Harlan Weaver, Women’s Studies Department, Kansas State University

“Shelter Promises: Encounters in the Ruff”

“Shelter Promises” joins the troubles of breed in contemporary shelter worlds with not only the difficulties of the sciences of dog behavior but also issues of kinship in both hetero- and homo-normative families. Larger and more structural interspecies intersectionalities guide the chapter towards interventions oriented towards a world where multi-species justice is the goal.

Request a copy of the paper by emailing kpflaum@uchicago.edu.

Light refreshments will be served.

This event is free and open to the public. Persons with disabilities who may need assistance to attend should contact Katharine Mershon (kpflaum@uchicago.edu).

Jan Dutkiewicz, Department of Politics, New School for Social Research

“Uncertain hog futures (or, two bacon shortages and the financial life of the capitalist pig)”

Meat is big business. The farm animal complex is a multi-billion dollar industry spanning a complex value chain that goes far beyond farms and supermarkets. The production and consumption of life and death that sets the daily rhythm of factory farming play out against an often unseen background of financial instruments and capital markets. The American hog – the standardized meat animal par excellence – is commodified through and through. Not only is it a commodity to be molded to meet consumer demand, but so too is it an asset whose value is governed by financial markets. Through an analysis of two recent “bacon shortages” – one a pure market panic and the other the result of a virus that killed millions of piglets – this paper explores the financial life of the modern mass-produced hog, tracing the (il)logics of porcine valuation in an ever-more-financialized agricultural sector. It argues that while most theories of finance focus on “abstraction” from the “real” economy, the pig is always available as a subject of intervention is response to market stimuli. In its body biology meets investor confidence, current treatment reflects futures pricing, and vitality is inextricably intertwined with market value, leaving animality itself as a source of risk to be hedged. The hog, a killable commodity whose life is dependent entirely on the vagaries of supply and demand, provides a privileged site from which to critique the operation and logics of modern markets, both revealing the violence inherent in ostensibly amoral financial transactions and troubling recent accounts of animal resistance to factory farming.

Request a copy of the paper by emailing hutch@uchicago.edu.

Light refreshments will be served.

This event is free and open to the public. Persons with disabilities who may need assistance to attend should contact Bill Hutchison (hutch@uchicago.edu). 

Hannah Chazin, Anthropology, University of Chicago

“Determining what? Thoughts on pastoralism as a beastly problem in anthropology and beyond”

Pastoralism, generally, has been regarded as a ‘problem’ in classical Western political thought and in evolutionary narratives of political complexity. This paper suggests that these problems can be re-conceptualized as reflecting a discomfort with or rejection of the necessary hybridity of the herd, which encompasses both humans and animals. The beastly figures of the herd are doubly unruly. First, their capacities for directed action trouble any simple division between subject and object. Animals’ uneasy status as quasi-subjects (or quasi-objects) fuels debate about the meaning and nature of domestication. Second, while ‘nature versus nurture’ establishes the animal as a ‘determined’ entity to which the human is or is not reducible, any serious engagement with herd animals threatens to undermine animals’ function as the limit case for arguments about determinism (either genetic or environmental). In this workshop, I explore how pastoralists and their herds are viewed through a variety of determinist lenses in anthropological and other literatures. Through this discussion, I develop some ideas on how approaching species as relationality, rather than order, undoes some of the problematic essentialisms of traditional determinist logics.

Request a copy of the paper by emailing kpflaum@uchicago.edu.

Light refreshments will be served.

This event is free and open to the public. Persons with disabilities who may need assistance to attend should contact Katharine Mershon (kpflaum@uchicago.edu). 

Katharine Mershon, Divinity, University of Chicago

“Beyond Good and Evil: Reading Religion in the American Pitbull”

PLEASE NOTE SPECIAL LOCATION: Walker 302 at 4:30 PM

This paper examines the religious rhetoric around rescue animals through the case study of the “pit bull,” America’s most ubiquitous and difficult to define rescue dog. Focusing specifically on the aftermath of the Michael Vick dog fighting case, I demonstrate the ways in which the pit bull is simultaneously demonized and sanctified in contemporary American culture. Depending on one’s attitude toward the dogs, Vick’s pit bulls were either represented as being unworthy or deserving of redemption. Through close readings of representations of the Vick dogs in American newspapers and social media, I examine the ways in which the pit bull simultaneously reifies and resists clear religious typologization as “pure good” or “pure evil.” In the conclusion, the paper offers some thoughts about how Vick’s fate is connected to the dogs he left behind.

