The Massachusetts Anti-Cruelty Statute: A Real Dog—a
Proposal for a Red-draft of the Current Law,” New England Law Review 35 (2000–2001): 1005;
Charles E. Friend, “Animal Cruelty Laws: The Case for Reform,” University of Richmond Law Review
8 (1973–1974): 201; Corwin R. Kruse, “Baby Steps: Minnesota Raises Certain Forms of Animal
Cruelty to Felony Status,” William Mitchell Law Review 28 (2001–2002): 1655; Joseph G. Sauder,
“Enacting and Enforcing Felony Animal Cruelty Laws to Prevent Violence against Humans,” Animal
Law 6 (2000): 2–6; Brett L. Shadle, “Cruelty and Empathy, Animals and Race, in Colonial Kenya,”
Journal of Social History 45.4 (2012): 1099; Brian Bonhomme, “Russian Compassion: The Russian
Society for the Protection of Animals—Founding and Contexts, 1865–75,” Canadian Journal of
History 45.2 (2010): 262–71; Diana Donald, “‘Beastly Sighs’: The Treatment of Animals as a Moral
Theme in Representations of London, c. 1820–1850,” Art History 22.4 (1999): 514–16; Larry Falkin,
“Taub v State: Are State Anti-Cruelty Statutes Sleeping Giants?,” Pace Environmental Law Review 2
(1984–1985): 266; Pamela D. Frasch, “Addressing Animal Abuse: The Complementary Roles of
Religion, Secular Ethics, and the Law,” Society and Animals 8.3 (2000): 339; Chien-hui Li, “A Union
of Christianity, Humanity, and Philanthropy: The Christian Tradition and the Prevention of Cruelty
to Animals in Nineteenth-Century England,” Society and Animals 8.3 (2000): 266; Susan Pearson,
“‘The Inalienable Rights of the Beast’: Organized Animal Protection and the Language of Rights in
America, 1865–1990,” 15–16, http://web.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/microsites/law-culture/
files/2006-files/Pearson-Long.pdf; Mark J. Parmenter, “Does Iowa’s Anti-Cruelty to Animals Statute
Have Enough Bite?,” Drake Law Review 51 (2002–2003): 820–22; Tannenbaum, “Animals and the
Law,” 565–78; Lesli Bisgould, Animals and the Law (Toronto, ON: Irwin Law, 2011), 58.
20. Favre and Tsang, “Development of Anti-Cruelty Laws,” 7.
21. Ibid., 14.
22. Ibid., 7.
23. Ibid., 11.
25. Favre and Tsang, “Development of Anti-Cruelty Laws,” 14. Favre and Tsang proceed to note that there
was ongoing confusion about whether the purposes of these laws were to protect property or prevent
animal suffering (12).
26. Ibid., 15–16.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 18.
29. Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law, 123–24.
30. Favre and Tsang, “Development of Anti-Cruelty Laws,” 14, 23.
31. Francione describes this change in philosophy as such: “The shift from malicious mischief statutes to
anticruelty statutes was supposed to represent a shift from pure property protection to a concern for
animals whether they were owned or not.” Later on, however, he states that “although there was sup-
posedly a dramatic difference between the theory of the anticruelty statutes and that of the malicious
mischief statutes,” they in reality “also focus primarily on property concerns” (Animals, Property, and
the Law, 121–25, 143–45).
32. Ibid., 123, 125–26.
33. Ibid., 4.
34. Ibid., 6, 18, 123.
35. Lesli Bisgould writes, referring to the development of the Canadian anticruelty Criminal Code provi-
sions: “Their essence has changed very little. In the manner in which they seek to protect inherently
conflicting interests—those of animals not to suffer, and those of people to cause such suffering”
(Animals and the Law, 58).
37. Ibid., 155.
38. Ibid., 145–46, 153.
39. Ibid., 147.
40. Ibid., 160.
41. For a survey of such critiques, see Reina Lewis and Sara Mills, Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader
(London: Routledge, 2003). See also Sudhir Chandra, Enslaved Daughters: Colonialism, Law, and
Women’s Rights (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and
Ella Shohat, Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota, 1997).
42. As Sally Merry notes, the exportation of law through colonialism affected both spaces (“From Law
and Colonialism to Law and Globalization,” Law and Social Inquiry 28.2 [2003]: 569).
43. See, e.g., Elizabeth A. Fay, A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 1–22;
and Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (London: Routledge, 1993). Mellor shows how gen-
dered our current understanding of romanticism is by proposing a paradigm shift through a focus on
women writers. For an overview of her project, see Romanticism and Gender, 4–12. See also generally
the works of Susan J. Wolfson, e.g., Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action
(Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2010) and Borderlines: The Shifting of Gender in
British Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).
44. Favre and Tsang, “Development of Anti-Cruelty Laws,” 2; Bonhomme, “Russian Compassion,” 264;
Donald, “‘Beastly Sighs,’” 514, Shevelow, For the Love of Animals, 60–61.
45. Shevelow, For the Love of Animals, 61.
46. Kruse, “Gender,” 180.
47. Shevelow, For the Love of Animals, 74–75.
48. Animals characterized as “wild” or “food” were represented and understood as distinctly different from
those animals that lived in the house and acted as “companion” to humans. See Martin A. Danahay:
“Nature in Hoof and Paw: Domestic Animals and Violence in Victorian Art,” in Victorian Animal
Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Deborah Denenholz Morse
and Martin A Danahay (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 98. Danahay extrapolates the public–private
divide to the domestic–foreign binary and has created an ingenious diagram that charts which spe-
cies were considered as belonging in the home (and the nation) and outside (or in “other” nations).
On the x-axis, Danahay maps the species as they were understood from violent to most peaceful. For
example, male dogs were seen as the most domestic of the violent animals, and monkeys, especially
those in human clothing, were the most peaceful domestic animals. In contrast, tigers were both
foreign and violent, and sloths were foreign but peaceful. This graph not only speaks to the qualities
of animals that were most appreciated in a companion but also alludes to the impact of imperialism
in the perception of animals (105–6).
49. Shevelow, For the Love of Animals, 64–65.
50. Tosh, Man’s Place, 33.
51. Anne McClintock explores the “cult of domesticity” in Victorian cities, and the related “invention of
the idea of the idle woman, the disavowal of women’s work.” See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather:
Race, Gender, Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995), 16. See also Lisa A. Keister
and Darby E. Southgate, Inequality: A Contemporary Approach to Race, Class, and Gender (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), 228–30; and generally, although the term cult of true womanhood is
used, Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18.2 (1966):
151; and Claudia Nelson, Family Ties in Victorian England (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), 46.
52. Teresa Mangum provides an example of how this selective respect for certain animals manifested in
Victorian society: the mourning of companion animals after their death. She writes, “Memorials
marked the gap left by a distinct, valued animal personality. In all fairness, they also implicitly argued
for the worth of animal life and even in some cases the hope for a reunion with the animal companion
afterlife. The paradoxical problem with mourning was that memorialization idealized but also isolated
the beloved pet as a being apart from the animal world of stray dogs, hunted animals, work animals,
and ‘food’ animals” (“Animal Angst: Victorians Memorialize Their Pets,” in Morse and Danahay,
Victorian Animal Dreams, 31).
53. Grace Moore, “Beastly Criminals and Criminal Beasts: Stray Women and Stray Dogs in Oliver Twist,”
in Morse and Danahay, Victorian Animal Dreams, 204. See also Heather Schell’s “Tiger Tales” where
the author argues that the reason England’s most ardent tiger hunters became vocal advocates of the
protection of tigers in India was due to their identification with the animals, and identification that
“entwined their sense of political power of the Indian people” (“Tiger Tales,” in Morse and Danahay,
Victorian Animal Dreams, 230; David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights [Cambridge: University
of Cambridge Press, 2003], 31).
54. Perkins writes that even at the time the hypocrisy of the beginning of the anticruelty movement, and
more specifically the attempts to criminalize animal baiting, was criticized. He includes a paragraph
from a journal of the day, in which one notable author writes: “The real thing that calls forth their
sympathy, and harrows up their soul, is, to see a number of artizans, by a relaxation of their labour,
baiting a bull or a bear, while a man with ten thousand a year may worry a hare, a stag, or a fox as he
pleases!” (Romanticism and Animal Rights, 93, citing Lewis Gompertz in the Medusa, 1820). See also
Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estates: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 155–58. For an American Victorian perspective, see Diane L.
Beers, For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United
States (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 51.
55. Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights, 93–95; Shevelow, For the Love of Animals, 49.
56. For example, Deborah Deneholz Morse argues that the novel Black Beauty was “intended for working-
class readers, as an anti-cruelty tract,” exposing the life of a carthorse through the first-person narrative
of the horse herself (“‘The Mark of the Beast’: Animals as Sites of Imperial Encounter from Wuther-
ing Heights to Green Mansions,” in Morse and Danahay, Victorian Animal Dreams, 187–89; Perkins,
Romanticism and Animal Rights, 105).
57. Bonhomme, “Russian Compassion,” 267; Donald, “‘Beastly Sighs,’” 514; Pearson, “Inalienable Rights,”
22–23.
58. Beers, For the Prevention of Cruelty, 22.
60. Parmenter, “Does Iowa’s Anti-Cruelty to Animals Statute Have Enough Bite?,” 820.
61. Favre and Tsang, “Development of Anti-Cruelty Laws,” 23; Frasso, “Massachusetts Anti-Cruelty
Statute,” 1005; Shevelow, For the Love of Animals, 152.
62. Shadle, “Cruelty and Empathy,” 1100.
63. Hilda Kean, cited in Kruse, “Baby Steps,” 1655; Li, “Union of Christianity, Humanity, and Philan-
thropy,” 267.
64. Li, “Union of Christianity, Humanity, and Philanthropy,” 275–76.
65. Ibid., 266–67; Shevelow, For the Love of Animals, 159–60.
66. Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights, 58. “Even if it was not overly stated, an analogy to the lower
classes could always be read into the discourse of animal rights. Animals also supplied a figure of speech
for other socially subordinated human beings, for classes of persons who supposedly were more like
animals, such as women, children, and subjected races in the expanding empire” (107). The focus on
suffering within the anticruelty movement tethered it to other movements focused on cruelty toward
children and women. Judith Fingard discusses how anticruelty movements focused on animals also
extended their support to women and children (“The Prevention of Cruelty, Marriage Breakdown, and
the Rights of Wives in Nova Scotia, 1880–1900,” Acadiensis 22.2 [1993]: 85; Natan Sznaider, “Pain
and Cruelty in Socio-Historical Perspective,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 10.2
[1996]: 343; Bisgould, Animals and the Law, 97–98). Furthermore, the focus on suffering presents
interesting links between the animal rights movement and antebellum abolitionist movements. The
literature notes how both focused on the ability to suffer rather than possessing the capacity to reason
as grounds for altering the legal system. For a discussion on the changing perspectives on human suf-
fering that motivated the legal end to slavery in America, see Elizabeth B. Clark, “‘The Sacred Rights
of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,” Journal
of American History 82.2 (1995): 473.
67. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture, and Postcolonialism (London:
Routledge, 1993). Rajan shows how the legislative action by the East India’s Company in India start-
ing in 1829 (such as the abolition of sati) “served as the moral pretext for intervention and the major
justification for colonial rule itself ” (42). This moment of colonial history represents a dynamic that
supported colonialism more generally: the perceived need for protection of women justified the op-
pression of all Indian people (42–48). See also Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists,
Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1994), 7–8 where Burton articulates one of the themes of her book: to further their objective of
achieving legal rights, British women engaged in racist discourse about Indian women.
68. Li, “Union of Christianity, Humanity, and Philanthropy,” 271–72.
70. Li, “Union of Christianity, Humanity, and Philanthropy,” 277. For a discussion on the link between
utilitarianism and colonialism, see Ratna Kapur, “Human Rights in the Twenty-First Century: Take a
Walk on the Dark Side,” Sydney Law Review 28.4 (2006): 665–87. Kapur highlights J. S. Mill’s ideas
on free speech, which he argued was an unfettered right for European men but not for the “‘native or
‘colonial’ subject . . . based partly on the argument that this subject lacked the capacity to reason” (17).
See also Piyel Haldar, “Utilitarianism and the Painful Orient,” Social and Legal Studies 16.4 (2007):
573; and generally the essays included in Bart Schultz and Georgios Varouxakis, eds., Utilitarianism
and Empire (Oxford: Lexington, 2005).
71. As Eve Darian-Smith notes, the fascination with the exotic other transcended class and gender strati-
fications at home: “Among all ranks and classes of English society there was a growing fascination
with otherness and both its positive and negative qualities” (Religion, Race, Rights: Landmarks in the
History of Modern Anglo-American Law [New York: Oxford University Press, 2010], 68).
72. For a discussion on the continued religious motivation behind the animal advocacy movement, see
generally Lisa Kemmerer and Anthony J. Nocella II, eds., Call to Compassion: Religious Perspectives on
Animals Advocacy (New York: Lantern Books, 2011).
73. See, e.g., Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Eliza F. Kent, Converting Women: Gender and Protestant
Christianity in Colonial South India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Penelope Carson,
“An Imperial Dilemma: The Propagation of Christianity in Early Colonial India,” Journal of Imperial
and Commonwealth History 18.2 (1990): 169.
74. Shadle, “Cruelty and Empathy,” 1098. He succinctly articulates the colonial logic as such: “Removing
a young woman’s clitoris held the tribe together; bludgeoning a harmless piglet to death contributed
nothing to the world” (1098).
75. Ibid., 1101.
76. Ibid.
77. See, e.g., Paul Ocobock, “Spare the Rod, Spoil the Colony: Corporal Punishment, Colonial Violence,
and Generational Authority in Kenya, 1987–1952,” International Journal of African Historical Studies
45.1 (2012): 29.
78. Shadle, “Cruelty and Empathy,” 1099.
79. See, e.g., Moira Ferguson, Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 1780–1900: Patriots, Nation, and
Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1998) for a discussion on the gender dimensions of
animal advocacy in England; Mary Ann Elston, “Women and Anti-vivisection in Victorian England,
1870–1900,” in Vivisection in Historical Perspective, ed. Nicolaas A. Rupke (New York: Routledge,
1990), 259; and J. M. Jasper and D. Nelkin, cited in Kruse, “Gender,” 180.
80. Pratik Chakrabarti, “Beasts of Burden: Animals and Laboratory Research in Colonial India,” History of
Science 48.2 (2010): 125 (“The Arya Samaj adopted the cow both as a symbol of Hindu compassion
towards other life forms and as an icon of the unification of the Hindu community, as a response to
colonial rule and in order to modernize Hinduism” [131]).
81. Ibid., 137–38.
82. See, e.g., Parama Roy, “Meat-Eating, Masculinity, and Renunciation in India: A Gandhian Grammar
of Diet,” Gender and History 14.1 (2002): 65; Jayanta Sengupta, “Nation on a Platter: The Culture and
Politics of Food and Cuisine in Colonial Bengal,” Modern Asian Studies 44.1 (2010): 86–90, 95–97;
Tristan Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times
(New York: Norton, 2006), 259.
83. Chakrabarti writes that through the adoption of the cow as a symbol of Hindu compassion toward
other life forms, the Cow Protection movement was a “particular expression of Hindu nationalism”
that labeled the British and Muslims as “‘outsiders’ to the Hindu identity and morality as well as brutal
because they consumed beef.” On the other hand, the Indian Pasteur movement, whose followers desired
the establishment of experimental institutes utilizing animals to treat rabies and other diseases, was
“absorbed within Indian nationalism as a progressive and modernist movement” (“Beasts of Burden,”
131–35).
84. Shevelow, For the Love of Animals, 9; Frasch, “Addressing Animal Abuse,” 339–40; Li, “Union of
Christianity, Humanity, and Philanthropy,” 269.
85. A similar statement is made by another notable animal advocate of the time, Richard Martin, speak-
ing to the House of Lords on Bear baiting and Other Cruel Sports: “though they could not be said
to possess rights in the same degree as men, yet that being placed under the protection of man, they
were entitled, so far as was consistent with the use which was given to map over the brute creation to
be treated with kindness and humanity” (Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, February 26,
1824, vol. 10 cc485–96).
86. See Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, May 21, 1823, vol. 9 cc432–5; Parliamentary Debates,
House of Commons, March 11, 1925, vol. 12 cc1002–13.
87. Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords, May 15, 1809, vol. 14 cc553–71.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid.
90. Darian-Smith, Religion, Race, Rights, 62–63.
91. Other jurisdictions exhibit similar patterns. For example, the Ontario Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals Act states, “Every person who owns or has custody or care of an animal shall
comply with the prescribed standards of care with respect to every animal that the person owns or has
custody of,”; however, this does not apply to “an activity carried on in accordance with reasonable and
generally accepted practices of agricultural animal care, management or husbandry” (Ontario Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, RSO 1990, c O.36, s 11.1 [1], [2]). Other examples
can be found in the following acts: BC Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, RSBC 1996, c 372, s
24.02; Animal Care Act, SM 1996, c 69, secs. 3(2), 4(1).
92. Humane Methods of Slaughter Act 7 USC 1901-1907.
93. Ibid.
94. Stephanie J. Engelsman, “World Leader—At What Price—a Look at Lagging American Animal
Protection Laws,” Pace Environmental Law Review 22 (2005): 335.
95. Animal Welfare Act 7 USC 54.
96. Transportation, Sale, and Handling of Certain Animals, 7 USC 54 at sec. 2132 (g)(1).
97. “Rats, Mice and Birds Excluded from Animal Welfare Act,” American Psychology Association 33.7
(2002), www.apa.org/monitor/julaug02/rats.aspx.
98. See Bisgould, Animals and the Law, 74.
99. Bisgould illustrates this argument—that only those cases deemed most horrific end in a guilty charge—
with the details of a few examples (Animals and the Law, 81–87).
100. Ibid., 71–75.
101. Francione, Animals, Property and the Law.
102. N.Y. Agric. & Mkts Law, Article 26, sec. 350. Hereafter cited as NYAGM.
103. Ibid.
104. Ibid., sec. 353.
105. Ibid.
106. Whether an act of cruelty and infliction of pain was justified or unjustified is “to be determined by the
trier of facts based upon the moral standards of the community,” and the justification “must be of the
type necessary to preserve the safety or property or to overcome danger or injury.” See People v Bunt,
462 NYS2d 142 (NY J Ct 1983) and People v Voelker, 658 NYS2d 180 (NY City Crim Ct 1997).
107. NYAGM, sec. 353.
108. Francione, Animals, Property and the Law, 134.
109. Thomas J. Catlaw and Thomas M. Holland, “Regarding the Animal: On Biopolitics and the Limits
of Humanism in Public Administration,” Administrative Theory and Praxis 34.1 (2012): 99.
110. Glen Elder, Jennifer R. Wolch, and Jody Emel, “Le Pratique Sauvage: Race, Place, and the Human-
Animal Divide,” in Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands
(London: Verso, 1998), 72.
111. (1992) 508 US 520, 113 S Ct 2217, 124 L Ed 2d 472.
112. Ibid., 526.
113. Ibid., 524.
114. Ibid., 526, citing Resolution 87-66.
115. Ibid., 526–27.
116. Ibid., 537. The Florida state provision at issue was section 828.12.
117. Ibid., 536, citing Fla. Op. Atty. Gen. 87-56, Annual Report of the Atty. Gen. 146, 147, 149 (1988).
118. Church of Lukumi Babalu, para. 536, citing Fla. Op. Atty. Gen. 87-56, Annual Report of the Atty.
Gen., 149n11.
119. Ibid., 527. In fact, the Supreme Court describes how the municipality sought a legal opinion from
the state attorney general to ensure that any ordinance passed would not be in conflict with state law.
The opinion that came back stating that since religious animal sacrifice did not fall within the state’s
definition of necessary it was illegal.
120. Ibid.
121. Church of Babalu Aye v City of Hialeah, 688 F Supp 1522, 1988 US Dist LEXIS 5675 (District court
decision).
122. The free exercise clause and the freedom of establishment clause together make up the “religion clauses”
of the First Amendment of United States. The first outlines the right to practice a religion without
interference and the second prohibits the government from enacting laws that favor a religion. For a
discussion on how these two clauses interact, and at times conflict, see, e.g., Jesse H. Choper, “The
Religion Clauses of the First Amendment: Reconciling the Conflict,” University of Pittsburgh Law
Review 41 (1979): 673.
123. Church of Lukumi Babalu, 537–38.
124. Ibid., 493. Curiously, despite the clear text of the initial resolution that the city adopted stating that
killing animals for ritual purposes is against public (read: dominant) morals and values, the Court
does not make this connection clear.
125. Ibid., 534.

126. Ibid., 541–42. These comments are outlined on pages 541–42. The comments included in the deci-
sion are not subtle; the individuals, including elected government officials, who attended this meeting
felt comfortable to explicitly employ their Christian beliefs to judge the legality of the practices of
Santeria. One councilman said, “The Bible says we are allowed to sacrifice an animal for consumption,
but for any other purposes, I don’t believe that the Bible allows for that” (541). The chaplain for the
city’s police department said, “We need to be helping people and sharing with them the truth that is
found in Jesus Christ” (542). Even the city attorney, who one would think would be more sensitive to
the constitutional issues alive in this discussion, read the results of the Resolution as being that “this
community will not tolerate religious practices which are abhorrent to its citizens” (542). The court
also alludes to the charged atmosphere of the meeting, noting that people interrupted speakers with
cheers (541).
127. The “general applicability” test is used by US courts to assess claims of infringement of the free
exercise clause. Laws which affect religious expression must apply generally to all religions and not
unduly burden only one. Finding that the local ordinances fail this test as they prohibit one specific
form of religious expression, the Court states that “this precise evil is what the requirement of general
applicability is designed to prevent” (545–46).
128. Ibid., 543.
129. The Court further comments that the city “has not explained why commercial operations that slaughter
‘small numbers’ of hogs and cattle do not implicate its professed desire to prevent cruelty to animals
and preserve the public health. Although the city has classified Santeria sacrifice as slaughter, subjecting
it to this ordinance, it does not regulate other killings for food in like manner” (ibid., 545).
130. Francione, Animals, Property and the Law, 160.
131. National Meat Association v Harris (Attorney General of California), 132 S Ct 965, 181 L Ed 2d 950,
80 USLW 4139.
132. “Rampant Animal Cruelty at California Slaughter Plant,” Humane Society of the United States,
January 30, 2008, www.humanesociety.org/news/news/2008/01/undercover_investigation_013008.
html. Video available at the same URL.
133. David Cassuto, “Meat Animals, Humane Standards, and Other Legal Fictions,” Law, Culture, and the
Humanities (2012): 4–5, http://lch.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/07/16/1743872112450561.full.
pdf+html. See, e.g., Matthew L. Wald, “Meat Packer Admits Slaughter of Sick Cows,” March 13, 2008,
New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/business/13meat.html?_r=1&ref=westlandhallmark
meatcompany. The CEO of the Hallmark/Westland Meat Company (which ran the slaughterhouses
at issue in the case) Steve Mendell’s comments are characterized as follows: “Mr. Mendell replied
that after he had seen the first video, he concluded that ‘it was a regulatory violation, for sure, it was
inhumane treatment, for sure,’ but that he did not believe it was a food safety issue until he saw the
second video on Wednesday.”
134. David Brown, “USDA Orders Largest Meat Recall in U.S. History,” February 18, 2008, Washington
Post.
135. California Penal Code, sec. 599–600.
136. Federal Meat Inspection Act, 21 USCS. The FMIA applies to California slaughterhouses because the
act specifies that it applies where a state has not implemented an inspection system imposing the same
standards as those under the act (FMIA, sec. 661(c)(1)). The application of the FMIA in this case is
addressed in National Meat Association, 468.
137. 9 Code of Federal Regulations, sec. 309.
138. Ibid., sec. 309.3.
139. Ibid., sec. 309.2.
140. This section states: “Requirements within the scope of this [Act] with respect to premises, facilities
and operations of any establishment at which inspection is provided under . . . this [Act] which are in
addition to, or different than those made under this [Act] may not be imposed by any State” (ibid.,
958–59, citing 21 U. S. C. sec. 678 [internal page references omitted]).
141. The treatment of the pigs in the slaughterhouses was the main issue, as the FMIA, like the California
statute, prohibits nonambulatory cattle to be slaughtered for human food (FMIA, sec. 309.3[e], referred
to in National Meat Association, 973).
142. National Meat Association, 959. Its judgment reverses the decision of the Court of Appeals, which held
that “states are free to decide which animals may be turned into meat” (963, citing 599 F. 3d, 1098,
1099).
143. Ibid., 968.

144. Ibid.
145. Ibid.
146. Ibid., 958, citing sec. 313.2(d)(2) and sec. 313.2(d)(3).
147. Ibid., 958, citing sec. 313.2(d)(1) and sec. 313.1(c).
148. Ibid., 963–64.
149. Cassuto, “Meat Animals, Humane Standards, and Other Legal Fictions,” 4.
150. Ibid. The FMIA has an interesting history; the creation of this act was motivated by the reaction to
Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (Pasadena, CA: Upton Sinclair, 1906). Though fiction, the novel
includes true accounts of the conditions in the meatpacking industry at the beginning of the twentieth
century (Cassuto, “Meat Animals, Humane Standards, and Other Legal Fictions,” 3). Sinclair’s work
is also cited in the National Meat Association, 968.
151. Cassuto, “Meat Animals, Humane Standards, and Other Legal Fictions,” 3–4, citing 9 CFR, sec.
313.2.
152. Ibid., 4.
153. Ibid. Cassuto provides a calculation that reveals how little time inspectors can spend on each animal:
according to 2010 data, each inspector inspected 16,330 animals, and assuming they each worked full
time and had no other duties, then each inspector saw 8 animals each hour (Cassuto, “Meat Animals,
Humane Standards, and Other Legal Fictions,” 5). Another figure that offers some perspective is
provided by Timothy Pachirat: one animal is killed every twelve seconds in industrial slaughterhouses
(Every Twelve Seconds [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011], 9).
154. Cassuto, “Meat Animals, Humane Standards, and Other Legal Fictions,” 5.
155. Cassuto, “Meat Animals, Humane Standards, and Other Legal Fictions,” 5–6, citing National Meat
Association, pt. 2, para. 2.
156. Cassuto, “Meat Animals, Humane Standards, and Other Legal Fictions,” 5–6.
157. Both the percentage of cases of cruelty toward animals that are prosecuted and the number of those
prosecuted where the decision is reported are relatively low. In Canada, Bisgould states that “there is
sometimes an apparent reluctance to attach criminal stigma by way of charges or conviction, as well
as in the sentence imposed, when the victim of the crime is an animal” (Animals and the Law, 76).
Bisgould goes on to show, in a very effective way, how few decisions involving animal cruelty are
reported legally, by listing pages of cases that became public only when the media published the story
(79–81). A similar situation exists in the United States and the United Kingdom. See Penny Conly
Ellison, “Time to Give Anticruelty Laws Some Teeth—Bridging the Enforcement Gap,” Journal of
Animal Law and Ethics 3 (2009): 1; and Francione, “Reflections,” 177n.
158. R v. Ménard, 1978 CarswellQue 25, 4 CR (3d) 333, 43 CCC (2d) 458.
159. Ibid., para. 55.
160. Ibid., para. 58.
161. Ibid., para. 56.
162. Ibid., para. 57.
163. Ibid., para. 60.
164. Ibid.
165. Ibid., para. 47.
166. Ibid., para. 48. The desire to distance himself from animals, and to not empathize, is evident throughout
Justice Lamer’s judgment. The familiar refrain that emotion is irrelevant to legal discourse is used here
to calibrate what is necessary and unnecessary suffering in accordance with mainstream practices.
167. Ibid., para. 49.
168. Ibid., para. 51.
169. Ibid., para. 465.
170. Reece v. Edmonton (City) [2011] AJ No 876; 2011 ABCA 238. Concerned about Lucy’s health and
well-being, and in light of the Humane Society’s decision not to take legal action against the zoo, an
application for a declaration that the city of Edmonton was in violation of the Animal Welfare Act was
made by Tove Reece, PETA, and Zoocheck Canada. At the first trial the chambers judge struck the
application on the grounds of abuse of process. The Alberta Court of Appeal upheld this ruling. For
the majority, the only issue deemed important enough to guide the decision was the fact that “seek-
ing a declaration takes the matter out of the hands of the Attorney General, and bypasses the penal
sanctions contemplated by the Act” (ibid., para. 31). The appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada was
dismissed (Reece v. Edmonton (City) [2011] SCCA No 447).
171. Reece v. Edmonton, para. 158–60. Indeed, Chief Justice Fraser’s comments about the rule of law have
been subsequently cited for their importance. See Friends of the Canadian Wheat Board v. Canada
2011 FC 1432 CanLii; Cameron v. Canada (Indian Affairs and Northern Development), 2011 FC 570
CanLii. See also Maneesha Deckha, “Initiating a Non-Anthropocentric Jurisprudence: The Rule of
Law and Animal Vulnerability under a Property Paradigm,” Alberta Law Review (forthcoming).
172. Reece v. Edmonton, para. 56, citing R v. Ménard, 465, leave den. [1978] 2 S.C.R. vii noting the passage,
“Thus men . . . impose on themselves a rule of civilization by which they renounce . . . all infliction of
pain, suffering or injury on animals which, while taking place in the pursuit of a legitimate purpose,
is not justified by the choice of means employed” (ibid., 28n).
173. Reece v. Edmonton, para. 162.
174. Claire Jean Kim, “Multiculturalism Goes Imperial: Immigrants, Animals, and the Suppression of
Moral Dialogue,” Du Bois Review: Social Science and Research on Race 4.1 (2007): 234–35.
175. See, e.g., Kapur, “Human Rights in the Twenty-First Century,” 665.
176. See, e.g., Ian Haney-López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 1996); Elizabeth Comack, ed., Locating Law: Race/Class/Gender/Sexuality Connections
(Halifax: Fernwood, 2006); Beverly Moran and Stephanie M. Wildman, “Race and Wealth Disparity:
The Role of Law and the Legal System,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 34 (2007): 1219; and Omar
Swartz, “Toward a Critique of Normative Justice: Human Rights and the Rule of Law,” Socialism and
Democracy 18.1 (2010): 185.
177. See Carol Smart, Feminism and the Power of the Law (London: Routledge, 1989); Jennifer Nedelsky,
Law’s Relations: A Relational Theory of Self, Autonomy, and Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011); and Mayo Moran, Rethinking the Reasonable Person: An Egalitarian Reconstruction of the Objec-
tive Standard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
178. See Patricia Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1991); Sharon L. Roach Anleu, “Critiquing the Law: Themes and Dilemmas in
Anglo-American Feminist Legal Theory,” Journal of Law and Society 19.4 (1992): 423; Kimberlé
Crenshaw et al., eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York:
New Press, 1995).
Cockfight Nationalism: Blood Sport, American Empire, and Nation Building | 549
Cockfight Nationalism: Blood Sport and

the Moral Politics of American Empire and
Nation Building
Janet M. Davis
O
n January 12, 1899, the American Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) held its annual meeting at its head-
quarters in New York City. President John P. Haines announced that
in the coming year, the ASPCA planned to spread its humane work to the
“new possessions of the United States,” the territorial spoils of victory after
the Spanish-American War (1898): “In Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philip-
pines, no such work as ours has ever yet been established. The duty of kind-
ness to animals has hardly been thought of. . . . It will be our duty doubtless
to endeavor to promote a better state of things wherever the authority of the
Nation is established.”1 Haines noted that a ban on blood sports, specifically
cockfighting and bullfighting, would be essential to achieve the ASPCA’s goals,
as similar legislation had done at home. Haines’s invocation of “duty,” “the
state of things,” the “Nation,” and the timing of his announcement in the
aftershocks of war highlighted the mutually constitutive relationship between
animal advocacy, benevolence, and American identity formation, an ideological
nexus, which had been central to the organized animal welfare movement in
the United States since its genesis in 1866, less than a year after the Civil War.
This essay explores the symbiotic relationship between animal welfare
and ideologies of American nation building during a series of struggles over
cockfighting in the new US Empire in the early twentieth century. Specifi-
cally, these clashes erupted in the US Occupied Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto
Rico, where the battle lines pitting American-sponsored animal protectionists
against indigenous cockfight enthusiasts were drawn along competing charges of
cruelty and claims of self-determination. American leaders unilaterally banned
cockfighting in the new territories and enacted stiff fines as high as $500 and
prison terms from one to six months.2 Specific political and cultural conditions
catalyzed the cockfight conflicts in each country: in the Philippines, cockfight-
ing disputes were tied to conflicts between Filipino businessmen, American

Occupation officials, and Protestant missionaries; in Cuba, a failed attempt to

unseat the government sparked a cockfighting struggle; and in Puerto Rico,
a coalition of indigenous entertainment interests clashed with American of-
ficials. Despite specific precipitating factors, struggles over the cockfight reveal
consistent ideological similarities across these three countries borne out of the
common experience of colonialism.
Although a variable cultural practice, the cockfight itself also contained
common elements in these far-flung geographic settings, as well as in the
United States. At the cockpit, the fight often took the form of a main (series of
odd-numbered fights between two parties) or a derby (with multiple entrants,
each participating in a series of round-robin matches): in each fight, two cocks
were suitably “matched” by weight. Other physical considerations included
the length of the roosters’ gaffs (their natural spurs or the metal razor spurs
attached to their legs), the trimming of specific feathers (tail, wing, and saddle),
and dubbing (clipping the wattle and combs). In the cockpit, handlers known
as “pitters” held each rooster and “billed” (presented) them to each other for
a few preliminary pecks. When the referee issued the call to “Pit,” the birds
were released and the fight began; each pitter was required to remain at least
six feet away from his rooster until the referee called “Handle,” an order to pick
up the birds if one was hung or punctured by a gaff. With a call to “Rest,” the
pitter would remove the gaff, keeping the opposing bird on the ground. “Rest”
lasted twenty seconds, and then the match would resume. However, if a rooster
could not fight, his pitter would say, “Count me”: the referee would count in
sets of ten and then a set of twenty. If a bird still refused to fight, or ran away,
it lost. If both birds refused to fight, the match was declared a draw; if both
ran away, then both lost. In any scenario, the death of a rooster meant defeat.3
These elements structured the rhythm and flow of cockfights across the
Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Yet this form of fraternal leisure was also
highly political. In this essay I argue that battles over the cockfight were a form
of animal nationalism. Supporters and opponents alike mapped gendered,
raced, and classed ideologies of nation and sovereignty onto the bodies of
fighting cocks to stake their divergent political and cultural claims about the
rights and responsibilities of citizenship and national belonging. Cockfighting
enthusiasts were cultural nationalists—indeed, cockfight nationalists—who
defended their right to fight as a right to preserve their cultural heritage and a
right to citizenship and self-determination. Similarly, anticockfighting activ-
ists implemented their own culturally inflected ideals of proper assimilability
and nation building to create an empire of benevolence and animal kindness,
which, in turn, bolstered exceptionalist ideologies of the United States as a

republic, not a traditional empire like Spain. In contrast to a formal empire
built on military conquest and colonial domination, this exceptionalist ideal
envisioned an empire of free markets, republican governments, democratic
elections, and republican values of civic virtue, benevolence, sobriety, and moral
uplift.4 American officials enacted new animal welfare laws in the empire, which
reinforced these exceptionalist values of benevolent stewardship—even though
subject people often viewed such legislation as imperialism by another name.
Correspondingly, US Empire builders treated indigenous reception to such
legislation as a bellwether for the potential assimilability of imperial subjects.
The Insular Cases (1901–1904) determined that the Constitution did not have
to follow the US flag, which therefore carried no promise of future citizenship
to the United States’ imperial subjects. In this milieu, indigenous compliance
to American animal welfare laws became a litmus test of fitness for citizenship.
Speciesism and Historical Analysis
The roosters in my essay are elusive historical subjects, even though their physi-
cality, behavior, and interactions with people shaped the social and cultural
experience of the cockfight. The written historical record is fundamentally
speciesist because it privileges human thought and human agency. The history
of animals is virtually synonymous with acts of human representation because
animal lives are mediated through human documents—written, photographic,
painterly, and aural.5 The animal studies historian Erica Fudge acknowledges
this methodological predicament as a problem of ontology and epistemology:
“I continue to use the term ‘history of animals’ as if it were, as Derrida has
proposed, sur rature—under erasure: it is both indispensible and impossible.
It sums up an area of study, but cannot define it.”6 Additionally, most human
actors in colonial cockfighting struggles believed in biblical dominion from
the book of Genesis (1:6), which codifies speciesism as a Christian imperative
by granting humanity control over all creatures. Nonetheless, animal protec-
tionists also fully embraced the concept of biblical stewardship, which subtly
undermined the purely speciesist credo of dominion, for they fervently believed
that human beings had a direct moral responsibly to protect animals.
One must be mindful that a history of animals can simply become a history
of people with animals in it.7 Thus a consideration of the roosters’ physical-
ity, behavior, and their interactions with people is essential to understanding
the cockfight’s cultural power and why it was such a flashpoint in the empire,
even though other blood sports were banned without incident. While animal
advocates were equally dedicated to banning bullfighting and cockfighting,

these blood sports were hardly interchangeable. Each animal and each cultural
practice carried its own historical circumstances and meanings. In contrast to
cockfighting, Filipinos, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans raised few objections to
American bans on bullfighting because they considered the plaza de toros to
be a detestable symbol of Spanish colonialism. The Cuban poet and exiled
nationalist José Martí characterized bullfighting as “a futile bloody spectacle
. . . and against Cuban sentiment for being intimately linked with our colo-
nial past.”8 While the bullfight remained an enduring metaphor for Spanish
brutality and decadence in a cultural imaginary of American exceptionalism,
cockfights escaped such colonial associations.
Unlike the bullfight, cockfighting was a long-standing form of leisure in
virtually all societies with domestic fowl. Indigenous fighting cocks originated
in India and Southeast Asia and traveled with human commerce and military
activity around the globe. The Italian diarist Antonio Pigafetta observed
cockfighting in Butuan, Philippines, during Magellan’s circumnavigation
voyage (1519–1522), decades before Spanish colonization.9 Polynesian travel-
ers brought the earliest chickens to the Americas on oceanic canoes between
1304 and 1424 according to DNA evidence found on chicken bones buried
on the Arauco Peninsula in south-central Chile.10 Chickens—and probably
cockfighting—traveled to other parts of the Americas thereafter. The incred-
ible range of geographically specific gamecock breeds or strains, such as the
Asil (South Asian), Malay, Japanese, Wisconsin Shuffler, Kentucky Warhorse,
Red Cuban, Pyles Old English, Irish Gilders, Persian, and French, attest to
the transnational reach of the cockfight.11
In addition to the cockfight’s geographic ubiquity, cockers (practitioners)
came from all social classes: chickens were widely accessible and affordable
(although some champion strains fetched high prices). Roosters were adaptable,
sociable, fecund, and hardy, and could be kept for little cost. They fought freely
among themselves, and the cockpit was infinitely transportable: a fight could
occur virtually anywhere, from a circle etched in the dirt to a fancy permanent
building. The traditional Spanish bullfight, by contrast, required considerable
capital investment. Since the eighteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church
and the landed nobility had sponsored bullfights in Spain, providing expansive
pasturelands for raising prize cows and elaborate, looming stadium-like arenas
for the fights.12 Cockers in myriad transnational settings characterized their
blood sport as a populist expression of indigenous culture—free from the co-
lonial baggage of the Spanish bullfight and its expensive pageantry of picadors,
Figure 1. banderilleros, and espadas. This held

The cockfight is a transnational, intergenerational true even in those Latin American
form of fraternal leisure that can take place virtually
anywhere. This postcard from Havana attests to the countries where Spanish conquista-
blood sport’s commercial popularity in the early dors likely introduced cockfighting.
twentieth century. “Habana. Riña De Gallos. Cock-
Fight,” Postcard, Havana, Cuba, 1912, Record Group Owing to its simplicity and acces-
350, General Classified Files, Entry 5A (1898–1913), sibility, the cockfight remained an
Cockfighting prohibition (Cuba), Box 213, File 1660,
350:150:56:8:6, National Archives at College Park, indigenous practice, regardless of its
College Park, MD. past colonial associations.
American Animal Protection: A Short Historical Summary
When John Haines announced the overseas empire as the latest field for
American animal advocacy, his activist agenda was essentially the same abroad
as it was at home. The ASPCA’s founder and first president, Henry Bergh,
underscored the connections between animal mercy and nation building when
he successfully introduced the first comprehensive state animal anticruelty bill
to the New York legislature on April 19, 1866, which made the act of beating,
overloading, or neglecting an animal a punishable offense. The incorporation
of the ASPCA gave the organization’s officers the powers of arrest. Bergh was
pleased that the bill’s submission date was the ninety-first anniversary of the
Battle of Lexington and Concord, and “was to be equally as significant in the
cause of animal protection as was that famous skirmish of American patriots
in their struggle for human liberty.”13 Linking human liberty and the birth
of the nation to new laws mandating kindness to animals, Bergh forged the
foundation for a sweeping animal nationalism that quickly spread across the
country and overseas. By 1900 all forty-seven states had passed anticruelty
laws modeled on the first New York statute, which also was the blueprint for
animal welfare legislation in the empire.14 Bergh and his colleagues attacked
cockfighting head-on in 1867 with an amendment to the original statewide
anticruelty statute that banned blood sports and made audience members and
hosts of such fights subject to prosecution. This legislation, too, was a boil-
erplate for subsequent statutes in other states, as well as overseas territories.15
At the turn of the twentieth century, cockfighting was illegal in forty states.16
Taken together, these new animal protection laws marked a significant de-
parture from a speciesist legal system. The historian Susan Pearson shows that
the older common law tradition defined animals purely as personal property.
Cruelty to an animal, therefore, was a crime solely against the property owner,
not the animal. (Women and children were likewise defined as household
dependents under coverture.) In 1866 New York State’s anticruelty statute
represented a major transformation because it legally recognized the rights of
animals to protection from pain and neglect, rather than simply defending the
property interests of the owner.17 Although the terminology of speciesism and
nonspeciesism would have been alien to Gilded Age animal protectionists, these
statutes represent a historical watershed in recognizing animal sentience and
the right to avoid suffering. Immediate areas of activism included protecting
laboring animals, and banning blood sports, unsanitary dairying practices,
and the transportation of animals to market without sufficient food and water.
Antivivisection represented an exceptionally vigorous activist field.
The humane movement’s convergence of liberty, kindness to animals, and
nation building gave ideological form to its immediate historical antecedents in
antebellum social reform, emancipation during the Civil War, and the ratifica-
tion of the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution. The historian
Diane Beers demonstrates the deep genealogical ties between animal protection
and other contemporary social justice movements, most notably abolitionism,
child welfare, prison reform, women’s rights, and the movement to prevent
domestic violence.18 The legal scholar Elizabeth Clark likewise shows that
antebellum abolitionist writers created a compelling literary genre that Clark
calls the “cruelty narrative.”19 Animal protectionists adopted this abolitionist
language in nonracist ways to demonstrate their shared commitment to these
social justice movements against cruelty.20 The Massachusetts SPCA (MSPCA)
regularly denounced American racist violence in its monthly magazine, Our

Dumb Animals: “The United States must bow its head in shame. Three lynch-
ings in almost as many days. Is the rest of the world to think of us as savages?
This magazine goes to every country of the globe.”21 Turning the racist lan-
guage of “savagery” on its head to condemn white supremacy, the MSPCA
was a steady critic of the patriotic language of benevolence in a violent society.
The MSPCA’s founder and first president George Angell condemned US
militarism overseas as a glaring contradiction of a patriotic rhetoric of uplift
and kindness. Angell evoked President William McKinley’s “Benevolent As-
similation” proclamation of December 21, 1898, when he reprinted Bertrand
Shadwell’s anti-imperialist poem, “Malevolent Assimilation,” at the height of
the Philippine-American War (1899–1902), when as many as four hundred
thousand Filipinos died from the same kind of wartime atrocities that prompted
international condemnation of Spanish colonial brutality during the 1890s:
reconcentrados (concentration camps), forced labor, shoot-on-sight orders, tor-
ture, starvation, guerrilla warfare, and burning entire villages.22 Angell readily
evoked the American Revolution and the nation’s ideal of self-determination
when he argued that Filipino nationalists had a right to fight the United States
for their sovereignty, “just as American boys would have done under similar
circumstances.”23 Formal empire building destroyed the bedrock principles of
benevolent American nation building.
Angell denounced racial violence, militarism, and formal imperialism as
part of his nonspeciesist commitment to kindness for all creatures. Still, he
embraced informal empire building. Like virtually all American humane
advocates, Angell believed in conquering hearts and minds with the peace-
able global spread of American democratic institutions, free trade, industrial
development, and Protestant evangelism. Animal humanitarians often tacitly
embraced notions of the white man’s burden as part of their call to educate
and enlighten their brethren of color abroad with a gospel of kindness. Put
another way, they shared the goals of Protestant missionaries and international
temperance reformers, groups that the historian Ian Tyrrell calls the architects
of America’s “moral empire.”24 Together, they promulgated a universalizing ethic
of kindness and uplift—sometimes with little regard to culturally specific local
practices, which, in turn, led to conflict. For moral empire builders, the colo-
nial cockpit was a spectacle of homosocial alterity and ruin: flush with strong
drink, gambling, certain violence to the roosters, and possible bloodshed for
its human participants. In short, the foes of the cockfight collapsed an entire
moral universe into the bodies of fighting roosters and men.
Deep Play Revisited
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz captured the symbolic merging of birds

and men in his famous essay “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,”
based on his Balinese fieldwork in 1958. The cockfight constituted “deep” play
through its “deep” matches of equally talented combatants; bettors placed the
largest wagers on contests with evenly matched roosters because the outcome
was unpredictable. As such, the cockfight performed high-stakes cultural work
by enacting status relations within Balinese society, as “a story they tell about
themselves.”25
The physical intimacy between male cockers and their roosters signified
another kind of “deep play.” The elaborate care of prize birds generated deep
fraternal affection for the cockfight writ large, thereby amplifying its cultural
and political power. Roosters did not enter the fighting pit until the age of
two—long after most chickens had been slaughtered. The birds received a
special diet; cockers conditioned roosters with rigorous exercise; they also
cradled and stroked their birds daily as a bonding exercise—the Filipino cocker
Angel Lansang confirms this deep bond between bird and cocker: “The cock
is handled and petted by his master and consequently all his physical and
mental assets are well known and minutely observed.”26 During cockfights,
pitters believed that human saliva was a restorative balm. Accounts from Cuba,
Georgia (US), Bali, Venezuela, and other countries described pitters licking the
rooster’s head wounds or momentarily submerging the battered head inside
their mouths to warm and revive the bird—thus giving etymological form
to the term cocksucker.27 Other accounts from England and Belgium include
pitters who urinated on the injured birds to “sterilize” the wounds.28
In all cases such physical proximity of cocks and men, coupled with the
mingling of bodily fluids, created a volatile crucible of homosocial familiar-
ity, blood, sex, affection, and violence. The folklorist Alan Dundes analyzes
this paradoxical relationship using a psychological and sexual poetics, or as he
puts it, “the Gallus as phallus.”29 The intimacy and violence of the cockfight
seemingly broke down the human and animal divide, if only to reify it with
the animal’s death. But the shared, fraternal spilling of male bodies across
socioeconomic groups made the cockfight a particularly intoxicating and ac-
cessible form of human and animal interaction that erupted, when threatened,
into a populist form of cultural nationalism worth fighting for.
The Philippines
The cockfight’s intimate resonances embodied myriad ideological meanings for

diverse historical actors in the US Occupied Philippines (1899–1946). For the
US military, it was a dangerous obstacle to wartime strategy. For some Filipino
nationalists, it represented cultural degradation. For other Filipino nationalists,
it was a patriotic institution. For American Occupation leaders, it triggered
confrontations with American missionaries, who, in turn, used cockfighting
to condemn Catholicism and Occupation governance. Brigadier General J. F.
Bell banned cockfighting by military order during the Philippine-American
War to stanch the flow of enemy intelligence, gambling revenues, and fraternal
morale building among Philippine nationalist forces.30 Manila’s first municipal
animal cruelty ordinance banned cockfighting outright as a means of practical
civil management and social control in 1902.31
Like elsewhere, the Philippine cockfight was a dominant physical space for
leisure and political resistance. It was also a significant anticolonial metaphor.
Dr. José Rizal, the scholarly martyr of the Philippine independence movement
who was executed by the Spanish in 1896, described the cockfight as a site
of social leveling in his nationalistic novel, Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not).
In one scene, rich and poor sit cheek and jowl at a Sunday cockfight, and an
underdog rooster defeats a larger foe: “A savage shouting greets this judgment.
. . . Whoever hears it from afar knows then that the underdog has won. . . .
This is what happens among nations. When a small one defeats a big one,
they relate the tale for centuries and centuries.”32 In reading the cockfight as
a metaphor for the nation, Rizal underscored the cross-class composition of
the spectators to highlight the depth and range of the Philippine nationalist
movement. Yet while Rizal’s literary uses of the cockfight showcase its popularity
and potency as a nationalist symbol, he still loathed the sport.
Certainly, cockfighting conflicts in the Philippines were hardly reducible to
a showdown between a unified front of native nationalist cockers of color and
foreign Euro-American empire builders. While the sport was a major mascu-
line pastime across the Islands, Filipino independence leaders were hardly in
lockstep with their countrymen. Despite depicting cockfighting as an idiom
of resistance, Noli Me Tangere also characterized the sport as enervating and
parasitic—sapping men of their money and judgment: “Cockfighting . . . is
one of the people’s vices, even more transcendental than opium among the
Chinese. The poor man goes there to risk what he has, wishing to get money
without working. The rich man goes as a distraction, using the money left over
from his feasting and the purchase of masses. But the fortune he wagers is his
own, the gamecock is brought up with great care, perhaps with greater care
than his own son, who succeeds his father in the cockpit.”33 Rizal characterized
the cockfight as an emasculating addiction using the transnational racialist
trope of Chinese “opium eating” to emphasize its craven thrills—made all the
more compulsive because of the sustained, intimate relationship between the
cockfighter and his bird, which might receive better care than one’s own child,
during the delicate process of husbandry, training, and attention in the cockpit.
The nationalist leader Emilio Aguinaldo also believed that the cockfight
threatened the nation’s manly vitality. He hated any form of gambling and
closed the cockpits during his brief tenure as president of the First Philippine
Republic (1899–1901): “Gambling more than anything else in the Philippines
is the mother of crime.”34 Imbued with republican ideals of self-restraint and
civic duty that would be familiar to any student of the American Revolution,
Rizal and Aguinaldo envisioned an independent Philippine republic founded
on moral virtue. (In fact, in 1774 the American Continental Congress banned
cockfighting, horseracing, traveling shows, and “every species of extravagance
and dissipation” that might threaten the republican purity and solemnity of the
future nation.)35 For Rizal, Aguinaldo, and other republicans, cockfighting and
its association with gambling made it a synonym for effeminizing dependency,
antithetical to sober, manly self-determination.
American Protestant missionaries in the Philippines similarly condemned the
cockfight as an immoral and profligate form of vice. They freely quoted Rizal
and Aguinaldo to support their own platform of purity reform.36 But unlike
the nationalist critiques of the cockfight, missionaries used the gendered and
racialist language of the “white man’s burden” to argue that cockfighting was
a litmus test of assimilability. Arthur Judson Brown, an American Presbyterian
missionary leader, reduced the enormous ethnic diversity of the Philippines
Islands to a lazy, fatalistic, barely dressed racial “type” who gambled every-
thing on the cockfight: “The unwillingness of the Filipino to work is a serious
problem in the development of the Islands. He does not lead ‘the strenuous
life.’ Rich soil, perpetual summer, and simple wants are not conducive to hard
labor. . . . At Escalante, I found a disgusted contractor who could not induce
men to load a lorcha (sailboat) at any price because they had won enough
for their immediate necessities at the Sunday cockfight, and they would not
work till the money was spent.”37 Deploying a common racialist critique of
“tropical” labor, Brown argued that the warm climate, coupled with the lure
of easy money at the cockpit, made the Filipino unfit for self-government or
future US citizenship.
To American evangelists, the capricious, slothful, barely clad Philippine

cockfight enthusiast was a stark contrast to industrious, middle-class, white,
Euro-American manly ideals. Brown’s reference to Theodore Roosevelt’s it-
eration of disciplined, athletic manliness from The Strenuous Life: Essays and
Addresses (1902) illustrates the transnational reach of this cultural precept and
its relationship to synergistic ideologies concerning racial difference, gender,
class, and empire. Because “he [did] not live the strenuous life,” the cocker
rejected manly thrift and capital accumulation in favor of drunkenly gambling
his livelihood on a violent, profligate game of chance in which his fate was tied
to his rooster’s success. In other words, his seeming dependency on blood sport
made him unfit for independence, and certainly inassimilable as a candidate
for future US citizenship. But he was potentially redeemable. Just as liberal
Protestants posited that the souls of “uncivilized” people were savable, they
also believed that a combined gospel of Christianity, kindness, and physical
vigor could uplift and improve Filipino men into budding citizens.
US Occupation authorities treated the cockfight as a barometer of cultural
degradation and catalyst for moral reform. Although American leaders officially
maintained the separation of church and state in Philippine public institutions,
they freely promoted evangelical Protestant ideologies of human improve-
ment. In the nondenominational setting of the public schools, the Philippine
Bureau of Education instituted an athletic curriculum to provide physically
wholesome alternatives to the cockpit.38 This program attracted roughly 80
percent of the public school student body by 1914 to build the “spirit of fair
play and sportsmanship, hitherto lacking” on the Islands. The zoologist and
Philippine Commission member Dean Worcester reported that baseball was
building future citizens as a consequence of successfully combating the lure
of the cockpit: “Baseball not only strengthens the muscles of the players, it
sharpens their wits. Furthermore it empties the cockpits to such an extent
that their beneficiaries have attempted to secure legislation restricting the time
which it may be played. It has done more toward abolishing cockfighting than
have the laws of the commission and the efforts of the Moral Progress League
combined.”39 As a sober way to develop a muscular male body in a fraternal
setting, baseball represented a wholesome contrast to the boozy, bodily violence
to man and bird at the cockfight.
Protestant missionaries and their supporters used the cockfight to indict
Catholicism and Spanish colonialism. They argued that Filipino men had little
semblance of manly moral free agency when bound to a church that mediated
human affairs through a corrupt papal intermediary and an extractive system
of friars that encouraged men to gorge themselves during innumerable Catho-
lic festivals and feasts, and then bet everything on a cockfight. The Spanish
government also profited handsomely because it levied heavy taxes on the
fights.40 Charles W. Briggs, a Presbyterian missionary in Panay and Negros
from 1900 to 1910, took these associations even further, making sweeping
connections between “fatalist” friars, the atrocities of the Philippine-American
War, Catholic ritual, and the profitable cockfight as an interconnected dem-
onstration of cruelty: “The shocking brutalities of the insurgent officers in the
late war were not mere incidents. They were true children of the friar system.
. . . The Church promoted questionable pleasures and became entangled with
the vices of the country. . . . Cockfighting and gambling occupy the part of
Sunday remaining after early mass.”41 Missionaries also treated the elaborate
care of gamecocks as another “decadent” Catholic ritual in which cockers gave
their birds Communion to fortify them for battle—a collapsing of human and
animal that contradicted their rigid credo of biblical dominion.42
In viewing the cockfight as a metonym for Catholicism, Protestant mis-
sionaries deemed Filipino Catholics to be just as animalized, inassimilable, and
“savage” as the polytheistic tribal peoples they proselytized in other mission
fields. In so doing, these missionaries participated in a long American tradition
of anti-Catholic sentiment, such as the nativist “Know Nothing” movement
of the 1840s and 1850s, whose Protestant members feared that Irish Catholic
refugees of the potato famine would place their loyalty with Rome, rather
than the United States.
American missionaries in the Philippines were livid when the Occupation
government lifted the ban on cockfighting in 1902 in favor of regulation.
(With the brutal pacification of the Philippine opposition, Occupation leaders
deemed the cockfight to be less threatening.)43 Nonetheless, American mis-
sionaries described the move from prohibition to regulation as a reincarnation
of Spanish rule.44 An American missionary field secretary denounced US com-
plicity in the cockpits in a newspaper editorial: “Cockfighting is the gambling
passion of the Filipinos, and the Catholic Church as well as the Government
has worked it for what is in it. It is very offensive: It shows the subtle clutch
the Catholics have on our politics there. . . . Can it be accounted for except
on his religion and his subservience to the dulcet notes of his priests?”45 Prot-
estant missionaries treated Catholicism and the cockfight as complementary
forms of dependency, emasculation, and “savagery”—in which wine and blood
comingled in a “pagan” credo of transubstantiation.
Evangelical criticism of the Occupation government’s cockfighting poli-
cies escalated in early 1908 when Manila’s municipal government granted a
private American consortium, the Carnival Association, permission to hold
cockfights during the Manila Carnival. The Evangelical Union—a federation

of evangelical Protestant churches working in the Philippines—was infuri-
ated. Letters and telegrams of protest poured into the War Department and
the White House from American evangelicals in the field, SPCA officials,
and individual congregants in the United States. On February 23, 1908, the
Episcopal bishop Mercer Johnston preached a sermon in Manila, “A Covenant
with Death, an Agreement with Hell,” during a large protest meeting con-
sisting of approximately 2,500 people, including members of the Philippine
Teachers Association, over 600 Filipino high school and university students,
and American Protestant women.46 In fire-and-brimstone language, Johnston
condemned the Occupation government for its complicity in the cockfight:
“Yonder cock-pit is as a house swept and garnished, awaiting the evil spirits
invited thither by the Carnival Association. . . . Yonder cock-pit is as a whited
sepulcher, hungering for dead men’s bones and soon to be filled with all un-
cleanness.”47 In characterizing the cockpit as a beckoning shrine filled with
the bones of martyrs and saints, Johnston drew on a well-known Protestant
speciesist discourse of Catholic animism.
Despite the energetic evangelical protest movement, American officials kept
the cockpits open. Clarence Edwards, head of the federal Bureau of Insular
Affairs, concluded that ordinary Filipinos—as well as many Americans on the
Islands—overwhelmingly favored cockfighting, and that the “opposition [was]
being fathered by a few ministers who desired to advertise themselves.”48 The
sport was so undeniably popular with Americans in the Philippines that US
soldiers introduced a fierce strain of chicken known as the Texas, which soon
became the most coveted fighting stock on the Islands. The Filipino cocker
Angel J. Lansang described the Texas as indomitable: “Flaming spirit and
deep-seated courage are the innate qualities of this specimen. It is said that
hit and pierced right thru the heart, at times, with one last desperate thrust,
this prodigious breed may still kill his foe.”49 The rise of the Texas strain was
a demonstration of the cockfight’s cross-cultural ubiquity in the Philippines,
a living testament to cultural fraternization and exchange among colonizer
and colonized.
Cuba
Ever since American mining and sugar enterprises established Cuban opera-
tions in the early nineteenth century, hordes of transient American business-
men, seamen, entertainers, fugitives, schemers, crooks, tourists, prostitutes,
and deserters flocked to the island just ninety miles off the US coast in search
of profit and pleasure.50 A rollicking vice economy catered to Americans; it

ended only after Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement overthrew the Fulgencio
Batista dictatorship in 1959. Sixty years earlier, American missionaries had
been eager to conquer this thriving vice economy after the Spanish-American
War. Engaging in humanitarian relief, purity reform, and educational projects
alongside their evangelism, American Protestant missionaries poured into Cuba
so quickly that an interdenominational conference in Cienfuegos in 1902 hur-
riedly hashed out a comity plan organizing locations of the most prominent
denominations into zones of influence.51
In the initial stages of US rule in Cuba, there was little dissent among
American leaders, missionaries, and animal advocates. In 1900 two US mili-
tary orders banned cockfighting outright, imposed prohibitive $500 fines, and
even punished spectators or anyone else who “aided” an animal fight with a
fine of $10 to $500, or with a prison term of one to six months. Despite these
draconian measures, the sport continued under open secrecy (like elsewhere),
even with the closure of urban public cockpits. The fights simply moved to
the countryside or to private grounds.52 Although members of the Cuban
Congress had sponsored a lottery bill to repeal both bans in 1903, President
Tomás Estrada Palma—a strong American ally—threatened a swift presiden-
tial veto. In his subsequent message to Congress, President Palma argued that
blood sports and gambling were a “cruel, semi-barbarous and demoralizing
spectacle,” a retrograde expression of Spanish colonial bondage that would
“injure the reputation of the Island.”53 Palma used the familiar teleological
language of barbarism and cruelty to demonstrate his government’s rejection
of bloody Spanish rule, in favor of supporting the United States and its project
of benevolent exceptionalism and nation building.
In 1907 the cockfight abruptly became a nationalist minefield. In the words
of one high-ranking American official, the cockfight now assumed “the dignity
of a presidential issue” as the center of a political power struggle that erupted
out of the failed Cuban revolution in 1906.54 This connection was hardly ob-
vious in late September 1906, when General José Miguel Gómez and fellow
members of the Republican Liberal Party rebelled against the reelection of
President Palma, whom they dismissed as a US dupe. Palma appealed to US
authorities for help; US troops quickly returned Cuba, per the terms of the
Platt Amendment (1901), and two weeks later, on October 13, 1906, Charles
E. Magoon was installed as US provisional governor. At the same time, the
Rural Guard, a paramilitary Cuban arm of the American military, intensified
its policing activities, taking special interest in enforcing the cockfight ban. In
a letter to Secretary of War William Howard Taft, Magoon himself acknowl-

edged the Rural Guard’s move as an act of revenge: “I am assured by many
persons, and I think the assertion is in a measure true, that the Rural Guards
are ‘getting even’ with the men of the insurgent forces.”55
Political unrest deepened in January 1907, when an American banker in
Havana staged a large cocking main. Between two hundred and three hun-
dred people attended, including American officers, as well as General Gómez,
Major General Pino Guerra, and other leaders of the 1906 rebellion. Hearing
the telltale shouts and squawks, two Rural Guardsmen rushed to the fight.
Spectators on the main caught sight of the soldiers and scattered, except for
Gómez, Guerra, and their friends, who seized the opportunity to stage a test
case showdown against the Rural Guard and the Palma administration. They
were promptly arrested for violating the ban and fined $50 apiece. Gómez
instantly demanded a repeal of the prohibition in his newspaper, El Rebelde,
and a protest movement was born.
Using a discursive alchemy of self-determination, fraternal freedom, and
yeoman leisure, the combustible movement exploded. Gómez and his allies
orchestrated huge local parades, rallies, and generated petitions across the
Island that year to denounce the Rural Guard and the US cockfight ban. The
petition, an important tool of protest during the American Revolution whose
symbolic importance was surely remembered in revolutionary Cuba, depicted
the discontent as an exemplary display of republican virtue. Local mayors
sent stacks of thick, signed testimony to Magoon, describing a “monstrous
manifestation” of citizens taking to the streets, in some places “a distance of
six squares,” as thousands of cockfight supporters assembled in public spaces
across Cuba. Magoon chronicled the predictable rhythm and structure of
these protests in his correspondence with Taft: “The demonstrations in favor
of repealing the law takes the form of a parade, which, after passing through
the streets, stops in front of the Mayor’s office and presents him with a request
to advise me of the demonstration and ask me to issue the desired decree. This
the Mayor does, either by telegram or letter.”56 In one such decree, Antonio
Ruiz, the president of a pro-cockfighting committee in Cienfuegos, presented
a “Manifest to the Public in General”: “The time has come when all Cubans,
lovers of their traditions, should combine in one solid mass, and as a one man
work without rest to obtain the reestablishment of the cockfights.”57 Coalesc-
ing as “one man,” the protesters transfigured the corporeal body of the rooster,
cocker, and spectators into a single national body fused by a shared commit-
ment to masculine leisure and self-determination.
Specifically, the petitions framed cockfighting as a right of independent

Cuban citizenship. They described the orderly, brotherly, socioeconomic inclu-
siveness of these gatherings, “in which all classes of society are represented, as
also all the towns and cities of the Island.” Like thousands of other petitioners,
Narciso Lopez Quintana of Havana beseeched Magoon to lift the ban with
keywords like “peaceful,” and “justice” to stress that the demonstrations were
maintaining “the sociological moral order which we are all in duty bound to
promote, in behalf of the reputation conceded to us by the civilized nations as
a cultured people.”58 Cuban petitioners proclaimed that cockfighting promoted
an upright, virtuous Cuban yeomanry—a forceful rebuttal to charges that
this blood sport sapped manly vitality. Using the intersectional language of
race, class, and gender to articulate ideologies of heritage, liberty, nation, and
culture, petitioners paid close attention to the hardworking laborers, whose
right to preserve their indigenous traditions of male leisure and conviviality was
especially critical in rural areas where little other amusement was available after
long days of agricultural toil. Writing from Nueva Gerona in the Isle of Pines,
D. M. Pearcy “and many others” described a moral, patriotic, and industrious
people, using the same language of suffering and mercy that humane activists
used to defend animals.
The cock-fight was not an imported sport bringing with it the pernicious vice of gambling.
No, it appeared as a compensation to the hardworking country laborer. The people of Cuba
who do not live in cities away from all business center and who limit themselves to the
cultivation of the soil to earn their living, without the lenitive offered by the amusements
to be found in all cities, felt the natural melancholy of those who suffer, and found in the
diversion it now acclaims some relief to sustain its hope in the future. And the amusement
. . . became a necessity which your kindness can gratify.59
Pearcy’s emphasis on the cockfight’s precolonial origins amplified the protest’s

nationalistic tenor. As an indigenous form of popular leisure, the cockfight
bore no taint of Spanish colonialism—and its recent barbarous memories
of General “Butcher” Weyler, reconcentrados, mass starvation, and political
persecution—unlike the bullfight, which remained a hated symbol of the late
Spanish empire. As a people who had suffered under Spanish rule, Cuban
cockers used a language of cruelty and kindness to appeal to an American
regime that fancied itself an empire of mercy—though the totalizing Platt
Amendment (1901) demonstrated otherwise because it authorized US military
and economic domination of Cuba for the next three decades. Cockers also
directly challenged the morality of the American humane movement’s credo of
kindness by pointedly suggesting that the suffering person was more important
than the suffering rooster.
Although protecting the roosters was central to animal advocacy in Cuba,

its movement language contained the same teleological references to nation
building and dissolution as those of the cockfight petitioners. John L. Shortall,
president of the Illinois Humane Society, announced that ending the prohibi-
tion would constitute “a serious backward step for Cuba, whereas should the
law remain in force it would be a marked evidence of progress and would be
uplifting in Cuba, and encouraging to those who are striving for better things.”
The president of the ASPCA, Alfred Wagstaff, declared, “It was the fervent
hope of the friends of humanity that whenever the flag of the United States
was planted, the dumb animals might share in the benefits of an advancing
civilization.”60 The Cuban animal welfare activist Magdalena Peñarredonda
wrote of her misgivings to Magoon: “I do not believe that an American Gov-
ernor, who represents a country where the ideas of commiseration and pity
towards the irrational animals are so thoroughly observed and practiced, will
permit that a struggle between two unfortunate animals which tear themselves
to pieces and bleed to death with horrible sufferings, should be the means of
pleasure and gain in Cuba.”61 Animal advocates fused their dedication to the
“least among us” to the nation’s ostensible moral purpose at home and abroad
in a nonspeciesist belief that an injury to one was an injury to all, a proposi-
tion made all the more credible because cockfights were often sites of shared
interspecies violence to birds and men.
Few animal advocates went so far as to use the humane movement’s ideolo-
gies of kindness to critique—rather than reinforce—American empire building.
Yet George Angell, a steady critic of US military aggression overseas, strongly
questioned America’s benevolent motives in Cuba: “We receive on this April
17th a circular from the Cuban Industrial Relief Fund stating that our flag
waves over three hundred thousand people who have neither food to eat, clothes to
wear, nor homes to live in.”62 Juxtaposing the American flag with mass starvation,
Angell denounced a foreign policy that perpetuated foreign domination at the
expense of humanitarian aid. Like other animal welfare leaders, he beseeched
Magoon, “in behalf of the more than two millions of members of our American
Bands of Mercy,” a demand to uphold the ban made all the more urgent be-
cause other aspects of American rule were antithetical to humanitarian ideals.63
American sugar growers also wanted to preserve the ban, but for reasons
that were purely economic: they argued that plantation laborers often skipped
work for days after a cockfight, slowing production of a highly profitable crop
that dominated the colonial economy.64 A delegation of mill owners went a
step farther, beseeching Magoon to preserve the ban alongside a plea for ad-
ditional prohibitions on leisure during the cane harvest.65 In recognition of
such totalizing attempts to control Cuban labor and leisure, the narrator in
James Gould Cozzens’s novel The Son of Perdition (1929) characterized the
sugar planters as a “foreign fiefdom in the heart of the island.”66
By April 1907 the situation had become so heated that trains and other
modes of public conveyance became theaters of conflict. Rural Guards roamed,
snatching chickens and arresting the owners, including wealthy planters who
happened to be caught traveling on trains with chickens, in defiance of US
military orders.67 In the face of an escalating national crisis, the political and
economic power of American sugar growers and the moral sway of evangeli-
cals and animal welfare activists could no longer carry the day, and American
leaders changed course. On January 28, 1909, home rule returned to Cuba,
and the leader of the repeal movement, General Gómez of the Liberal Party,
was elected president. On July 3, 1909, the Cuban Congress repealed the US
ban, in favor of letting each municipality legislate its own cockfighting laws—
a model of governance based on Philippine legal precedent.68 Colonel Frank
E. McIntyre of the federal Bureau of Insular Affairs criticized the repeal as
“the lie” that would keep “a back country Cuban family . . . in thatch-roofed
huts” with American blessing—and permanently inassimilable.69 Cockfight-
ing enthusiasts, however, saw the repeal in their own nationalistic terms, a
vindication of their struggles for cultural and political self-determination in a
country under virtual US sovereignty.
Puerto Rico
Like the Philippines and Cuba, cockfighting conflicts in Puerto Rico started
with a colonial ban. On March 10, 1904, the US civil government instituted
by the federal Foraker Act (1900) banned bird and quadruped fights; guilty par-
ties were subjected to a $50 fine and/or a month in jail.70 As elsewhere, Puerto
Ricans ignored the ban, especially in rural areas distant from the metropolis.
Animal advocates and American civil officials in Puerto Rico also used the
colonial language of American civilization, uplift, dependency, and tutelage to
justify the ban—and to argue that Puerto Ricans were unfit to manage their
internal affairs. American officials read the cockfight as yet another expression
of corruption in Puerto Rico rooted in Spanish colonial politics of collusion
and patronage with local elites.71
US authorities reasoned that cockfighting was a signature of inassimilable
alterity, a catalyst for idleness, permanent poverty, Catholic fatalism, and whole-
sale violence to birds and men. The American journalist William Dinwiddie
noted that after a long, orderly cockfight, “the crowd moved from a cock-fight
to a solemn Catholic ceremony,” in a seamless symbiosis of the two cultural
worlds, both of which rendered Puerto Ricans completely passive to oppressive

