This article analyses the use of images in the discourse of animal ethics in an attempt to see how visual cultural studies can contribute to the debate in environmental philosophy. Drawing on Derrida's critique of the utilitarian theory of animal liberation and Mitchell's analysis of iconoclasm in visual culture theories, the article argues that an iconoclastic strategy of visual representation in the discourse of animal ethics undermines the very objective of such an ethical theory. Two case studies — Peter Singer's (...) animal liberation and J.B. Callicott's land ethic — illustrate an implacable tendency to essentialize the visual and animal identity. (shrink)

This article analyses the use of images in the discourse of animal ethics in an attempt to see how visual cultural studies can contribute to the debate in environmental philosophy. Drawing on Derrida's critique of the utilitarian theory of animal liberation and Mitchell's analysis of iconoclasm in visual culture theories, the article argues that an iconoclastic strategy of visual representation in the discourse of animal ethics undermines the very objective of such an ethical theory. Two case studies — Peter Singer's (...) animal liberation and J.B. Callicott's land ethic — illustrate an implacable tendency to essentialize the visual and animal identity. (shrink)

Nearly 20 years age, Yi-Fu Tuan wrote his influential Dominance and Affection:The Making of Pets , which argued that human affection for domestic animals is inseparable from dominance. Today, cultural critics persist in the view that companion animals are compromised, even degraded, because they are controlled by humans. The essay attempts to rethink the relationship between humans and companion animals beyond the freedom-dominance binary. It argues for a conceptual approach that defers confidant interpretation of animals while dramatically relaxing control of (...) them within human settings. It suggests that this approach be called a "performance ethic" and offered the House Rabbit Society as a model. (shrink)

The systematic examination of the visual depiction of nonhuman animals by humans, and the representation of nonhuman animal imagery is an opportunity to observe varying degrees of anthropocentrism in the manner in which the nonhuman animal is represented. The investigation we present ventures beyond the traditional scope of post-modern human alterity and suggests that an Otherness status should be extended to encompass both the human animal and the nonhuman animal. An important motivation for seriously considering nonhuman animal experience is the (...) biological similarities shared by human animals and nonhuman animals. Many perspectives toward the nonhuman animal have ignored such similarities, and this in turn results in the infliction of much trauma and injustice on nonhuman animals. We argue that the visual representation of nonhuman animals has the potential, to a substantial degree, to affect the general human understanding of and interactions with all nonhuman animals, and with positive, neutral, and negative implications for all involved. In other words, it really matters how we represent animals. (shrink)

Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor (Pokot, 2017), an adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead (2009), tells the story of an old woman, Janina Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat), who advocates for animal rights and uses every measure to fight the local hunting culture. Due to the centrality of the relationship between human beings and the world of nature, Holland’s film refers to the recent debates aimed at de-centralizing the human subject. This article will argue, however, that (...) despite its attempt to alter the human–animal relationship, Spoor conveys anthropocentric perspectives and as such it does not participate in the “non-human turn.” Instead, the film can be linked to the “emotional turn” taking precedence in the humanities during the last two decades, in that it expresses the director’s affective response to the political realities of contemporary Poland, especially its unshaken patriarchal power, which subordinates the social margins. (shrink)

The canine photographs, videos, and photographic narratives of artist William Wegman frame questions of animal aesthetic agency. Over the past 30 years, Wegman's dog images shift in form and content in ways that reflect the artist's increasing anxiety over his control of the art-making process once he becomes identified, in his own words, as "the dog photographer". Wegman's dog images claim unique cultural prominence, appearing regularly in fine art museums as well as on broadcast television. But, as Wegman comes to (...) use these images to document his own transition from dog photographer to dog breeder, these texts also reflect increasing restrictions on what I term the "pack aesthetics," or collaborative production of art and artistic agency, that distinguish some of the early pieces. Accounting for the correlations between multiple and mongrel dogs in Wegman's experimental video work and exclusively Weimaraner-breed dogs with human bodies in his recent work in large-format Polaroid photography, this article explores how Wegman's work with his "video dog star," his first Weimaraner dog Man Ray, troubles the erasure of the animal in contemporary conceptions of artistic authority. (shrink)

Traditionally animal ethics has criticised the anthropocentric worldview according to which humans differ categorically from the rest of the nature in some morally relevant way. It has claimed that even though there are differences, there are also crucial similarities between humans and animals that make it impossible to draw a categorical distinction between humans who are morally valuable and animals which are not. This argument, according to which animals and humans share common characteristics that lead to moral value, is at (...) the heart of animal ethics. Lately the emphasis on similarity has been under attack. It has been claimed that the search for similarity is itself part of anthropocentric morality, since only those like us are valuable. It also has been claimed that true respect for animals comes from recognising their difference and ‘otherness’, not from seeing similarities. This paper analyses the new ‘other animal ethics’ by critically examining its basis and consequences. The conclusion is that despite the fact that other animal ethics is right in demanding respect also for difference, it remains both vague and contradictory in its theoretical basis, and leads to undesirable consequences from the perspective of animal welfare. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on recent artworks by South African artist Nandipha Mntambo. I read these for the ways in which the discourse of species works within and against the humanist sacrificial economy of the subject that Jacques Derrida calls “carno-phallogocentric”. Drawing on Derrida's “metonymy of ‘eating well,'” Achille Mbembe's analysis of colonial violence, and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, I argue that these works inscribe and disturb a speciesist, sexual, and racial politics of animalization, and do so by (...) figuring a transgressive animality that stalks the “origins” of “the human” and troubles its carnivorous and colonial relations of “eating the other.” The works render ambiguous the humanist border that separates “man” from what he calls “the animal” and thicken the singular division between edible and inedible bodies, and literal and figurative eating. I suggest that this figures what Haraway might call an “eccentric subject”, one that not only holds open the possibility of a nonanthropocentrism but, as Haraway would say, “nourishes indigestion” at the heart of “carno-phallogocentric” power. But this is risky practice, as a recent controversy about reading Mntambo's work shows. (shrink)

In contrast to rigid conceptions of nonhuman animals, several philosophers have put forth ideas that suggest a more flexible and extended vision of other animals. In articulating the condition of humans in the world, philosophers have referenced ideas that necessarily bring other beings in common with humanity. Significantly, conceptions of movement and biological transformation have played a central role in these ruminations, thereby suggesting the importance of geographical variables in human/nonhuman relations. By drawing out the connections between these perspectives, this (...) paper outlines an ethics of extension. (shrink)

Media and nonhuman animal liberation is an under-researched area in the United Kingdom. If the most appropriate metaphor describing the media/social movement relationship is "dance," then largely the media and animal liberation are dancing in the dark of neglect. Drawing upon different approaches to media and offering some notes toward animal liberation media studies, this article explores how, by engaging with the "established terms of the problematic at play," animal liberationists and their claims are appropriated by speciesist ideology through exclusion (...) and confusing and redefining maneuvers. A contextual analysis of its typical texts raises questions of the public interest role, due impartiality of media and, implicitly, of movement strategy. (shrink)