The Gender, Place and Culture Jan Monk Distinguished Annual Lecture: Feminism and animals: exploring interspecies relations through intersectionality, performativity and standpoint

Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography

Volume 22, Issue 1, 2015

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The Gender, Place and Culture Jan Monk distinguished annual lecture
The Gender, Place and Culture Jan Monk Distinguished Annual Lecture: Feminism and animals: exploring interspecies relations through intersectionality, performativity and standpoint
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DOI:
10.1080/0966369X.2014.993546
Alice J. Hovorka^a*
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Published online: 30 Jan 2015
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Abstract
This article explores the ways and extent to which feminism helps investigate interspecies relations and the lives of animals in academic scholarship. It argues that animals need feminism. Indeed feminists are well suited and positioned to take on questions of and issues related to animal lives through key theoretical ideas and methodological approaches, namely intersectionality, performativity and standpoint. Extending such ideas and approaches to animal subjects fills gaps in animal studies literature and generates invaluable insights on the fundamental workings of power in society and the implications for both humans and animals. The article also argues that feminism should embrace animals and animal scholarship. Doing so generates new insights on societal relations of power and extends existing feminist boundaries regarding whose knowledge counts and how it is counted. Ultimately, an enhanced feminism–animal dialogue generates geographical knowledge that is comprehensive and reflective of the interrelatedness of all beings that shape individual, institutional and ideological realms.
La distinguida conferencia anual “Jan Monk” de Gender, Place and Culture Feminismo y animales: la exploración de las relaciones entre especies a través de la interseccionalidad, la performatividad y el punto de vista (standpoint)
Este artículo explora las formas y hasta qué punto el feminismo colabora con la investigación sobre las relaciones entre especies y la vida de los animales en la investigación académica. Sostiene que los animales necesitan feminismo. Por cierto lxs feministxs están bien preparadxs y posicionadxs para abordar cuestiones y temas relacionados con la vida de los animales a través de ideas teóricas y abordajes metodológicos claves, particularmente la interseccionalidad, la performatividad y el punto de vista (standpoint). Extender esas ideas y abordajes a los sujetos animales llena un vacío en la literatura de estudios animales y genera conocimientos invalorables sobre la acción básica del poder en la sociedad y las implicancias tanto para humanos como para animales. El artículo también sostiene que el feminismo debería incluir a los animales y a la investigación acerca de animales. Hacerlo genera nuevas conocimientos sobre las relaciones sociales de poder y extiende los actuales límites del feminismo con respecto al conocimiento de quién cuenta y cómo se cuenta. En última instancia, un mayor diálogo feminismo-animal genera conocimiento geográfico que es integral e indicativo de las interrelaciones de todos los seres que conforman la esfera de lo individual, lo institucional y lo ideológico.
女性主义与动物：透过相互交织性、展演性与立场探讨跨物种关係
本 文探讨女性主义在学术研究中，如何、以及在何种程度上协助探讨跨物种关係与动物的生活。本文主张，动物需要女性主义。女性主义者，透过关键的理论概念和方 法论取径，亦即相互交织性、展演性和立场，的确处于极佳的位置，对动物生活有关的问题及议题进行探讨。将这些概念与方法，延伸至动物身上，填补了动物研究 文献中的阙如，并对权力在社会的根本运作、及其对人类与动物的意涵，产生宝贵的洞见。本文同时主张，女性主义应该欣然接纳动物及动物研究。如此这般，将对 社会的权力关係产生新的见解，并对有关谁的知识具有意义、如何具有意义的既有女性主义边界进行延伸。最终，扩大的女性主义—动物对话，将生产包含并反应了 形塑个人、制度与意识形态范畴的所有生命体之间的相互关係性的地理知识。
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Keywords:
feminist geography,
animal geography,
intersectionality,
performativity,
standpoint,
Botswana,
geografía feminista,
geografía animal,
interseccionalidad,
performatividad,
punto de vista,
Botsuana,
女性主义地理学,
动物地理学,
相互交织性,
展演性,
立场,
波札那
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Abstract
Jump to section
Introduction
Feminism–animal connections and...
Intersectionality
Performativity
Standpoint
Conclusion
Disclosure statement
This article explores the ways and extent to which feminism helps investigate interspecies relations and the lives of animals in academic scholarship. It argues that animals need feminism. Indeed feminists are well suited and positioned to take on questions of and issues related to animal lives through key theoretical ideas and methodological approaches, namely intersectionality, performativity and standpoint. Extending such ideas and approaches to animal subjects fills gaps in animal studies literature and generates invaluable insights on the fundamental workings of power in society and the implications for both humans and animals. The article also argues that feminism should embrace animals and animal scholarship. Doing so generates new insights on societal relations of power and extends existing feminist boundaries regarding whose knowledge counts and how it is counted. Ultimately, an enhanced feminism–animal dialogue generates geographical knowledge that is comprehensive and reflective of the interrelatedness of all beings that shape individual, institutional and ideological realms.
Keywords:
feminist geography,
animal geography,
intersectionality,
performativity,
standpoint,
Botswana,
geografía feminista,
geografía animal,
interseccionalidad,
performatividad,
punto de vista,
Botsuana,
女性主义地理学,
动物地理学,
相互交织性,
展演性,
立场,
波札那
Introduction
Jump to section
Introduction
Feminism–animal connections and...