Spanish rule: “Verily only such a mercurial race could have stood the blighting
abuses of a despotic government with complacence.”72
US governor H. M. Towner treated the ban as a form of public protection
and uplift: “The fights of the cocks were nearly always the commencement
of fights by the people. Drinking led to drunkenness and drunkenness led to
quarrels and assaults, even to murder. . . . To be prepared for a cockfight in
these days, as now, the jibaro (peasant) must have money, liquor, and a gun or
knife. To hurt, to harm, to kill—that is the object lesson of cock fighting.”73
Based on copious historical examples of sober and orderly cockfights, Towner’s
description represented the exception, not the rule.74 Still, the intimate circum-
stances of the matches—the proximity of fighting birds, men, strong drink,
easy money, and bloodshed— potentially embodied a troubling moral collapse
across the species divide. As such, human beings and animals both were victims
of the cockfight. Owing to the ubiquity of cockfighting and other forms of
animal abuse, Ella Payne, an American schoolteacher in Mayaguez, requested
federal funding from the Bureau of Insular Affairs in 1913 to create a humane
organization in her town: “Animals must be better protected. We are under
the STARS AND STRIPES.”75 Payne emphatically believed that a proactive
animal protection movement was the linchpin to achieving America’s higher
humanitarian purpose in its empire. As a manifestation of animal nationalism,
Payne’s plea highlighted these interlocking ideologies of kindness, American
exceptionalism, and empire building.
Puerto Ricans simultaneously deployed their own powerful brand of
cockfight nationalism to defend their rights.76 After the US Congress passed
the Jones Act in 1917, which granted Puerto Ricans limited US citizenship,
indigenous cockers framed their right to fight as an expression of their rights
as American citizens. Even though they also made heavy references to the
cockfight as a defining element of their Puerto Rican identity and heritage,
they posited this right in cultural terms, rather than as a claim to sovereignty
(like Cuba and the Philippines). Writing from Rio Piedras in 1920, Manuel
Jiménez Santa urged the Puerto Rican Senate and US Secretary of State
Bainbridge Colby to repeal the law: “The fact is that here, though American
citizens, we are persecuted by the police force, because of following a tradition.
. . . Porto Rico, deprived of her traditional cockfights, is a Ruin.”77 Jiménez
warned that the United States’ international stature was now in jeopardy; he
urged US authorities to respect local cultural autonomy in a manner befitting
the nation’s support for Cuba Libré during the 1890s: “The United States of
America, by its conduct in Porto Rico, is digging the grave for its prestige as a
colonizing nation in the opinion of the peoples of South America, who, with
astonishment and terror, look upon these things done by a nation which sent
its armies to fight for the democracy and freedom of the world.”78
Jiménez evoked the same patriotic language of republican virtue to argue in
favor of cockfighting that American officials and animal welfare activists used
to denounce it. Although the ban remained during the 1920s, cockers received
an unexpected boost in 1927 when prizefighting, another form of violent
corporal spectacle, was legalized. A US government commission regulated
boxing thereafter and took a healthy share of the profits from this lucrative
sport. In the aftermath of legalization, boxing soared in popularity and fancy
newfangled stadiums became a common sight.79 Cockers saw this success as a
clear sign to redouble their efforts to lift the ban because they had long allied
themselves politically with boxing interests. Lobbying groups agreed, and in
1928 the Puerto Rican legislature voted to repeal the ban.
Yet Governor Towner privileged moral nation building over economic na-
tion building and vetoed the bill. Alongside a swell of support from Protestant
missionaries and local animal advocates, Towner used the well-trodden dialectic
of barbarism and exceptionalism in his address to the Puerto Rican House of
Representatives, calling the original ban a “wise and patriotic act . . . a great
benefit to the country. . . . Such sports were common in a barbarous and cruel
age, but are being abandoned in a more humane and kindly era.”80 Similarly,
journalists observed that Puerto Ricans (like other subject people in the US
Empire) were abandoning the cockpit, in favor of wholesome American team
sports like baseball: “Cockfighting has given way gradually to less bloody
forms of sport.”81 Other critical editorials highlighted human victimization
as a consequence of the cockfight: “The jibaro (peasant) pays no attention,
saving his breath for the secret pit, the dashing fury of his little bird, the hot
argument of epic narrative afterward.”82 The peasant cocker lived in the mo-
ment, addicted to the capricious excitement and “the dashing fury of his little
bird”; possessing little interest in sober capital accumulation, he would remain
forever incapable of self-government if cockfighting were legalized.
In the end, the desire to jumpstart a sluggish economy during the Great
Depression trumped the moral imperative of protecting roosters and cockers.
In 1933 the new US administration of Governor Robert H. Gore argued
that legalization would make Puerto Rico’s tourist economy more attractive
to American visitors through racialized nostalgic spectacles of authentic, na-
tive culture:83 “We must create more lures for the tourist-minded man and
woman. . . . We must have the recreation to satisfy the spirit that is ever seeking
something new. And to gratify that, you can offer the oldest sport known to
original man—a sport that I participated in as a boy in my Kentucky home.”84
A coalition of animal protectionists, American officials, purity reformers,

and missionaries denounced the repeal as a profit-minded repudiation of the
United States’ moral responsibilities abroad. The former secretary of state of
Puerto Rico under President Woodrow Wilson, Martín Travieso, condemned
the repeal as a retrograde move: “This is just a sample of what our new Governor
is doing to demoralize our people, to expose us to the contempt and ridicule
of other civilized communities and to destroy the wonderful work done by the
people of this island during the thirty-five years of our life under the Ameri-
can flag.”85 In the end, the cockfight became a significant lure for American
tourists seeking leisure and tropical otherness—the keystones of Puerto Rico’s
burgeoning tourist economy, which was developed and sustained, in part, with
the bodies and blood of game fowl.86 Today, Puerto Rico’s official territorial
Sports and Recreation Department runs eighty-six cockfighting clubs, draw-
ing approximately one million spectators per year, and grossing roughly $100
million in revenue in recent years.87
Conclusion
In his annual address for 1899, ASPCA president John Haines observed
presciently that the link between ideologies of animal kindness and nation
building might prove to be the American humane movement’s undoing in the
empire if activists moved too fast or unilaterally. In other words, he cautioned
humane societies against assuming the unbridled zealotry of a conquering
army. He advocated “prudence” in building an animal protection movement
abroad, given the potentially hazardous contingencies of culture and nation:
“The peoples of those islands will be predisposed to resent what may seem
to them to be an interference with their traditional customs, and they will be
jealous of everything that implies an assumption of moral superiority on our
part.”88 Indeed, the fractious history of the colonial cockfight demonstrates that
men and their roosters immersed in “deep play” were flashpoints for cultural
and political contestation. The cockfight was a crucible of American empire
building and its discontents.
Nonetheless, cockfighting has remained legal ever since the bans were
overturned in the Philippines (1902), Cuba (1909), and Puerto Rico (1933).89
Cockers retain the full-throated fraternal language of cockfight nationalism—
itself a product of the colonial clashes that Haines warned against in 1899. The
Filipino cocker Lansang has written that the cockfight allowed his countrymen
“to assert and preserve our dignity as a free and independent country. After all,
cockfighting is a precious heritage handed down to us by our brave ancestors
and its traditions have been written in blood. Let us make of our national
sport a symbol of our country.”90 Similarly, in October 2010, Puerto Rico’s

territorial legislature passed a resolution to protect cockfights as “an integral
part of the island’s folklore and patrimony.”91 Although cockfighting has been
illegal in all fifty US states since 2008, Hawaiian state legislative members of
the committee on Tourism, Culture, and International Affairs also approved
a nonbinding resolution in 2010 that recognized cockfighting as a “cultural
activity.”92
Perhaps the most consistent feature of this troubled transnational history of
cockfight nationalism has been the persistent erasure of the roosters in a specie-
sist historical record. Still, two prevailing modes of experiential representation
have endured since the dawning of the US Empire: enthusiasts insistently stress
the cocks’ “natural” desire to fight, while animal protectionists emphasize the
gamecock’s inevitable suffering and certain death.93 Despite this acknowledg-
ment of bodily cruelty, early twentieth-century SPCA advocates unwittingly
helped the roosters disappear as historical subjects because they folded the
suffering chicken into a wholesale moral condemnation of the cocker. Because
animal protectionists relentlessly targeted human depravity, colonized cockers
saw cockfighting bans as an intrusive way for American imperialists to control
colonial bodies—human and animal alike. Consequently, cockfighting prohibi-
tions in the empire were ephemeral, and cockfight nationalism bore the stamp of
cultural nationalism. To be sure, the violent circumstances of American empire
building may have precluded other outcomes, yet a sustained nonspeciesist
focus on the roosters themselves through culturally sensitive humane educa-
tion programs might have fostered more ethical protection measures with less
internal resistance than outright cockfight bans. But the American nation-state
has long favored public funding for punitive, rather than educational measures,
a political reality that bedevils animal advocacy to this day.
Notes
I would like to thank Claire Jean Kim, Carla Freccero, and an anonymous reviewer for their insightful
and generous comments. I also offer my heartfelt thanks to the managing editor Jih-Fei Cheng, copy
editor Paula Dragosh, and other members of the editorial team at American Quarterly for their superb
guidance throughout the publishing process.
1. “May Stop Bullfighting: Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Society to Work in New Fields,” New York
Times, January 14, 1899.
2. Brigadier General J. Franklin Bell, “Telegraphic Circular No. 19,” Telegraphic Circulars and General
Orders (Bantangas: Headquarters, Third Separate Brigade, 1902), 17–18; “Ordinance for the Preven-
tion of Cruelty to Animals,” Ordinances City of Manila (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1902), 115,
112.150, Record Group 350, Philippine Materials Collection, V 376, Entry 95, 350:150:58:20:2,
National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland (hereafter cited as NARA
II); “Military Order No. 165,” April 19, 1900, Havana; Letter from Charles E. Magoon to William
Howard Taft, Habana, February 25, 1907, 2; both from Record Group 350, General Classified Files,
Entry 5A (1898–1913), Cockfighting prohibition (Cuba), Box 213, File Marker 1660, 350:150:56:8:6,
NARA II; No. 33: “An Act to Amend Section 5 of an Act Entitled ‘An Act to Prevent Cruelty to Ani-
mals,’ [Originally] Approved March 10, 1904,” Approved, May 4, 1933, Record Group 350, General
Classified Files, Entry 5B (1914–1945), Cockfighting (Puerto Rico), Box 1074, File Marker 26484,
350:150:57:11:2, NARA II.
3. Jim Harris, “The Rules of Cockfighting,” in The Cockfight: A Casebook, ed. Alan Dundes (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 12–13.
4. For a classic treatment, see William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 50th
anniversary ed. (1959; rpt. New York: Norton, 2009).
5. The philosopher Peter Singer defines speciesism as “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the
interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species” (Animal
Liberation [1975; rpt. New York: New York Review of Books, 1990], 6).
6. Erica Fudge, “A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals,” in Representing Animals, ed.
Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 6.
7. Here I am paraphrasing Virginia Anderson’s invaluable observations on the challenges of studying
livestock in colonial New England and the Chesapeake (Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals
Transformed Early America [New York: Oxford University Press, 2004], 4).
8. José Martí, quoted in Louis A. Pérez Jr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 78.
9. Scott Guggenheim, “Cock or Bull: Cockfighting, Social Structure, and Political Commentary in the
Philippines,” in Dundes, Cockfight, 136–37.
10. John Noble Wilford, “First Chickens in Americas Were Brought from Polynesia,” New York Times,
June 5, 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/science/05chic.html.
11. Tim Pridgen, Courage: The Story of Modern Cockfighting (1938; E-Reprint: Home Farm Books, 2009),
72–85.
12. Timothy Mitchell, Blood Sport: A Social History of Spanish Bullfighting (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
13. Sydney H. Coleman, Humane Society Leaders in America: With a Sketch of the Early History of the
Humane Movement in England (Albany, NY: American Humane Association, 1924), 39.
14. Susan Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 79.
15. Anyone charging admission or aiding the arrangements of said fight could be convicted of a misde-
meanor (“New York Revised Statutes 1867: Chapter 375—an Act for the More Effectual Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals—Sections 1–10,” Animal Legal and Historical Center, www.animallaw.info/
historical/statutes/sthusny1867.htm [accessed July 12, 2011]).
16. Diana L. Beers, For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the
United States (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 76–77.
17. Pearson, Rights of the Defenseless, 77–80.
18. Beers, For the Prevention of Cruelty, especially pages 24–29.
19. Elizabeth B. Clark, “‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual
Rights in Antebellum America,” Journal of American History 82.2 (1995): 463–93.
20. Pearson, Rights of the Defenseless, 109–14.
21. Our Dumb Animals 67.1 (1934): 3.
22. Julian Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and
Puerto Rico during U.S. Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 6; Paul A. Kramer,
The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2007), 157.
23. Bertrand Shadwell, “Malevolent Assimilation”; George Angell, “Shooting Boys in the Philippines”;
and Angell, “To the Filipino”; all from Our Dumb Animals 35.1 (1902): 2.
24. Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2010).
25. Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in Dundes, Cockfight, 109.
26. Angel J. Lansang, Cockfighting in the Philippines (Our Genuine National Sport) (Baguio City, Philip-
pines: Catholic School Press, 1966), 140.
27. Alan Dundes, “Gallus as Phallus: A Psychoanalytic Cross-Cultural Consideration of the Cockfight as
Fowl Play,” in Dundes, Cockfight, 259–61, 268.
28. Ibid., 260.
29. Ibid., 241–82.
30. Brigadier General J. Franklin Bell, “Telegraphic Circular No. 19,” Telegraphic Circulars and General
Orders (Bantangas: Headquarters, Third Separate Brigade, 1902), 17–18.
31. “Ordinance for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,” Ordinances City of Manila (Manila: Bureau
of Printing, 1902), 115, 112.150, Record Group 350, Philippine Materials Collection, V 376, Entry
95, 350:150:58:20:2, NARA II.
32. José Rizal, Nole Me Tangere (Touch Me Not), trans. Harold Augenbraum (1887; rpt. New York: Penguin
Classics, 2006), 307–8.
33. Ibid., 302.
34. Emilio Aguinaldo, quoted in Mercer Green Johnston, “A Covenant with Death, an Agreement with
Hell: A Sermon Preached in the Cathedral of St. Mary and St. John, Manila,” February 23, 1908, Cock-
fighting (Philippines), Box 454, File Marker 6633, General Classified Files, Entry 5A (1898–1913),
RG 350, 350:150:56:13:5, NARA II.
35. Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (1982; rpt. New York: Norton, 1988), 247.
36. Johnston, “Covenant with Death.”
37. Arthur Judson Brown, The New Era in the Philippines (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1903), 72–73;
Frederick Chamberlin, The Philippine Problem, 1898–1913 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1913), 41.
38. For additional information on anticockfighting initiatives and humane education programs in US Oc-
cupied Philippines public schools, see Janet M. Davis, “Bird Day: Promoting the Gospel of Kindness
in the Philippines during the American Occupation,” in Nation-States and the Global Environment:
New Approaches to International Environmental History, ed. Erika Marie Bsumek, David Kinkela, and
Mark Atwood Lawrence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 181–206.
39. Dean C. Worcester, The Philippines Past and Present (1914; rpt. New York: Macmillan, 1930), 408–9.
40. For a thorough discussion of Philippine cockfighting during the Spanish colonial era, see Guggenheim,
“Cock or Bull,” 136–39.
41. Charles W. Briggs, The Progressing Philippines (Philadelphia: Griffith and Rowland, 1913), 101.
42. Bruce L. Kershner, The Head Hunter and Other Stories of the Philippines (Cincinnati: Powell and White,
1921), 68–69.
43. See, for example, “An Act Amending Section 40 of Act #82 Entitled ‘A General Act for the Organiza-
tion of Municipal Governments in the Philippine Islands,” No. 364, Enacted February 20, 1902,
Record Group 350, General Classified Files, Entry 5A (1898–1913), Cockfighting (Philippines) Box
454, File Marker 6633, 350:150:56:13:5, NARA II.
44. Guggenheim, “Cock or Bull,” 136–39.
45. “The Government and Gambling in the Philippines,” n.d., n.p., Record Group 350, General Classified
Files, Entry 5A (1898–1913), Cockfighting (Philippines), Box 454, File Marker 6633, 350:150:56:13:5,
NARA II.
46. Telegram from the Evangelical Union to President Roosevelt, February 25, 1908, Record Group 350,
General Classified Files, Entry 5A (1898–1913), Cockfighting (Philippines), Box 454, File Marker
6633, 350:150:56:13:5, NARA II.
47. Johnston, “Covenant with Death.”
48. Memorandum from Clarence Edwards to William Howard Taft, Secretary of War, February 24, 1908,
Washington, D.C., Record Group 350, General Classified Files, Entry 5A (1898–1913), Cockfighting
(Philippines), Box 454, File Marker 6633, 350:150:56:13:5, NARA II.
49. Lansang, Cockfighting in the Philippines, 54.
50. Pérez, On Becoming Cuban, 22.
51. Ibid., 242–55.
52. “Military Order No. 165,” April 19, 1900, Havana; Letter from Charles E. Magoon to William Howard
Taft, Habana, February 25, 1907, 2; both from Record Group 350, General Classified Files, Entry 5A
(1898–1913), Cockfighting prohibition (Cuba), Box 213, File Marker 1660, 350:150:56:8:6, NARA
II.
53. “Tomás Estrada Palma Message to Congress on January 6, 1904,” quoted in letter from Charles E.
Magoon to William Howard Taft, February 25, 1907, 12–13.
54. Ibid., 1.
55. Ibid., 3.
56. Ibid., 8.
57. Antonio Ruiz, “Manifest to the Public in General,” January 20, 1907, Record Group 350, General
Classified Files, Entry 5A (1898–1913), Cockfighting prohibition (Cuba), Box 213, File Marker 1660,
350:150:56:8:6, NARA II.
58. Letter from Narciso Lopez Quintana, et al. to Charles E. Magoon, Havana, February 24, 1907, Record
Group 350, General Classified Files, Entry 5A (1898–1913), Cockfighting prohibition (Cuba), Box
59. Letter from D. M. Pearcy et al. to Charles E. Magoon, Nueva Gerona, February 17, 1907, Record
60. Letter from John L. Shortall to Magoon, Chicago, February 16, 1907; Letter from Alfred Wagstaff
to Magoon, February 18, 1907; all from Record Group 350, General Classified Files, Entry 5A
(1898–1913), Cockfighting prohibition (Cuba), Box 213, File Marker 1660, 350:150:56:8:6, NARA
II.
61. Letter from Magdalena Peñarredonda to Charles E. Magoon, Yagaujay, Cuba, 16, 1907, Record Group
350, General Classified Files, Entry 5A (1898–1913), Cockfighting prohibition (Cuba), Box 213, File
Marker 1660, 350:150:56:8:6, NARA II.
62. George Angell, “Our Flag in Cuba,” Our Dumb Animals 31.11 (1899): 146.
63. Letter from George Angell to Governor Charles E. Magoon, Boston, February 12, 1907, Record
64. Letter from Edwin F. Atkins to Charles E. Magoon, Cienfuegos, Cuba, March 2, 1907, Record Group
350, General Classified Files, Entry 5A (1898–1913), Cockfighting prohibition (Cuba), Box 213, File
Marker 1660, 350:150:56:8:6, NARA II.
65. Letter from Charles E. Magoon to William Howard Taft, February 25, 1907, 7–8.
66. James Gould Cozzens, The Son of Perdition (1929), quoted in Pérez, On Becoming Cuban, 237.
67. Telegram from Charles E. Magoon to William Howard Taft, Havana, April 23, 1907, Record Group
350, General Classified Files, Entry 5A (1898–1913), Cockfighting prohibition (Cuba), Box 213,
File Marker 1660, 350:150:56:8:6, NARA II.
68. Letter from Charles E. Magoon to William Howard Taft, February 25, 1907, 11–12; “Inclosure to
Dispatch No. 992: An Act Legalizing Cock-Fighting,” translated from the Official Gazette, July 3,
1909, Record Group 350, General Classified Files, Entry 5A (1898–1913), Cockfighting prohibition
(Cuba), Box 213, File Marker 1660, 350:150:56:8:6, NARA II.
69. Letter from Colonel Frank E. McIntyre to Gus J. Karger, Washington, D.C., May 23, 1910.
70. No. 33: “An Act to Amend Section 5.”
71. Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning, 84–90.
72. William Dinwiddie, Puerto Rico: Its Conditions and Possibilities (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1899), 179.
73. “Bill to Legalize Cock Fighting Vetoed by Governor H. M. Towner,” San Juan (Puerto Rico) Times,
May 16, 1928, Record Group 350, General Classified Files, Entry 5B (1914–1945), Cockfighting
(Puerto Rico), Box 1074, File Marker 26484, 350:150:57:11:2, NARA II.
74. Dinwiddie, Puerto Rico, 179.
75. Letter from Ella E. Payne to Bureau of Insular Affairs, Mayaguez, Porto Rico, August 12, 1913, Record
Group 350, General Classified Files, Entry 5A (1898–1913), Animal Cruelty (Puerto Rico), Box 151,
76. Puerto Rico’s own political, geographic, and cultural history shaped the tenor of local protests against
the cockfighting law, as in other colonial settings. Puerto Rico became a US territory fairly peacefully
in 1898; the majority of the Island’s elites supported eventual US statehood with autonomous internal
governance, or strong advantageous trade (coffee and sugar) and tax privileges as a territory, rather
than outright independence. See Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning.
77. Letter from Manuel Jiménez Santa to US Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby, Rio Piedras, June 18,
1920; see also letter from Jiménez to Colby, Rio Piedras, June 8, 1920; letter from Santa to Antonio
R. Barceló, Presidente del Senado, Rio Piedras, June 8, 1920; all in Record Group 350, General
350:150:57:11:2, NARA II.
78. Letter from Manuel Jiménez Santa to US Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby, Rio Piedras, June 18,
1920.
79. “Cock of the Walk No More,” (Manila) Philippines Herald, September 16, 1928, Record Group 350,
General Classified Files, Entry 5B (1914–1945), Cockfighting (Puerto Rico), Box 1074, File Marker
26484, 350:150:57:11:2, NARA II.
80. Harwood Hull, Cockfighting Bill Fails in Porto Rico,” New York Times, June 3, 1928; “Bill to Legalize
Cock Fighting Vetoed by Governor H. M. Towner,” San Juan (Puerto Rico) Times, May 16, 1928.
81. “Cock of the Walk No More.”
82. Indianapolis News, June 11, 1928, Record Group 350, General Classified Files, Entry 5B (1914–1945),
Cockfighting (Puerto Rico), Box 1074, File Marker 26484, 350:150:57:11:2, NARA II.
83. No. 33, “An Act to Amend Section 5 of an Act Entitled ‘An Act to Prevent Cruelty to Animals,’” First
Special Session of the Thirteenth Legislature, Puerto Rico, May 4, 1933, Record Group 350, General
350:150:57:11:2, NARA II.
84. Martín Travieso, “Puerto Rico Cockfighting,” New York Herald Tribune, October 22, 1933, Record
Group 350, General Classified Files, Entry 5B (1914–1945), Cockfighting (Puerto Rico), Box 1074,
85. Ibid.
86. See Dennis Merrill, Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Latin America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
87. Danica Coto, “Puerto Rico Cockfighting: Legal Cockfights in Danger in U.S. Territory,” Huffington
Post, July 24, 2012, www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/22/puerto-rico-cockfighting_n_1693362.
html.
88. “May Stop Bullfighting,” New York Times, January 14, 1899.
89. Betting, however, is banned in Cuba. See Amanda Erickson, “Cockfighting in Cuba,” The Atlantic
Cities, July 3, 2012, www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/07/cockfighting-cuba/2462/.
90. Lansang, Cockfighting in the Philippines, 20.
91. Coto, “Puerto Rico Cockfighting.”
92. Tim Sakahara, “Committee Supports Cockfighting as a Cultural Activity,” Hawaii News Now, March
29, 2010, www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/12224788/committee-supports-cockfighting-as-a-cultural-
activity?redirected=true.
93. For enthusiast accounts, see Pridgen, Courage; and Lansang, Cockfighting in the Philippines.
Technology, Vaccination, and Antivivisection in Jazz Age Philadelphia | 575
Materia Medica: Technology, Vaccination,

and Antivivisection in Jazz Age
Philadelphia
Jeannette Vaught
I
n September 1929 Robert R. Logan, the Philadelphia editor of the Ameri-
can Antivivisection Society’s periodical the Starry Cross, penned a column
to his readers. Like many editorials the antivivisection activist had written
since World War I, this one attacked vaccination, the number one enemy of
antivivisectionists who subscribed to the Starry Cross. Vaccination was excori-
ated in every issue as poisonous, polluting (especially to children), and abusive
to the animals whose bodies were used to produce the antitoxic serums for
vaccines. The main mission of the AAVS and other allied societies throughout
the United States and Britain, where the movement originated in the 1860s,
was to end the practice of performing experiments on live animals for medical
research, and the Starry Cross filled its pages with scathing invective against the
quickening medical profession and its growing dependence on vaccines. The
Starry Cross consistently argued that vaccination was merely a commercial ploy
to line the pockets of greedy medical opportunists at the expense of vulnerable
animals’ and children’s lives. The journal maintained this position unwaver-
ingly into the 1920s, though by 1929, the argument against vaccination was
losing ground to the visible gains in public health and attendant public trust
in medical science.1
Logan’s entry, appearing in the October 1929 issue, differed from the usual
Starry Cross missives, however. “It must be recognized,” he wrote, “that each
epoch has its peculiar expression, and that this is an age when every move-
ment must take on something of the spirit of organization and the method of
advertising which is characteristic of the day,” indicating his realization that in
order to remain relevant, antivivisectionists needed to consider certain compro-
mises regarding technology and modernization. Having spent years decrying
the existence of advertising and its modern vehicles, the radio and the cinema,
this must have been difficult for Logan to admit. Yet he did not compromise
the moral philosophy undergirding the religious and ethical argument against

vaccination. Logan was careful to distinguish exactly how “with it” the AAVS
and its followers should be, drawing clear moral boundaries. He continued,
With medical advertising on every page and billboard it is inevitable that we should seek to
catch the eye, and if the doctor must use the radio to fill the mother’s heart with fear it is but
natural that we should “get upon the air” to give her courage. The jazz band of vivisection
with its saxophones and serums, vaccines and glandular operations, is making the public
ear insensitive to nature’s harmonies, so we must blow a little harder on our pipes of truth.2
Logan’s link between vivisectional medicine and a jazz band, analogizing poison
penetrating the skin to poison wafting into the body through the airwaves,
and accusing both of disrupting “nature’s harmonies,” harbors a troubled
negotiation between animals, scientific change, medical technologies, and a
modernizing Philadelphia. Describing antivivisectional research and its invasive
products as a “jazz band” furthermore exposes latent racial anxieties underlying
the AAVS’s firm stance against vaccination.
The vivisection–vaccination controversy in the pages of the Starry Cross crys-
tallizes two specific conflicts that the Philadelphia antivivisectionists struggled
to reconcile in the 1920s. The first is a discrepancy between human and animal
compatibility: the AAVS expressed a desire for a universal spiritual compat-
ibility between humans and animals in terms of their vulnerability to suffering
and need for compassionate protection from the threat of scientific research,
but expressed equally strong sentiments against equating the compatibility
of spirit and the body. Vaccination highlighted this conflict between valuing
humans and animals as spiritually, but not corporally, compatible. The AAVS,
arguing that serums derived from animal bodies were an unnatural “admix-
ture of contaminators of human blood,”3 had to contend with both spiritual
poison (resulting metonymically from the sinful torture of animals involved
in making the serum) and physical poisons (resulting in an actual mixture of
human and animal bodies). This anxiety was heightened by the penetration
that vaccination brings with it: the needle’s penetration of the skin and the
resulting penetration of nonhuman fluid into the human body were potent
threats to sexual, spiritual, and bodily purity. The AAVS found an effective
analogy to this threat of pollution in musical language, using “harmony” as a
measure of safety and vigilance and “jazz” to describe harm. Trying to square
this conflict came down to a question of human value, revealing a complex
speciesism underlying the logic of the AAVS’s arguments against vaccination.
The second paradox circles around racial anxieties that stem from the
penetrative aspects of vaccination. Throughout its publication history, the
Starry Cross espouses a progressive social stance toward race, colonialism, and
immigration consistent with its pacifist Christian ideology. Yet as the 1920s
progressed, the Starry Cross increasingly turned to jazz as a metonym of the
chaotic, unpredictable atmosphere contributing to medical tyranny over the
body; Logan’s “jazz band” is but one of many times jazz appears in the context
of vaccination. Deploying the specter of jazz entangles animal activism with
racial animalization, and suggests that the vaccination’s injection of animal
serums into the human body is a form of miscegenation.
Philadelphia’s antivivisectionists were not the only activists opposing vac-
cination. The city was also home to the Anti-Vaccination League of America
(AVLA), founded in 1908 after Philadelphia ramped up its attempts to require
child vaccination against smallpox during an outbreak in 1906.4 While the
AAVS and the AVLA differed in their activist approaches to antivaccination,
both took issue with the political power the state was gaining over one’s body.
Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts already had compulsory vaccina-
tion laws on the books by 1908, which the AVLA targeted as forms of “medical
tyranny.”5 Well-organized efforts to overturn these laws, and others across the
Eastern Seaboard, failed during the 1910s. In 1921 the Sheppard-Towner Act
established federal funds to match state efforts to set up clinics providing care,
including vaccinations, for mothers and children, codifying for the first time
widespread governmental involvement in personal health care.6
The AAVS was not unilaterally antimodern, antitechnological, or even
antiscience, despite its central goal of eliminating the practice of experimental
research. The contributors to and readers of the Starry Cross were primarily
educated, middle- and upper-middle-class white citizens, both women and
men. With 1,500 subscribers listed in 1926, they were a small group among
many social reform workers.7 The publication broadly reflects a Christian
uplift sensibility resonant with Progressive reformers like the Woman’s Chris-
tian Temperance Union, combined with a kind of libertarian antistatism and
suspicion of compulsory legislation the AAVS shared with other antivaccina-
tion advocates. It can be difficult to put a finger on how the AAVS organized
its position in society, as the lists of things that it espoused and opposed that
percolate up from the journal’s pages are at times contradictory. During the
1920s, it consistently favors Abraham Lincoln, nature, George Bernard Shaw,
Mark Twain, Christian Science, the practice of public sanitation and antisepsis,
vegetarianism, Gandhi, mental suggestion, internationalism, immigration,
and the concept of evolution, if not certain secular interpretations of brutal
survivalism. On the other hand, it consistently vilifies cancer, pollution, com-
mercialism, socialism, fascism, materialism, slavery, racial discrimination,
colonialism, aggression and domestic violence, war, entertainment (especially
animal entertainment, but also dancing and the cinema), and the Red Cross.
The one quality underlying all its preferences is a deep commitment to the value
and preservation of life and a belief that all life could be improved through a
scientific practice that shared, not condemned, such an ethic.
What I did not expect to find within that ethic was jazz, much less a pattern
of linking jazz to vivisection when arguing against vaccination. Yet the surpris-
ing frequency of this link in the pages of the Starry Cross during the 1920s
exposes some unexpected fissures in the antivivisectionists’ seemingly clear
valuations of human and animal life. While its readership and following were
small, the AAVS was nevertheless visible enough to draw both congratulatory
and invective correspondence from prominent medical practitioners, Hol-
lywood executives, and legislators.8 Despite the sharp focus of the periodical’s
activism and its somewhat marginal position within the Philadelphia social
reform scene, its strange combination of vaccination, jazz, and vivisection bears
close study, as its motivations to protect animals are deeply bound to broader
cultural anxieties about the threat to purity posed by science, race, and sex.
For Logan and the middle-class white readers of the Starry Cross, the stakes of
succumbing to the jazzy cacophony of vaccination amounted to no less than
medical miscegenation. By turning to racialized, speciesist arguments in asking
for mercy toward animals against the “insensitivities” of scientifically minded
torture, the antivivisectionists’ use of the sound and image of the tortured
animal was meant to protect the human body and keep it white.
In following this line of investigation, I connect the growing literatures
within American studies on science and technology, on the one hand, and
animals, on the other. In doing so, I expand on the groundbreaking cultural
work on the relationships of animals to scientific research—such as Coral
Lansbury’s Old Brown Dog, Donna Haraway’s oeuvre (especially her discourses
on animal experimentation in Primate Visions and When Species Meet) and the
anthropologists Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock’s stellar Remaking Life and
Death—to trouble the strategies that activists have used in promoting animal
protection. Being on the side of animals often requires difficult compromises,
something that Steve Baker has termed in other contexts “a spurious notion
of fondness.”9 The present special issue offers an opportunity to delve deeply
into the current and historical ramifications of this contradiction that speak
to broader American studies concerns. The AAVS’s spurious fondness airs out
the underside of an argument that was, on its surface, a genuinely heartfelt
effort to promote benevolence, and informs current scholarship and activism
regarding animals, science, and American culture.
Vis Medicatrix Naturae: The Problem of Human Value
The Philadelphia AAVS was not exaggerating the number of animals mutilated
for vaccine production. From the earliest days of immunological research,
animals were central to studying immunity and producing vaccines. The Latin
word for cow, vacca, is built into the word vaccine—coined by the English
physician Edward Jenner during his experiments relating the bovine disease
cowpox to the more deadly human smallpox in the 1780s and 1790s.10 A
century later, the German physician Robert Koch laid the foundation for the
germ theory of disease and bacteriology with the use of an ox’s eye, with which
he could make a culture medium to isolate and grow microbes.11 Shortly after,
the French scientist Louis Pasteur used Koch’s concept of the culture medium
to refine the process of vaccine production. To safely confer immunity without
spreading the disease, Pasteur found that he could control the mutation of the
microbe—essentially controlling its virulence—by passing it through a number
of living bodies until it stabilized in a safe form, usually requiring six to eight
sets of animals for each experiment. He did this by using hundreds of dogs,
and later guinea pigs and rabbits, as his culture media. This model of vaccine
production became standardized and grew in scale as the demand for vaccines
expanded over the first half of the twentieth century.12
In the United States, John D. Rockefeller founded the Rockefeller Institute
in New York in 1901 to carry out bacteriological and microbiological research.
The institute and its primary researchers of the 1910s and 1920s, Simon Flexner
and Hideyo Noguchi, were frequent targets of attack in the Starry Cross for
their use of thousands of animals. The AAVS had legitimate concerns. Of the
many Pasteur-type experiments the institute carried out on animals to find
vaccines for deadly bacterial diseases such as tetanus, cholera, and diphtheria,
only the last was widely successful by the 1920s, a success that necessitated
an even greater volume of animal fluids. To produce the antitoxin at enough
volume to satisfy growing demands, researchers turned to larger animals. Horses
were infected with diphtheria bacilli to produce antibodies, which were then
harvested by drawing significant amounts of blood.13
The antibody-containing serum was then separated from the drawn blood
and used to make antitoxin. Antitoxin vaccines had (and continue to have) the
disadvantage of only conferring immunity for a limited time. For the AAVS,
these circumstances rightly painted a picture of limitless animal suffering with
only dubious, spotty, and often legitimately dangerous results to human and
animal life.
Figure 1. Proponents of vaccination and bacteriologi-

The Starry Cross ran this advertisement
cal research vociferously argued that these risks
during the late 1910s and early 1920s,
were outweighed by the benefit of vaccines
connecting the vivisection of horses to
the contamination of children. Courtesy
to public health. William Williams Keen, a
of University of Texas Libraries.
prominent Philadelphia-born brain surgeon,
wrote prolifically in defense of the experimental
method, vivisection, and new medical technologies, including vaccination, for
professional and lay audiences. Keen’s writings reached a large audience: he
was president of the Philadelphia School of Anatomy from 1875 to 1889 and
built his reputation over the turn of the century as a brain surgeon, becom-
ing president of the American Surgical Association and American Medical
Association in 1898 and 1900, respectively. His public presence attracted the
attention of the AAVS early on, and by the late 1910s Keen and the Starry
Cross had entered into a long epistolary debate that would last well into the
1920s, when Keen was in his nineties. Having served as a military surgeon in
both the Civil War and World War I, Keen experienced firsthand the transfor-
mation of medicine as it adjusted to Koch’s and Pasteur’s germ theories in the
1880s and 1890s. The most practical change grew from the work of Joseph
Lister, who, influenced by Pasteur’s early work, proved that cleaning hands,
instruments, and surgical environments greatly reduced the risk of infection
in surgical patients. This antiseptic method became de rigueur for modern
medical practitioners by the late nineteenth century and inaugurated the
Figure 2. modernization of scientific experimenta-

Professor William W. Keen’s clinic, Jefferson
tion. The Starry Cross actually supported
Medical College Hospital, December 10, 1902
Lister’s antisepsis techniques—a small
(surgeons around a person on operating table
with spectators [medical students?] in the back-
point on which they found common
ground). Courtesy of Library of Congress.
ground with Keen—but did not agree
that the acknowledged existence and
control of microbial contaminants should justify the rapidly expanding field
of vivisectional research.14 Keen had been an established surgeon in his forties
when Lister’s discoveries revolutionized surgery, and Keen drew on his own
experiences to argue for the continued benefit that such research could pro-
vide.15 “Only those who have lived through the transition period,” he wrote,
“can fully appreciate the joy of deliverance from Death.”16
Keen’s education and practice in Philadelphia reflected the city’s unusually
rich medical and scientific roots. Enlightenment ideas guided the founding
of the United States and its Constitution; Benjamin Rush taught medical
courses at the University of Pennsylvania (né the College of Philadelphia) in
1769 before signing the Declaration of Independence.17 Thomas Jefferson’s

American Philosophical Society was another early entry into Philadelphia’s
scientific milieu.18 Samuel Morton, infamous collector of skulls and author
of Crania Americana, graduated with a medical degree from the University
of Pennsylvania in 1820 before turning to natural science, devoting much of
his energies to Philadelphia’s flourishing Academy of Natural Sciences in the
mid-1820s,19 which joined other scientific, cultural, and medical institutions
forming the heart of nineteenth-century US knowledge production, in which
the proper conduct and purpose of scientific research was established as a highly
contested public discourse.
Especially important to later antivivisectionist arguments were ongoing
debates in Europe and America over Romantic science, French positivism,
and eventually German materialism. These debates took place squarely within
the Philadelphia medical fold in the late nineteenth century, as the ever-active
medical community strove to modernize via the latest philosophical and tech-
nical advances from Europe, but did so in conflict with lingering Romantic
and idealist philosophies.20 German materialism found its way to Philadelphia
after the Civil War, as physicians such as Keen were swayed by Hermann von
Helmholtz’s sensory-perception methods of studying physiology and anatomy
in complement to Pasteur’s experimental methods.21 Materialist science held
that truth could be obtained only through the senses, not through the mind
or spirit, which necessitated experimentation, not contemplation, to achieve
knowledge.
Late in Keen’s career, he wrote public defenses of vivisection in the name
of materialist science for several publications (most notably the Ladies’ Home
Journal,22 which incidentally was founded in Philadelphia within twenty days
of the AAVS and the Starry Cross). His books on technical and philosophical
subjects, including Animal Experimentation and Medical Progress (1914), Medi-
cal Research and Human Welfare (1917), and I Believe in God and Evolution
(1922), reflect his direct and extended confrontation with antivivisectionists
during the last thirty years of his life.
Keen appears almost monthly in the Starry Cross, which maintained the
practice of publishing both sides of the exchanges between Keen and AAVS
members. The tenor of the correspondence is caustic. Both view the other as
a danger to public health and as immoral crusaders for modern corruption,
especially regarding each party’s position on vaccination. Starry Cross associ-
ate editor Mary Lovell asserted, “It is not difficult to account for diseases like
gangrene, tuberculosis, and cancer, considering the persistent introduction
into the human system for so many years of foul products of disease, vaccines
and serums,” citing a Dr. Robert Bell of London to support the connection
between vaccination and increased levels of disease.23 A few pages on, Lovell
recounted a dispute in Los Angeles, California, over a proposed bill to make
vaccination compulsory in schools. After arguing that the imposition of com-
pulsory vaccination was primarily motivated by the potential for commercial
gain,24 she reported what she saw as the most dangerous risk: one child “was
refused admission to school without vaccination. Her parents finally, but with
much reluctance, consented. Within a week the girl was dead . . . there was no
question but that the vaccination was the cause of death.”25
This editorial occasioned several letters between Keen and Lovell, published
in the October issue of 1926. Keen wrote, “My dear Mrs. Lovell: I have read
your editorial in the July Starry Cross with amazement. Dr. Robert Bell . . .
evidently ought to be in a psycopathic [sic] hospital if he really asserts that the
increase in cancer is due to vaccination.”26 Lovell’s response to Keen clarifies
the position of the AAVS and reveals the impasse between antivivisectionists
and modern medical scientists:
We look on the question of vivisection from totally different points of view. I look at it
solely from the moral and spiritual side. While I think that the claims of prevention and cure
through the use of vaccines and serums and methods resulting from vivisection are weakened
by the known fact of evil results . . . my never to be abated hostility to it is because I believe
it to be fundamentally and radically wrong. If all the benefit said to be derived from it could
be proved permanent. . . . I should still believe that some better way could be found, and
seek it earnestly and prayerfully.27
What to the AAVS was consistently “fundamentally and radically wrong” was,
to Keen, “conspicuously humane” and absolutely necessary to “magnificent,
life-saving, health giving discoveries.”28
The crux here, on one level, is axiomatic: Keen is unabashedly speciesist
and holds that the medical ethics of materialist science requires that one must
hold humans above animals. In contrast, the AAVS maintains that holding
humans above animals for any reason, and causing animal suffering to do so,
is the fundamental moral wrong, appealing to the Romantic universality of
animal and human spirituality. However, for Keen’s argument to cohere, one
has to believe that what can be learned from experimentation on animal bodies
can be transferred to human bodies, an equivalence with which the AAVS is
uncomfortable. It is telling that, in their decades-long back-and-forth about vac-
cination, the terms of the arguments between Keen and the AAVS never change,
and they accuse each other of committing the same crimes: of perpetrating
medical violence against people; of hindering the moral and scientific progress
of American and world civilization; and of being dishonest and malevolent in

their representation of information. These circular arguments reveal the strange
underlying sameness of Keen’s and the AAVS’s message. While vaccination’s
extreme consumption of animal bodies makes it seem like a perfect target for
antivivisectionists’ arguments for a universal mercy for human and animal, their
argument rests on the assumption that physically mixing human and animal
bodies is a violation of nature. Keen openly values humans over animals in
the name of public health; the AAVS values humans over animals in the name
of propriety. By viewing the injection of animal antibodies into humans as a
sinful corruption, the AAVS’s logic is fundamentally no less speciesist than
Keen’s defense of the practice.
Animus ex Machina: Confronting “The Offspring of Our Animal

Inheritance”
Robert Logan’s attachment of the term jazz to vaccination ties this speciesism
directly to a concern with preserving whiteness. The musical analogy is apt in
the context of Philadelphia’s varied activist culture responding to racial migra-
tion and ethnic immigration from southern and eastern Europe. “Jazz” ties
the scientific ethics of antivivisection to cultural definitions of human value.
In particular, it calls to mind the prominent Philadelphia reformers support-
ing the Philadelphia Settlement Music School, namely, Mary Louise Curtis
Bok (daughter of Cyrus Curtis, the founder of the Ladies’ Home Journal, and
wife to its editor in chief, Edward Bok). Starting in 1908 in Philadelphia,
Settlement Music Schools grew out of immigrant settlement houses across
the mid-Atlantic, designed to direct the nonworking activities of immigrant
laborers and to standardize, and Americanize, the kinds of music and instru-
ments that immigrants played.
Settlement Music Schools touted their music education as strictly recre-
ational and discouraged participants from pursuing professional musical careers:
one Cleveland school advertisement urged that student “Joe” ought to “follow
his music study as an avocation if not as a profession, for he will have much
leisure time in the future. His leisure time should be a source of stability and joy
rather than restlessness and boredom.”29 The expectation of nonprofessionalism
subtly underscores the reformers’ position that playing “ethnic” music, and
especially pursuing an itinerant musical or vaudeville career, was not a proper
way for immigrants to spend their laboring hours. Many of Philadelphia’s
Settlement music classes were taught by members of the Philadelphia Orchestra,
establishing the standard of European classical music as the desired musical
style.30 And while nonprofessional musicianship was favored, the creation of

the Curtis Institute of Music in 1924 also underscores the belief that, if one
is talented enough with classical instruments, then the proper professional
course is to study for a position in a stable, classical orchestra. Classical music
signified assimilation and whiteness; it was one of many ways that urban re-
formers sought to work against cultural contamination. And while Logan and
the AAVS may not have agreed with the “medical tyranny” of compulsorily
vaccinating newly arrived members of their city, the antivivisectionists’ clear
distaste for jazz clearly aligns with fears of cultural infection and impositions
on bodily and cultural purity. The antivivisectionists would tie a judgment
about musical expression to the sound and image of the tortured animal as an
indicator not simply of one’s taste but of one’s human value.
The connection between jazz and antivivisection activism combines the
AAVS’s concerns with universal mercy, individual liberty, and the threat of
commercialism in both the scientific and the cultural realms. Ronald Schleifer
writes convincingly of “the transformations in understanding, experience,
and history that were conditioned by the repertoires of cultural phenomena”
in “both the sciences and the popular arts” of the early twentieth century,
theorizing the coconstitution of scientific modernity and the emergence of
popular entertainments.31 “Modernism,” he writes, “brought with it “the
need felt by many working in the arts and sciences to rethink and redefine
received conceptions about human life, social value, and scientific knowledge.”
Combined with “huge influxes” of eastern and southern European immigrants
and the migration of African Americans from the south to various urbanizing,
industrializing centers in the north and Midwest, the commercialism of en-
tertainment was a major challenge to normative “received” understandings of
music, for one, and also labor, health, and social values.32 Certainly this link is
borne out by the AAVS’s twin critique of materialist science and commercial
popular music in likening vivisectional medicine and vaccines to jazz. While I
must speculate about exactly what antivivisectionists were hearing when they
called it “jazz,” scholars of the jazz age agree that during the early 1920s, the
term referred broadly to all popular and nonclassical music, including Tin
Pan Alley tunes composed and performed by white musicians and George
Gershwin’s jazz–classical hybrids,33 and that the term carries racial as well
as ethnic undertones. Black jazz as an urban “vernacular” phenomenon was
marginal to the more “prosaic” mainstream, and at the start of the decade was
produced and consumed primarily by African Americans.34 However, as the
decade progressed, despite “the popular belief that jazz was a primitive ‘jungle’
music, black jazzmen were in the process of developing a professional band
style” from “an amalgam of black music and white orchestral traditions.”35 The
readers of the Starry Cross most likely never heard black jazz, but neverthe-
less they saw in these amalgamated forms of jazz an appeal to “baser” desires.
Moreover, urban living conditions in Philadelphia and elsewhere put eastern
and southern European immigrants in close contact with African Americans.
While the AAVS’s social agenda supported both groups’ access to uplift, its
use of jazz to denote spiritual and bodily “disharmony” points to a greater
concern with losing potentially “white” Europeans to the temptations of Negro
music—a fear that the Settlement Schools actively worked to mitigate. The
AAVS was certainly not the only white audience ambivalent to jazz; the music
was widely considered a “racial and ethnic attack on middle-class, Protestant
values of self-discipline, sexual propriety, and self-advancement.”36 However,
by disparaging jazz in the service of promoting animal protection, the AAVS
created a perilous contradiction between a tempered racial progressivism and
animalism, enmeshing antivivisection and antimiscegenation at the center of
its arguments against the penetrative and polluting technology of vaccination.
The AAVS’s vision of modern progress is one that combines kindness and
the sharing of a universal, nondiscriminatory spirit—extending as much to op-
pressed peoples as oppressed animals—with the primacy of individual freedom
from the “slavery” of state compulsion and commercialism.37 In a 1924 issue of
the Starry Cross, Logan uses the language of evolution to argue that modernity
is not properly progressing toward those goals, but is instead hindering the
development of the human spirit, encumbering the human mind in favor of
a materialist—and animalistic—focus on the body:
[The “human kingdom” is a]dvancing with appalling slowness, to be sure, in the midst of
wars and brutalities, international hatreds, economic slavery, murders and judicial murders,
the tortures of the trap and the slaughterhouse and the deviltries of the laboratory. Yet these
abominations are nothing new; they are the offspring of our animal inheritance of passions
mis-driven by the half-developed, unregulated mind, whereas anti-vivisection and humane
education and child protection societies and peace awards are new and shine as beacon lights
to point the path of progress.38
This understanding of evolution clearly asserts a natural hierarchy of humans

and animals progressing toward more self-regulation and control, which is being
disturbed by an unnatural return to animal “passions.” Lovell further describes
this disjuncture as a disruption of correct development, using the language
of music to emphasize the scale and tenor of its backwardness. She writes,
“Vivisection and its resulting tyranny over the human body are anachronisms,
out of harmony with the progressive spirit of the age which objects to tyranny
of any kind.”39 This “confusion,” “disorganization,” and “disharmony” found

purchase in the antivivisectionists’ increasing use of the term jazz to describe
vivisectional practices. As early as 1922, references to the “jazz age” popped up
in the Starry Cross as a metaphor for social decadence and medical profligacy,
as in the case of the “poor flapper” diagnosed with “the disease ‘flapperism’”
and sent for medical treatment, instead of the AAVS’s preferred method: a
regimen of spiritual and social uplift to heal the “strain of living in a jazz age.”40
Popular jazz, then, was white and black, native and foreign, human and
animal: popular white bands such as the Original Dixieland Jass Band and the
New Orleans Rhythm Kings “did our best to copy the colored music we’d heard
at home” while also incorporating influences from Arnold Schoenberg, Igor
Stravinsky, Gustav Holst, and Eastwood Lane.41 This very amalgamation was
almost more threatening than black jazz itself as a miscegenation made manifest
in music. The Original Dixieland Jass Band was made up of the children of
Italian immigrants who had migrated from New Orleans to Chicago. Musicians
from Philadelphian immigrant families, such as Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang, né
Salvatore Massaro, likewise flouted the goals of the Settlement Music School
by taking classical instruments such as the violin and guitar and putting them
toward a professional career in popular jazz music.42 Jazz also carried etymo-
logical sexual weight: as the venerable jazz historian Marshall Stearns noted,
“‘The word “jass,” later “jazz,” turned up first in Chicago in the middle teens
with an unprintable meaning,’” not unlike “other words descriptive of musical
styles with origins in Negro slang.”43 Jazz songs often included the sounds of
barnyard animals as sonic abbreviations for sex. Music placed under the wide
umbrella of jazz was a challenge to white sexuality, even when performed by
white entertainers (and perhaps white musicians performing jazz was even
more jarring to reformers like the AAVS). The profound “disharmony” of this
sexualized and racialized music was all the more disconcerting to the AAVS
given its easy availability through the modern technologies of the phonograph
and radio.
Philadelphia itself was not a jazz hub like its close neighbors New York—
fully in the swing of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s—and Atlantic
City. Entertainers from Philadelphia, such as the black jazz singer Ethel Waters,
Venuti, and Lang, left the city to build their careers.44 Yet their music gained
entrance into middle-class homes through the radio, which had become a
common fixture in the mid-1910s. Radio stations played everything from
classical music to variety shows, dance music such as the foxtrot, and of course,
popular or “jazz” music, in addition to advertisements and educational pro-
grams. For readers of the Starry Cross, constant vigilance was required in the
presence of the airwaves themselves, emphasizing the need to protect one’s body
from harmful, controlling messages coming in. The radio’s airwaves figured
as another form of uncontrollable penetration, characterized as an “invisible
ether which bears the waves of jazz and merriment to millions of mechanical
receivers” while also “bearing the unheard, but not unregistered, groans and
whimperings of thousands of mutilated and disemboweled animals.”45 This
statement is arresting, as it suggests that the audible proof of animal torture
could literally be vaporized into the air, creating a toxic miasma of “jazz” that
could infect unsuspecting people who put themselves at risk by having a good
time. Yet these links recur: radio advertisements for the Metropolitan Life
Insurance Company, for example, included a segment called “Health Talks.”
Harry Bradford, contributor to the Starry Cross, commented in 1926 that “these
were so thoroughly devoted to warning their listeners-in to get vaccinated, and
‘protected’ against typhoid . . . that we ‘hung up’ about as speedily as if ‘jazz’
were coming in, for such performances are the ‘jazz’ of medicine.”46 Bradford
was not advocating against radios (one was in his parlor, and tuned in), or
musical entertainment, or medicine itself: rather, he used the term jazz to de-
lineate a concrete relationship between vivisection, vaccines, and commercial,
or materialist, aims. Jazz stood in for the cries of tortured research subjects,
perpetrating the sonic penetration of the “deviltries of the laboratory” into
unsuspecting homes, and serving as an analogue to the ether of the vivisector
used to dull the senses of a vulnerable living animal in order to torture it. Let
me be clear here: jazz, to the AAVS, is both the cloaked noise of animals and
a way to turn its unwitting listeners into animals themselves.
To that end, if the “jazz of medicine” referred specifically to the danger of
vaccination advertising, the Starry Cross extended the metaphor to the sugges-
tion that medical research be performed on humans. Agnes Chase, respond-
ing to one Dr. Norbury’s proposal to avoid animal vivisection by performing
medical experiments on consenting death row inmates instead of “unreliable”
animals—with the promise of freedom granted to those who survived—criti-
cized this suggestion as a result of the escalation of vivisectional medicine.
After vehemently expressing her belief that vivisectional medicine was illogical
because of the anatomical and physiological differences between animals and
humans, Chase posited that “the use of condemned criminals for vivisection
. . . is evidence of the increasing boldness of the vivisector” who,
having been permitted almost unrestricted use of animals . . . now feels no hesitancy in
demanding adult human material with every reason to believe that ultimately he will be
accommodated. Dr. Norbury’s idea to inform the individual that, if he would assume the
risk of “great suffering” and “the likelihood of death” by surrendering himself to vivisection,
he would be rewarded by being released again upon society if he survived . . . is the logical
outcome of what might be described as “jazz reasoning,” and implied that its author either
cares for nothing but the indulgence of his own desires at any cost to others, or that he is
merely seeking a very vulgar type of publicity.47
Dr. Norbury’s suggestion to replace animals with humans could be interpreted

as an antivivisectionist argument, since it spared animals from experimentation.
However, while some antivivisectionists ostensibly supported such reasoning
(often offering up the idea that vivisectional doctors and medical students
should be research subjects), to Chase and the Starry Cross, the “jazz reasoning”
of any form of vivisection, human or animal, was an ultimate corruption of
the spirit.48 Substituting humans for animals as research subjects did nothing
to address the AAVS’s broader fear that materialist research itself was corrupt;
instead, it affirmed the corrupting influence of experimentation. Yet calling
such reasoning “jazz” passed a racial judgment on this confusion of human
and animal bodies. Despite couching its argument in terms of universal mercy
and kindness toward animals, the AAVS was unsparingly harsh regarding race,
sex, and contamination.
“Jazz medicine,” “jazz reasoning,” and the “jazz band of vivisection with its
saxophones and serums” all link materialist science to the sound of tortured
animals and the physical mutilation of animal bodies while pointing to the
vulnerability of humans to experimentation. Of course, for the readers of the
Starry Cross, human vivisection was already happening via compulsory vaccina-
tion. The gap in knowledge between laboratory scientists and nonscientists,
rapidly widening since Pasteur and the Rockefeller Institute, opened a space
for readers’ critique of science, materialism, and technology that valued the
inviolable body and spoke to a very real anxiety about a loss of control, a
disruption of the “harmony” of natural evolution aided by modern penetra-
tive technologies that sullied the purity of the body. None of those values are
unreasonable. But linking the threat to human purity posed by the hypodermic
needle to the “disharmony” of jazz, and then describing jazz as the carrier of
the silent screams of vivisected animals, gives pause.
Recall Logan’s characterization of vivisectional laboratory practices as the
“offspring of our animal inheritance.” In one phrase, he espouses evolution,
condemns vivisection, and places humans and animals on an unequal hierarchy
of value, the former being a more evolved derivation of the latter. Those who
vivisect are closer to animals than humans, on a grand evolutionary scale. Like-
wise, the AAVS animalized jazz by relating it to vivisection and condemning its
sonic penetration of the parlor as the silent carrier of animals’ tortured screams,
unequivocally participating in the racial zoologizing of nonwhite people. From
this position, the willing participant in vaccination was engaging in a form
of miscegenation, both bestially and racially. Vivisectors are animalized; the
human victims of vaccinations are animalized; vivisectors contaminate the
human spirit; the human victims of vaccination are contaminated: the align-
ment of this animalization with jazz infused the “merciful” critique of scientific
contamination with inescapably racialized speciesism.
Conclusion
Appealing to the sonic dimensions of animal torture in the face of widening

acceptance of vaccination reveals the extent to which Philadelphia’s antivivi-
sectionists struggled to adjust their rhetoric to social change and keep pace
with the “peculiar expression” of the interwar years. In the late nineteenth
and very early twentieth century, the plea for universal mercy toward animals
could encompass racial progressivism, the individual’s capacity to combat
disease without the state’s aid, and the preservation of human purity both
in body and in spirit. But by the mid-1920s the AAVS was wholly unable to
reconcile antivivisection activism with these other fundamental tenets, and
its attempt to vilify the medical technology of vaccination by enmeshing the
protection of animals with the protection of human purity failed. Animal
experimentation for human medicine did (and very much does) continue; vac-
cination, once genuinely dangerous, became safer, standardized, and nationally
compulsory.49 Tying animal activism to antivaccination was in some sense the
AAVS’s undoing, a “fatal flaw” that had much to do with the public presence
of antivivisection activism fading away in the years before World War II. In
a world where scientific research was becoming a trusted authority, the “jazz
band of saxophones and serums” was a bizarre anachronism, too uncomfortable
to maintain. Where the AAVS saw vaccination as a polluter of white bodies,
mainstream American families increasingly began to turn to it as a protector
of whiteness, a defender of purity against disease and contamination, and a
necessary component of American childhood.
Of course, controversies over vaccines have always existed. Recently they
have bubbled up in mainstream outlets, bringing the voices of the AAVS into
an odd “harmony” with current antivaccination activism. These discourses
share a belief that vaccines cause disease (autism being a hotly debated, if sci-
entifically suspect, result of certain vaccines). However, while the superficial
basis of both arguments cohere, they diverge on the concept of natural: the
AAVS was adamant that vivisection and the use of animal-produced antibod-
ies were fundamentally unnatural, whereas today’s antivaccination activists
often point to the synthetically produced ingredients in vaccines as pollutants.
The perceived tyranny of the chemical reigns, despite its sparing of thousands
upon thousands of animal lives that would have been necessary for the ongo-
ing production of vaccines in the contemporary world—a point well beyond
the scope of current debates. Laboratory synthetics were developed as way to
eliminate the need for animal torture, with its potential attendant spiritual and
bodily contaminations (and, frankly, for expediency). Now, synthetics have
replaced the animal body not only in vaccine production but also in antivac-
cine activism. In some sense, they have made the animals both historically
and currently involved in vaccine production invisible, exposing the degree
to which the AAVS’s arguments about animals and vaccines have become ir-
relevant even in an age where animal protection both inside and outside the
laboratory is a visible, public issue.
So what, in the final analysis, were the antivivisectionists protecting? If the
answer were simply “animals used for laboratory research,” we may imagine
that antivivisection activism, despite many contributing factors to this result,
might not have collapsed as profoundly as it did from the 1930s to the late
1960s, when it reemerged, secularized, in a very different context and with
very different rhetoric. Instead, the vaccination controversy exposed contradic-
tions within the AAVS’s arguments that compromised their position, especially
in light of visible gains in public health being made with the aid of vaccine
technologies by the late 1920s. Critiquing vaccines because of their basis in
animal suffering, their impact on the commercialization of health, and their
role in the increasing vulnerability of the body to intrusive technologies is a
powerful moral argument. However, tying them to sex, race, miscegenation,
and bestiality is quite another thing. The racialization and animalization of
vaccination proves that for the AAVS, its mission to protect animals and pre-
serve the spiritual and bodily purity threatened by vivisectional research was
ineluctably tied to preserving whiteness.
The role that the AAVS played in scientific history was a small, and failed,
one. But its contribution is an important tool in understanding what is at stake
when we attempt to define the human against the animal or to investigate the
permutations of that perceived boundary. The need to turn to race in order
to describe the horror of injecting animal serums into the human body, the
sanctioning of that activity by science, and the public trust in materialist sci-
ence as an authority, is a powerful example of how one prejudice (speciesism)
can so easily slide into another (racism) even though the core ideology of the
AAVS was quite progressive on both counts. Scholars at the intersection of

science, animals, and American culture need to be attuned to the figurative
power of the human–animal divide to perhaps reveal too much, or go too
far, or compromise the integrity of an argument that seems, on its surface, to
be much simpler. Conversations about the scientific treatment of the animal
body, even in a specifically benevolent context such as the AAVS, encompass
an ethics that necessarily engages both the human and animal corpus. Perhaps
we are more compromised than we would like to think.
Notes
I wish to thank Claire Jean Kim, Carla Freccero, Jih-Fei Cheng, Paula Dragosh, and the associate edi-
tors and anonymous readers whose insightful critiques and editorial work brought this piece together.
Special thanks to Janet Davis, Elizabeth Engelhardt, and Karl Hagstrom Miller for their time, expertise,
advice, and encouragement along the way, and to John Cline, for his unflagging support, assistance,
and ideas.
1. Anita Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 112.
2. Robert R. Logan, “A National A. V.,” Starry Cross 37.10 (1929): 147.
3. Harry B. Bradford, “Blood Pollution Is Outraging Nature!,” Starry Cross 31.7 (1922): 107.
4. James Colgrove, “‘Science in a Democracy’: The Contested Status of Vaccination in the Progressive
Era and the 1920s,” Isis 96.2 (2005): 174.
5. Ibid., 174–75.
6. Ibid., 173. Antivaccination campaigns could point to compelling evidence of the danger of vaccines.
Colgrove details the widespread and diverse motivation for antivaccination. The success of antivac-
cination legislation was somewhat regional, occurring especially in the western states.
7. Robert Logan, “Our Subscribers,” Starry Cross 35.3 (1926): 40.
8. Such as Will Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America and famous
namesake of the Hays Code of film censorship (Mary Lovell, “Interesting Correspondence: Motion
Pictures,” Starry Cross 36.2 [1927]: 25).
9. Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation (Champaign: University of Illinois
Press, 2001), 67.
10. Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals, 55.
11. Ibid., 96. The eye’s aqueous humor became a culture medium for anthrax, proving that the organism
could be grown outside the body and increasing the ability to isolate and study bacterial organisms.
12. Ibid., 98–99.
13. Ibid., 108. Technically, true vaccines confer lifetime immunity. Antitoxins, such as the diphtheria
and tetanus antitoxins, must be boosted throughout one’s lifetime. These particular diseases are now
covered by what doctors call the “T-DAP” vaccine. The AAVS’s fear about the increasing scale of
animal involvement in vaccine production was not unfounded: over a million monkeys, and possibly
five times that number, were involved in polio research, starting with Flexner’s attempts to cure the
disease during the 1930s and through the production of the Salk polio vaccine after World War II.
14. Guerrini also speaks at length about Pasteur, Lister, and the use of animals in developing the germ
theory at the turn of the twentieth century. The Starry Cross folks thought sanitation, in combination
with a vegetarian diet and mental cleanliness, was quite enough to prevent the spread of disease.
15. Keen writes specifically of this transformation in Medical Research and Human Welfare: A Record of
Personal Experiences and Observations during a Professional Life of Fifty-Seven Years (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1917).
16. Ibid., 10.

17. Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2010), 18.
18. Edgar P. Richardson, “The Athens of America: 1800–1825,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed.
Russell F. Weigley (New York: Norton, 1982), 241.
19. Ibid., 27.
20. Let us not forget that nineteenth-century Romantic universalism was prominent among those
scientizing racial difference. During the antebellum period, naturalists like Morton and the Swiss
paleontologist Louis Agassiz found a hospitable climate to promote Romantic theories upholding the
“natural” superiority of the Teutonic race. Broadly speaking, where the Enlightenment called for gaining
knowledge of the universe by studying its individual components, the Romantics (primarily German
intellectuals, among them G. W. F. Hegel and Georg Schilling) favored studying the whole in order
to understand its parts. However, the Frenchman August Comte’s theory of positivism, published and
translated during the 1830s, upheld Enlightenment principles of perception by rejecting introspec-
tion in favor of a strict scientific method and empirical interpretation of sensory data, fundamentally
undermining the concept of universal truth and secularizing scientific practice. While some early US
adopters of positivism, such as John C. Calhoun, used the philosophy to support the continuance
of slavery, its tenets did render it possible to destabilize the Romantic philosophies undergirding
nineteenth-century scientific racism. Louis Menand provides an analysis of the philosophical debates
underpinning nineteenth-century science in The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). More information on Helmholtz can be found in Michel
Meulders, Helmholtz: From Enlightenment to Neuroscience, trans. Laurence Garey (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2010). These debates also play out in Fabian, Skull Collectors.
21. Helmholtz and materialism equally influenced artists, such as the Philadelphian Thomas Eakins, who
combined the medical and artistic pursuit of anatomical knowledge in his 1875 painting The Gross
Clinic, depicting the materialist surgeon Samuel D. Gross.
22. “What Vivisection Has Done For Humanity,” Ladies’ Home Journal, April 1910, archive.org.
23. Mary Lovell, “Vaccination in Dogs,” Starry Cross 35.7 (1926): 100.
24. Ibid., 101.
25. Ibid.
26. “Correspondence between Dr. Keen and Mrs. Lovell,” Starry Cross 35.10 (1926): 153.
27. Ibid., 154.
28. William Williams Keen, Animal Experimentation and Medical Progress (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1914), 14, 21.
29. Martha Ramsey and Duane Ramsey, “The Settlement Music School,” Music Supervisors’ Journal 19.5
(May 1933): 34.
30. “The History of Settlement Music School,” Settlement Music School, www.smsmusic.org/about/history.
php?t=1 (accessed January 23, 2013).
31. Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and Popular Music (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 26.
32. Ibid., 2–3.
33. Ibid., 3.
34. Louis Erenberg, Swinging the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998), 6. Race and popular music in American history have a venerable
literature unto their own. Two recent contributions in American studies on the complex racing of
jazz are Joel Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture
between the World Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); and Karl Hagstrom Miller,
Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2010).
35. Ibid., 7–8.
36. Ibid., 10.
37. While Starry Cross published stories and editorials espousing these values in nearly every issue, some
particularly clear passages occur in “Animals and Slavery” (June 1920, 84); “Immigration” (July 1922,
99); and “Children of Slavery” (March 1923, 39).
38. Robert Logan, “The Peace Award,” Starry Cross 33.1 (1924): 4.
39. Mary Lovell, “The Threat of a Prince,” Starry Cross 36.6 (1927): 100.
40. Mary Lovell, “Spurious Knowledge,” Starry Cross 32.11 (1922): 165.
41. Arnold Shaw, The Jazz Age: Popular Music in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987),
35–37.
42. Lang flouted the goals of the Settlement School even more by occasionally passing as black: “He
recorded more than two dozen sides with black blues artists, certainly more than any other white
musician of his time. For these interracial recordings—‘mixed bands’ were uncommon well into the
forties—he generally used the pseudonym Blind Willie Dunn” (James Sallis, The Guitar Players: One
Instrument and Its Masters in American Music [New York: Morrow and Company, 1982], 68).
43. Quoted in Shaw, Jazz Age, 17.
44. As a result, there is little scholarly work on Philadelphia’s own jazz scene. Biographical information
for Lang’s and Waters’s careers, and the 1920s jazz world, are particularly forthcoming in Shaw, Jazz
Age and Sallis, Guitar Players.
45. Robert Logan, “The Muckrake,” Starry Cross 35.3 (1926): 36.
46. Harry B. Bradford, “What We Got Over Our Radio,” Starry Cross 35.3 (1926): 42.
47. Agnes F. Chase, “Heard and Read,” Starry Cross 37.2 (1929): 24.
48. Keen responds directly to the pro-human-vivisectors with horror in Animal Experimentation and
Medical Progress.
49. Antivaccination activism is at a high point currently, with parents opting not to vaccinate their children
in steadily increasing numbers. While Jenny McCarthy has been the most recent public face of antivac-
cination (tying it to autism), recent local and national media spar over the issue. See, for example, “AP
Analysis: More Parents Are Deciding Not to Get Their Children Vaccinated,” Post Standard (Syracuse),
November 28, 2011; and KJ Dell’Antonia, “Are Your Children at Risk from Vaccine Exemptions?,”
New York Times, November 29, 2011.
Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies | 595
Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk

Studies
Greta Gaard
O
vercome with diarrhea and intestinal cramps, villagers in Colombia
and Guatemala conclude that the powdered milk rations donated
by the United States must not be food and use the powder, mixed
with less water, to whitewash their huts.1 In India’s Kerala province, a dairy
farmer stares with dismay at the huge Swiss Brown cow that has replaced her
native dwarf Vechur cow and exponentially increased her costs for feed and
veterinary bills.2 Living along the industrialized Saint Lawrence Seaway where
General Motors has been dumping PCBs and heavy metals for over twenty-five
years, Akwesasne midwife Katsi Cook starts the Mothers’ Milk Project after
discovering alarming levels of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), DDT,
and flame retardants in Mohawk mothers’ breast milk and in the body fat
of Beluga whales.3 Fifteen years later, Sandra Steingraber passes a glass of her
own breast milk among the delegates at a United Nations panel hearing on the
reproductive health effects of POPs, emphasizing the bioaccumulation of toxins
at the top of the food chain, in the bodies of nursing infants.4 In 1994 milk
produced with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH)—Monsanto’s
Posilac—appears in US grocery stores, approved by the US Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) and inspiring protests from small farmers, consumer
groups, environmentalists, and animal advocates alike.5
What critical framework is sufficiently inclusive to describe these uses of
milk across nations, genders, races, species, and environments? Because milk
is produced by female mammals, a feminist perspective seems to offer a logical
foundation for such inquiry. From the start, feminism has been a movement
for justice: at its heart is the centrality of praxis, the necessary linkage of intel-
lectual, political, and activist work. Feminist methodology puts the lives of the
oppressed at the center of the research question and undertakes studies, gathers
data, and interrogates material contexts with the primary aim of improving
the lives and the material conditions of the oppressed. Using standard feminist
methodology, twentieth-century vegan feminists and animal ecofeminists chal-
lenged animal suffering in its many manifestations (in scientific research, and

specifically in the feminized beauty and cleaning products industries; in dairy,

egg, and animal food production; in “pet” keeping and breeding, zoos, rodeos,
hunting, fur, and clothing) by developing a feminist theoretical perspective on
the intersections of species, gender, race, class, sexuality, and nature. Motivated
by an intellectual and experiential understanding of the mutually reinforcing
interconnections among diverse forms of oppression, vegan feminists and
ecofeminists positioned their own liberation and well-being as variously raced,
classed, gendered, and sexual humans to be fundamentally interconnected to
the well-being of other nondominant human and animal species,6 augmenting
Patricia Hill Collins’s definition of intersectionality to include species as well.7
Another scholarly field well positioned to address milk, food studies ar-
gues that food history is a history of ideas, and milk—a commodity that the
American dairy industry has marketed as “natural” and “wholesome” —is not
a homogeneous entity but one that has various meanings and compositions
in different historical and cultural contexts. Both Deborah Valenze’s Milk: A
Local and Global History (2011) and Anne Mendelson’s Milk: The Surprising
Story of Milk through the Ages (2008) trace Western food history over the last
five thousand years, arguing that milk has been crucial to the survival of many
Eurasian cultures, whose people could digest animal-derived lactose from
cows, sheep, and goats.8 Religious histories from Hinduism to Catholicism
show the importance of milk in spiritual practices past and present: in India,
milk is still used to feed the elephant-headed god of wisdom, Ganesha; in
medieval Europe, St. Bernard had a vision of being miraculously fed by the
Virgin Mary’s breast milk.
Food histories of Great Britain and the United States in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries confirm that from 1850 on, milk was commodified on a
large scale, with its highly perishable liquid form inspiring urban dairy produc-
tion, railway transport, and finally doorstep delivery.9 Until its sterilization or
pasteurization in the 1920s, milk was one of the major public health issues
of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, transmitting infections
of various types, along with epidemic diseases such as scarlet fever, typhoid,
and tuberculosis. Milk-fed infants also faced higher morbidity and mortality
rates, yet cows’ milk continued to be used in orphanages (where no mothers
or wet nurses were available) and in families alike. In her chapter “Why Not
Mother?” Melanie DuPuis argues that “the rise of urbanization and the rise in
artificial feeding of children went hand in hand.”10 US women chose not to
breastfeed for reasons that differed across class: middle- and upper-class women
were allegedly fragile, with “nerves” that would be disturbed by breastfeeding;
additionally, breastfeeding took time away from their social obligations, and
combined with pressure from husbands who wanted their wives’ attentions,
but were otherwise barred by social norms that proscribed sex while nursing.
Both very poor and very wealthy women faced another barrier to breastfeed-
ing: inadequate food intake, a result of either poor diet or cultural norms
for “dainty” eating. Most urban well-to-do-women turned to formula, cows’
milk, or wet nurses. Working-class women could not afford such luxuries and
breastfed their infants unless prevented by economic circumstances.
The pervasive availability of cows’ milk today—from grocery stores to gas
stations—is a historically unprecedented product of industrialization, urban-
ization, culture, and economics. Without human intervention, fresh cows’
milk is largely unavailable for more than part of a year (March to November):
cows require nine months for gestation, along with ample pasture and feed,
to produce milk.11 Its availability is part of Western industrialized culture’s
continuing “triumph over nature”; as Atkins concludes, in Britain milk was
“representative of efforts to redraw the boundaries between nature and soci-
ety.”12 Far from being “the perfect food,” milk offers a narrative about progress
and perfection that embodies “the politics of American identity over the last
150 years” argues DuPuis, linking “the perfect whiteness of this food and the
white body genetically capable of digesting it.”13 Comparing cows’ milk with
human breast milk, Andrea Wiley explains that cow’s milk must be fortified
to offer Vitamin D, and has “more protein, minerals (except iron), and some
B vitamins, and less sugar, Vitamin C, and Vitamin A.”14 Although the dairy
industry promotes milk as a major source of calcium, a necessary mineral for
growth and strong bones, the majority of the world’s human population can-
not digest cows’ milk, and the claim that this milk produces strong bones and
taller children is simply unsupported by the research to date.15 As of 2008,
consumption of cows’ milk in the United States has declined to just 76 percent
of what it was in 1970, while consumption of cows’ milk has increased 17
times in China and 2.4 times in India; both are developing countries where
there has been a general rise in the demand for animal products as a sign of
modernity and affluence.16
Animal studies scholarship includes the varying approaches of posthuman-
ism, human–animal studies, and critical animal studies, all offering a range of
perspectives for addressing milk across species, though this potential remains
largely untapped. A recent article in Society and Animals appears to invoke
Donna Haraway’s posthumanist construction of factory-farmed animals as
“workers” in its framing and discussion of dairy cows as collaborating with the
dairy producer.17 Haraway refers to “laboratory working animals” and “working
animals in the food and fiber industries” as if being the experimental animal or
the animal whose body is confined within the structures of industrial animal
production were a sustainable “job” that animals might willingly choose, or
resign from.18 From the more activist standpoint of critical animal studies,
“Haraway’s work has become paradigmatic of a largely depoliticized approach
within Animal Studies,” evincing a clear humanist interest in human–animal
relations that maintains species dominance.19
To date, the majority of research on milk comes from food studies scholars,
vegan feminist and ecofeminist scholars, and feminist environmental science
sources such as Sandra Steingraber’s Having Faith (2001) and Maia Boswell-
Penc’s Tainted Milk (2006).20 Both science sources address the nutritional
value of human breast milk for mother and child, the “body-burden” of en-
vironmental toxins transferred through that milk, and more specifically the
environmental racism challenged by the Akwesasne Mothers’ Milk project.
Advocacy groups such as Environmental Working Group and the MOMS
and POPS project regularly monitor milk as an environmental indicator of
health, and have found perchlorate (a rocket fuel) in every sample of Califor-
nia supermarket cows’ milk21 as well as flame retardants (PBDE), pesticides
(lindane, endosulfan, DDT), and other POPS in human breast milk.22 This
movement in environmental science affirms Katsi Cook’s insight that the
mother’s body is the first environment, an insight that links the concerns of
feminism, environmental justice, and interspecies justice.23
Postcolonial studies offers another critical perspective, building on Alfred
Crosby’s concept of “ecological imperialism”24 to describe both the ruthless
appropriation of indigenous land—particularly violating indigenous women,
queers, and animals25—and the introduction of exotic livestock and European
agricultural practices.26 The ecofeminists Val Plumwood and Vandana Shiva
have pointed out the ways dualistic thinking and instrumental reasoning of
the “Master Model” have constructed nature, the indigenous, and the animal
as “other” to meet human (elite male) needs, and biocolonization functions as
a continued practice, patenting indigenous knowledges and genetics, all under
cover of “progress” through Western science and agribusiness.27 Environmental
racism and classism exemplify additional contemporary colonial practices,
linking the continued expropriation of resources and transfer of wastes to
communities of color, and rural and impoverished communities around the
world. Until the work of Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, postcolonial studies
had yet to “resituate the species boundary and environmental concerns” at the
center of its inquiry, examining the “interfaces between nature and culture,
animal and human.”28
Taken alone, each of these fields offers specific perspectives on knowledge

while overlooking others. This essay proposes bringing these knowledge fields
together through a new intersectional field of feminist postcolonial milk studies,
a perspective capable of interrogating the multiply complex cultural assump-
tions and material practices articulated through milk.
Milk Money: Gift Economies versus Capital
In vernacular English, to “milk” something is to take it for everything you can

get—but that is an adult’s slang. For newborn mammals, mother’s milk is a
priceless gift: it offers nutrition, hydration, and affection, ecologically packaged
at the right temperature. Breast milk helps protect infants against common
childhood diseases, including diarrhea, pneumonia, respiratory tract infections,
gastrointestinal infections, celiac disease, inflammatory bowel disease, obesity,
diabetes, childhood leukemia and lymphoma, and Sudden Infant Death Syn-
drome.29 Adults who were breastfed as children have lower blood pressure and
lower cholesterol, lower rates of type 2 diabetes and obesity, and exhibit higher
intelligence and stronger filial bonds of friendship and empathy.30 Benefits
for breastfeeding mothers include a quicker return to prepregnancy weight,
temporary protection against conception, reduced risk of breast and ovarian
cancer, and lower rates of obesity.31
But these benefits are not equally utilized by all populations across race
and class, nor have they been measured in breastfeeding relationships that are
commodified to cross race and class boundaries: for example, did the women
enslaved or the wet nurses hired to breastfeed infants of the upper class enjoy
the same bio-psycho-social benefits as they would have in nursing their own
offspring? Did the upper-class infant enjoy the same nutritional, emotional,
intellectual benefits as she or he would have if nursed by the baby’s birth
mother? And while milk sharing within women’s communities has been both
a traditional and contemporary practice, this sharing is part of a gift economy
among voluntary participants. Can we describe as “milk sharing” the nursing
that takes places across species—as in a mother’s voluntary and affectionate
suckling of an infant of another species, as was common for pigs, dogs, mon-
keys, and bear cubs in precolonial Polynesia, the forests of South America, and
the hunter-gatherer societies of Southeast Asia, Australia, and Tasmania?32 Or is
taking the milk of another mother—whether a human mother or a cow mother,
goat, sheep, or elephant—to be appropriately described as “gift,” “wages,” or
“theft”? What is milk “worth”?
In an editorial on the economic value of breast milk, Mothering magazine

founder Peggy O’Mara did the math, bringing together the $4 billion a year
in US formula sales, the $1 billion annual health care cost-savings from breast-
feeding, and the costs hospitals pay for handling donated breast milk—$50 per
liter in Norway, $96–160 a quart in the United States.33 Using the American
Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommended minimum of breastfeeding for
the first six months of life,34 the annual number of US births (4,130,665),
the amount of breast milk produced (25 ounces per day, or 140 quarts per
six months), its value per quart ($96), and the percentage (13.3 percent) or
number (549,378) of US mothers who exclusively breastfeed at six months,
O’Mara concluded that this small percentage of nursing mothers generates
$7 billion in gross domestic product.35 In just six months, these breastfeeding
moms outstrip the economic value of two years of formula sales. Summarizing
data from the AAP journal Pediatrics, the Huffington Post places the value of
breast milk even higher.36 Focusing largely on health care costs and savings, AAP
pediatricians estimate the lives of nine hundred babies would be saved along
with $13 billion in health care if 90 percent of US women would breastfeed
for the first six months of life, or $3.6 billion (in 2001) if only 50 percent of
mothers breastfed. But today, only 12 percent of mothers follow AAP guide-
lines. Who are they, and why do the other 88 percent of moms stop nursing?
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there
are racial and ethnic differences in breastfeeding, with educated middle-class
Asian/Pacific Islander mothers breastfeeding at the highest rates (52 percent)
at six months, followed by Hispanic mothers (45 percent), Euro-American
mothers (43 percent), then American Indian mothers (37 percent) and African
American mothers (26 percent).37 Predictably, economic pressures make these
percentages even lower. Histories of racism and colonialism in the United States
legitimating the rape of indigenous and African women, the theft and sale of
their children in boarding schools or in slavery, and the requisite nutritional
and affectional neglect of African infants when their mothers were used as
wet nurses and “mammies” for white slave owners’ children all provide some
historical context for today’s low breastfeeding rates.38 For all women, the US
cultural hostility to the material realities of motherhood can be seen in the
stigmas around welfare for single mothers and their children, workplace policies
restricting maternity leave and flextime, women’s persistently lower wages, and
a lack of national legislation correcting these phenomena. According to Ann
Crittendon, becoming a mother is the most expensive workplace decision a
woman can make and “the single biggest risk factor for poverty in old age.”39
Yet unpaid female caregiving is the lifeblood of families, and the heart of
the economy. Including child rearing, cooking, managing household finances,
resolving emotional conflicts, and chauffeuring, Edelman Financial Services
estimated a mother’s worth at $508,700 a year, not including retirement and
health benefits.40 But in Crittendon’s Price of Motherhood and the book it
inspired, The Motherhood Manifesto,41 breastfeeding gets less than two pages
and is always discussed in terms of maternity leave. Admittedly, the United
States has the lowest rates of maternity leave of all industrialized nations, of-
fering only twelve weeks of unpaid leave under the Family and Medical Leave
Act (FMLA) of 1993, or six weeks under the California paid family leave law,
as compared with Germany’s and Sweden’s forty-seven weeks of full-time-
equivalent paid leave, Norway’s forty-four weeks, and Greece’s thirty-four
weeks; an international study of twenty-one nations’ parental laws found the
United States twentieth out of twenty-one, only one of two nations providing
no paid leave at all.42 In addition to having to pay for these job-protected twelve
weeks of parental leave, new mothers face other costly and cultural barriers to
continued breastfeeding: the cost of a breast pump ($269 for Medela’s Pump-
In-Style electric breast pump), an office refrigerator to store the pumped milk,
and workplace policies that include a lactation room and guaranteed breaks
to use that room as needed.
Under these conditions, Crittendon calls the AAP breastfeeding guidelines
“a sick joke.” As she explains,
In economics, a “free rider” is someone who benefits from a good without contributing to
its provision: in other words, someone who gets something for nothing. By that definition,
both the family and the global economy are classic examples of free riding. Both are depen-
dent on female caregivers who offer their labor in return for little or no compensation.43
Women’s breast milk and women’s labor are part of the gift economy that
is simultaneously invisible, unmonetized, and appropriated in national and
international economic systems. In Africa and Latin America, village women
will share in nursing to relieve other mothers to work, or to support an infant
whose mother is ill, has no breast milk, or has died.44 In the United States,
“lactivist” mothers have formed milk-sharing networks such as Facebook’s
“Eats-On-Feets” page that allows mothers who need breast milk and mothers
willing to donate excess breast milk to find each other.45 This network uses the
four principles for safe breast milk sharing—informed choice, donor screen-
ing, safe handling, and home pasteurization46—and proudly contrasts their
gift economy with the costs of milk banks, which may charge $4.50 an ounce
for handling and screening donated (i.e., free) breast milk.
When women’s breast milk is introduced as a market commodity, it fares

poorly. In 2010 New York chef Daniel Angerer produced his wife’s breast milk
cheese at Klee Brasserie and was promptly shut down by the New York Health
Department.47 A year later, London’s Daily Mail reported that a Covent Garden
store, Icecreamists, had begun selling human breast milk in a champagne glass
and labeled the product “Baby Gaga.”48 Allegedly the woman who donated
the first thirty ounces of breast milk was not paid for her time or bodily flu-
ids, but she did have to undergo health screening; thirteen more women had
volunteered to donate their breast milk as well. Reporting on his experience
of eating human breast milk cheese in the Village Voice Blogs, Robert Sietsema
reported “it feels like cannibalism” (a sentiment echoed in several other posts
online) and enumerated concerns that seem representative of those expressed
on the blogosphere: “human instinct” says “there’s something fundamentally
disgusting” about it; excess breast milk should be donated for the nourish-
ment of premature and critically ill babies; no one knows the effects of human
breast milk on adults; and human breast milk products have not undergone
the medical testing regularly used to screen cows’ milk. But from a feminist
posthumanist standpoint, Sietsema’s final concern was most salient:
Women are not farm animals. Human-breast-milk cheese casts them in that role. There is
nothing “ethical” about milking humans. What woman would consent to being milked for
the culinary pleasure of others, unless strapped for cash? The natural result of this happening
on a large scale is the exploitation of poor mothers, who will be tempted to sell milk and
feed their babies formula.49
Clearly, Sietsema’s remarks rely on the human–animal divide. If eating women’s

breast milk “feels like cannibalism,” what does it feel like to eat other females’
milk? And what does it feel like to be a farm animal?
In a word, it probably feels like death—otherwise called “herd retirement.” In
February 2012 the Twin Cities’ City Pages ran an article exposing “Cooperatives
Working Together—a collective of America’s biggest dairy co-ops, including
Arden-Hills based Land O’Lakes—herd retirement program that slaughtered
more than 500,000 dairy cows between 2003 and 2010” to raise the price of
milk.50 The program worked: the dairy industry profited over $11.7 billion
off herd retirement, raising prices for American dairy consumers in 2011 and
driving more small family farmers out of business. Whereas in the 1980s there
were at least 8,500 small dairy farms in Minnesota, by 2007 that number had
dropped to 2,000. The journalists Andy Mannix and Mike Mullen profiled
some of those small farmers, like Joe Sonneker, whose grandfather cleared their
160-acre lot over a century ago and started the small dairy farm he hoped to
pass down for generations. In 2012, with Cooperatives Working Together

controlling more than 70 percent of US milk production, small farmers like
Sonneker feel they do not have a voice in the future direction of dairying.
Of course, neither do the cows. Since the Depression, dairy cows have been
producing more milk for humans than the market could handle, and when
government programs to purchase and store the excess could not keep up with
the costs, the USDA instituted a Dairy Diversion Program encouraging farm-
ers to slow down production. When that effort failed, the Dairy Termination
Program was instituted, encouraging farmers to sell their herds and get out of
dairying for at least five years—but then farmers not involved in the program
simply increased their herd sizes and production output. East Dublin Dairy
in Murdock, Minnesota, is a case in point, milking over 5,280 cows twice a
day. As the Pew Commission Report on Industrial Farm Animal Production
documents, the current “efficiencies” in farm production that have arisen over
the past fifty years are not sustainable, and their operations create an “unac-
ceptable level of risk to public health and damage to the environment, as well
as unnecessary harm to [food] animals.”51
For an animal whose natural lifespan is twenty to twenty-five years, cows in
dairy production now survive only four to five years. The cow’s milk output has
increased from two thousand pounds per year in 1950 to up to fifty thousand
pounds of milk in 2004, thanks to bovine growth hormones, putting enormous
pressure on the cows’ bodies.52 Artificially inseminated at fifteen months of age,
a dairy cow suffers an endless cycle of pregnancy and lactation, milked two to
three times daily by electronic milking machines, conditions that cause mastitis
and other infections that must be treated with antibiotics. Fed an energy-dense
food, she may spend her whole life confined in a concrete stall or standing on
a slatted metal floor. Her calves are taken from her within hours after birth,
with females kept to replace their mothers in the dairy and males sent to veal
farms, where they are confined in crates so tight they cannot move, and fed an
iron-deficient diet until they are slaughtered at fourteen to seventeen weeks of
age.53 Predictably, the larger dairies also produce more manure and methane,
polluting the air and water. Using Crittendon’s critique of unpaid caregiving,
the industrialized dairy system is also a “free rider,” profiting at the expense of
the cows, the small dairy farmers, and the dairy consumers as well.
Replacing breastfeeding’s gift economy and severing the nursing relation-
ship between mammal mothers and offspring, the industrialized dairy system
of extracting wealth from animal nature, from labor and consumers, and
concentrating it in the hands of the producer-owners is not “cooperative”: in
dairying, that term is now a Trojan horse, concealing the ideological character
of economics. To unmask its operation, an international, postcolonial perspec-

tive is needed.
Mother Dairy, Mother Nature
Most Westerners will recall Nestlé’s powdered milk campaign in Africa and
India that persuaded thousands of young mothers to use powdered milk and
infant formulas instead of their own breast milk, and thereby made corpo-
rate profits at the expense of widespread infant suffering, causing diarrhea,
malnutrition, and death. As documented by the British NGO War on Want,
Nestlé’s baby food sales representatives dressed like nurses to give an appearance
of scientific credibility to their sales in the poorer countries of Africa, Latin
America, and Asia, including India.54 Because of poverty, lack of education,
and lack of adequate facilities, many mothers in these countries could not read
the instructions on the formula package and did not have access to baby bottle
sterilizing equipment or clean water. Instead, they put faith in the ideology of
progress and the superiority of technologically advanced nations: in a colonial
world, indigenous people are pressured to share the viewpoint of the colonizer,
to believe themselves inferior, and to adopt the ways of the colonizer in order
to “improve.” In India, multinational corporations like Nestlé and Glaxo were
criticized by the World Health Organization for selling infant formulas and
powdered milk, and an International Code for the Marketing of Breastmilk
Substitutes was issued in 1981. Under cover of this international rebuke, an
Indian national dairy corporation was quietly picking up Nestlé’s lost share
of infant milk food sales. The story of Amul corporation and its engineering
of India’s Operation Flood is a story of Third World elites joining First World
corporations in colonial practices, with devastating effects on mothers and
children, cows and calves, rural poor and small dairy farmers—a story that
both parallels and exponentially magnifies the harms done to dairy farmers
in the United States.55
Launched in 1970 and implemented in three phases until 1996, when
European dairy food aid supplies ended, Operation Flood was the invention
of Verghese Kurien, initiated as a solution to a difficult market situation.56 In
the late 1960s the European Economic Community (EEC) had a huge dairy
surplus in the form of milk powder and butter, and after reconstituting some
quantities and dumping others, the EEC finally sought to dispose of these
products to the third world in the form of food aid. As Frances Moore Lappé
and Joseph Collins explain in Food First,57 food aid has always been a colonialist
extension of foreign policy, farm interests, and corporate interests; it is offered
to open future markets for commercial sales, extending the reach of agribusiness
corporations and enabling First-World governing and economic institutions
to control their Third World counterparts. Lappé and Collins’s theory well
describes the outcomes of India’s Operation Flood, through the wealth and
rise to power of Kurien and the Amul Dairy Cooperative.
At the time of the EEC surplus, Kurien was a twenty-year employee of
Amul, India’s largest manufacturer of milk powder and butter; the food aid
would ruin Amul’s markets. But as chair of India’s National Dairy Development
Board, Kurien was well positioned to orchestrate a solution. In “Imperialism
through Food Aid: The Role of Third World Elites,” Claude Alvares explains
that Operation Flood would not use the food aid as charity offered for direct
consumption by the poor; rather, “food aid would be sold to the public, and
the funds generated [would be] invested for the long term dairy development
of the country.”58 Dairying would be an instrument of progress, business elites
argued, as small and landless farmers would be organized into cooperatives for
enhancing milk production and also enabling them to negotiate better rates for
their products. India’s government saw that the project would generate funds
for dairying that the government could not raise, along with providing milk
for the middle classes in the cities and improving the economic condition of
the poor. Accordingly, the Indian Dairy Corporation (IDC) was established in
1970 to administer Operation Flood—and Kurien was appointed its chair.59
The operations and proclaimed outcomes of Operation Flood were strongly
criticized by the development scholars Bharat Dogra, Alvares, and Shanti
George. In his famous exposé of Operation Flood, “The White Lie,” first
published in 1983 and denied via media and statistical manipulations by India’s
National Dairy Development Board and Indian Dairy Corporation, Alvares
listed the actual outcomes of Operation Flood:
1. it created four “Mother Dairies” (in Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, and Madras), milk-pro-
cessing plants that recombine solid milk products and butter oil into milk for city people;
2. it built a national milk grid radiating from Anand to transport milk from the dairy
processing plants, throwing local producers around these cities out of employment;
3. it made Amul the largest baby-food producer in India, and the strongest opponent of
the World Health Organization’s Code against advertising baby foods;
4. it diverted large stocks of imported commodities from the cities to Gujarat dairies
controlled by Amul;
5. it made Kurien a consultant for the World Bank, overseeing a new third world expansion
of Operation Flood in Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and China.60
While the dairy cooperatives were already collecting more milk than they
could sell and converting the surplus into baby food and butter, in the rural
town of Kaira Indian farmers were depriving their own undernourished children
of cows’ milk to sell to the cooperatives; we are not told why their human moth-
ers were not breast-feeding or why mothers’ milk was not sufficient, though
poverty and malnourishment seem likely explanations. Alvares simply reports
that these Kairan farmers barely got a remunerative price for their cows’ milk.
Part of the problem had to do with the cattle: Operation Flood involved
the import of European bulls, heifers, and crossbreeds. In India, cattle have
multiple uses in agricultural tasks (traction, fuel, fertilizer), and though the
indigenous cows and buffalo are poor milk producers compared with the
exotic northern European breeds, their upkeep is minimal, and they are envi-
ronmentally sustainable. While the imported breeds require special feeds and
are subject to diseases that need veterinary attention, indigenous breeds subsist
on local vegetation and are adapted to the climate, withstanding diseases and
parasites, and calving easily without human assistance.61 But the value of their
subsistence milk could not be converted into profits for Amul. Fifteen years
after the third and final phase of Operation Flood ended in 1996, Kerala’s
indigenous cattle population had declined by 48 percent.62
Rural women have also been harmed by Operation Flood, as the production
and sale of ghee, along with its economic returns, used to be the sole province
of women. With Operation Flood, the new crossbreeds required additional
feeding and milking labor from women and children, and the milk was sold
for cash, leaving women no economic returns and lowering their status in the
family economy. Alvares cites an Indian Council Social Science study on the
impact of Amul on women:
The enormous structure of the Amul complex at Anand, with a highly modern campus of
steel frame, mosaic and glass, air-conditioned buildings, laboratories, gleaming aluminum and
steel plants, white uniformed and capped staff, beautifully laid out gardens, sound proofed
and plush seated auditoria and air-conditioned luxury buses seem very far removed from
the lives of the village women whose work has made this glossy new world possible, but to
which they have no entry. Not one of them has acquired mastery over the new technology
that has taken over their traditional tasks of making butter and cheese for the urban con-
sumer. They are not even aware that they are contributors to a development miracle that is
assuming the size of a national movement.63
Despite these social costs, Operation Flood was celebrated by social and
international elites. Bruce Scholten’s India’s White Revolution is a single-authored
volume that prominently features a jacket endorsement from Kurien, copious
footnotes and quotations from Kurien, and most poignant of all, a photograph
of the Amul range of dairy products, including the tiny tin of infant milk
food substitute with the picture of a fat, smiling baby. But even Scholten
concedes to critic Shanti George when she points out that Operation Flood’s
“modernisations resulted in a net loss of women’s status,” as only men were
employed in the new high-tech infrastructure.64 Even after retiring as chair of
the National Dairy Development Board, Kurien remained in charge of the
Gujarat Coop Milk Marketing Federation, where he had already exported Amul
butter and cheese to over forty countries, including the United States. India’s
“white revolution” companioned its Green Revolution in the colonial pattern
of shifting subsistence production into cash commodities for export,65 thereby
destabilizing an already precarious subsistence economy (often powered by
women’s work) and throwing thousands of people into real material poverty. In
his book’s conclusion, Scholten reports that Kurien has been contacted by “Af-
rican countries such as Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Rwanda”
all expressing interest in replicating Operation Flood.66 Such expansion may
displace nomadic cattle herders such as the Maasai, whose subsistence lifestyle
is well suited to their environment; for other areas, an African Operation Flood
will surely affect human health and nutrition if populations have no historical
relationship with cattle herding and thus have inherited no lactase for digesting
milk beyond childhood.
Milk Has Something for Some Bodies
In the 1970s the Washington, DC-based Physicians Committee for Responsible

Medicine (PCRM) filed several petitions with the Federal Trade Commission
(FTC) against the American Dairy Council, showing data proving that ad-
vertisements promoting dairy products violated federal advertising guidelines;
accordingly, in 1974 the FTC’s complaint of “false, misleading, and deceptive”
advertising forced the Dairy Council to change its slogan from “Every Body
Needs Milk” to “Milk Has Something for Everybody.”67 Both vegan milk
critics68 and some food studies scholars69 have challenged the dairy industry’s
“perfect food” myth about milk. Vegan studies are more likely to emphasize
the linkages between animal-based diets and many Western diseases such as
heart disease, obesity, and cancers of the colon, breast, and prostate, while
both food studies and vegan studies scholars concur in observing the associa-
tion between osteoporosis and animal-protein-based diets,70 an association of
greatest concern to women, whose hip-fracture rates are regularly double that
of men’s. These correlations are reinforced by the fact that “as [most notably
Asian] populations move to a more Western, industrialized lifestyle, which
often includes dairy consumption, the risk of osteoporosis increases.”71 These
scholars also agree on the Eurocentrism and racism of the US dairy industry’s
claims for the universal healthfulness of milk.
Populations that have a historical practice of milking domestic animals
(central and northern Europeans, countries colonized by Europeans [the United
States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand], and Saharan nomads) have retained
the enzyme (lactase) that digests lactose sugar in milk, far beyond childhood;
however, the majority of the world’s populations lose the lactase enzyme by the
age of four, and thus lactose intolerance is common among Vietnamese, Thai,
Japanese, Arabs, Israeli Jews, and African Americans, Native Americans, Asian
Americans, and Hispanic Americans.72 Rather than acknowledge this diversity
in digestive capacities, the US dairy industry has coined the terms lactase im-
persistence and lactose maldigesters, terms that effectively pathologize nonwhite
populations. In 1999 the PCRM again challenged the promilk agenda of the
US National Dairy Council, this time in the Journal of the National Medical
Association, a publication serving African American health practitioners, and
in 2005 filed a class-action lawsuit against grocery stores and dairies in the
Maryland and Washington, DC, area calling for milk carton labeling. The
campaign was publicized by images of people of color clutching their stom-
achs, or doubled over outside a unisex bathroom, and captioned “got lactose
intolerance? 75% of people do, particularly people of color. If you’re lactose
intolerant, you may have grounds for a lawsuit.”73 Such grounds of racism in
milk promotions have historical precedent. The food science scholars Wiley and
DuPuis each quote histories of milk written in 1929 and 1933, respectively, to
illustrate the precedence and persistence of overt racism from Depression-era
claims for milk’s capacity to produce racial superiority:
The races which have always subsisted on liberal milk diets are the ones who have made
history and who have contributed the most to the advancement of civilization. As was well
said by Herbert Hoover in an address on the milk industry delivered before the World’s
Dairy Congress in 1923, “Upon this industry, more than any other of the food industries,
depends not alone the problem of public health, but there depends upon it the very growth
and virility of the white races.”74
A casual look at the races of people seems to show that those using much milk are the
strongest physically and mentally, and the most enduring of the peoples of the world. Of
all races, the Aryans seem to have been the heaviest drinkers of milk and the greatest users
of butter and cheese, a fact that may in part account for the quick and high development
of this division of human beings.75
Continuing the theme of white power, patriotic milk promotion ads in the
United States during World War II labeled a factory photo of workers on a
milk-bottling line as “white ammunition.”76
Why has the dairy industry not been held accountable for its blatant
ethnocentrism? Beyond a nexus of cultural hegemony and economics, one
source points out the conflict of interest caused by allowing the same person
to chair the National Academy of Sciences’ Food and Nutrition Board,77 con-
sult with several dairy-related companies (i.e., the National Dairy Council,
Nestlé Company, and Dannon), all the while chairing the Dietary Guidelines
Committee that established the Food Guide Pyramid and setting national
nutrition policy for the National School Lunch and Breakfast programs, the
Food Stamp Program, and the Women, Infant, and Children Supplemental
Feeding Program.77 Such antidemocratic alliances across government, science,
and industry appear to persist in both First-World and Third-World contexts,
exemplifying the links between intranational and international colonization.
Material Perspectives on Milk and Bovine Agency
The parallels between the findings in animals and humans are indeed remarkable.
—Editorial introduction, Hormones and Behavior special
issue, “Oxytocin, Vasopressin, and Social Behavior”
What is the embodied experience of a dairy cow, and how can we know it? To
date, this question has been addressed primarily from the standpoint of the
animal sciences—that is, those who unabashedly explore lactation, maternal
behaviors, weaning distress, and the implications of breaking mother–calf
social bonds in their research, all for human profit. Some of these studies
combine an animal welfare approach with their quest for profits,78 while others
seem purely production-focused. Acknowledging the well-known role of the
hormone oxytocin (OT) in pregnancy, birth, and lactation, these milk studies
examine OT specifically in terms of milk production and maternal behaviors.
One study compares milk production when mother cows are milked in the
presence of their calves, and then allowed to nurse their calves, versus cows
that are exclusively machine milked without their calves;79 this study finds
that the bodies of mother cows release more oxytocin in the presence of their
calves, and thus they produce more milk even though they nurse the calves
after machine milking. Without their calves, mother cows produce little or
no oxytocin, reducing the milk production (“ejection”) to such an extent that
dairy farmers regularly rely on “tactile teat stimulation, either manually or by
the milking machine,” and dairy scientists believe “it is necessary to elevate
oxytocin blood concentrations either by exogenous oxytocin or by applying
nervous stimuli such as vaginal stimulation which are strong enough to induce
endogenous oxytocin release.”80 Another study explored the effects of oxytocin
injected into cows whose milk production is disturbed by being “switched
from suckling to machine milking” or by being “milked in unfamiliar sur-
roundings.”81 The study acknowledges that “in dairy practice, OT treatments
are frequently applied intramuscularly at a very high dosage,” which increases
oxytocin for a few hours,82 but has the lasting damage of desensitizing the
cow’s udder and producing a reliance on repeated injections to obtain milk.
Studies of “weaning distress” find that this distress can be reduced by “dis-
entangling” the various aspects of weaning—cow–calf separation and the act
of nursing.83 Acknowledging that oxytocin is involved in nursing for both the
mother cow (as a response to the presence of the calf and teat stimulation,
OT promotes lactation) and her calf—OT is released in the calf ’s body “only
when calves were nursing from the cow and not when drinking milk from a
bucket”84—animal science researchers then propose that OT is comparable to
other “opiate-like substances in milk” rather than a material produced through
and reinforcing attachment—and thus “young mammals develop an addiction
to milk and without that source of opiates, they become like addicts craving
their drug of choice!”85 Pathologizing oxytocin—the biological foundation of
the mammal mother–infant affectionate attachment, a material and relation-
ship crucial to species survival—animal scientists strive to construct their own
role in separating mother cow–newborn calf dyads as simply hastening an act
of healthy separation.
A cornerstone of animal science scholars’ arguments is the theory of “parent-
offspring conflict” first described by Robert Trivers and persistently cited as a
fact supporting the commercial dairy farmers’ practice of separating mother
cows and calves within two to six hours after birth.86 According to this theory,
“weaning conflict” arises from the fact that while mammal infants benefit from
continued mothering and nursing, the “level of maternal investment” decreases
with age, and the mammal mothers “do better” or “benefit” from investing in
future reproduction and new offspring, leaving the older offspring to forage
for themselves.87 Exploring variations on the timing of mother–calf separation,
watering down milk, and providing sucking substitutes, and even comparing
Harry Harlow’s well-known abusive research on infant monkeys88 with human
toddlers’ use of stuffed animals to support the claim that “animals—includ-
ing humans—routinely develop attachments to inanimate objects,”89 animal
scientists use false analogies and flawed logic in their attempts to produce
scientific legitimation for the exploitive practices of commercial dairying. But

they stand on slippery ground: all their data point to the fact that severing the
mother cow–calf relationship—a complex relationship that involves a constel-
lation of maternal behaviors responding to the copresence of mother and calf
(licking, sniffing, nursing, calling, and bio-behavioral synchrony)—is what
causes emotional, behavioral, and biological distress.
Instead of focusing on the material of milk production, studies of oxytocin
in human mammals tend to focus on relational behaviors, attachment, nurtur-
ance, empathy, and happiness—yet material and relational elements are present
for both bovine and human mother–infant pairs. In the special 2012 issue of
Hormones and Behavior titled “Oxytocin, Vasopressin, and Social Behavior,”
scholars suggest that these hormones “modulate human social behavior and
cognition,” “enhance interpersonal trust,” and “have been linked to attachment,
generosity, and even pair bonding in humans.”90 As with other animal studies,
these studies of human relations showed that oxytocin release is behaviorally
influenced, promoted by the mother’s breastfeeding, her physical proximity
(which includes touch, odor, movements, body rhythms), her affectionate gaze
and vocalizations, which together create the bio-behavioral synchrony that
lays the foundation for such social, emotional, and cognitive competencies
as self-regulation, empathy, social adaptation, and a reduced risk of depres-
sion, as well as supporting more secure romantic relationships in adulthood.91
Mothers’ oxytocin response is moderated by contextual factors and individual
characteristics;92 it may be influenced by the mothers’ experiences of parental
care from their own childhoods, thus paralleling research for other animal
species, indicating that the generational transmission of OT operates through
parenting behaviors.93 Most interesting for gender equity is the study assessing
oxytocin levels in first-time parents, which found “comparable levels of baseline
OT in fathers and mothers,” indicating that “active paternal care provides one
pathway to activate the OT system in bi-parental mammals, which in moth-
ers is triggered by birth and lactation.”94 In this study, both parents showed
bio-behavioral synchrony with their infants, though each parent engaged in
gender-specific behaviors (i.e., fathers tended to throw the infant in the air,
move the child across the room, or move the child’s limbs, behaviors that
nevertheless increased the fathers’ OT levels).95
Animal science research can thus be used to undermine or to advance animal
industry and technology, and influence interspecies relations. The dance of
infant cry and maternal milk letdown is biologically and behaviorally encoded,
but the code can be broken; in 2012 animal scientists are selectively breeding
cows that seem indifferent to separation from their newborn calves. “How do
you break a wild animal?” asks pattrice jones. “The key can be found in the
word itself: You sever connections.”96
Inside each glass of milk is the story of a nursing mother separated from
her offspring.97 To justify and feel comfortable in “breaking” the bio-psycho-
social bonds that join mother and calf, dairy scientists, dairy farmers, and
dairy consumers alike must deny the web of relationships that defines healthy
ecosystems. Although animal science scholarship provides ample documenta-
tion of the distress this separation produces for both mother cow and calf—
“vocalizations” averaging more than 120 calls during twenty minutes for the
calf,98 and “increases in vocalizations and activity” for the mother cows99—the
abstractions of the words used to describe this distress shield us from the im-
ages of the cows and calves themselves. Bovine resistance to commercial milk
production is concealed in these animal science studies and requires a critical
animal studies approach to uncover.
Animal activists confirm that cows separated from their calves bellow and
appear to grieve for days afterward, sometimes ramming themselves against
their stalls in attempts to reunite with their calves. News articles report the
“amazing” feats of cows returning across miles of countryside to nurse calves
from whom they were forcibly separated.100 Some cows even use subterfuge to
deceive dairy farmers and protect their calves. The veterinarian Holly Cheever
recounts one such experience when she was contacted for consultation by a
dairy farmer whose cow was mysteriously dry.101 With her fifth pregnancy, the
cow had disappeared to give birth and returned with her calf, which the dairy
farmer promptly removed; she was milked morning and night, but produced
no milk. Days later, the farmer called back: he had followed the cow out to
pasture during the day and discovered her secret. The mother cow had given
birth to twins, and had hidden one in the tall grasses. As animal science re-
searchers acknowledge, “Under natural conditions cattle ‘hide’ their young away
from the herd, returning at infrequent intervals during the day to suckle.”102
But what Cheever noted is a sophisticated conceptual process that the dairy
scientists did not predict: this cow was capable of remembering the four prior
births and the loss of those calves; this cow was capable of anticipating a
similar fate for her new offspring; this cow made a kind of “Sophie’s Choice”
decision in choosing which of the twins to bring back to the dairy farmer and
which of the twins to hide and protect; this cow was capable of subterfuge,
stealthily returning to nurse her newborn each day, then presenting herself for
milking at the usual hours, morning and night. Though Cheever “pleaded for
the farmer to keep her and her bull calf together, she lost this baby, too—off
to the hell of the veal crate.” Cheever’s observation documents an example of
farmed animal agency and resistance.
How does drinking this bovine mother’s milk shape human identity? Who
do we become?
Toward a Feminist Milk Studies
In California and Wisconsin, rows of cows are lined up in stalls, with metal
suction cups pumping on their teats, extracting milk; on the May 21, 2012,
cover of Time magazine, a twenty-six-year-old mother is pictured, breastfeeding
her three-year-old son.104 Which image is more shocking?
Ideologically imprisoned in a humanist colonial framework, few human
mothers who breastfeed their infants use this embodied experience as an avenue
for empathizing with other mammal mothers; few human parents who touch
and nurture their newborns have used these behaviors’ affectionate oxytocin
release as an opportunity to consider the experiences of other animal parents
locked in systems of human captivity. Feminist milk studies addresses the
bio-psycho-social connections produced through the behavioral and material
elements of this first relationship, the mother–infant bond, and their nursing
milk.105
For too long, the dominant culture has childishly projected its own gendered
image onto nature as selfless and self-sacrificing mother, as in Shel Silverstein’s
book The Giving Tree, or onto other mammal species, requiring the female
bovine to symbolize maternal nature: mindless, patient, slow-moving, lactat-
ing. If we set aside this stereotype and look into her eyes, what can we see?
Notes
1. Robert D. McCracken, “Lactase Deficiency: An Example of Dietary Evolution,” Current Anthropology
12 (1971): 479–517; Norman Kretchner, “Lactose and Lactase,” Scientific American 277 (October
1972): 71–78.
2. P. Sainath, “Cattle Class: Native vs. Exotic,” Hindu, January 6, 2012, www.thehindu.com/opinion/
columns/sainath/article2778130.
3. Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (Boston: South End, 1999).
4. Sandra Steingraber, Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood (New York: Berkley Books,
2001).
5. Greta Gaard, “Milking Mother Nature: An Eco-Feminist Critique of rBGH,” Ecologist 24.6 (1994):
202–3.
6. A. Breeze Harper, ed., Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society
(Brooklyn, NY: Lantern Books, 2010); Lisa A. Kemmerer, ed., Sister Species: Women, Animals, and
Social Justice (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011).
7. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment
(Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990); Richard Twine, “Intersectional Disgust? Animals and (Eco)feminism,”
Feminism and Psychology 20.3 (2010): 397–406; Katrina Fox, “Milk Is a Feminist Issue,” Scavenger,
April 10, 2011, www.thescavenger.net/index.php?view=article&catid=36:feminism-a-pop-culture/

milk-is-a-feminist-issue662.html/.
8. Deborah Valenze, Milk: A Local and Global History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011);
Anne Mendelson, Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk through the Ages (New York: Knopf, 2008).
9. Peter Atkins, Liquid Materialities: A History of Milk, Science, and the Law (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010);
and E. Melanie DuPuis, “Why Not Mother?” The Rise of Cow’s Milk as Infant Food in Nineteenth
Century America,” in Nature’s Perfect Food: How Milk Became America’s Drink (New York: New York
10. DuPuis, “Why Not Mother?,” 46.
11. Ibid., 28–29.
12. Atkins, Liquid Materialities, xix.
13. DuPuis, Nature’s Perfect Food, 8, 11.
14. Andrea S. Wiley, Re-Imagining Milk (New York: Routledge, 2011), 9.
15. Ibid., 64–82.
16. Ibid., 91.
17. Jocelyn Porcher, “Dairy Cows: Workers in the Shadows?,” Society and Animals 20.1 (2012): 39–60.
18. Annie Potts and Donna Haraway, “Kiwi Chicken Advocate Talks with California Dog Companion,”
Feminism and Psychology 20.3 (2010): 318–36.
19. Zipporah Weisburg, “The Broken Promises of Monsters: Haraway, Animals, and the Humanist Legacy,”
Journal of Critical Animal Studies 7.2 (2009): 58.
20. Carol J. Adams, Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals (New York: Continuum,
1994); Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan, eds., Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical
Explorations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Greta Gaard, “Reproductive Technol-
ogy, or Reproductive Justice? An Ecofeminist, Environmental Justice Perspective on the Rhetoric of
Choice,” Ethics and the Environment 15.2 (2010): 103–29; Gaard, “Milking Mother Nature”; Lori
Gruen, “Dismantling Oppression: An Analysis of the Connection between Women and Animals,” in
Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, ed. Greta Gaard (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993),
60–90; pattrice jones, “Fighting Cocks: Ecofeminism versus Sexualized Violence,” in Kemmerer, Sister
Species, 45–56; Lisa Kemmerer, “Appendix: Factory Farming and Females,” in Kemmerer, Sister Spe-
cies, 173–85; Sandra Steingraber, Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood (Cambridge, MA:
Perseus Books, 2001); and Maia Boswell-Penc, Tainted Milk: Breastmilk, Feminisms, and the Politics of
Environmental Degradation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).
21. Environmental Working Group, “Rocket Fuel in Cows’ Milk—Perchlorate,” 2004, www.ewg.org/
node/8438/print.
22. “Monitoring Mother Earth by Monitoring Mothers’ Milk,” Commonweal (Bolinas, CA: Commonweal
Biomonitoring Resource Center, 2009).
23. Winona LaDuke, “Akwesasne: Mohawk Mothers’ Milk and PCBs,” in All Our Relations: Native Struggles
for Land and Life (Boston: South End, 1999), 11–26.
24. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986).
25. See Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South
End, 2005); and Greta Gaard, “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism,” Hypatia 12.1 (1997): 114–37.
26. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (New
York: Routledge, 2010).
27. Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy:
The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Boston: South End, 1997).
28. Huggan and Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, 6.
29. American Academy of Pediatrics, “Breastfeeding and the Use of Human Milk,” Pediatrics 129.3 (2012):
827–41.
30. World Health Organization, “Ten Facts on Breastfeeding,” 2012, www.who.int/features/factfiles/
breastfeeding/en/; Ruth Feldman, “Oxytocin and Social Affiliation in Humans,” Hormones and Behavior
61 (2012): 380–91.
31. World Health Organization, “Ten Facts on Breastfeeding.”
32. Frederick J. Simoons and James A. Baldwin, “Breast-Feeding of Animals by Women: Its Socio-Cultural
Context and Geographic Occurrence,” Anthropos 77.3–4 (1982): 421–48.
33. Peggy O’Mara, “The Economic Value of Breastmilk,” April 19, 2012, http://mothering.com/peg-
gyomara/breastfeeding-2/the-economic-value-of-breastmilk.
34. The discrepancy between the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recommended two years of
breastfeeding and the American Academy of Pediatricians’ (AAP) recommended six months has more
to do with cultural and economic contexts than it does with babies. As the WHO confirms, breast
milk contributes to infant health and emotional well-being on multiple levels, providing 100 percent
of infant nutrition for the first six months of life, up to one-half or more of nutritional needs for the
next six months, and up to one-third of nutritional needs the second year of life (see www.who.int/
nutrition/topics/exclusive_breastfeeding/en/ ). In global contexts, and particularly in rural or developing
countries, infants who are fed formula are at greater risk of mortality because of unsanitary conditions
(i.e., polluted water, unwashed bottles, diluted formula), and thus breastfeeding is a greater protection
for life; moreover, a culture of prolonged breastfeeding persists in less-industrialized parts of the world.
In a first-world context, where mothers are more likely to have access to bottle sanitization, purified
water, economic or food aid, and infant formula—coupled with the pressure to earn income shortly
after childbirth, and the heteropatriarchal sexualization of women’s breasts as toys for adult men rather
than as functional sustenance for infants—the AAP strategically recommends the minimum duration
for breastfeeding, yet only 12 percent of mothers meet even this recommended minimum, a sharp
decline from the 70 percent of mothers who breastfed at the beginning of the 1900s (see Anne L.
Wright and Richard J. Schanler, “The Resurgence of Breastfeeding at the End of the Second Millen-
nium,” Journal of Nutrition 131.2 (2001): 4215–55. The other 88 percent face barriers that are linked
to larger systems of racism and classism; see “Racial and Ethnic Differences,” www.cdc.gov/mmwr/
preview/mmwrhtml/mm5911a2.htm./
35. O’Mara, “Economic Value of Breastmilk.”
36. Lindsey Tanner, “Breast-Feeding Study on Benefits, Cost: 900 Lives and Billions of Dollars Could Be
Saved Annually,” Huffington Post, April 5, 2010, www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/05/breastfeeding-
study-on-be_n_525180.html.
37. US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Racial and Ethnic Differences in Breastfeeding
Initiation and Duration, by State—National Immunization Survey, United States, 2004–2008,” Mor-
bidity and Mortality Weekly Report 59.11 (2010): 327–34, www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/
mm5911a2.htm.
38. Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Smith, Conquest.
39. Ann Crittendon, The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least
Valued (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 6.
40. Ibid., 8.
41. Joan Blades and Kristen Rowe-Finkbeiner, The Motherhood Manifesto (New York: Nation Books, 2006).
42. Rebecca Ray, Janet C. Gornick, and John Schmitt, “Parental Leave Policies in 21 Countries,” Center
for Economic and Policy Research, 2009, www.cepr.net/documents/publications/parental_2008_09.
pdf .
43. Crittendon, Price of Motherhood, 258, 9.
44. Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1988).
45. As of July 30, 2012, allied chapters had formed in twelve other countries as well.
46. Shell Walker and Maria Armstrong, “The Four Pillars of Safe Breastmilk Sharing,” Midwifery Today,
Spring 2012, 34–36, www.eatsonfeets.org/docs/TheFourPillars.pdf.
47. Michael Inbar, “Chef Dishes Up Breast Milk Cheese,” March 9, 2010, http://today.msnbc.msn.com/
id/35778477/ns/today-food/t/chef-dishes-breast-milk-cheese/#.T-4XgPm3Xbg.
48. Daily Mail Reporter, “One from the Chest Freezer: Restaurant Sells Breast Milk Ice Cream,” February
26, 2011, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1360225/Shop-sells-breast-milk-ice-cream-London-
restaurant-Icecreamists-Baby-Gaga.html.
49. Robert Sietsema, “Five Reasons Why Manufacturing Human Breast Milk Cheese Is Disgusting,”
Village Voice Blogs, February 27, 2011, http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/2011/02/five_rea-
sons_wh.php.
50. Andy Mannix and Mike Mullen, “Milk Money: A Half-Million Cows Were Worth More Dead Than
Alive, and Now We’re All Paying the Price,” City Pages 32.1626 (2012): 9.
51. Pew Commission Report on Industrial Farm Animal Production (2008), Putting Meat on the Table:
Industrial Farm Animal Production in America, April 29, 2008, viii, www.pewtrusts.org/uploadedFiles/
wwwpewtrustsorg/Reports/Industrial_Agriculture/PCIFAP_FINAL.pdf.
52. Joseph Keon, Whitewash: The Disturbing Truth about Cow’s Milk and Your Health (Gabriola Island,
BC: New Society Publishers, 2010), 192–96.
53. John Robbins, Diet for a New America (Walpole, NH: Stillpoint, 1987), 112–17.
54. Claude Alvares, ed., Another Revolution Fails: An Investigation into How and Why India’s Operation
Flood Project, Touted as the World’s Largest Dairy Development Programme, Funded by EEC, Went off the
Rails (Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1985).
55. Operation Flood has been called the “White Revolution,” alluding to the Green Revolution of biotech-
nology and genetic engineering heralded by agricultural corporations such as Monsanto and Cargill,
and strongly critiqued by scholars such as Vandana Shiva (Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on
Biodiversity and Biotechnology [London: Zed Books, 1993] and Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and
Knowledge [Boston: South End, 1997]) as a pseudorevolution involving the massive theft of indigenous
knowledge, biodiversity, seeds, and genes.
56. Alvares, Another Revolution Fails.
57. Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins, Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity (New York: Random
House, 1977).
58. Alvares, Another Revolution Fails, 3.
59. Paradoxically, the rise of third-world elites through Operation Flood may have been enabled by the
preceding three decades of animal welfare work undertaking by Mohandas Gandhi, India’s preeminent
anticolonialist. Florence Burgat addresses at length the Gandhian concept of nonviolence in dairying and
argues that “the field of animal husbandry is so vast that only an economic solution can be envisaged”
(“Non-Violence towards Animals in the Thinking of Gandhi: The Problem of Animal Husbandry,”
Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 14 [2004]: 239). Although Gandhi devoted much of
his time from 1925 to 1947 (the end of his life) to implementing animal husbandry reforms, and the
dairies he envisioned were indeed attempted between 1955 and 1966, they were eventually “excluded
from the list of priorities” (246). Nonetheless, the National Dairy Development Board soon gave
“significant scientific support” to “improve[ing] indigenous milk-producing species and to set[ting]
up model dairies” (246). Operation Flood was launched in 1970.
60. Alvares, Another Revolution Fails, 5–7.
61. Sainath, “Cattle Class.”
62. Ibid.
63. Alvares cites an Indian Council Social Science study (Another Revolution Fails, 37–38).
64. Shanti George, quoted in Bruce Scholten, India’s White Revolution: Operation Flood, Food Aid, and
Development (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 233.
65. Shiva, Biopiracy.
66. Scholten, India’s White Revolution, 254.
67. Keon, Whitewash, 13.
68. T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell, The China Study (Dallas, TX: Benbella Books, 2006);
Keon, Whitewash; Frank A. Oski, Don’t Drink Your Milk! (Brushton, NY: TEACH Services, 1977);
Robbins, Diet for a New America.
69. DuPuis, “Why Not Mother?”; Wiley, Re-Imagining Milk.
70. Keon, Whitewash, 173; Wiley, Re-Imagining Milk, 80.
71. Wiley, Re-Imagining Milk, 80; cf. Campbell and Campbell, China Study.
72. DuPuis, “Why Not Mother?,” 27; Keon, Whitewash, 45; Wiley, Re-Imagining Milk, 24.
73. Wiley, Re-Imagining Milk, 32.
74. Ibid., 33–34.
75. DuPuis, “Why Not Mother?,” 117–18.
76. Wiley, Re-Imagining Milk, 59.
77. Campbell and Campbell, China Study, 312.
78. Of the studies surveyed here, scholars associated with animal welfare programs were universally housed
in animal science and food science programs, not in the humanities.
79. Shehadeh H. Kaskous, Danies Weiss, Yassin Massri, Al-Moutassem B. Al-Daker, Ab-Dallah Nouh,
and Rupert M. Bruckmaier, “Oxytocin Release and Lactation Performance in Syrian Shami Cattle
Milked with and without Suckling,” Journal of Dairy Research 32 (2006): 28–32.
80. R. M. Bruckmaier, “Normal and Disturbed Milk Ejection in Dairy Cows,” Domestic Animal Endo-
crinology 29 (2005): 271. In this quotation, humanities scholars will readily note the passive voice, a
mode of diction that neatly sidesteps the question, “Who is stimulating this cow’s teats and vagina,
and for whose pleasure?” As pattrice jones has remarked, linking heterosexism and speciesism: “A
primary tenet of gay liberation is that what consenting people do with each other’s bodies is nobody
else’s business. And, of course, eating meat is something you do to somebody else’s body without their
consent” (“Fighting Cocks: Ecofeminism vs. Sexualized Violence,” in Kemmerer, Sister Species, 47).
Her observation could be applied equally well to this animal-science-initiated and uninvited sexual
abuse of “dairy” cows.
81. C. J. Belo and R. M. Bruckmaier, “Suitability of Low-Dosage Oxytocin Treatment to Induce Milk
Ejection in Dairy Cows,” Journal of Dairy Science 93 (2010): 63–69.
82. Ibid., 63.
83. Jennifer Jasper, Monika Budzynska, and Daniel M. Weary, “Weaning Distress in Dairy Calves: Acute
Behavioural Responses by Limit-Fed Calves,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 110 (2008): 136–43;
Daniel M. Weary, Jennifer Jasper, and Maria J. Hotzel, “Understanding Weaning Distress,” Applied
Animal Behaviour Science 110 (2008): 24–41.
84. Weary, Jasper, and Hotzel, “Understanding Weaning Distress,” 29.
85. Ibid.; cf. Ruth C. Newberry and Janice C. Swanson, “Implications of Breaking Mother-Young Social
Bonds,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 110 (2008): 3–23.
86. Robert L. Trivers, “Parent-Offspring Conflict,” American Zoologist 14 (1974): 249–64.
87. Marina A. G. Von Keyserlingk and Daniel M. Weary, “Maternal Behavior in Cattle,” Hormones and
Behavior 52 (2007): 106–13; Weary, Jasper, and Hotzel, “Understanding Weaning Distress.”
88. Harry F. Harlow and Margaret K. Harlow, “Social Deprivation in Monkeys,” Scientific American 207.5
(1962): 136–46.
89. Jasper, Budzynska, and Weary, “Weaning Distress in Dairy Calves,” 142; italics mine.
90. “Editorial Comment: Oxytocin, Vasopressin, and Social Behavior,” Hormones and Behavior 61 (2012):
227.
91. Feldman, “Oxytocin and Social Affiliation.”
92. Lane Strathearn, Udita Iyengar, Peter Fonagy, and Sohye Kim, “Maternal Oxytocin Response during
Mother-Infant Interaction: Associations with Adult Temperament,” Hormones and Behavior 61 (2012):
429–35.
93. Feldman, “Oxytocin and Social Affiliation.” Primate studies show that females deprived of socialization
and maternal care during early life do not learn these maternal skills and are abusive toward infants,
suggesting a bio-behavioral connection between oxytocin release and nurturing behaviors (James P.
Curley and Eric B. Keverne, “Genes, Brains, and Mammalian Social Bonds,” TRENDS in Ecology and
Evolution 20.10 [2005]: 561–67; Harlow and Harlow, “Social Deprivation in Monkeys”).
94. Feldman, “Oxytocin and Social Affiliation,” 385.
95. Along with diverse brain regions, oxytocin is also “released at peripheral cites, including the heart,
thymus, gastrointestinal tract, uterus, placenta, amnion, corpus luteum, and testes, underscoring the
widely-distributed and dynamic nature of OT production in body and brain”—confirming the biologi-
cal basis for human males to release oxytocin in strong affiliative relationships (Feldman, “Oxytocin
and Social Affiliation,” 382).
96. pattrice jones, “Stomping with the Elephants: Feminist Principles for Radical Solidarity,” in Igniting
a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth, ed. Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella II (Oakland, CA:
AK Press, 2006), 321.
97. Lisa Kemmerer proposes the term nursing milk, which foregrounds the relational constitution of milk
(“Appendix”). To conceal this relational ontology, the dairy industry in the United States promotes
advertising that presents milk as a commodity, an object of liquid-in-a-glass that can produce “milk
mustaches” and “strong bones/bodies” while concealing the fate (veal for males, future dairy cows for
females) of those calves for whom the mothers’ milk was created to feed. No wonder that the viewing
public has conveniently forgotten the fact that milk comes from teats and not cartons; such elision
enables industrial dairy sales and production.
98. Jasper, Budzynska, and Weary, “Weaning Distress in Dairy Calves.”
99. Von Keyserlingk and Weary, “Maternal Behavior in Cattle.”
100. Karen Dawn, Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way We Treat Animals (New York: HarperCollins,
2008), 162–64.
101. Holly Cheever, “Cow Proves Animals Love, Think, and Act,” 2012, www.globalanimal.org/2012/04/13/
cow-proves-animals-love-think-and-act/71867/.
102. Von Keyserlingk and Weary, “Maternal Behavior in Cattle,” 108.

