Teaching the Animal: The Humanities by DeMello Margo

Author:DeMello, Margo [DeMello, Margo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lantern Books
Published: 2010-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

animals and men and women relate or don’t relate to each other. This section of a course could address a number of sub-themes including: language and how to communicate across difference; domesticity and domestication; friendship across difference; food and consumption; and sex. The latter category itself shores up a number of analogous issues in women’s and animal studies: breeding and the politics of reproduction; sexual violence, pornography, and bestiality; exoticizing women and animals.

3. The nal category addresses questions of ethics and rights, and especially, how to think of these questions not in terms of universals, but in consideration of those who are differently bodied, differently abled, and may or may not even comprehend the concept of a right or an ethics.

Sample Exercises

• Teaching the PETA Ads

• What are the messages being sent by the ads?

• Is the nudity central to the message?

• How does the naked white woman’s body affect the message?

Unpacking Privilege

• Have students make a list of elements/mechanisms/manifestations of (white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied) privilege. (Alternatively, list ways in which women, people of color, queers, and the disabled are oppressed.)

• Have students make a list of the elements of elements/mechanisms/manifestations of species privilege. (Alternatively, list the ways that animals are oppressed).

• Compare the lists and discuss what can be learned from both the similarities and the differences.

Readings for These Exercises

• Karen Davis: The Holocaust and the Henmaid’s Tale

• Marjorie Speigel: The Dreaded Comparison

• Peggy McIntosh: “White Privilege and Male Privilege”

Bene ts to Students

Attending to the ways in which the operation of othering determines relations between men and women, people of color, queer people, and nonhuman animals, and when and under what conditions the latter can be seen or heard, allows for a richer understanding of the ways that oppression operates. To focus on the ways that women and animals or other marginalized groups are similarly regarded and oppressed, however, also risks re-inscribing false essentialisms and reasserting a particular (patriarchal) de nition of the human as the norm. One of the goals of teaching animal studies and women’s studies together is to displace any one viewpoint as a foundation for ascribing value to groups or individuals and to attend to connections and commonality as well as differences. Because the study of nonhuman animals brings us necessarily to the limits of our own knowledges—we can’t really know what the world is for them—it returns our gaze to our own situatedness, to the particularities of our own forms of knowing. Our efforts to reach out and know otherness, should always be coupled by a humility about the inadequacies of our knowledge, thereby guarding against any particular patriarchal or anthropocentric view of the world, from appearing as the world. Respect for animals and women as distinct world makers, furthermore, and a recognition of the role our inquiries about women and animals can play in our self-conceptions and understandings of human practices and institutions, are two of the important transformative lessons animal studies, together with women’s studies, can provide.

This essay was commissioned for this volume.

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