Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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Volume 17 Number 2, August 2016

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Chaudhuri, Una and Holly Hughes (Eds). Animal Acts: Performing Species Today. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. 246pp.  

 

Review by

 

John Vignaux Smyth

Portland State University

 

Co-editor Una Chaudhuri’s introduction situates Animal Acts – a volume comprised of eleven contemporary performance pieces accompanied (in all but the final case) by academic commentaries - in the larger context of “`the animal turn’ in the humanities and social sciences” (1), and also of what she calls the “epistemological crisis of interspecies performance” (9). To emphasize the latter problem, Chaudhuri cites John Berger’s phrase (in his excellent 1980 essay “Why Look at Animals?”) about the “narrow abyss of non-comprehension” (8) that separates human from other animals. I will return briefly to Berger’s essay at the end of this review.

 

It would be an exaggeration to say that this worthy and fashionable book’s various dramatizations and arguments concerning our relations with animals (and each other) are all of a piece from either an artistic or ideological point of view. But the majority of them do make a polemical link - by now familiar in the contemporary academic Humanities and “Post-Humanities” - between animal studies and queer studies, and especially to lesbian relations and a certain kind of feminist or queer politics. I will first try to summarize this relation between “animal” and “queer” as it advanced in various ways here.

 

Thus, for example, the first performance text titled “The Dog and Pony Show,” by co-editor Holly Hughes, is at least as much about how dogs mediate the relation between the “femme” author and her “butch” lover (21) as it is about dogs (or indeed ponies). And indeed why not, especially in a piece that concludes, from the personal as well as evolutionary point of view, that “dogs made us” (29) as much as vice-versa?  Her wry remark that “I have lesbian Tourette syndrome” (14) – a compulsion to mention lesbianism in any and every context – is recited by Donna Haraway’s commentary, which also approves (and why not?) Hughes’ more or less poetic claim that “I come from the place and time when vaginas roamed the earth” (14). Haraway writes of the “queer pull of dogs” (30, my emphasis), and her own short text concludes, in its final endnote, by mentioning a “lesbian Christmas party” – reminding us of Hughes’s line, also mentioned by Haraway, that “horses demand so much more than Jesus.” These opening twin texts, one might say, set the tone for the volume as a whole.

 

Haraway (elsewhere a distinguished scholar in the fields of biology and science studies, as well as advocate of what she calls “ironic” socialist feminism) is famous for her well-informed critique of what she calls “the discredited breach of nature and culture” - a phrase later also cited by Cary Wolfe in his commentary on Deke Weaver’s “Monkey” (157) – and we might say that her opening commentary anchors the book as a whole in a discrediting of what several other contributors call “binaries.” Here, then, the animal and queer perspectives seem united by a critique of the animal/human “binary” that is linked (with considerable support from global tradition, it must be said) more or less directly to the male/female “binary,” and hence to what is nowadays labeled “hetero-normativity.”

 

For instance - describing the somewhat disturbing play “Stay!” by Vicky Ryder, Lisa Asagi, and Stacy Makishi - Marla Carlson writes that “Rather than simply creating and living out a new binary (master versus dog), these two women [called George and Liz] shift around, alternating in the roles of human and dog” (49). Carlson further suggests that the play “moves towards a doggy aesthetic, beyond the [binary] butch-femme aesthetic exemplified […] by the work of these performers’ mentors” (53).  “The question remains,” she adds, “what does any of this have to do with animals?” “The dogs of Stay! are not dogs, although they have likely learned some parts of being human from dogs” (53).