Intersectionality
Performativity
Standpoint
Conclusion
Disclosure statement
‘Everywhere animals disappear’ (Berger 1980, 26) and this is largely the case for feminist scholarship. Indeed feminists have not committed, partially, let alone fully, to the question of the animal, to the place of animals in relation to feminist theory, or to empirical research featuring animal lives (Birke 1991). At the same time, animal studies scholarship remains largely void of feminist perspectives and analyses (gendered or otherwise) despite relevant and intriguing ontological, epistemological and methodological connections and shared interests in expressions, manifestations and implications of power dynamics. Each scholarly realm stands to benefit from enhanced engagement so as to push forward their respective conceptualizations and empirical investigations. In turn, this promises to facilitate enriched understanding of interspecies relations, the lives of animals and humans, as well as broader societal relations of power. My objective for this article, therefore, is to explore and enhance feminist theoretical dialogue about, on and with animals in order to generate geographical knowledge that is comprehensive and reflective of the interrelatedness of all beings that shape individual, institutional and ideological realms. To this end, I draw inspiration from feminist animal scholars Birke (2002) and Clark (2012) to argue that animals need feminism and feminism needs animals.
On the one hand, animals need feminism. Feminism is well suited and positioned to take on questions and issues of the animal given its commitment to analysing the body, connecting discursive with material constructions, emphasizing co-created situatedness, promoting empathic understanding, exposing the logic of exclusion and politics of abjection, attending to marginalized social groups and reflecting upon its own participation in the ethics of representation and speaking for others (Birke 2002; Clark 2012). Feminism exposes and challenges social hierarchies, endeavours to make better science and advocates for justice and equality (Gaard 2012). It has sought ways of knowing to combat destructive and exploitative tendencies that objectification and distancing promote, and the ethical consequences that emerge as a result (Gruen and Weil 2010). It has an extensive history unpacking complex relations of power. Feminism is thus poised to complement, extend and complicate discussions taking place in animal scholarship.
On the other hand, feminism needs to take animals seriously. New insights may be gained on familiar feminist topical ground by considering animals and species relations of power. Boundaries may be pushed in productive ways by extending well-established feminist tenets regarding ‘whose knowledge counts and how it is counted’ to animal subjects. Animals may provide new ways to think through feminist concerns regarding the human–animal divide, biological determinism and social justice issues (Birke 1991). Animal scholarship challenges traditional approaches to and boundaries of science broadly defined. It has been at the forefront fostering new epistemological paradigms that give significance and agency to the more-than-human world, thereby making it more difficult to see others as tools for our use and mastery (Gruen and Weil 2010). Feminist animal scholars should embrace and engage with new forms of knowledge for consideration of animal ethics, animality and the creaturely axis (Rohman 2012) so as to reflect further on its intellectual contributions and extend its reach.
As a feminist geographer, my own journey towards exploring the lives of animals has evolved slowly and at times unconsciously. In much of my earlier work, focused on urbanization, gender and everyday life in Botswana, animals featured as a backdrop to gender relations of power. Animals were the means, resources and objects through which, for example, men and women built their urban agricultural enterprises. I did not consider fully that the animals involved would be intimately connected with expressions of gendered roles and responsibilities, access to and control over resources, or articulations of identity and selfhood. I certainly did not consider fully that these animals were pivotal actors in shaping human livelihoods, let alone pay attention to their own positionality, circumstances and experiences. Yet as Wolch and Emel (1998, xi) claim, ‘Animals are so indispensable to the structure of human affairs and tied up with our visions of progress and the good life that we are unable to fully see them’. I now foreground animals in my work in order to see what I learn from thinking through and with them. Thus far my journey connecting feminism with animals has expanded my understanding of the world, challenged me to think differently about our relationships with others (and indeed all sorts of others) and helped me formulate an appreciation of how all lives are interconnected, co-constructed and mutually constituted.
In the remainder of this article, I reflect upon the ways and extent to which an enhanced dialogue between feminism and animals may proceed. I begin by outlining existing, albeit limited, feminist engagements with animals and animal issues (highlighting the work of feminist animal studies scholars, including feminist geographers), and noting an absence of feminist thought within existing animal studies scholarship (which includes work by animal geographers). I then identify and discuss three feminist ideas, namely intersectionality, performativity and standpoint, which serve as useful entry points to exploring interspecies relations and the lives of animals; concurrently, the extension of these ideas into animal-based research pushes further feminist ideas and agendas. I adopt a feminist–posthumanist frame that calls into ontological question the meaning, integrity and place of the human and encourages conceptualizations of humanity as entangled with rather than separate from nature (Anderson 2007). I draw upon briefly my explorations of animals in the southern African nation of Botswana to illustrate productive areas of conversation between feminism and animals. I conclude with some remarks as to the synergies and opportunities within and between feminist geography and animal geography as a means of enriching geographical research on human–environment interactions and societal relations of power.
Feminism–animal connections and shortcomings
Jump to section
Introduction
Feminism–animal connections and...
Intersectionality
Performativity
Standpoint
Conclusion
Disclosure statement
Animals prove an uncomfortable subject for feminists for numerous reasons. Some feel it is important to resist comparisons between women and animals because those people lacking power in society are often derogated by likening to animals (Birke 1991). Aligning the plight of women and animals – or in the least their shared interests – potentially reinforces ideas of women as a lesser class of beings (Adams and Donovan 1995). Some argue it is important to avoid linking biological constructions, especially assumptions of instinctive or innate qualities of male/female, to individual identities and embodied experiences. Biology has long been viewed as a source of gender inequality and attention has focused more often on social constructions of gender and human uniqueness (Birke, Bryl, and Lykke 2004; Gaarder 2011). Finally, some worry that attention to animal lives and issues will divert attention from more important or urgent human concerns such as violence, racism and poverty (Adams and Donovan 1995; Gaard 1993); indeed some purport that feminism should only concern itself with human liberation (Gaarder 2011).
