Tranimacies
Tranimacies is a neologism that pushes and pulls together transness and animality so as to better germinate unruly, wily, perverse relationships between them and their spawn. Through tranimacies the book aims at rethinking the linking of liberation struggles amongst former colonized peoples and lands, minoritized genders and sexualities, and racially marked persons and non-human animals, and does so in a variety of geopolitical and temporal sites. This rich compendium includes original scholarship and dialogues as well as poetry, comix, bioart, and performance documentation.
The composite term of tranimacies enmeshes several everyday and scholarly concepts: transgender, animal, animacy, and intimacies. This edited volumes bundle of theoretical and artistic works insists on the beating heart of embodied experiences and political pulses at the core of these concepts. The authors show that tranimacies are spread throughout what Mel Y. Chen describes as the animacy hierarchies that delimit zones of possibility and agency, confounding the vertical order with transversal movements. As an intervention into the burgeoning debates within and across trans, animal, critical race, and posthuman studies this publication seeks to destabilize the logic of turns in critical theory, and through sticky intimacies uncover how animality, race, and gender underscore the humanist production of meanings. By taking a decolonial approach (in the main, but not exclusively) the authors hope to shift debates in animal studies towards accounting for and delinking from colonial mentalities. Three poems interweave our selection of chapters, which together forge three lines of inquiry defined by a certain ethos: transhistories of the present, lessons from the bestiary, and #animatingephemera.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.
Eliza Steinbock is Assistant Professor of Cultural Analysis at Leiden University, the Netherlands, and the author of Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (Duke, 2019); co-editor of Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis: Aesthetic Resilience (Routledge, 2020); project-leader of The Critical Visitor consortium, developing intersectional approaches for inclusive heritage (20202025).
Marianna Szczygielska is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany, and the author of scholarly publications on the history of zoos, human-animal relations and queer studies, and feminist activism; co-editor of Plantarium: Human-Vegetal Ecologies special issue for Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience (2019).
Anthony Clair Wagner is Senior Lecturer in Design at Linnaeus University, Sweden, and the author of several articles on trans, monstrosity, and art, for example Visible Monstrosity as Empowerment, in Transgender Studies Quarterly 2.2. Workshop leader of the Monster Workshop and artist.
First published 2021
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Chapter 15 2017 Eliza Steinbock. Originally published as Open Access.
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ISBN13: 978-0-367-56717-0 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-367-56720-0 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978-1-003-09913-0 (ebk)
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The publisher accepts responsibility for any inconsistencies that may have arisen during the conversion of this book from journal articles to book chapters, namely the inclusion of journal terminology.
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Eliza Steinbock
Marianna Szczygielska
Anthony Clair Wagner
T ranimacies is a neologism that pushes and pulls together transness and animality so as to better germinate unruly, wily, perverse relationships between them, and their spawn. The composite term of tranimacies enmeshes several everyday and scholarly concepts: transgender, animal, animacy, intimacies. This special issues bundle of theoretical and artistic works insists on the beating heart of embodied experiences and political pulses at the core of these concepts. Following Mel Y. Chens 2012 book Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, a plethora of work can be found that engages with the racializing and dehumanizing dimension of affects. This approach is especially potent in animal studies as it helps to theorize the somewhat neglected registers of constructing humanness against the non-human Other. Many articles herein make reference to Chens politicized notion of animacy (a concept from linguistics), whether through an elaboration of how one might position animacies in other disciplines or a close critique of how the concept ranks animate liveliness. The authors show that tranimacies are spread throughout what Chen describes as the animacy hierarchies, confounding the vertical order with transversal movements. Hence, the blooming of tranimacies necessarily transforms those hierarchies into complex constellations of carnal relationships we suggest understanding as anti-identitarian affective encounters in Luciana Parisis terms (37) a set of relations that shifts the binary mode of sex/gender from unitary bodies to a material network of desires.
With the notion of tranimacies we want to point to how the ordering of intimacies, whether sexual, communal or by species, is in part determined by affective politics. Furthermore, we want to keep a critical focus on the intimate edge of practices and technologies of bio-power and necro-power that become implicated when transgressing sexual, communal or species boundaries, which Jin Haritaworn and others rightly call for in their edited volume Queer Necropolitics. With tranimacies we seek to provide a specifically transgender informed and conceptually trans* shaped commentary on the animal turn in humanities. Susan Strykers characterization of transgender, in reference to people who move away from the gender they were assigned at birth, speaks to the transversal movement we identify within tranimacies: the movement across a socially imposed boundary away from an unchosen starting place rather than any particular destination or mode of transition (Transgender History 1). The movement across gendered ordering can also be understood as occurring not just in the time of transition but also in the space of being a moving target, a set of composing forces that cannot be isolated. The editors of the
