(Be-)Coming Across Animal

Mapping Speciesqueer Identities and their Ethico-political

Implications for More-than-Human Care

People

Researcher:

• Gray Black, PhD Candidate at the University of St Andrews

Context

Speciesqueers can be defined as individuals born and classified as Homo sapiens, whose personal and social identities do not (necessarily) align with their assigned species. In other words, speciesqueer identities fall outwith the human and non-human binary. With the numerical majority also finding belonging within the wider 2SLGBTQIA+ community, historical inquiry makes a case for speciesqueers as a queer counterculture disassociated from the homonormativity of the late-20th Century. (Be-)Coming Across Animal is a sociopolitical analysis of the transnational genesis of contemporary speciesqueer culture and, moreover, the eco-ethical relations embodied and enacted through the lens of queer, multi-species imaginaries.

Aims

In order to invite gender- and sexually-diverse peoples into political solidarity with non-human agencies, my research seeks to answer the following primary question:

“In what ways do speciesqueer identities help to articulate the coalition potential between queers and non-human animals?”

By collaborating with speciesqueerness to excite animal-queer intersectionality, my project also seeks to affirm, empower, and engage non-normative, posthuman, and Subaltern lifeworlds whilst expanding the scope of queer ecology studies. With connection, agency, representation, and power thematically buttressing the theoretical scaffolding, this project is explicitly and implicitly political and will therefore push the epistemological and methodological limits of international relations.

Methods

This research project will be conducted in three phases. Preliminarily, this project sets out to conceptually ground and orient the reader thorough a literature review orbiting feminist ethics of care and the poststructuralist socio-political theories of Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, Isabelle Stengers, Karen Barad, Donna Harraway, and Cleo Woelfle-Erskine. This project will require an in-depth understanding of the communities with whom it collaborates and to whom these theories apply, therefore necessitating ethnographic fieldwork and interviewing. Subtended by a constructivist and hermeneutical framework, the project will conclusively analyse speciesqueer phenomenology to blueprint a translatable ethos.

Get Involved

(Be-)Coming Across Animal is currently open to research participants. To review more about participant opportunities, and to propose questions or collaborations, please visit Black’s research website.