Why the Animal?

Queer Animalities¹, Indigenous Naturecultures, and Critical Race Approaches to Animal Studies

 

Science, Technology and Society Center (STSC)

University of California, Berkeley

370 Dwinelle Hall

April 12, 2011

9 am - 1 pm

 

     The last decade has seen an upsurge of important scholarship in the field of “animal studies.” Under this rubric, scholars with roots in philosophy, anthropology, literature, film, biology, feminist and queer theory, history, geography, and other fields are, in some ways, attempting to recover knowledge territory claimed by and for the natural sciences in the last several hundred years. Given the disciplinary roots of this multidisciplinary field, such scholarship characteristically aims essentially to “dehierarchalize” the relationships of “westerners” with their non-human others. While this move in one sense amplifies the scope of social science and humanities inquiry, it also tends to reinscribe familiar starting points. Not least, much animal studies work can tend to restrict its attention to beings that “live,” e.g. dogs, cattle, bears, mushrooms, microorganisms.

This symposium brings together scholars within animal studies who focus on queer and critical race approaches with scholars working within longer-lived strands of study—indigenous approaches to knowing “nonhumans” focused on critiquing settler colonialism and its management of nonhuman others. Some of the scholars also consider human relations with beings classed in dominant frameworks as “nonliving.” Our hope is that their conversation, together with ample opportunity for audience responses and provocations, will generate fruitful intellectual cross-fertilizations.

 

Scout Calvert, School of Library and Information Science, Wayne State University

Mel Chen, Gender & Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley

Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, Political Science, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Zakiyyah Jackson, Erskine A. Peters Fellow, UC Berkeley & University of Notre Dame, Africana Studies

Noenoe Silva, Political Science, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

 

Program

8:45–9:15	Coffee
9:15–9:25	Cori Hayden, UC Berkeley Anthropology Welcome and Introductions
9:25–9:45	Kim TallBear, UC Berkeley Why the Animal? Framing Comments
9:45–10:10	Scout Calvert, Wayne State University Flush Sisters and Sire’s Milk: Traffic between Kin and Kine in Technologies for Reproduction
10:10–10:35	Noenoe Silva and Jonathan Goldberg–Hiller Taking Indigenous Cosmologies Seriously
10:30–10:45	Break
10:45–11:10	Zakiyyah Jackson, Erskine A. Peters Fellow, UC Berkeley & University of Notre Dame, Africana Studies Who Cuts the Border? Race and the Future of Animal Studies
11:10–11:35	Mel Chen, UC Berkeley Animals and Animacy
	Discussion and Roundtable

 

 

Abstracts:

Scout Calvert, Wayne State University

Flush sisters and sire’s milk: exuberant filiation, reproductive technology, and kinship tracking in Angus breeding.

Artificial reproductive technologies allow cattle to parent calves in far reaching times and places. A donor cow may “flush” dozens of embryos in her lifetime, while a bull may sire tens of thousands of calves. But the “expected progeny differences” chart on these animals’ pedigrees attributes maternal traits to the sire’s genetic contribution, rather than to his daughters. These phenotype predictions are the result of intensive data collection efforts over decades. This paper examines kinship production through pedigree technologies and ARTs, and the material effects of these devices--witnessed as two genetic diseases spread to frequencies of 10% in the Angus herd since 1990.

 

Noenoe Silva and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Taking Indigenous Cosmologies Seriously

The scientific, philosophical, and political efforts to policethe distinction between human and animal—amalgamated processesthat Giorgio Agamben has called "the anthropological machine"—havebeen significant components of neocolonial governance in Hawai`i.In this essay, we trace the changing sovereign and exceptionalstrategies used by the state of Hawai`i to subordinate KanakaMaoli, the indigenous peoples of the islands, through violenceagainst and scientific regulation of animals. These disparatestrategies converge in their consequences for making KanakaMaoli useful to the state's legitimacy and authority to thedetriment of indigenous cultural, economic, and political autonomy.In the interests of this autonomy and against the anthropologicalmachine, we break from Western political theory to suggest thatan investment in the Kanaka ontological concept of kino lau,which we translate as "having many bodies, human and nonhuman,"provides an exciting alternative perspective on the relationshipsof human and nonhuman animals. We show how the study of kinolau can offer practical resistance to the subordinating imperativesof neocolonial legality.

 

Noenoe K. Silva (Kanaka Hawai'i) is from Ko'olaupoko, O'ahu.  She grew up in the Bay Area, and earned her BA in Hawaiian language, Master's in Library and Information Studies, and PhD in Political Science, all at UH Mānoa.  She is the author of Aloha Betrayed:  Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism.  She currently teaches in the political science department specializing in Hawaiian and indigenous politics and also teaches advanced undergraduate and graduate courses for Kawaihuelani Center for Hawaiian Language at UH Mānoa.  Her current research interest is in establishing Native Hawaiian intellectual history. 

 

Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller teaches sociolegal theory in the Political Science Department at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa. His recent research explores the mobilization and countermobilization of rights in various empirical contexts including the postcolonial recognition of indigenous peoples and the politics of same-sex marriage. His recent work has appeared in New Political Science, Law, Culture & the Humanities, Law & Social Inquiry, and other sociolegal journals. He is the author of The limits to union: same-sex marriage and the politics of civil rights (University of Michigan Press, 2004) and is completing a new manuscript called The Legal Aesthetics of Civil Rights, or, How to do things with equality. He is presently the co-editor of the Law & Society Review.

 

Zakiyyah Jackson, Erskine A. Peters Fellow, UC Berkeley & University of Notre Dame, Africana Studies

Who Cuts the Border? Race and the Future of Animal Studies

My scholarship is at the intersection of Animal Studies, Queer Theory, and African Diasporic Feminism and examines African diasporic culture’s attempts to redefine the human by redirecting representations that animalize black gender and sexuality found in law, science, philosophy, and neoliberalism. Jacques Derrida’s 2001 essay “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” has become in recent years perhaps the seminal text of Animal Studies. Since the publication of Derrida’s groundbreaking essay, scholarly journals ranging from Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy to the literary criticism of PMLA, have devoted entire issues to the emerging interdisciplinary field of Animal Studies. Yet, this emergent field within critical theory has yet to integrate an intersectional approach into its critique of anthropocentricism. My work brings intersectional thinking to Animal Studies, enabling me to more fully uncover the political stakes of “the animal turn” for social relations.

 

Mel Chen, UC Berkeley

Animals and Animacy

Mel Y. Chen is Assistant Professor of Gender & Women's Studies at U.C. Berkeley and an affiliate of the Center for Race and Gender and the Institute for Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences.

Mel's former work, Speech Lost from Speech: On the Borders of Linguistic Self-Possession, appearing in articles and book chapters, explored the gendered, racialized, and nationalist politics of silence in language theories in order to reconsider linguistic subject and objecthood, and to lay out the stakes and workings of linguistic reclamation.

More recently, the essay "Racialized Toxins and Sovereign Fantasies" (Discourse29(2-3): 367-383) considers industrial pollutants as altered disease vectors and asks about the ways they can be racialized in the course of transnational migration. Mel is also tracing the ethical contours of a queer of color approach to human animality, as well as non-human animacies, and will convene "Species Spectacles", a U.C. Humanities Research Institute Residential Research Group focused on animality, sexuality and race, in Fall 2009. These projects take part in Animacies, Mel's current book manuscript.

Mel's short film, Local Grown Corn (2007), explores interweavings of immigration, childhood, illness and friendship; it has played in both asian and queer film festivals.