 

This departure from actual (non-human) animals reaches its zenith later in the volume in Jess Dobkin’s performance piece or “`performance blueprint,’ as she calls it” (193) – which includes Dobkins “[stripping] down literally to fuck herself with a condom-wrapped dildo” (according to Jill Dolan’s commentary, 193) – but whose two-page excerpt reproduced in Animal Acts consists of a story, projected also (in performance) as a puppet show, about a unicorn who refuses to get on board Noah’s ark with the binary animals, two-by-two. Princeton Professor Dolan writes that “the singular unicorn represents a queer resistance to such reproductive and other binaries” and that “Dobkin’s challenge to binaries peppers her dolorous, evocative language” (194). Dolan’s final moral: “with the figure of the lesbian/queer performer actively withdrawing from the stage, appearing to take shelter from its demands for presence, the unicorn’s great refusal and the counterintuitive great hope in her absence are palpable indeed” (195).

 

Rather more informative, and perhaps more dolorous, than this pleasant fairy story and the morals drawn from it by Jill Dolan, is “Horseback Views: A Queer Hippological Performance,” in which academic and equestrian Kim Marra combines her own experience as a rider traumatically injured and blinded in one eye by her horse with some interesting facts about the nineteenth and twentieth-century history of riding, especially its relation to female emancipation. Noting that “equestrian sports are one of the very few where men and women compete on equal footing in the same events, as do male and female horses” (124), Marra also confesses that “for me, coming out as an equestrian means owning up to being raised with a lot of money gained through the sort of capitalist wheeling and dealing that our Marxist-inflected profession of theatre and performance studies has been bent on critiquing” (112). In contemporary academia, commentator Jane Desmond writes, “`coming out’ as a member of the economic and social elite [is] a potentially uncomfortable identity for a humanities professor committed to social justice” (134). Indeed, since “Lesbian has considerable academic cachet” (111), “coming out” as a rich rider - let alone “Anglophilic” (112) - perhaps takes considerably more academic/theatrical courage than “coming out” as a lesbian - something that Marra herself associates interestingly with recovering from her injuries as well as with her passion for horses. Noting that her mother hoped she would eventually substitute boys for horses, she also cites a British survey of the 1990s that predictably “found that three-quarters of married horse-owning women would as soon give up their husbands as their horses” (130). (One imagines the husbands!)

 

Because Marra’s cogent piece illustrates the way in which so-called political correctness in academia and elsewhere can cut both ways - she and Desmond feel she will be well received as a disabled lesbian, but perhaps scapegoated as a wealthy rider of thoroughbreds – we may link it indirectly to Ann Pelligrini’s later commentary on Heather Woodbury’s treatment of Pentecostal Christianity in her serial performance piece(s) titled “As the Globe Warms,” in which the problem of scapegoating is also emphasized. In the excerpt published here, a Pentecostal teenager called Lorelei speaks in tongues – but in quasi-animal ones that announce the deaths of the animals concerned (bat, bee, and frog). According to Pellegrini, “Christianity’s concern with eternal life and death is repurposed for Woodbury’s presumptively secular audience to illuminate the toll of human arrogance in the world. Not for nothing does the fictional world of Lorelei Ray, her family and friends unfold in Vane [i.e, Vain] Springs, Nevada” (213). Meanwhile, however, Lorelei and her “Christian freak friends” are also scapegoated online by “a posse of `mean twins’” (214), and Pellegrini remarks: “It is the `fat Christian freak’ – dare I say: the religiously queer teen – who is cyberbullied. Here, I see Woodbury slyly and importantly undercutting the cultural mapping ‘secular’ is to progressive as ‘religious’ is to backward” (214).   

 

We see that the label “queer” tends here to get attached to anyone or anything (e.g. “religiously queer”) that plays the role of potential scapegoat. Indeed the final piece of the volume, Rachel Rosenthal’s “Others,” needs no academic commentary precisely insofar as it loudly and harrowingly proclaims how animals are scapegoats alongside women, other races, the gay and lesbian, transgendered, and the old (236). Rosenthal catalogues a more or less familiar litany of atrocities perpetrated against animals in the name of Cartesian philosophy and more modern ideologies, including of course farming and research practices, and she surrounds her horror stories, a bit like Jess Dobkins earlier, with a moralistic fairy story: a girl is rewarded for being kind to animals, while her two sisters are punished for their failure to be so.