Yet some feminists – notably animal ecofeminists and feminist political ecologists – have ventured into the animal realm to expose intersections between women and animals, and to promote an ethical stance based on caring and animal advocacy (Adams 1990; Donovan 2006; Donovan and Adams 1996; Gaarder 2011; Gruen and Weil 2010; Gaard 1993; Emel 1995; Kheel 1988, 2008; Seager 1993, 2003; Wolch, Andrea, and Lassiter 1997, 2000). By centring animals, they have connected diverse forms of oppression grounded in sexism and speciesism, and lobbied to end animal suffering (Gaard 2012). Of particular importance has been feminist ethics of care theory (Gilligan 1982; Donovan and Adams 1996), engaging a dialogical mode of ethical reasoning wherein humans pay attention to animal communications and incorporate the voices of animals into public policy and ethical discourse (Donovan 2006). Feminist animal scholarship flourished especially between the era of animal liberation, marked by Singer's (1975) attention to animal suffering and Regan's (1983) promotion of animal rights and the era of posthumanism, reflected in the work of Derrida's (2002) reflection on his own animalism, Wolfe's (2003) coinage of the term, and Haraway's (2003) exploration of dog training (Gaard 2012). Empathy for animal suffering quickly became feminized, however, and mocked as a movement of ‘emotional little old ladies in tennis shoes’ and feminist ideas have gained little traction amongst prominent (predominately male) social theorists (Gaard 2012). The contemporary period represents a re-engagement of feminist animal studies, owing in part to the Sex, Gender, Species Conference held at Wesleyan University during February 2011 and subsequent scholarship generated as a result (Gruen and Weil 2012).
Given limited feminist engagement with animal subjects and issues, it is not surprising that feminist perspectives and analyses are lacking within animal studies scholarship, including animal geography. As a sub-discipline, animal geography has evolved from its early twentieth century roots in zoogeography (examining animal spatial patterns and distributions) and cultural landscape (reflecting on animals as symbolic sites of human culture) to focus later in the century on animals as the ultimate Other (Philo 1998; Wolch 2002; Wolch and Emel 1995). Since the 1990s, animal geographers have recognized the centrality of animals in human society and acknowledge animals as subjects and distinct social group worthy of consideration. Animals are not simply natural resources, units of production, or entities to be trapped, counted, mapped and analysed (Wolch and Emel 1998). Animal geographers recognize that animals are essential in explanations of human–environment or spatial relations because interdependence between species is irrefutable and animals are deeply intertwined in our own lives (Urbanik 2012; Wolch and Emel 1995). They also explore increasingly the particular lives, identities and experiences of animals themselves. Within geography, recent texts have emerged exploring animals from gendered perspectives in relation to identity construction and material manifestations of human–animal links (Bull 2009; Collard 2012; Gillespie, 2014; Hovorka 2012).
According to Seager (2003, 168): ‘animal geography is one of the most intellectually challenging, paradigm-shifting, innovative, radical (in the best sense of the word) areas of intellectual activity and social activism’. Here I see parallels between feminist geography and animal geography in their mission to acknowledge and legitimate the Other, expose the broader systems of power that produce and normalize differences and inequalities between social groups (be they human or non-human) and innovative approaches to scholarship and science that achieve such aims. Taking cues from existing feminism–animal scholarship, I argue that contemporary threads in feminism are well suited and positioned to enhance, extend and complicate research and debates in animal geographies while engaging animal issues and subjects offers new pathways for feminism. Feminist ideas of intersectionality, performativity and standpoint serve as useful catalysts for such dialogue and feature respectively in the following sections.
Intersectionality
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Introduction
Feminism–animal connections and...
Intersectionality
Performativity
Standpoint
Conclusion
Disclosure statement
Feminist ideas regarding intersectionality are particularly useful for understanding human–animal relations. Intersectionality is a theory and approach of studying the relationships amongst numerous dimensions of social relationships, subject formations and categories of power (McCall 2005). Its origins lie in feminist socio-legal scholarship that displaced the standard subject of feminism as a white, western, heterosexual, middle-class woman and embraced circumstances and experiences rooted in Black Feminism (Rodó-de-Zárate, 2014). For three decades, critical race and feminist theorists (Butler 1997; Hill Collins 1990; Crenshaw 1991; Essed 1990; hooks 1981, 1984; Mohanty, Russo, and Torres 1991; Walby, Jo, and Strid 2012; Yuval-Davis 2011) have rejected narrow, separate, essentialist categories of gender, race, ethnicity, class, orientation, age, ability and other identifiers. Instead, they have acknowledged and explored how such categories intersect and emerge in relation to one another symbolically and in practice. Intersectional analysis names and describes hidden acts of discrimination and illuminates ‘the way in which any particular individual stands at the crossroads of multiple groups’ (Minow 1997, 3). Feminist geographical contributions to intersectionality illustrate how differences and inequalities emerge through co-production of space and subjectivity as manifested in discursive imaginings and material placements (Bondi and Davidson 2003; Hopkins and Noble 2009; Katz 2004; Kobayashi and Peake 1994; Longhurst 2005; Massey 1994; McDowell 2008; Peake and Alissa Trotz 1999; Pratt and Hanson 1994; Radcliffe 1999; Rodó-de-Zárate 2014; Rose 1995; Valentine 2007). Feminist political ecologists highlight social difference as emerging from the convergence of broader political economic structures, everyday socio-ecological practices and access to resources (Elmhirst and Resurreccion 2008; Gururani 2002; Harris 2006; Hovorka 2005; Nightingale 2006, 2011; Rocheleau, Barbara, and Wangari 1996; Sundberg 2004).
