Animal Drag: Power, politics and the performance of animality

This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to Animal Drag – a critical and conscious performance of animality – through chapters that trot, squawk, slither, and crawl through analyses. Each chapter illuminates how Animal Drag, through its social and material interruptions, critiques multiple categories of being and doing, especially species. This edited volume brings together acts of Animal Drag from multiple disciplines and approaches. Performing animality is a political act capable of destabilising who and what is considered human and rendering visible the constructions of the ‘other’, especially species. From Indigenous snake dancing to contemporary mermaiding; from modernist fashioning with furs and feathers to performers engaged with nonhuman clowning; from video art with tail-docked costumes and adorned antlers to a drag cow and zoo-based art-play; and from a self-satisfying tail growth to the rendering of spiders in comics, this volume explores how Animal Drag – critical and conscious acts of animality – through its material and social interventions might challenge audiences to reconsider capitalist society’s shaping and care of the nonhuman. We straddle human–animal studies, posthumanism, theories of drag and thus queer theories of performance and adornment, to argue that many communities have been considered or treated as nonhuman. In doing so, our chapters also engage with scholarship and politics that intersect with critical animal studies as part of illuminating problematic binaries, such as crip and critical race theory. Through our case studies we show that many of these issues can be brought to light in a single act of Animal Drag. As part of interrogating contemporary asymmetries of power in the world, it is no coincidence that many of the chapters’ protagonists and their provocations are also situated in the neoliberal art spaces that uphold cultural gatekeeping, including notions of civility and all its toxic connotations. At stake is a new practice and theory that points out ‘doing human’ is also an act. Animal Drag trots, slithers, squawks, crawls, weaves and stands to benefit many ‘minorities’, to share vulnerabilities across outdated divisions in the hope of building a more productive and open web of care. Animal Drag asserts that performing animality is a political act, capable of de-stabilising humanism and constructs of othering, especially species. The volume trots across and crawls through human-animal studies, posthumanism, theories of drag and thus queer theories of performance and adornment too, to argue that critical and conscious acts of animality challenge the audience to reconsider societal shapings of the nonhuman and the human-animal divide. Historically, those othered have also been considered nonhuman. In doing so, Animal Drag also squawks with many other “minority” studies that have worked with Critical Animal Studies as part of illuminating problematic binaries, but through a series of single acts that disrupt these through the one performance. Together, it weaves a wider discourse on the social and material semiotics of “doing human”, to hopefully generate a wider web of care.

Pagina's: 240, Hardcover, Manchester University Press (P648)