Determinations of ability/disability are rooted in coloniality, specifically in categorizations of race, gender, and animality as they bear on social formations. I elucidate this rootedness by weaving the “coloniality of ability” into María Lugones’ accounts of the coloniality of gender and the colonial-modern system as founded on the “human-nonhuman” difference. This enables me to reveal an “ability system” based on the “ability-bestiality” difference and delineate with more specificity liminal sites of oppression and resistance across the heterogeneous socialities of coloniality-modernity. (...) From the perspective of the coloniality of ability that I develop, I focus on the liminality of the white woman Victorian invalid and that of the colonized “bestial” body in order to distinguish between two forms of colonial-modern liminality—“light” and “dark.” I also draw from this discussion two forms of colonial-modern oppression—“dehumanizing” and “bestializing”—and two related modalities of anticolonial resistance—“humanizing” and “decolonial.”. (shrink)

I give an argument for veganism by drawing parallels between a) bestiality and animal fighting, and b) animal product consumption. Attempts to draw principled distinctions between the practices fail. The wrong-making features of bestiality and animal fighting are also found in animal product consumption. These parallels give us new insight into why popular objections to veganism, such as the Inefficacy Argument, are inadequate. Because it is often difficult to enact significant life changes, I hope that seeing the parallels (...) between animal product consumption and acts we are already so strongly motivated to avoid can help us abstain from animal products. (shrink)

Settler colonialism is structured in part according to the principle of civilizational progress yet the roots of this doctrine are not well understood. Disparate ideas of progress and practices related to colonial dispossession and domination can be traced back to the Enlightenment, and as far back as ancient Greece, but there remain unexplored logics and continuities. I argue that civilizational progress and settler colonialism are structured according to the opposition between politics governed by reason or faith and the figure of (...) the child as sinful or bestial. Thus, it is not contingent, but rather necessary that justificatory frameworks of European empire and colonialism depict Indigenous peoples as children. To illustrate how the theoretical link between Indigenous peoples and children emerges not as a simple analogy, but rather, as the source of the premodern/modern and savage/civilized binaries, I trace the various historical iterations of the political/childhood opposition through the classical, medieval, enlightenment, and modern eras. I show how the model of civilizational progress from a premodern and savage state of childhood continues to serve as the model for settler colonial exclusion and domination of Indigenous peoples. (shrink)

I will argue against bestiality as a socially acceptable practice based on five standard premises. The standard premises I will present will contain notes in regard to: instrumentality; consent; disease transmission; deviance; and morality. There is significant work available on the harm done to the beast, so aside from brief summary; the question of the good of the beast is not in the focus. I will also ignore any religious concerns, either surrounding morality or freedom of practice. Instead, these (...) arguments are in support of the moral identity of the individual and of society as a whole. (shrink)

Filling a gap in knowledge in gender theory, genocidal, and Holocaust studies, this paper operationalizes the concept of phallicism as an analytic explanation of the simultaneous killing and sexual victimization of racialized men in western, capitalist, patriarchal societies. The theory of phallicism posits that racialization lays the basis for a sexualization process wherein racialized males are caricaturized as both salacious savages (who can be raped by the men or women of the dominant racial group) and bestial/wanton creatures deserving of immediate (...) death for the sake of liberal civility. Breaking with the dominant interpretive lenses in scholarly discourses around race and gender that understand racialized femininity as the basis of dehumanization, this paper will operationalize the notion of phallicism through historical and comparative analysis of the writings of political prisoner George Jackson and Primo Levi, a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust. With the theory of phallicism—the guiding theoretic of the paradigm of Black Male Studies—we can sharpen our conceptual acumen to account for the function of misandric patterns of intergroup violence and its role as the organizing principle of the negrophobia characteristic of Western, patriarchal, capitalist regimes. (shrink)