Feminist intersectional analyses contain limited yet fruitful engagement with species as an identifier and speciesism as a system of oppression (let alone animals as a subject). Ecofeminists, for example, explore shared oppressions and simultaneous degradation of women and animals to expose their material pairing and broader conceptual dualisms (Adams 1990; Adams and Donovan 1995; Donovan 1990, 2006; Emel 1995; Gaard 1993; Griffin 1981; Kheel 2008; Plumwood 2000, 2003; Twine 2001). Both sexism and speciesism produce a ‘saming’ and ‘othering’ of women and animals, denying them rationality, agency and history (relative to men and humans) and enabling a moral detachment that creates and perpetuates oppressive practices and institutions (Gruen and Weil 2010). Geographers working at the crossroads of feminism and animals or within animal geography itself, as further examples, explore co-constructions of human and animal identities. Intersectional analyses detail how animal representations produce hierarchies of ‘civilized’ or ‘savage’ societies (Elder, Jennifer, and Emel 1998) or gender identities (Collard 2012); how racial and gendered notions of human boundary-making shape processes of animal domestication, containment or extermination (Anderson 1995; Bull 2009; Emel 1995; Gillespie 2014); and how gender, class and/or race influence different attitudes or practices towards animals (Howell 2000; Wolch, Alex, and Lassiter 2000).
Feminist intersectionality thus elucidates the fundamental interconnectedness of humans and animals whereby the ideology which authorizes oppressions based on gender (class, race, ethnicity, age, etc.) is the same ideology which sanctions the oppression of animals and nature (Seager 2003). It encourages analytical sophistication regarding how certain human social groups are connected with certain nonhuman social groups and the implications of this pairing for all. Such analysis proved vital in my own work exploring the phenomenon of female-owned commercial poultry farms in and around Gaborone, Botswana, as well as explaining the implications of women–chicken pairings for urban development and agricultural diversification. Gender–species intersectionality allowed me to illustrate comprehensively how gender relations of power operate in everyday life through particular spaces and in conjunction with particular animals; it also allowed me to illuminate the centrality of animals to human lives, livelihoods and landscapes (see Hovorka 2012).
Briefly, to be a man or woman in Botswana means that you are associated with and have access to certain animals that, in turn, come with particular opportunities and/or constraints. For example, cattle occupy an unparalleled position of power in Botswana offering socio-economic status, shaping land-use practices, driving the national economy, providing jobs, income and foodstuffs, featuring in policy and programming, receiving government support for their health and wellbeing and pairing with men who hold birthrights to and benefits from cattle ownership. In contrast, chickens hold lesser socio-economic status, scavenge at rural homesteads, offer subsistence-oriented secondary foodstuffs, remain invisible in policy and programming, and associate with women on account of their nurturing role (taking care of a chicken is likened to taking care of a child) and their economic status (women are more likely to afford a chicken than a cow). The past decades have seen enhanced status of chickens and women in Botswana given government financial grants that encouraged women to embrace their associations with and access to chickens (i.e. women's work). Women have become successful entrepreneurs by accessing state-offered capital, purchasing or leasing agricultural land, generating substantial amounts of income and becoming highly visible and networked individuals within agricultural and entrepreneurial sectors. At the same time, chickens have become a desired animal given their increased visibility and economic value within a booming poultry sector. They now offer jobs and income – surpassing the beef sector in terms of market value – and offer social status to those with whom they are associated. Government policy documents tout chickens as a ‘success story’ with Botswana now entirely self-sufficient in broiler meat production.
Unfortunately, such intersections of women and chickens are not as positive when considering other dimensions of intersectionality, particularly class, locale and mode of production such that only certain women (those that are middle income, urban based and commercial producers) have reaped the rewards of embracing chickens as ‘women's work’. Furthermore, only certain chickens (those that are western broiler breeds rather than indigenous Tswana breeds) are privileged and sought after given their propensity for income-generation and social status. Other implications of the women–chicken pairing include the fact that the success of intensive commercial poultry production means that men too wish to be included in this agricultural sector and indeed are making headway in controlling this vertically integrated realm. Finally, chickens live in poor conditions and die in greater numbers given the poultry industry's rise; thus achieving higher status in this case is not necessarily a good thing. Intersectionality insights have practical applicability for the Government of Botswana because it helps explain why chickens have become popular as an agricultural activity and whether a similar boost in productivity and empowerment could be replicated elsewhere. It also helps explain the ways in which women's empowerment may or may not be achieved given their relative subordination to men; and explains the ways in which animal lives are implicated in differences and inequalities rooted within human society.
