The Big Names in Animal Studies
The first people to question the human-animal distinction and the idea that only human beings have language weren't literary critics. Charles Darwin's work on the theory of evolution was key to kick starting these debates, and in the latter half of the twentieth century the animal studies game really started to kick into gear:
John Berger, the Marxist art critic, published an important essay titled "Why Look at Animals?" (1980), where he asked questions about our relationships with other animals in both art and life. The answer to the question "Why Look At Animals?" isn't just "because they're adorable."
The feminist thinker Carol Adams wrote an important book looking at connections between gender-based and animal oppressions in The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990).
Scientist, feminist scholar, and anthropologist Donna Haraway has written numerous books that have helped to initiate the field and continue to sustain and provoke it, including Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989), The Companion Species Manifesto (2003), and When Species Meet (2008).
Haraway's theorizing includes a (sometimes too) generous helping of dog stories, especially about her canine companion, named Cayenne Pepper (which: aww).
While Adams and Haraway are both feminists, they disagree about the way feminist theory can and should be applied to how we think about and treat animals. Haraway argues that instead of trying to avoid mucking around with animal lives, we really have no choice and we should embrace the ways in which animals and humans "co-shape" one another. The more we get together, essentially, the happier we'll be!
Persuaded by Haraway's emphasis on companionship and "cooperation," many in animal studies have embraced these ideas. They do sound like good things to support, right? Everyone learning from one another? C'mon, guys—didn't we learn this in kindergarten? How come so many of us can't seem to follow this simple (and awesome) way of living?
What do Bieber and Jacques Derrida have in common? Answer: Almost nothing… except they both used their fame to help the critters. The famous deconstructionist Jacques Derrida was a bit of a Johnny-Come-Lately to the field of animal studies but his celebrity status helped his ideas on human-animal relations to have a tremendous impact. In the last decade of his life he gave numerous lengthy lectures that have been collected and published, including The Animal that Therefore I Am (1997) and The Beast and the Sovereign (2011).
Derrida's work on the animal is similar to the rest of his work in the very close attention it pays to language. For instance, he insists that our very language is abusive to other animals. And no, he's not just talking about "Bad dog!"
The world is filled with so many different species and individual animals, but yet we talk about them (even here on Shmoop) as "the animal," as if they can all be reduced to a single category. To amend this issue, Derrida invents a new word (he loves doing this): animot. This is an adorable French word that when spoken combines the sense of the French word les animaux (the animals) and the French word mot (word), reminding us that there are animals in the world (not just a singular kind, the animal) and that even the idea of animality only exists in language, in words.
Building on the work of Derrida and Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben, Cary Wolfe and Matthew Calarco have contributed important work that helps to distinguish the multiple threads of animal studies and the relationship between literature and lines of thought on the animal in Continental philosophy. We're all getting behind the animals, oops, les animot now. Woot.
Other important contributors to the field include:
Erica Fudge (literary studies, representation)
Susan McHugh (literary studies, narrative)
J.M. Coetzee (novelist, ethics, relationship of philosophy and literature)
Una Chadhuri (literary studies, drama)
Ursula Heise (literary studies, extinction, new media)
Randy Malamud (literary studies, zoos)
Stacy Alaimo (literary studies, gender studies, sea creatures)
Helena Pedersen (critical animal studies)
Vasile Stanescu (critical animal studies, ethics)