This article explores the aesthetic and cultural connections between the hyper-masculinization inherent to hip hop culture (and particularly to gangsta rap), the pit bull dog breed, and dogfighting. Building on recent scholarship that has identified the racial and racist assumptions underlying the pit bull controversy, I provide further evidence and arguments on how the highly racialized and genderized hip hop discourses inoculate the pit bull body and suffuse it with multiple meanings reminiscent of America’s traumatic encounter with otherness. As a palimpsest that attests to both mainstream and countercultural explorations of racialized masculinities, the pit bull body is made to “perform” its role as both an agent and a victim within the nation’s compulsive need to control and monitor the “other.”
NONE were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to feel or rub or caress one another's scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one another's blood or flesh, keep one another warm-that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food.-Ursula K. Le Guin, "She Unnames Them"
Beginning with the premise that the media participates in the manufacturing of the societal consent that enables and perpetuates the systematized exploitation of nonhuman animals, this article explores how media coverage of such nonhuman animals (and of wildlife in particular) during the COVID-19 crisis may influence our consumption of popular entertainment in a way that centralizes the discussion on the implications of established speciesist practices. I specifically focus on the impact of the first season of Netflix’s successful docuseries Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness, directed by Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin, which was released in March 2020, a key moment in the worldwide management of the pandemic. Tiger King has generated significant controversy because of its languid commitment to a solid conservationist message and to the paradigm of animal advocacy documentaries. However, understanding how and why nonhuman animals were considered newsworthy by COVID-19 media provides us with some interpretative keys through which to reapproach the significance of the show. Analyzing the series’ main themes and motifs in light of the media’s narratives on lockdown, wildlife, and human interference over nature allows us to continue exploring methodologies through which to question the multiple anthropocentric discourses that structure and order societal consent to the existence of zoos.
06Abstract: Throughout their history, Western children’s films (along with the subgenre of family films) have recurrently featured real animals, usually as the partner or sidekick of a protagonist child. This chapter examines the significance that the real animal body, whether a wild or domestic one, has within the genre, and the narrative and ethical challenges it faces within visual culture. By focusing primarily on the tensions between the authentic and the artificial within the context of modernity, the study offers a critical perspective on how anthropomorphism is practiced through the conventions that are appropriate to the genre, and on how such idiosyncratic narrativization of the animal then contributes to the consolidation of ethical discourses pertaining to the use of animals in the film industry.
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