103. Cheever, “Cow Proves Animals Love, Think, and Act.”
104. Kate Pickert, “Are You Mom Enough?,” Time Magazine, May 21, 2012, http://lightbox.time.
com/2012/05/10/parenting/#1; and Farah L. Miller, “Jamie Lynne Grumet, Breastfeeding Mom on
‘TIME Magazine’ Cover, Illustrates Attachment Parenting,” Huffington Post, May 10, 2012, www.
huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/10/jamie-lynne-grumet-breastfeeding-time-magazine-cover_n_1506096.
html.
105. Kemmerer, Sister Species.
“Surplus” Life and the Politics of Transspecies Care | 619
Chimpanzee Sanctuary: “Surplus” Life

and the Politics of Transspecies Care
Julietta Hua and Neel Ahuja
I
n the first decade of the new millennium, animal activists heralded
unprecedented legal protections for nonhuman great apes. Countries
across Europe and the Pacific abolished the medical use of chimpanzees,
gorillas, bonobos, baboons, and orangutans; meanwhile, the United Nations
formalized a new conservation effort in twenty-three range states in Africa and
Southeast Asia. In 2000 the US Congress also passed the Chimpanzee Health,
Improvement, Maintenance, and Protection (CHIMP) Act, which dedicates
federal funding for a sanctuary system providing long-term care for captive
chimpanzees previously used in US biomedical and military research. Such
legislation acknowledges claims for legal redress against histories of displace-
ment, confinement, and experimentation, signaling an apparent posthumanism
of the law. In his signing statement for the CHIMP Act, former president Bill
Clinton presented this expansion of state protection as a moral imperative:
“This Act is a valuable affirmation of the Federal Government’s responsibil-
ity and moral obligation to . . . ensure a secure retirement for surplus Federal
research chimpanzees and to meet their lifetime needs for shelter and care.”1
Chimpanzee sanctuary, as both a social institution and a conceptual appara-
tus, signals the decline in the biomedical use of chimpanzees in the United States
and the rise of a gendered ethic of carework, two developments deeply linked
to twentieth-century imperial knowledge projects publicizing the cultural,
biological, and emotional likeness of humans and chimpanzees. This article
examines the rise of the US chimpanzee sanctuary—a system of domestic sanc-
tuaries that house and care for chimpanzees declared “surplus” or “retired” from
biomedical research2—as a site through which to understand the contradictory
neoliberal conditions that transform chimpanzees from imperial conscripts in
Cold War technological development into unkillable wards of the US state. We
furthermore explore the deeply gendered ways in which the philosophy and
practice of sanctuary is informed by—but ultimately exceeds—earlier models
of animal rights and conservation. Animal rights and conservation serve as
two dominant discourses through which to figure “the just” and “the moral”

when it comes to animals. Yet as Karla Armbruster notes, in the history of

conservation, “protecting and speaking for the gorillas [and other great apes]
often demonstrate[s] a serious disregard for the rights and needs of the native
[human populations of Africa],”3 while idealistic invocations of universal ape
rights, as Lori Gruen and Kari Weil make clear, “flattens or erases the com-
plexity of our interactions with others . . . [and] truncates the description of
moral problems.”4 Given these limitations, we read the chimpanzee sanctuary
as a pragmatic yet constrained solution that focuses on the humane reform
of captivity by marshaling feminized human labor to administer the surplus,
nonlaboring time of captive chimpanzees. The emergent care-based vision of
justice depends on a neoliberal valuation of feminized affective labor that is
key to the sanctuary’s political–economic logic of humane captivity. In this
context, the chimpanzee remains an exceptional species granted state redress,
a status enabled at once by changing public understandings of animal ethics,
the cost savings of feminized labor, and technical and economic pressures that
devalue chimpanzees as once-privileged sources of bio-value.
Working from our interviews conducted with caregivers at one small
chimpanzee sanctuary,5 we argue that the productive potential of chimpanzee
sanctuary lies in the possibilities that the space/time awaiting death offers for
reconceptualizing notions of justice. The sanctuary on which our claims are
based is one that, like many others, espouses an explicit anticaptivity, but not
necessarily rights-based or conservationist, mission and philosophy. We read
the practice of the sanctuary and its workers as one that centers an idea of “the
good” as providing for each individual chimpanzee’s needs, never the same
from moment to moment even for any one individual, which institutes an
obligation for care-into-death. This philosophy not only frames the project of
the organization but also informs how each caregiver narrates the trajectory of
his or her own career path as well as his or her opinions about animal activism.
Our research is based primarily on our formal, recorded interviews of the paid
(non-volunteer) employees of the sanctuary, but is also drawn from informal
conversations (notated but not recorded) we had with the workers as well as
observations made while visiting the sanctuary. While our observations are
based on our ethnographic research of one sanctuary, we argue that the broader
political and economic conditions under which sanctuaries in general have
emerged shape its constraints as well as its conditions of promise and possibility.
In what follows, we first briefly outline the paradox of human–chimpanzee
likeness, where projects of science and technology in the context of US im-
perialism utilize species comparisons to justify experimentation, exploitation,
and captivity even as they underline rationales for why chimpanzees should
be protected. The brief history of the shifting discourses of likeness helps
contextualize the institutionalization of the sanctuary, as well as the sanctuary’s
discursive and political conditions of emergence. This historical paradox of
likeness informs how we read our interviews with sanctuary caregivers, which
document struggles to reshape duties toward chimpanzees through languages
of care, highlighting three terms of transspecies engagement: (1) a hesitance
toward claiming species-wide conservation goals and a focus on chimpanzee
individuality; (2) awaiting and welcoming the death of wards during the
“surplus time” of retirement; and (3) an obligation to provide a kind of good
life, but acknowledging that this goal is deeply compromised by the realities
of captivity. Unlike many conservation and rights initiatives, these approaches
to care emphasize improvisation and complexity, resisting the collapsing of
animal exploitation to a universalized model of oppression analogous to rac-
ism, sexism, or other structures of social power. While neoliberal institutional
priorities frame hegemonic conceptions of justice for humans through the
promise of greater expansion of rights, we ask, “What might it mean that
late-liberal conceptions of justice, when it comes to chimpanzees, are often
actively disengaged from rights?”
The Likeness of Species: US Empire, Biocapital, and Postwar

Primate Figures
Today’s great ape sanctuary efforts are informed by interlinked political

struggles over the constitution of postwar imperial biomedicine and the rise
of transnational animal rights and ecological movements, all of which have
been deeply influenced by scientific research on the likeness between humans
and other primates. Postwar efforts to incorporate primate models into
scientific disciplines, research infrastructures, and projects to reconstitute a
humanist internationalism from approximately 1945 to 1970 helped shape
neoliberal debates that, from 1970 to the present, coalesce around the ethics
and ecological impacts of the biomedical primate trade. Despite the heated
public contestation between animal activists and research scientists over the
captivity and vivisection of apes and monkeys, the biomedical, ecological, and
animal rights discourses on primate research turn on similar constructions of
the biological, social, and cognitive likeness of primate species, even as they
also emphasize diversity within species.
In the three decades following the end of World War II, the US govern-
ment, pharmaceutical producers, and private research institutions imported
large numbers of nonhuman primate species for use in biomedical research,
behavioral studies, defense experiments, toxicology testing, and vaccine produc-
tion. The imperial trade in nonhuman primates, which exploited preexisting
colonial divisions of economic and ecological resources between Asian and
African range states and primate-importing states, made the United States
home to the world’s largest captive populations of nonhuman primates used
in research. Testing bodily responses to zero-gravity expansionism and to new
pharmaceuticals enlisted to battle polio and other diseases, federal officials
and private labs imported apes and monkeys. Breeding projects became espe-
cially significant after importation schemes encountered political challenges
of decolonizing states that refused unfettered access to primate biocapital.6
Postwar investments in high-tech biomedical research, the decolonization of
primate range states, and an emergent Cold War “monkey race” between the
United States and the Soviet Union contributed to a massive federal effort to
figuratively and literally domesticate the bodies of nonhuman primates, with
chimpanzees and rhesus macaques emerging as prized species. In the 1950s
the defense apparatus imported hundreds of chimpanzees for radiation and
spaceflight studies; meanwhile, the public–private effort to stem the spread
of polio through mass vaccination depended on the bodies of an estimated 1
million rhesus macaques, put to death in the process. After the success of the
rhesus-derived Salk vaccine, state officials began to view nonhuman primates
as key raw materials of the national security state, necessary for the successful
engineering of defense and immune technologies.
Responding to both heavy Soviet investments in primate research and the
decolonial disruptions to the biomedical primate trade, US officials made a
concerted effort to develop a domestic primate breeding program to ensure a
steady supply of primates not dependent on importation schemes from Africa
and Asia. This project developed into the eight National Primate Research Cen-
ters of the National Institutes of Health and the Caribbean Regional Primate
Center located in Puerto Rico. The primate centers have housed forty-five
species of primates, and currently maintain over seventy thousand individuals,
with large populations of rhesus macaques, marmosets, and vervets. Because of
the difficulty of importation, declining range populations, ethical controversies,
low research demand, and high cost of care, the larger great ape species occupy
a small niche in these institutions, with chimpanzees numbering around one
thousand remaining the largest group.7
Expanded funding for primate resources during the 1950s and 1960s helped
invigorate primatology more broadly.8 In Primate Visions Donna Haraway
highlights the particular importance, in the wake of the nuclear bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Nazi genocides, that anthropological research
on nonhuman primate bodies played in reinvigorating a universal concept of
the human. Emerging evolutionary thought described the species differentia-
tion of the human through an account of the rise of a patriarchal vision of
hunting man attached to a nuclear family; this vision of human nature eclipsed
the traumatic historical time of the racially fragmented humanity of the world
wars with the shared evolutionary time of primate universality, reproduced
through the patriarchal family as primordial scene of origins. Race did not
disappear in this formulation—it was sedimented into the notion of cognitively
equal but distinct “populations.” Even as apes and monkeys were figured as
primordial origins of a globalized human, they also became important figures
of modernity and conscripts of the Cold War effort: captive chimpanzees were
triumphantly launched into outer space by NASA in 1960 and 1961 to prove
that the nation could survive zero-gravity expansionism.9 Thus narratives of
universal human origins emerged alongside Cold War efforts to differentiate
the “advancement” of the United States from communist states.
Publicizing nonhuman primates as models for the past and future hu-
man also raised questions about the ethics of their indefinite captivity and
unregulated exploitation. By 1970 a convergence of biomedical, ethical, and
environmental concerns brought increasing attention to the plight of apes
and monkeys, both within the continental borders of the United States and
internationally. A new generation of species theorists concerned with the uses
of animals in factory farming, hunting, and laboratories helped develop a
liberal, rights-based critique of “speciesism” that followed on the anticaptivity
discourses of British and American abolitionism as well as the social justice
concepts of the civil rights and women’s movements.10 At the same time, pres-
sured to act on growing environmental concerns over chemical toxicity at home
and abroad during the Vietnam War,11 the United States entered into negotia-
tions for the first international agreements on the conservation of endangered
animals. In the same year that it passed the 1973 Endangered Species Act, the
United States ratified the Convention on International Trade in Endangered
Species (CITES). This agreement banned the commercial trade of endangered
species. In a contested series of decisions spanning 1984–1992, the US Fish and
Wildlife Service (FWS) debated whether chimpanzees should be considered
endangered and, furthermore, whether captive apes could be distinguished
from free-ranging apes and categorized differently for conservation purposes.

Against the recommendations of animal rights organizations and increasingly
outspoken primate behavioralists, including Roger Fouts and Jane Goodall,
the FWS sided with the NIH, which argued for continued exploitation of
captive chimpanzees.12
These debates were resolved through the determination of the research
potential of chimpanzees in the search for AIDS treatments; researchers found
that chimpanzees were one of the only species susceptible to HIV infection,
leading to a scramble for new supplies of the animals.13 From 1987 to 1993
the NIH ran a program that bred nearly four hundred captive chimpanzees
at five research institutions across the United States.14 Yet by the early 1990s
the HIV research yielded no advances, with scientists unable to accurately
model human AIDS in chimpanzees. Citing the wasted resources and cruel
conditions of the chimpanzee program, animal advocates made increasingly
successful appeals to lawmakers to establish curbs on chimpanzee research. At
the same time, a group of high-profile primatologists argued that free-ranging
chimpanzees had distinct, geographically bound cultures that demonstrated
shared learning of particular behaviors, customs, and technologies.15 Primatolo-
gists argued that humans coevolved with other apes’ adaptive forms of social
organization, affective connection, and cognitive capacity. The informational
language of the new genomics offered even starker challenges to normative
political and ethical distinctions dividing humans from other great apes, and
the human body itself could be reconceived as “98% chimpanzee” based on
the equivalence of DNA base-pair sequences.16 Increasingly, primates appeared
biologically, socially, culturally, and cognitively “like us,” “kin” of humanity,
in the words of former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.17 By the late 1990s
NIH officials conceded the exceptional ethical status of chimpanzees even as
they reasserted control over other species used in research: “The phylogenetic
status and psychological complexity of chimpanzees indicate that they should
be accorded a special status with regard to euthanasia that might not apply
to other research animals, for example, rats, dogs, or some other nonhuman
primates. Simply put, killing a chimpanzee currently requires more ethical and
scientific justification than killing a dog.”18 It was in this context of declining
research use and increasingly aggressive public activism that the first privately
run US sanctuaries were launched in the 1990s; in 2000 the federal govern-
ment established an official sanctuary system with an accredited care institution
called Chimp Haven in Louisiana.
Geographically, the paradox of chimpanzee likeness emerges mainly in the
wealthy importing countries: it was here that species comparisons moved from
justifying importation and captive research to justifying redress and state care.
The major transformations in laws would likely have been impossible without
an international conversation sparked by the ethicists Peter Singer and Paola
Cavalieri.19 Singer and Cavalieri’s Great Ape Project (GAP) draws on the at-
tributions of cognitive, cultural, and emotional complexity to great apes—as
well as comparisons between these capacities and those of human infants and
the cognitively disabled—to propose the 1993 Declaration on Great Apes,
modeled after the UN Declaration on Human Rights. The declaration incor-
porates humans among the other great apes in a multispecies “community of
equals” that would, with a global scope, recognize the universal “right to life,”
“the protection of individual liberty” (banning incarceration except for criminal
convictions and protection of the individual or commonweal, subject to due
process), and “prohibition of torture.”20 Although the declaration has yet to be-
come international law, its emphasis on negative rights (freedoms from torture
and captivity) as fundamental rights of all great apes influenced several of the
legislative debates over ape rights in nonrange states in the 1990s and 2000s.
Yet the anticaptivity discourse mobilized against chimpanzee vivisection
in the importing states seems less appropriate to the contexts of African and
Asian range states, where discourses of sustainable development dominate
elite efforts to conserve species within a neoliberal framework privileging
extraction and ecotourism. In conflict areas, such as the Congo–Rwanda
border region where both violence and mining for the blood mineral coltan
(used in cellphones and computers) exacerbates the displacement and death
of chimpanzees, formal rights seem most precarious. Given the complexities
of conservation in the face of war and deepening international divisions of
wealth and labor, global South elites at the 1992 United Nations summit on
biodiversity in Rio de Janeiro worked to link biodiversity to cultural diversity
and to capitalist efforts at “sustainable development.” Within this context,
GAP supporters, including Goodall, helped parlay the rights initiative into
a UN partnership, the Great Ape Survival Project (GRASP). In its Kinshasa
Declaration on Great Apes of 2005, GRASP aimed to tether conservationism
to a post-1992 sustainable development agenda that moves beyond neocolonial
parks and policing to recognizing the value of “ecosystem services” protected
by chimpanzees and other flagship species, the self-determination of local
communities, and, notably, the “common but differentiated responsibility” of
humans to conserve the “genetic, ecological, and cultural diversity of all great
ape populations for all time.”21
Despite this division in the politics of redress across range states and import-
ing states, both approaches emphasize the particularity of groups and individu-
als within the family of great apes, making local practices central to attempts to
grant care and rehabilitation to chimpanzees. The approaches to redress for great
apes of the 1990s and 2000s suggest political strategies that privilege situated
interactions, locality, and autonomy. Chimpanzees, in the post-Rio politics of
sustainable development, are no longer simply signs of a shared evolutionary
history; they are instead figures of diversity, evidence of the complexity of bio-
logical and cultural differentiation. Emerging alongside broader discourses of
diversity and multiculturalism, the refiguring of categorical human/not-human
distinctions through attention to particularity and complexity continues to
define the conceptual grounds of these animals’ incorporation into the law.
This operation we think of as the workings of the racial, which continues to
define how difference is characterized in global politics despite the apparently
postracial and posthuman mythologies of particularity.22
Prison and Personhood: Negotiating Likeness in Sanctuary Practice
Our interviews with sanctuary workers reveal the complexity of sanctuary

as a space to delink justice from notions of freedom as return to the “wild”
and from rights and legal personhood. Sanctuary workers’ understandings of
their work initiate new modes of relationality that offer a reconsideration of
anthropocentrism, austerity, the logics of incarceration, “surplus time,” and the
limited notions of justice based in liberal–humanist formalisms. Resisting the
tendency to frame the plight of captive chimpanzees as yet another instance of
the same forms of injustice that have historically kept humans from exercising
their political freedoms and rights, the sanctuary workers keep from collapsing
the issue of chimpanzee captivity into broader social justice calls for the exten-
sion of rights and the recognition of neoliberal difference. The practices of the
sanctuary highlight the paradox of likeness that limits legal incorporation as
a privileged avenue for framing justice, providing instead alternative modes
of engagement that resist any universal script for understanding transspecies
relations. Even while captivity and imprisonment provide the everyday archi-
tecture of life in the sanctuary, including the physical space of the sanctuary
where chimpanzees live in enclosures, caregivers complicate legal discourses
of personhood and rights.
Lacking the resources or territorial control to return chimpanzees to a free-
ranging environment, sanctuaries encounter the problem of captivity: How
can the space of captivity be transformed into a maximally livable space for
nonlaboring chimpanzees? Sanctuary practice is deeply inspired by anticaptivity
discourses of animal rights movements. Published in 2000, the legal scholar
Steven Wise’s manifesto for great ape rights, Rattling the Cage, offers a power-
ful image of captivity. Wise begins with the death scene of Jerome, painting
a portrait of an individual who “languished in his cell,” a “large, windowless,
grey concrete box . . . 9 feet by 11 feet by 8.5 feet.” Wise’s brief prison nar-
rative notes that “the teenager was dull, bloated, depressed, sapped, anemic,
and plagued by diarrhea,” and it sensationally recounts his intentional infec-
tion with HIV strains as an infant. It is only after these details are presented
that the reader is clued in to the fact that the incarcerated juvenile subjected
to medical experimentation is not human—he is a chimpanzee who dies
after eleven years of captivity in the Infectious Diseases Units at the Yerkes
National Primate Research Center, affiliated with Emory University.23 Wise’s
book, which presents the first detailed legal case for extending personhood to
other great apes, assembles decades of ethological study to demonstrate that
chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans share emotional and cognitive
capacities exceeding those of human infants and thus entitling them to legal
rights. Drawing on a reading of antislavery jurisprudence as a basis for personal
rights, Wise further argues that minimal capacities to suffer and to experience
the world through self-recognition and memory entitle all great apes to the
negative rights of legal persons: protection from bodily harm, death, enslave-
ment, and a minimal recognition of the right to physical freedom.
In the emerging institutions of chimpanzee sanctuary, the mourning of
captivity and the focus on individual suffering has become the basis of an
ethic of expansive duties toward chimpanzees figured, as in Wise’s book, as
kidnapped and wrongly imprisoned. Yet the sanctuary, in accepting the reality
of lifelong captivity, reveals the limits to animal rights discourses that focus
on expanding legal personhood. One sanctuary worker, Kelly, is succinct in
expressing this basis for sanctuary: the chimpanzees “didn’t get to grow up in
Africa and they had to go live in a cage. . . . They’re stuck here and we should
do everything we can for them. . . . They didn’t commit any crime and that’s
how I look at it; it’s not their fault but they have to live in a cage. They’re in
for a crime they didn’t commit.” Kelly’s sentiment, if taken out of the context
of her work as a sanctuary caregiver, can be read as a moment where the idea
of injustice against chimpanzees slips into an anthropomorphic frame, collaps-
ing the captive chimpanzee into human prisoners. However, Kelly and other
sanctuary workers avoid such a collapsing by articulating the individuality and
difference of each chimpanzee ward. Kelly’s statement of chimps as having to
live in a cage for “a crime they didn’t commit” is, rather, an acknowledgment
capturing the difficulties of reforming captivity that the workers negotiate daily,
as chimpanzees are both like and unlike humans. Kelly continued to recount
to us how even though she tells visitors that chimpanzees are “our closest rela-
tives so they feel the same emotions that we [humans] do,” she is continually
reminded that “these [chimpanzee wards] are really great friends of mine, but
I would never feel safe to be right next to them because they might bite. It
doesn’t mean they’re any less of a good friend. They bite each other but they
can handle it. We’re built differently, and I think that’s the thing. We have two
separate worlds.” Invoking a likeness and even kinship between human and
chimpanzee, caregivers nonetheless recognize limits to transspecies cohabita-
tion. As Kelly says, her chimpanzee wards are “built differently”; they and she
“have two separate worlds.” It is only the condition of captivity that brings
the “two separate worlds” together. This tension in the idea of likeness—that
chimpanzees are at once our kin even as they entrench the boundaries of dif-
ference separating species—is one that sanctuary workers regularly negotiate.
Sanctuary workers articulate the project of the sanctuary as departing from
the history of conservation and animal rights movements. For example, Jennifer
illustrates another recurring sentiment among the workers that conservation
is a related, but nonetheless different, kind of project from the sanctuary:
“I think of [conservation] as separate [from the work of the sanctuary]. . . .
Ultimately I think there’s a tie, absolutely if people are learning about chimps
or orangs from a sanctuary—I’m reluctant to say a zoo, since I don’t think
you really learn anything from a zoo.” Another caregiver, Danny, says, “My
motivation is the animals, the individual animals. I don’t see myself being all
that involved in conservation. Not that I . . . I think it’s so important, but I
have trouble being motivated by this vague concept of . . . an ecosystem [that]
will be tipped out of balance. Something like that just wouldn’t make me get
out of bed every morning to do the same thing. . . . It’s more like an injustice
to an individual kind of thing than an idea of this sort of group that’s hard to
define as a species [that motivates me].” The workers articulate their mission
through anticaptivity discourse that troubles their own work in the space of
the sanctuary as well as other institutional spaces like zoos. Further, in their
hesitation to see conservation as a central part of their work at the sanctuary,
Danny and Jennifer reject species as itself the categorical level for conceptual-
izing justice. In fact, all the workers we spoke to expressed a sentiment similar
to Shannon’s claim: “I don’t want there to be chimps in zoos, so if that means
they are all gone so be it. Of course, I don’t want chimps to go extinct, but I
don’t think that having a handful in zoos is the solution.”
The sanctuary workers invoke an ethic of interpersonal engagement and
duty at the level of the individual over a sense of saving the species. This sense
of personal stories and relationships is in fact what all our interviewees note
as a key reason why they entered sanctuary carework; Shannon says, “I think
there’s great value in being able to meet a chimp.” Danny says that it is the
positive interaction and lifelong relationship that develops with the chimps
that makes sanctuary work more appealing than, say, veterinary medicine.
The interpersonal engagement that draws caregivers is one performed daily
through the labor of care, which takes an improvisational form even as there
are regularized duties of feeding and cleaning.
Caregivers design elaborate games and puzzles, and occasionally introduce
foreign objects for the entertainment or socialization of chimpanzees. These
“enrichment” processes dispense with any universal script for chimpanzee care,
revealing that difference inheres in the micro-politics of caregiving rather than
at the level of the group or species. While the caregivers avoid the state labels
of “retirees” (recognizing national service) or “surplus” beings, they address
chimpanzee wards as individuated bearers of surplus time,24 creatures bearing
an uncertain remainder of life free from laboratory exploitation. This surplus
time is filled with activities to normatively socialize chimpanzees to accept the
conditions of confinement, to forgo the infamous forms of aggression attrib-
uted to the traumas of captivity. For example, while some of the chimpanzee
wards have acclimated to their lives in the sanctuary, shared with the other
chimpanzee wards and their human caretakers, the workers all agreed that one
chimpanzee, more than the others, continues to act in ways that caregivers
understand as protest. Jennifer describes it this way:
She [the chimpanzee], when we were getting ready to leave at the end of the day . . . would
start banging on the cage, stomping on the floor. She wanted something, she wanted some-
thing. So we would offer a pen or a boot or [ask] do you want some water. Nothing was
ever good or right. She was never satisfied so we would leave at the end of the day with her
banging at us. It was the most horrific time. I would struggle with that for hours after being
home, of knowing that [she] is sitting there bored out of her mind, pulling her hair out
[a nervous habit the chimpanzee brought with her to the sanctuary]. There was nothing I
could do. So I came up with this idea of giving them evening puzzles. At the very end of
the day we would give them something that hopefully takes some time. . . . I’m constantly
trying to challenge her.
Jennifer expresses how even after many years with this chimpanzee, she is still
working to devise new ways to negotiate their relationship. She told us how
some days the chimpanzees disrupt the schedule (enclosure cleaning and feeding
times), and on these days the caregivers simply wait for their wards to allow
them to continue with their daily routines. Like her account of constantly
improvising new ways to make life meaningful for the chimpanzees, Jennifer
describes the sanctuary’s daily schedule as always also unfixed. Further, these
improvisational practices and conditions point to how the relationships between
the wards and their caregivers are continuously made and remade. The language
of individual personhood, in our interviews, is not expressed in the kinds of
terms established in the legal tradition outlined in Wise’s work. Instead, it
reframes individuality in terms of a particularized and improvisational ethical
engagement in the practices of everyday life and labor.
This improvisational and individualized treatment of the chimpanzees’
surplus time does not, of course, take place in an ideal space outside power
relations; in fact, these practices echo Michel Foucault’s description of the in-
sidious production of docile bodies through a “political anatomy of detail”;25
enrichment activities help smooth the functioning of the reformed carceral
space. From this humane practice of reforming captivity and articulating the
chimpanzee as individual, the sanctuary workers express a new mode of rela-
tionality, one that transcends the debates over species difference and likeness
in the public political discourse on the ape. Recognizing that chimpanzees
should not be thought of as like humans, Jennifer resists blaming the individual
chimpanzee for behaviors that contradict the efforts of the caregivers. Rather,
it is because she is a chimpanzee and captive that she is treated differently:
“Sometimes it can be irritating [accommodating the chimps’ moods]. It’s not
her fault and I understand that. Maybe I’m more patient with chimps than I am
with humans sometimes. Certainly no reprimanding, ever; she gets the choice
to act how she wants.” The difficult moments workers recounted—mainly
when chimps throw sand, dirt, and excrement at them—are contextualized
as part of the broader institutional conditions that placed the chimps in the
sanctuary in the first place. In fact, the idea that a broader institutional con-
text of injustice places the chimpanzees in the position of lifelong captivity
is central to distinguishing the individuality of the chimpanzee wards—that
difference that resists both a species as well as an anthropomorphic approach
to understanding the relationship between ward and caregiver and “recognizes
the importance of each individual animal while developing a more compre-
hensive analysis of her situation.”26 The chimpanzee wards are differentiated
from other, noncaptive chimpanzees and from their human caregivers; their
likeness to each is constantly held in tension.
What the workers express is the deeply entangled relationship between
human caregiver and chimpanzee ward encountering an imperfect space of
confinements and segregations, a space that overdetermines individual, day-to-
day relations. What Jacqueline Donovan and Carol Adams term a care tradition
in animal ethics is evident in the practices of the sanctuary and its workers,
where thinking about others beyond the species barrier means an obligation
to consider each instantiation of the “other” in a way that does not reduce
explanations to “species truths.” In other words, for the sanctuary caregivers,
the “otherness” of their wards lies not in explanations based on notions of
species difference but in the context of captivity that frames relations between
caregivers and wards. In fact, no day-to-day relationship between caregiver and
ward escapes the history of experimentation and differentiation that neces-
sitates captivity until death. This broader institutional and discursive history
thus does more than tell the story of the establishment of the sanctuary as a
social and political structure; it shapes the very practices and relations formed
in (and that form) the sanctuary’s space.
Awaiting Death: Neoliberalism and the Ethic of Care
One way some animal rights and conservation traditions understand their
projects is to problematize the killing of animals, whether in hunting, farm-
ing/ranching, science, and other activities. What might it mean, then, that
the project of the sanctuary welcomes the death of the chimpanzee? Haraway
makes a case for entanglement over rights, and even life, as the lens through
which to consider transspecies relations.27 Making a case to move away from
the abhorrence of death, Haraway suggests an attention to labor where “animals
are working subjects, not just worked objects,”28 where laboring conditions
produce a context of entanglement that locates ethical relations in death and
even acts of killing. In a moment when neoliberal politics calls on “certain
people . . . to fulfill the role of those who ‘care,’”29 chimpanzee sanctuary sug-
gests the messy politics of redress that belie confident assertions of universal
right or uncomplicated claims for life. Thus, in welcoming death, the sanctuary
highlights the uneven ways affect entangles subjects. As Sam says,
Our goal is to put ourselves out of business so we can’t just provide care; we want to be really
proactive about doing what we can to stop their [chimpanzee] use. Hopefully one day we’ll be
out of business. The sanctuary community has been doing this population modeling project.
. . . we’re projected to still have 3 chimps 25 years from now. That would be if we didn’t add
any more. So it’s still a long time before we put ourselves out of business. It’s bittersweet.
This desire to “put ourselves out of business” imagines “the just” as one of
awaiting death, where rights and even life are not sufficient grounds for con-
sidering what constitutes justice for chimpanzee wards.
In her ethnography of a Malaysian orangutan rehabilitation center, Rheana

Salazar Parreñas argues that “affective encounters of mutual vulnerability are
crucial for the center’s operation,” structuring the unequal relations of gender,
class, and nationality within an institution driven in part by the capital of
tourists who travel to experience the affective intensity of “custodial labor.”30
Likewise, the North American sanctuary we visited demonstrates a kind of
politics of entanglement that fails to resolve into universal claims to life, rights,
and freedom, highlighting the close relation of bodies that constitute care.
Kathy Rudy and other feminist animal studies scholars emphasize the “affective
connection constituted by the stories we tell about [animals], by our affection
for them and theirs for us, and by the various ways their characters inspire
us.”31 This is the form of connection through which the sanctuary sustains the
system of undervalued labor on which it depends.
Affect thus entangles subjects unevenly by allowing donors to care for chim-
panzee wards, even as they escape the structures of undervalued care labor. As
Blaine says, the sanctuary “purposefully concentrates on positive stories. That’s
one thing we sat down and said, ‘This is how we’re going to frame what we
do,’ because I think people are more attracted to that.” The idea of affection
between individuals—human and chimpanzee—mobilizes private donors, who
do not volunteer at the sanctuary, to pay for the outsourced labor of caring
for the state’s chimpanzees. “Purposefully concentrating on positive stories” of
sanctuary wards celebrating birthdays, enjoying new toys and puzzles, and other
activities indicating successful assimilation into a so-called better life moves
donors to care. Sanctuary workers cultivate affect in their donors, but this
affective tie between donor and sanctuary, routed through the individualized
stories of chimpanzee “successes,” cannot address the undervaluing of carework,
the reality of captivity, the needs of the many other species held captive in labs,
or the unequal distributions of sovereignty that have militarized conservation
efforts in range states, displacing countless indigenous communities. While
wealthy philanthropists express caring by donating money for the outsourced
retirement of state chimpanzees, caregivers perform the improvised and often
undignified labor of caring for chimpanzees with varied histories, behaviors,
and desires.
The structural conditions of neoliberal capital that stress austerity shape the
conditions of labor within the sanctuary. For instance, Jennifer says, “There
are definitely times where I just want to say ‘I work at [the convenience store]
7-11.’” Jennifer’s desire to imagine a different kind of labor is an acknowledg-
ment that the work of caregiving is difficult and undervalued; nonetheless
caregivers (even Jennifer) express enjoying their work and do not resent either
long workdays or the emotional burdens they carry after working hours. While
many feminist scholars have critiqued the way the idea of a care obligation hides
structural conditions that continue to undervalue certain kinds of feminized
domestic and care labor (and circumscribe them outside the formal definitions
of “work”),32 the sanctuary operates by mobilizing this care obligation among
the white and primarily female cohort of caretakers; as Danny says, “The staff
and volunteers are servants to the chimps.” In this sense, the sanctuary work-
ers find themselves caught between the ethical imperative to render care as
justice and the state imperative to reduce labor and housing costs for “surplus”
animals. The affective cannot address the structural conditions that undervalue
the carework on which the sanctuary depends.
Given the neoliberal context out of which sanctuaries emerge—of cost sav-
ings and austerity as the key reasons to retire chimpanzees from research—it is
interesting to note the questioning of these terms by sanctuary workers. Sam
admits that while developing a rapport with people who might hold views op-
positional to those of the sanctuary is important, “It’s harder to find common
ground [with researchers and labs]. . . . a lot of the conversations with those
types of people generally revolve around money and how we can provide care
cheaper than they can . . . [but] there’s just this really big disconnect.” What
Sam seems to acknowledge, then, is the way sanctuary coalesces around the
energies of differentiated actors and has never simply been about cost savings
even though it operates through neoliberal frameworks favoring privatiza-
tion. The dedication to their work and the fulfillment that caregivers receive
suggest that there is something that escapes the institutional conditions that
overdetermine the sanctuary. Yet the fact that invocations of a care obligation
devalue carework illustrates the ambivalence that underpins the sanctuary—an
ambivalence that the caregivers recognize in their underpaid work and in the
realities of lifelong captivity. For example, Blaine expresses skepticism about
some African sanctuaries that are attempting to rehabilitate and reintroduce
once-captive chimps into “the wild,” noting that “it’s confusing as to how that
would even work . . . there’s not a lot of land to go back to.” This reluctance
to see return-to-the-wild-as-freedom as a viable alternative, and the adoption
instead of a form of waiting for death in (and thus of ) captivity critiques the
idea that “the saving of nature . . . [is] an innocent endeavor, a noble exercise
for the good of all life.”33 Foregrounding the constructedness of the idea of
nature and “the wild,” particularly through “a morality tale about the impending
death of nature,” the sanctuary workers are wary of what Stephanie Rutherford
calls a one-world discourse, the possibility of integrating displaced captive spe-
cies into liberal notions of freedom. In accepting and even preferring death,
sanctuary workers work to resolve the paradoxes of captivity arising from deep
transnational histories of projects of the laboratory, wildlife conservation and
biodiversity, and animal legal rights.
Conclusion: Reframing Justice and Providing “the Good Life”
We understand the chimpanzee sanctuary as a social project defined by and

through the daily practices of sociality taking place between human caregiv-
ers, between chimpanzee wards, between caregivers and wards, and between
the sanctuary and its broader political community of volunteers, donors, and
government officials. As such, the practices that constitute the sanctuary reveal
the micro-practices of care that negotiate broader institutional conditions of
privatization, austerity, and individuation that often fall under the sign of the
neoliberal. If the collapsing of identitarian differences (in an ever-emergent field
of unending differences) also falls under the sign of the neoliberal—evident,
for example, in the 1990s rise of multicultural discourses critiqued for ren-
dering race an aesthetic rather than material matter existing alongside gender,
sexuality, citizenship, and so on34—the practices of the sanctuary provide an
opportunity to question these conceptual grounds. The extension of rights
and political-legal inclusion enable a conceptual terrain of ever-expanding
and equivalent differences in need of recognition, including the difference
of nonhuman animals. How do the practices of the sanctuary refigure the
conceptual grounds for thinking about difference, likeness, and entanglement?
Neoliberal discourses of difference, like multiculturalism, are troubling in-
sofar as they enable an analogic frame for understanding difference and power,
which brings resemblance or likeness to otherwise unlike subjects, even when
these subjects are interconnected. In his analysis of the logic of analogy in the
right to marriage campaigns, Chandan Reddy articulates the trouble with
analogy this way: “They regulate what we understand as the essential matter
and meaning of those subjects by their reduction to the ‘principle’ supposedly
shared between them. . . . In linking unlike subjects through a single principle
that principle must cut off anything that is irrelevant.”35 The focus on likeness
can initiate a field of equivalence that can truncate analysis of the uneven ways
power produces and entangles fields of difference. The practices of the sanctu-
ary, in questioning whether the captivity of their wards is like human captivity,
and in refusing to see the wards as like other chimpanzees, forgo the logic of
analogy in understanding what justice might mean for the wards. The sanctu-
ary’s practices instead highlight the limits of juridical humanization by calling
into question the premises of likeness through which chimpanzees are figured
not only as sources of bio-value but later as subjects of redress.36 Thus while
animalization is certainly one strategy used in varied forms of social violence
including racism and sexism, we are also interested in accounting for the dif-
ferentiated histories by which some exceptional species, like chimpanzees, are
privileged through institutionalized forms of labor undervaluation. In this case,
that means thinking through the emerging emphases on complexity, particular-
ity, and affect that accompany neoliberal state attempts at animal sanctuary.37
The labor of difference itself, of improvised relationality with chimpanzees,
is evident in sanctuary workers’ insistence on the uniqueness of their wards and
in their unending attempts to perform the ethical relation anew as caregivers
await the deaths of their wards. In our interviews, only Shannon spoke of her
work and relationship with chimpanzees as tied to a broader political sense of
justice for disenfranchised humans (“oppressed groups”). Though she noted
her general concern for human disenfranchisement, Shannon was also quick to
note that she did not consider her dedication toward chimpanzees as equivalent
to her general concern for human rights. The sense of justice conveyed by the
interviewees (none of whom used that term) was one of ethical interaction
rather than the extension of rights. This ethical form, which also includes
educational outreach and advocacy, is framed primarily in terms of providing
a limited form of the “good life” for the chimps—of improvising enrichment
in the limited architectures of surplus time in confinement, of doing what
they can, but knowing that they will fail to materialize any ideal of freedom.
As Jennifer says, “My job is to make it [life] as interesting and exciting for
them as possible. I can’t give them Africa, but I can give them the best I can.”
Notes
1. Bill Clinton, Clinton Statement on Chimpanzee Health Act, December 20, 2000, http://pin.primate.
wisc.edu/research/welfare/clinton.html.
2. The CHIMP Act designates Chimp Haven, a large outdoor sanctuary located in a forested area of
rural Louisiana, as the first national chimpanzee sanctuary. Founded in 2002, Chimp Haven is the
only sanctuary that receives federal funding in addition to private donations. On January 22, 2013,
the National Institutes of Medicine made its final recommendation to retire the majority of some
seven hundred federally owned chimpanzees, leaving only a small colony of approximately fifty ani-
mals in NIH custody. The remainder of “surplus chimpanzees” will be retired to Chimp Haven and
other accredited sanctuaries. In addition to Chimp Haven, the North American Primate Sanctuaries
Alliance consists of six other chimpanzee sanctuaries—including the one we visited for the present
study—that currently house chimpanzees formerly used as companion animals and in entertainment
or biomedical research. These sanctuaries operate through private donations. Anticipating the mass
“retirement” of federally owned apes to sanctuaries, NAPSA is developing care standards that would
allow its member institutions to join Chimp Haven in the official federal system.
3. Karla Armbruster, “Surely, God, These Are My Kin: The Dynamics of Identity and Advocacy in the
Life and Works of Dian Fossey,” in Animal Acts, ed. Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior (New York:
Routledge, 1997), 218.
4. Lori Gruen and Kari Weil, “Animal Others—Editor’s Introduction,” Hypatia 27.3 (2012): 477–87.
5. For purposes of anonymity to our informants, we choose to refrain from naming the sanctuary or its
location. Caregiver is the term preferred and used by the sanctuary’s paid workers.
6. The Indian government briefly banned primate exports to the United States in 1955, citing radiological
experiments and animal welfare concerns, and imposed new restrictions on the types of research that
could be conducted following the embargo. And in 1960 the decolonization of the Congo brought
about a dramatic end to a Belgian-run primate institution at which the National Institutes of Health
planned to develop a new program of chimpanzee importation.
7. Neel Ahuja, “Macaques and Biomedicine: Notes on Decolonization, Polio, and the Changing
Representations of Indian Rhesus in the United States, 1930–1960,” in The Macaque Connection:
Cooperation and Conflict between Humans and Macaques, ed. Sindhu Radhakrishna et al. (New York:
Springer, 2012), 71–91; Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of
Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), 121, 136–39.
8. Haraway, Primate Visions, 125–26.
9. Ibid., 197–202.
10. See, for example, Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New
York: Avon, 1975); Richard Ryder, Victims of Science: The Use of Animals in Research (London: David-
Poynter, 1975); Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (New York: Routledge, 1983); Mary Midgley,
Animals and Why They Matter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983). On the long history of
animal activism and links to other social movements, see Hilda Kean, Animal Rights: Political and
Social Change in Britain since 1800 (London: Reaktion: 1998); and Kathryn Shevelow, For the Love
of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement (New York: Henry Holt, 2008).
11. The rise of conservationism globally was intimately tied to new medical theories about the ecological
foundations of disease. Within the United States, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1962) notably connected concern for birds and other species threatened by chemical toxicity
to concerns over human health. These links between medical and ecological concern intensified with
the rise of organized ecological movements, especially in response to the chemical bombing campaigns
carried out by the United States during the Vietnam War. See Barry Weisberg, Ecocide in Indochina:
The Ecology of War (San Francisco: Canfield, 1970).
12. Debrah Blum, The Monkey Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 20–25.
13. Chimpanzees and rabbits were the only experimental animals found susceptible to HIV infection.
Following a series of studies published between 1984 and 1986, chimpanzees were understood to be
the most appropriate animal model for the disease given phylogenetic similarity to humans. See, for
example, Harvey J. Alter et al., “Transmission of HTLV-III Infection from Human Plasma to Chim-
panzees: An Animal Model for AIDS,” Science 226.4674 (1984): 549–52; Patricia N. Fultz et al.,
“Persistent Infection of Chimpanzees with Human T-Lymphotropic Virus Type III/Lymphadenopathy-
Associated Virus: A Potential Model for Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome,” Journal of Virology
58.1 (1986): 116–24.
14. Institute for Laboratory Animal Research, Chimpanzees in Research: Strategies for Ethical Care, Manage-
ment, and Use (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1997), 7, 49.
15. Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics (New York: Harper Collins, 1982); Richard W. Wrangham, W.
C. McGrew, Frans B. M. de Waal, and Paul Heltne, eds., Chimpanzee Cultures (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1996). See also W. C. McGrew, Chimpanzee Material Culture: Implications
for Human Evolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
16. Jonathan Marks, What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003).
17. Kofi Annan, foreword to The World Atlas of Great Apes and Their Conservation, ed. Julian Caldecott
and Lera Miles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
18. Institute for Laboratory Animal Research, Chimpanzees in Research, 38.
19. Although only Spain granted full personhood to apes, a number of other nonrange states including
New Zealand, the European Union, the UK, Japan, India, and the United States established de jure
or de facto bans on invasive experimentation, reversing long-standing state support for biomedical
researchers to appropriate all nonhuman species in the expansive quest to engineer cures for disease.
20. “The Great Ape Project, Declaration on Great Apes,” in The Great Ape Project: Equality beyond Hu-
manity, ed. Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri (London: Fourth Estate, 1993), 312.
21. Kinshasa Declaration, 2.
22. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2007).
23. Steven Wise, Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals (New York: Picador, 1999), 1–2.
24. This term is adapted from Michael Ralph, “‘Flirt[ing] with Death,’ but ‘Still Alive’: The Sexual Di-
mension of Surplus Time in Hip Hop Fantasy,” Cultural Dynamics 18.1 (2006): 61–88.
25. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979), 139.
26. Josephine Donovan and Carol Adams, introduction to The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics,
ed. Josephine Donovan and Carol Adams (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 3.
27. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
28. Ibid., 80.
29. Stephanie Rutherford, Governing the Wild: Ecotours of Power (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011), xvi.
30. Rheana Salazar Parreñas, “Producing Affect,” American Ethnologist 39.4 (2012): 673–87.
31. Kathy Rudy, Loving Animals: Toward a New Animal Advocacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2011), 18.
32. See, for example, Eileen Boris, Home to Work (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Eileen
Boris and Rachel Parreñas, eds., Intimate Labors (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010);
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Domestica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
33. Rutherford, Governing the Wild, xvii.
34. For this critique, see, for example, Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1996).
35. Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 190, 200.
36. “Juridical humanization” is borrowed from Samera Esmeir’s Juridical Humanity (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2012). Hers is one of many works, including Colin Dayan’s The Law Is a White Dog
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), that considers the ways, in Esmeir’s terms, “modern
law recovers the human” (Juridical Humanity, 2). For such scholars, the law operates as a gatekeep-
ing device, which defines the boundaries of humanity. As such, inclusion into legal personhood for
chimpanzees is always a constrained project, since it does not necessarily displace the law’s function
as a humanizing mechanism.
37. See the critique of intersectionality and the turn to complexity in feminist science studies, outlined
in Jasbir Puar, “‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess’: Intersectionality, Assemblage, and
Affective Politics,” 2011, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0811/puar/en/.
Animal Instincts: Race, Criminality, and the Reversal of the “Human” | 639
Animal Instincts: Race, Criminality, and

the Reversal of the “Human”
Megan H. Glick
If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
—Claude McCay, “If We Must Die”
I
n July 2007 Atlanta Falcons’ quarterback Michael Vick was indicted for
owning and operating a large interstate dog-fighting ring from a compound
in Surry County, Virginia. The story began three months earlier, after
Vick’s property was subject to a drug raid, and police found and removed a
significant amount of dogfighting equipment, including steroids, rape racks,
bats, chains, treadmills, and a large piece of bloody carpet. Sixty-six live but
badly scarred dogs were taken into custody by animal control officers, who also
found the bodies of eight dead dogs and the remains of countless others on
the property. For months after the evidence was uncovered and the allegations
were levied, Vick denied everything, claiming that he rarely visited the Surry
County property, and that it was family members and friends who had carried
out the illegal activities in his absence. By August, however, Vick was forced
into a confession, following the guilty pleas of three of his friends who became
codefendants in the case, and by December he was sentenced to twenty-three
months in federal prison with a release date of July 20, 2009. Simultaneously,
he was tried in state court for felony dogfighting and received a suspended
three-year sentence and a fine of $2,500.1
As the facts of the case unfolded in the media spotlight, Vick was publicly
attacked by both animal rights and animal welfare groups who expressed out-
rage at the alleged abuse perpetrated at the kennels. Of particular concern was
the postfight disposal of the dogs, by means such as electrocution, drowning,
and hanging, measures that were frequently referred to as forms of “execution”
by activists, the press, and even the language of Vick’s federal indictment.2
Although the use of this terminology across multiple venues remained unde-
fined and unremarked on, it nonetheless begs a question: if the very notion of

executability typically depends on a specific definition of life—one that has

political meaning—and if the realm of political meaning is reserved solely for
the province of the human, what does it mean that the Vick dogs became “ex-
ecutable”? What frameworks of logic—political, cultural, and otherwise—had
to exist for this to take place?
The unqualified use of this terminology by multiple parties, all with dif-
ferent public dispositions toward animals, must be understood as significant.
While animal rights activists have publicly protested the use of animals for
entertainment purposes, both animal rights and animal welfare organizations
have objected to the imposition of cruelty against animals.3 Conversely, the US
mass media do not appear to have a coherent or consistent discourse on the issue
of the treatment of nonhuman beings, though it would be fair to characterize
mainstream US media as not being oriented toward animal rights and welfare.
Likewise, the uneven establishment and application of animal-related laws in
the US court system do not speak to a consistent practice or a cross-species
egalitarian ethic. Rather, leniency on issues of animal abuse enabled by US
law allows for differential understandings of the limits of human dominance,
which in turn explains the quotidian nature of animal abuse. Yet, in the Vick
case, the use of the term execution in activist, media, and legal forums seems to
connote a transparency, that is, a shared use of language that requires neither
explanation nor qualification.
In a world of zero-sum resources and enfranchisements, the exaltation of
animals to a quasi-human status poses many philosophical and ethical ques-
tions. If dominant culture purports to believe in the primacy of human rights,
in the primacy of the food chain, so to speak, how can we understand the
displacement of this logic in the elevation of certain animals to an “executable”
status? This question accrues particular significance against the backdrop of
deeper histories of dehumanization, which have long mapped racial categories
onto the animal–human boundary. In the case at hand, Vick’s race was explic-
itly and implicitly called into question: both by his lawyer, who argued that
dogfighting was a culturally based predilection, and by the specter of imagined
black male violence that haunts US public culture.
This essay examines how the Vick dogs became defined, both by popular
cultural discourse and by legal rhetoric, as something more than animal. Tying
the dogs to Vick’s own positionality—a black man always already under the
scrutiny of the US legal system—I demonstrate that the Vick case is particularly
revealing of the often mystified links between categorizations of species, race,
and gender. To access these connections, this essay considers the role of death
in the fashioning of animal and human subjects by extending Achille Mbembe’s
theorization of “necropolitics” to the realm of the nonhuman, arguing that

“death-worlds” created by a culture of glorified violence against animals com-
promises the possibilities of justice for human and nonhuman subjects alike.
Animal–Human Death-Worlds
Contemporary political theory imagines the executable body as distinctly

human. Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler, for instance, both point to the
reliance of human life on conceptions of human death. Agamben argues that
the juridical order determines the human through the capacity for politically
meaningful death. Those individuals who become politically disenfranchised
consequently become slaughterable, but not murderable in the legal sense. He
calls this phenomenon “bare life,” in which the stripping of political meaning
reduces the subject to a purely biological state. Similarly, Butler asserts that
the “other” is made executable through a negation of political meaning, or the
negation of grievability. For Butler, the other is already imagined as “inhuman,
the already dead, that which is not precarious and cannot, therefore, be killed.”4
For Agamben and Butler, liminal states of existence—bare life and nongrievable
life, respectively—thus demonstrate that the perception of matterable life is
always determined in relation to practices of death and disenfranchisement.
Mbembe has articulated a slightly different formulation, noting how particu-
lar states of political existence are dependent on the nature of the distribution
of death. He argues that the separation of “those who must live [from] those
who must die” is the founding impulse of the dehumanizing processes of im-
perialism and racialization. Racial difference, Mbembe notes, has long been
critical to the political imagining of the category of the subhuman, and it is
this imagining of “inhumanity” that enables the “condition for the acceptability
of putting to death.”5 Unlike Agamben and Butler, both of whom deploy the
idiom of a dominant sovereign in the configuration of death, Mbembe speaks
to a broader instrumentality of death in the age of “global mobility,” where
“the exercise of the right to kill [is] no longer the sole monopoly of states”
but is instead carried out in a “patchwork” manner by different groups and
individuals with competing interests, in the “spaces of everyday life.”6 Mbembe
suggests that the distribution of the right to kill has created a “terror forma-
tion” that he calls “necropolitics,” in which the parsing and repeated iteration
of in/disposable lives becomes the justification for death. For Mbembe, it is
life under the constant sign of death that creates what he calls “death-worlds,”
or “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are
subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”7
In each of these works, the figure of the sub-/non-/liminally human is

deployed metaphorically as the end point of processes of dehumanization. At
times, this figure is imagined as an animal or, at the very least, becomes animal-
ized. In Mbembe’s argument, the symbol of the animal serves a particularly
important function. First, Mbembe borrows G. W. F. Hegel’s and Georges
Bataille’s related configurations of death as a return to the animal, or “natu-
ral,” side of oneself, asserting that the process of becoming a subject is both a
matter of separating oneself from animal existence and of facing the threat of
death.8 For Mbembe, the figure of the animal is also mirrored in the figure of
the “savage” created through discourses of imperialism and race. This parallel
between the literal nonhuman (the animal) and the figurative nonhuman (the
“savage”) is a familiar move in discourses of dehumanization, where progress,
or “becoming,” and the nature–culture divide, becomes the basis on which
all things human rely.
In Mbembe’s estimation—and indeed in many contemporary theorizations
about the state of political existence—the figure of the nonhuman hovers
over processes of dehumanization. Yet it is important to ask why this figure
is not usually addressed in conversations about human rights. Admittedly,
the conceptual refusal to equate dehumanized persons with the nonhuman
can be attributed to the fact that the dehumanized subject, while frequently
politically disenfranchised, does not, in the literal sense, become animal. Yet
metaphorically, disenfranchisement is likened to the state of the animal, to a
life without rights, without self-control, without self-possession. Moreover,
the language of the animal can often be seen in discourses of dehumanization,
where lowly creatures, such as cockroaches, lice, rats, and other vermin, are
deployed imaginatively to justify forms of violence unfit for particular under-
standings of humanity. Even still, the human as a category is frequently taken
for granted, though it remains deeply tied to political and juridical notions of
enfranchisement and belonging. To imagine a state of literally becoming-animal
is to imagine a state of dehumanization so profound as to be too dehumanizing
to talk about. Discourse says, “So and so likens such and such a population to
rats.” It does not say, “such and such a population is, or has become, a pack of
rats,” no matter how inhumanely or abusively they have been treated.9
Yet if the language of becoming-animal is a kind of curious absent center
in discourses of dehumanization, the language of becoming-human in the
case of certain animals is even less well thought out. The slippery slope of
dehumanization—from the human to the liminally human to the nonhu-
man—should indicate that movement in the opposite direction is possible as
well. While scholars have just begun to identify how the perceived treatment
of animals can be a marker of difference, the processes of humanization—

cultural, political, and social forms of anthropomorphization in the case of
certain species—have yet to be analyzed as a critical component of discourses of
humanity and dehumanization. For instance, Glen Elder, Jennifer Wolch, and
Jody Emel demonstrate how the treatment of animals by postcolonial subjects
in the United States has been used as a marker of racial and national differ-
ence.10 In cases where such subjects have killed animals “inappropriately,” or,
in ways unimaginable by modern US conventions, forms of legal surveillance
and punishment have become justifiable. Hunting in places and times where
it is not sanctioned, sacrificing for non-Judeo-Christian religious purposes, or
consuming animals “unfit” for human appetites are used to call into question
the civility of individuals, as well as entire peoples and cultures.
In recent years, work in the field of animal studies has begun to address the
issue of competing human and nonhuman interests. For many scholars, such
as Claire Jean Kim, Julie Guthman, Cathryn Bailey, and Amie Breeze Harper,
race is a salient, if often underinterrogated, site of speciation and speciesism.
Each author identifies a universalizing impulse in animal rights and animal
welfare discourse, which seems to stake out a claim for a singular, cross-cultural
ethical stance on animals. As Kim points out, this demand involves an “implicit
suggestion . . . that it is possible to bracket race in public discourse, to carve out
a race-free discursive space” in which to imagine the question of the animal.11
In effect, this presumption has the capacity to recapitulate discourses of race
and racism, in which the problematic model of color-blindness becomes the
overarching narrative. While criticizing the dismissal of race as a nonfactor in
animal treatment, Kim is equally unconvinced that racial or cultural heritage
can be used as appropriate rationales for the differential treatment of animals.
She notes that moral dialogue on the issue of animal abuse should not be
silenced for fear of indictments of racism or cultural imperialism, as has been
the case in critiques of the live animal markets in San Francisco’s Chinatown
community.
Greta Gaard makes a similar argument while addressing the 1990s contro-
versy over the Makah tribe’s appeal to continue practicing the cultural ritual
of whaling in Seattle, where whaling for any purpose had been outlawed. Fol-
lowing public discourse, Gaard notes, it would seem that the Makah’s desire
to continue a cultural tradition stood against the interests of animal rights
activists who argued on behalf of the whales’ right to life. In this instance,
activists’ opposition to Makah whaling practices became tantamount to the
rejection of Makah culture and identity, and it was precisely this type of
cultural imperialism that enabled certain Makah leaders to oppose the basis
of the local law. Yet, as Gaard avers, to assume that the practice of whaling is
somehow endemic to Makah culture is to miss the complexity of beliefs and
interests within the culture itself. Not all Makah desire to whale; not all Makah
believe that whaling is culturally necessary; and many Makah are critical of
the practice of whaling.12
The easy slippage between understanding a practice as having complex
cultural meaning versus understanding a practice as endemic, or essential to,
a particular culture is at stake in many of the apparent conflicts identified be-
tween racial and ethnic minorities and animal rights and welfare activists. This
slippage is responsible for ideological clashes between groups and individuals
who find various forms of animal rights and welfare discourse deeply imperialist
in nature. Identifying how preexisting racism and xenophobia toward Chinese
immigrants were mobilized in anti–live animal market discourse, Kim asks an
eerie question: “Are anticruelty campaigns illegitimate if they benefit from, take
advantage of, or even deepen majority prejudices toward immigrant minorities?
What if being racist is what enhances the ‘winnability’ of a campaign?”13 Such
an inquiry takes on special meaning in the current moment, when the idea of
postracialism has captured the public imagination. To be sure, the critique of
animal practices has become one site of the articulation of suppressed racial
ideologies in an era where discourses of political correctness, multiculturalism,
and a “black” presidency dominate mainstream understandings of the dis/
location of race in the United States.
Considering the place of race and culture in academic evaluations of animal
ethics, Maneesha Deckha notes that a similar blind spot often occurs. For
Deckha, while gender has appeared as a frequent and important intersectional
category in academic interrogations of humanism and anthropocentrism, even
becoming a hallmark of posthumanist theory that pulls deeply from feminist
philosophies, issues of race and culture remain at the margins. Drawing on
theories of intersectionality, Deckha argues that this blind spot does not allow
for a clear reflection on issues of cross-cultural and cross-species alignment.14
Thus while the relationship between race and animality is well imagined in
considerations of practices of dehumanization, it remains underexamined as
a key component in much of animal rights discourse.
Returning to Mbembe, who suggests that the figure of the inhuman/animal/
savage is critical to imaginings of the “living dead,” and who notes how pro-
cesses of racialization depend on subjugation under the sign of death, I want
to think about how racialization and speciation both depend on particular
conceptualizations of matterable life. Because animal death never properly en-
ters the realm of murder in the eyes of the law, it is always somehow allowable,
normalizable, and widely distributable. For this reason, animal death always
already belongs to the realm of the necropolitical. This is significant because it
is not the death itself but the management of that death that becomes the issue
at stake. Even certain advocates of animal rights and welfare, such as PETA
(People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and the Humane Society, do not
allege that animals should never be killed. Rather, it is suggested that animals
be killed “humanely,” in proper contexts and for proper reasons. Those spe-
cies or individual animals that do meet these standards, and/or are killed for
reasons not widely supported, become victims of “abuse,” while others suffer
similar fates and are imagined to be treated humanely.
Animal studies scholarship offers important insights into the connections
between the issue of animal death and questions of routinization and banaliza-
tion. The British academic collection known as the Animal Studies Group, for
instance, proposes that killing is the most common act that characterizes the
animal–human relationship. From culture (food, fashion, and entertainment),
to science (biomedical research and experimentation), to religion (sacrificial
rituals), to family life (the frequent euthanization of beloved pets), the slaughter
of animals is one of the most common features of modern life. In his work
on factory farming, the historian Richard Bulliet has argued similarly that the
current moment can be characterized by a “postdomestic” animal–human rela-
tion, in which violence against animals is both common and invisible. Bulliet
points to the mystification of meat production as a sign of postdomesticity, in
which violence against animals is hidden from the consumer eye while becom-
ing measurably greater through machinations of industrial farming.15 Charles
Patterson’s controversial work Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and
the Holocaust, pushes this argument farther by illuminating how the industrial
slaughter of animals paved the way for the industrial slaughter of minorities
in Nazi Germany.16 In this formulation, one mode of violence conditions the
subject to accept another, creating a circular loop of logic: “Population x is
subhuman and so is deserving of imprisonment and death; population x is
imprisoned and slaughtered in a manner similar to animals; thus the members
of population x are animals.”
Across these three works, animal death emerges as both quotidian and ex-
treme. It is the very backing of modern society, and it is a holocaust. It occurs
every second of every day, providing large profits and sustaining entire indus-
tries, yet we hide from its ugly glare. It is everywhere, and it is nowhere. This
dynamic must be understood as the very definition of necropolitical regimes of
terror, in which the spaces and moments of “everyday life” are marked by the
sign of constant death. While Mbembe’s theorization addresses the dynamics of
dehumanization vis-à-vis the violence of continual warfare, in which “new and

unique forms of social existence” are created out of a politics of subjugation,
this essay imagines violence against animals as a formative impulse in modern
US “death-worlds.” These death-worlds are created not only through literal
acts of violence against animals but also through the animalization of certain
human populations. Turning to the debate over Michael Vick’s involvement
with the torture and death of the Bad Newz Kennel dogs, I want to consider the
role of the relationship between race and animality in the narrative of the case.
The Michael Vick Project
In contemporary US culture, dogs exist in peculiar relation to practices of

violence and death. As Clare Palmer points out, dogs are unique subjects in
the modern psyche: no other species is loved and killed with equal vigor as
dogs—except for other humans. Palmer uses the example of shelter euthaniza-
tions to point out the common use of the term humane to temper the reality of
killing healthy animals.17 What little statistics exist indicate that between 6 and
10 million dogs and 7 and 10 million cats are “humanely” killed each year in
shelters, numbers that reflect between one-tenth and one-quarter of the entire
domestic dog and cat populations.18 If these numbers seem extreme, their logic
is profoundly quotidian: they are, to be sure, lives not worth living. And in this
way there is an odd symmetry between representations of shelter animals and
life in the ghetto, where survival seems just as likely as death, and familiarity
with the randomness of one’s lot replicates a form of banal necropolitics.
Ambiguous attitudes toward dogs extend back in time. In particular, dog-
fighting has not always been understood as abusive and has not always been
illegal. Dating back centuries in the United States, dogfighting was not fully
outlawed in all US states until 1976. Indeed, it was only a century earlier that
the United Kennel Club and the American Kennel Club both sanctioned
and sponsored dogfighting as a legitimate enterprise, complete with rules
and regulations. Moreover, it is really only within the last fifteen years that
dogfighting has begun to be tried under the law with any sort of regularity.19
And in many ways, it has not been the law but certain moral codes that have
served as the primary deterrent.
Significantly, at the very moment that dogfighting reached peak popularity
in the United States—the mid- to late nineteenth century—so too did the na-
tion witness the rise of the first significant animal rights movement, propelled
by the founding of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals in 1866. That same year, New York became the first state to outlaw
dogfighting. The efforts of the ASPCA and the movement to illegalize dog-
fights grew partly out of a disagreement about whether the sport constituted
“cruelty against animals”—a new philosophical concept that emerged from
post-Enlightenment ideologies about the correlation between the meanings
of civilization, humanitarianism, and proper relations with the animal world.
In this context, the movement toward compassion was less about concern for
the welfare of the animal in question than about one’s own modern sensibili-
ties, which included, of course, control over one’s baser instincts and violent
tendencies toward defenseless creatures.20
The same stigma maintains in the current moment, where cruelty toward
animals is understood to represent a proclivity for violence that is constructed
as either based in the body, as a form of psychopathology, or based in culture
as a form of ethnic, racial, or class difference, a difference partly based on a
sense and critique of antimodernism. Animal abuse, like all violent crime,
thus typically casts two possible perpetrators—the insane or the culturally
othered—those whose systems of meaning and value are already understood
to be at odds with dominant ideologies.21
These gradations—of moral judgment, and of life itself—are at the heart of
what makes the issues of animal abuse and animal rights so difficult to navigate.
Time and again, we return to specters of othered humanity—the human who
refuses to act humane, and the animal elevated to a level of anthropomorphism.
This nexus is especially significant at the site of the dog, humanity’s foremost
companion species, or “significant other” as Donna Haraway has called it.22
This otherness is mirrored in the configuration of the law, which recognizes
dogs as both property and as partial persons, through punitive legislation that
demands reparation in the name of the owner and in the name of the dog’s
sentience. Movements to tighten legislation on animal abuse are, however, rarely
based on legal principles; instead, they rely heavily on the cultural meaning
of the animal at stake.
Culturally speaking, dogs must be docile subjects—pets that are neither
animal aggressive nor human aggressive, and their use value must lie in their
capacity to fulfill the demands of companionship (i.e., Cesar Millan’s “pack”).
When dogs are used for other purposes—as food, religious sacrifice, or sport—
they cease to become dogs, and our discomfort with their possible suffering
and pain has as much to do with our conceptualization of humanity as it does
with their right to a comfortable life. Used in these ways, dogs become a site for
debate about the nature of individual liberties and freedoms, just as dogs trained
for attack purposes push the boundaries of allowable proprietary claims: bite
the wrong hand and they are imagined to be beyond redemption—disposable,
euthanizable—casting shadows on their owner’s ability to be a “good citizen.”