This article explores the controversy between ancient Greek dramatists and their fellow philosophers over the vertical axis, with special reference to Socrates. I begin with a discussion of the vertical axis in Greek theatre, and turn to Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus to discuss the vertical as a manifestation of the tragic preference ascribed to our “divine” upper body over our “bestial” lower body. Then, I discuss the deus ex machina as an image of divine vertical intervention in the horizontal human plot, (...) and claim that Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophical critique of this theatrical convention fails to notice that the dramatists made a subversive use of the illogicality of this convention. The second part of the article is dedicated to the vertical as an expression of man’s desire to transcend the boundaries of the human sphere. I discuss the negative treatment of this desire by Greek dramatists, who regard it as an unworthy aspiration, compared to its positive treatment by Greek philosophers, who presents it as a worthy aspiration, since it is only through such an ascent that one can get a glimpse of the eternal. In this context, I examine two representations of Socrates: his deus ex machina appearance in Aristophanes’ Clouds, implying the hubristic stance of philosophers; and his habit of long immobile standings as introduced in Plato’s Symposium, implying the philosophers’ superiority over the dramatists. However, the publicly-visible nature of Socrates’ standstills also turns them into a display of philosophizing, meaning that Socrates of the Symposium is a philosopher who (perhaps unfairly) theatricalizes his verticality so as to challenge the art of theatre. (shrink)

in this article, we experience the exercise of a screen ethnocartography in agency with the film Beasts of the southern wild by the director Benh Zeitlin. We tested a film experimentation that led to a renewed writing ways of life. We bet on cinema and childhood as possibilities for creating cracks and a stutter of language for the creation of new worlds and ways of living. In cinema images less as a representation, and more as art that proposes incompleteness, fissure, (...) a hole in appearances. In childhood as an exercise of differentiation and resistance to dominant narratives in a given context. In childhood as a limiting experience of/in language, tirelessly exposing the human condition in front of the world. Thus, accompanying the main character of the plot, little Hushpuppy — a six-year-old resident of the “Charles Doucet Island”, experienced as “the Bathtub” —, we are shaken by the forms of life there, considered bestial and not recognized by city humans. Hushpuppy, his father and friends resist attempts to destroy their existence by the forms of the state that try to domesticate them, imbued with the logic that primitives must come to civilization, just as children must become adults. (shrink)

In this paper, I intend to deny the morality and instrumentality of the behavior known as bestiality, or the use of non-human animals for sexual gratification by human beings. While to most modern peoples, this hardly even seems like it should be in question, it should be the nature of the human mind to occasionally question long-standing traditional moray in the hopes of finding solutions to problems and the disbanding of superstition. It has been proposed that the moral question, (...) and by extension the legal question, of bestiality is based on traditions long outlived and unnecessary. In an IceNews.is article written in 2008, Norwegian lawyers were growing concerned over the prevalence of animal brothels in Denmark and the precedent it set for Norway [http://www.icenews.is, 2008]. The article, when coupled with the 2001 article title “Heavy Petting” by prominent Utilitarian philosopher, Peter Singer, proves that the issue of bestiality is no longer the purview of jokes and psychological discussions. I will argue against bestiality as a socially acceptable practice based on five standard premises. The standard premises I will present will contain notes in regard to: instrumentality; consent; disease transmission; deviance; and morality. There is significant work available on the harm done to the beast, so aside from brief summary; the question of the good of the beast is not in the focus. I will also ignore any religious concerns, either surrounding morality or freedom of practice. Instead, these arguments are in support of the moral identity of the individual and of society as a whole. (shrink)

Contemporary debates about sexual ethics are dominated by a consent-oriented approach—consensualism. This position well explains the immorality of such acts as rape, pedophilia, bestiality and necrophilia. However, consensualism faces difficulties when it comes to adultery or HIV transmission. This article analyzes such unacquired moral obligations not to engage in consensual sex. A new natural law approach is proposed to explain and justify these obligations. This position places central importance in the evaluation of sexual acts on whether they are aimed (...) at achieving some common good and whether they harm some other good. As will be shown, the new natural law overcomes the difficulties of consensualism and grounds unacquired obligations in sexual ethics. And if this approach is combined with a pluralistic view of the goods that are realized in sex, then the new natural law does not allow the conservative conclusions about sexual morality inherent in the old natural law theory. (shrink)

Los textos de Nietzsche sobre el "animal hombre" proponen la moral de la bestialidad y la depredación, la antropología zoológica salvaje, la biología del racismo y la eugenesia, la historia de la inconsciencia y el retroceso, la política del Estado bestia, la religión del dios cabrón sátiro, la fisiología de los instintos básicos, en definitiva, la reproducción del "superhombre monstruo superbestia". ABSTRACT. The texts of Nietzsche on the "animal man", intend the wild zoological anthropology, the morals of the bestiality (...) and predation, the biology of eugenics and racism, the history of unconsciousness and eternal return, the politics of the beast State, the religion of the satyr god, the physiology of basic instincts, to sum up, the reproduction of the "superman monster superbeast". (shrink)