Intersectionality expands the nodes from which it is possible to unpack how power works in society by taking seriously species as a driver of social construction, experience formation, difference and inequality (Deckha 2009). It also moves forward conceptualizations of which actors are involved in intersectional manifestations, especially through ideas regarding ‘human’ and ‘animal’ as relationally performed, reproduced and co-produced (Birke, Bryl, and Lykke 2004; Haraway 2003, 2008; Twine 2010b). Intersectionality thus complements threads in animal geography purporting the centrality of animals; it generates possibilities for considering what an individual animal may experience in the world on account of who they are (based on their own sex, breed, age, etc.), where they are symbolically and materially located (in relation to humans or to other nonhumans) and with whom they are connected. To this end, intersectional analysis extends opportunities for animal geographers to engage specifically with issues of gender and patriarchy that so clearly shape animal lives and human–animal relations. Conversely, for feminist geographers, engagement with animal subjects, species and speciesism offers enriched exploration and understanding of socio-spatial practices across multiple axes of difference beyond the usual categories of gender, race, ethnicity, orientation and age. It encourages disaggregation of ‘nature’ in feminist geography research so that animals are no longer lumped together with other components of the natural world but rather are recognized as vital actors (re)producing relations of power that shape broad structural socio-spatial dynamics and everyday life.
Performativity
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Introduction
Feminism–animal connections and...
Intersectionality
Performativity
Standpoint
Conclusion
Disclosure statement
Feminist ideas regarding performativity are also useful for understanding human–animal relations and – more provocatively – the lives of animals themselves. Performativity is a theory and approach of studying the processes through which social identities and experiences are produced and reproduced. According to Butler (1990, 1993), discursive gender and sexual norms are not freely chosen but rather compelled and sanctioned by broader conventions; these norms are materialized through the body and bodily performances are historically embedded in context. Feminist geographical contributions focus on performance articulated within and through materiality and space (Bell et al. 1994; Gregson and Rose 2000; Kallio 2007; Lewis and Pile 1996; McDowell 1995; McDowell and Court 1994; Nash 2000; Nelson 1999; Pratt 2004), thus extending Butler's original subject as grounded in time and place, possessing agency and materially constituted (Nelson 1999; Rose 1999; Pratt 2004). Feminist geographers more prominently apply concepts of embodiment and the body as means of investigating subject formation, experience and context (Bell and Valentine 1995; Butler and Parr 1999; Longhurst 2001; Nast and Pile 2005; Longhurst and Johnston 2014). Resultant scholarship reflects dialectical and relational views of bodies as simultaneously real and constructed, natural and social (see overviews in Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2008; Longhurst 1995; Whatmore 2006), as well as place-based dynamics influencing how bodies are socially constructed and physically experienced (Cream 1995; Longhurst 2005; McDowell 1999). In sum, performativity is the process through which social subjects (body as labelled, inscribed, socially constructed), subjectivities (lived experience of a body) and spatialities (bodies embedded in a particular place) are produced and reproduced (terminology adapted from Grosz 1995; Longhurst 2005).
Applied to an animal body, performativity requires attention to four key issues as discussed by feminist-posthumanist theorists. First, animal performativity necessitates acknowledging animal otherness as a doing or becoming rather than based on innate characteristics and behaviours, as is often assumed to be the case with animals. This means moving from ‘animal’ as noun or essence to ‘animaling’ as a verb or doing (which parallels Butler's ‘queering’) to reflect adequately the relational emergence of animal identity and experience; linguistic boundaries are established and are maintained by humans in relation to animals, and in turn are expressed materially through animal bodies (Birke, Bryl, and Lykke 2004). Second, animal performativity requires moving beyond language such that matter itself begins to matter (Barad 2003). Here those innate characteristics and behaviours associated especially with nonhuman animals resurface to render animals as active, communicative participants in the creation of meaning. Material conditions and the body's materiality (its anatomy and physiology) are important not because they support particular discourses but rather matter itself is a generative and causal factor in the formation of bodies and performance through doings and actions (Barad 2003; Haraway 2003; Whatmore 2002). Third, actors in performative relationships are not distinct entities but rather act upon each other through intertwined agencies of mutual construction (Barad 2003). Such relational understanding of performativity requires inclusivity – of both human and animal – and acknowledges animal agency as central to co-construction. There are three kinds of performativity at issue: of animality, of humanness and the relation between the two (Birke, Bryl, and Lykke 2004). Fourth, exploring animal performativity requires ‘focusing on animal bodily involvements in the world’ (Whatmore 2006, 603) and engaging methods and tools that capture fully animal identities, experiences and contexts. Often this requires drawing upon various disciplines, such as ethology, behavioural ecology and biology, to account for the ways in which animals-live-in-the-world.
Performativity does not feature prominently in animal scholarship beyond these reflections. When engaged, the concept tends to highlight human performance as wrapped up and manifested in human–animal relations. Collard (2012), for example, illuminates the ways in which binaries of predator/prey, masculine/feminine, culture/nature and human/animal are falsely binary and shape performances of key gendered figures of Vancouver Island's historical and contemporary landscape. While insightful, performativity here aligns more closely with intersectionality rather than exploring performativity of an animal in its own right. To this point, emergent research within animal scholarship, including that by geographers, engages animal bodies as a way of understanding political economic manifestations of the human–animal divide. For example, animal bodies are conceptualized as capital, inputs, commodities and biotechnologies circulating within global industrial food systems and bearing physically the brunt of oppressive and exploitative economic processes (Shukin 2009; Twine 2010a; Weis 2013). In this vein, Gillespie (2014) vividly depicts the intimate and violent ways that cows born into a globalized food industry are subject to sexualized and gendered discourses of objectification, pregnancy and rape, and invasive practices of forced reproduction, milking and slaughter; Whatmore and Thorne (2000) deftly articulate how broader processes of information networks and conservation politics work through elephants as virtual bodies, as bodies in place and as spaces.