Yet what does it mean that so often these battles over the roles and boundaries
of animality—let alone dogness—are marked also by the problem of race? Like
so many other pathologies, animal abuse is continually represented as somehow
endemic to communities of color, while aberrant and psychopathological in
the case of whites. History is rife with high-profile, white criminals known for
their serial abuse of animals—everyone from Jeffrey Dahmer, who, prior to
his seventeen-person killing spree, was known locally for impaling the heads
of dogs, cats, and frogs on his front lawn—to Lynndie England of the Abu
Ghraib scandal, whose prior job at a poultry plant caused many to speculate
about her sanity and desensitization toward violence (to say nothing, of course,
about her use of dogs and dog leashes in the torture and abuse of prisoners).23
In these cases, the individuals charged with animal abuse are understood to
be just that: individual, solitary cases, whose shockingly low regard for human
life always already far outstrips and overshadows any past nonhuman abuses.
Conversely, in cases dealing with people of color, differential “cultural norms”
have become the backdrop against which animal mistreatment is understood.
Vick’s particular story was further complicated by his massive fame. As a
former number one draft pick, often called the “best running quarterback
of all time,” he was more than a football player, more than a (black) athlete.
He was a hero, a figurehead, the face of multimillion-dollar endorsement
campaigns with some of the biggest corporations in the world. Yet even prior
to his trouble with the Bad Newz Kennels, Vick was often a subject of media
controversy for mouthing off and misbehaving in public forums. Critics fre-
quently called him “immature” and wondered if a “Virginia Tech sophomore
from the projects” had the capacity, both mentally and physically, to enter the
arena of professional sports.24
Perhaps ironically, perhaps expectedly, once the dogfighting scandal hit the
press, the narrative of Vick as a hot-headed kid from the wrong side of the
tracks became his redeeming feature. His treatment of the dogs was quickly
attached to his upbringing within a violent, inner-city housing project, where
animal fighting is understood to be prevalent (though no significant research
exists comparing animal fighting practices according to socioeconomic or
geopolitical status) and where, presumably, desensitization to violence is more
common. Popular narratives about the Vick case thus appealed to the familiar
notion that blackness is linked to some inherent sense of pathology—that all
kids from such environments are somehow destined to string up dogs, drown
them, strangle them with their bare hands, smash their heads into concrete
floors, and electrocute them to death.
These connections were further reinforced and reenacted in Vick’s ten-part

reality television show produced for BET in 2010, titled The Michael Vick
Project, which one critic tellingly called Vick’s “attempt to humanize himself,”
and which played under the byline, “I’m Michael Vick: my fall from grace was
tragic, but it was all my fault, and I’m on a mission to get it all back. Not the
money and the fame, but to restore my family’s good name. This is the Michael
Vick Project.”25 As suggested by the title, the show attempts to capture Vick’s
rehabilitation and reparations, while the viewer is brought through familiar
shots of a poor black childhood marked by too much idle time and an early
exposure to “adult” activities.
In The Michael Vick Project, much like the case itself, Vick’s background came
to stand in as the subject culpable for the crime—his was a case of temporary
insanity by way of blackness. In response to those perplexed by why such a suc-
cessful athlete would fall back on old and ugly habits, he reflected, “Yeah, you
got the family dog and white picket fence, and you just think that’s all there is.
But some of us had to grow up in poverty-stricken urban neighborhoods, and
we just had to adapt to our environment.” When asked if he felt that “white
people simply don’t understand that aspect of black culture,” Vick affirmed,
“I think that’s accurate.”26 “I hate to use our culture as an excuse, but that’s
what it is . . . and that’s what happened and that’s the way I thought about it
growing up, and this is something we do. I love animals. I love dogs. I love
birds. I love all types of animals. But this was just the way we was brought up
. . . no one ever told me it was the wrong thing to do.”27
Though the dominant narrative of The Michael Vick Project encourages the
viewer to travel with Vick on his road to recovery, the brutality of the crimes
committed and the strangeness of Vick himself are hard to miss. On location
at the Bad Newz Kennels, we learn that the kennels are part of a large com-
pound Vick commissioned almost ten years earlier, complete with a mansion
for himself and his guests. The entire property was financed for collecting,
holding, and fighting dogs. Rows of empty, dirty chain-link cages are shot
without irony, considering neither the fates of their earlier inhabitants nor
the fate of Vick himself, who between 2007 and 2009 lived in a concrete cell
of his own. As he walks through the halls of the now-deserted residence, he
reminisces about good times that were had there and the privacy it afforded his
family and friends. The bloodied carpet that once occupied a central location
has been removed for the screening, and, like the empty dog cages, the house
reverberates with ghosts past.
Similar to the opening line of the series, which mechanically replays the
same phrase over and over again—“my fall from grace was tragic, but it was
all my fault”—Vick uses the language of grievance and restitution to tell the
story of the Bad Newz Kennels, robotically repeating his wrongness while of-
ten providing glimpses of the fact that his own understanding of wrongdoing
is far from what the audience expects. In a more recent interview with GQ,
Vick lamented that he was legally barred from having dogs until the end of
his probation period in June 2012, as he “always had a family pet, always had
a dog growing up. It was almost equivalent to the prison sentence, having
something taken away from me for three years. . . . I miss my companions.”28
In his own mind, then, these two pastimes—pet keeping and dogfighting—are
not diametrically opposed but instead two sides of the same coin, a singular
token of his passion for all things canine.
This statement and others like it provide a bizarre wrinkle in the narrative
of Vick’s defense, which blamed his treatment of the Bad Newz dogs on the
very childhood that he now admits offered a love of family pets. Though these
two pieces of the puzzle hardly fit together, the public has cared more about
Vick’s process of atonement, and promise of personal transformation, than the
possibility that something is amiss with Vick himself. Throughout the trial, his
lawyers coached him to admit his “poor judgment,” to demonstrate that he
was “willing to deal with the consequences and accept responsibility for [his]
actions,” and to bow his head in a gesture of remorse. Strangely enough, the
dance around Vick’s restitution was conducted by both sides of the law: upon
completion of the trial, US Attorney Chuck Rosenberg smugly remarked, “this
was an efficient, professional, and thorough investigation that well exposed a
seamy side of our society. . . . I trust Mr. Vick learned important lessons and
that his admission of guilt will speed his rehabilitation.”29 But what were these
lessons, and what exactly did Vick admit? Perhaps much like the dogs he raised,
fought, and killed, he learned to bare his teeth only when told.
Second Chances
The desire for Vick’s redemption was articulated most strongly by many African
American commentators. In the months after Vick’s indictment, a prolifera-
tion of images of African American leaders and groups showing solidarity for
a man whom they felt was unjustly accused and even more unjustly punished
appeared across news media outlets. The NPR political analyst Juan Williams
and other critics argued that racial differences in opinions on the Vick case
could be explained by anxiety within the black community about the politics
of “second chances.” “There is a very real issue here, of people with felony
convictions (and their families) who want employers to look past their criminal
record. . . . Mr. Vick is a stand-in for these people, especially the disproportion-
ate share of black men caught in this predicament.”30 This concern did speak
to broader sentiments, as many African American commentators focused on
what they perceived to be an overzealous punishment for the crime at hand
(both in terms of Vick’s sentencing and in terms of his treatment in the press)
and did not generally argue in favor of exoneration based on Vick’s upbringing.
In large part, African American leaders who chose to support Vick defended
their position not by focusing on his actions but by focusing on what he did
not do, that is, kill or harm another human being. In this formulation, frequent
comparisons were made between canine and human death.
NAACP Atlanta chapter president R. L. White, for example, released a
statement shortly after Vick’s arrest, lambasting the public and the media for
their apparent racism toward Vick. “In some instances,” White concluded,
“I believe Michael Vick has received more negative press than if he would’ve
killed a human being. . . . the way he is being persecuted, he wouldn’t have
been persecuted that much had he killed somebody.” White added that he
could not “understand the uproar over dogfighting, when hunting deer and
other animals is perfectly acceptable”—sports that are of course predominantly
associated with white communities.31
Yet even if we accept White’s premise that we do have competing and
often contradictory codes about the proper treatment of animals—some we
hunt, some we eat, some we exterminate, and others we buy little pink coats
for—why would he suggest that Vick’s treatment by the press would have been
ameliorated had he murdered another person instead? Likely because White
was imagining the person that Vick would have statistically been in a position
to kill—another African American—whose life, when measured against that
of a dog, may, in the public’s mind, matter less.
As the author Patrice Evans put it,
When Americans work themselves into a furor over a species that has yet to hold public
office, then change the channel when more trenchant social matters come up, like say, the
unjust incarceration rate for young black men, you can’t help wondering who’s really winning
in America: you or the Airedale? . . . it seems unjust when the rewards of class and privilege
become an entitlement for a whole other species. Did we win the battle for Obama only to
lose the war for the dogs?32
Senior writer for ESPN David Fleming remarked similarly,
For some African-Americans, a suspicion that somewhere along the way this increased
devotion to animals directly correlates to a decreased respect for humans has hardened into
excusing Vick of wrongdoing altogether. There are cries of racism when perhaps speciesism
may be more accurate. At the same time, animal rights activists seem to be indulging their
misanthropic side. Pets are easy to love—humans not so much.33
These conceptualizations—of the politics of unequal life, both human and

animal—seemed irrelevant for animal rights groups such as PETA that, with
striking disregard for any racial sensibility, called Vick a monster, followed
him to and from the courthouse, and, later, attempted to tank his reentry
into the NFL.34
Since the 2005 inauguration of the traveling exhibit originally called “Are
Animals the New Slaves?” and now called “Glass Walls,” currently installed on
the National Mall in Washington, DC, PETA has come under fire from Afri-
can American critics. Drawing parities between images of African Americans
under slavery and domesticated, shackled animals, the exhibit has appeared
contemporaneously with a series of ads placed on billboards and in magazines
around the country, featuring people staged as abused animals. All of this
caused considerable outrage, with local residents protesting the images and
the NAACP releasing a formal statement about the misappropriation of black
bodies, black suffering, and even black political discourse, as the exhibit’s first
panel quotes Martin Luther King Jr.: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice
everywhere.”35
Yet in the Vick case, as in other instances involving high-risk, violently
prone animals, PETA, as well as the Humane Society of the United States,
recommended the dogs’ euthanization. Peculiarly then, PETA’s advocacy to put
the Vick dogs down raised them out of the realm of animality. They were not
innocent enough to be the “new slaves” represented in PETA’s campaigns; they
were not the nameless, voiceless, animals for whom PETA spoke. Rather, they
were vicious pit bulls, each with a name, each with a story, and each perceived
to be bred into a life of miserable but inevitable violence. Their desperation
appeared to mirror Vick’s, as did their eventual rehabilitation by Best Friends
Animal Sanctuary in Kanab, Utah, a rescue organization that took in the Vick
dogs when no one else would. In 2008 the saga of the dogs’ transformation
at the sanctuary was broadcast as a special two-hour episode of DogTown
on the National Geographic channel (also home to Millan’s Dog Whisperer),
titled “Saving the Michael Vick Dogs.”36 Much like The Michael Vick Project,
DogTown tells the story of rehabilitation and reentry; both offer salvation
narratives in which violent offenders, be they human or animal, are cured of
their baser instincts and are given “second chances.”37 Like the discourse of
executability that seemed to travel across political lines, Vick and the dogs he
abused became placed within parallel narratives of redemption. As one Best

Friends volunteer who worked with the dogs noted, “My fear [was] [n]ot that
I’d be attacked by a pitbull. But that I’d discover these dogs were too damaged
to ever have a chance at a decent life.”38
The resurrection of Vick’s dogs occurred at the same time that Vick served
his prison sentence, a fact that provided an important backdrop for the nar-
rative of his atonement. Vick became one of the pack—he was understood as
“damaged” in his own way, and concern over his “chance at a decent life” was
articulated by his warm reentry into the NFL (not to mention his speaking
engagements with the Humane Society). Narratives of criminality and animal-
ity that dictate the terms of black masculinity in US culture thus provided
the context for both Vick’s “fall” and his comeback. His time in prison served
a critical and instructional purpose. In a society where incarceration rates for
black men are cited as ranging between 17 percent and 33 percent,39 the legal
regulation of Vick, because of his fame, not in spite of it, articulates the banal-
ity of modern carceral culture.
As Lisa Marie Cacho argues, ubiquitous patterns of criminalization deter-
mine and define the lives of persons of color in the United States, whose very
status under the law is consigned to literal and figurative states of death. She
suggests that the subject positions enabled by the law are often misinterpreted
as “outcomes” of law abidement or violation, rather than “effects of the law”
itself:40
people who occupy legally vulnerable and criminalized statuses are not just excluded from
justice; criminalized populations . . . form the foundation of the US legal system . . . [which]
is to say that law is dependent upon the permanence of certain groups’ criminalization.41
In this way, Vick’s incarceration was both necessary and inevitable, and his
dogs became a means to an end. In a moment that has been popularly char-
acterized as “postracial,” these eventualities must be understood as critical to
the reinstantiation of difference.
The assertion of a postracial stance in the Vick case could be seen across
mainstream media news outlets, many of which suggested that Vick’s incredible
wealth raised him above the full reach of the law and out of the category of
proper “blackness.” After all, who, if not the best-paid quarterback in the NFL,
could afford proper legal counsel? Debates over the boundaries of blackness in
the Vick case came to a head in August 2011, when ESPN raised eyebrows after
pairing an article by the African American political commentator Touré—au-
thor of the recent Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?—with a whitewashed image
of Vick under the title “What If Michael Vick Were White?” Aghast, Touré
promptly appeared on numerous news outlets, railing against ESPN’s coupling
of his story with the “sensationalist thought experiment of race-switching.”42
Touré argued that we are far from understanding or fully addressing the racial
implications of Vick’s case (though he also was among the many who cited
Vick’s upbringing as a critical link in the story).
Beyond the support Vick received from African American critics based on
ideas of racial solidarity, and beyond discourses of “cultural difference” that
were expressed across color lines and in various contexts, racial difference was
also articulated through a third, and more disturbing venue: the language of
dark comedic revenge. First, in the form of a canine “payback” initially sug-
gested with humor in popular commentary, and later, in the development of a
Michael Vick “chew toy” still on sale today—the likes of which seemed to both
prefigure the manufacture of the Obama monkey dolls in the 2008 presiden-
tial race and hark back centuries to what Bill Brown has called the “relentless
objectification” of blackness, initiated by the implosion of the “person/thing
binary” under slavery and then symbolized in the development of black col-
lectibles.43 This type of racial objectification sheds light on the ease with which
death threats were levied at Vick after his release from prison; if anything, his
status as executable seemed curiously less clear than that of his dogs.
None of these considerations, however, plainly deals with the violence at the
heart of Vick’s actions. Whether or not we believe that terms such as torture and
execution should be reserved only for the province of the human species, and
even though we must acknowledge that black men are severely and dispropor-
tionately victimized by the US justice system, Vick’s actions remain alarming.
Compared with the laundry list of slow, painful torture sessions and deaths
Vick inflicted on dozens of dogs, the practice of dogfighting itself—which is,
after all, the main criminal act at the center of all the disputes—begins to seem
like child’s play. The level of sadism exhibited in the bodies of the beleaguered
dogs that survived, and the remains of those that did not, does not suggest the
actions of a well man.
Among other forms of evidence, investigators uncovered shallow graves
with disemembered body parts, rape stands and breaking sticks, a bloodstained
fighting area, and dozens of live dogs, injured and underfed, chained to car
axles just out of each other’s reach. Vick and his friends were discovered to
have hung several dogs “by placing a nylon cord over a 2 x 4 that was nailed
to two trees.” Others were drowned by having their heads held in a five-gallon
bucket of water. One was killed by “slamming it to the ground. . . breaking
the dog’s back and neck.” Another was electrocuted after being wet down
with water. These acts, as well as the death toll raised by the Bad Newz Ken-
nel dogs themselves, were allegedly seen as humorous, “funny,” by Vick and
his friends. Throughout all the allegations and fact-finding, Vick admitted to
killing only two dogs, and he did so in a straightforward manner: “I carried a
dog over to [codefendant] Quanis Phillips, who tied a rope around its neck.
I dropped the dog.”44
In recent years, legal statutes on animal abuse have become more stringent
because of the emergence of psychological studies that have linked behavioral
tendencies toward animal abuse with spousal and child abuse, large-scale acts
of public violence (such as serial killing), and forms of socio- and psycho-
pathology—much like the Dahmer case. In this line of thinking, the abused
animal is but a stop along the way—an early sign of a future criminal act against
the only victims perceived to really “matter” —people. Washington senator
Maria Cantwell, coauthor of the Animal Fighting Prohibition Enforcement
Act (AFPEA) passed in 2007, partly as a result of the uproar over the Vick case,
remarked along similar lines that “staged animal fights spawn not just malicious
animal cruelty, but also drug trafficking, illegal gambling, public corruption,
and even murder.”45 Cantwell’s language presents a familiar equation that links
animal abuse to other forms of illegal and unethical behavior. (Was this another
kind of “second chance”? First strike, beat a dog, second strike, you’re out?)
Yet how can we understand the use of the term execution as it was mobilized
in the Vick case, alongside Cantwell’s use of the phrase “even murder” as an
outcome, rather than a replication of, animal abuse? Ultimately, what remains
unclear is whether animal abuse for animal abuse’s sake is ever really the issue.
Vick’s own twenty-three-month stay in prison was enabled by a broader
conviction—conspiracy to participate in illegal interstate commerce (largely,
gambling and gambling-related activities)—though this reality was ignored
because of the public’s aversion to dogfighting. Ask most people on the street
about Vick’s charges, and the reply would likely have to do with animal abuse.
This kind of bait and switch is characteristic of public perceptions about
animal law and animal cruelty. Punitive measures against animal abusers are
rarely as stringent as might be imagined through the lens of cultural distaste
for animal cruelty. Because of this, animal law is applied unevenly and without
consistent rationales.46
Nonetheless, what becomes interesting about this troubling logic is the fact
that it did provide the framework for Vick to have been punished much more
heavily: precedents had been made, and surely other cases would follow. For
this reason, it is important to think beyond the framework of hypersurveil-
lance that we typically might apply to a case about the criminalization of a
black man in the public eye. Instead of imagining his trial, sentence, and the
sensationalism that surrounded both as being unduly punitive, I think that
we may have to consider the opposite—that rather than being sentenced too
harshly, he may have been sentenced too leniently47—and not because of the
impressive legal defense his fame and fortune procured for him but, in the end,
because of his race. This lenience is indicative of discourses of the banality of
criminality, of the banality of monstrosity, that shape popular imaginings of
black masculinity.
Prevailing scholarship on the prison-industrial complex demonstrates how
the increased policing of “minor,” nonviolent crimes in the last twenty-five
years has provided the rationale and justification for the staggering rise in in-
carceration rates, and how this policing has disproportionately affected people
of color. In this light, animal abuse becomes a curious case. Because it occupies
a liminal place in the law, yet is both violent in nature and understood as a
“gateway” crime, it straddles the line between minor and major offenses. Its
inconsistent prosecution under the law provokes an important question: when
is an act of violence not considered as such? When it is directed at a body that
is imagined as inherently violable?
Similar haziness about the moral coding of violence against animals can be
seen in the politics of Vick’s postincarceration comeback. Speaking out on be-
half of a more recent addition to the posttrial dogfighting legislation, the 2011
Animal Fighting Spectator Prohibition Act, which penalizes adult spectators
who either attend animal fights or bring children to such events, Vick noted,
I deeply regret my previous involvement in dogfighting; I’m sorry for what I did to the
animals. During my time in prison, I told myself that I wanted to be a part of the solution
and not the problem. . . . I’ve been speaking to kids and urging them to be responsible and
to be good to animals. . . . I’m here to send a similar message—to help address the problem
and break the cycle—of teaching these kids not to get mixed up in this crime. . . . I hate to
use it as an excuse, but seeing dogfights as a kid had a huge impact on me.48
Vick’s ability to repent and to become a champion for a problem that he

had once contributed to—even becoming a spokesperson for the Humane
Society after his release—suggests the limits of compassion for nonhuman
species. Substitute any violent crime against a person for animal abuse or
dogfighting in Vick’s remarks, and it would be hard to imagine how he might
become a sympathetic figure. But, by 2010, he had been admitted back into
the NFL, joining the Philadelphia Eagles and receiving the NFL Comeback
Player of the Year Award for a successful season on his new team. A year later,
Nike resigned a sponsorship contract that it had revoked pending his 2007
trial. By October 2012 Vick was legally allowed to begin owning dogs again
and promptly brought one home to be “well cared for and loved as a member
of [the] family.”49
Interestingly, public knowledge of Vick’s new dog occurred only after Vick
accidentally tweeted a photograph of himself with a box of dog treats in the
background. Sites across the Web immediately jumped on the image, remark-
ing with strange consistency that “either Michael Vick loves eating Milkbones,
or he has a new dog.”50 Of course other possibilities remained: he could have
been at a house other than his own, or the dog treats could have been left by
someone else. But in the furor that ensued, none of these options seemed
possible. The only question that remained was whether Vick, in fact, was the
animal himself.
Notes
I would like to thank Claire Jean Kim and Carla Freccero for their thoughtful critiques, and for put-
ting this special issue together; the members of the 2011 ASA panel, “What the Public Body Hides:
Displaced Narratives, Recurring Damages,” where this essay originated: G. Melissa Garcia, Francoise
Hamlin, Daphne Lamothe, and Susie Woo; Laura Grappo for her ever-judicious eye; and the anony-
mous reviewers and editorial staff at American Quarterly for their excellent feedback.
1. “Vick Dog Fighting Case,” CBSNews, July 20, 2009, www.cbsnews.com/elements/2007/07/26/
in_depth_sports/timeline3099127.shtml; ESPN News Services, “Apologetic Vick Gets 23-Month
Sentence on Dogfighting Charges,” ESPN, December 11, 2007, sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/
story?id=3148549.
2. U.S. v. Purnell A. Peace, a/k/a “P-Funk” and “Funk,” Quanis L. Phillips, a/k/a “Q,” Tony Taylor, a/k/a
“T,” Michael Vick, a/k/a “Ookie,” 18 U.S. 371 (2007).
3. This statement is not intended to reduce the complexity of these movements or the diversity of
opinions within them. Rather, it is to say that on the most basic level, these movements stand against
the mistreatment of animals, versus media and legal discourses that either waffle on the question or
function to enable nonhuman abuses. In this essay, “animal welfare groups” is intended to connote
organizations dedicated to the humane treatment of animals, such as the Humane Society, whereas
“animal rights groups” is intended to convey more radical organizations, dedicated to a politics of
animal liberation.
4. Judith Butler, Precarious Life (New York: Verso, 2006), 150.
5. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 17.
6. Ibid., 36.
7. Ibid., 40.
8. Ibid., 14.
9. On this point, see, for example, Hugh Raffles, “Jews, Lice, and History,” Public Culture 19.3 (2007):
521–66.
10. Glen Elder, Jennifer Wolch, and Jody Emel, “Le Practique Sauvage: Race, Place, and the Human-
Animal Divide,” in Animal Geographies: Race, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands,
ed. Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel (London: Verso, 1998), 72–90.
11. Claire Jean Kim, “Slaying the Beast: Reflections on Race, Culture, and Species,” Kalfou 1.1 (2009):
4.
12. Greta Gaard, “Tools for a Cross-Cultural Feminist Ethics: Exploring Ethical Context and Contents
in the Makah Whale Hunt,” Hypatia 16.1 (2001): 7.
13. Claire Jean Kim, “Multiculturalism Goes Imperial: Immigrants, Animals, and the Suppression of
Moral Dialogue,” Du Bois Review 4.1 (2007): 235.
14. Maneesha Deckha, “Toward a Postcolonial, Posthumanist, Feminist Theory: Centralizing Race and
Culture in Feminist Work on Nonhuman Animals,” Hypatia 27.3 (2012): 529–30.
15. Richard W. Bulliet, Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relation-
ships (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 45–46.
16. Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern
Books, 2002). Marjorie Spiegel has also drawn an important analogy between slavery and animal
subjugation in The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery (New York: Mirror Books, 1997).
17. Clare Palmer, “Killing Animals in Animal Shelters,” in Animal Studies Group, Killing Animals (Ur-
bana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 170–87. Yi-Fu Tuan also touches on this point in his classic
Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
18. Palmer, “Killing Animals,” 180.
19. Sarah Chase, “Timeline of Animal Fighting,” Animal Legal and Historical Center, Michigan State
University College of Law, http://animallaw.info/ (accessed January 10, 2012).
20. See Susan J. Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
21. See, for example, Humane Society of the United States, “Animal Cruelty and Human Violence,” April
25, 2011, www.humanesociety.org/issues/abuse_neglect/qa/cruelty_violence_connection_faq.html.
22. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (New York:
Prickly Paradigm, 2003).
23. See, for example, Cynthia Hodges, “The Link: Cruelty to Animals and Violence towards People,”
Animal Legal and Historical Center, Michigan State University College of Law, 2008, www.animal-
law.info/articles/arus2008hodges_link.htm; Humane Society of the United States, “Animal Cruelty
and Human Violence: A Documented Connection,” April 25, 2011, www.humanesociety.org/issues/
abuse_neglect/qa/cruelty_violence_connection_faq.html; Emma Brockes, “What Happens in War
Happens,” Guardian, January 2, 2009, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/03/abu-ghraib-lynndie-
england-interview; Josh White, “Abu Ghraib Dog Tactics Came from Guantanamo,” Washington Post,
July 27, 2005, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/26/AR2005072601792.
html.
24. Interestingly, Vick also trades on this language in his many apologies, in which he calls his actions at
the kennels “immature.” See, for example, “Vick to Be Sentenced Dec. 10 After Guilty Plea,” ESPN,
August 28, 2007, http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=2992890.
25. “Episode 1: The Confession,” The Michael Vick Project, BET, 2010.
26. Will Leitch, “The Impossible, Inevitable Redemption of Michael Vick,” GQ, September 2011, www.
gq.com/sports/profiles/201109/michael-vick-gq-september-2011-interview#ixzz1ZZNGEXuq.
27. Mike Florio, “Mike Vick Wants to Own a Dog Again,” NBC Sports, December 15, 2010, http://
profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2010/12/15/mike-vick-wants-to-own-a-dog-again/.
28. Leitch, “Impossible.”
29. “Apologetic Vick Gets 23-Month Sentence on Dogfighting Charges,” ESPN, December 11, 2007,
http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=3148549.
30. Juan Williams, “Michael Vick’s Second Chance: Why Survey Data Show a High Level of Black Sym-
pathy for the Ex-Con Quarterback,” Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2009, http://online.wsj.com/
article/SB10001424052970203550604574360253023096042.html.
31. White, quoted in “NAACP Official: Vick Shouldn’t Be Banned from NFL,” CNN, August 22, 2007,
http://articles.cnn.com/2007-08-22/us/vick_1_dogfighting-operation-dogfighting-case-arthur-
blank?_s=PM:US.
32. Patrice Evans, “A Walk in the Park,” ESPN The Magazine, September 5, 2011, http://espn.go.com/
espn/story/_/id/6894756/patrice-evans-dogwalking-blogger-provides-lessons-race-michael-vick-espn-
magazine.
33. David Fleming, “The Dog in the Room,” ESPN, August 25, 2011, http://espn.go.com/espn/commen-
tary/story/_/id/6889579/espn-magazine-examining-michael-vick-where-dogfighting-falls-continuum-
cruelty.
34. PETA, “Vick Protests in New York City,” The PETA Files, July 20, 2007, www.peta.org/b/thepetafiles/
archive/2007/07/20/vick-protests-in-new-york-city.aspx; Sean Leahy, “If PETA Protests Mike Vick’s
NFL Return, Will That Scare Off Suitors?,” USAToday, July 19, 2009, http://content.usatoday.com/
communities/thehuddle/post/2009/07/68494802/1#.UO8azbY1Z7E.
35. Danielle Wright, “Another PETA Exhibit Compares Animal Cruelty to Slavery,” BET, July 21, 2011,
www.bet.com/news/national/2011/07/21/another-peta-exhibit-compares-animal-cruelty-to-slavery.
html; PETA, “Honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Every Day,” The PETA Files, November 1, 2011,
www.peta.org/b/thepetafiles/archive/tags/Washington+D-C_2E00_/default.aspx.
36. DogTown, season 2, episode 1, National Geographic, 2008.
37. As mentioned earlier in the article, the notion of “second chances” circulated in media accounts of
Vick. It also came to be associated with the Vick dogs, as Best Friends Animal Sanctuary and DogTown
both promise the public a “second chance” for the beleaguered animals.
38. Leslie Smith, “Can the Michael Vick Dogs Be Saved? At Best Friends, the Answer Is Yes,” Dogtime:
Find Your Wag, June 15, 2010, www.dogtime.com/best-friends.html.
39. “Criminal Justice Fact Sheet,” NAACP (2013), www.naacp.org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet (ac-
cessed March 1, 2013).
40. Lisa Marie Cacho, Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New
York University Press, 2012), 4.
41. Ibid., 5–6.
42. Glenn Davis, “Touré Still Isn’t Happy about That ‘White Michael Vick’ Photo, ESPN Still Stands by
It,” SportsGrid, August 27, 2011, www.sportsgrid.com/nfl/Touré-white-michael-vick-cnn/.
43. Bill Brown, “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny,” Critical Inquiry 32.2 (2006):
197.
44. Animal Legal Defense Fund, “Animal Fighting Case Study: Michael Vick,” Animal Legal Defense Fund:
Law and Cases, January 2011, http://aldf.org/article.php?id=928.
45. “Animal Fighting Prohibition Enforcement Act Approved by Congress,” United Poultry Concerns,
April 11, 2007, www.upc-online.org/cockfighting/041107hr137.html.
46. See, for example, Bruce A. Wagman, Sonia S. Waisman, and Pamela D. Frasch, Animal Law: Cases
and Materials (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2009).
47. As suggested earlier in the article, animal abuse is unevenly prosecuted. Here I am suggesting that
because of current legal and social scientific attitudes toward animal abuse, and when compared with
other cases, Vick’s sentence can be understood as unexpectedly lenient (and even more so because of
his race).
48. Michael Vick, quoted in Nate Davis, “Michael Vick Backs New Anti-dogfighting Bill,” USA Today,
July 20, 2011, http://content.usatoday.com/communities/thehuddle/post/2011/07/eagles-qb-michael-
vick-backs-new-anti-dogfighting-bill/1#.UBmKMXAkqsI.
49. Jemele Hill, “Michael Vick’s Next Lesson,” ESPN, October 20, 2012, http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/
id/8514986/michael-vick-family-dog-chance-set-example-teach-own-children.
50. Larry Brown, “Either Michael Vick Loves Eating Milkbones, or He Has a New Dog,” Larry Brown
Sports, October 5, 2012, http://larrybrownsports.com/football/michael-vick-milk-bones-dog/157081.
Of Course There Are Werewolves | 661
“Of Course There Are Werewolves and

Vampires”: True Blood and the Right to
Rights for Other Species
Dale Hudson
F
rom classical Hollywood’s “monster mash” Bud Abbott and Lou Costello
Meet Frankenstein (1949) and television classics The Addams Family
(1964–66) and The Munsters (1964–66) to recent franchises Blade
(1998–2004), Underworld (2003–12), and Twilight (2008–12) and series Buffy
the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Angel (1999–2004), True Blood (2008–pres-
ent), The Vampire Diaries (2009–present), and The Originals (2013), vampires,
werewolves, and other movie monsters serve as a means of acknowledging
social difference without addressing it directly.1 Whether comedy or horror,
relationships between humans and supernatural species offer ways to negoti-
ate—and even contest—naturalized social inequalities, yet they can also serve
as a way to ignore discursive and material legacies of these inequalities. Film
and television representations of interspecies relations conventionally hinge on
assumptions that humans are exceptional—and, moreover, that “native-born
Americans” (though seldom Native Americans) are exceptional humans. One
contribution of animal studies is that it institutionalizes a decentering of “the
human” as the measure of all things. If Donna Haraway asks who we become
“when species meet,” then this essay is interested in what happens when some
of the species are supernatural.2 It asks whether HBO’s True Blood (creator Alan
Ball) might suggest ways for humans to live ethically with other species and to
think interspecies relations in ways that consider what interspecies ethics might
also mean to humans still defined in terms of race, sex, nativity, and religion.
The self-reflection demanded by the animal turn requires an extension and
elaboration of the unmasking of European humanism by the postcolonial turn,
particularly an unpacking of the preponderance of animalizing and sexualizing
tropes used to debase, belittle, and humiliate particular groups in order to
conquer and contain difference. As a faith in human exceptionalism, anthro-
pocentrism facilitates faith in national exceptionalism rooted in the precepts of
the European Enlightenment, which, as Ali Behdad argues, facilitate a willful

amnesia about the dispossession and genocide of indigenous nations and the
enslavement or servitude of vast populations required to support foundational
myths of nation with evidence of industrial progress and economic growth.3
Neither animalized humans nor humanized animals, vampires and werewolves
are nonetheless entangled within the knots of zoomorphism and anthropo-
morphism that historically bind and secure notions of anthropocentrism—and
might perhaps undo them. Just as actors mask their identities behind makeup,
prosthetics, computer-generated animation, or rubber masks to portray movie
monsters, the category of supernatural species figuratively masks ways that rac-
ism, sexism, and nativism continue to structure social and political life in the
United States. Masking conceals through the act of covering, but it simultane-
ously reveals this very act of covering.
Supernatural species offer the potential to decolonize our familiar habits
of thinking, particularly our unwitting complicity with forms of cinematic
and televisual realism in reifying political realism.4 Mimetic codes have a long
history that dates to cave paintings yet are closely linked to modern European
visual practices of control invented by Leon Battista Alberti, Gerardus Merca-
tor, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, and others to suggest politically neutral
illusions of realism. In so doing, they consolidate and organize assumptions
about race, sex, and species. The most outlandish fantasies of the Manifest
Destiny and “Anglo-Saxon race” in westerns like John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939)
and The Searchers (1956) often passed as realist and thus suitable to teach
students history, since they were shot and edited in classical Hollywood’s “in-
visible style.” Vampires and werewolves do not pretend to be realities in the
same way that Ford’s colonizers pretend to be “settlers” of unclaimed lands.
Supernatural species dare us to look beyond the visual evidence, beyond the
naturalized and normalized technologies of vision and hearing that appear
to record audiovisual images in ways that are invisible, silent, and unbiased.
Supernatural species exemplify some aspects of Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari’s concept of “becoming-animal” to destabilize the centrality of hu-
man subjectivity that facilitates the use of animals as tropes for humans to
understand themselves. Becoming-animal is “a process that is performative
and transactional without being in any way mimetic,” involving “a rethink-
ing of the encounter itself,” as Una Chaudhuri explains.5 True Blood extends a
prompting in science/speculative fiction toward thinking interspecies relations
in nonhierarchical and nonanthropocentric terms of interdependency while
also foregrounding the historical legacies of racism, sexism, nativism, and
speciesism carried by the visual and narrative conventions of movie monsters.
“We believe in the existence of very special becomings-animal,” Deleuze and
Guattari write, “traversing human beings and sweeping them away, affecting
the animal no less than the human,” so that “the becoming-animal of the hu-
man being is real, even if the animal the human being becomes is not.”6 They
actually introduce becoming-animal as one of the “memories of a moviegoer,”
pointing to movie monsters as potential instigators for thinking relationships
beyond naturalized categories of social difference.7 Supernatural species suggest
an interpretation of becoming-animal that challenges us. “Of course there are
vampires and werewolves,” Deleuze and Guattari assure us.8 The question that
emerges is whether supernaturalism in True Blood helps us in terms of think-
ing the right to rights for species other than humans, as the series represents
the United States with a certain amount of realism as still embroiled in the
struggles for such rights for all humans.
Resurrecting Dead Bodies of History
Now in its sixth season, True Blood departs from conventional vampire film
and television by shifting focus from the right to exile, popularized by Bram
Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula about a Transylvanian count immigrating to
imperial Britain, to the right to citizenship in the postcolonial United States.
Vampires “mainstream” and demand citizenship. Fulfilling audience expecta-
tions for camp based on the international proliferation of sexy vampire films
in the 1960s and 1970s, vampires “come out of the coffin.” Since same-sex
marriage remains an unsettled issue, the tongue-in-cheek riff on “coming out
of the closet” is rather apt. As Margot Canady points out, lesbian, gay, bisexual,
and transgender (LGBT) communities continue to experience second-class
citizenship in an unremittingly “straight state.”9 Vampires can hardly hope to
fare better. They are stigmatized by stereotypes. In the first season, vampires
share a “nest” that looks like a camped-up stereotype of a working-class, Italian
American or Jewish American home with its garish furniture covered in pro-
tective plastic. Nesting situates the vampires outside a human realm, equating
them with nonhuman animals that nest, from birds and rodents to reptiles and
insects. Questions about the right to rights for supernatural species are framed
within the historical context of a region of the United States that has often
been one of the most vociferous against extending rights to nonwhite-male-
humans, who were considered property and treated like animals and machines.
Even before anti–civil rights, enslavement of Africans and African Americans,
followed by racial segregation and the lynching of Italian immigrants and
African Americans alike, marked Southern history. The series resurrects the
dead bodies of this history in the undead bodies of vampires.
Based on Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries (2001–13), True

Blood mixes social realism of everyday experiences of decay, poverty, and vio-
lence in the US South—a hallmark of the Southern Gothic novels by William
Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Tennessee Williams—
with overt supernaturalism. True Blood imagines the New South as a space
inhabited by multiple species on multiple planes of reality. The series centers
on telepathic “half-fae” (fairy) waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin)
and her relationships with the vampires Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) and
Eric Northman (Alexander Skarsgård), the shapeshifter Sam Merlotte (Sam
Trammell), and the werewolf Alcide Herveaux (Joe Manganiello) in the rural
Louisiana town of Bon Temps. Since all appear white, Sookie risks none of the
traditional Southern social stigmas for “mixed race” company and romance.
Speciesism nonetheless revisits debates inflected with fears over “mixed” blood,
illusions about “pure” bloodlines, and the return of asymmetrical power rela-
tions that facilitate exploitation.
Sookie and her brother, Jason (Ryan Kwanten), trace their ancestry to
Descendants of the Glorious Dead, an organization like the Daughters of the
American Revolution, whose programs of “historic conservation, patriotism,
and education” mythologize bloodline connections to Europe above all through
a library billed as “one of the world’s premier genealogical research centers.”10
Sookie’s grandmother, Adele Hale “Gran” Stackhouse (Lois Smith), invites
Bill to speak at one of the organization’s meetings before most people are
comfortable with the “mixed” company of vampires. The white-male-human
soldier Bill Compton was “made” vampire in 1865 when the Civil War was in
its last year. He is a native-born American who fought against his own govern-
ment. As a vampire, he preserves and reinvents Confederate history, telling
Gran’s group that he fought during the “War for Southern Independence.”
Because Bill makes history immortal, he partly revives the “lost cause” of the
Confederacy. Gran approves of Sookie’s relationship with Bill, but everyone
close to Sookie—her brother, her best friend, Tara Thorton (Rutina Wesley),
and her boss, Sam—is suspicious. Long dead histories of racism, sexism, and
nativism are resurrected most directly in moments of speciesism, including
age-old tropes of animalizing and sexualizing difference.
Before learning that she is half-fae, Sookie is unable to understand her own
difference. “Maybe I’m an alien” (3.6), she wonders, unconsciously reproducing
the US legal term for noncitizens in her effort to rationalize her uneasy feeling
of partial belonging. Attempting to understand Bill’s difference, Sookie calls
Bill a “self-hating vampire” and recommends that he and his vampire daughter,
Jessica Hamby (Deborah Ann Woll), “walk the line between vampires and
humans” rather than being “just a vampire” (2.4). She demands that they as-
similate, projecting her own desires to be considered “normal” by humans. Until
the fifth season, particularly its cliffhanger with Bill bathed in the blood and
ascending to position of ur-vampire, Bill internalizes the negative associations
of difference defined in human terms that Sookie unconsciously reproduces.
When he was transformed more than a century earlier, he hid in the shadows.
Unlike Jessica today, whose “babyvamp” blog (www.babyvamp-jessica.com/)
is part of the series’ multiplatform format, he could not interact with a human
society that knew him to be a vampire. Vampirism serves as a trope for social
and legal marginalization and minoritization. Vampires require invitations to
enter a human’s home, and humans can also withdraw the invitations, much
like the state can cancel temporary work visas or choose to enforce their
requirement in agricultural and hospitality sectors; however, as Eric informs
Sookie, a property deed to her house—“a little piece of paper”—takes away
from her one of the only powers that she ever had over him (4.2). Property has
been central to legal definitions of citizenship, and people who were defined
as property could not own property.11
Bill exists in a world where his white-male privilege has been long since desta-
bilized. His thoughts are sometimes anachronistic. He and Eric must advocate
for the right to rights. Vampires pay taxes and demand political rights, extend-
ing the foundational myths of “no taxation without representation” associated
with the Boston Tea Party. Emboldened by the ability to live among humans
without being suspected of wanting to feed on them, vampires campaign for
political enfranchisement through a Vampire Rights Amendment (VRA) to the
US Constitution, which remains a few states away from ratification. The VRA
evokes the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which took nearly fifty years to
come before Congress, only to expire after a decade of debate in 1982. Con-
gress moves slowly in representing citizens—African American men in 1870,
women in 1920, Native Americans and the poor in 1924. As such, vampires
want to be called “Vampire Americans,” much like they wanted to be called
“Carpathian Americans” in Blood Ties (dir. Jim McBride, 1991). Vampires are
marked by difference in terms of species, rendering them closer to nonhuman
animals. “Vampires aren’t American,” explains Mr. Floodgates to Sookie in
one of Harris’s novels. “They aren’t even black or Asian or Indian. They aren’t
Rotarians or Baptists. They’re all just plain vampires. That’s their color and
religion and their nationality.”12 Vampires have no right to rights. Given the
long history of unequal rights to the uneven rights of US citizenship, other
species await the outcome of the VRA before announcing their own existence.
Bill explains that vampires have heightened senses because of their condi-
tion, much like marginalized populations always have to have “eyes in the
back of their head” to avoid becoming victims of further exploitation, since
they are not fully protected by law. In a flashback scene, the one-thousand-
year-old Eric sees his Viking parents murdered by werewolves for the nearly
three-thousand-year-old Russell Edgington (Denis O’Hare). While the scene
establishes a naturalized animosity between supernatural species, it also intro-
duces hope for ethics between species. Eric’s maker is the two-thousand-year-
old former Roman slave Godric (Allan Hyde), who hopes that vampires will
become “less savage” to humans, and he imparts this hope to Eric. When Bill
and Eric are drawn into a murderous rampage by a group of vampires oppos-
ing “mainstreaming,” Eric questions their savagery. The series places the onus
of humanity on vampires, who have known the inhumanity of being enslaved
by humans, either directly or through past generations.
Bill was “made” vampire when state policies redefined male slaves as “freed-
men” under the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and as citizens under the
Thirteenth Amendment (1865). Tara McPherson suggests that the Old South
operated according to a “lenticular logic” of race that covertly represses com-
plex historical connections to produce whiteness and blackness as mutually
exclusive categories.13 She develops the expression from the hologram postcard
celebrating nostalgia for the Old South. The two images in the hologram can
never be seen simultaneously. To see one requires tilting the postcard until
the other disappears. She suggests that the hologram serves as a visualization
for two images—a genteel one for white people and a brutal one for black
people—that are seldom seen as interdependent. If the Old South is histori-
cally defined by a lenticular logic of race, then the New South in True Blood
operates according to a lenticular logic of species. In addition to “blacks”
and “whites,” there are vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural species.
Social differentiation becomes ever shifting and ever contingent—and inter-
dependencies are broader than humanism can contain. Sookie herself seems
somewhat entangled in binary terms for difference when she refers to Bill as
“Vampire Bill,” a species-inflected moniker that troubles no one, as might
racially inflected ones like “White Jason” and “Black Tara.”
Species in True Blood extends from human and nonhuman animals and
supernatural creatures to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) with the
Japanese invention of synthetic blood for medical use, yet even this supernatu-
ral species largely masks race. Later marketed as food for vampires, whether
TruBlood is as good as true (human) blood suggests historical debates on
whether a drop of “black blood” contaminated an otherwise “white-skinned”
body. Vampires cannot claim all white-male-human privileges. They are not
“truly” white. “We’re white, he’s dead,” explains Sookie’s coworker Arlene
Fowler (Carrie Preston) about Bill’s difference. Interspecies conflicts extend
the ongoing “culture wars” that Robert Stam and Ella Shohat trace as part of
“centuries of discursive struggles going back to the Renaissance and the En-
lightenment and their antecedents, going back to the Conquest of the Americas
and even the Crusades.”14 By including complex characters like Arlene, who
is openly racist and speciesist at times yet is sympathetic as a single mother–
turned–veteran’s wife at other times, True Blood engages with the multiplicities
of contemporary experiences in the United States.
Like Deleuze and Guattari’s vampires and werewolves, vampires on True
Blood reproduce through infection, not impregnation, so their lineages are
affective rather than genetic, challenging legal and social histories that define
race in terms of blood and ancestry to overshadow earlier definitions based
on association.15 Vampire blood saves human lives and heals human wounds,
much like the dead labor of “illegal immigrants” saves national economies. It
is also sold as a recreational drug for humans as “V.” When humans drink a
vampire’s blood, the vampire bonds to them, sensing when the human’s life is
endangered according to a supernatural and extrafamilial blood bond. Sharing
blood implies ownership that makes people into property, as slavery made it
possible to consider black people as the property of white people. “Sookie is
mine,” Bill says (1.3), heterosexualizing Count Dracula’s line to his male house-
guest Jonathan Harker. Although the phrase implies possession, the narrative
reveals “mine” to mean something closer to “me,” with blood sharing as an
intersubjective bond. Although difference is eroticized through blood tropes,
drawing on long histories of blood-quantum laws (“one-drop” rule) to define
and enforce racial categories, sharing blood dissolves subjectivity.16 “We will
be one,” Eric tells Sookie after they drink each other’s blood (4.8). Vampires
form relationships that transcend ones defined between humans, suggesting
that frameworks for US history might be redefined rather than resurrected
according to social paradigms that rewarded racism and sexism.
Bad Times in Bon Temps
Throughout the United States, legal and social definitions of race and sex have
been as fluid as the blood sucked from the veins of the willing and the unsus-
pecting. The mode of Southern Gothic highlights the particular and perhaps
peculiar postcolonial condition of the US South. Although the South always
functioned as colonizer through slavery, servitude, dispossession, and secession,
the South often considers itself as colonized after the Civil War (1861–65). As
both colonizer and colonized, the South is a site of contradictions familiar to
overseas postcolonies ruled by elite classes. While postcolonial theory offers
multiple concepts to describe such conditions, using one on supernaturalism
developed in the context of the former US colony of the Philippines helps
deprovincialize US exceptionalism. Bliss Lim develops the concept of “immis-
cible times” to describe “a translation of thorny and disreputable supernatural-
isms into the terms of a modern, homogeneous, disenchanted time” with a
simultaneous “persistence of supernaturalism [that] often insinuates the limits
of disenchanted chronology,” which may be understood by the metaphor of
water and oil comingling without yielding a “true solution.”17 The immiscible
times in True Blood reveal a New South that neither fully resembles nor fully
contradicts the heroic national official history of citizenship based on exclu-
sion (“free white men” only) progressing through constitutional amendments
to include the free white-male-human’s others.18 Histories comingle; they are
multiple rather than universal—and supernatural species mark moments of
enchantment.
The speculative reality of True Blood’s diegesis operates as a corollary for
the alternative modernities of the postcolonial condition where progressive
(antiracist and antisexist) and retrogressive, secular and religious, rational and
enchanting moments comingle without contradicting or neutralizing one an-
other. As a gay African American character, Lafayette Reynolds (Nelson Ellis)
can demand ethical treatment by white homophobes, yet when his cousin Tara
voices her frustrations over the insults and humiliations of racism and sexism,
no one wants to listen. The voice-over narration of Sookie’s telepathic abili-
ties foreground the largely unspoken sexism and speciesism that continue to
dominate the everyday thoughts of customers to Merlotte’s Bar and Grill. She
hears “the hateful things that hateful people don’t want to say out loud” (2.6).
In Bon Temps, the secular time of modernity oozes alongside the feudal time
of supernaturalism, visualized when Sookie and friends enter or leave the realm
of the fae. True Blood’s sets like Fangtasia (a vampire-owned bar for humans
who love vampires) and the Fellowship of the Sun (a Christian fundamentalist
church for humans who hate vampires) point to deep-rooted contradictions
of the South, its unrestrained excesses and violent prohibitions. Signs of the
mixing of religious and sacrilegious are evident on rural and suburban highways
lined with mega-churches alongside strip-clubs and gun-and-ammunition
superstores. Christianity emerges in both (white) fundamentalist and (black)
reform churches. Such contradictions are captured within the opening-credit
sequence with its stylized images of holy baptisms and burning cigarettes, decay-
ing road kill and gyrating pole dancers, civil rights demonstrations and a child
wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood under the lyrics of Jace Everett’s “Bad Things.”
If times are immiscible, bloodlines were permeable, so that bloods comingle
and trouble an entire history of legal definitions of race, kinship, and entitle-
ment. African blood allegedly submerged white blood, but Native American
blood allegedly disappeared into white settler blood—and with it indigenous
rights to land allotments. Indigenous nations appear only in the realm of the
supernatural in True Blood. The only Native American vampire to date is
Longshadow (Raoul Trujillo), a bartender caught embezzling from Fangtasia
and put to the “true death” during the first season.19 An underlying obsession
with bloodlines emerges in anxieties about miscegenation and incest. After
murdering Sookie’s Uncle Bartlett (Cheyenne Wilbur) for molesting her as
a child (2.1), Bill abruptly ends a sexual relationship with his lawyer, Portia
Bellefleur (Courtney Ford), when he learns that she is his grand-descendant
(4.4). Jason pursues Crystal Norris (Lindsay Pulsipher), a werepanther prom-
ised to her half-brother Felton (James Harvey Ward) who lives in the isolated
community of Hotshot where they are free to breed within the family and
sell crystal methamphetamine. The frequency with which incest appears as a
narrative device suggests unresolved anxieties about nonincestuous and non-
procreational sex. Taboos over miscegenation and homosexuality unfold into
ones of interspecies relationships. Of the main characters, only the lead African
Americans Tara and Lafayette and the shapeshifter Sam establish interspecies
relationships that might also be seen as interracial—and these relationships are
sometimes coercive and often short-lived. Their lovers invariably die. Sookie
mostly suffers as a result of her relationships with vampires.
Immiscible times unfold in encounters with ghosts who move between mo-
ments in US history that have been segregated by convention. Supernaturalism
reveals hidden histories. Tripping on V, Lafayette loses sight of his boyfriend,
Jesus Velasquez (Kevin Alejandro), beneath a colorful mask that evokes pre-
Columbian civilizations via brujería, a syncretic practice developed during
Spanish colonization that combines without mixing indigenous religions
and Christianity, which Jesus learned from his grandfather Don Bartolo (Del
Zamora). Considered as healing, it is saintly; as witchcraft, demonic. Hidden
beneath the brujo mask, Lafayette commits violent acts, pouring bleach into
gumbo at Merlotte’s (5.3) or disenabling the brakes on Sookie’s car (5.4) until
Don Bartolo is killed. Lafayette later becomes a medium for the ghosts of dead
people, particularly ones associated with “bad things” that people try to repress,
including racist and sexist moments in US national history. Lafayette “sees”
Arlene’s dead ex-fiancé, the serial murder René Lenier (Michael Raymond-
Figure 1. James). The ghost of Mavis (Nondu-

Lafayette hallucinates an animalized pre-Columbian
miso Tembe), a “negress” who sings
mask over Jesus’s face, True Blood 4.10 (2011).
French lullabies to Arlene and René’s
baby, Mickey, possesses Lafayette’s body to seek justice for her dead son. Her
lover, Virgil (Austin Hérbet), murders them, fearing the social consequences
that he would face if (white) people discovered that he has fathered a mixed-
race child in an extramarital affair. Only when dead history is buried through
the symbolic gesture of a belated burial for Mavis’s child can Lafayette return
to the realm of the living. Jesus himself is a child of rape, evoking the violent
history that produced the racial category of mestizo. Supernaturalism in True
Blood’s New South reveals immiscible times in which histories of enslavement
from the Middle Passage through Jim Crow linger alongside histories of con-
quest/annexation from the Spanish Empire through the Republic of Texas.
Other characters also see ghosts associated with other moments in US na-
tional history. Arlene’s husband, Terry (Todd Lowe), sees the ghost of an Iraqi
woman, Zaafira (Anna Khaja), in the form of a supernatural Arabo-Islamic
figure of Ifrit, which seeks justice for the murder of Iraqi civilians during his
tour of duty. Terry fears imaginary “Iraqi insurgents” when not on antipsychotic
drugs (4.10). He is tormented by memories of murdering the unarmed Zaafira
at the order of his sergeant, Patrick Devins (Scott Foley), who mistook her
unarmed husband as a “hostile” (5.4).20 The massacre of unarmed Iraqi civilians
happens as the US soldiers celebrate the US national holiday of the Fourth of
July with drugs and alcohol. The scene exposes the hypocrisy of US national ex-
Figure 2. ceptionalism: the soldiers commemorate US

Mavis’s ghost leaves Lafayette’s body, True
Blood 4.10 (2011).
independence while trying to institute Iraqi
dependence. US soldiers think Ifrit means
“the evil” (5.5). True Blood attempts to situate irrational and visceral fears of,
and racism against, Arabs and Muslims in relation to war crimes during two
decades of US military invasions and occupations of Iraq, yet Ifrit menaces
Terry and Patrick, already suffering from posttraumatic stress syndrome, and
through the medium of Lafayette demands that they fight unto death. While
True Blood opens space for consideration of US war crimes in Iraq, it closes
them with Islamophobia. Ifrit’s vengeance reproduces anti-Muslim racism.
When Terry is nearly driven to suicide, Patrick yells: “Suicide is for Muslims—
and you are better than that. You are a goddamned US Marine!” (5.6). The
racism evokes ongoing public discussion on ways that US military training
sometimes casts the War on Terror as a War on Islam, evidenced in targets at
shooting ranges with images of Muslim woman in hijab and verses from the
Qur’an. This instance of anti-Muslim racism extends one three seasons earlier.
Joining a leadership retreat for the Fellowship of the Sun, Jason wins high
praise from Reverend Steve Newlin (Michael McMillian) and his wife, Sarah
(Anna Camp), when he mobilizes the reactionary violence of homophobia,
misogyny, and Islamophobia to defend himself from a vampire during a role-
playing exercise. He grabs a US flag, breaking the pole for a weapon to impale
his attacker, whom he calls a “Muslim Buffy with a dick” (2.2). Although this
episode demonstrates fluidity between other forms of hate-fueled ignorance,
the series offers the relief of irony in the fifth season when Steve attempts to
“glamour” Jason into becoming his lover. Steve’s punishment is to be “made”
vampire, presumably unleashing his latent desires for Jason. The head of a
religious cult of intolerance becomes a self-defined “gay vampire American.”
Renegotiating the Privileges of Whiteness
If Hollywood representations of multiculturalism were often no more than

colorful landscapes of African American, East Asian American, and Latina/o
American faces in supporting roles or as background extras to convey the
representational surface of inclusion against which white-male-human he-
roes and their nuclear families were framed as exceptional, then Hollywood
representations of postmulticulturalism include Native American and Arab
American faces against which white-male-human heroes are framed as adrift
or unable to act, sometimes requiring the protection of white-female-human
characters to maintain asymmetrical power relations in “updated” disguises
of postracism and postsexism.21 True Blood fans the lingering embers of “lost
cause” for white-male-human privilege in its first episode. The first onscreen
vampire is an overweight, white-male vampire, wearing a military-camouflage
shirt and a “feed cap” embroidered with a Confederate flag, suggesting that
the privileged position of the white-male-human in the Old South might be
restored only in supernatural terms in the New South. Nonetheless, vampires
do not always have access to the built-in privileges of masculine whiteness. Not
only do vampires resurrect the South’s undead histories, they also suffer because
of them through burning crosses and speciesist graffiti (3.10). A “postmortem”
extra feature on the DVDs even links antivampirism with anti-Semitism.
The Vampire Authority advocates through the American Vampire League
(AVL) for the VRA. Eric disassociates vampires from terrorists and libertarians,
saying that vampires are “tax-paying Americans” in an AVL public-service an-
nouncement (4.1), available as part of the series’ multiplatform narrative on
AVL’s website (www.americanvampireleague.com/). The authority assimilates
to human ways (perhaps, “the American way”) by punishing vampires caught
on video feeding on humans with the “true death,” an equivalent to the death
penalty still practiced in the United States. With the invention of synthetic
blood in 1982, Nan Flanagan (Jessica Tuck) recruits Bill to support the main-
streaming movement and asks him to change the vampire aristocracy’s view
of humans as food (4.2). The vampire aristocracy, however, believes vampires
are superior to humans. Guardian of the Vampire Authority, Roman Zimojic
(Christopher Meloni) believes that humans are not “food” for vampires but
Figure 3. their “ancestors,” envisioning an evolution-

Convenience store as site for the first
ary chain that is not anthropocentric and
image of “mainstreaming” vampire, True
Blood 1.1 (2008). interspecies relations that are not adversarial.
According to the Sanguinistas, vampires trace
their bloodlines to Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who refused to be dominated
by him, so they will not be dominated by humans. Intravampire conflicts
reproduce intrawhite ones during the Civil War. Conflict within the vampire
community emerges in quasi-religious beliefs that evoke pre-Enlightenment
European social organization, suggesting ways that the brave “new world” of
the United States carries vestiges of its own colonial/colonizing past.
Hatred and intolerance are organized by the Fellowship of Sun, which stig-
matizes interspecies relationships and promotes hate crimes. Among the most
violent responses to vampires are its antivampire rallies led by plastic-looking
televangelists, alluding to ways that libertarian organizations like the Ku Klux
Klan, which contested the constitutional abolishment of slavery and servitude
during the mid-1860s, reappear in contemporary far-right and all-white move-
ments like the so-called Tea Party. The Newlins exploit religion to promote
violent speciesism. Steve tells Sookie that she is a “traitor to her race—the
human race” (2.8). Speciesism draws on contemporary forms of racism that
cast anyone profiled as “Arab or Muslim looking” as a potential terrorist. He
announces that he “will not negotiate with subhumans,” echoing official US
refusals to negotiate with organizations that it profiles as terrorist. One of
the Newlins’ followers, Luke McDonald (Wes Brown), straps silver shrapnel
and explosives to his body, becoming a suicide bomber to punish vampires
for thwarting a plan to sacrifice a vampire to the sun’s rays. Afterward, the
Vampire Authority spokesperson, the eight-hundred-year-old Nan refers to
the Fellowship as “anti-vampire terrorists” (2.9). She also calls fellow vampire
Russell a terrorist after he rips the heart from a newsreader on live television
(3.9). She counters assumptions that all vampires are terrorists because of Rus-
sell’s outlier actions by noting that all humans were not considered terrorists
after Osama bin Laden’s outlier actions (3.10). In the fifth season, vampires
who oppose “mainstreaming” begin to blow up TruBlood factories in Houston,
Tokyo, Kuwait, and Bucharest as another form of terrorism. Aligned with the
Sanguinistas, Bill masterminds terrorism, which Steve conceals by denouncing
the “terrorists who cut off our food supply” on television (5.10). Eric fears they
will “start a civil war” (5.9).
In less-spectacular ways, speciesism inflects everyday life. The plump busy-
body Maxine Fortenberry (Dale Raoul) believes “all vampires know each other,”
reworking a common racial slur made about non-European Americans (4.8).
When her son, Hoyt (Jim Parrack), attempts to shame her “antivampire” and
“antiblack” thoughts and deeds, she acknowledges them without hesitation
or embarrassment, indicating merely that her antiblack racism is supposed to
be “a secret” (2.9). Sheriff Bud Dearborne (William Sanderson) is clear that
“dead human bodies” are more important than “missing vampires.” He cites
the police’s limited funding as an explanation for its limited service, repro-
ducing the inequalities of legal protection that racialized humans historically
received throughout the United States. Placing white-male-vampire bodies in
a position at the margins of the law’s protection and enforcement, however,
does not challenge everyday racism—and sometimes seems to aggravate sex-
ism. White-male-vampires suffer by the presence of supernatural species that
embody misogynist stereotypes, often opposing tolerance and diversity, such
as the maenad Maryann Forrester (Michelle Forbes), the witches Marnie Ston-
ebrook (Fiona Shaw) and Antonia Gavilán (Paola Turbay), and the vampires
Salomé Agrippa (Valentina Cervi) and Lilith (Jessica Clark).
Despite antivampire speciesism of hate groups like the Fellowship, African
American humans suffer the most in True Blood. “People think just cause we
got vampires out in the open now race isn’t an issue no more,” observes Tara.
True Blood makes efforts to desegregate representation of the New South in
the novels on which it is based by recasting white characters such as Tara as
African American.22 Departing from the television conventions for representing
African Americans, examined in Tony Coke’s Fade to Black (1991), True Blood
allows Tara and Lafayette to have each other as family and to have mothers,
breaking with classical Hollywood’s racist stereotypes of mammies and coons
who nurtured or terrorized white plantation owners yet seemed to have no

families or communities of their own. Suffering African American female bod-
ies are given ample screen time. Tara’s mother, Lettie Mae Thornton (Adina
Porter), is possessed by alcoholism, and Tara is bound, gagged, and raped by
the white-male-vampire Franklin Mott (James Frain). When Sheriff Dearborne
jokes that the brutal murder of Lettie Mae’s spiritual healer Miss Jeanette (Aisha
Hinds) involved a “human-animal collaboration,” given the autopsy report’s
suggestion of wounds from claws and knives, the sheriff ’s token female and
token African American deputy Kenya Jones (Tanya Wright) defends herself
from his accusation that she lacks a sense of humor. She informs him that she
does not find “a black woman paralyzed and butchered to death in the town
where [she] live[s]” to be a joke (2.4). In other words, she asks him to do the
work of translation that US history historically has forced women of color to
do. Nonetheless, race and sex form glass ceilings within state institutions. Ke-
nya is passed over for promotion to sheriff despite her superior qualifications.
Despite the presence of supernaturalism, race continues to be a very real
issue in Bon Temps. The system of oppressions within oppression emerges in
statements like the one that Lafayette’s institutionalized mother, Ruby Jean
Reynolds (Alfre Woodard), makes about Jesus. “He’s a Mexican,” she declares,
“but he ain’t raped me yet” (3.2). She calls him a “wetback” with “rotten cheese
teeth” and her son a “faggot.” Racism combines with nativism, not only in
the prejudices by a few African Americans toward Mexican Americans, but
also between native-born whites and immigrant whites. The vampire Pam
De Beaufort (Kristin Bauer van Straten), a former human prostitute from
San Francisco, refers to the exotic dancer Yvetta (Natasha Alam) as an “idiot
migrant” (3.11) even though she knows that Yvetta worked as a cardiologist
in Estonia. The character embodies aspects of the “brain drain” and human
trafficking for prostitution and pornography after the collapse of eastern Eu-
rope. White-human privilege benefits both men and women. When discussing
whether to report Sookie’s murder of the werewolf Debbie Pelt (Brit Morgan)
to the police, Lafayette advises Sookie that self-defense is always believable from
white women. The scene evokes the requisite whiteness to access the rights
of “stand your ground” laws in places like Arizona, Florida, and Texas, where
use of “deadly force” as self-defense is permitted without the “duty to retreat.”
Racism lingers below the surface of everyday interactions, exploding in
moments of tension. Visual references to slavery occur when Lafayette is held
prisoner under Fangtasia, shackled at the neck and ankles (2.2) in a state that
Sookie describes as “chained up like an animal” (2.4). The explicit visual and
narrative reference to the iconography of the Middle Passage is clearly distin-
guished from shackles as a fetish object in “extreme sex.” Tara’s very name evokes
the historical imprint of slavery on African American populations, conjuring
MGM/Selznick’s plantation fantasy Gone with the Wind (dir. Victor Fleming,
1939) and the practice among slave owners to name their slaves after themselves.
When she questions the justice in the police shooting of her African American
boyfriend Benedict “Eggs” Talley (Mehcad Brooks), Arlene assumes that Tara
is trying to manipulate the history of slavery and racism to her advantage. “I
hate it when they make everything about race,” she says. Tara is killed in the
crossfire as Sookie tries to protect herself from Debbie Pelt. Once Pam “makes”
Tara a vampire, she puts her to work at Fangtasia. “So, I’m your slave,” Tara
says when she learns that “makers” can command their children to do anything.
Pam nods, and Tara mumbles that “things fucking stay the same,” equating
vampirism with things that only partly equalize opportunities and seldom undo
historical inequalities. When the shopkeeper, Tracy (Anastasia Ganias), accuses
Tara of being “uppity,” Pam prevents Tara from harming Tracy. Pam repeats
the racist term but inflects it with self-consciousness. Pam tells Tara that she
is proud of her in the way that a human is proud of a “well-trained dog” and
rewards her by “glamouring” Tracy into becoming Tara’s “blood slave” (5.7).
Flipping racial tropes satisfies Tara’s hunger, but fails to nourish her.
Shifting into Interspecies Ethics
A common device in vampire film and television is to humanize vampires by

having them substitute animal blood for human blood.23 An alternative is
synthetic blood. Daybreakers (dir. Spierig Brothers, 2009) imagines a vampire
dystopia in a global blood crisis, worsened by a terrifying newspaper headline:
“German Blood Substitute Fails.” While the film explores the politics of scar-
city and state policies of austerity, True Blood explores a politics of interspecies
relationality facilitated by the GMO of TruBlood, which allows vampires to
become a noncarnivorous species. Vampires are typically more “humane”
to animals than humans, who consume animal flesh as burgers, steaks, and
gumbo at Merlotte’s, asserting anthropocentrism through the “sexual politics
of meat.”24 Lafayette prepares animal corpses for Sookie to serve to flesh-eating
humans. Even the shapeshifter Sam, who transforms into horses, dogs, and
mice, sees no problem with serving “beef,” “pork,” and “chicken.” The most
humane werewolf Alcide feeds on rabbits and squirrels when in wolf form.
Apart from one reference by the shapeshifter Suzanne McKittrick (Christina
Moore) to shifting into a hen to understand industrial farming (4.2), human
and supernatural characters show little awareness of the treatment of nonhu-
man animals, perhaps suggesting an impasse to True Blood’s exploration of

the right to rights for other species—one of the “bad things” outlined in the
series’ theme song. Although his methods are unethical, Russell is driven by
concern over humans destroying the planet, something evident to him in the
foul odor of air and diminished flavor of human blood.
Although the series does not go so far as to advocate for animal and en-
vironmental rights, it questions the limitation of rights to humans, often by
placing humanism’s universal signifier—the white-male-human—in a relatively
unfamiliar position as disempowered. Jason and his girlfriend, Amy Burley
(Lizzy Caplan), do bad things when they kidnap gay-white-male-vampire Ed-
die Gauthier (Stephen Root) to satisfy their V addiction (1.9). In captivity, the
social privileges of queer white masculinity diminish until Eddie’s existence
resembles ones typically reserved by humans for female animals like cows,
goats, or camels held captive for milk or chickens for eggs. White-male humans
struggle to think outside anthropocentric terms. Jason speculates whether Sam
would be able to eat his own eggs were he to shift into the form of a chicken
(2.11). He does not allow his thinking about Sam-as-chicken to carry over into
thinking about the right to rights for chickens. Jason and Hoyt are amused
when they meet recent NYU graduates Jen (Thea Brooks) and Missy (C. C.
Sheffield), who plan to specialize in dog psychology at veterinary school (3.1).
Jason and Hoyt participate unconsciously in an unacknowledged speciesism
that aligns “animals” with machines—mere objects outside the protection of the
state’s natural law and, moreover, outside the protection of humanism—that is,
“before the law” in Cary Wolf ’s argument.25 “Mainstreaming” is not prompted
by greater social acceptance of difference by humans; rather, it is pursued when
the Yakanomo Corporation develops a synthetic substitute for human blood.
As a GMO, TruBlood is unnatural, an artificial species of blood that facilitates
a seemingly unnatural and artificial interspecies community. Human manipula-
tions of nature have an unintended and unforeseen consequence of revealing
another sentient species with which humans share the planet.
Supernatural species train attention to naturalized assumptions about socially
and legally defined definitions of what passes as “natural” or is legally defined
as a “Natural person.” The modern nation-state imagines its national body in
exclusively human forms and terms. The question of animal rights is intro-
duced in the series when Sam’s brother, Tommy Mickens (Marshall Allman),
and stepmother, Melinda (J. Smith-Cameron), are forced by Sam’s stepfather,
the “dogman” Joe Lee (Cooper Huckabee), to shift into pit bulls and perform
in dogfights. Scenes of dogfighting showcase human cruelty toward animals
and recall the opening of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) in which the
young, university-educated, African American protagonist is humiliated by old

white men who make him box for their entertainment. True Blood explores the
legacies of the racialized animalization of African Americans by examining an
illegal sport that is now mostly associated with validation of white masculinity
among working-class men in the South.26 Elsewhere in the series, dogfighting
also centers on establishing and confirming honor and status, particularly
among the werewolves of the historical Confederate stronghold of Shreveport,
Mississippi. Werewolves are hirsute, aggressively masculinist, and working
class. They wear denim jeans and sleeveless shirts to display their tattoos, and
they ride motorbikes. They are the inverse to the feminized werewolf Oz (Seth
Green) in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (creator Joss Whedon), whose monthly
cycle of transformations on the full moon is compared by his white-female-
human girlfriend Willow (Alyson Hannigan) to her own menstrual cycle.27
Female werewolves in True Blood are animalized and sexualized, with Debbie
Pelt becoming a V addict and trying to kill Sookie. Fighting Alcide’s father,
Jackson (Robert Patrick), to his death, Marcus Bozeman (Daniel Buran) be-
comes the new pack master. He terrorizes his ex-wife, the shapeshifter Luna
Garza (Janina Gavankar). After killing Marcus, Alcide refuses to honor him
according to the request of Marcus’s mother, Martha (Dale Dickey), by eating
Marcus’s flesh, as she and the other werewolves do. Werewolves are fiercely
protective of their pack and follow their pack master unconditionally. “Packs
ain’t a democracy,” as Alcide explains (3.5). They enslave themselves to Russell
for fear of annihilation as a species.
Werewolves in True Blood reproduce through impregnation, not infection
like Deleuze and Guattari’s werewolves, and thus they do not offer a becoming-
animal in their transformations. With their transformation from human to
wolf, they do not destabilize human–nonhuman hierarchies; instead, they
mostly reproduce the asymmetries of master–pet relations. Comparably, the
relationship between vampires and werewolves suggests an anthropocentric
space and moment of when species meet. With the exception of Alcide,
werewolves submit themselves like “dogs” to Russell. He tames wolves into
dogs, selecting weaker wolves amenable to domestication and dependency by
rewarding them with his blood in a strange perversion of Pavlov’s experiment
that is completely at odds with Haraway’s conception of “companion species”
for symbiotic relationships and “significant otherness” that unmoor notions
of independent beings and ontological difference.28
Although the vampires on True Blood cannot transmogrify into bats, wolves,
or rats, Sam shifts into the shape of birds and mice to escape attack and in-
filtrate locked rooms. He most frequently shifts into the shape of a border
collie, becoming a domesticated dog who protects Sookie from vampires and
barks in his sleep. During his brief relationship with Daphne Landry (Ashley
Jones), she tells him that her “go-to shift” is the form of a pig (2.6). The figure
of the shapeshifter suggests fluidities between human and nonhuman animal
form. Shapeshifters move between forms to suggest a different organization
of nonhuman animals, one that recognizes each species for its own natural
capacities and naturalized relationships with humans. Birds can fly, rats can
crawl into small spaces, horses can run through the woods, and dogs have been
recognized as human’s “best friend.” In some ways, True Blood invites audience
to contemplate ways that naturalized discourses of humanism and democracy
mask anthropocentrism.
Unmasking Humanism as Speciesism
Frantz Fanon’s critique of the “old humanism” and the need for a “new hu-
manism” anticipates directions in posthumanism. In Peau noir, masques blancs
(1952), he analyzes the detrimental aspects of “the evolved” (les évolués), who
hide their “black skin” (peau noir) behind “white masks” (masques blancs).29 If
the black skin is itself seen as a colonial construct, one that is often inflected
with animalizing tropes of bestiality and savagery, then the white mask might
be understood as a colonizing construct for anthropocentric humanism. Neel
Ahuja proposes the term animal mask that “appropriates the rhetoric of ani-
malization to reveal its ongoing racial, neocolonial, or ecological legacies.”30
In True Blood, masks with human faces figure as animal masks, concealing and
revealing the patriarchal structures of anthropocentric whiteness. When Jason
lacks money to buy V, Lafayette gets him to dance wearing only “tighty whitey”
underpants and a Laura Bush mask, parodying rumors of the youthful cocaine
habits of George W. and Laura Bush to highlight their antidemocratic reforms
(1.3). In other instances, particularly the Barack Obama masks worn by the
“bigots” who shoot shapeshifters (5.5–6), human-faced masks reveal the rac-
ism, sexism, and speciesism that emerge with the permanent destabilization of
white-male-human as universal signifier. At other moments, the series parodies
naturalized assumptions about masks when characters mask their human iden-
tities as supernatural—war veteran/fry cook Terry as a zombie, wicca/waitress
Holly Cleary (Lauren Bowles) as fairy—for Halloween at Merlotte’s (4.12).
True Blood features no white-male-human ideal. White-male-human char-
acters are defeated, injured, or incompetent. They are adrift in a world that is
not only multicultural but supernatural. White-male-human privilege is a “lost
cause.” Jason becomes a V-addict, member of the Fellowship, and hostage to
a clan of incestuous werepanthers before tracing his problems to the psycho-

logical damage of sleeping with his schoolteacher. Jason’s best friend Hoyt is
socially awkward, joining a hate group of bigots after a failed love affair with
the vampire Jessica. Andy Bellefleur (Chris Bauer) becomes sheriff of Renard
Parish through trickery. Seduced by the fae Mourella (Kristina Anapau) though
“more comfortable [in a relationship] with someone of the same species”
(5.11), he fathers a litter of four half-fae daughters like Sookie (5.12). Even
the oldest white-male-human character, Sheriff Dearborne, resigns from public
service because of exhaustion from not being a white-male-human hero—and
later engages in antivampire hatred. The series parodies the hypocrisy of a US
democratic system, designed by white-male-humans for white-male-humans,
when Lafayette sells his body and V to congressional candidate David Finch
(John Prosky), who campaigns as antivampire, antigay, and antidifference. No
white-male humans are beyond reproach, not even former presidents. A scene
in Fangtasia shows a caricature of the former US president George W. Bush as a
vampire, sucking blood from the neck of the Statue of Liberty (1.4), an image
that first appeared on a 2004 cover of the Village Voice and now circulates as
an Internet meme.31 By destabilizing the privileges of white-male humanness,
True Blood perhaps seeks to encourage white audiences to empathize with how
the unearned privileges of whiteness continue to oppress anyone who cannot
claim them.
The displacement of white-male-human privilege allows Sookie to think in
feminist terms about things like ownership over her body. Bill and Eric might
fight over possession of Sookie’s body, and Eric may even take possession of her
house, but Sookie’s body remains her own. Wearing a tight Merlotte’s T-shirt
and micro-shorts, she challenges people to look her in the eyes as she reads
their thoughts. Sookie is not like the vampire slayer Buffy Summers (Sarah
Michelle Gellar) in Buffy the Vampire Slayer with its seven seasons of stories
about “white vigilante youths against people of color in the name of civiliza-
tion,” as Kent Ono observes.32 Buffy’s “girl power” was often empowered by
disempowering nonwhite characters with racist slurs and racial violence. Sookie
is not “just a (white) girl” but mixed, half-human and half-fae, and remixed by
imbibing vampire blood.
If Arabo-Islamic-looking demons are among the calculated “security risks,”
then an uncalculated risk is a group of “bigots,” who hide their faces behind
Barack Obama masks and chant “yes, we can,” mocking one of the campaign
slogans for Obama’s first presidential election as they shoot shapeshifters
(5.5–6).33 They feel as though they live in a world in which “it’s some sort of
crime now being a regular old human!” They kidnap Jessica and encourage Hoyt
Figure 4. to kill her because “it ain’t murder,”

Lafayette videos Jason dancing in Laura Bush
mask, True Blood 1.3 (2008).
since “she’s already dead.” Mentioned
in dialogue, the series’ “Keep American
Human” website (www.keepamericahuman.com/) reproduces traditional anti-
immigrant misinformation and includes fake amateur videos.34 With titles such
as “Makin’ Soup Outta Supes,” they evoke the war pornography associated
with Abu Ghraib prison. The bigots follow a “dragon” in the tradition of the
Ku Klux Klan, yet theirs is a woman, Sweetie Des Arts (Jennifer Hasty), who
becomes retired Sheriff Dearborne’s extramarital lover and attempts to have
Sookie and Hoyt fed alive to her pigs. The series situates her hatred within
individual psychology rather than social structures when Sookie “sees” Sweetie’s
humiliating memories of being overweight and unpopular in school.
The bigots respond to the destabilization of white-male-privilege with
speciesism inflected with sexism and racism by appropriating the prodemoc-
racy rhetoric of the Obama–Biden campaign toward antidemocratic ends, a
violent version of the logic of depoliticizing appropriation of the expression
“Right on!” from a speech by Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale into the
BIC Corporation’s “Write on!” campaign for selling ballpoint pens that Stuart
Ewen describes.35 They effectively blame the first African American president
for their circumstances, but they are more complicated than “simple” rac-
ists in the binary terms of the Old South. The inclusion of a token African
American member, Tyrese (Johnny Ray Gill), among the “Barack Obamas”
suggests the ways that speciesism dislodges racism in a postmulticultural era.
Figure 5. Unlike one drop of “black blood,” which

Shape shifter–hunting bigots in Barack
classified white-looking bodies as black
Obama masks, True Blood 5.1 (2012).
under Jim Crow, one “black” character does
not transform the group of mostly white-male-human bigots into an African
American gang. Instead, the token black character reveals the ever-shifting
shape of race in postmulticultural Hollywood. Tyrese is “free” to join the
“regular old humans,” who were invariably white-male-human persons before
vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters, and other supernatural species entered
public knowledge. Difference between humans and vampires diminishes the
difference by race between humans.
Speculating on Road Kill and Going Feral
Nonhuman animals have been central figures in dehumanizing vampires.

