Logo image
Back
With animal: Exceeding the 'Absent referent' through maternity
Journal article   Peer reviewed

With animal: Exceeding the 'Absent referent' through maternity

Clare Archer-Lean
Hecate, Vol.42(2), pp.23-38
2016
Appears in  UniSC Diversity and Inclusion Research Collection
url
https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=205272202387052;res=IELLCCView
Webpage

Abstract

Performing Arts and Creative Writing Literary Studies Historical Studies anthropomorphism animal welfare--law and legislation feminist fiction animal rights euphemism UniSC Diversity Area - Gender Equity
Patriarchal literary representations position women as exceeding the "normative rational" existence: uncontrollable and unpredictable. "Woman as Other" finds its foundations in a historical imagining that conflates female monstrous bodies and animal bodies (Caputi 115): the siren call, the mermaid, the gorgon. American writers Carol Guess and Kelly Magee hyperbolise this conflation and excess in order to critique it in their 2015 collaborative short story collection, With Animal. Guess and Magee use post-human speculative and magic realist conventions to thread twenty-seven brief stories, each featuring non-human progeny born to human mothers or occasionally non-human mothers bearing human children; sometimes narrated from the child's perspective, sometimes the mother's. These darkly comic vignettes stand as allegory for the complex and multiplex nature of female desire and sensuality (in both the maternal and sexual realms). This paper examines how far the work exceeds some of the critiqued limitations of anthropomorphism and, in so doing, attempt a breach of the human/non-human divide and expose the imbrication of androcentrism and anthropocentrism. Reading With Animal through Carol J. Adams's Sexual Politics of Meat provokes rumination on how far the work operates as imaginative articulation of the "absent referent." The "absent referent" refers to the systemic discursive silence implicit in all forms of animal exploitation: the fragmentation, objectification and violence behind the actuality is untraceable in the act of consumption (Adams 20-21). In imagining animal subjects with intense, intimate human connection-maternal and reproductive-the animal subject or animal mother refutes objectification and silence. And the thematic choice of maternity also enables critical focus on Adams's identification of links between female and animal objectification in social discourses. With Animal has potential to exceed the limits of the "anthroparchy" (Cudworth 68-69) that ecofemiminist and intersectionality critics have defined.

Details

Metrics

1 File views/ downloads
183 Record Views
Logo image