Intrigued by possible insights gained from performativity applied to animal bodies, my colleague and I embarked recently on research investigating the lives of donkeys in Botswana. We used a feminist-posthumanist notion of performativity to frame this work in order to foreground the lived experiences of donkeys themselves and to explore ‘donkeying’ as performed within broad societal relations of power (Geiger and Hovorka, in review). We first considered donkey subjects, focusing on their identities as socially constructed by humans, and donkey spatiality, focusing on donkey bodies rooted within a particular context. Broadly speaking, human privileging of cattle in Botswana generates unintended consequences and challenges for other animals in that it displaces attention from other livestock – first chickens and now donkeys – which are relatively marginalized. Donkeys are placeless in that they tend to wander aimlessly along roadsides or remain tethered at homesteads – compared to cattle revered at ranches, cattleposts, grazing lands – and government officials lament wasted donkey lives with little and in fact no resource investment or planning efforts targeting donkey health and wellbeing. Furthermore, donkeys' substantial contributions to people's livelihoods, in terms of food security, mobility, income-generation remain overlooked in policy and decision-making realms. Interviews with 100 human owners focused on how they value, care for and use donkeys to unravel and document discursive practices that produce donkey subjects and subjectivities. These interviews confirmed the importance of donkeys to people's livelihoods and revealed intimate connections that people form with their donkeys as companions and even family members. Yet interviews also revealed the general belief that donkeys are made to work for humans and require harsh treatment to ensure that they get the job done. This stems from donkeys being notoriously stubborn and difficult to read by humans whereby donkey owners would incur increasingly severe methods to get donkeys moving and felt that donkeys did not need brushing, hoof trimming, or even water because they are perceived as tough animals.
To account fully for donkey performativity, we focused directly on donkey bodies in terms of both physical and emotional elements to grapple with donkey subjectivity and lived experience. This required moving beyond language and discursive word-based constructions of experience to include thoroughly the materiality of donkey lives and the implications of subject and spatiality constructions on their being. To do so we drew upon animal welfare science assessments to document various indicators of donkey health and wellbeing. Physical assessments involved examining the donkey for sore and scar prevalence, eye condition, hoof condition and potential limb deformities. This information was used to construct a body map identifying key welfare issues and was paired with an overall body condition score based on estimated weight and prominence of spine, hips and shoulder blades. We found that the majority of donkeys surveyed were afflicted with states of poor physical welfare, indicated by thinness, long and cracked hooves, scores and scars covering their bodies and poor coat condition. Emotional assessments involved examining the donkey's ear position, facial expression, neck position and their interaction with both a stranger and their owner. We found that the majority of donkeys surveyed were afflicted with an overall sad demeanour by displaying unresponsiveness, avoidance and disinterest. As such, our research offers insights on the lived experience of donkeys, but also offers explanation as to how such experiences emerge on account of who the donkey is and what they mean to humans in a particular context. This in turn generates a baseline of donkey welfare indicators for community residents and practitioners in and around Maun, Botswana; it also provides an overview of political, economic and social cultural trends surrounding the use and significance of working donkeys in the lives of local persons.
Performativity thus centres the animal and attends to its subject identity construction and subjective lived experience as connected to its broader spatial context. Theoretically and empirically it offers animal geographers a means of holistically getting to know the animal while doing so in relation to the human; it reveals that humans and animals are deeply intertwined with implications on their respective wellbeing. For feminist geographers, animal performativity offers an opportunity to embrace all sorts of bodies and embodied lives as legitimate and meaningful sites of knowledge production. It also revitalizes materializations of bodily matter and brings-biology-in (Birke, Bryl, and Lykke 2004) and examines how societal relations of power work with and through individual animals themselves. Animal performativity pushes feminist methodological approaches into interdisciplinary realms, and feminist topical foci into those that are beyond issues of gender and sex. Like intersectionality then, performativity generates valuable insights on interspecies relations and pushes further both feminist and animal geography scholarship, as well as the concept itself, in productive and provocative ways.
Standpoint
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Introduction
Feminism–animal connections and...
Intersectionality
Performativity
Standpoint
Conclusion
Disclosure statement
Feminist ideas regarding standpoint offer avenues for recognizing animal subjects, exploring their worldviews and generating knowledge with them. Standpoint, as emerging from second-wave feminist thought, is a theory and approach that makes three central claims (Hartsock 1983; Harding 1993; Binnie 2011). First, knowledge is socially situated whereby individual knowledge and experiences are based on one's particular positionality, which in turn shapes one's perspectives and opinions in daily life. For example, women possess different worldviews than men given their relationship to material social relations of reproduction. Second, marginalized groups are socially situated in ways that make it more possible for them to be aware of things and ask questions than it is for the non-marginalized. For example, women have arguably deeper views of the world given their direct connections to child rearing within social reproductive contexts. Third, research, especially focused on power relations, should begin with the lives of the marginalized to acknowledge and incorporate their perspectives into the construction of scientific knowledge.
Adapted to the animal subject these tenets prove relevant and necessary for investigating wholly and rigorously their lives, circumstances and experiences in society. Animals, as a social group and as individuals, have situated and partial knowledge that reflects their own realities and worldviews (Wolch 1996). This requires effort by researchers to investigate and establish animal thought, intention and behaviour, as well as recognize different-kinds-of-animals and understand them as unique individuals. Here ‘feminist objectivity’ can acknowledge and engage diverse and wide ranging perspectives that move beyond the human (Haraway 1988). Furthermore, animals arguably align with ‘strong objectivity’ whereby their status as a marginalized group imbues them with incentive to understand perspectives other than their own and little incentive to defend the status quo compared to those who are not marginalized (Harding 1993). While difficult to operationalize with a nonhuman subject, this tenet reinforces the fact that research on and from the lives of the marginalized (here animals) is often forgotten or intentionally ignored, thus generating partial and distorted accounts of society. It is important to note that not all animals are marginalized relative to one another or relative to humans. Some animal social groups take precedence over other animal social groups (i.e. cattle over chickens or donkeys in Botswana) at the same time that some animal social groups take precedence over human social groups (e.g. conservation of elephants over local communities in Botswana).