Whereas the vampires of eastern European folklore were largely reanimated
corpses, vampires in literature often drew equally on associations with lizards,
bats, and rats. Among the dead animals in True Blood’s opening credits are
an alligator skull, decomposing fox, and bloody corpse of an opossum likely
killed by a careless human driver. The opossum perhaps unintentionally re-
calls the opossums in Hollywood’s first vampire films, the English-language
Dracula (dir. Tod Browning, 1931) and the Spanish-language Drácula (dir.
George Melford, 1931), which, along with scorpions and armadillos, relocate
the Castle Dracula from eastern Europe to Southern California.36 The opos-
sums also reinforce fears of contagion, infection, and contamination, as well
as the urgency for the control of a potential public-health crisis regardless of
human-rights violations. The dead opossum in the True Blood opening-credit
sequence underscores that nonhuman animals have few rights, particularly

“wild” animals. Intercut into a sequence of images that select exaggerated
iterations of the sexual and religious practices of humans, the unmourned
corpse becomes an exaggerated example of anthropocentrism that underscores
the selectively democratic working of the United States. The dead opossum is
among the most vulnerable sentient creatures with no possibility of protection
under state laws or the faith of religious salvation.
Wild animals like alligators, foxes, and opossums function outside the an-
thropocentrism of “improvement” by domestication. Feral animals, as Brian
Luke explains, are “formerly domesticated animals but now occupying a semi-
wild state on the boundaries of hierarchical civilization,” so that by adopting the
position of feral animals, “animal liberation is not furthered by imposing controls
(‘reason’ over ‘natural’ indifference), but by breaking through the controls on
human-animal connection to which we are subject” to become “a process of
human moral development.”37 Whether being “made” vampire is the equivalent
to going feral remains to be seen. Before she is “made” vampire, Tara recovers
from another setback when the maenad Maryann lures her into a realm that
is perhaps closer to a “going feral” than a becoming-animal. Maryann beguiles
Bon Temps’s human residents with sexual energy and self-destructive violence,
so that even its most sexually repressed citizens ecstatically perform what they
would ordinarily consider debaucheries. Maryann is outed by the shapeshifter
Daphne as one of Dionysus’s maenads. She is known by other names: Kali,
Isis, Gaia; Dionysus, by the name of Satan. Greek mythology is remixed with
Hollywood interpretations of Egyptian, Hindu, and Christian ones.
Like some humans, Maryann follows one master to the exclusion of seeing
interdependencies between species. In the manner of classical European orgies
to Dionysus, Maryann dons a bull mask to look like a Minotaur. She places
her hands into the ground, transforming them into claws. She is not, however,
a becoming-animal. She murders humans, animals, and even supernaturals
when they threaten or betray her. She feeds Tara and Eggs a meal of Daphne’s
heart, adding cannibalism to the repertoire of inhumane tropes culled from
the ancient depths of (European) human civilization. She hopes to satisfy her
god by feeding him the heart of the shapeshifter Sam and sacrificing herself.
At the same time, Maryann’s powers include an ability to transform a reality
that would be defined by normative conventions as a filthy mess into one that
could be defined as a beautiful paradise. Covered in mulch, moss, insects, and
reptiles, the interior of Sookie’s house begins to resemble the swamps of the
Louisiana bayou. It also comes to resemble Jim Clifford’s photograph of a
“dog,” imagined amid a “burned-out redwood stump covered with redwood
needles, mosses, ferns, lichens—and even a little California bay laurel” that
he and Haraway encountered “during a December walk in one of the damp
canyons of Santa Cruz.”38 As Haraway observes, “so many species, so many
kinds, meet in Jim’s dog.” Maryann promotes symbiosis that includes the
beauty and ugliness of life and death alike; she frightens anyone advocating
for a purely cultured approach to nature, those who aim at species “improved”
by means other than natural selection. Maryann untames and makes feral.
Although Dionysus might liberate through intoxication, frenzy, and wild-
ness, he is a Greek god and therefore born from the same traditions that pro-
duced democracy as an exclusive institution to which woman and slaves need
not apply. Maryann is ultimately murdered by two white men to maintain
the patriarchy. Sam transforms into a white bull, which Maryann mistakes for
her god. Sam impales her with his bullhorns and removes her heart with his
human hands. According to the conventions of Hollywood, the real victim
of Maryann is an African American man: Eggs is shot to death by Jason, who
misreads his confession to Andy as a threat to the sheriff ’s deputy. Eggs becomes
yet another dead black body for which there will be no justice. Feral animals
might challenge patriarchy, but African Americans still suffer: Eggs with his
life, and Tara with agony over his death.
In True Blood the postmulticultural United States is really a postcolonial
United States where the (colonial) past continues to shape social relations and
political representation in the (postcolonial) present; that is, the legacies of
slavery, servitude, and genocide operate alongside the racial/ethnic and religious
profiling in economic policies at home and new-imperial wars abroad. In some
ways, Maryann’s narcissism and incapacity for self-reflection ask audiences to
consider the conceit of European civilization as mother to democracy, particu-
larly as it figures itself as “the West” to include settler colonies.39 Democracy’s
rule by the demos (people) is contingent on classification of selected humans as
people. US law classifies some people as “persons.” The AVL wants “vampire
equality,” that is, equality with humans. It wants to destabilize the anthro-
pocentrism of the state’s constitutional legal system. More substantially, the
authority wants assimilation that is multidirectional insofar as it lobbies for
the state to change its definition of citizenship to include vampires alongside
“natural persons” (humans), destabilizing what it means to be “natural” under
law. Thinking in terms of rule (-cracy) for multiple species—human and non-
human, that is, more than just humans (“Natural person”) and corporations
(“legal persons”)—might contribute to democratization beyond humans-
only democracy. For Deleuze and Guattari, becomings-animal are modes
of relationality, ones that affect both species like the wasp and the orchid in
their example. By inviting us to imagine interdependencies between species
in supernatural terms, True Blood asks us to consider ones in real life, inviting
us to think interspecies relations toward justice for all humans, regardless of
race, sex, nativity, or religion, and the right to rights for nonhuman species.
Notes
I thank Carla Freccero, Claire Jean Kim, and the anonymous readers at American Quarterly for their
generous comments and suggestions; Eric Zinner for his support of my work; and Sheetal Majithia
for her insightful comments on an early draft.
1. Supernatural species also appear in Bewitched (1964–72), I Dream of Jeannie (1965–70), Dark Shadows
(1966–71), Forever Knight (1989–96), Dark Shadows (1991), Kindred: The Embraced (1996), Sabrina,
the Teenaged Witch (1996–2003), Charmed (1998–2006), Ultraviolet (1998), Blood Ties (2006–7),
Blade: The Series (2006), The Dresden Files (2007), Moonlight (2007–8), Being Human (2008–present),
Valemont (2009), The Gates (2010), The Walking Dead (2010–present), Teen Wolf (2011–present), and
the US remake of Being Human (2011–present).
2. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
3. Ali Behdad, A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2005), xii–xiii.
4. I expand this analysis in “Blood, Bodies, and Borders: Immigration and Globalization through Trans-
national Hollywood’s Vampires” (book manuscript under review).
5. Una Chaudhuri, “Animals Rites: Performing beyond the Human,” in Critical Theory and Performance,
ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2010), 508.
6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 237–38.
7. Ibid., 233.
8. Ibid., 275.
9. Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
10. “About DAR,” DAR National Society, 2005, www.dar.org/natsociety/whoweare.cfm.
11. See Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106.8 (1993): 1707–91.
12. Charlaine Harris, Living Dead in Dallas (New York: Ace Books, 2002), 144.
13. Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 249.
14. Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic (New
York: New York University Press, 2012), 1.
15. See Ariela J. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2010).
16. The novels play with blood-quantum theories. In All Together Dead (New York: Ace Books, 2007), Eric
gives Sookie enough of his blood for her to qualify “hemoglobin-wise” as “being close to a vampire,”
but she maintains her human privilege (215); in fact, she seldom worries about her “fate” because she
was raised a “free United States human citizen” (210).
17. Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2009), 12, 32.
18. See Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,” in Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip
Parameshwar Gaonkar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 1–23.
19. Other nonvampire characters claim indigenous ancestry. Sam falls in love with the shapeshifter Luna,
who claims Mexican and Navajo ancestry, though has no substantial connection to either. Jesus’s
grandfather Don Bartolo also claims indigenous ancestors.
20. The Iraq storyline is set in Al Anbar Province, where US troops fought “Sunni insurgents.” US civilians
began to recognize Anbar after reports of massacres of Iraqi civilians in Fallujah even before reports
of sexualized and racialized torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib near Baghdad.
21. The fifth film in the Twilight franchise, Breaking Dawn, Part 2 (dir. Bill Condon, 2012), parades a
century of Hollywood stereotypes of Native Americans, Amazonians, Egyptians, and Romanians, all
of whom are stuck in an ancient past, so as to highlight the national exceptionalism of native-born
whiteness of its protagonists.
22. Similarly, The Vampire Diaries recasts Bonnie as African American.
23. In Interview with the Vampire (dir. Neil Jordan, 1994), the reluctant vampire Louis (Brad Pitt) repulses
his maker Lestat (Tom Cruise) by drinking the blood of rats, tossing their desiccated corpses with
the same indifference that Lestat shows to his human victims. In Twilight (dir. Catherine Hardwicke,
2008), the vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) practices “vegetarianism,” consuming only
animal blood. By Breaking Dawn, Part 2, Bella (Kristen Stewart) instinctively craves the human blood
of a mountain climber but settles instead for the animal blood of a mountain lion—and even saves
a deer from becoming the lion’s meal in the process. The scene presents Bella as exceptional and the
mountain lion as unexceptional: she overcomes her “animal instincts,” whereas the mountain lion is
imprisoned by carnivorism. The film animalizes “the animal” in precisely the ways that anthropocen-
trism requires. In Harris’s novel, Definitely Dead (2006), the witch Amelia Broadway accidently turns
her lover Bob into a cat, though the novel does not really explore what becoming-act might mean in
nonanthropocentric terms.
24. Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, 20th anniversary
ed. (New York: Continuum, 2010), 48.
25. Cary Wolf, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University
of Chicago, 2013), 3–10.
26. Rhonda Evans, Deann Kalich (Gauthier), and Craig J. Forsyth, “Dogfighting: Symbolic Expression
and Validation of Masculinity,” in The Animal Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings,
ed. Linda Kalof and Amy Fitzgerald (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 209.
27. In the Ginger Snaps films (2000–4), the misogynist implications of this casting of menstruation as
animalization is purportedly undercut by the exceptionalism of Ginger (Katharine Isabelle), who does
not want to endanger others, especially the white-male-human others on whose bodies she has fed.
In Angel, the werewolf Nina Ash (Jenny Mollen), who transforms from human to wolf for three days
each month, is hunted by humans who eat the meat of exotic animals.
28. Donna J. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago:
Prickly Paradigm, 2003).
29. Frantz Fanon, Black Sin, White Mask, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 2008).
30. Neel Ahuja “Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World,” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 558.
31. See Matt Herber, “2004 Village Voice Cover Makes Cameo on HBO Vampire Series,” New York
Observer, September 30, 2008, http://observer.com/2008/09/2004-ivillage-voicei-cover-makes-cameo-
on-hbo-vampire-series/.
32. Kent A. Ono, “To Be a Vampire on Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Race and (‘Other’) Socially Marginalizing
Positions on Horror TV,” in Fantasy Girls: Gender in the New Universe of Science Fiction and Fantasy
Television, ed. Elyce Rae Helford (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 168.
33. On October 27, 2008, the Huffington Post linked an article titled “Obama Mask Listed as ‘Terrorist
Costume’ on Amazon” from the fictional Oxdown Gazette created more than fifty years ago by the
National Council for the Training of Journalists.
34. In their other realm, the fae claim to be “refugees,” fearing attack by vampires and returning mostly
to beguile humans into impregnating them to replenish their population. “My people were rapists,”
Sookie observes (5.7).
35. Stuart Ewen, All-Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic
Books/HarperCollins, 1988), 251.
36. Opossums, armadillos, and scorpions add what the animalizing prosthetics did in F. W. Murnau’s
Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens/Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922). An animalized char-
acterization of Count Orlok’s (Max Schreck) psychology is visualized externally according to the
traditions of German Expressionism.
37. Brian Luke, “Taming Ourselves or Going Feral: Towards a Nonpatriarchal Metaethic of Animal Lib-
eration,” in Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Exploration, ed. Carol J. Adams and Josephine
Donovan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 312–13.
38. Ibid., 5.
39. Dionysus was worshiped as late as the eleventh century BCE, with “democracy” not becoming a term
until the fifth century BCE.
Race, Class, Gender, and Nation in Cultures of Dog Rescue and Dog Fighting | 689
“Becoming in Kind”: Race, Class, Gender,

and Nation in Cultures of Dog Rescue and
Dogfighting
Harlan Weaver
I
n September 2002 I adopted a “pit bull” I named Haley. Rescued from
euthanasia at the hands of animal control, Haley made the rounds of
several foster homes before our meeting on a sunny San Francisco street.
She proceeded to accompany me through the many life changes of a twenty-
something graduate student: marching with me in protests and Pride parades,
moving with me to Santa Cruz and then back to the Bay Area, and staying by
my side as we walked through numerous public spaces. This last element of
our relationship merits some discussion, because during our time together, I
transitioned from female to male. While the social is always part of the personal
in trans, transgender, and transsexual experiences, in my case Haley’s presence
deeply shapes my world. In moments when my appearance has been at its most
liminal, when I have felt vulnerable as a visibly transgender person, she has
ensured my safety. Concurrently, my whiteness, queer identity, and middle-
class status encourage other humans to read Haley as less threatening; in my
presence, she is perceived as less dangerous. Each of us shapes who the other is.
This enmeshment of our identities exemplifies what I term “becoming in kind.”
Becoming in kind signals the deep imbrications of identity and being that
many relationships between humans and nonhuman animals entail. Consider
gender—as the above story reveals, Haley helps make my gender expression
possible, for my gender is shaped by the space between us, just as her experi-
ences of species and breed are shaped by my race, class, and sexuality. The
“kind” of becoming in kind indexes the role of these identity categories in
relationships between humans and nonhuman animals. “Becoming” indicates
the nonstatic, processual nature of these relationships, a sense of negotiating
togetherness as an ongoing process, a becoming like that described by Rosi
Braidotti as “an affect that flows, . . . a composition, a location that needs to
be constructed together with, that is to say in the encounter with, others.”1
Becoming in kind speaks to the joint building of a sense of togetherness, a we,
and the kind of beings we become.

In attending to the ways togetherness shapes who we become, becoming

in kind has stakes in ontology. In this sense, becoming in kind is inflected by
Donna Haraway’s “becoming with”: a “dance of relating” in which “all the
dancers are redone through the patterns they enact,” processes of human/
nonhuman animal encountering in which each becomes “jointly available” and
through which each emerges changed.2 Becomings have a rich philosophical
inheritance, and Haraway’s becoming with is deliberately set against another
becoming: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “becoming animal.” For Deleuze
and Guattari, becoming animal elucidates connections that challenge patri-
linear genealogies, connections with others produced not by resemblance or
filiation but by alliance.3 These becomings are ways of being that bring into
doubt individual subjectivities through relatedness without descent, kinship
despite kind. However, Haraway is critical of the way Deleuze and Guattari
write against “individuated animals, family pets” as participants in modes of
oedipalized subjectivity they abhor, which she sees as a commitment to the
sublime altogether disconnected from the ordinary fleshly relationships between
humans and nonhuman animals.4 And while my own sense of becoming is also
invested in unexpected kinships, I find that Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming
animal misses the ways that ontologies and identities are often mixed, for it fails
to address how a statement about one’s being, such as “I am transgender,” can
be a statement about one’s categorical kind that is caught up in and shaped by
one’s encounters with nonhuman animals. In this sense, my becoming in kind
is indebted to Haraway, Deleuze, and Guattari, but by pairing becoming with
kind I aim to connect the ontological stakes of jointly crafted ways of being
and unexpected kinships with the identity categories of larger social worlds.
Becoming in kind provides an important way to think through the rela-
tionship among categories such as species, breed, race, class, and gender. My
use of kind indexes it as category and divider, as a taxonomy that shapes and
is shaped by these connections. Deleuze, Guattari, and Haraway linger in this
sense of kind, for it is a kind rooted in difference rather than analogy. In this
sense, my pairing of becoming and kind deliberately contrasts with the paral-
lels introduced by animal advocates between, for example, species and race.5
My sense of kind also contrasts with the notion of difference inherent in the
introduction of the term speciesism by Richard Ryder and its subsequent use by
Peter Singer, which relies on analogies with racism and sexism as explanatory
mechanisms.6 What I would like to suggest by thinking through and reading
for becoming in kind is an alternate way to understand the connections among
species distinctions and human-specific categories. Instead of parallels or analo-
gies, becoming in kind describes intersections. These intersections reveal how
relationships between humans and nonhuman animals provide the conditions

of possibility for specific experiences of race, gender, class, sexuality, species,
and breed. Because of this focus, becoming in kind has the potential to change
how we understand the relationships among the categories that define humans
and nonhuman animals in a way that has important implications not only
for animal studies but also for scholarship invested in critical race, feminist,
and queer theories.
The specific relationships among humans and nonhuman animals that
shape this writing are those among “pit bulls,” dog rescuers, and dog fighters.
Debates about so-called dangerous dogs and dogs perceived to be in danger
provide apt case studies for thinking through the intersections of race, species,
gender, breed, and nation because they reflect social conflicts about identities.
What constitutes danger and in which bodies should it be localized? What
kinds of measures should be taken and at whom should they be aimed? These
and related questions come up all too frequently in debates about pit bulls
and the people connected to them, and it is in this fertile ground that the
enmeshments of human and nonhuman animal identities I name “becomings
in kind” are the easiest to see.
The “Pit Bull”
Any casual Internet search about dangerous dogs today would lead one to
believe that the top contender, what one might term America’s most wanted
dog, is the “pit bull.” I use quotation marks because, despite the fact that it
is a widely used term, there is technically no such thing as a pit bull. Keep-
ing in mind that contemporary dog breeds are regulated and determined by
kennel clubs, not biologists, one can see that this confusion is partly due to
the shifting history of breed politics: the American Kennel Club (AKC), in an
effort to distance its registries from dogs with reputations as fighters, began
to recognize the American Staffordshire Terrier (AmStaf ) in the 1930s, while
the United Kennel Club (UKC) continued to register the American Pit Bull
Terrier (APBT) throughout the twentieth century. Add to this the fact that the
American Dog Breeder’s Association (ADBA) also has a registry for APBTs, and
the confusion as to what exactly pit bull stands for is easy to see. As Malcolm
Gladwell notes, pit bulls are dogs with a “category problem.”7
While many take the term pit bull as a loose indicator of all the breeds noted
above, the question of phenotype, or physical characteristics, complicates mat-
ters. An Internet-based test developed by the pit bull advocate Marcy Setter
illustrates the difficulties of identification: “Find-A-Bull” features a grid of
sixteen dogs ranging from thirty to eighty pounds, all registered members of
bully breeds, all fairly squat, muscular, short-haired.8 Only one of the dogs
is an APBT. Setter’s point, that very few people can accurately identify any
of the pit bull–type breeds just by looking, is compounded by the fact that
many dogs identified as pit bulls or pit bull–type dogs are not registered with
the AKC, UKC, or ADBA at all. For example, dogs identified as pit bulls by
members of communities experiencing conflicts related to dog bites very rarely
have a human around who can or will attest to their parentage, papers, or
bodily correlation to a breed’s ideal phenotype. In this sense, dogs labeled as
pit bulls experience breed as a formulation that lies in the eye of the beholder,
a variation of “I know it when I see it.” Indeed, a recent study contrasting
perceptions of breed by workers at dog adoption agencies and animal shelters
with DNA samples showed only 36 percent agreement between the label of pit
bull or pit bull–type and APBT- or AmStaf-specific genomic markers.9 Thus,
while dog breeds are regulated by kennel clubs, popular perceptions of the
ways breed is understood to inhere in physical characteristics, unclear under-
standings of the specifics of those characteristics, and the fuzziness of the term
pit bull itself make for a tricky situation. Then there is the term pit bull–type,
used throughout much of this piece, which attempts to address the category
problems of the term pit bull through the looser “-type” while indicating an
understanding of a kind of being, however loosely identified, shared by both
advocates and foes.10 Of course, a more precise taxonomy would not address
the problem of the dangerous dog as a moral category.
The practice of labeling particular breeds of dogs as dangerous requires some
context. Harold Herzog points out that problems with dogs such as pit bulls
and Rottweilers often reflect an increase in numbers rooted in boom and bust
breed popularity cycles.11 Shifting understandings of breed also affect matters,
as Karen Delise reminds us when she notes that the most dangerous dog of
the nineteenth century was the bloodhound, a dog designated by its purpose
(often the pursuit of escaped slaves), not its appearance.12 Indeed, breed-as-
phenotype began in the twentieth century, in contrast with breed-as-purpose.13
Unfortunately, legal solutions to dog-related problems often perpetuate these
category problems, evident in the passage of breed-specific legislation, or BSL.
BSL ranges from banning particular dog breeds and mandating their eutha-
nasia to requiring muzzles and mandatory fence heights.14 Bans have resulted
in the forcible removal of dogs from homes who are then killed by animal
shelters, as was the case with a 1989 breed ban in Denver, Colorado, where
even elderly dogs who had not experienced any conflicts were subject to seizure
and euthanasia. Mandatory fence heights and related restrictions can also be
prohibitively expensive, making it next-to-impossible for people with lower

incomes to be able to afford to keep their dogs.15 Notably, BSL has also been
documented to be ineffective; the National Canine Research Council points
out that “citizens of Denver continued to suffer a higher rate of hospitalization
from dog-bite related injuries after the breed ban than the citizens of breed-
neutral Colorado counties.”16 Further, while breed bans have been enacted in
a wide range of locales, their logic is universally problematic.
The language of BSL reflects the complexities outlined above to varying
degrees. “Pit bulls,” “pit bull terrier dogs,” “American Pit Bull Terriers,” “Bull
Terriers,” and “pit bull–type dogs” are all targeted in different municipalities.
The addition of “-type” is telling, as are common provisions that name breeds
such as the APBT and AmStaf, followed by the addendum: “or any dog display-
ing the majority of physical traits of any one or more of the above breeds.”17
However, these laws are fairly uniform in attributing danger to dogs because
of breed. For example, Des Moines, Iowa, defines “vicious dog” to include
“the American Staffordshire Bull Terrier and the Pit Bull Terrier.”18 This is to
say, BSL names and labels as innate (and often, unpredictable) the qualities of
danger and viciousness in the bodies of specific kinds of dogs, kinds of dogs
characterized by fairly fuzzy categories.19 In practice, these laws are focused on
dogs with a loose conglomeration of physical characteristics such as “exagger-
ated jaw muscles, heavy necks and shoulders, and large physical mass,” point-
ing to what one might term pit bull profiling.20 BSL produces pit bulls and
pit bull–type dogs as criminalized beings. As Colin Dayan notes, legal rituals
make and unmake particular humans and nonhuman animals, and the legal
rituals clustered around dangerous dogs participate in producing the very kinds
of being they regulate as criminalized by naming them criminal by nature.21
Dangerous Dogs and Race
As my opening vignette makes clear, pit bull identities are not only crafted
through the frequently contested processes outlined above but also shaped by
connections with human-specific categories.22 The most prominent among
these is race. For example, pit bull advocates routinely seize on race-related
language to garner sympathy for their cause. Intent on transporting dogs out
of Denver, Colorado, after the passage of the breed ban, owners and allies
developed what they termed a “pit bull underground railroad,” calling to
mind emancipation from a race-based system of slavery.23 Pit bull proponents
deliberately appropriate terms from race-related struggles, reframing BSL as
“Breed-Discriminatory Legislation” and referring to the practice of differen-
tiating between pit bulls and other dogs as “canine racism.”24 Op-ed pieces
critiquing anti–pit bull activists often introduce parallels between breed stigma
and race: “I’m white, but if an African American or Hispanic person were
to murder my entire family I wouldn’t go to my local paper and call for the
demonization of all African American and Hispanic people.”25 And the recent
case of Lennox, a dog in Ireland who was seized and euthanized for being a pit
bull–type dog, resulted in a flood of pictures on the Internet from advocates
of pit bulls captioned with the phrase “I am Lennox,” a deliberate echo of an
earlier meme of photos of people in hoodies protesting the 2011 killing of
African American youth Trayvon Martin as racist.26
The media also frequently make both implicit and explicit connections
among pit bulls, race, and criminalization. Writers decrying the presence of
pit bulls in urban areas characterize the dogs’ owners as “thugs,” “gangstas,”
and “white trash.”27 Recent stories about dogfighting center on and vilify
prominent African American public figures, such as NFL quarterback Michael
Vick and the rapper DMX. These stories frequently make claims that rap and
hip-hop cultures are central to contemporary social problems related to pit
bulls.28 The language used to describe the dogs also resonates with nineteenth-
century sciences of race. The criminologist Cesare Lombroso’s characterizations
of criminals as being excessively large of face, overly muscled, and possessing
enormous jaws, and Samuel George Morton’s depiction of so-called lower races
as encumbered by protruding jaws both echo the contemporary emphasis on
pit bulls’ strong jaws, heavy muscles, and large physical mass.29
These examples demonstrate how the contemporary production of the
pit bull in the United States as a kind of being frequently relies on, overlaps
with, and connects to human racial categories. Breed histories reflect these
connections, for while APBTs and AmStafs were primarily owned and bred
by white men in the rural southern United States for much of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, in the 1980s there was an influx of urban men of
color into breeding circles.30 In pointing out these connections I am not
positing that pit bulls are themselves racialized, a move that ignores dispari-
ties in histories of violence and species. However, the role of race in pit bull
category construction speaks to this article’s central formulation: “becoming
in kind.” Pit bull figurations actively and continuously connect to and draw
from processes and practices of human racialization. This is especially evident
in a recent and prominent legal case involving pit bulls, dogfighting, and a
famous African American man.
Bad Newz Kennels
The 2007 conviction of Michael Vick on dogfighting charges drew national

attention. A talented African American athlete in a position reserved for white
men for most of the NFL’s history—quarterback—Vick was an important
public figure because of his race long before his conviction. When the federal
government indicted him, stories began to surface of his cruelty to the dogs
he owned, alleging his and his cohort’s involvement in strangling, shooting,
hanging, and electrocuting dogs who would not fight. A media storm followed,
with protests staged against Vick across the country, some of which harked
back to practices of lynching by hanging and burning him in effigy.31 Images
surfaced of Vick spray-painted onto concrete walls in his football uniform,
choking a dog, and in more Internet-based media, shackled to a snarling dog
as if he were enslaved.32 The case was hotly debated along racial lines among
dogfighters as well, many of whom saw in it the denigration of the sport by
street-level style fights known to be staged in urban areas by men of color.33
These images and stories point to how the case shaped public perceptions of
who Vick is and was.
The cultural geographers Glen Elder, Jennifer Wolch, and Jody Emel have
argued that when practices involving animals deemed problematic, such as
dogfighting, “occur in racialized and marginalized places, such as ghetto areas,
the prospects of racialization on the basis of animal practices rise higher.”34 They
point out that “animal bodies have become one site of political struggle over
the construction of cultural difference and help to maintain white American
supremacy.”35 Vick’s conviction by both the judiciary and the court of public
opinion transformed him into a convicted criminal in serious debt with a
major image problem. This transformation, concomitant with his temporary
exile from the elite fraternity of the NFL, changed how people read Vick’s
African American masculinity. In this sense, it was not just his conviction that
transformed public perceptions of Vick but also the relationships with animals
on which his conviction was based.
Jim Gorant’s 2010 New York Times best seller, The Lost Dogs: Michael Vick’s
Dogs and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption, underscores changing perceptions
of Vick in light of race. In his description of Vick, Gorant, a Sports Illustrated
writer, highlights features such as “a strong jaw that made him look as if he had
an underbite,” and culminates in an assertion that Vick’s appearance, “while
handsome, could be fairly described as almost canine.”36 This description codes
Vick as animal-like, othering him in a manner deeply reminiscent of earlier
projects of human racialization through animal likeness.37
Media connected to the dogs taken from Vick’s Bad Newz Kennels also
affected public perceptions of Vick. Gorant’s book, which contains italicized
passages narrated from the viewpoint of one of the dead dogs, is part of a larger
advocacy movement on behalf of the dogs formerly owned by Vick. Initially
understood as “some of the most viciously trained dogs in the country” by
Wayne Pacelle, head of the Humane Society of the United States, the dogs from
Vick’s kennel came to be seen as “Vick-tims.”38 This transformation changed
perceptions of Vick, for the danger initially seen as inhering in breed came
to be localized instead in the person of Vick, an African American man. The
dogs’ transformation from fighters to victims played a central role in altering
public understandings of who Vick was and is by changing the meanings oth-
ers attached to his race and masculinity. These shifting perceptions reveal that
Vick’s relationship with his dogs is a becoming in kind.
Whiteness to the Rescue
Typically, federal, state, and local governments euthanize any and all dogs
involved in a dogfighting bust, including those that work as government in-
formants.39 Indeed, workers at animal shelters commonly call pit bulls seized
from dogfighting operations “kennel trash,” for as they wait for their inevitable
death, they take up shelter space that other adoptable dogs might well use.40
However, the federal government’s decision to permit the dogs involved in the
Vick case to be evaluated, rehabilitated, and, if possible, placed with families
denotes a shift in federal policy that changed the connections the dogs experi-
enced between the category pit bull and race. This is especially apparent in the
rescue narratives about the dogs, for they uniformly emphasize tropes common
to both neoconservative and neoliberal projects of citizenship, recuperating
them into a tacit whiteness.
An Internet video titled “See Them Now” posted by BAD RAP, a pit bull
advocacy group involved in the Vick case, features photos of several of the
postrescue dogs accompanied by a voice-over from Donna Reynolds, the group’s
cofounder.41 Emphasizing that the dogs’ job is to “show America that pit bulls
aren’t monsters,” Reynolds tells us that they “remind us that everyone wants
and needs to be treated as an individual.” Hector, a dog covered with bite scars,
has “wonderful play manners.” Ernie is a big dork who “wants to be friends
with everybody” and happily lives in a home with a child. And Uba, who now
lives with a dog and a cat, knows that “the cat is his boss, and he’s happy to
take on a cat as part of his family.” Gorant uses similar language, pointing to
the dogs’ “dorkiness” and “pure unfiltered love.”42 Much of the literature and
media coverage of the Vick dogs traffics in these tropes: the dogs are almost
uniformly described as happy, unique individuals who are excellent and loving
family members and have good manners. Importantly, this language is also
central to contemporary practices of US citizenship.
Writing at the beginning of the Clinton administration, Lauren Berlant notes
how “the intimate public sphere of the U.S. present tense renders citizenship
as a condition of social membership produced by personal acts and values,
especially acts originating in or directed towards the family sphere.”43 This
agenda continues in contemporary US politics, not just in the neoconserva-
tive “focus on the family” campaign, but also in the push for gay marriage, a
central tactic of which is the deployment of rhetoric and images tying queer
identities into the norms of American kinship practices. The stories of the
Vick dogs reveal how nonhuman animals also participate in these practices of
citizenship. In addition to their goal of finding what rescuers term “forever”
homes and families, the Vick dogs became more literal aspiring citizens, for
one of the main goals for all the dogs is that they pass the Canine Good Citizen
Test.44 Where and how this canine citizenship intersects with the citizen-acts of
family-oriented dog rescuers, and how both parties relate to “tacit whiteness,”
merit further attention.
For Berlant, two figures are central to the discourses of reactionary con-
servative politics: the American fetus and the American child. She calls them
“supericons,” reading them as “the last living American[s] not yet bruised by
history . . . not yet caught up in the confusing identity exchanges made pos-
sible by mass consumption and ethnic, racial, and sexual mixing.” Further,
she notes how both the fetus and the child’s lack of knowledge, agency, and
accountability give them ethical claims on the adult political agents who write
laws and administer resources.45 Not-yet citizens, Berlant’s innocent supericons
require that others advocate on their behalf; unmarked by the categories of dif-
ference so divisive to contemporary US society, they participate in an invisible
racialization, a tacit whiteness.
The rescued and rehabilitated Vick dogs, cleansed of the taint of dogfight-
ing by their rehabilitation, represented as innocent victims, and transformed
into iconic family members, participate in the national public sphere in ways
remarkably similar to Berlant’s supericons. Indeed, the very shift in federal
policy that enabled their initial salvation—and I use the term salvation delib-
erately, as the language of “second chance” runs rampant in their stories—is
a case of adult political agents’ acknowledging their ethical claim on both the
law and the resources at its disposal. Of course, unlike the fetus and the child,
these dogs will never become real US citizens. Rather, in aspiring to pass the
Canine Good Citizen Test, they aim to become good cultural citizens even
as they are unable to act as political citizens. Notably, publicity on behalf of
other rescued pit bull–type dogs deploys similar tropes.
Rescue groups that work with pit bulls routinely describe them as fun-loving,
exuberantly happy, sweet, affectionate dogs who crave human attention.46
Pictures of dogs engaged in cross-species love with humans and other animals
and depictions of dogs as productive members of society abound in this type
of media. For example, stories about dogs who have become certified therapy
dogs are prolific, as in the case of Ruby, a pit bull–type dog who now works
with elderly folks in a nursing home.47 Leo, another Vick dog, earned the
nickname “Dr. Leo” from hospital staff because of “the healing joy he brought
to cancer patients” in his work as a therapy dog.48 Affective labor in the strong
sense, these dogs’ work affirms their place in US American families and homes.
The work of former rescue dogs underscores my central point about the
dogs taken from Vick’s kennels, for the changes they undergo in terms of the
category pit bull rely on changes in their relationship to the categories of race
and nation. No longer partnered with “thugs,” these hardworking canine citi-
zens have been very publicly removed from their position as victims of abuse.
Recoded as “unique individuals” with stories to tell and love to give, these dogs
participate in families in ways that connect them to a tacit, normative whiteness.
They become pit bulls who are committed to the greater social good, pit bulls
with stakes in home-life, pit bulls whose loving families need to advocate for
them to further distance them from the taint of their bad reputation, or “bad
rap.” In living, training, and becoming with the humans who are committed
to their rescue, these dogs undergo alterations in their experience of kind.
On Rescue
The experiences of dog rescuers involved in the Vick case and others like it are
also forms of becoming in kind. Detailing the labor and emotional toll of care
and love in dog rescue, Gorant describes a volunteer who worked with the Vick
dogs during their shelter confinement, Nicole Rattay. Noting that “Rattay was
quickly growing attached to the dogs and this caused her distress, . . . they made
her cry . . . every night,” Gorant sympathizes with Rattay’s admiration for “how
resilient and loving” the dogs were.49 One can join this narrative with that of
the pit bull advocate Ken Foster, who finds that each time he rescues a dog,
he has a puzzling epiphany, “wondering if I’m doing it for them or whether
in rescuing them, I’m actually doing something for myself.”50 Another dog
rescuer, Terry Bain, underscores the power of this connection, noting that dog
rescue can transform your heart, giving it “an even greater capacity to love.”51
The sense of a self made more whole by the act of rescue reflects the ways
that dog rescuers are changed by encounters with their canine charges. The
prominence of the term rescue in their accounts reveals an identity rooted in
salvation. While inflected by religion—one Vick dog adopter, upon meeting
her charge, is moved to help “this beautiful soul”—this salvation also relies
on geography, for it hinges on moving these dogs out of the woods and/or the
streets, out of animal shelters, and into homes.52 David Delaney notes that
the space of home is one among many spaces that race makes, and while the
spaces into which these dogs are moved are inflected by whiteness, as Berlant
makes clear, they are also shaped by class.53 It can be difficult to rent a home
and own any dog in many urban US municipalities, much less a pit bull–type
dog, the looseness of whose category is no impediment to insurers’ denial of
coverage or charging higher rates. These factors reveal that the homes made
more whole by a rescued dog are homes that are themselves made possible by
the financial resources of the middle class. The identities of the animal rescuers
whose hearts and homes are made whole reveal becomings in kind shaped by
class as well as race, changes all the more notable when contrasted with the
writings of white southern dog men.54
Becoming Dog Men
Dogfighters, or dog men, are seen as the diabolical enemy by dog rescuers,
humane organizations, law enforcement, and most animal lovers. While con-
temporary dogfighting involves dog men from both urban and rural contexts,
often divided along racial lines, throughout much of the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries most American dog men were white men located in the
southern United States. Importantly, these men were in conversation with each
other through underground breed magazines and semisecret publications in
obscure presses. Because it is difficult to gain access to the more web-based
contemporary discussions, I focus here on writings from underground publi-
cations dating from the 1970s through the 1990s.55 These writings reveal an
alternate formation of becoming in kind, one with stakes in a different kind
of whiteness, but one, like that of the rescuers, cemented by kinship and love.
The unique individual pit bull so prominent in stories about the Vick dogs
and pro–pit bull media is central to the narratives of dog men and game dog
fanciers. Ed Faron and Chris Faron, the authors of The Complete Gamedog,
describe their mistake in matching Pinky in terms of ignoring her individuality:
“Instead of looking at each dog as an individual, a lot of the time we would
tend to assume that if a dog acted hot and was at least 18 months old it was
‘ready.’”56 They go on to exhort their readers to tailor their conditioning and
testing to the individual dog. Elaborate accounts of individual dogs’ matches

and detailed descriptions of particularly prized dogs’ personalities further this
emphasis, especially as such tales figure prominently in the readings of indi-
vidual dogs critical to dog men’s genealogies, both human and nonhuman.
Like rescued dogs, fighting dogs participate in human families. Writing
of the loss of Mean Jolene in a match against Sadie, the Farons describe not
only how much they loved her and how they believe that Jolene died doing
what she loved doing but also how they value her as a family member, stat-
ing: “We bid farewell to you, Jolene, and feel privileged to have been able
to call you one of our family.”57 Another white southern dog man, Thomas
Garner, proudly displays an 11” by 14” picture of his stud dog “Ch Pedro”
beside his children’s pictures on his office wall.58 And while game dogs’ names
are often prefaced by the kennel in which they were bred—Wildside’s Mean
Jolene, for example—it is also common for them to retain the patronymic of
their breeder, as in the Boudreaux line of dogs. The language of these naming
practices often crosses human and nonhuman animals in additional ways, as
in the following description of Roadblock’s Grand Champion: “Joey beat three
top dogmen with good dogs for his championship, and then went on to beat
two champions and a grand champion for his next three matches.”59 Because
dog men retain these patronymics to track dogs’ genealogies, and because dogs
are often gifted to or fostered by other dog men, the dogs cement a kinship
network among dogfighters and dog men. Dog men’s relationships with their
dogs also explicitly incorporate an affect often tied to family: love.
Bobby Hall, an old-timer dog man, describes a moment when a woman
asks Earl Tudor, one of his idols in the world of dog men, “‘Just what kind
of S.O.B. does it take to fight dogs?’ And Earl replied, ‘Lady, it takes a man
who loves dogs very much.’”60 The touch of this love comes through in Hall’s
writing about handling, the job of the person in the fighting pit with the dog.
Describing a conversation with Tudor during which Hall holds a dog, Hall
relates Tudor’s words to him: “I have watched you and you have picked up
and handled each dog as if you were in the pit with them.” Hall replies, “It
makes me feel closer to them.” Hall’s description of Tudor’s response is telling:
“Peering gently over the top of his glasses, he cleared his throat so the emotion
feeling would permit him to reply in a low church tone and with tenderness he
said ‘Bobby, it makes them feel closer to you, too.’” Tudor then congratulates
Hall on a recent win, and Hall notes, “Well, after he told me this it was all I
needed, a little pat on the back from the master.”61
Hall and Tudor’s exchange reveals how dog men navigate a form of masculin-
ity through the bodies of their dogs. Tales traded among dog men tend to be
filled with paeans to the older dog men who introduced the younger ones to
the game. While some are brief—“I owe everything I know to Ron”—others
are more intimate, as Hall’s story reveals.62 The process of introduction involves
established dog men’s not only bringing a newcomer to an underground fight
but also letting him buy into their bloodlines, a practice of kinship cemented
through dog breeding. Introductions are also something of an apprenticeship:
“If you’re lucky, someone who is already established in the game will take you
under his wing and teach you everything he knows.”63 These ties between older
and younger dog men reveal how the practices that bring these white southern
dog men together, fighting and breeding pit bulls, also bring them into a shared
masculinity in which the kind of man one becomes is fundamentally shaped
by connections with other men made possible through the bodies of pit bulls.
Not only is this masculinity very homosocial, as Hall and Tudor’s exchange
reveals, but it is also white.
Ed Faron’s description of being arrested on suspicion of dogfighting while
living in North Carolina highlights his understanding of race. Writing “I
found myself in a cell block where I was the only white person, which I guess
was just another way they were trying to mess with my head,” Faron distin-
guishes himself from other prisoners.64 Notable in naming whiteness, the
implicit norm of most of these dog men’s accounts, Faron’s description of his
placement as a deliberately offensive measure speaks to his understanding of
himself as someone whose whiteness would normally keep him out of such
spaces. He narrates an increased sense of not-belonging in this jail space the
following morning, when he is overwhelmed and irritated by the “Motown
music” played by his fellow prisoners, almost all of whom are men of color,
and many of whom he met previously when he repossessed their belongings
while working as a repo man.65 For Faron, his placement in this space signifies
a change in his experience of white masculinity, one tainted not only by its
association with dogfighting but also by race and class. As a white man and
suspected dogfighter, Faron has been categorized with the men of color who
were previously unhappy participants in his labor as a repossession agent. Like
Hall’s and others’ ties to fellow dog men, Faron’s arrest reveals how he and they
become in kind with their fighting dogs, for their experiences of the intersec-
tions of whiteness, class, and masculinity are fundamentally shaped by their
relationships with pit bulls.
Some Kind of Love
It is notable that all the relationships I examine in this article involve love. Even
Vick has gone on record to publicly affirm that he loves dogs.66 But what kind
of love is this, especially given the many ways in which it is neither innocent
nor liberatory? And how is this love part of the becomings in kind that I read
in these relationships? At the beginning of this article, I laid out the ways that
“becoming in kind” speaks to the overlaps in identity and ontology experienced
by humans and nonhuman animals. As the dogfighters I write with reveal, while
the becomings I read are like Haraway’s “becoming with” in that humans and
nonhuman animals emerge changed from an encounter, they are not the kinds
of becomings that necessarily build better shared worlds. To get at the ethics
and politics I hope to draw from becoming in kind, I take up how it is caught
up in specific affects like love by outlining how I am in conversation with not
only Haraway but also Vinciane Despret, a feminist philosopher of science.
Despret thinks through “attunement” as a way to articulate the changes
to both humans and nonhuman animals enabled by practices of relating.
Describing an experiment in which students were given ostensibly smart and
dumb groups of rats to raise in order to see whether the students’ expectations
of the rats would shape the rats’ performances (which they did), Despret finds
that the rats and the students became attuned.67 She argues that the students
conveyed their trust to the rats through caressing, manipulating, handling, and
encouraging them, gestures that attuned the rats to the students’ beliefs. For
Despret, “These beliefs brought into existence new identities for the students
and for the rats.”68 The students and rats emerged differently, into new identi-
ties, because of the touches exchanged between them.
Love and touch are key to the interspecies ontologies Haraway and Despret
describe. Despret argues that the trust that makes the students and rats become
available to each other is tied to love. Quoting Isabelle Stengers, who notes that
“trust is one of the many names for love, and you can never be indifferent to
the trust you inspire,” Despret reads trust as a practice of love that facilitates
the ontological shifts prompted by attunement.69 Haraway’s sense of love is
less wholesome—she describes her relationship with her dog as follows: “Sig-
nificantly other to each other, in specific difference, we signify in the flesh a
nasty developmental infection called love.”70 These kinds of love make clear
how touching and loving encounters shape experiences from which humans
and nonhuman animals emerge changed. Love is part of becomings.
The loves that shape the becomings in kind I read among pit bulls, pit bull
rescuers, and dog men are similar to those outlined by Haraway and Despret.
The bodily intimacy of handling, apparent in Hall’s use of massage as part of
his “duty and obligation to give 100% total dedication to this gladiator going
into battle,” is a form of love conveyed through touch.71 And love features in
dog men’s stories not only in the ways the men are driven by “the love of this
great dog”72 but also in accounts like that of Mean Jolene, who they claim
died “doing what she loved best.”73 Love is omnipresent in rescuers’ stories that
tell of the ways rescue acts as a way to expand one’s heart and highlight how
rescued dogs do love-oriented labor as canine good citizens. However, love is
also central to rescuers’ advocating a better kind of death. Arguing against the
outsourcing of the work of rescue to often poorly funded animal sanctuaries, the
pit bull activist Jessica Dolce advocates another form of love through contact:
“Putting them to sleep, in your arms, can be the greatest act of love you can
give to your pet.”74 These are undoubtedly funny kinds of love.
Parallels between Despret’s rats and Hall’s dogs also reveal important differ-
ences among these loves, for dogfighters’ loves are laced with power dynamics.
Like the rats, the dogs are eager to move into the identities their handlers desire.
Unlike the rats, these dogs are directed into violence. While many dogs bred
for fighting do not like to fight, some do. Indeed, many dogs love to fight—
called “dead game” by proud handlers—even as many other dogs, also bred
by dog men, would be happy never to fight. Dog men like Hall express a love
that is a way to gain money, a love that makes me uneasy, not only because a
dogfight is terrible to witness, but also because this love, even when the dogs
also love to participate in fighting, is a love that extracts profit from the bodies
of the dogs it breeds, maims, and kills. The love of Hall and others is a love
shaped by power, money, and blood, but not necessarily a love that makes for
better, healthier dogs.
The loves under discussion here are inextricably tied to contemporary
political discussions about not only animals but also race, gender, and nation.
Perceptions of love are often the basis for public discussions about whether a
relationship with an animal is good or ethical. Indeed, the love that animal
rescuers speak about is a love drawn from the language of political discourse
that asks us to “make love, not war,” a love connected to justice. However, as
Hall and others reveal, love is never easy, nor is it innocent. Indeed, uneasy
and noninnocent loves are central to the becomings that emerge from human
and nonhuman animal encounters. As Haraway reminds us, love is “often
disturbing, given to betrayal, occasionally aggressive, and regularly not recip-
rocated in the ways the lovers desire.”75 Many of the loves I outline here are
connected to oppression and aggression, racism and nationalism. The presence
or absence of love, or its perceived presence or absence, as articulated by the
woman who asks Tudor “just what kind of S.O.B. does it take to fight dogs?,”
does not directly address the ethics or politics of becoming in kind, for love is
everywhere in these stories, yet each love differs in terms of the kinds of power
dynamics involved. Becoming in kind offers a way to better understand and
even challenge these uneasy and different loves.
Conclusion: Loving Differences
Let me revisit the story with which I began this piece, in which a dog, a
middle-class white transperson, safety, and love become together: the story of
Haley and me. Like pit bulls, transgender identities bring with them a number
of category problems. Legibility is an issue, but there is also the question of
whether one even wants to be read as, say, a white male. I admit that when I
first began transitioning, thoughts of running into the likes of Newt Gingrich
in the bathroom made me very nervous. I did not want to share a category
with such a man. Becoming in kind was a way for me to think through the
ways that who I was, no longer a woman, but not quite a man, and not really
interested in being a man, was facilitated by my relationship with a pit bull.
As a feminist and white transperson, becoming in kind was a way for me
to understand how the categories that shape many humans’ existences and
against which many folks chafe—race, class, gender, nation, transgender, and
more—are caught up in relationships with nonhuman animals. Importantly,
becoming in kind also made me uneasy about my love with Haley, for it pushed
me to situate the ways narratives of animal rescue and salvation are caught up
in these category problems. In this sense, becoming in kind not only helped
me better understand the many ways human and nonhuman animal loves are
noninnocent but also pushed me to think critically about how to disrupt the
connections among these enmeshed human and nonhuman identities and, for
example, racism and nationalism.
However, becoming in kind does not necessarily help Haley in the way that
it helps me, for the problems of categories and kinds central to this essay are
problems that dogs in Haley’s position cannot themselves contest. She cannot
express ambivalences about her legibility as a pit bull, nor can she “look back”
in a way that challenges the connections among categories and kinds I outline
here.76 In this sense, this essay falls into a long line of animal representations
in which advocacy is mixed with seeming anthropocentrism, for the categories
of race, class, sexuality, and nation I address are categories that Haley herself
will never recognize, even as they shape her body.77 This problem of animal
representation leads me to the formulation of more hopeful and hopefully less
anthropocentric politics that stem from becoming in kind, formations inflected
by what one might term “becoming in kindness.”
The political stakes of becoming in kind are twofold: recognition and dis-
ruption. Kimberle Crenshaw’s influential formulation of intersectionality has
inspired myriad conversations about how the experiences of categories such
as race and gender are ineradicably intertwined.78 In proposing “becoming in
kind,” I hope to introduce a way to understand how the overlapping catego-

ries of difference that divide human worlds are part and parcel of necessarily
intermingled human and nonhuman worldings.79 In this sense, the recogni-
tion becoming in kind prompts participates in ongoing conversations among
many scholars in animal studies, in feminist, critical race, labor, environmental,
and indigenous studies, who are concerned with how we might inherit the
intertwined violences that have shaped our more-than-human worlds. This
recognition can, in turn, help us interrupt and disrupt the ties among these
identity categories for the better.
When I advocate disruption as following from thinking with becoming in
kind, I am invested in taking up the uneasy loves I read with and finding ways
to interrupt their attachments to the norms of rescue, race, gender, and nation.80
A disruption following from becoming in kind might mean understanding how
some forms of uneasy loves, like that of the person whose pit bull–type dog
is skinny and has heartworms, shape and are shaped by classism and racism,
such that help, if offered, should address how these factors shape the twinned
lives of human and dog rather than propose salvation by separation. A disrup-
tion might also mean exploring the potential for restorative justice rather than
lengthy prison sentences when dealing with people who have been involved
in dogfighting, challenging ties between notions of justice and a growing and
highly racialized prison-industrial complex. And disruption might mean fa-
cilitating loves outside homes and apart from narratives of normative kinship,
as illustrated in the following story.
Downtown Dog Rescue, a Los Angeles–based organization founded by
Lori Weise and Richard Tuttlemondo in 1996, began its work trying to spay
and neuter dogs. Weise and Tuttlemondo had become concerned with the
ballooning stray dog population in LA’s “skid row” and wanted to help. They
quickly learned that many of the seeming strays—most of them pit bull–type
dogs—had owners.81 Rather than attempt to part people from their dogs, they
tried to connect them with not just spay/neuter resources but also more general
veterinary care. Tuttlemondo notes that a key lesson from this process was to
“accept the dog owner as he or she is now, no judging their lifestyle choices.”82
This sense of a person who lives outside—Tuttlemondo is careful to note that
folks prefer “living outside” to “homeless”—as a dog owner who should not
be judged reveals a form of understanding well versed in funny kinds of love.
Tuttlemondo points out that “people love animals regardless if they live inside
or outside.”83 The practices of Downtown Dog Rescue—paying for impound
fees and medical treatment, giving an address for dog licenses, and providing
transportation to a vet, leashes and collars, dog food and training, and letters
of recommendation—respond to how the lives of these dogs and owners are

mutually shaped by intersections of racism, classism, sexism, speciesism, and,
given the predominance of pit bull–types, what I will call “breedism.”84 And
these practices do not attempt to recuperate owners or dogs into normative or
wholesome patterns of, say home building and kinship, but rather encourage
their continual disruption.
The work of the folks at Downtown Dog Rescue is attuned to becoming
in kind; it is a work whose politics is about understanding uneasy loves and
facilitating these loves’ interruption of the incorporation of dogs into contem-
porary American conceptions of home and family. This work is savvy to the
use of dogs-as-victims as a way to racialize and denigrate humans, and this
work is invested in helping pit bull–type dogs thrive without having to bring
them into families and affirm their connections to an implicit and normative
whiteness. This work is also committed to understanding that dogs love and
are happy with folks who live outside, which is to say that Downtown Dog
Rescues recognizes that what is good for dogs, according to dogs themselves,
is not necessarily home ownership and pit bull–inclusive insurance. This is
a work that pits kindness against kind. No community outreach efforts are
ever innocent, but the work of Downtown Dog Rescue strikes me as uneasy
and uncomfortable in a good way. It is this kind of work that I hope think-
ing with becoming in kind can encourage. And it is this kind of work that I
think makes for a better and jointly shared world, for it takes up the troubles
of a more than human intersectionality and finds ways to encourage different
kinds of becoming in kind.
Notes
This writing of this article was facilitated by the generosity of Drucilla Pettibone, whose unique archives
provided much of the material I think with. Revisions were made with the intellectual and financial
support of the Animals and Society Institute and Wesleyan Animal Studies summer fellowship program.
1. Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge, MA: Polity,
2002), 118.
2. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 34, 25.
3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987), 238.
4. Ibid., 240; Haraway, When Species Meet, 30.
5. Marjorie Spiegel draws such parallels in The Dreaded Comparison (London: Heretic, 1988). Claire
Jean Kim discusses these types of analogies in “Moral Extensionism or Racist Exploitation? The Use
of Holocaust and Slavery Analogies in the Animal Liberation Movement,” New Political Science 33.3
(2011): 311–33.
6. Richard Ryder, “Experiments on Animals,” in Animals, Men, and Morals, ed. Stanley Godlovitch,
Roslind Godlovitch, and John Harris (New York: Taplinger, 1972); and Peter Singer, Animal Libera-
tion, 2nd ed. (New York: New York Review of Books, 1990).
7. Malcolm Gladwell, “Troublemakers: What Pit Bulls Can Teach Us about Profiling,” New Yorker,
February 6, 2006, www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/02/06/060206fa_fact.
8. For Marcy Setter’s Find-a-Bull test, see www.pitbullsontheweb.com/petbull/findpit.html (accessed June
30, 2012).
9. Victoria Voith, Elizabeth Ingram, Katherine Mitsouras, and Kristopher Irizarry, “Comparison of
Adoption Agency Breed Identification and DNA Breed Identification of Dogs,” Journal of Applied
Animal Welfare Science 12 (2009): 253–62.
10. “Pit bull–type” illustrates the category problems associated with denigrated identities: how does one
speak on behalf of and acknowledge a need for shared recognition of the very grouping one is simul-
taneously committed to challenging?
11. Harold Herzog, “Forty-Two Thousand and One Dalmations: Fads, Social Contagion, and Breed
Popularity,” Society and Animals 14.4 (2006): 383–97.
12. Karen Delise, The Pit Bull Placebo: The Media, Myths, and Politics of Canine Aggression (Ramsey, NJ:
Anubis, 2007), 20–35.
13. Ibid., 48.
14. For locations, see map of BSL, www.understand-a-bull.com/BSL/Locations/USLocations.htm (accessed
July 2, 2012).
15. Vicki Hearne, Bandit: The Heart-Warming True Story of One Dog’s Rescue from Death Row (New York:
Sky Horse, 2007), 25.
16. These data are from the National Canine Research Council website, “Media Center,” nationalcani-
neresearchcouncil.com/media-center/bsl/ (accessed July 2, 2012).
17. Linda Weiss, “Breed-Specific Legislation in the United States,” Animal Legal and Historical Web Center,
2001, www.animallaw.info/articles/aruslweiss2001.htm.
18. Ibid.
19. The attorney Kenneth M. Phillips points to several cases where the “owners of a pit bull were deemed
to be aware of its dangerous propensity to attack without warning, even though it never had done so
in the past, thereby supporting a jury’s finding of civil liability for a dog bite” (“Breed Specific Laws,”
dogbitelaw.com/breed-specific-laws/breed-specific-laws.html [accessed July 3, 2012]).
20. Ibid.
21. Colin Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton, NJ:
22. Here and in the remainder of this article, I use pit bull without quotations, but with the understanding
that the term itself is contested.
23. Nicolas Riccardi, “Denver’s Dogged Outlaws,” Los Angeles Times, August 2, 2005.
24. The authors of stubbydog.org are among those who use the phrase “breed-discriminatory legislation”
(stubbydog.org/2012/07/12-reasons-to-oppose-breed-discriminatory-legislation/ [accessed July 23,
2012]). The term canine racism is widespread; see Karyn Grey, “Breed-Specific Legislation Revisited:
Canine Racism or the Answer to Florida’s Dog Control Problems?,” Nova Law Review 27 (Spring
2003): 415–32.
25. Josh Liddy, “Response to Pam Ashley,” under “discrimination,” and “opinion,” www.swaylove.org/
response-to-pam-ashley (accessed July 23, 2012).
26. There are prolific examples of this on Facebook pages related to the Lennox case (www.facebook.
com/WeRLennox [accessed July 27, 2012]), and there are also more formal blog-type entries: see, for
example, Karyn Zoldan, “Tucson: I Am Lennox Pitbull. BSL Sucks,” “Tucson Tales,” tucsoncitizen.
com/tucson-tails/2012/07/17/tucson-i-am-lennox-pitbull-bsl-sucks/ (accessed July 27, 2012).
27. Brian C. Anderson, “Scared of Pit Bulls? You’d Better Be!” City Journal (Spring 1999), www.city-
journal.org/html/9_2_scared_of_pit.html; Bixby Jones, “Pit Bulls, White Trash, and Ghetto Fabulous
A-holes,” thesandytongue.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/794/ (accessed July 3, 2012).
28. For example, a July 24, 2007, Associated Press article, “Vick Case Illustrates Pit Bull’s Changing Sta-
tus,” includes a subsection titled “Tied into the Hip Hop Culture” outlining links between pit bull
problems and hip-hop and rap music cultures (www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19937995/ns/us_news/t/
vick-case-illustrates-pit-bulls-changing-status/ [accessed July 7, 2012]).
29. Gina Lombroso-Ferrero, Criminal Man: According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso, commentary
Cesare Lombroso (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1911), 11–24; Samuel George Morton, Crania
Americana (Philadelphia: J. Dobson, 1839).
30. Changes in racial patterns of ownership and breeding in the 1980s are discussed in Hearne’s Bandit and
further highlighted with regard to dog men in Off the Chain: A Shocking Exposé on America’s Forsaken
Breed (dir. Bobby Brown; Allumination Filmworks, 2004).
31. Steve Hummer, “Vick Burns in Tailgate Effigy at Dome,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 18,
2011, www.ajc.com/sports/atlanta-falcons/vick-burns-in-tailgate-1183830.html.
32. MJD of Yahoo News documents the graffiti in “NFL” (sports.yahoo.com/nfl/blog/shutdown_corner/
post/Philly-graffiti-artist-wants-Vick-to-treat-Cowbo?urn=nfl,185585 [accessed July 7, 2012]), while
Lisa Richards deploys the Vick in chains image in “Excusing Michael Vick’s Animal Abuse as Reaction
to Slavery and Segregation,” Lisa Richards: Rock N’ Roll Politics, January 4, 2011, sports.yahoo.com/
nfl/blog/shutdown_corner/post/Philly-graffiti-artist-wants-Vick-to-treat-Cowbo?urn=nfl,185585.
33. Typical of these arguments are assertions that those who engage in street-level fights are less responsible
than earlier dog men, failing in such tasks as the weeding out of “man eaters,” resulting in higher levels
of dogs biting humans than previously, when such dogs were (supposedly) assiduously put down.
See, for one example, answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080318180257AAVT6Pq (accessed
January 30, 2013).
34. Glen Elder, Jennifer Wolch, and Jody Emel, “Race, Place, and the Bounds of Humanity,” Society and
Animals 6.2 (1998): 198.
35. Ibid., 194.
36. Jim Gorant, The Lost Dogs: Michael Vick’s Dogs and Their Tales of Rescue and Redemption (New York:
Gotham Books, 2010), 10.
37. Achille Mbembe remarks on this in On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001),
26–28.
38. Quoted in Gorant, Lost Dogs, 109.
39. I learned of this practice through a seminar on illegal animal fighting in which a USDA agent gave
details of a bust where three successive contests were staged inside a building operated by the USDA
and its informants. The dogs involved in the contest, government agents or no, were all put down
(HSUS and Oakland Animal Shelter, July 2010).
40. Susan McCarthy, “A Better Life for Michael Vick’s Pit Bulls: BAD RAP Lends a Helping Hand,” Bark,
July–August 2008, www.thebark.com/content/better-life-michael-vick%E2%80%99s-pit-bulls.
41. Bay Area Dog Lovers Responsible about Pit Bulls was one of two rescue groups involved in evaluating
the Vick dogs. The video, “See Them Now,” was posted at www.badrap.org/rescue/vick/now.html but
is no longer up (accessed February 1, 2011).
42. Gorant, Lost Dogs, 148, 212, 227.
43. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 5.
44. The Canine Good Citizen is a program run by the AKC. The test involves ten elements, including
accepting a friendly stranger and supervised separation. More information is available at www.akc.
org/events/cgc/program.cfm (accessed July 27, 2012).
45. Berlant, Queen of America, 6.
46. These descriptions are easy to find, but one of the more prominent is that of the Villalobos Rescue
Center, also featured in the television show on Animal Planet, Pit Bulls and Parolees, www.vrcpitbull.
net/dog/ (accessed July 3, 2012).
47. Julie Kink, “Gentle Pit Bull Ruby Working to Erase Breed Stereotype,” St. Croix Valley Press, November
27, 2009, www.presspubs.com/st_croix/news/article_7d40b429-aa49-5740-add4-1035a36f51df.html.
48. Joanne Brokaw, “Leo, One of the Michael Vick Dogs, Passes Away,” Patheos (blog), December 18,
2011, www.patheos.com/blogs/heavenlycreatures/2011/12/leo-one-of-the-michael-vick-dogs-passes-
away/.
49. Gorant, Lost Dogs, 148.
50. Ken Foster, The Dogs Who Found Me (Guilford, CT: Lyons, 2006), 11.
51. Quoted in Foster, Dogs Who Found Me, book jacket.
52. Catalina Stirling, “Jasmine’s Story,” www.jasmineshouse.org/who-we-are/jasmines-story/ (accessed
January 27, 2013).
53. David Delany, “The Space That Race Makes,” Professional Geographer 54.1 (2002): 6–14.
54. To note, many rescuers also highlight how owning a “breed ambassador” gives them the feeling that
“you’ve got to work harder . . . you are being scrutinized and watched every minute of the day,” re-
vealing how some pit bull rescuers experience a sense of stigma as pit bull owners (quoted in Hilary
Twining, Arnold Arluke, and Gary Patronek, “Managing the Stigma of Outlaw Breeds: A Case Study
of Pit Bull Owners,” Society and Animals 8.1 [2000]: 26).
55. My access to this archive was made possible by the generosity of my friend and colleague Drucilla
Pettibone of Emory University.
56. Ed Faron and Chris Faron, The Complete Gamedog: A Guide to Breeding and Raising the American Pit
Bull Terrier (Charlotte, NC: Walsworth, 1995), 86.
57. Ibid., 55.
58. Quoted in Faron and Faron, Complete Gamedog, 75. To note, the term Ch is short for Champion,
indicating a dog who has won three fights.
59. Faron and Faron, Complete Gamedog, 63. The term Grand Champion indicates a dog who has won
five fights.
60. Bobby Hall, Bullyson and His Sons (Charlotte, NC: Walsworth, 1986), 85.
61. Ibid., 73.
62. Quoted in Rhonda D. Evans and Craig J. Forsyth, “The Social Milieu of Dog Men and Dog Fights,”
Deviant Behavior: An Interdisciplinary Journal 19 (1998): 61.
63. Ibid.
64. Faron and Faron, Complete Gamedog, 11.
65. Ibid., 12.
66. Vick made this statement during an interview with Piers Morgan on July 17, 2012 (piersmorgan.
blogs.cnn.com/2012/07/17/michael-vick-says-he-might-get-a-new-dog-certainly-not-a-pit-bull/).
67. The experiment was done by Robert Rosenthal, published in 1966 (Experimenter Effects in Behavioral
Research [New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts]). Rosenthal’s own interest was in demonstrating
experimental bias.
68. Vinciane Despret, “The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis,” Body and Society 10.2
(2004): 122.
69. Stengers expresses this in “God’s Heart and the Stuff of Life,” Pli 9 (2000): 105.
70. Haraway, When Species Meet, 16.
71. Hall, Bullyson, 191.
72. L. B. Hanna, The American Pit Bull Terrier and His Master (West Sussex, UK: Beech, 1926), 84.
73. Faron and Faron, Complete Gamedog, 54.
74. Jessica Dolce, “How I Failed as a Dog Rescuer: Lessons from a Sanctuary,” the notes from a dog walker
blog, July 21, 2012, notesfromadogwalker.com/2012/07/21/how-i-failed-as-a-rescuer-lessons-from-
a-sanctuary/.
75. Donna Haraway, “enlightenment@science_wars.com: A Personal Reflection on Love and War,” Social
Text 50 (Spring 1997): 123.
76. John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” (New York: Penguin, 2009).
77. Jonathan Burt touches on the ambivalences of these representations in Animals in Film (London:
Reaktion, 2002).
78. Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against
Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991): 1241–99.
79. In making this proposal, I am also in conversation with Val Plumwood, who argues for an understanding
of “interlocking oppressions” as a way to think through the relationship among race, species, gender,
and other categories of difference in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993).
80. This move echoes Beth Povinelli’s argument in “Notes on Gridlock: Genealogy, Intimacy, Sexuality,”
Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 215–38, in which she proposes an interruption of the ties among sex,
kinship, and intimacy as a way to get at a more promising queer politics.
81. Sheila Pell, “Downtown Dogs,” Bark (March–April 2008): 60.
82. Tuttlemondo’s presentation has been uploaded to the petsmartcharities website, www.petsmartcharities.
org/resources/resources-documents/downtown-dog.pdf (accessed July 23, 2012).
83. Ibid.
84. Susan McHugh wonderfully documents the extensive history of connections between nonbreed dogs
seen as “mutts” and “mongrels” and folks living on the edges of societies, such as Ireland’s travelers and
folks who live outside homes in the United States (“Mutts,” in Dog [London: Reaktion, 127–70]).
Cross-Species, Cross-Class, and Inter-Racial Queerness in El niño pez | 711
Orthodox Transgressions: The Ideology