 

As regards the quasi-technical, quasi-comic use of the term “queer,” I note that “Queer Tales of a Transnational Cuban Cockroach” is the subtitle to Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes’ commentary on Carmelita Tropicana’s amusing Cuban play titled “With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit?/Con Que Culo Se Sienta la Cucaracha?” Queer cocktails come in various varieties of this sort, like Haraway’s “queer pull of dogs” mentioned earlier, and indeed the book’s cover photograph (from “Stay”) that depicts from the rear a girl kneeling in front of stuffed game-animals on the walls, raising her skirt to them.

 

This short review cannot do much more than mention many of the twenty one contributions to Animal Acts - including two of the most notable ones, titled “Monkey” and “Elephant,” from Deke Weaver’s performance series “The Unreliable Bestiary.” Weaver’s performances exploit the uncertain borderline between fact and myth when it comes to our knowledge of species, and play on the audience’s likely confusions between the two, while also inventing edifying myths or fictions of his own.  Cary Wolfe’s commentary on “Monkey,” as I mentioned earlier, makes a link between Weaver’s art and the discrediting of the nature/culture divide proposed by Haraway, as well as the kind of ethical and theoretical ruminations provided by Jacques Derrida in his posthumous essay, “The Animal that Therefore I am.”[i] While Professor Wolfe stresses the unsettling of the animal/ human divide in both Derrida and Haraway, it is worth noting that Derrida’s essay also insists on the “abyssal rupture” between animal and human: “I have thus never believed in some homogeneous continuity between what calls itself man and what he calls the animal. I am not about to begin to do so now. That would be worse than sleepwalking, it would simply be too asinine [bête].”[ii]

  

Similarly, it must be noted that Haraway’s critique of the animal/human and/or nature/culture “binaries” elsewhere takes a pointed distance from what she calls “relativisms or pluralisms.”[iii] Binaries are thus not simply dissolved into pluralities, such as the plurality of species, but are maintained “ironically,” to use Haraway’s language (or “abyssally,” to use Derrida’s).

Finally, since Chauduri’s useful introduction also cites very positively, as we saw at the start, what she calls John Berger’s “classic essay ‘Why Look at Animals?’” (8), we may conclude this brief review of with one of Berger’s more provocative claims that also seem in considerable tension with some of the polemics of Animal Acts:  

 

The marginalization of animals is today [1980] being followed by the marginalization and disposal of the only class who, through history, has remained familiar with animals and maintained the wisdom that has accompanied that familiarity: the middle and small peasant. The basis of this wisdom is an acceptance of the dualism at the very origin of the relation between man and animal. The rejection of this dualism is probably an important factor in opening the way to modern totalitarianism.[iv]

 

It is difficult to imagine how Jill Dolan’s brave talk of “challenging binaries,” for example, is compatible with any wisdom – peasant or otherwise - claimed on the basis of “an acceptance of the dualism at the very origin of the relation between man and animal.” In the perspective of Animal Acts, Berger’s 1980 phraseology probably seems old-fashioned, nostalgic, and even chauvinistic.

 

Yet, as Hughes and Haraway both stress, the rejection of dualisms or binaries, far from getting rid of divisions and scapegoatings, seems merely to multiply them: “There are deep divisions. There are the cat lesbians. There are the dog lesbians; there are the lesbians who go both ways and the asthmatics. If you don’t align yourself with one of these groups, you have false consciousness” (Hughes, 14). “Divisions in feministland break down on humananimal [sic] lines. My feminist theory graduate seminars in the early 1980s divided into factions over woman-horse loves, even literary ones” (Haraway, 34).  

 

Thus Animal Acts is a volume worth reading, among other things, for both exploring and illustrating the seeming intractability of the ethical and intellectual quandaries that beset contemporary thought: about animals, about sex, about victimage and justice, and about logical or “binary” thinking – itself, of course, an animal act.