Clearly provocative, animal standpoint raises questions regarding whether animal realities and worldviews can be known to humans. In his exploration of ‘what is it like to be a bat’, Nagel (1974) concludes that humans cannot comprehend ‘bat phenomenology’ given they are limited by their mental apparatus and may misread the communication or proceed along incorrect assumptions. Similarly, Wittgenstein (1963, 223) claims that ‘if a lion could talk we could not understand him (sic)’. In contrast, feminist animal scholar Donovan (2006) argues that lions do talk and it is not impossible to understand much of what they are saying. Rather humans need to learn the languages of the animal world and read animals as we do humans through body language, eye movement, facial expression, tone of voice (Donovan 2006) or even silence, stare, gesture and reflex (Wolfe 2003). Calls for more empathy in studying animals are part of a groundswell of changing attitudes toward reductionist science and the impoverished view of the lives of animals that it encourages (Bekoff 2007; Johnston 2008; Weil 2010). Researchers (and humans more broadly) need to learn to be affected by nonhuman entities (Latour 2004) through cultivating ‘response-ability’ (Haraway 2008), pursuing ‘intimate familiarities’ (Birke 2002) and engaging a ‘vital materialism’ (Gibson-Graham 2011) with them.
Striving for affective engagements with animals through empirical investigations is admittedly fraught with difficulties given their speculative nature, lack of scientific evidence, anthropomorphic excessiveness, logistic hurdles and methodological challenge (Wolch 2002; Lorimer and Whatmore 2009). Indeed consideration of animal standpoint calls into question how their subjective views may be articulated as they are unable to share their views with humans (Donovan 2006). Yet feminists are up to this task given that methodologically they learned to be affected long ago by viewing research subjects as active participants in knowledge production, embracing methods decreasing distance between the researcher and the subject, and seeking empathetic understanding of individual and collective standpoints. Much can be drawn, for example, from feminists who take emotions seriously in their research and argue for heightened, reflexive awareness of the often unacknowledged emotionality of researchers' experiences (Davidson, Bondi, and Smith 2012).
Feminists have also stretched methodological bounds by embracing mixed approaches to ensure holistic and authentic standpoint representations. This too well positions feminists to get-to-know-animals through means that foreground material and discursive political ecologies beyond the confines of inherited identities (Haraway 2008) and contemplate the messiness of human–animal relations (Collard 2012). Those engaging animal standpoint must stretch to become acquainted with the particularities of nature and forge beneficial alliances to investigate its complexity (Lulka 2009). This requires bridging social and biological sciences, embracing numerous modes of inquiry and associated calibrations, and supplementing familiar repertoires of humanist methods with those that amplify other corporeal registers (Jepson, Maan, and Buckingham 2011; Lorimer 2010; Whatmore 2006). Animal geographers investigating animal subjectivities through such affective science provide thoughtful and thought-provoking empirical studies that respectfully and holistically attempt to represent animal realities and worldviews (e.g. Gullo, Unna, and Wolch 1998; Risan 2005; Lorimer 2010).
Our research team exploring the lives of animals in Botswana works to operationalize animal standpoint through ‘lively biogeographies’ that foster constructive interdisciplinary collaborations and engage animals as mindful, dynamic and differentiated beings co-evolving and co-existing with humans (Lorimer 2010). To do so we, as social scientists, conduct research with ethologists, veterinary scientists, behavioural ecologists and biologists to incorporate where possible phenomenological and biophysical elements of animals that may reflect their intentions, behaviours and emotional responses in particular contexts. Such collaborations, for example, offer avenues for moving beyond examining solely people's insights on how they value, use and care for donkeys to examine donkey circumstances and experiences, and physical and emotional well-being. In this research, our social science skill set expanded from human-based interviews to incorporate observations of donkey hooves, coat condition and attentiveness amongst other variables with assistance from our animal welfare science and veterinary colleagues. Interdisciplinary collaborations also offer opportunities to simultaneously investigate human and animal experiences of conflict-based scenarios. Our work on African wild dogs in the central Kalahari involves not only interviews with farmers whose livelihoods pivot on depredation and stress caused by dogs frequenting villages and cattleposts but also involves tracking dogs on-foot, through spoor, or using satellite/radio collars to understand real-time encounters between people, cattle and wild dogs.
We view donkeys and wild dogs as active participants in knowledge production and strive to decrease the distance between us and the animal subjects we study by embracing new protocols and techniques at the same time that our natural science counterparts embrace those elements (e.g. affects, emotions, lived experiences) previously excluded from animal-based methodological protocols (Lorimer and Whatmore 2009). Together we seek empathetic understanding of individual donkeys and wild dogs, detailing both their physical materiality and their embodied ecologies.
