Becoming Nonhuman: Uncanniness, Impossibility and Human-Animal Indistinction in Recent Literature and Visual Art

Though much work in the emerging field of animal studies theorizes human-animal relations and offers ways to bring about justice for animals, far fewer studies speak to how literature and art can aid in developing an ethics that takes into account the bodies of nonhumans as well as the bodies of humans. By examining twentieth-century and contemporary literature and visual art that destabilizes accepted notions of "the human" by introducing elements of the uncanny, in which the familiar becomes suddenly strange, Becoming Nonhuman aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on the rapidly growing field of animal studies by considering representations of human and animal bodies that undermine and complicate taxonomic boundaries, thereby blurring the lines between animal and human, self and other. In this investigation, I examine works by fiction writers Margaret Atwood, T.C. Boyle, Angela Carter, Annie Proulx, Karen Russell, Hannah Tinti, and Joy Williams; poet Lynn Emanuel; painters Francis Bacon and Jenny Saville; and photographers Martin d'Orgeval, Laurent Bochet, and Britta Jaschinski. Taking the essential strangeness of animals as a starting point for discussion and asking what, when faced with this impossibility of understanding the other, our obligations nonetheless are, my investigation considers the material likeness of human and animal bodies and their existence as meat and as skin, along with human attempts to metamorphose into animals. While such attempts fail because they are limited by one's corporal existence, they nonetheless introduce the possibility of becoming something other than human through the act of inhabiting another's perspective, of becoming, in essence, nonhuman. In considering moments of uncanniness mediated by the materiality of the human/animal body that disrupt established species boundaries, I work to open a more inclusive space for reflecting on who constitutes "us" and to widen our notions of who "matters" from an ethical standpoint. I argue that an ethics that encompasses the animal can be established on the basis of a common corporal vulnerability rather than on a relationship that may or may not occur.