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A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities pp 117–128Cite as

Intersections: The Animal Question Meets Feminist Theory

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Butler (1993) emphasized how cultural norms materialize gendered bodies. No doubt we also materialize oppressive practices toward animals through our bodily comportment; certainly, animals (e.g. cows, horses) respond differently according to human body posture (e.g. Birke et al. 2011).

  2. 2.

    Other species do not always share the traits we primarily use for perception and communication – not all mammals for example have binocular vision, something which profoundly shapes our (visual) view of the world. Yet there is enormous common ground. And millennia of shared lives has resulted in some species becoming adept at recognizing our meaning. Dogs, particularly, can easily read human gestures (Topál and Gásci 2012). These skills are critical to interspecies communication. Humans, of course, can also build relationality at a distance, by means of technology. Even so, the technologies we have depend upon the human body and its particular capabilities (e.g. vision, hearing).

  3. 3.

    We acknowledge here that there is some degree of domination, in that animals have fewer choices and are located firmly within a sociocultural framework in which animals are, indeed, dominated and abused. Nevertheless, there are possibilities, sometimes, for companion animals to experience pleasure in relatings with us (see Cudworth 2011) – and perhaps even to enjoy shared activities.

  4. 4.

    The hormone oxytocin, for example, often called the “bonding hormone,” is released by both dog and person when they gaze at each other (Nagasawa et al. 2015).

  5. 5.

    However, this perspective could be accused of speaking to the same liberal ontology that we argued against above. What would a politics that can take collectives into account look like (see Holmberg 2015)?

  6. 6.

    There is growing recognition of animal sentience in legislative systems – European legislation, for example, acknowledges animal sentience. But there are also increasing demands for at least some species to be accorded rights broadly analogous to human rights (great apes for instance). For further discussion of the issue of animals and citizenship, see Donaldson and Kymlicka (2011).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept Biological Science, University of Chester, Parkgate Rd., Chester, UK

    Lynda Birke

  2. Department of Sociology, Uppsala University, Box 624, 751 26, UPPSALA, Sweden

    Tora Holmberg

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  1. Lynda Birke
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  2. Tora Holmberg
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Correspondence to Tora Holmberg .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tema; Gender Studies (Tema Genus), Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

    Cecilia Åsberg

  2. Centre for Humanities, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Rosi Braidotti

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Birke, L., Holmberg, T. (2018). Intersections: The Animal Question Meets Feminist Theory. In: Åsberg, C., Braidotti, R. (eds) A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62140-1_10

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