Standpoint thus pushes to the foreground animals as subjects with particular circumstances, experiences and worldviews. Feminist iterations of this concept offer a meaningful springboard from which to acknowledge this ultimate Other while feminist methodological emphases on situated knowledge, empathy, and mixed methods provide useful tools with which to conduct empirical research. Existing threads in animal scholarship align closely here, in particular calls for affective science that investigate interspecies relations and animals themselves as lively and engaged. The humanist framing of science and scholarship makes it challenging to contemplate what an animal standpoint may be or how an animal may wish to represent itself, detail its circumstances or articulate its experiences. Animal representation from a human's perspective is always-already inevitable and means that the whole animal can disappear (Fudge 2002). Nevertheless, the trickiness of representation should not be used to discard the idea of animal standpoint as a vital building block of scientific enquiry. Recognizing animal informants as active subjects possessing situated knowledge is certainly within the realm of possibilities (Birke 1991; Nagel 1974).
Conclusion
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Introduction
Feminism–animal connections and...
Intersectionality
Performativity
Standpoint
Conclusion
Disclosure statement
I appreciate that feminists may remain sceptical of or uncomfortable with animal subjects and issues, at the same time that animal scholars may view their theoretical ideas and methodological approaches suitably robust. Yet feminism and animal scholarship align in many respects: both challenge traditional approaches to and boundaries of science; both seek ways of knowing that may combat the inequitable and exploitative tendencies and unjust consequences that distancing (based on categories of gender or species) can promote (Gruen and Weil 2010). Given these synergies, I urge feminists and animal scholars to explore how each may complement, extend or complicate discussions going on in their respective intellectual and empirical engagements. To wit, animals need feminism and feminism needs animals. An enhanced feminism–animal dialogue generates geographical knowledge that is comprehensive and reflective of the interrelatedness of all beings that shape individual, institutional and ideological realms.
In this article, I have argued that feminist ideas of intersectionality, performativity and standpoint serve as useful entry points to exploring interspecies relations and the lives of animals, at the same time that extension of these ideas into animal-based research pushes further feminist thought and agendas. First, intersectional linkages exist between forms of oppression and inequality grounded in both sexism and speciesism, as illuminated by feminist animal scholars. Intersectional analysis may be extended by animal geographers incorporating more consistently gender as a category and axis of difference in terms of human–animal relations (women–chicken linkages in Botswana) or even in terms of animal subjectivities themselves (differential experiences of dairy cows based on their gendered attributes and roles). Second, performativity expressed through identity construction and embodied experience applies to both human and nonhuman animals. Extended application of performativity by both feminist and animal geographers facilitates understanding of human performance as shaped by associations with animals and animal performance as shaped by associations with humans. Bodily expressions of subject, subjectivity and spatiality investigated across species reveals how humans and animal lives, circumstances and experiences are intertwined. Third, standpoint offers possibilities of getting-to-know animals and their worldviews through empathetic and situated methodological means embedded within feminist approaches. Standpoint in turn highlights animals as central to societal relations of power and promotes lively more-than-human approaches with animals as necessarily legitimate social actors.
As a feminist geographer, I believe that feminism offers perspectives and analyses that transcend sole focus on women, gender and sexism – indeed feminism is a powerful force within science that should not be limited in its application to particular (human) subjects or topics. Like Clark (2012), I urge feminists to engage with animals not (only) because they are feminists and therefore invested in the implications of species for issues of sex and gender, but because as feminist scholars they are uniquely and strategically positioned to do this work. Stretching intellectually in this way does not mean we should cast aside the importance of traditional feminist subjects, topics and interests. Rather extending into the underexplored terrain of the more-than-human affirms and illuminates the interconnectivity of all beings. As an animal geographer, I see value in engaging with feminism given that it has paved the way for critical scholarship by pushing boundaries of what can be known, how we come to know, and what knowledge emerges as legitimate and meaningful as a result. While it is unlikely we can know a bat's inner most desires (just like people's) we can still recognize that both humans and animals are embedded in social relations and networks with others upon which their social welfare depends. This realization and acceptance leads to recognition of kinship and difference. We should come to know, however partially, the animals with whom we coexist in order to sustain webs of connection and an ethic of respect, mutuality, caring and friendship (Wolch 2002, 734).
In short, animals are good to think with (Lévi-Strauss 1962) and with their assistance we can generate geographical knowledge that draws out comprehensive understanding of the world. Animals are also here to live with (Haraway 2003). Thus we cannot, as human animals, limit our engagement with other species to the academic realm. Rather we must seek empathetic and ethical engagement with animals within our individual daily lives, institutional structures and ideological constructs. To this end, I see an enhanced dialogue between feminism and animals as a productive and fruitful means of taking species relations of power and animals themselves seriously.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Jan Monk whose work has inspired innovation and excellence in feminist geography. I am honoured to be part of the Jan Monk Distinguished Professor Lecture series at the Department of Geography and Development, University of Arizona in March 2014 and at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in Tampa, Florida in April 2014. Thanks to my hosts at each event, especially Sapana Doshi, Peter Hopkins and Lynda Johnston. I also appreciate the insightful comments provided by the editors of Gender, Place and Culture in the preparation of this manuscript. More broadly, thanks to many individuals who have provided support, encouragement and inspiration at pivotal moments in my career: Fiona Mackenzie, Dianne Rocheleau, Susan Hanson, Donna Haraway, Robin Roth and Roberta Hawkins. Thanks to colleagues and my graduate students at the Department of Geography, and research collaborators at the Campbell Centre for Studies in Animal Welfare, University of Guelph, as well as the Department of Environmental Sciences at University of Botswana, the Government of Botswana, and countless research participants.
Disclosure statement
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Feminism–animal connections and...
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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