Request a copy of the paper by emailing hutch@uchicago.edu.

Light refreshments will be served.

This event is free and open to the public. Persons with disabilities who may need assistance to attend should contact Bill Hutchison (hutch@uchicago.edu).

The Animal Studies Workshop is proud to support the  University of Chicago Animal Welfare Society in presenting—

“The Sexual Politics of Meat Slideshow”
Carol Adams, Independent Scholar

Special Location: International House, 1414 E. 59th Street

The University of Chicago Animal Welfare Society welcomes Carol J. Adams in celebration of the 25th anniversary of her groundbreaking work of vegetarian-feminist critical theory, The Sexual Politics of Meat. In her continuously evolving slideshow, Ms. Adams builds on The Sexual Politics of Meat and The Pornography of Meat, presenting insights developed through decades of intersectional scholarship and activism. Drawing from autobiography and a close study of contemporary cultural images, Ms. Adams elucidates the concept of the absent referent and applies this concept to the objectification, fragmentation, and consumption of the female and animal body. Ms. Adams further considers the ways in which meat advertising encodes whiteness and patriarchy. The event will be followed by a book sale and signing and reception catered by Upton’s Naturals. The event is free of charge and open to the general public.

The event is generously co-sponsored by the International House Global Voices Program, Critical Inquiry, The Center for International Studies Norman Wait Harris Fund, The Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, The Animal Studies Workshop, University of Chicago Undergraduate Women in Philosophy, UChicago Program on the Global Environment, Resources for Sexual Violence Prevention (RSVP), The Seminary Co-op Bookstores, Upton’s Naturals, and VegFund.

Bill Hutchison, English, University of Chicago

“The Wind-Up Bird: Pigeons, Drones, and Biomilitarism”

This paper charts a particular type of biopolitical power that I call “biomilitarization.” I borrow the term from one of its earliest users, experimental psychologist Robert Lubow. In 1965, Lubow founded Behavior Systems: an institute for the development of advanced techniques in training animals for military applications. I reclaim the term from Lubow’s practical affirmation in order to critique evolving military technologies. Biomilitarization, I propose, seeks to perfect the biological by excising the biological: it is a process by which life is continuously refined so as to exercise military power. I offer one narrative of this process, from pigeon to drone.

My case-study falls into two parts. The first examines the accomplished arc that reaches from pigeon to drone. The second examines the ongoing project of excising the drone’s biological remnant. The pigeon is a highly plastic animal molded by centuries of human intervention. I will trace a lineage from the carrier pigeon to the surveillance pigeon to the “war in the air” to increasing deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or drones, in military applications. Current problems with drones are primarily with biological components – remote human pilots – or issues related to those biological components, such as a need for reliable communication networks that connect drones to pilots. The response is an uptick in research and development on autonomous, self-regulating drones, the next step in a process of biomilitarization in which the ideal state of life is reached through total elimination of the biological.

Request a copy of the paper by emailing kpflaum@uchicago.edu.

Light refreshments will be served.

This event is free and open to the public. Persons with disabilities who may need assistance to attend should contact Katharine Mershon (kpflaum@uchicago.edu).

Beth Berkowitz, Religious Studies, Barnard College (in collaboration with the Jewish Studies workshop and the Chicago Center for Jewish Studies)

“The Question of Gentile Bestiality: Shame, Subjectivity, and Sex with Animals in Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 55a-b”

What happens when we include other species in our understanding of subjectivity?” That is the question that Colleen Glenney Boggs in her Animalia Americana sees at the core of animal studies. In one version of animal studies, this means having animals join the ranks of liberal subjects, along with women, African-Americans, gays and other historically marginalized groups. But in another version, that inspired by Derrida, the liberal subject is not expanded, but exploded. Animal studies deconstructs subjectivity rather than redefining it. In this paper I will argue that a talmudic discussion on Sanhedrin 55a-b that asks whether an animal who has sex with a gentile should be tried and executed – does both. This passage expands subjectivity to include the animal, but the passage also, in the course of its argumentation, destabilizes the schemas of subjectivity such that subjectivity itself is questioned. The discussion of talmudic texts in this paper suggests, building on but also modifying Boggs, that subject formation is not distinctive to modernity, and neither is the criminalization of bestiality and its operation as a site of biopolitical regulation and resistance. The talmudic laws serve as a site for exploring spectrums of subjectivity, and they challenge in some ways and reinforce in others the binaries (human/animal, but also animate/inanimate, male/female, child/adult, Jew/non-Jew) that dominate legal discourse.