of Cross-Species, Cross-Class, and
Interracial Queerness in Lucía Puenzo’s
Novel El niño pez (The Fish Child)
Ángeles Donoso Macaya and Melissa M. González
Her chin trembled a bit when she saw me in the cage. She didn’t have eyes for anyone else.
Although that bitch of a vet said the one next door had a better snout, she wanted me. She
didn’t stop talking till we got to the house (she always treated me like an adult). And that
same day we sealed our pact: I was supposed to be a present for Sasha, her mother, but I was
hers. I peed on her a little, to let her know that I understood. And she got it.
—Lucía Puenzo, El niño pez
Nothing can ever rob me of the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses
to be conceptualized [rebelle à tout concept].
—Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am
T
he two epigraphs above frame the tendencies and limits of one per-
vasive fantasy that animal studies both seeks to understand and risks
replicating: through our cultural texts we frequently fantasize that we
know the animal and can speak for the animal, always already refusing the
unknowability of the animal that is a seminal concept in the field. El niño pez
(The Fish Child),1 a 2004 Argentine novel narrated by a dog that claims to
transgress the very boundaries between species and subjects that it reinforces,
also illustrates some of the central challenges and desires of animal studies,
particularly those involved in overcoming humanism, sexism, and racism.
On the one hand, putting a Latin American novel in dialogue with Ameri-
can studies seems natural to us as Latin Americanists—after all, in Spanish,
América refers to the entire hemisphere, and Latin Americanists have long
been troubling notions of the border. On the other hand, as Americanists,
we realize that the so-called transnational turn has led American studies to
consider the inseparability of Latin American and North American cultures in
our networked, globally capitalist present, and putting this Argentine novel in
dialogue with Anglo-European animal and queer studies demonstrates some of
the transnational commonalities and epistemological challenges of speciesism,
sexism, and racism.
Best known internationally for her critically acclaimed film about an intersex
adolescent, XXY (2007), the Argentine writer and filmmaker Lucía Puenzo has
produced a growing oeuvre of contemporary novels and films that frequently
crosses all manner of generic and social boundaries, between male and female,
animal and human, homosexuality and heterosexuality, and between novels
and films, as with the novel and film versions of The Fish Child and Wakolda
(in production).2 The novel The Fish Child tells what could be described as a
queer love story that crosses the boundaries between human and animal by
virtue of its being narrated by a horny dog and featuring the legend of a fish
child who lives in a Paraguayan lake. As told by the rascally mutt with the
comically lofty name of Serafín, a wealthy Argentine teenager named Lala is
in love with Lin, the adolescent Paraguayan housekeeper who works for and
lives in Lala’s radically dysfunctional bourgeois home. Lin reciprocates Lala’s
affection, and together they start planning their escape to the rural town of
Ypacaraí, in Paraguay, where they dream of building a house by the lake. Little
by little, Lala steals and sells art, jewelry, and other valuables from her parents’
house to save up for the escape. Everyone is oblivious to the ongoing theft, and
initially the lovers’ plan seems foolproof; however, complications arise because
every male character desires Lin, who is in turn easily seduced by their desire,
prompting Lala’s murderous jealousy.
By presenting the readers with a story of same-sex, interclass, and interracial
coupling narrated by an eloquent pet dog, The Fish Child appears to stage
a series of sexual, interspecies, and class transgressions. However, the novel
actually stages a central problem of our neoliberal times: simply violating
traditional boundaries and hierarchies is not inevitably transgressive of the
social order but can actually represent hegemonic ideologies. While there is
insufficient space here for a thorough analysis of Puenzo’s films on their own
terms, it is interesting to consider Zoila Clark’s argument that in both XXY
and the film adaptation of The Fish Child, Puenzo approaches gender, race,
and class as social constructs that we choose, since we, “the ‘humanimals’
that we are, [are] capable of choosing from a sea of possibilities our preferred
state within nature.”3 While Clark celebrates this as an accomplishment, in
our view, it is precisely Puenzo’s ethic of free choice that ignores the violence
and real political consequences involved in the production of minority sub-
ject positions. Furthermore, by representing these subject positions as free
choices, both the film and Clark’s article embrace a rather neoliberal ethic of
consumer choice and ignore the complex, interpellative mechanisms through
which subjects are formed—topics that have been the subject of decades of
poststructuralist inquiry.
Indeed, several features undermine the transgressive potential of the novel’s

same-sex, cross-class, interracial, and cross-species representations: namely, the
novel’s normalization of the main characters’ lesbian relationship to the point of
minimizing the queer experience of difference; its neocolonial romanticization
of the indigenous, lower-class protagonist; and the fundamental anthropo-
morphism that makes the dog narrator little more than a literary device that
unproblematically reproduces the male gaze in the novel. Furthermore, the
novel’s failure to represent the nuances of sexualized and racialized difference
is key to its failure to transgress speciesism, emphasizing the similarities of
the abjection of the “animalized human” and the “humanized animal.”4 In
part, the melodramatic logic of the novel’s plot guides the series of ideological
contradictions around questions of cross-species, cross-class, interracial, and
same-sex love that, in our view, are at the heart of the novel. Moreover, read
alongside debates within the field of animal studies about the human–animal
bond that address Donna Haraway’s and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s
perspectives on “becoming animal,” the novel’s orthodox brand of transgression
gives us insight into the perhaps insurmountable epistemological challenge
posed by anthropocentrism as well as some of the pitfalls of positioning the
boundary between nonhuman animals and human animals as the final frontier
of queer theory.
Although an English translation of the novel by David William Foster
recently became available, it has not been as widely disseminated as the sig-
nificantly different 2009 film adaptation, and given general unfamiliarity with
the novel, further summary of its plot is necessary. The novel begins in medias
res with the wounded dog narrator remembering the story while, as we later
discover, he is fleeing with his two mistresses to Paraguay after they have freed
Lin from the sex-trafficking ring she is forced to participate in as an inmate
in a minors’ prison. Serafín, the dog, remembers the day he came to join the
dysfunctional and bourgeois Brontë household and then proceeds to narrate
the central love story, giving us insight into the various family members in the
process. Brontë, the brooding and enigmatic patriarch, is a renowned writer
who spends his time locked in his study and interacts with his family only
when the media come to interview him. Sasha, the mother, indulges her new-
age interests and runs away with her lover to India early on in the narrative,
initiating the family’s fall into utter decadence. Pep, the son, is a drug dealer
and addict who uses Serafín to test new product and is eventually caught and
locked up for dealing, a scandal that only enhances Brontë’s mystique as a writer.
Finally, Lala, a sullen adolescent with no friends to invite to her birthday party,
is in love with Lin (Ailín), the Paraguayan maid who works for Lala’s family
and who is always called “la Guayi” (short for “the Paraguayan girl”) by the
family and by the dog narrator because of her nationality.
The epithet “la Guayi” also reinforces Lin’s objectified status: nearly every
single male character in the novel desires and beds Lin: a local security guard,
Lin’s dog trainer friend, and Lala’s father, Brontë. The plot rapidly unfolds after
Lala discovers her dad and Lin having sex; emotionally bereft, Lala prepares
two glasses of milk, one of them poisoned, and offers one to her father without
knowing or caring which it is. After awaking the next morning and discovering
she has killed her father instead of herself, she escapes to Paraguay, sure that
Lin will show up there. While in Ypacaraí, Lala learns about Lin’s past, about
her adolescent pregnancy, and the legend of the fish child—which turns out
to be a local myth that grew out of the kernel of truth that Lin drowned the
sickly infant she gave birth to as a young teenager. Although the upper-class
Lala naively believes that Lin will be able to escape to Paraguay and waits for
her there, Lin is charged with the homicide of Lala’s father and with stealing
valuables from the family. When Lala discovers that Lin has been detained
in a minors’ institute because of her, Lala returns to Buenos Aires dirty and
bedraggled after a couple of months in rural Paraguay, no longer looking like
a proper girl from her high-class neighborhood. She completes her physical
transformation by shaving her head and her eyebrows and leaving her family’s
house forever in search of Lin. With the help of Serafín, Lala puts her own
life and that of her dog at risk to rescue Lin from the sex-trafficking ring that
her jailers force her to participate in, and they kill or wound several of their
enemies. The story ends with the couple riding on a bus, along with their
injured and probably dying dog, on their way to Paraguay.
The Novel in Its Latin American Literary Context
Twenty-first-century literature in Brazil and the Southern Cone (which con-

sists of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay) has tended to distance itself from the
postdictatorial literature of the 1980s and 1990s. As the critic Idelber Avelar
notes in The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the
Task of Mourning, in the older fictions of the 1980s and 1990s, elements of the
past that remain unresolved reemerge: namely, memories of the disappeared
and the trauma generated by dictatorship. These postdictatorial narratives
mourned the obsolescence of the literary itself in the afterlife of state violence
and subsequently sought fragmented narrations, filled with complex language
and irregular structures that called attention to the fragmentation of the social
through their formal fragmentation.5 Unlike these fragmented, experimental
narratives that reflect on social and political realities, much Southern Cone
literature in the twenty-first century returns to more traditional, and global,
literary forms and genres—such as melodrama, as we see functioning in The
Fish Child—employing more continuous narrative styles, leaving behind the
cuts, jumps, gaps, and temporal breaks that characterize postdictatorial fiction.6
Even when literature is neither politically engaged nor directly reflecting on the
social, its representations and ideological tendencies can reveal and reflect key
cultural values and realities that are both globally and locally oriented. Interest-
ingly, as we shall show, The Fish Child’s depictions of homosexuality participate
in a broader global trend toward normativity; but first we must position the
novel vis-à-vis a broader and thriving Latin American queer literary tradition.
David William Foster—one of the first scholars to engage with the Latin
American literary canon from the perspective of sexual identities, and still today
a leading figure in the study of LGBTQ cultures in Latin America—delineated
the contours of this tradition over two decades ago, in 1991.7 In 1994 it seemed
to Foster more accurate to talk about “gay and lesbian themes” and to refer to
a “Latin American homoerotic tradition” (rather than a queer tradition), since
“to most writers and a good number of the critics, the term [queer theory] is
meaningless, whether in English or in something like a Spanish or Portuguese
translation.”8 In Foster’s model, this tradition included not only those writers
with “a professed gay identity” such as Manuel Puig or Néstor Perlongher but
also “individuals who have written on gay themes, either with negative images
. . . or with positive images . . . and . . . an individual who, although not deal-
ing overtly with a gay topic or professing a gay identity, has works in which
something like a gay sensibility can be identified, no matter how problemati-
cally.”9 The latter would apply to Puenzo, who is married to the writer Sergio
Bizzio, but who frequently explores nonnormative sexuality and gender in her
artistic work. Having much in common with the anti-identitarian precepts
of queer theory, Foster’s parameters were crucial in expanding inquiries into
sexuality in Latin American literary and cultural studies in the early 1990s.10
Today, queer theory thrives within Latin America, and in Argentina in par-
ticular, where the University of Buenos Aires has had a queer studies research
center for over a decade (Área de Estudios Queer). While some Latin American
academics and activists, such as Norma Mogrovejo, have argued against the
incorporation of Anglo-centric queer theory into Latin American feminist
and academic thought as a colonizing imposition from the north, most Latin
American academics working in queer studies today cite US academics such as
Judith Butler and Lisa Duggan alongside important Latin American cultural
producers and public intellectuals such as Perlongher and Severo Sarduy.11
Furthermore, as Foster reminds us, in the case of Argentina, there has been
long-standing “important intellectual activity that has served to create, through
principled analysis, a reflective discourse regarding homoeroticism.”12 The Fish
Child seems, at first glance, to participate in this discourse: the protagonists’
same-sex romance has indeed automatically led the few academic articles that
engage with the novel to assume the automatically transgressive nature of the
story in the name of queer politics.
Lala’s and Lin’s “Homonormative” Affair
Most readings of The Fish Child (both the novel and the film adaptation) take
for granted the transgression that, supposedly, is at the core of the argument.
For example, one academic review of the film argues:
The Fish Child is a significant challenge to the patriarchal system and to state authority in
general. Puenzo uses the love between two women, a highly transgressive thing in and of
itself, as a backdrop for the murder of the father who, because of his position of power over
them—one of whom is his daughter and the other his employee—represents the dictatorial
dominion of the masculine state.13
Assen Kokalov interprets the plot as if it were written in the postdictatorial

mode, failing to take into account several important features. First, the as-
similation of professional, monogamous, white homosexuals into the national
imagination has made especially obvious in the twenty-first century the ways
that the neoliberal state has dissolved the universality of gayness as transgres-
sion. Second, the killing of the patriarch is an act of jealousy that both alludes
to the psychoanalytic trope in a melodramatic mode and also undermines
political commentary: Lala kills her father because he had sex with her lover
and she wishes to assume his subject position. Third, there is scant evidence
elsewhere in the novel that supports a reading of an allegorical dimension to
the murder of the father, as there would be in postdictatorial fiction. Further-
more, the murder is only one among many depoliticized breakings in the novel
that gesture at transgression but can be seen to reify the very conventions they
appear at first to defy.
The same-sex love of Lala and Lin tries to defy not only heterosexual norms
but also class and race stratifications: Lala comes from a wealthy family in
the suburbs of Buenos Aires, and la Guayi is a poor indigenous teenager who
emigrates to Argentina—a promised land of sorts—from one of the poorest
countries in South America. While Lala’s and Lin’s class differences are perceived
as a problematic dimension of their union by other characters in the novel, the
homosexuality of their affair is never commented on—this produces puzzle-

ment in the reader seeking realism, as it does not reflect the reality of either
Argentine or transnational attitudes toward homosexuality.14 Confirming the
author’s awareness of this antirealist strategy, Puenzo notes in more than one
interview that for the film version of the novel she instructed the actresses to
not treat the homosexuality of their characters as an issue because she wanted
to tell a story about complex characters without recurring to “stereotypes,” also
noting that many more viewers have been scandalized by the class differences of
the young couple than by their homosexuality.15 Puenzo even goes so far as to
say, “There would not be much of a difference if instead of being a love story
about two women it were about a man and a woman.”16 Such statements about
the sameness of homosexuality, often made with the intention of transgressing
social norms by claiming that homosexuals are perfectly normal, are increas-
ingly common across the globe, not just in nations like Argentina that have
legalized gay marriage.17 Nevertheless, such perspectives minimize the queer
experience of difference, and the very idea that the lesbian couple might be
interchangeable with a heterosexual one effaces the intended transgression and
reaffirms some of the norms that create stigma around homosexuality in the
first place, a phenomenon that queer theorists have explored at length in the
late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Michael Warner, for example,
has explored how discourses that posit homosexuality as normal, particularly
the discourse of gay marriage, reify the stigmatization of sex and invalidate
less-normative queer relationships and lives.18 Duggan uses the term homo-
normativity to describe the sexual politics of neoliberalism that ask queers to
abandon radical practices and politics so that they may become assimilated,
and “virtually normal,” to borrow the title of Andrew Sullivan’s conservative
progay treatise.19 Furthermore, Puenzo’s statement that the two women could
be exchanged for one man and one woman without altering the story much
is not wholly accurate in the context of the story: while Lala could possibly be
replaced with a male character in the novel or film without, arguably, making
much of a difference (but still a significant difference), the replacement of Lin
with a male character is simply inconceivable, given her status as a racialized
and gendered object of desire.
Early on, Serafín offers the following interpretation of the most significant
difference between Lala and Lin: “Lala’s desire was disoriented before la Guayi
arrived, but since then, there had been no room for anyone one else; la Guayi
liked everything that looked at her with those eyes, men, women, even her own
reflection . . . the other’s desire was hers.”20 Although the final clause above
might be interpreted as a nod to a Lacanian reading of the subject and desire,
what precedes it makes very clear the literal dimension of the observation: Lin
liked everything that might look at her, “todo lo que la mirara” as the original
says, not “todos quienes la miraran” (“all [people] who might look at her”).
This description of Lin turns her into a mere mirror, an empty vessel that
reciprocates the desire of the other without distinguishing between male and
female or between thing and person or, it follows, between human and animal.
Rather than being transgressive, this blurring of boundaries represents her as a
passive, mimetic creature who is not entirely human, a depiction very much in
line with the very oldest, animalizing tropes the colonizers created about the
indigenous, as when, for example, Christopher Columbus notes in his diaries
that the Indians are “tame” creatures with silky hair like a horse’s mane.21
The Reality of Paraguayan Domestic Workers in Argentina
While it is common in Latin America to precede a person’s name with an

article with mostly affective connotations, the more generic nature of Lin’s
nickname—“the Paraguayan”—points at the interchangeability and invis-
ibility of Lin as a Paraguayan maid in the upper-class social context of the
Brontë family, especially given the real prevalence of Paraguayan maids in the
neighborhood. Immigrant Paraguayan women, who often leave their unfairly
compensated domestic jobs in Paraguay in search of more opportunities in
Argentina, find themselves years later still working as domestic laborers, facing
the same gender and class discrimination as before, but also dealing with the
additional stressors of racism and xenophobia. As M. Cristina Alcade points
out, “While migrant women’s gender is a significant source of subordination,
it is far from the only or perhaps even the most significant identity marker that
shapes women’s experiences of violence . . . in the most intimate of spaces, the
ascription of Indianness and the amount of education attributed to women
. . . are also significant factors in the violence women experience.”22 Norma
Sanchís and Corina Rodríguez Enríquez point out that while progressive Ar-
gentine laws encourage immigration and seek to protect immigrant rights, the
realities of racism and xenophobia drastically reduce access to these rights.23
Still, Paraguayans represent the largest national group in the immigrant com-
munity, a majority of whom are women, and 58.1 percent of whom work in
domestic service jobs.24
In the novel, the Brontë family’s neighbors also have an indigenous Para-
guayan maid, a realistic allusion to the prevalence of domestic workers from
Lin’s country. In fact, in Argentina, having a domestic worker has become a
status symbol that separates women into different classes. Speaking specifically
of Paraguayan maids in Argentina, Clyde Soto, Myrian González, and Patricio

Dobrée note, “Beneath the appearance of a free exchange are hidden unequal
relationships between people who are valued differently: some of these women
are to serve, others to be served. For this reason, having access to domestic
labor is simultaneously a status symbol.”25 Soto, González, and Dobrée go
on to point out the ubiquity of the association of Paraguayan, indigenous,
woman and immigrant identities with domestic labor.26 Although reflecting
the real prevalence of Paraguayan maids in Argentina, the novel acknowledges
the negative consequences of racism in only one area of the plot: the ease with
which Lin is falsely accused of the murder of Brontë and incarcerated. Less
concerned with the sexual abuse and economic exploitation faced by Paraguayan
maids, the novel instead presents Lin as a fascinating, mysterious, unknowable
indigenous other who is desired by, and desires, all who come into contact
with her. Thus, rather than critique or parody this desire for the racialized
other, the novel participates in the romanticization of the indigenous woman.
Becoming Human: The Animal-Inflected Ideology of the

Objectification and Romanticization of the Indigenous Other
Nearly every characterization of Lin depicts her as a passive indigenous sub-

ject who is also preternaturally in touch with the earth and in awe of literary
culture.27 In the memorable dinner scene, when a drunk and besotted Brontë
promises to make her a character in his next book, she naively and excitedly
believes him, as she has a solemn respect for books, which she is shown respect-
fully dusting but never reading.28 The narrator notes in this scene that Lin
has never been so “obsequious” or so “tame” as when Brontë gives her his full
attention, both words charged with connotations that recall the domestication
of animals as well as Columbus’s first impressions of the indigenous peoples.
Urged by Brontë, Lin sings at the table in Guaraní, her indigenous language,
with a voice that is “other, serious, velvety, Indian, it came from the opening
of her stomach but seemed to arrive from deeper, from lower down, from the
earth, and as it conquered the space, it got heavier, like the interwoven song of
all of the birds.”29 This nonironic romanticization of the Indian woman who
is in touch with nature to the point that the line between her song and the
birds’ is blurred represents no transgression or new insight but rather one more
instance of the long history of European animalization of the indigenous other.
Despite scenes like this that animalize and romanticize Lin, the few critics
who have written on either the novel or the film have persisted in seeing a
transgressive value in the representation of indigeneity. Carina González, for
instance, argues that through the incorporation of Guaraní “the novel pro-
poses a new subjectivity focused on the recovery/re-adoption of an animalistic
nature as a way of life that resists domination and as a form of excess capable
of transcending the limits of gender, morals and cultural territories marked
by politics.”30 González does recognize the ambiguous status of Guaraní
throughout the novel—she notes that it can be the language of intimacy, but
can also serve to separate and exclude, when, for example, Lin’s grandfather
intentionally mistranslates Guaraní for Lala.31 Yet González suggests that orality
is a form of affirmative resistance in the novel without troubling the fetishiz-
ing of the indigenous woman. Likewise, Kokalov argues that the incorpora-
tion of the Ypacaraí imaginary, the legend of the fish child, and the Guaraní
songs that Lin frequently sings are all “a legitimate presentation of the ways
in which marginalized immigrant communities try to rescue elements of their
own culture within a foreign milieu that constantly manifests itself as hostile
and demeaning towards them and their culture.”32 While it is absolutely true
that immigrants preserve their languages and traditions in the face of cultural
hegemony, in the uncomfortable dinner scene above, Lin’s voice is quite lit-
erally “other.” Her character responds to the Anglo-European demand that
indigenous people represent the earth and the past and be “tame” in the face
of patriarchal power, barred as they are from modernity and agency. Here the
indigenous voice can “conquer” only when it seduces and entertains.
Lest we assume that the animalization of Lin occurs only through the dog
narrator’s perspective, her first boyfriend remembers how as a young teenager
she used to collect bird and fish eggs and ask him to put them inside her,
saying, “Here inside I have space for all. . . . Why should they be orphans?”33
Represented throughout the novel as an earth mother, Lin blurs the line between
animal and human and is shown as mostly powerless over many of the forces
that shape her life. Yet an earlier scene alludes to the colonizer’s fantasy that the
erotic appeal (for him) of the indigenous woman is tantamount to real power
(over him): “And I realized,” narrates the dog as Lin performs a striptease for
Lala, “that it was la Guayi who ran all of us. The Brontë family and the world.”34
The dog narrator betrays a decidedly anthropomorphic male gaze in sentences
such as these, and its echoing of the oft-heard joke that one’s pet dog is “really
in charge of the household” only compounds the irony. Immediately after mak-
ing this observation, Serafín directly addresses Lin’s not-quite-human status,
asserting that Lin is sometimes neither like “us” the animals nor like “you all”
the humans but “something in between.”35 Although this purports to describe
Lin’s otherworldly power, neither the sexualized indigenous housekeeper (as
the “animalized human”) nor the pampered domestic pet (as “the humanized
animal”) have much real power in the diegetic universe, as both of their lives’
courses are determined by their bourgeois family and the state. While Lala,
Brontë, and the police act, both Lin and Serafín react.
Although Lala and Lin are quite different, both of the young lovers have
blood on their hands; however, only Lin ever expresses a sense of guilt, confess-
ing at the end the transformative insight she has when Lala says that she was
doing her depressed and often suicidal father a favor when she poisoned the
milk. At this moment, Lin realizes that she had always been lying to herself
when she told herself that she killed her weak infant for his own sake, and
she says that admitting that she did it for herself liberates her from the iciness
she has carried inside all these years.36 It is for this reason that she accepts her
jail sentence as an appropriate punishment, not for Brontë’s murder, but for
drowning her child. On the other hand, neither the dog’s narration nor the
dialogue he reports give any insight into Lala’s sense of guilt or lack thereof.
Furthermore, early on in the novel, Lala appears to have arranged a murder
more heinous than the poisoning of the often suicidal Brontë, which could,
after all, have ended in her own death, had he chosen the other glass. Serafín
reports that Guida, the local security guard, died in a scuffle with some local
“hoodlums,” one of whom had met with Lala a few weeks earlier, after Lala
had caught Lin and Guida in bed together. The dog remembers the meeting
with the local youth clearly because, as he reports, he never forgets anybody
who plays fetch with him: “Before we left, she gave him a couple of Sasha’s
necklaces, and he gave me the stick [he had been throwing for me]. But who
cares about Guida?”37 Really, nobody cares much about Guida or any of the
other lost or dead characters. In a curious reversal of the hierarchies of griev-
ability that Judith Butler has explored in Psychic Life of Power and Frames of
War whereby the dehumanized homosexual victims of hate crimes and the
Arab casualties of war are ungrievable, here it is only the drowned infant, not
the patriarch or working-class man, who can be grieved.38 The eponymous fish
child is mourned through the creation of a lie that becomes a legend about
a human–animal hybrid; in other words, the shame associated with his birth
and death is displaced via its transformation into a story about his dehuman-
ization. Indeed, nearly every character in the novel is subject to some degree
of dehumanization, except, of course, Serafín, the dog narrator, who has the
most recognizably human emotions of all of them.
Toward the very end of the novel, the dog narrator contradicts the previously
made observation about Lin that “the other’s desire was hers,” suggesting that
perhaps her animalized human character has changed, and she is becoming
human. In a flash-forward from his memory of the escape, Serafín notes that
Lin tells Lala she needed to believe that her forced prostitution in exchange
for favors in prison was “fair treatment” in order to stay “on this side of a
breaking point that everyday drew closer.”39 However, if the other’s desires
were still hers, then sexual abuse would be categorically impossible and the
need to believe that it was “fair treatment” to survive it would be inexplicable.
Never is Lin so human as when she acknowledges the need to protect herself
from the traumatic effects of the violence she is subjected to. Besides this
flash-forward, there are four actions in the final chapters that indicate that
Lin has been transformed: her donning of her male john’s clothes instead of
her black dress; her confession that she drowned her sickly child for her own
benefit, not his; her kicking the warden who prostituted her out of the car
to an almost-certain death; and the narrator’s final observation that Lala and
Lin were “actually strangers. In love with a memory that was only that.”40 As
long as they are strangers to each other, Lin’s desire can no longer successfully
match the other’s, and she appears to have separated from her identification
with the other’s desire of her, as her character seems decidedly more human,
as well as more assertive and aggressive.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the transformation of Lin’s abject subject posi-
tion as an animalized human requires the killing of other animalized subjects,
in this case the brutish prison guard who treats the minors she oversees like
chattel. On the one hand, as Cary Wolfe and Jonathan Elmer point out, in-
formed by Jacques Derrida’s seminal arguments in The Animal That Therefore
I Am, the discourse of animality is crucial not only to the establishment of a
human subject but also for how we distinguish between criminal killing (e.g.,
the murder of a white citizen) and noncriminal killing (e.g., the killing of a
racialized other in armed conflict abroad). In other words, those we can kill
with impunity tend to be animalized and dehumanized. Likewise, Lin’s near-
certain murder of the animalized, brutish prison guard is both noncriminal
and affirmative of her newly accomplished humanity within the context of the
novel. According to Wolfe and Elmer, the generalized cultural legitimization
of the killing of nonhuman animals (for food, clothing, testing) is necessary if
“the ideological work of marking human others as animals for the purposes
of their objectification and sacrifice is to be effective.”41 In other words, the
speciesism that enables us to overlook the violence that produces our leather
shoes and meatloaf dinners is wrapped up in the dynamics that enable our
subject formation and allows us to tolerate the killing of civilians in Iraq.42
Although in an interview Puenzo discusses the challenges of asking the audience
to love two such amoral characters as Lin and Lala, another line of thinking
would posit that we are always already predisposed to love murderers as long
as we perceive their victims as animalized humans.43
While the novel’s own version of the species grid is unstable and at times
unexpected—given Lin’s changing status and the unmourned murder of the
patriarch—ultimately, it reverses but never overturns or interrupts traditional
hierarchies of humanity and grievability. The mere fact that it is the lesbians
committing the murders, and the patriarchs, unwanted children, dogs, and
brutish female pimps who die, does not undo the logic of the speciesist sys-
tem. Lin’s recognition of herself as a selfishly motivated criminal (“I did it for
me”) and violent act of vengeance represent her becoming human within an
entirely human-centric universe, one in which humans are dehumanized and
abjected, but also one in which transgressions of animal–human hierarchies do
not occur. It is interesting to consider how a novel might invert or complicate
this hierarchy or imagine the animal without assigning it human affect and
voice, but The Fish Child accomplishes none of these. Indeed, its dog narrator
is more a cute trick than any transgression of the social order.
Serafín’s Macho Fantasies and Anthropocentric Reality
González argues that, through the voice of the narrating dog, Puenzo explores
the liminal space in between man and animal, thereby recuperating the re-
pressed animal side of the human. This initial recuperation of the repressed
animal side of the human accomplished at the outset of the novel by the dog
narrator anticipates the transgressions that personify the characters of Lala
and Lin, whom González characterizes as “absolutely free”: “In this animal
symbiosis, characters acquire a new agency, one that authorizes the excesses of
bare life, closes up the excisions, and advances over the destabilized territories
of humanity, social classes, gender, and language.”44 Of course, as we have
shown, Serafín’s decidedly male gaze and the romanticization of Lin as indig-
enous other argue against the destabilization of these territories in the novel.
Nevertheless, González claims that the novel’s “aesthetic operation deconstructs
the mechanisms of the modern anthropological machine, that, according to
Giorgio Agamben, isolates the animality of man in order to imprison him
exclusively in his biological life.”45 We agree with González when she suggests
that “Serafín is . . . the first who exposes men’s animal nature as having been
relegated by the humanist conception in which modern thought is founded”;
however, we would argue, at odds with González’s ideas, that paradoxically
nothing demonstrates the anthropocentrism of the novel more than the dog
narrator, who is both emotionally and sexually attached to his mistress and
her lover.46 In other words, Serafín neither resists nor transgresses, but rather
reproduces the logic of the anthropocentric machine within the narrative.
Going beyond attachment, as Puenzo herself suggests in an interview, the

dog also seems to be his mistress’s extension: “The dog in the novel brings with
him a very cynical humor. He is a dog with no breed in a world of pedigree
dogs. It is as if he were an extension of the body of his mistress, it’s very pro-
vocative.”47 In other words, the relationship can also be read as less about an
affective bond between a human animal and a nonhuman animal than about
a projection of the human onto the animal. Perhaps nothing betrays Serafín’s
anthropomorphic perspective more than his bawdy and cynical sense of humor,
which draws heavily from the human, male picaresque literary characters he
reminds us of.48 Significantly, the mixed-breed dog self-fashions himself this
way on the novel’s first page: “Just to make sure you understand: I am black,
macho, and bad. . . . If I see something moving below the leaves . . . I bite it.
Forgive me, I ramble, I know . . . it’s not easy if Lala is stroking me like that.
And it wouldn’t be proper, a dying dog with an erection.”49 This is not the
innocent parent–child relationship we commonly graft onto human–pet rela-
tionships, but its brand of sexuality remains caught up in the most traditional,
patriarchal gender roles, only with a comic twist. Serafín is not above resorting
to trickery to get physical gratification from his mistresses, as he recounts the
first time that la Guayi and Lala bathe him: “I faked an escape attempt (they
would have suspected if I gave in to a bath without fighting), but really I was
completely aroused at the thought of their hands, rubbing me.”50 This rather
hilarious description of the horny dog’s machinations works only as a projection
of human eroticism onto the animal; the fact that it is a dog undertaking this
behavior empties it of its violating power and lets it become funny, but that
is about the extent of the difference. The anthropomorphic Serafín assumes
a fundamentally male gaze; in fact, he joins the male humans in the house in
their lustful male gazing at the lesbian couple:
The fact of the matter is that since that night, something happened to both of them. They
had the traces of so many caresses on their skin . . . their eyes charged with secrets. . . . Pep,
Brontë and their friends wouldn’t stop staring at them. I would hump the pillows in the
living room. I would bite them, fuck them, two, three at a time . . . to no avail, something
was going on, and we were all uncomfortable. Same thing happened to Brontë: before he
would masturbate with a picture of his wife, but now he had no imagination even for that.51
The “same thing” happens to all the males in the house, not just the outwardly
human ones, demonstrating that Serafín’s narrated desire for Lala and Lin is
an interhuman one.
Buying into the shock value of such scenes that show a dog sexually aroused
by his mistresses, one might be tempted to argue that the novel stages a series
of transgressions: Lala, the protagonist, defies her family and transgresses

reproductive-hetero-normativity, race, and class stratifications by loving Lin;
her dog, in turn, appears to queer the human–animal bond with his desire for
his human mistresses. In the end, however, the three main characters—Lala,
Lin, and Serafin—reproduce or remain caught up in the same structures they
supposedly transgress. Structurally, both Lala’s and Lin’s positions in the narra-
tive reproduce the normative family romance, and the dog’s perspective remains
caught up in an anthropocentric frame. We should ask, of course, whether a
dog narrating a novel in a human language can ever be not anthropomorphic.
In her study of two animal narrators brought to life by Virginia Woolf and
Paul Auster, Jutta Ittner asks just the right questions: “Are these fictional rep-
resentations of the animal mind just harmless testimonies to the curiosity and
playfulness that the animals’ Otherness evokes in us? Are they reflections of
a deep, if unconscious, yearning for contact with the unknowable, or cheap
exploitations of our need not to feel separate from the animated universe?”52
She concludes that they are both, but that any animal representations are “self-
centered” given the real impossibility of accessing the animal perspective. Like
the eponymous fish child, Serafín the dog narrator is a lie.
As a human tendency projected onto the dog narrator, the dog’s “male gaze”
mediates the logic of desire presented in the novel and is so anthropomorphic
that it plainly reproduces the all-too-familiar, human male–oriented voyeuris-
tic desires about lesbian sex. Anthropocentrism is not only a blind spot for
critics of the novel, but also in many of the theoretical debates within animal
studies, even as its decentering is a foundational idea of the field. As Matthew
Calarco notes, the main difficulty faced by animal rights discourse is that it is
“constrained to determine animality and animal identity according to anthro-
pocentric norms and ideals.”53 While rethinking our theories of the subject and
our theories of sexuality from the perspective of the constitutive human–animal
divide is valuable, transgressing that divide is another issue entirely. To queer
the human–animal bond, we would need to displace anthropocentrism from
our critique. Is this even possible?
“Becoming Animal” or “Becoming With”? Animal Studies’

Anthropocentrism and the Question of Queering
In a 2010 essay in the Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Carmen Dell’ Aver-
sano tries to make a case for queering the human and nonhuman animal bond:
One of the assumptions of queer is that identification and desire can cross the societal
boundaries separating sexes, genders and sexual definitions, and that, indeed, these boundaries
have been set up largely to tame and to segregate love and empathy, to enforce a conformity
of emotion resulting in a conformity of behavior. Up to now, queer studies have neglected
one fundamental boundary which is enforced in an even more totalitarian way than any
with which queer critique has dealt with so far, but which is nevertheless crossed every day
by currents of empathy, fondness and love: the boundary separating humans from animals.54
Following Butler’s troubling of gender, Dell’ Aversano troubles the allegedly

natural distinction between humanity and animality, correctly noting that the
human–animal boundary has been enforced in a totalitarian fashion. Dell’
Aversano encourages us to consider the affective bonds between human and
nonhuman animals as an alternative to genital-centric affective relationships
between humans. On the other hand, however much we may experience our
relationships with our domestic animals as two-way exchanges, it is entirely
possible that we may know only the currents of empathy, fondness, and love
that cross the human–animal boundary as humans. Dell’ Aversano stresses that
“queer theory has never confronted a more entrenched and more hegemonic
case of naturalization, which not only deproblematizes certain discourses,
identities and lifestyles but makes alternative ones not simply dangerous or
stigmatized but unthinkable.”55 While rethinking subjectivity and indeed re-
framing whole disciplines by interrogating the essentializing, foundational logic
of the human–animal divide is a fruitful endeavor, and queer theory should pay
close attention to the human–animal and nonhuman animal boundary it has
largely ignored, two caveats are in order. First, the human–animal boundary
cannot be analogous to the boundaries between sexes and genders because it is
more broadly constitutive of us as human subjects, and second, the possibility
of “becoming animal,” as explored by Donna Haraway and Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari, remains unresolved. Dell’ Aversano engages with Haraway’s work
in only one critical footnote, where she condemns Haraway for her training
of agility dogs because it constitutes animal exploitation: “Even though her
Companion Species Manifesto heavily capitalizes on the transgressive value of
the opening image of the author and her dog kissing . . . one would look in
vain for instances of more substantial—theoretical—transgression both in the
Manifesto and in its much more verbose and narcissistic sequel When Species
Meet.”56 But the most urgent question is whether any human writing on the
nature of the animal can be nonnarcissistic—in other words, is the transgres-
sion of the human–animal divide implied by “becoming animal” (Deleuze and
Guattari) and “becoming with” (Haraway) even possible?
In When Species Meet, Haraway merges theoretical and scientific discourse

with personal reflections and experiences to develop a concept she defines as
“becoming with”:
Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog? . . . Because I become with dogs, I am
drawn into the multispecies knots that they are tied into and that they retie by their reciprocal
action. My premise is that touch ramifies and shapes accountability. Accountability, caring
for, being affected, and entering into responsibility are not ethical abstractions. . . . touch
and regard have consequences.57
Since the notion of “becoming with” is so fundamental to Haraway’s approach

to companion species, she examines Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming-animal”
(as a way to differentiate her approach from theirs). However, Haraway is es-
pecially dismayed by how the authors depict domestic pets and their masters:
Little house dogs and the people who love them are the ultimate figure of abjection for
Deleuze and Guattari, especially if those people are elderly women. . . . I am not sure I can
find in philosophy a clearer display of misogyny, fear of aging, incuriosity about animals
. . . here covered by the alibi of an anti-Oedipal and anticapitalist project. . . . It is almost
enough to make me go out and get a toy poodle for my next agility dog.58
As Dell’ Aversano’s and Haraway’s criticisms tell us, emotions do tend to run
high whenever we make a theoretical examination of our deeply personal, affec-
tive bonds with animals, but this only tells us about our end of things, not the
animals’. Neither Dell’ Aversano nor Haraway resolves the question that would
seem, judging from their own criticisms, to be the most pressing and the most
vexing: how might we engage with animals in a genuinely animal-centric way?
Perhaps a more precise version of this question is less how to engage with
animals in a genuinely animal-centric way than, as Deleuze puts it in From A
to Z, how might we have “an animal relation with an animal.” In this series of
conversations between Deleuze and Claire Parnet, organized according to the
alphabet, Deleuze begins with the question of the animal in the section “A as
in Animal.” In this conversation, Deleuze asks, “So the question is, what kind
of relationship do you have with an animal? If you have a human relation-
ship with an animal—but again, generally people who like animals don’t have
a human relationship with animals, they have an animal relationship with
the animal, and that’s quite beautiful. Even hunters—and I don’t like hunt-
ers—but even hunters have an astonishing relationship with the animal.”59 In
other words, the hunter acts as any animal predator would act—or, to put in
Deleuzian terms, he becomes a predator—smelling and tracking like an animal,
and therefore has an animal relationship with the animal. Despite Haraway’s
criticisms of Deleuze and Guattari, their notion of becoming animal makes the
most progress in answering the question of how to have an animal relationship,
and actually has much in common with Haraway’s own.
When Parnet asks Deleuze what difference there might be between the
repugnant and insignificant animals that he makes frequent reference to in
his writing, such as ticks and rats, and those domesticated animals that the
philosopher appears to disdain, Deleuze responds, “It’s not really domestic,
or tamed, or wild animals that concern me, or cats or dogs. . . . The problem,
rather, is with animals that are both familiar and familial.”60 Similarly, his
criticism of psychoanalysis centers on how it translates and reduces everything
to the realm of the familiar:
I can’t stand the human relationship with the animal. I know what I am saying because I
live on a rather deserted street, where people walk with their dogs, and what I hear from my
window is quite frightening, the way that people talk to their animals. Even psychoanalysis
notices this! Psychoanalysis is so fixated on familiar or familial animals, on animals of the
family, that any animal, in a dream, for example, is interpreted by psychoanalysis as being
an image of the father, mother, or child, that is, an animal as a family member.61
Deleuze here explains his dislike of the relationship between domestic pets
and the people who love them, pointing out how caught up it is in an an-
thropocentric, psychoanalytic framework. On the one hand, it becomes clear
here that domestic pets are sometimes the “ultimate figure of abjection” for
Deleuze, but only because of how we project ourselves and our human family
relationships onto them. Like Haraway, Deleuze wants to find a new way to
relate to the animal; unlike Haraway, he does not consider it to be frequently
accomplished in domestic pet relationships. Instead, Deleuze confesses to
Parnet that what impresses him about animals is “the fact that every animal
has a world, and it’s curious because there are a lot of humans, a lot of people
who do not have a world. They live the life of everybody, that is, of just any
one and any thing. Animals, they have worlds. What is an animal world? It’s
sometimes extraordinarily limited, and that’s what moves me.”62 This world
can sometimes consist of no more than two of three affects—as it happens with
the tick that reacts exclusively to light, smell, and touch—but can sometimes
be more complex.
Yet Serafín’s world is not the dog world theorized by animal behaviorists
but the all-too-human world of melodrama: a world of desire, sex, passions,
jealousies, and patricide. Instead of assuming that literary devices like a dog
narrator are transgressively animal-centric, as many critics do, we need to
imagine new ways to respond to the epistemological challenge of our anthro-

pocentrism, or we are doomed to reinforce the hegemony of humanism and
its psychoanalytic frameworks.
Even though The Fish Child does not queer the human–animal divide
by representing the attempt at an animal relationship with the animal, the
oedipal “triangle” formed by Lala, Lin, and Serafín that is at the center of the
novel does stage issues concerning sex, race, and species, in such a way that
the notion of becoming-animal acquires special relevance. Deleuze and Guat-
tari contend—in the analysis that rankles Haraway—that some animals are
“Oedipal animals with which one can ‘play Oedipus,’ play family, my little
dog, my little cat, and then other animals that by contrast draw us into an
irresistible becoming”; but they also argue that “the same animal can be taken
up by two opposing functions and movements, depending on the case,”63 and
the animal is not limited to an oedipal role. For Deleuze and Guattari, becom-
ing results from an encounter, but it does not proceed through identification:
“Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is
it regressing-progressing; neither it is corresponding, establishing correspond-
ing relationships; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or producing
through filiation. . . . Becoming is a verb with consistency all its own; it does
not lead back to ‘appearing,’ ‘being,’ ‘equaling,’ or ‘producing.’”64 To delve
into the mystery of becoming-animal, we need more narratives that imagine
it head-on, but The Fish Child is not one of them.
On the contrary, the relationship between Lala and Lin could be read as a
twenty-first-century reimagining of the nineteenth-century foundational family
fiction described by Doris Sommer. She uses the term foundational fictions to
describe a corpus of nineteenth-century romantic, melodramatic novels that
disseminated dominant ideologies about class, race miscegenation, and politics
in the early stages of the formation and consolidation of the Latin American
nation-states. While in some foundational fictions “race relations are tragic,”
in others interracial love brings about the promise of national regeneration;
in either case, however, they support racist national ideologies.65 In the case
of The Fish Child, the rich white girl and the poor indigenous girl dream of
escaping civilization together and building a house by the lake—they even have
their puppy dog, and the family romance is complete. Rather than transgress
mainstream ideology, they fulfill it about as thoroughly as the heterosexual
couples of the nation-consolidating foundational fictions. At the outset, the
novel deploys two possibilities: in one, the characters transgress heteronorma-
tivity and class and race stratifications with their same-sex love; in the other,
these same characters function inside the structure of melodramatic family
romance. Only the latter possibility is fulfilled, as Lala, Lin, and Serafín remain
caught up in the family romance. At the end Serafín is sacrificed so that the
lesbian relationship of Lala and la Guayi can thrive, a sacrifice that hints at
how contemporary Argentine homonationalism permits the incorporation of
lesbian relationships, even interracial ones, into the national imaginary, but
suppresses queerer possibilities. Ultimately, the novel introduces but forecloses
the potential of becoming animal, of an interspecies queer relationship, and
Serafín, the oedipal puppy, must die, in a modern rewriting of the trope in
which queer love inevitably leads to violence and death.
Notes
1. Because this coauthored article is the fruit of our collaborative thinking, writing, and editing, we have
chosen to list our names alphabetically. We have included our own, literal translations of the novel to
best reflect our own reading of the original text. We have also translated some critical sources from
Spanish to English to make them accessible to American Quarterly readers.
2. XXY, Puenzo’s first feature film, won the 2007 Cannes Critic’s Week Grand Prize and was Argentina’s
entry for the best foreign-film Oscar. Puenzo’s film adaptation of The Fish Child (2009)—which she
wrote, directed, and produced—was rather less successful, received mixed reviews, and won a couple
of less-prestigious awards. Besides Carina González’s recent “Migración y oralidad: La vida animal en
la novela El niño Pez de Lucía Puenzo” (“Migration and Orality: Animal Life in the Novel El niño Pez
by Lucía Puenzo”), all related academic articles and reviews focus primarily on the film adaptation
of The Fish Child, with limited discussion of the novel, whose dog narrator was removed for the film
adaptation. Given the erasure of the dog narrator and various other significant changes in the film
version, we have chosen to focus mainly on the novel, which inspired our argument in the first place.
3. Zoila Clark, “Our Monstrous Humanimality in Lucía Puenzo’s XXY and The Fish Child,” Hispanet
Journal 5 (2012), www.hispanetjournal.com/OurMonstrousHumanimality.pdf.
4. We borrow the terms animalized human and humanized animal from Cary Wolfe and Jonathan Elmer’s
incisive analysis of The Silence of the Lambs, in which they discuss a hierarchical “species grid” whose
other points are the “animalized animal” and the “humanized human” (“Subject to Sacrifice: Ideol-
ogy, Psychoanalysis, and the Poverty of Humanism,” in Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse
of Species, and Posthumanist Theory, ed. Cary Wolfe [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003],
101–2).
5. Emblematic novels of the time include Ricardo Piglia’s Respiración artificial (Artificial Respiration)
(1980) and La ciudad ausente (The Absent City) (1990) as well as Diamela Eltit’s Lumpérica (1986),
whose title is a neologism that combines the Spanish words for “America” and “lumpen.”
6. This trend is not absolute: a strain of twenty-first-century Argentine literature remains engaged with
the postdictatorial mode. For example, recent novels by Félix Bruzzone, Martín Kohan, Alan Pauls,
and Pola Oloixarac not only reflect directly on Argentina’s political past since the 1970s but also oc-
casionally employ complex and fragmented narrative structures. In Aquí América Latina: Una Especu-
lación, the critic Josefina Ludmer notes contemporary Argentine literature’s at-times obsessive focus
on post-1970s national history. The Fish Child, of course, participates in the strain of contemporary
Argentine literature that harks back to predictatorial narrative styles while also representing the popular
and media culture of the globalized present.
7. Foster published Gay and Lesbian Themes in Latin American Writing as early as 1991, Latin American
Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook in 1994, and Sexual Textualities: Essays
on Queer/ing Latin American Writing in 1997.
8. David William Foster, Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994), xii–xiii.
9. Ibid., x–xi. Manuel Puig (1932–1990) gained international recognition for his novels, especially El beso
de la mujer araña (The Kiss of the Spider Woman) (1976), which was made into film and later adapted
into a Broadway musical (1993). Néstor Perlongher (1949–1992) was the founder of the “neo-barroso”
style (using a play on the Spanish word for “neo-barroque”), and today he is most well-known as a
queer poet and foundational queer activist for his work with the Frente de Liberación Homosexual
(Homosexual Liberation Front) (David William Foster, “Argentine Intellectuals and Homoeroticism:
Néstor Perlongher and Juan José Sebreli,” Hispania 84.3 [2001]: 445).
10. For a more recent panorama on related scholarship and topics, see Ignacio López-Vicuña’s 2004 review
essay: “Approaches to Sexuality in Latin America: Recent Scholarship on Gay and Lesbian Studies,”
Latin American Research Review 39.1 (2004): 238–53.
11. José Javier Maristany, citing Christian Gunderman, reminds us that writers like Sarduy anticipated
queer theory in the 1970s with their antinormative ideologies and aesthetics; furthermore, he sug-
gests that an alternative genealogy of queer theory in Latin America might be traceable via the early
popularity of Deleuze and Guattari and French poststructuralism in the region (“¿Una teoría queer
latinoamericana? Postestructuralismo y políticas de la identidad en Lemebel,” Lectures du genre 4
[2008]: 17, www.lecturesdugenre.fr/Lectures_du_genre_4/Maristany.html).
12. Foster, “Argentine Intellectuals,” 442. The critic points “to important writers like Manuel Puig (the
only one to have gained international attention), Alejandra Pizarnik (who is now receiving considerable
critical attention for the lesbian elements of her work), Oscar Hermes Villordo, Juan Maria Borghello,
Juan José Hernández, Héctor Lastra, Renato Pellegrini, Manuel Mujica Lainez, Reina Roffó, to name
only a few. Films like Enrique Dawi’s Adiós, Roberto (1985) and America Ortiz de Zárate’s Otra historia
de amor (1986), along with those of Maria Luisa Bemberg (La señora de nadie [1982], Yo, la peor de
todas [1990], De eso no se habla [1993]), provide an impressive list where one can begin to examine
a cultural record of issues of same-sex identity and the repudiation of compulsory heterosexuality in
Argentina” (442).
13. Assen Kokalov, review of El niño pez by Lucía Puenzo, Chasqui 38.1 (2009): 228. Brontë, the father
in the novel, is transformed from a writer into a judge in the film version. Although Kokalov’s reading
makes a bit more sense when it involves the killing of a judge who represents state power, it does not
easily apply to the novel.
14. In 1996 the city of Buenos Aires adopted a new constitution. Article 11 recognized and granted the
right to be different, forbidding any kind of discrimination that could lead to segregation on the basis
of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, ideology, opinion, nationality, physical traits,
psychophysical conditions, social or economic circumstances, or any other circumstance. Yet, as Foster
points out, such legal changes can hardly transform long-standing behaviors and practices: “Such a
guarantee can hardly begin to scratch the surface of a long history of homophobia in Argentina and,
more to the point, of a long history of police persecution: police edicts regarding public decency still
remain in effect, and public displays (including on occasion activities in the semiprivate space of bars
and clubs) of homoerotic manifestation and affection continue to be more than sporadically harassed”
(“Argentine Intellectuals,” 441).
15. Juan Sardá, “Lucía Puenzo: ‘Hay gente que se ha escandalizado por la distinta procedencia social de
las dos chicas, más que por su homosexualidad,’ El Cultural.es, April 24, 2009, www.elcultural.es/
noticias/CINE/504250/Lucia_Puenzo-_Hay_gente_que_se_ha_escandalizado_por_la_distinta_pro-
cedencia_social_de_las_dos_chicas_mas_que_por_su_homosexualidad.
16. Ibid.
17. President Cristina Fernández signed the bill legalizing same-sex marriage in Argentina on July 21,
2010. In relation to this “new homonormativity,” one cannot fail to mention the increasing visibility
of gay and lesbian themes within mainstream media. For instance, the widely watched Argentine soap
opera Botineras, which aired on the TELEFE network from November 2009 until August 2010 and
revolved around the life of soccer players’ wives, depicted a gay relationship between two members of
the soccer team; this is especially striking considering that soccer is the most popular and machista sport
in Argentina. Another telenovela from 2010, Para vestir Santos (2010), airing on Canal 13, depicted a
relationship between two lesbians.
18. Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free
Press, 1999).
19. Lisa Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Liberation,” in Materializing De-
mocracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 176, 189.
20. Lucía Puenzo, El niño pez (Buenos Aires: Beatriz Viterbo, 2004), 123.
21. Cristóbal Colón and Bartolomé de las Casas, Los cuatro viajes del Almirante y su testamento (Madrid:
Espasa-Calpe, 1964), 31, 58.
22. M. Cristina Alcade, “‘Why Would You Marry a Serrana?’ Women’s Experience of Identity-Based Vio-
lence in the Intimacy of the Homes in Lima,” JLACA: The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean
Anthropology 12.1 (2007): 2. Rebeca Raijman, Silvina Schammah-Gesser, and Adriana Kemp point
out that across the globe “migrant women suffer from a double disadvantage. Since domestic work is
the only occupational niche available for them, women have to endure a work setting that is small, is
unregulated, and involves patriarchal and vertical ties with the employer” (“International Migration,
Domestic Work, and Care Work: Undocumented Latina Migrants in Israel,” Gender and Society 17.5
[2003]: 730).
23. Norma Sanchís and Corina Rodríguez Enríquez, Cadenas globales de cuidados: El papel de las migrantes
paraguayas en la provisión de cuidados en Argentina (Santo Domingo, DR: UN Women, 2011), 53.
24. Ibid., 46.
25. Clyde Soto, Myrian González, and Patricio Dobrée, La migración femenina paraguaya en las cadenas
globales de cuidados en Argentina: Transferencia de cuidados y desigualdades de género (Santo Domingo,
DR: UN Women, 2012), 34.
26. Ibid., 35.
27. González, for example, reads the many clichés and stereotypes embodied by the characters in the novel
as a sort of meta-reflexive strategy. She notes that the characters’ “stereotypical attitudes follow the
norms of pop culture mediated by pulp fiction, film noir, melodrama, and action series. This sort of
cliché . . . [intends] to serve as a realist background, adulterated already by the fictional realm of media,
on which a new rupture is imprinted, i.e., the entering of the indigenous world, the oral language,
and the animal speech” (“Migración y oralidad,” 198). Yet one of our points is precisely that the
representations of the indigenous other (Lin), the indigenous language (Guaraní), and what González
calls “animal speech” (an oxymoron in itself ) are also stereotyped in the novel. In other words, neither
Lin’s “indigenous world” nor Serafín’s “animal speech” represent an irruption of anything “real” into
a stereotyped space because both elements are already stereotyped.
28. Puenzo, El niño pez, 118.
29. Ibid., 119.
30. González, “Migración y oralidad,” 193.
32. Kokalov, review of El niño pez, 230. Even though Puenzo’s intention was to cast a Paraguayan actress
for the role of Lin, ironically, she ended up casting a well-known Argentine singer (Mariela Vitale)
for the film version, who had to learn the songs phonetically because she does not speak Guaraní.
34. Ibid., 20.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., 163.
37. Ibid., 16.
38. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 46.
40. Ibid., 169.
41. Wolfe and Elmer, “Subject to Sacrifice,” 101.
42. Colleen Glenney Boggs very intelligently expresses the consequences of Wolfe and Elmer’s “species
grid” in her insightful article about “American bestiality” and the various animalizations that occurred
at Abu Ghraib: “Although the humanized human negates the importance of the animalized animal,
that negation establishes his identity” (“American Bestiality: Sex, Animals, and the Construction of
Subjectivity,” Cultural Critique 76 [Fall 2010]: 113). While pointing out that human and animal
identities are dependent on one another, Boggs paraphrases the species grid that produces four distinct
subject positions: the humanized human, the animalized animal, the animalized human, and the
humanized animal (113). In this system, any brutality of the humanized human directed against the
brute (or animalized animal) and the animalized human is perfectly justified.
43. Oscar Ranzani, interview with Lucía Puenzo, “Los dos personajes son muy amorales,” Página12,
February 6, 2009, www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/espectaculos/2-12776-2009-02-06.html.
44. González, “Migración y oralidad,” 203.
45. Ibid., 199.
46. Ibid., 200–201.
47. Ranzani, interview with Lucía Puenzo. It is unclear whether Puenzo, in her use of the word cynic, means
to allude to its etymology: the original Greek term means “doglike” and was applied to followers of
certain schools of philosophy.
48. Indeed, it is likely that Puenzo has in mind one of Cervantes’s novelas ejemplares, El coloquio de los
perros (The Dialogue of the Dogs), which is widely read in Spanish-speaking schools, as an intertext.
Cervantes’s speaking dogs also draw on the picaresque tradition.
50. Ibid., 18.
51. Ibid., 16–17.
52. Jutta Ittner, “Part Spaniel, Part Canine Puzzle: Anthropomorphism in Woolf ’s Flush and Auster’s
Timbuktu,” Mosaic 39.4 (2006): 181.
53. Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2008), 8.
54. Carmen Dell’ Aversano, “The Love Whose Name Cannot Be Spoken: Queering the Human-Animal
Bond,” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 8.1–2 (2010): 81.
55. Ibid., 79–80.
56. Ibid., 116.
57. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 35–36.
58. Ibid., 30.
59. Gilles Deleuze from A to Z, 3 DVDs (dir. Pierre-André Boutang, 1988–89; Paris: Sub-til and Sodeparaga/
Semiotext(e), 2012), DVD 1.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 233.
64. Ibid., 239.
65. Doris Sommer, “For Love and Money: Of Potboilers and Precautions,” PMLA 116.2 (2001): 382.
Sommer argues, “As a rhetorical solution to the crises in these novels (and nations), miscegenation is
often the figure for subsuming the primitive or barbarous sector in color-coded flirtations between
Creole liberals and Creole conservatives” (383).
They Were Girls: Animality and Poetic Voice in Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal | 735
They Were Girls: Animality and Poetic

