I found an interspecies friendship article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interspecies_friendship that does not bother to discuss the relationships between humans and animals in the article itself, it simply links to an article about human-canine bonds. What would Donna Haraway think of this?!
But seriously, I am sure there are articles that deal with human-animal relationships, I just thought it was a funny piece of anthropocentricism that whoever authored this page did not consider humans a 'species'.
Correspondingly, a google image search for "interspecies friendship" fails to turn up many human/non-human animal friendships in the first few pages of results! Just one little kitty attached to an ankle- nonetheless, makes for very pleasant research!
That's all for now!
Interesting. I wonder how much we can consider friendship when the human always sees him/herself in the dominant position. Perhaps we'd have to begin with bacteria rather than cute fuzzy animals?
ReplyDeleteLast semester, I attended the talk by Natalie Loveless at the Concordia Feminist Media Studio. Although her discussion did not centre this upcoming work, she referenced project she is developing that considers Donna Haraway's dog as research-creation. This I found quite enticing -- I wonder how it might help to frame our relationships with other species as creative daily practice?
ReplyDeleteFor a long time I had a fish with whom I'd eat breakfast everyday -- I even named him Cayenne after Haraway's dog. I loved this relationship, but it struck me as odd given that the fish didn't "do" anything, yet what existed between us was a daily affective togetherness. Similarly, this can be extended beyond pet-relations to those of the more non-normative human relationships with bacteria or even dirt (as Erin above suggested). In her book 'Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization', Ladelle McWhorter undertakes a genealogy of her own body, where she describes 'becoming dirt'. One day while eating Doritos, she is about to brush the crumbs into her compost but instead stops:
"'Nope,' I thought, 'I can't feed that crap to my dirt.' I threw the crumbs in the trash and reached for that one last chip. It was halfway to my mouth before I was stuck by what I'd just said. I looked out the at my garden, my trenches, my dirt, and then my gaze turned downward toward my Doritos-stained hand. Dirt and flesh. Suddenly it occurred to me that, for all their differences, the two things I was looking at were cousins -- not close cousins, but cousins, several deviations once removed. I haven't purchased a bag of Doritos since." (167)