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Animal Encounters: A Genre of Contact

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Book cover Animal Encounters

Part of the book series: Cultural Animal Studies ((CAS,volume 4))

Abstract

What does it mean to encounter an animal? Encounters are regularly summoned in animal studies, but rarely subject to conceptual scrutiny. The chapter argues that encounters might be considered a particular genre of contact that bring categories of difference into view as well as their simultaneous undoing. Building on this conceptualisation, the chapter outlines why human-animal encounters have been framed as key sites of transformative potential that have the capacity to rupture and disturb, awe and delight. As a crucial site of intervention and manipulation, human-animal encounters raise important questions about power, privilege, and violence.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I use genre here to denote a form of contact that involves an identifiable set of characteristics, partly inspired by Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (5) in which she outlines an interest in “genres of the emerging event”—“the situation, the episode, the interruption, the aside, the conversation, the travelogue, and the happening”.

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks are due to Alexandra Böhm and Jessica Ullrich for their careful editorial work, and to Jonathan Darling for his comments on previous versions.

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    Helen F. Wilson

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Wilson, H.F. (2019). Animal Encounters: A Genre of Contact. In: Böhm, A., Ullrich, J. (eds) Animal Encounters. Cultural Animal Studies, vol 4. J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_2

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