Voice in Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal
Sarah Dowling
C
ritics tend to overlook the animals in American poetry; we remember
the red wheelbarrow alone, and forget that what “so much depends /
upon” is its placement “beside the white / chickens.”1 But American
poetry is practically a bestiary: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence
Dunbar, and Robert Frost all wrote poems prominently featuring animals, as
did most of the major modernists: Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams,
Mina Loy, Elizabeth Bishop, T. S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. Animals appear
through the midcentury and into the present in the work of James Merrill,
Frank O’Hara, Maya Angelou, Joy Harjo, and Lisa Jarnot. But while animals
take pride of place in so many poems, these works rarely receive serious con-
sideration, perhaps because of their “cute factor.”2 If some tame creatures fade
into the background, other animals are more insistent, more disruptive, harder
to ignore. In CAConrad’s The Book of Frank, for example, the titular character
“grew crows for hands / . . . at dinner during prayer / his crows flapped / excited
in the name of the Lord.”3 Frank’s crows do not just ruin the blessing; their
irreverence extends to every aspect of family life: “when Father died / Frank
was found / straddling him / his crows picking the seven / gold fillings.”4
Although fantastical, Frank’s crow-hands blur the boundary between species,
pointing toward what Kalpana Rahita Seshadri calls the “humAnimal,” a term
whose “A-shaped slash . . . can open and close the weave of power that sepa-
rates and unseparates human and animal.”5 In Frank’s case, having crow-hands
stands as evidence of his animalization as a child, as queer, as a rural person,
and so on: the crows’ disruptive flapping illustrates the “manipulation of the
impropriety between human and animal [accomplished] through the withhold-
ing of language as speech, which is necessarily also an expulsion from law and
society.”6 Rather than confer poetic voice on nonhuman animals to signal the
limits of human perception, contemporary poets are increasingly turning to
poetic forms more suited to the Franks among us, that maintain the compro-
mised, diminished, desubjectified status to which animals and the animalized
are relegated.7 The question such works raise, and the one that most concerns

this essay, is, how is lyric or poetic voice transformed when the possibility of
political speech or even speech in language is absent? Such transformations in
poetic voice have been powerfully explored through antiracist poetic projects
such as Myung Mi Kim’s Under Flag and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! I argue
that in Bhanu Kapil’s recent book Humanimal [a project for future children],
animality forms a line of continuity across colonial and postcolonial time; it
is the basis of Kapil’s imagined future coalition of diminished, not-quite hu-
mans—children, immigrants, and the disabled.8 Kapil’s manipulations of the
gap between human and animal result in a poetic voice that swerves from the
singular, humanistic voice of the lyric, crossing the species boundary to craft
an embodied, multiply-voiced utterance.
Humanimal delves into the story of Amala and Kamala, the famous Ben-
gali wolf girls. Extracted from a wolf ’s den on October 17, 1920, by the
Reverend J. A. L. Singh, a Christian missionary, the two feral children were
kept in Singh’s small orphanage at Midnapur. According to his diary, Singh
aimed to reeducate the girls from their wolf ways: like so many feral children
before them, they ran on all fours, slurped raw meat, howled in the night to
their lost wolf family, and showed no interest in human interaction. Through
a regime of massage, socialization, and physical training, Singh and his wife
hoped that the girls would learn to walk upright, to speak in language, and
to live a moral life. Unfortunately, Amala, about eighteen months old at the
time of her capture, died of nephritis on September 21, 1921. Kamala, who
was thought to be about eight years old when she was taken from the wolves,
lived until November 14, 1929. In nine years, she learned to trust the Singhs,
to speak about fifty words, and to care for the orphanage’s younger charges.
During her short lifetime, Kamala’s story spread through the Indian media,
and by 1926 reports of the Bengali wolf girls appeared in the British and Ameri-
can press. In particular, Kamala fascinated American social scientists. Scholars
of anthropology, child development, education, psychology, and sociology
entered into correspondence with Singh and with the Anglo-Indian authori-
ties whose word, they hoped, would validate the missionary’s claims. Singh’s
diary of the wolf girls’ progress was published in the United States as the most
significant document in Wolf-Children and Feral Man, a lengthy catalog of case
histories of feral and isolated children compiled by the Denver anthropologist
Robert Zingg.9 Contemporaneously, the prominent and influential Yale child
psychologist Arnold Gesell published a “narrative interpretation” of Kamala’s
life, Wolf Child and Human Child, a highly romanticized reconstruction of her
family life as a rural peasant, her wolf life, and her tenure at the orphanage,
complete with naive, line-drawn illustrations and a selection of photographs
of her eating entrails, accepting a treat from Mrs. Singh’s hand, scratching at
a door, and standing upright, apparently for the first time.10 In the estimation
of these American scientists, Kamala’s animal being promised to reveal a truer,
more elemental human self and offered the promise of a civilizing medico-
pedagogy that could be exerted equally on the colonized, the disabled, or any
child. However, Kamala’s failure to live up to this promise during her own
short life sparked controversy: her inability to become fully human provoked
great debate among American scientists, and this debate itself demonstrates the
extensive overlap between discourses of animality, coloniality, and disability.
Some six decades later, Bhanu Kapil, an Asian American poet born in the
UK to Indian parents, discovered Singh’s and Zingg’s collaboration in the
stacks at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Norlin Library; their book
served as source material for hers. Humanimal begins, Kapil explains, “at the
limit of touch”: her own hand lingering over a dusty volume in the stacks; her
attempt to reach through this history and document Amala’s and Kamala’s
short lives differently.11 Kapil’s densely research-based prose poetry concerns
mental illness, immigration, monstrousness, and their various intersections.12
From her first book, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, to her most recent,
Schizophrene, Kapil examines transformations in subject and geography: “What
does the shape of her body and her mind look like as she moves through the
world?”13 The wolf girls’ estrangement from language, unique postures, and
truncated lifespan determine the form of her third book, Humanimal, Kapil’s
“project for future children.” Its antidevelopmental prose poetry corresponds
to the wolf girls’ physicality: unlike the narrative impulse, the normativizing
desire “to make our story biographic,” as Gesell puts it, Kapil creates a loping
text that ranges among poetry, history, memoir, and documentary. Written
primarily in short, numbered paragraphs of elliptical prose, it recounts the story
of Kamala and Amala in compressed sentences that replicate the shock and
awe of the civilizational violence to which the two wolf girls were subjected.
In Humanimal Kapil creates a system of echoes between past and present that
links Kapil and her father to the wolf girls. The various forms of animalization
that each experiences form a continuity across the distances in space and time
that separate them. The animality and animalization that shut Kamala, Kapil,
and her father out of their respective societies become the condition of possibil-
ity for a poetry in which embodied experience and bodily vulnerability replace
the self-certainty of the speaking subject. Humanimal’s blended, partial, and
radically contingent voices conjoin rather than distinguish speakers; they open
and close the boundary between human and animal in order to recognize and
name the animalizations imposed by power, what Seshadri calls “expulsion[s]
from law and society.”14 More importantly, though, in manipulating this gap,
Kapil produces a poetic voice especially suited to the rendering of nonnorma-
tive embodiment, especially suited to rendering connections across time and
geography.
This essay tracks the reception of Kamala’s story in the 1940s and argues
that the terms of that decade’s academic debates are taken on some sixty years
later when Kapil revisits the wolf girls’ story. For Zingg, Gesell, and others,
animality is the ground condition for physical health and bodily normality,
but it must be transcended in order to achieve the normative future. Kamala’s
failure to transcend her animality demonstrates the American scientists’ confla-
tion of animality, disability, and coloniality. This same failure, however, makes
Kamala valuable to contemporary poetry’s representation of the nonsubject. If
Kapil’s poetic form approximates the terror of the wolf girls’ incarceration and
medical correction, it also counters the triumphant developmental narrative
that American scientists sought to impose on the wolf girls’ story. Instead, this
poetry moves outward laterally; Kamala’s animality is a vector of coalitional
identification that works against the aspirational and normativizing logic of
development codified by the American scientists who wrote about her. In
Kapil’s deliberately retrogressive text, animality spans colonial and postcolonial
temporalities, making links between different experiences of diminishment.
Rather than restore the wolf girls to lyric subjectivity, Humanimal inscribes a
different relation among language, ethics, and species, creating a poetic form
that corresponds to their non- or not-just-human being.
Unique but Very Poorly Operating Girls
The wolf girls’ origins are mysterious. Unable to speak in language when
they were extracted from their wolf mother’s den, the girls could not give an
account of how they had come to live with her or with each other. Perhaps
their wolf mother had stolen them as infants, perhaps they had wandered off
as toddlers — they were not biological siblings, but they were likely members
of the rural populations to whom Singh’s missionary work was dedicated.15
As Singh explains,
The wolf-children were first seen by natives on various occasions. I heard of these children
for the first time on August 26, 1920. The same “ghost story” was repeated to me on Sep-
tember 24, 1920. The children were seen through a field glass by several people (Europeans
and Anglo-Indians) from a distance of about one hundred yards, on the 9th and 10th of
October, 1920.
Three wolves were observed to come out of a tunnel-like passage from their den,
closely followed by two cubs; then there appeared a human head covered with bushy hair,
with a ghastly look about the face. This head tarried for a while looking to this side and that,
then a human form came out of the den followed by another human being at its heels. The
two children crawled on all fours.16
Realizing that the “ghosts” had human form, Singh established a hunting party
to save these children from life in the wild, extracting them from their den on
October 17, 1920. The mother wolf was smoked out of the den, then shot with
arrows and killed as she tried to defend her brood. Once the mother had been
defeated, the den was broached and a sheet thrown over the trembling bundle
of cubs. Amala and Kamala were separated from their wolf siblings, bound,
and transported to Singh’s orphanage. By some accounts, this lengthy transit
included a period of starvation of up to a week, and the wolf girls nearly died.
Singh’s diary records mostly bad days; it is largely a catalog of Kamala’s
transgressions and punishments, her slow progress to upright posture and
linguistic facility, and her frequent regressions into animal behavior. Although
Singh often met her wolf ways with incredible violence, he seems to have
harbored little doubt that Kamala would eventually be fully assimilated into
human society. Indeed, the wolf girls’ doctor insisted that with sufficient time
and proper training they “could have returned to an ordinary human condition
from the stage of animal.”17 In the posthumous American writings on their
case, however, speculations about the wolf girls’ idiocy and dysgenic character-
istics are pervasive. As Amala falls out of the picture, the question of Kamala’s
animality comes to hinge on her mental competence: ought our animal selves
be viewed as the root of continuous adaptation and development? Or ought
animality be understood in terms of limitation, subhumanity, and pathology,
synonymous with disability and colonial backwardness? American academic
debates on the wolf girls strongly favor the latter, revealing the connections
between discourses of idiocy, education, and civilization as they relate to the
defective child. Kamala’s uneasy shift to “civilization” and her resistance to
being “wean[ed] from her savage ways” were interpreted as evidence both of
her tribal heritage and of her intellectual disability.18 For American scientists,
Kamala symbolized a series of questions about human development at the
individual and societal levels, and the question of “mental deficiency,” of
“feeblemindedness” or “idiocy,” was front and center.19
The wolf girls’ story came to light only through disability: when they fell
sick, Singh explains, “the doctor had to know the circumstances of their early
life in order to know how to treat their illness. He told the story in Midnapore
and the cat was out of the bag.”20 Local gossip prompted a flood of visitors—
“these gentlemen and ladies could not be refused”—and by 1922 editors and
reporters from Indian newspapers were visiting the orphanage. “Very soon, to
our disgust,” Singh explains, “all the papers published about the wolf-children
. . . but we could do nothing.”21 Singh insists that he and Mrs. Singh “refused
. . . visits from the press”; however, they allowed a visit from Bishop Packenham-
Walsh and the students of the Camp of Inter-Collegiate Christian Colleges
on August 30, 1926.22 Of course, the students had read “article after article”
about Amala and Kamala, and so Packenham-Walsh insisted that the students
meet Kamala, the surviving wolf child.23 “I made only one condition,” Singh
states: “that they should not talk about it outside. We were afraid lest a new
publication would result.”24
Despite Singh’s wishes, the story circulated; “England and America became
highly interested from the psychological point of view.”25 Amala and Kamala
made their New York Times debut on Friday, October 22, 1926, on the front
page. Drawing on a British wire report, the brief article describing their capture
and Amala’s death, and the progress of Kamala’s civilization found its echoes
in the Chicago Daily Tribune, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times,
where additional articles breathlessly announced in their titles, “Wolf Girls Are
Saved from Den in Bengal,” and, for an alternate perspective, “Wolf Fosters
Lost Babes.”26 Articles of increasing length and complexity appeared over the
following months, authenticating the wolf girls’ story through the testimony
of Packenham-Walsh.27 Drawing on stories of feral children from folklore,
mythology, and fiction, the New York Times declared Kamala a “Mowgli in
real life” in December, but lamented in January that although her fictional
counterpart had “picked up the more-or-less elaborate ways of civilization with
. . . brilliant ease,” Kamala was “tragically unlike” Mowgli and resisted “efforts
. . . to wean her from her savage ways.”28
Speculation centered on this “tragic” difference, especially as discussion of
the wolf girls’ story shifted from the news media to the academic realm and
to popular scientific publications in the 1930s and 1940s with the publication
of Singh’s diary and Gesell’s biography of Kamala.29 Both works were widely
reviewed in academic publications, but the general consensus was politely
negative. In addition to worrying about the possibility of a hoax, most re-
views suggested that Kamala was in fact a “mental defective.” Gesell’s fanciful
biography, however, argued quite forcefully that had she lived, Kamala might
have risen to a “normal” mental state, albeit only to what he viewed as the low
level of her rural forebears.
To make this argument, Gesell ventured beyond the generic boundaries

of scientific writing to create a fanciful, storybook reconstruction of Kamala’s
biography. Imagining her birth, he interprets Kamala’s human family life as
itself a kind of animal life, almost continuous with her future among the wolves:
In one of the mud and thatched huts of Godamuri a dark-skinned Hindoo mother, perhaps
from the primitive tribe of Kora, gave birth to a daughter. An ancient midwife, we may sup-
pose, gave attendance and comfort. Not much comfort was needed. Childbirth was an old
story in this household. Perhaps there was an expression of regret that this babe was a mere
girl, when the father came home at evening with his white bullock dragging the plowshare
which had turned the spring soil.
The manger of the bullock was near by. Man and beast lived in intimate association
in this villager’s hut. So thoroughly domesticated is the ox in India that he is reputed to have
an almost human mien! If the ox did not hush his voice on seeing the newborn infant, he
may yet have “bent trewe eyes of pitty ore the mow.”30
As Gesell’s biography suggests, the scientific and popular literature on Kamala’s

unusual case condenses animality and disability. In addition to the animality
implicit in his description of Kamala’s mother’s labor, Gesell emphasizes the
“intimate association” between Kamala’s family and the animals on whom they
rely. The ox’s “hush[ed]” greeting to the “sooty baby” suggests that animals are
not so sharply divided from humans in these “thatched hut[s].”31 Instead, Ka-
mala’s life within this “primitive” and “ancient” civilization is almost predictive
of her wolf life to come: Gesell stops just short of suggesting that in Kamala’s
natal village humans and animals can speak to each other.
If the girls’ animality offered the promise to reveal a state of nature, a true,
elemental humanity, the possibility of their mental impairment excluded
Kamala especially from any representative status. As one reviewer brutally
stated, “Persons as stupid and beast-like as she have had no wolf-history to
which to attribute their condition.”32 Singh and Zingg’s catalog of feral and
isolated children, Wolf Children and Feral Man, makes clear the long-standing
association between mental disability and feral childhood. Feral children are
not necessarily “defective,” Zingg explains, but they display a “universal initial
imbecility when restored to human society.”33 “Though the degrees of recovery
vary from almost complete . . . to practically nothing,” he explains, “the initial
human behavior of all cases appears idiotic, despite the animal-like keenness of
the senses of smell, hearing, and sight.”34 The most significant “failure[s]” of
wild children are in the “development of speech” and their tendency to walk
on all fours, but these deficiencies are not due to “congenital idiocy.”35 Rather,
they are the result of isolation: “Deprived too long of human association, or
animal-conditioned too strongly, the sensitive potentialities of human develop-

ment are permanently inhibited and/or the traces of animal conditioning are
never completely lost.”36 Other commentators such as Wayne Dennis, Gesell’s
biggest detractor, argued forcefully for the likelihood of Kamala’s imbecility.37
For Dennis, Kamala represented the tragic but mundane weakness of mere
aberration; no animal quality could elevate her to medical or academic signifi-
cance: she was merely a “low-grade defective” and a “mute idiot.” Moreover,
he suggests that she was absolutely typical within her context: “India possesses
a large number of unfortunates to whom such a myth could be fitted.”38
India’s many “unfortunates,” however, were not merely disabled; in fact,
many American commentators believed that Kamala’s story was a fairly com-
mon incident in that country, viewing wild children as a by-product of India’s
colonial backwardness. The distinction between Gesell’s vision of the “mud
and thatched huts of Godamuri” and Kamala’s feral childhood was, to their
minds, minimal. American commentators on Kamala’s case suggest that some
human societies, themselves backward, are veritable breeding grounds for
throwbacks like feral children. Zingg, for example, suggests that feral children
are a particularly Indian phenomenon: “Since 1850 there have been constant
and recurring reports of native soldiers, peasants, and others taking children
from wolves.”39 Similarly, Dennis suggests that Indian credulity is to blame
for the recurrent myth of wolf-children: of fourteen relatively current reports
of wolf-children, he explains, “12 have come from India, where the myth of
a child reared by animals is widespread.”40 “Since the idea of wolf-children
is current in India,” he argues, “if a mute, who could give no account of his
past, were found in India at the present time, it is easy to guess the direction
of speculation concerning his origin.”41
By the time the wolf girls were extracted from their den, however, colonial
rule in Bengal was entering its final phase. In Midnapur and in West Bengal
more generally, mass mobilization against the colonial state was on the rise.
Contemporaneous with the wolf girls’ discovery by Reverend Singh in 1920,
the peasant community was actively engaged in resisting the colonial state’s
increasing incursions into village life. While the rapidly dissolving zamidar
landowning class was remaking itself as an urbanized middle class and a po-
litically radical intelligentsia, the jotdar trading and money-lending class was
being absorbed into local structures of governmental power as an effective
force against the encroachment of the state. The agrarian peasant sharecrop-
ping and laboring class was increasingly differentiated from the jotdar class,
and increasingly indebted to them; however, solidarity across these peasant
classes remained vital, and the jotdar class led the more impoverished agrarian
peasants in their revolt. By the time the American commentators on Kamala’s

case were publishing their work in the early 1940s, West Bengal was entering
a third wave of nationalist upsurge. The American commentators’ conflations
of animality, disability, and coloniality come at precisely the moment when
Kamala’s compatriots and contemporaries were most actively engaged in con-
testations of colonial rule.
Kapil suggests a loose parallel between the rising anticolonial resistance
that coincided with Singh’s capture of the young wolf girls and the “period
of Naxalite ‘activity’” during which she undertook her research trip to West
Bengal in 2004.42 In creating this system of inexact reflections between present
and past, Kapil reinforces the conflations articulated by an earlier generation
of American commentators on Kamala’s case. Using physical differences coded
as animal, as “idiot,” and as colonial, Kapil’s poetic form corresponds to the
wolf girls’ distinct physicality, their limited vocabulary, untidiness, perverse
food preferences, and quadrupedal posture. Humanimal accepts rather than
refutes the overlaying of animality, coloniality, and disability, and in blurring
the species boundary Kapil crafts a lyric voice that not only is plural but spills
beyond the presumption of human subjectivity that typically inheres in the
self-certainty and self-sufficiency of the lyric “I”: “Say it is a wolf becoming
a girl, the action in reverse.”43 Creating connections among the broad spec-
trums of physical life restrained by colonial violence and medico-pedagogical
intervention, her prose poetry locates possibility in the bodily difference of
Kamala’s animality, using this as the basis for a coalitional poetics that echoes
between and conjoins the wolf girls, her father’s childhood in India, and her
own childhood in the UK.
A Dark Mirror
Humanimal attends to the many parallels between Kamala’s and Kapil’s expe-
riences in Midnapur, and to the animalization that both underwent in their
childhoods. “Writing makes a mirror between the two children who perceive
each other,” Kapil explains, “in a physical world, the mirror is a slice of dark
space.”44 Her text breaks the space between these children, creating the pos-
sibility for coalition between them:
When I was a child returning to London after a year in India, the children on my street asked
me if it was true. “Did you eat snakes for breakfast?” As a joke, I said yes and for a summer or
so read books in my garden, shut out from their games: “little black pig,” “Paki snake eater,”
and so on. When I grew up, I wrote about the blood-stream of a child as intermingling with
that of an animal. Within an environment, the glide path of this child was soundless. When
conditions fluxed, I build a flux gate. I made a cut in the trees and let her go.45
Kamala’s literal and experiential animalization, the product of her wolf life,
inexactly reflects the animality imputed to Kapil as the child of immigrant
parents, the racial other. Throughout Humanimal, the wolf girls’ animal bodies
are placed in counterpoint with other forms of difference; Kapil’s text relies
on a system of reflections, where disparate experiences of animalization mirror
and echo each other.46 Using visual imagery and documentary photographs,
Kapil draws associations between the wolf girls’ quadrupedal movement, her
family’s conspicuously brown skin, and a deep scar on her father’s leg. Each
image of a body records a history of violence and suggests a trajectory that
swerves from the normative requirements for subjecthood. Humanimal refuses
to posit a universalizable poetic subject who exists separately from bodily needs
and wants, from bodily wounds; instead, it creates echoes between various
animalities, bringing diverse experiences of compromised human embodiment
into conversation with one another.
If animality typically signifies the “inferior, devalued qualities of human
nature,” in Kapil’s work it traces a trajectory through colonial and postcolo-
nial time, and becomes the condition of possibility for a coalitional poetics
that brings different attributions of primitiveness, wildness, and colonization
into dialogue.47 Humanimal is rooted in the specificities of Kamala’s unique
physicality, particularly in her quadrupedal gait and the series of violent acts
that strip her of her wolf history. Kapil’s elliptical prose documents the force-
ful processes Amala and Kamala suffered when they were returned to human
society: “With hard fingers they tore strips from my spine. All blonde-black
fur. All hair from a previous life.”48 While Singh’s diary and Gesell’s biography
praise the medico-pedagogical intervention exerted on Kamala, describing
the massage administered by Mrs. Singh as a loving and “truly therapeutic
laying on of hands,” “skillfully and tenderly done with many endearments,”
in Kapil’s book these physical manipulations push the limits of cruelty.49 In
Humanimal, contact between the Singhs and the wolf girls is almost always
negative: “In the shadow of the church, in the Home, Joseph took Kamala’s
hair in his fist and cut it off, close to the skull . . . Joseph held her elbows
together behind her back and, with his other hand, bathed her forehead with
water at the font.”50 In another instance, “the doctor breaks Kamala’s thumbs
and wraps them in gauze.”51 This violence sought to bring the “poorly operat-
ing girl[s]” from the “aberrated physiological patterns” of wolf-life into the
“normal pattern of a woman”: speaking in language, wearing clothes, morally

upright, and Christian.52
Despite the torturous treatment to which they are subjected, the wolf girls
remain distinct and animal. Even as she is socialized into the world of the
orphanage, the bodily modifications produced by her wolf life continue to
distinguish Kamala from the others:
It’s Palm Sunday and Kamala, with the other orphans in a dark, glittery crocodile, walks
from Home to church. Her two arms extend stiffly from her body to train them, to extend.
Unbound, her elbows and wrists would flex then supinate like two peeled claws. Wrapped,
she is a swerve, a crooked yet regulated mark. This is corrective therapy; the fascia hardening
over a lifetime then split in order to re-set it, educate the nerves.53
Kamala’s wolf history determines the shape of her body, affecting the exten-
sion of her limbs, their flexion, making her arms look like “two peeled claws.”
Walking in a crocodile with the other children—in a long row, two by two—
she sticks out from the “dark, glittery” sequence. “Crooked yet regulated,”
she must be “train[ed]” and “wrapped” so that her body will fit the pattern of
“Home,” “church” and “orphans.” “This is corrective therapy,” Kapil explains;
she extensively documents the civilizational violence that disciplines the wolf
girls’ bodies into upright movement but cannot fully erase the modifications
produced by their early lives among the wolves.
Much like Kamala’s difference from the other orphans, Kapil’s family swerves
from the norms of their society, a “crooked yet regulated mark” of another
kind. Relying primarily on descriptions of photographs, Kapil creates reflections
between the wolf girls’ physical difference and her own racial difference as a
South Asian child in the UK. She describes a photograph from a family holiday:
The coast of Wales. Your legs were a brown and silver frame to the day: bony, skinny really,
and smashed-up looking beneath a coat of coarse, black hair. The sand was white, as were
the other holidayers. I felt bitterly the contrast of our own exposed skin against the blueness
of the sky and the waves. Your legs were frankly an embarrassment: visible chunks of flesh
taken from your thighs and shins at another point in history. Mummy’s bright yellow sari with
its schizophrenic border of green and black zig-zags, and so on. Only in the water were you
and I a family, colorless, wavy and child-centered. Invisible in the eyes of the other families.
Do you remember? A wave bobs up, higher than the person with the camera. Embedded
in the dark, silver cream of the Kodak paper, you’re like a brown rectangle with a black dot
for the mouth and two brown arms. I am a brown dot and one brown arm, obscured by
iridescence; your singular, limbed progeny.54
Kamala’s animality is more physical than metaphorical; in this passage, so is

Kapil’s father’s: his “bony,” “smashed-up” legs with their “coarse, black hair”
are too “flesh[y]” and visceral on a beach where the other “holidayers” match
the white sand. This bodily difference “frame[s . . .] the day” and its “bitter”
experience of singularity. “Only in the water” does her father’s excessive and
excessively wounded flesh disappear enough to make “a family, colorless, wavy
and child-centered.” In Kapil’s dark mirror of writing, the wolf girls’ animality
reflects this experience of racial difference; the manipulation of the gap between
human and animal forces one girl into an unfamiliar society, and another girl
out of a familiar one.
In each of Kapil’s repeated descriptions of photographs, the subjects do not
quite attain normative embodiment; they retain an animal quality that produces
visual echoes among the text’s various figures. Along with the documentary
photographs of Amala and Kamala and Kapil’s textual descriptions of her own
family photographs, Humanimal also includes one digital image, a photograph
of a long, deep scar on her father’s leg, which he received in a street beating
as a child in India. The picture of his scar is overlaid with a map of London
showing part of the borough of Barnet, a mostly white area in which a large
majority of homes are owner occupied. The juxtaposition between map and
scar evokes the trajectory of Kapil’s father’s life: “A twelve-year-old, illiterate
boy, my father was standing in a field when he had a vision. He said: ‘I sud-
denly knew that when I grew up I would be a teacher in England. I said, “I
will go to England and teach English to the English.”’ And he did. He dragged
himself out of the field and into the sky.”55 This aspirational narrative, however,
is explicitly framed as a continuation of, rather than an emancipation from,
the animalized condition of his impoverished childhood in which he received
the brutal scar. In the image the scar graphically displays the impossibility of
transcending one’s animal flesh, even in such genteel settings as the Hampstead
Heath Extension, which lies just beyond the area covered by the map. More-
over, Kapil demonstrates that the gap separating human and animal can close
even in the service of civilization: one of the many frightening memories that
Kapil recounts is her father’s violent caning of a pupil and her own terrified
retreat from the scene.
In Humanimal, the attempt to create social viability from animality is
always cruel; figures like the Singhs, who are fighting for the children in their
orphanage, are at the same time fighting the wolf children whom they attempt
to domesticate. Similarly, when the South Asian family on a British beach be-
comes visible as “a family . . . child-centered,” they are also obscured beyond
recognition: “You’re like a brown rectangle with a black dot for the mouth.”
This “child-centered” family, along with Kapil’s subtitle, cannot help but evoke
the Child of Lee Edelman’s No Future, the symbol of a highly conservative
futurity, positioned against the negative futurity of political subversion usually
aligned with “queer.”56 However, if Edelman’s Child is “the perpetual horizon
of every acknowledged politics” and the symbol of “social viability,” Kapil’s
future child is a ghostly presence, obliquely evoked in her text’s frequent de-
scriptions of the hurt and the shamed.57 Moreover, Edelman’s description of
conservative futurity has nothing to do with children as such; strictly speaking,
it designates an adult desire to perpetuate an existing social order and describes
a rhetorical practice of exclusion that masquerades as protection. By contrast,
the “wavy” image of Kapil’s family on the beach, which suggests an aspiration
toward normative wholeness, only becomes “colorless” and “invisible”: “I am
a brown dot and one brown arm, obscured by iridescence.”
Attributions of animality linger behind or around all the “poorly operat-
ing” individuals in Humanimal. These animalized bodies fail to measure up to
the colonialist, evolutionary logic of uprightness—physical and moral—that
shapes the source texts from which Humanimal is composed. Kapil’s poetry,
although it explicitly announces itself as a “project for future children,” pro-
poses a future of co-adaptive devolution, challenging readers to rethink the
relentless optimism that generally inheres in the language of childhood and
futurity. Kapil’s unknowable, potentially dangerous, and infinitely vulnerable
future children refuse the universality of a subject who exists separately from
emergent, embodied needs. Humanimal’s speaker is not singular; as the text
proceeds, its speaking voices become increasingly melded, conjoining them-
selves through the embodied conditions of their own articulation. In this way,
Kapil reconfigures the painful and disempowering manipulations of the gap
between human and animal. She demonstrates that a poetic voice not bound
by the humanist assumptions implicit in lyric singularity can cross the species
boundary to enunciate a new and surprising coalition.
Future Children
Theorists of critical animal studies frequently cite Jacques Derrida’s contention

that the purpose of rethinking the species boundary is not to “‘giv[e] speech
back to animals,’ but rather [to rethink] the relation between language, ethics,
and species itself.”58 In the domain of American poetry, the question of “giving
speech back” is particularly acute. While certain strands of contemporary lyric
poetry emphasize the restoration of lyric subjectivity to historical victims and
the creation of humanizing testimonials in verse, other modes of writing, such
as Kapil’s, avoid the liberal humanist assumptions implicit in such pluralistic

approaches to lyric subjectivity. When it comes to wild or feral children, of
course, the idea of “giving speech back” becomes even more vexed: the child’s
linguistic attainment is typically considered the measure of her successful rein-
tegration into human society.59 As Seshadri points out, no wild child has ever
been “able to use language as anything more than a random pile of words with
uncertain indexical functions — never as a mode of symbolic expression.”60
For the feral child, language is an “experience rather than a tool, a means to
an end,” and in this sense, the feral child remains “in the state of infancy—a
state that is neither of the past nor the future but is radically contemporary.”61
The wolf girls’ relation to language is, on the one hand, purely experiential
and utilitarian, but on the other, exploits language’s capacity “to signify and
not signify.”62 In Humanimal Kapil opens and closes the boundary between
lyric utterance as characteristically human speech and an embodied animal
utterance that self-consciously avoids lyric self-representation. Kapil blends her
own voice with Kamala’s instrumental use of language to derive a poetic form
corresponding to the bodily vulnerability of animals and of the animalized,
and to the truncated temporality of diminished, feminized beings.
As its title indicates, Kapil’s text integrates the human and the animal,
breaking down these categories through the use of the prose poem, combining
human and animal voices in alternating paragraphs of text. Rather than restore
the wolf girls to language or to lyric subjectivity, Humanimal creates a poetic
form that approximates to their non- or not-just-human being. Kapil includes
passages from Singh’s diary in which he documents Kamala’s slow acquisition
of language, the lists of her words that he faithfully records:
L. “Ud: Ashud/Medicine. Doo: Dudh, Milk. Bhāt/Rice. Moor: Muri/Parched Rice.

Māng: Māngsa, Meat. Foo: Phul, Flower. Hut: Hāth/Hand. Dim: Dim/Egg. Khel:
Khalera/Toy. Pān: Pān/Betel Leaf. Zo: Jal/Water. Maz: Mach/Fish. Ain: A-inah/Mirror.
Fok: Farak/Frock. Chui: Churi/Knife. Bag: Baghān/Garden. Cho-Ghoi: Chota Gharu/
Timepiece. Joot: Juta/Shoe.—Kamala’s words, with Bengali equivalents and English
equivalents, as recorded by Joseph on December 1924 when he wrote, observing her
during a bout of fever and dysentery: “One peculiarity was especially noticed during
her illness: her tongue became active, and she commenced talking in a fashion that
amazed us all immensely. Though the words were broken, yet she expressed herself in
a wonderful way.”63
At first, Humanimal alternates between numbered paragraphs mainly in Kapil’s

voice and lettered bold-font paragraphs that seem to be in Kamala’s. As the
book progresses, however, these shift and transform: the two voices blur and
blend as time passes in Midnapur for Kamala and, years later, for Kapil when
she visits with a documentary film crew. Because the passage above is a lettered
passage rendered in bold font, it announces itself as Kamala’s voice. However,
its citational content, taken from Singh’s diary, suggests that we are reading the
voice of the researcher–poet, Kapil. The quotation marks in the passage cannot
be parsed clearly, and Kapil’s authorial voice intrudes in the middle of the pas-
sage before the quotation marks close on Kamala’s words (as recorded by Singh).
This blended voice represents Kamala’s rudimentary speech, Singh’s diary, and
Kapil’s research, but the textual conventions for representing Kamala’s voice
overtake the rest. Animality creeps in and disturbs our presumptions about who
speaks and how they do so, about what forms speech takes, and about what is
at stake in claiming a subject position. The appearance of Kamala’s voice, then,
is not merely a pluralistic inclusion, an expansion of lyric subjectivity; rather, it
is constitutive of Kapil’s unconventional poetic form. By using a continuously
shifting “I” to render the animality of feral children, of immigrants, and of her
own authorial subjectivity, and by rendering these simultaneously, Kapil ques-
tions the self-certainty and self-sufficiency that typically characterize the lyric
subject, offering in its place the blended voice of a speaker whose coalitional
utterance crosses boundaries of time, space, and language.
The basis for this crossing is the condition of bodily vulnerability shared
by all of Humanimal’s central figures. For example, Kapil describes her father’s
body as a “liquidy, peeled thing—constantly re-opened spots of tissue,” echo-
ing the description of Kamala’s arms as “two peeled claws.”64 She describes the
scar on his leg almost as a form of asemic writing: wordless, without specific
semantic content, it is “pooled with a silvery protein that hardened into long
ovals and other shapes.”65 Dark and bright alternations in a long, cruel line,
the scar is a nonlinguistic inscription, writing that records the violence to
which the flesh was subjected. We might call this writing animal. Kapil offers
commentary on the scar:
Krishnan, my father, was born in India in 1937, ten years after Kamala died. This is a
photograph of scar tissue, to represent a deep cut in his leg from a street beating. What is a
street? Here, the flesh is healed over, repaired by natural processes. If the image, the excess
rectangle tends to the next page, mark it black. This scar doesn’t fade; it doesn’t melt, over
time, into a skin.66
It seems clear enough that the scar documents the violence of its own creation.
But why classify the scar as animal writing? The scar, like Kamala’s body, is
shaped by the events the flesh has undergone. It records and testifies to a his-
tory of animalized life. Crucially, though, the scar records this history without
reference to the biographical structures that shape Gesell’s rendering of Ka-
mala’s life or the lyric structures that shape our assumptions about personal
testimony; it avoids the shape of the subject that polices the species boundary
and differentiates human from animal. Contextualized within Kapil’s book,
the scar signifies a mode of writing that corresponds to humanimal being, a
poetics that avoids the self-certainty of lyric speech in order to accommodate
animalized modes of speech and inscription.
The animalized bodies at the center of Humanimal—small and childlike,
dark and hairy, bent into a quadrupedal posture—are tasked with the prob-
lem of survival. Kapil’s “project for future children” does not take children
as symbols of future possibility; rather, she situates the wolf girls within an
animalistic, colonial past, a zone of idiocy and incomprehension that refuses
the normative logic of development. Rather than progress toward a human
future, Kapil’s humanimal children are reduced, feminized. They do not become
subjects over time, and they expire before their possibilities can be realized.
“Where is the future child?” Kapil asks, “curled up with wolves, sub-red, the
wolfgirl’s eyes reflected light. She was seven when her Father found her, coiled
in a den.”67 Not only an animal, “curled up with wolves,” this future child is
also confined to the past tense: “She was seven.” The Home, the Father, and
the medico-pedagogical intervention and progress they represent are sources
of horror for the wolf girls, who want nothing more than to return to their
wolf mother and to the familiar comforts of the jungle.
The wolf girls, like so many other feral children, died very young. And even
if they had not, their lives already veered from the commonplace itinerary in
which children progress toward an adulthood of domestic comforts and pro-
creation. In his introduction to the diary, Reverend Singh frames his reluctance
to publish the wolf girls’ story, especially during their lifetimes, as a matter of
biological and social reproduction. Publication, he suggests, would put the
girls’ futures at risk: “I have reserved publication [because] they were girls, and
if the rescue story became public, it would be difficult for us to settle them in
their life by marriage, when they attained that age.”68 Given that the truncated
span of the wolf girls’ lives excluded even the progression to linguistic fluency
and physical uprightness, it seems strange that Singh should imagine them
“settle[d] . . . in their li[ves] by marriage,” but his rescue included an aspira-
tional trajectory toward this form of “settle[d]” life. To ensure their viability as
biologically and socially (re)productive creatures, however, Singh and his wife
had to protect the girls from notoriety, to conceal their bodily animality under
a publication ban.69 The Singhs’ desire for the wolf girls to marry outlined a
future for them; however, Singh’s retrospective statement is grounded in the

past tense and in extinguished possibility: they were girls, and their brief, feral
life spans rendered his hopes impossible.
For Kapil’s humanimal children, there can be no positing of a universaliz-
able subject who exists separately from bodily needs and wants, from bodily
wounds; they do not fit the standard of uprightness based on universalizable
norms. Instead, they are engaged in co-adaptive devolution; they signify differ-
ent futures that work against the optimism typically associated with childhood:
I want to stand up but I can’t do that here. They would know I am a wolf by my sore hips,
the look in my eyes. At the edge of the garden was a line of blue chalk. My mother was
crouching here, waiting for me in her dark coat. In the dream, I walk towards her and she
stands up. She opens up her coat like two wings and I step into her cloth heart, her cleft
of matted fur.70
The animal body reveals itself; the pain of upright posture and the threat of
discovery hold the wolf girl back, keeping her in the garden, behind “a line of
blue chalk.” But in the forest, the wolf mother waits, holding open the pos-
sibility of a different and more connected embodiment. The future desired
by and for the wolf girls is retrogressive, their “dream” slips backward into the
forest, the animal world, and into the wolf mother’s warm and messy body. In
Kapil’s book, Kamala returns to the place where her animal body could thrive,
to the humanimal coalition that enabled her survival for years. Instead of exist-
ing as a distinct subject within this world, becoming human, her body blends
with her wolf mother’s; she imagines their symbiosis as a conjoined, melded
existence, a manipulation of the gap between human and animal that allows
life to flourish.71 Kamala’s dream of physical reunion with her wolf mother is
realized by Kapil’s innovations in poetic voice.
Kapil endows Kamala’s story with affects other than her scientific source texts’
emphases on disability and colonial backwardness, but she worries that she
cannot contain these domesticating energies or the gleeful frisson produced
by the encounter with the wolf girl. In this way, Humanimal maintains that
the opening and closure of the gap between human and animal is an effect of
power in which the animalized are shut out from language and society, but
her work also reveals that in pursuing this gap, in tracing its openings and
closures, the possibility for thinking and writing differently springs forward. A
coalitional voice, crossing boundaries of time, location, and language, stands
as an alternative to the additive pluralism of American poetry’s lyric “I,” whose
shape can, we are told, be filled with any content. Instead, Kapil’s form cor-
responds to the radical contingency of the voice itself: totally ephemeral, the
voice emanates from and is shaped by bodily flesh, and it vibrates and lodges
within bodily flesh, creating a momentary physical connection through sound.
But if Humanimal begins with the desire for something lovely, it quickly
finds itself needing to account for the horror provoked by encounters with
animality, especially one’s own. Toward the end of Humanimal, Kapil encloses
a meditation on her father’s scar:
My father’s right leg, linear and hard as the bone it contains, and silver. There are scooped
out places where the flesh is missing, shiny, as they would be regardless of race. A scar is
a memory. Memory is wrong. The wrong face appears in the wrong memory. A face, for
example, condenses on the surface of the mirror in the bathroom when I stop writing to
wash my face. Hands on the basin, I look up and see it: the distinct image of an owlgirl.
Her eyes protrude, her tongue is sticking out, and she has horns, wings and feet. Talons. I
look into her eyes and see his.72
In her “dark mirror of writing,” Kapil creates an imaginative connection with

Kamala that allows her to see her father in the owl girl’s eyes, which are her
own. Taking seriously the “manipulation of the impropriety between human
and animal,” Kapil makes Kamala’s animality reflect various historical and
contemporary experiences of animalization; drawing a coalition between various
animalized figures, she creates a poetic voice that begins in bodily vulnerabil-
ity and that therefore extends across the boundary of species, incorporating
distinctive experiences without assimilating their difference.
Notes
1. William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, vol.
1, 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986),
224.
2. As Sianne Ngai notes, “Cute objects have no edge to speak of, usually being soft, round, and deeply
associated with the infantile and the feminine”; “nothing could seem more adverse to a traditional
understanding of literary modernism or the avant-garde” (“The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,” Critical
Inquiry 31.4 [2005]: 813–14).
3. CAConrad, The Book of Frank (Seattle: Wave, 2009), 31.
4. Ibid., 31.
5. Kalpana Rahita Seshadri, Humanimal: Race, Law, Language (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2012), 22.
6. Ibid., 17.
7. In this essay I use the terms subject, person, and human somewhat interchangeably because their defini-
tions in poetry and its related theoretical discourses tend to overlap.
8. Bhanu Kapil, Humanimal [a project for future children] (Berkeley, CA: Kelsey St., 2009).
9. J. A. L. Singh and Robert Zingg, Wolf Children and Feral Man (North Haven, CT: Archon Books,
1966).
10. Arnold Gesell, Wolf Child and Human Child: Being a Narrative Interpretation of the Life History of
Kamala, the Wolf Girl (New York: Harper, 1941).
11. Stephanie Luczajko, “An Interview with Bhanu Kapil,” Tinge, Fall 2011, www.tingemagazine.org/
an-interview-with-bhanu-kapi/.
12. Kapil’s other full-length books include Incubation: A Space for Monsters (Providence, RI: Leon Works,
2006), a kind of retelling of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road from the perspective of a monstrous immigrant
girl; The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Berkeley, CA: Kelsey St., 2009), based on interviews with
South Asian immigrant women; and Schizophrene (Calicoon, NY: Nightboat, 2011), which traces
intersections of migration and mental illness in post-Partition diasporic communities.
13. Bhanu Kapil, “Working Note,” How2, March 2001, www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/
online_archive/v1_5_2001/current/new-writing/rider.html.
14. Seshadri, Humanimal, 17.
15. Indeed, most of the children in Singh’s orphanage came from these remote areas. As Paul C. Squires
explains, “In every village that Singh visited he found orphans roaming about in want of food and
shelter. Gradually he gathered together a number of orphans and in this manner there evolved Singh’s
orphanage at Midnapur. This orphanage was started on Singh’s own initiative and responsibility and
depended upon his personal income” (“‘Wolf Children’ of India,” American Journal of Psychology 38.2
[1927]: 314).
16. Letter from Rev. J. A. L. Singh to Paul C. Squires, quoted in Squires, “‘Wolf Children’ of India,” 314.
17. W. N. Kellogg, “A Further Note on the ‘Wolf Children’ of India,” American Journal of Psychology 46.1
(1934): 149–50.
18. E. A. J., “Jungle’s Laws Still Hold,” New York Times, January 30, 1927.
19. Debates over whether Kamala suffered from an intellectual disability persist to this day. The French
writer Serge Aroles claims to have debunked Kamala’s story, casting her as the ultimate false wolf child.
Aroles suggests that Kamala had a mild case of Rett Syndrome; his research indicates that Reverend
Singh beat her so that she would walk on all fours, lap food, and drink like a dog, and give other
animalistic performances. Aroles contends that while the adoption of a child by a wolf is not entirely
impossible, the archival records on every wolf child are riddled with inconsistencies, falsehoods, and
flights of fancy, suggesting that this archivally prominent phenomenon has never actually occurred.
For such an adoption to take place, he argues, a lone female wolf suffering from pseudopregnancy
would have to come across an abandoned infant, pick it up without rupturing the skin, and raise it
in total isolation from humans, wolves, and other predators. Because of various demographic factors,
Aroles believes that if the adoption of a child by wolves were ever to take place, India would be a likely
location; nevertheless, he maintains (somewhat bombastically) that this statistical possibility remains
untested in reality. In this way, the equation between animality, disability, and (post-)coloniality re-
tains its strength even in contemporary writings about Kamala’s case, and even in those writings most
doubtful of the veracity of her tale (Serge Aroles, L’Énigme des enfants-loups: Une certitude biologique
mais un déni des archives, 1304–1954 [Paris: Éditions Publibook, 2007]).
20. Singh and Zingg, Wolf Children and Feral Man, xxxiii.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., xxxiv.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. “Wolf Fosters Lost Babes,” Los Angeles Times, October 22, 1926; “Wolf Girls Are Saved from Den in
Bengal,” Washington Post, October 22, 1926; Chicago Daily Tribune, October 22, 1926.
27. Not surprisingly, the story had legs: a gleeful article in the New York Times, titled “Fight in London
Club over ‘Wolf Girl’ Tale,” described how the tale “brought the members . . . to fisticuffs today after
a heated argument” (New York Times, October 23, 1926). Singh and Zingg’s Wolf Children and Feral
Man refers to several other New York Times articles about Indian wolf boys that appeared contem-
poraneously with the stories about Amala and Kamala: two articles describing the Jhansi wolf child
appeared in April 1927, and another in May of the same year (174).
28. “Mowgli in Real Life in News from India,” New York Times, December 26, 1922; E. A. J., “Jungle’s
Laws Still Hold.”
29. In addition to the academic and popular articles I cite here, Singh and Zingg also cite articles that
appeared in the American Weekly (September 17, 1939; May 18, 1941; December 28, 1941); Harpers
Magazine (January 1941); and Scientific American (March 1941).
30. Gesell, Wolf Child and Human Child, 9–10. The ox’s sympathetic gaze is expressed through a quotation
from “Tryste Noël,” a poem by Louise Imogen Guiney (1861–1920). Guiney is an American known
for writing religious lyrics recalling the conventions of seventeenth-century verse; indeed, we might
include Guiney within the list of poets that begins this essay.
31. Gesell, Wolf Child and Human Child, 10.
32. Wayne Dennis, review of Wolf-Children and Feral Man, American Journal of Psychology 56.2 (1943):
316.
33. Singh and Zingg, Wolf Children and Feral Man, 135.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 134, 135.
36. Ibid., 137–38. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder use the phrase “compulsory feral-ization”
to describe this long-standing association between feral childhood and disability, and suggest that
the history of disability and its medical management continues to resonate with Jean Marc Gaspard
Itard’s efforts to train Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron: the helping professions step in, with ameliora-
tive aims, hoping to undo the difference that disability (or feral childhood) represents. Mitchell and
Snyder argue that disability, like feral childhood, is understood as “a regressive throwback to a prior,
primitive, subhuman state” (“Compulsory Feral-ization: Institutionalizing Disability Studies” PMLA
120.2 [2005]: 627).
37. Wayne Dennis, review of Wolf Child and Human Child, American Journal of Psychology 56.1 (1943):
157. From the early 1940s to the early 1960s, Dennis published many negative reviews of Zingg’s and
especially Gesell’s work in various popular and academic publications.
38. “Wolf Child Stories Are Doubted by Psychologist,” letter, Science News 39.17 (1941): 261.
39. Singh and Zingg, Wolf Children and Feral Man, 141.
40. “Wolf Child Stories Are Doubted by Psychologist,” 261.
41. Ibid.
42. Kapil, Humanimal, 48.
43. Ibid., 16.
44. Ibid., 54–55.
45. Ibid., 40.
46. Ibid., 54.
47. Annie Potts, “The Mark of the Beast: Inscribing ‘Animality’ through Extreme Body Modification,”
in Knowing Animals, ed. Laurence Simmons and Philip Armstrong (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 131–54.
49. Gesell, Wolf Child and Human Child, 33; Bishop Packenham-Walsh, quoted in Gesell, Wolf Child and
Human Child, 32.
51. Ibid., 50.
52. These quotes are from Kapil’s epigraph from Ida Rolf ’s Rolfing and Physical Reality (Humanimal, n.p.).
53. Ibid., 13–14.
54. Ibid., 50–51.
55. Ibid., 38.
56. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004).
57. Ibid., 3, 9.
58. Quoted in, for example, Simmons and Armstrong, Knowing Animals (5); and Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites:
American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003), 10.
59. Here we might remember the more recent cases of neglected children and the extensive speech therapies
exerted on them: Poto and Cabengo (Virginia and Grace Kennedy), twins who invented and spoke
almost exclusively in their own idiolect, but transitioned to a normal use of English, and Genie, a
horrifically abused child discovered at age thirteen, who was able to learn words but not grammar.
60. Seshadri, Humanimal, 143.

61. Ibid., 172.
62. Ibid., 141–42.
64. Ibid., 52.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid., 20.
67. Ibid., 14.
68. Singh and Zingg, Wolf Children and Feral Man, 32–33.
69. As Singh and Zingg’s book briefly discusses, feral children are often described as asexual, which would
perhaps have added a further complication to Singh’s plan, had it ever come to fruition.
71. Kapil’s description of Kamala’s desire to physically meld with her wolf mother is reminiscent of Donna
Haraway’s description of symbiogenesis: “Ms Cayenne Pepper continues to colonize all my cells—a
sure case of what the biologist Lynn Margulis calls symbiogenesis. I bet if you checked our DNA, you’d
find some potent transfections between us. Her saliva must have the viral vectors. Surely her darter-
tongue kisses have been irresistible” (The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant
Otherness [Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003], 1).
72. Kapil, Humanimal, 54–55.
Vegans, Freaks, and Animals: Towards a New Table Fellowship | 757
Vegans, Freaks, and Animals: Toward a

New Table Fellowship
Sunaura Taylor
This article is excerpted from Beasts of Burden, forthcoming from the

Feminist Press. All rights reserved.
I
n September 2010 I agreed to take part in an art event at the Headlands
Center for the Arts in Marin County, California. The Feral Share,1 as
the event was named, was one part local and organic feast, one part art
fund-raising, and one part philosophical exercise. I was invited to be part of
the philosophical entertainment for the evening: I was to be the vegan repre-
sentative in a debate over the ethics of eating meat. I was debating Nicolette
Hahn Niman, an environmental lawyer, cattle rancher, and author of Righteous
Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food beyond Factory Farms.
My partner, David, and I got to the event on time, but spent the first forty
minutes or so sitting by ourselves downstairs while everyone else participated
in the art event, which took place on an inaccessible floor of the building.
Our only company was a few chefs busily putting the finishing touches on the
evening’s meal—a choice of either grass-fed beef or cheese ravioli.
David and I had been warned prior to the event about the lack of access,
but as we sat there waiting, we began to feel increasingly uncomfortable. The
disability activist in me felt guilty that I had agreed to partake in an event that I
could not participate in fully. My innocuous presence, as I quietly sat downstairs
in my wheelchair waiting, somehow made me feel as if I were condoning the
discrimination that was built into the event and the art center itself. As if my
presence were saying, “It’s OK, I don’t need to be accommodated—after all,
being disabled is my own personal struggle.”
David’s and my alienation was heightened soon after when we were given
our meal—as the only two vegans in the room we were made a special dish by
the chefs (some of whom were from Alice Waters’s famous Berkeley restaurant
Chez Panisse).2 The dish was largely roasted vegetables. As I was about to
expound to a room full of omnivores on the reasons for choosing veganism, I
felt keenly aware of how this food would be read—as isolating and different,

as creating more work for the chefs, and as unfilling in comparison with the
other dishes. I entered into the debate with a keen sense of being alone in that
room, not only because I was the only visibly disabled individual, but because,
besides David, I knew I was the only one with no animal products on my plate.
Michael Pollan writes in The Omnivore’s Dilemma that the thing that trou-
bled him the most about being a vegetarian was “the subtle way it alienate(d)
me from other people.”3 People who write about food often spend a surprising
amount of energy deciphering how much feeling of social alienation they are
willing to face for their ethical beliefs. Countless articles in popular magazines
and newspapers on the “challenges” of becoming a vegetarian or vegan focus
on the social stigma one will face if they “go veg”—the eye rolling, the teas-
ing comments, the weird looks. Jonathan Safran Foer writes that we “have
a strong impulse to do what others around us are doing, especially when it
comes to food.”4
It is difficult to ascertain what role these articles themselves play in mar-
ginalizing the vegetarian experience. There are many pressing issues that face
individuals who would perhaps otherwise choose to try to become vegetarian or
vegan, such as the reality of food deserts in low-income, often largely people of
color neighborhoods and a government that subsidizes and promotes animal-
and fat-heavy diets versus ones with vegetables and fruits.5 However, rather
than focus on these serious structural barriers, many articles often present the
challenge of avoiding meat and animal products as a challenge to one’s very
own normalcy and acceptability.
Those who care about animals are often represented as abnormal in
contemporary American culture. Animal activists are represented as overly
zealous, as human haters, even as terrorists, while vegetarians and vegans are
often presented as spacey, hysterical, sentimental, and neurotic about food.
Even vegetarian foods become “freaked,” and alternatives to meats are often
described as lab or science experiments. Since many animal protein alternatives
are not traditionally American, the marginalization of these foods as somehow
weird or unnatural works both to solidify an American identity (what “real”
Americans eat: real meat) and to exoticize the other. However, the abnormality
of those who do not eat animals is perhaps best exemplified by the name of a
popular vegan podcast and book: Vegan Freaks. The title refers to how many
vegans feel that they are perceived by mainstream culture.6
My point is not to say that there is no challenge to becoming a vegetarian
or vegan, but rather to point out that the media, including various authors,
contribute to the “enfreakment” of what is so often patronizingly referred to
as the vegan or vegetarian “lifestyle.” Of course the marginalization of those
who care about animals is nothing new. Diane Beers writes in her book For
the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in
the United States “that several late nineteenth-century physicians concocted a
diagnosable form of mental illness to explain such bizarre behavior. Sadly, they
pronounced, these misguided souls suffered from ‘zoophilpsychosis.’”7 As Beers
describes, zoophilpsychosis (an overconcern for animals), was more likely to
be used to diagnose women who were understood as “particularly susceptible
to the malady.”8 As the early animal advocacy movement in the UK and the
United States was largely made up of women, such charges worked to uphold
the subjugation both of women and of nonhuman animals.
As this history suggests, not so very long ago Niman and I would not have
been invited to speak with any sort of authority on these topics because we
are women. However, Niman and I are also both white, a fact that reflects the
reality that racism is largely still an underaddressed issue within animal-ethics
conversations. Although, historically, middle- and upper-class white women
have made up the bulk of the animal advocacy movement, it was not until
the mid-1940s that they began to achieve positions of leadership. People of
color have been even less likely to be included in these conversations, let alone
be represented as leaders within mainstream animal advocacy movements. It
unfortunately comes as no surprise that this legacy of patriarchy and racism
still deeply affects conversations around animal ethics, sustainability, and food
justice. Just last year, the scholars Carol J. Adams, Lori Gruen, and A. Breeze
Harper were driven to write a letter of complaint to the New York Times for
inviting a panel that consisted solely of five white men to judge a contest seek-
ing the best arguments for defending meat eating. Repeatedly those who are
given space at conferences, publication opportunities, and media attention on
these topics are white and male. Adams, Gruen, and Harper write, “The fact
is that ethical discussions about eating animals are permeated with sexist and
racist perspectives that have operated as normative.”9
Disability and disabled people have also largely been left out of these
conversations, and ableism has similarly been rendered as normative and
naturalized. The disability community has had a challenging relationship to
the animal rights community, as epitomized by continued debates involving
philosophers like Peter Singer, whose works has denied personhood to certain
groups of intellectually disabled individuals.10 But even in less extreme ways,
disabled individuals and the various issues that affect us have largely been left
out of the animal welfare and sustainability movements, whether because of
the movements’ obsession with health and physical fitness or a lack of atten-
tion to who has access to different kinds of educational and activist events.
As I sat in that inaccessible space at the Headlands, waiting downstairs for

the debate to begin, feeling like a freak in both my body and my food choices,
I thought about Michael Pollan and the numerous other writers who speak of
“table fellowship,” or the connection and bonds that can be made over food.
Pollan argues that this sense of fellowship is threatened if you are a vegetar-
ian. Would I have felt more like I belonged if I had eaten a part of the steer
who was fed to the guests that night? On his attempt at being a vegetarian,
Pollan writes: “Other people now have to accommodate me, and I find this
uncomfortable: My new dietary restrictions throw a big wrench into the basic
host-guest relationship.”11
Pollan feels “uncomfortable” that he now has to be “accommodated.” It
is a telling privilege that this is a new experience for him. Disrupting social
comfort and requesting accommodation are things disabled people confront
all the time. Do we go to the restaurant our friends want to visit even though
it has steps and we will have to be carried? Do we eat with a fork in our hands,
versus the fork in our mouth, or no fork at all, to make ourselves more accept-
able at the table—to avoid eating “like an animal”? Do we draw attention to
the fact that the space we have been invited to debate in is one of unacknowl-
edged privilege and ableism? For many disabled individuals, the importance
of upholding a certain politeness at the dinner table is far overshadowed by
something else—upholding our right to be at the dinner table, even if we make
others uncomfortable.
Pollan assumes you can make it to the table in the first place. I looked around
at the audience I was about to speak to and thought about those who were
not at the table: people whose disabilities, race, gender, or income too often
render them invisible in conversations around animal ethics and sustainability.
Safran Foer asks a simple question in his book Eating Animals: “How much
do I value creating a socially comfortable situation, and how much do I value
acting socially responsible?”12
In many ways my debate with Niman was like many other conversations
between vegans and those who support humane meat: we debated the environ-
mental consequences of both veganism and sustainable omnivorism, discussed
whether veganism was a “healthy” diet, and spent a long time parsing out why
animals may or may not have a right to live out their lives free from slaughter
by humans. Niman and I passionately agreed about the atrocities of factory
farms, and we both understood animals to be sentient, thinking, feeling beings,
often with complex emotions, abilities, and relationships. However, where Ni-
man argued that it is possible to kill and eat animals compassionately, I argued
that in almost all cases it is not, and that the justifications for such positions
are not only speciesist but ableist.
As the debate was only an hour, I had previously decided that trying to talk
about disability as it relates to animal issues would not be possible. But after
being in that inaccessible space, I felt compelled to discuss it. I felt a respon-
sibility to represent disability and animal issues to the best of my ability—to
represent a model of disability I politically agreed with in hopes that some of
the marginalization I had experienced would be considered.
Throughout the debate I tried to explain how my perspective as a disabled
person and as a disability scholar influenced my views on animals. I spoke
about how the field of disability studies raises questions that are important
to the animal-ethics discussion. Questions about normalcy and nature, value
and efficiency, interdependence and vulnerability, as well as more specific
concerns about rights and autonomy, are central to the field. What is the best
way to protect the rights of those who may not be physically autonomous but
are vulnerable and interdependent? How can the rights of those who cannot
protect their own, or those who cannot understand the concept of a right, be
protected?
I described how limited interpretations of what is natural and normal leads
to the continued oppression of both disabled people and animals. Of the
tens of billions of animals killed every year for human use, many are literally
manufactured to be disabled. Industrialized farm animals not only live in such
cramped, filthy, and unnatural conditions that disabilities become common
but also are literally bred and violently altered to physically damaging extremes,
where udders produce too much milk for a cow’s body to hold, where turkeys
cannot bear the weight of their own giant breasts, and where chickens are left
with amputated beaks that make it difficult for them to eat. Even my own
disability, arthrogryposis, is found often enough on factory farms to have been
the subject of Beef Magazine’s December 2008 issue.13
I also spoke about how animals are continually judged by ableist human
traits and abilities. How we understand animals as inferior and not valuable
for many of the same reasons disabled people are viewed these ways—they
are seen as incapable, as lacking, and as different. Animals are clearly affected
by the privileging of the able-bodied human ideal, which is constantly put
up as the standard against which they are judged, justifying the cruelty we so
often inflict on them. The abled body that ableism perpetuates and privileges
is always not only nondisabled but also nonanimal.
In the end I tried to share what I could about disability studies, how it of-
fers new ways of valuing human life that are not limited by specific physical or
mental capabilities. Disability studies scholars argue that it is not specifically
our intelligence, our rationality, our agility, our physical independence, or
our bipedal posture that gives us dignity and value. We argue that life is, and
should be presumed to be, worth living, whether you are a person with Down
syndrome, cerebral palsy, quadriplegia, autism, or like me, arthrogryposis. But,
I asked, if disability advocates argue for the protection of the rights of those of
us who are disabled, those of us who are lacking certain highly valued abilities
like rationality and physical independence, then what are the consequences of
these arguments in regard to nonhuman animals?
As the debate ended, I felt a sense of defeat creep over me—not over animal
issues but over disability issues. I had a strong feeling that the disability poli-
tics I had represented would be misunderstood: instead of people considering
their own privilege as human and nondisabled, I would be seen as using my
disability to boost animal issues.
The very first person who came up to speak to me introduced herself as
the mother of an intellectually disabled child. She was both impressed with
me (in a sort of supercrip way) and worried for me—like someone trying to
save my soul.
“This doesn’t help your cause.” She kept saying, “You don’t have to compare
yourself to an animal.”
In some ways I understood where the woman was coming from. Individuals
with intellectual disabilities have not been treated well by the branch of animal
rights discourse promoted by people like Singer. As the philosopher Licia Carl-
son writes, “If we take seriously the potential for conceptual exploitation and
the current marginalization of intellectual disability in philosophy, we must
critically consider the roles that the “intellectually disabled” have been assigned
to play in this discourse.”14 I tried to explain that I was not really meaning to
compare myself to an animal, but was rather comparing our shared oppres-
sions. Disabled people and nonhuman animals, I told her, are often oppressed
by similar forces. I told her, though, that to me being compared to an animal
does not have to be negative—after all, we are all animals.
She told me she did not want to compare her disabled child’s situation to
an animal’s situation, that they were not related. Her child was not an animal.
I was doing a disservice to myself and others by making these connections.
The woman never got mad at me, as I assume she would have at an able-
bodied person saying what I was saying. Instead she seemed sad for me, as
if I lacked the disability pride and confidence to think of myself as anything
more than animal.
If I had demanded accommodation, instead of politely following social
etiquette and making others feel comfortable, would my confidence as a dis-
abled human being have come through differently? I wonder whether, if I had
arrived at the event insisting on my body’s right to access, would the confidence
I have in my embodiment have been so unmistakable that even discussing my
relationship to animals would have been recognized as a gesture of my love for
disability? Perhaps my behavior would have been seen as disruptive, perhaps it
would have made others uncomfortable, but by demanding accommodation
I would have insisted on a different kind of table fellowship.
The inaccessibility of the space framed my words that night and led me to
focus on the ways in which animal oppression and disability oppression are
made invisible by being rendered as simply natural: steers are served for dinner
and disabled people wait downstairs.
Figure 1.
Animals With Arthrogryposis, oil on canvas, 2009, 72“ x 108”. Painting by Sunaura Taylor. Photo courtesy
of David Wallace.
Notes
1. The Feral Share was an art event organized by Joseph del Pesco and Jerome Waag. The event was
hosted at the Headlands Center for the Arts on September 19, 2010.
2. Chez Panisse is a restaurant in Berkeley, California. It was cofounded in 1971 by the food writer and
activist Alice Waters and the film producer Paul Aratow. It is known for serving local and organic
foods.
3. Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006),
313.
4. Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (New York: Little, Brown, 2010), 32.
5. A study done by Tufts University showed that “between 1997 and 2005 subsidies saved chicken, pork,
beef and HFCS producers roughly $26.5 billion.” These subsidies support a meat industry that itself
is worth $160 billion (which does not even include the $70 billion fishing industry).
6. Bob Torres and Jenna Torres, Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World (Oakland, CA: PM Press,
2010).
7. Diane L. Beers, For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the
United States (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 2006), 16.
8. Ibid.
9. Carol J. Adams, Lori Gruen, and A. Breeze Harper, “What’s Wrong with Only White Men Judging a
Contest Defending Meat-Eating?,” CarolJAdams.blogspot.com, March 24, 2012, http://caroljadams.
blogspot.com/2012/03/whats-wrong-with-only-white-men-judging.html.
10. Licia Carlson and Eva Feder Kittay, eds., Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy
(Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
11. Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 314.
12. Safran Foer, Eating Animals, 55.
13. W. Ishmael, “Dealing with Curly Calf,” Beef Magazine, 2008, http://beefmagazine.com/genetics/1201-
curly-calf-issue.
14. Licia Carlson, “Philosophers of Intellectual Disability: A Taxonomy,” in Carlson and Kittay, Cognitive
Disability, 318.
Contributors | 765
Contributors
Neel Ahuja
Neel Ahuja is assistant professor of postcolonial studies at the University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is completing a book titled “Bioinsecurities:
Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species.” His most
recent essays on species and the politics of affect appear in the journals Social
Text and Tamkang Review.
Janet M. Davis
Janet M. Davis is associate professor of American studies and history at the
University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of The Circus Age: Culture
and Society under the American Big Top (University of North Carolina Press,
2002), and the editor of Circus Queen and Tinker Bell: The Life of Tiny Kline
(University of Illinois Press, 2008). She is the author of The Gospel of Kind-
ness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America (Oxford University
Press, forthcoming in 2014).
Maneesha Deckha
Maneesha Deckha is associate professor of law at the University of Victoria.
Her research interests include critical animal law, postcolonial feminist theory,
health law, and bioethics. Her work has appeared in Hypatia, Ethics and the
Environment, the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, the Journal for Critical
Animal Studies, the McGill Law Journal, and Sexualities among other publica-
tions. She has received grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research
and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. In 2008 she held
the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Law and Society at New York University.
Ángeles Donoso Macaya

Ángeles Donoso Macaya is assistant professor of Spanish at Borough of Man-
hattan Community College–CUNY. Her scholarly interests pay special atten-
tion to the meanings and methods of collaborative practices between artistic
media—literature, photography, performance, and site-specific interventions.
Her research areas include twentieth- and twenty-first-century Southern Cone
and Mexican literature, film, and documentary photography; visual studies;
queer and gender studies; and animal studies. She received a grant from the

Chilean National Council for the Arts and Culture. Her work has appeared
in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Chasqui, and Aisthesis.
Sarah Dowling
Sarah Dowling is assistant professor of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at
the University of Washington Bothell. Her research focuses on contemporary
multilingual poetry and has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Canadian
Literature, GLQ, Journal of Medical Humanities, and Signs. Sarah is also the
author of various books of poetry: Security Posture (Snare, 2009), Birds & Bees
(Troll Thread, 2012), and DOWN (Coach House, 2014).
Brigitte Nicole Fielder

Brigitte Nicole Fielder is associate lecturer in the Department of English at
the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is working on two book projects,
“Kinfullness: White Womanhood and Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-
Century American Literatures” and “Animal Humanism: Species, Race, and
Humanity in the Long Nineteenth Century.” She has received research fel-
lowships from the American Antiquarian Society and the Animals and Society
Institute/Wesleyan University Animal Studies. Her work has appeared in
Studies in American Fiction.
Karen Joy Fowler

Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels and three short story collections.
She is a cofounder of the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award and current presi-
dent of the Clarion Foundation, which exists to support the annual Clarion
Writing Workshop at UC San Diego. Her most recent novel is We Are All
Completely Beside Ourselves, published by Putnam in May 2013.
Carla Freccero
Carla Freccero is professor and chair of literature and the history of conscious-
ness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she has taught since
1991. Trained in early modern continental interdisciplinary studies, she also
works in feminist and queer theory, popular culture, and, most recently,
animal theory. She is the author of three books, including Popular Culture:
An Introduction (New York University Press, 1999) and Queer/Early/Modern
(Duke University Press, 2006), and the coeditor of Premodern Sexualities,
with L. O. Fradenburg (Routledge, 1996). She is working on a book titled
“Animate Figures,” on relations between linguistic figurality and animal be-
Contributors | 767
ing; her essays in animal theory include “Chercher la chatte: Derrida’s Queer
Feminine Animality,” in Thinking about Animals (Michigan State University
Press, forthcoming); “Carnivorous Virility, or Becoming-Dog” (Social Text,
2011); and “Figural Historiography: Dogs, Humans, and Cynanthropic Be-
comings,” in Comparatively Queer (Palgrave, 2010).
Greta Gaard
Greta Gaard is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls,
and a Community Faculty in gender studies at Metropolitan State University
in St. Paul, Minnesota. She co-founded the Minnesota Green Party in 1993
and has organized movements against economic globalization through direct
action; she is currently active with MN350.org and Tar Sands Action. Begin-
ning with Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature (Temple University Press,
1993), Ecofeminist Literary Criticism (University of Illinois Press, 1998), and
Ecological Politics (Temple University Press, 1998), her more recent books
include The Nature of Home (Arizona University Press, 2007) and a coedited
volume, International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism (Routledge, 2013).
She recently served on the Executive Council for the Association for the Study
of Literature and Environment.
Megan H. Glick
Megan H. Glick is assistant professor of American studies at Wesleyan Uni-
versity. Her other essays on the animal–human boundary can be found in
Social Text (Fall 2012) and Gender and History (August 2011). Her current
book manuscript explores ideas of the “human” in twentieth-century scientific
and popular cultures.
Melissa M. González
Melissa M. González is assistant professor of Hispanic studies and Core Faculty
in both Latin American studies and gender and sexuality studies at Davidson
College. Her research spans US Latina/o and twentieth-century Latin Ameri-
can literature and culture, gender studies, and queer theory. She is working on
a book manuscript, “Queer Ambivalence: Desiring Resistance in the Age of
Gay Marriage across the Americas,” that focuses on the cultural politics of gay
marriage in South and North America and studies how the new acceptability
of previously transgressive sexualities creates alternative frontiers of exclusion.
Julietta Hua
Julietta Hua is associate professor of women and gender studies at San Fran-
cisco State University. She is the author of Trafficking Women’s Human Rights
(University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
Dale Hudson
Dale Hudson teaches film and new media studies at New York University
Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) and previously taught at Amherst College and Ithaca
College. His research applies transnational and postcolonial frameworks to
understanding media and appears in Afterimage, Cinema Journal, French
Cultural Studies, and Screen, among other journals and anthologies. His book-
in-progress, “Blood, Bodies, and Borders,” examines transnational US history
in relation to immigration and film. He is also a digital curator for the Finger
Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF).
Claire Jean Kim

Claire Jean Kim is associate professor of political science and Asian American
studies at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches graduate and un-
dergraduate classes on racial politics, multiculturalism, social movements, and
human-animal studies. Her first book, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean
Conflict in New York City (Yale University Press, 2000) won two awards from
the American Political Science Association: the Ralph Bunche Award for the
Best Book on Ethnic and Cultural Pluralism and the Best Book Award from
the Organized Section on Race and Ethnicity. She is just completing a second
book, Race, Species and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cambridge University
Press, 2014), which examines the intersection of race and species in impas-
sioned disputes over how immigrants of color, racialized minorities, and Native
people in the United States use animals in their cultural traditions. She has
also written numerous journal articles and book chapters. She is the recipient
of a grant from the University of California Center for New Racial Studies,
and she has been a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton,
New Jersey, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute.
Sunaura Taylor
Sunaura Taylor is an artist, writer, and activist. Taylor’s artworks have been
exhibited at venues across the country, including the CUE Art Foundation,
the Smithsonian Institution, and the Berkeley Art Museum. She is the recipi-
ent of numerous awards including a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant
Contributors | 769
and an Animals and Culture Grant. Her written work has been printed in
numerous edited collections as well as in publications such as the Monthly
Review, Yes! Magazine, and Qui Parle. Taylor worked with the philosopher
Judith Butler on Astra Taylor’s film Examined Life (Zeitgeist, 2008). Taylor
holds an MFA in art practice from the University of California, Berkeley,
and will be a PhD student in American studies in the Department of Social
and Cultural Analysis at New York University in fall 2013. Her book Beasts
of Burden, which explores the intersections of disability studies and animal
ethics, is forthcoming from the Feminist Press.
Jeannette Vaught
Jeannette Vaught is a PhD candidate in American studies at the University
of Texas at Austin. Her forthcoming dissertation, “Science, Animals, and
Profit-Making in the American Rodeo Arena,” uses the sport of rodeo to
examine veterinary advancements in both industrial animal agriculture and
animal sport since 1975, interrogating the role that veterinary science plays
in constructing arguments of laboring-animal care and value in contemporary
American culture.
Harlan Weaver
A recent graduate of the History of Consciousness Department at the Uni-
versity of California, Santa Cruz, Harlan Weaver conducted his dissertation
research on the role of affect in transgender embodiments. He is currently a
National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Center
for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society, where he is examining the
ways that race, gender, sexuality, and nation shape and are shaped by the sci-
ences that populate discourses about dogs who have been labeled dangerous.

American Quarterly Speciesracesex PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

American Quarterly Speciesracesex PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

This issue is provided by

the Johns Hopkins University Press Journals Division

Sharing of personal account information, logins, and passwords is not permitted.

©2013 The American Studies Association

©2013 The American Studies Association

(critical) animal studies, environmental studies, and American studies. The

Carla Freccero: My disciplinary training is literary and historical, although I

ing on this special issue, I continued to experience a longing for joyfulness

in a celebratory spirit, sometimes matter-of-factly) and those who want to

Why intersectionality, coarticulation, coconstitution? What is achieved by these

CF: Ever since Kimberlé Crenshaw argued for “intersectionality” as a way to

CJK: Each of the concepts in question poses certain difficulties, so perhaps it

What are some of the sources of resistance to these concepts?

CJK: Resistance to the conceptual linking of species/race/sex usually comes

CJK: I am reminded of the tensions I encounter when I try to persuade race

CF: I think that a particular challenge in this convergence of fields is to move

expansive and complex ontologies and epistemologies. These days I am eager to

CJK: Feminists in particular have done pathbreaking intersectional work on

challenges to the architecture of animal suffering around us—whether in in-

CF: I am not sure I agree; why is it so important to distinguish the love of

Harlan Weaver, in “‘Becoming in Kind’: Race, Class, Gender, and Nation in

©2013 The American Studies Association

You and Your Records

Some of your records are not to our taste.

We are not those rats.

The Berkeley Rats

The International Genetic Standard Rat

We have become data.

Animal Humanism: Race, Species, and

©2013 The American Studies Association

As abolitionists were well aware and historians have shown, comparisons

children’s literature discussed here, the affective rhetoric is prominent and

Abolitionists and Animals

Theories of scientific racism provide one prominent racialized use of animals,

Her master took the trader’s gold;—

Children’s literature against animal cruelty and children’s abolitionist litera-

But Howard thought he should not like

Slave’s Wish” are accompanied by the “Soliloquy of Ellen’s Squirrel, on Receiv-

The thought that you have set me free,

To him, who a hole, or a palace inhabits,

people uncomfortably similar.28 As Leslie Ginsberg acknowledges, children’s

These uncanny resemblances between stories about animals and abolition-

Ye who sigh as from these pages

At times a snow-white sail she spied,

Thus kind are some good persons, oft,

And thus good people often give

Domestic Proximity and Animal Kinship

than necessitating “sameness” for ethical behavior.40 We might understand

The child loved “Kitty” all the more

acters. While animal-mediated sympathy may indicate a limited sympathy in

Her father then makes a paternalistic argument in support of slavery: black

Abolitionist articulations of humanity were sometimes paired with more

He asks, Am not I man?

Say am I a man and a brother,

For though you may deem a Gorilla

The overlapping discourses of nineteenth-century scientific and social justice

similarly conceived in nineteenth-century literary and scientific conversation.

The visual and associative anthropomorphism of the illustration is accom-

Welfarist and Imperial: The Contributions

©2013 The American Studies Association

of anticruelty statutes or provisions as part of their criminal law.4 Despite the

The Genesis of Anticruelty Statutes

Contemporary anticruelty statutes are a product of the Enlightenment and