Request a copy of the paper by emailing kpflaum@uchicago.edu.

Light refreshments will be served.

This event is free and open to the public. Persons with disabilities who may need assistance to attend should contact Katharine Mershon (kpflaum@uchicago.edu).

N. Katherine Hayles, Literature, Duke University

Unusual details: This event will be from 4:30-6 pm in Classics 110.

Join the Animal Studies workshop for an informal conversation with Professor N. Katherine Hayles about animals, plants, robots, software, and other forms of life. Professor Hayles will be on hand to talk about individual research interests, animal studies as a whole, and to ask questions and offer advice. Please join us for an opportunity to chat with a giant in her field.

Light refreshments will be served.

This event is free and open to the public. Persons with disabilities who may need assistance to attend should contact Bill Hutchison (hutch@uchicago.edu).

Find our full workshop schedule here.

—in collaboration with the 18th- and 19th-Century Atlantic Cultures workshop—

Lynn Festa, English, Rutgers University
“Lousy Bodies”

Please note unusual time and location:
this event will be from 12-1:30 pm, Logan Center 801.

Focusing on representations of—and from the point of view of—the louse, this paper examines how Hooke’s treatise on the microscope and the riddle as well as doggerel verse and occasional prose written from the point of view of the louse experiment with the distance between human and parasite, between eater and eaten. The louse finds in the human body an “all-you-can-eat” buffet but it never picks up the tab, a non-reciprocal arrangement that cannot be easily enfolded into the (ostensible) quid pro quo of the market, the political contract, or even the golden rule. The fact that the human body teems with life that is not solely its own proclaims the lie of that basic unit of modernity— the autonomous, self-possessed individual—and exposes the difficulty of defining the threshold of individual beings, where one body—one life—ends and another begins.  The devices, material and linguistic (literal and literary), that I focus on in this paper—the microscope, the pun, the riddle, and the it-narrative—both exploit and undercut anthropomorphism, engineering a deliberate estrangement of sensation, perception, and perspective that makes visible the entangled relations of humanity, other creatures, and inanimate things.

The paper, to be read in advance, is available here. For the password, please email Bill Hutchison at hutch@uchicago.edu.

This event is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Nicholson Center for British Studies. It is free and open to the public. Persons who require assistance to participate fully should contact Sam Rowe at strowe@uchicago.edu or Allison Turner at acturn@uchicago.edu in advance.

Pao-Chen Tang, CMS, University of Chicago
“Of Dogs and Hot Dogs: Dialectics between Image and Language in Early Silent Shorts”

Request a copy of the paper by emailing hutch@uchicago.edu.

In the concluding paragraph of his Electric Animal, Akira Mizuta Lippit argues when animals, philosophically lacking language as per a tradition in Western thoughts, become “filmic organisms,” they are “transformed into languages, or at least, into semiotic facilities.” My essay takes up Lippit’s insightful but perhaps underdeveloped claim and poses three related questions. First, is Lippit referring to the cinematic animal in general or specific kinds of onscreen animals? Second, how does cinema enact this process of semiotic transformation? Third, are animals as filmic elements necessarily turned into languages or signs? I will address these questions by tracing the appearances and functions of animals in early commercial shorts, especially dogs, in relation to Tom Gunning’s now paradigmatic account of early cinema as medium of attractions. Certain dogs on film, I argue, complicate Lippit’s claim. By no means mere languages or signs, they function as contingent events, vaudeville gags, and syntheses of attractions and narratives. The films I will examine include: Dickson and Heise’s Athlete With Wand (1894), Lumière brothers’ La sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon (1895), Méliès’ Une partie de cartes (1896), and Porter’s Dog Factory (1904) in the context of a peculiar film genre: the “sausage-making” film.

Light refreshments will be served.

This event is free and open to the public. Persons with disabilities who may need assistance to attend should contact Bill Hutchison (hutch@uchicago.edu).

Find our full workshop schedule here.