New Literary History

Abstract:

This article explores the problematic history of bringing together disability and animality, along with its potential. The aim is to introduce and develop the concept of disanimality, which is defined as “a disruptive affect, a feeling of discomfort, a site for critique, but also an opportunity for critical disability, animality, and human-animal studies to come together in more productive ways.” The underlying question is why these fields have had such a fraught relationship in the past, focusing, on the one hand, on why disability studies has often been reluctant to embrace animal advocacy, and, on the other hand, why certain forms of animal advocacy are less appealing, such as veganism and animal liberation. With examples from Don LePan’s dystopian novel, Animals, in which cognitively disabled human children are raised and slaughtered for food in a nightmarish near-future world, the article puts pressure on explicit comparisons between disabled people and animals. Rather than calling for veganism and liberation, the article pursues a posthumanist approach that allows not only for structural comparisons of biopolitical hierarchies, but also acknowledgments of fundamental differences between different forms of life, even as it disavows a singular binary opposition between “the human” and “the animal.”