Feminism & Nonhumans: Animals Objects Environments

Rutgers WGS 302 Fall 2013

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"[Alston's brown mouse] Males appear to vocalize to advertise their presence to potential mates and competitors."

- Bret Pasch, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin

  There is much "art" in the natural world, from the moment there is sexual selection, from the moment there are two sexes that attract each other's interest and taste through visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory sensations...these forms of sexual selection, sexual attraction...affirm an overabundance of resources beyond the need for mere survival, which is to say, to the capacity of both matter and life to exchange with each other, to enter into becomings that transform each. They attest to the artistic impact of sexual attraction, the becoming-other that seduction entails. This is not a homeostatic relation of stabilization...but a fundamentally dynamic, awkward, mal-adaptation that enables the production of the frivolous, the unnecessary, the pleasing, the sensory for their own sake.

- Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art 

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Björk, "Oceania" from Médulla (2004)

One breath away From Mother Oceania Your nimble feet make prints In my sand You have done Good for yourselves Since you left my wet embrace And crawled ashore Every boy is a snake is a lily Every pearl is a lynx is a girl Sweet like harmony Made into flesh You dance by my side Children sublime You show me continents I see the islands You count the centuries I blink my eyes Hawks and sparrows Race in my waters Stingrays are floating Across the sky Little ones My sons and my daughters Your sweat is salty I am why I am why I am why Your sweat is salty I am why I am why I am why

When we talk about art coming from the forces of the earth, let us not forget that the earth is at least 70% water and that water is the condition for all forms of life.  Our evolutionary ties to the oceans (Mother Oceania, in this song) are even older and more primordial than our ties to the land (Mother Earth).

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In this process of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization, the body becomes intimately connected to and informed by the peristaltic movements...contraction and expansion, of the universe itself.  Body and universe, entwined in mutual concavity/convexity, floating/falling, folding/unfolding are directly touched by that outside now enframed, creating sensation from their coming together.

-Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art

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This is a bioluminescent "neon rainbow" jellyfish whose body features flashing colored "lights."  As the narrator says in the video, because light doesn't penetrate to the depth that the jellyfish inhabits, this animal appears black to anything around it.  What does this say about nature and the production of sensations?  Doesn't it demonstrate that nature has an artistic impulse, a force that strives to proliferate the creative, excessive, non-necessary?  Even if there is nothing to sense it? 

Art comes from the excess, in the world, in objects, in living things, that enables them to be more than they are, to give more than themselves, their material properties and qualities, their possible uses, than is self-evident.

-Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art

MANY MORE IMAGES HERE

This is the nudibranch, or blind sea slug, which is said to be the most elaborately colorful animal in existence.  There are many, many variations of them and they all look wildly different, and are all stunning.  The fact that they are blind, I think, poses an interesting challenge to our received understandings of how we view art.  What does the fact that this animal's body is wonderfully artistic mean when we realize that the animal cannot see itself or the other members of its species?  What does this say about the link assumed between visuality and art?  Of course, no art sees itself as art.  How can we think about the affects or sensations produced by the creative force of nature through living bodies when those bodies cannot see or partake in those sensations? 

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Björk, "Jóga" from her 1997 album Homogenic.  (She has obviously been preoccupied with the themes that she later brought to fruition with Biophilia for a long time)

I feel emotional landscapes they puzzle me then the riddle gets solved and you push me up to this state of emergency

-Björk, "Jóga"

Landscape, by contrast [to geography] is that space revealed by sensation, which has no fixed coordinates but transforms and moves a body as it passes through it.

-Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art

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This video is an art piece by my friend, Jamie Sneider, entitled "Mating"  A literal example of art deterritorialing the qualities of the animal world.

...the constitution of a territory is the fabrication of the space in which sensations may emerge, from which a rhythm, a tone, coloring, weight, texture may be extracted a moved elsewhere, may function for its own sake...

--Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art

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It is to this extent that architecture, and all the arts that follow from it, are linked to birdsong, the olfactory dance of insects, the performative displays of vertebrates, including humans: they are each the constitution of a territory, a sexualized territory, the space that is one's own in which one can enact sexual seduction, extract sexual satisfaction, and intensify sexual forces.

-Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art

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This video of spoken word poet Andrea Gibson showed up in my Facebook newsfeed today. I feel it relates well to the conversation we had last Wednesday while discussing Dog Boy.

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Puppy love.

Or is it simply, love?

My female pug named Muffin and the neighboring dog (whom my family likes to jokingly call) “Mr. Fluffy” have a clear relationship; maybe it is romantic, maybe it is friendship. Labels aside, when I hear Mr. Fluffy barking and I tell Muffin that he is out, she bolts to the backdoor and begs to be let outside. Once she and I are outside in the back of the yard, she always stops and absorbs his presence. She is always at bliss when she is near her doggie companion. Her ears relax, her tail is wagging, her anxiety to see him is relieved. Their admiration for each other is palpable. It reminds me of our reading and discussions of becoming human and dogs exhibiting human emotion: is it “human” emotion? Or is it simply emotion we all share?

This leads me to share a fascinating article in the New York Times that explains the deconstruction of animal emotions: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/opinion/sunday/dogs-are-people-too.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&smid=fb-nytimes

I hope you enjoy the read, and the pictures of my 10 yr old pug, my pride and joy: Muffin.

-Francine Glaser, 10/7/13

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This is Lucy the Chimpanzee with her caretaker (Janis Carter), who was separated from her birth mother and raised by Maurice and Jane Temerlin (Maurice was a psychologist). When I listened to the Radiolab's segment on Lucy, I came to think about some of the followings:

- lack of language in animals 

- inability to feign the feigning

- a becoming-human animal (in Lucy's case, it was not her choice to be in a becoming-human process in the first place) ultimately being subjected to human rejection (by her human "parents") and human brutality (Lucy's fondness in humans results in her death by poachers)

It's a really touching story and I strongly recommend that you listen to it, when you get a chance!

http://www.radiolab.org/story/91706-lucy/

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Heather Gabel

(matriarch v alpha female)

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Siberian boy, 7, raised by dogs after parents abandoned him

In 1998, police near Moscow rescued Ivan Mishukov, then aged six, from a pack of wild dogs with which he had lived for two years. Ivan had left the family home when he was four to get away from his mother and her abusive alcoholic boyfriend. He took to begging and won the dogs' trust by offering them scraps of food. In return, they protected him, from the cold and from ill-wishers, and made him their pack leader. Police finally managed to separate the boy from the dogs by leaving bait for the pack in a restaurant kitchen.

This article is about a more recent case of a boy raised by dogs--this one from the time he was three months old (inspiration for Puppy, perhaps?).  Romochka is based on the story of Ivan Mishukov.

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'Dog Boy': The Complicated Humanity Of A Wild Child

Eva Hornung's novel is based on the true story of a boy who lived with a pack of dogs for two years.

An NPR article about Dog Boy

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"The line or block of becoming that unites the wasp and the orchid produces a shared deterritorialization: of the wasp, in that it becomes a liberated piece of the orchid's reproductive system, but also of the orchid in that it becomes the object of an orgasm in the wasp, also liberated from its own reproduction.  A coexistence of two asymmetrical movements that combine to form a block, down a line of flight that sweeps away selective pressures.  The line, or the block, does not link the wasp to the orchid, any more than it conjugates or mixes them: it passes between them, carrying them away in a shared proximity in which the discernability of points disappears."

-Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

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-Gilles Deleuze, "A for Animal," Deleuze's Abecedaire, 1988-89

"There is always the possibility that a given animal, a louse, a cheetah, or an elephant, will be treated as a pet, my little beast.  And at the other extreme, it is also possible for any animal to be treated in the mode of the pack or swarm; that is our way, fellow sorcerers.  Even the cat, even the dog..."

--Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

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The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.

The Tiger’s Bride - The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter

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"The Dog" (1819-1823), Francisco Goya, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain

"Half-buried dog into yellow eternities, sublime and miniscule straw-haired dog his yellow nose risen to the world-wide saffron yellow sky, dog in profile meek half-stuck in the infinite sand, cradles dog slowly fought over by life and death, indelible ochre puppy between the infiniteness of oblibvion and the infiniteness of memory"

-Hélène Cixous, Le jour où je n'étais pas là