(De)Facing the Animals: Zooësis and Performance

Abstract

How can an animal look you in the face? That will be one of our concerns.-Jacques Derrida (2002:377) Did your food have a face? -People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals poster (2001) As my two epigraphs suggest, the burgeoning field of animal studies encompasses a vast cultural territory, ranging-contentiously 1 -from philosophy to activism, and including anthropology, sociology, history, psychology, art history, cinema, and literary studies. This special issue of TDR extends an exploration, begun several years ago (see Read 2000), of the intersections of this new field with performance studies. 2 In proposing the term "zooësis" (Chaudhuri 2003) to designate the activity at these intersections, I am conscious of indulging a neologistic impulse that has become a characteristic of animal studies; a symptom, perhaps, of its desire to intervene radically in established discourses and their terms of art.

“Cow Is a Mother, Mothers Can Do Anything for Their Children!” Gaushalas as Landscapes of Anthropatriarchy and Hindu Patriarchy

“…Gaushalas are overcrowded with cows to protect them from slaughter at Muslim hands, but are chained almost continuously to avoid territorial fights breaking out between stressed, frustrated animals in a state of zoo psychosis. Zoo psychosis refers to the “involuntary repetitive movements” that are “symptoms of the trauma of being kidnapped, displaced, incarcerated, alienated, bored to death” (Chaudhuri , 162). A young bull bobbed his head repeatedly in the Thane gaushala in an effort to yank off his harness threaded painfully through his nostrils.…”

Meat Culture

“…This bovine catwalk becomes, in the pasture release and open farm events, an arena of zooësis. Una Chaudhuri (2007a) has proposed the notion of zooësis in order to conceptualize how human culture uses 'the animal' , as trope and as body, in meaning-making practices. Zooësis does not only refer to the entire Western tradition of animal representations, but also to all culturally contingent human-animal practices such as dog shows, zoos, animal experiments, hunting, meat consumption etc.-each practice carrying its own history and its own repertoire; its own actors and its own audience (Chaudhuri 2007b).…”

“…Una Chaudhuri (2007a) has proposed the notion of zooësis in order to conceptualize how human culture uses 'the animal' , as trope and as body, in meaning-making practices. Zooësis does not only refer to the entire Western tradition of animal representations, but also to all culturally contingent human-animal practices such as dog shows, zoos, animal experiments, hunting, meat consumption etc.-each practice carrying its own history and its own repertoire; its own actors and its own audience (Chaudhuri 2007b). The pasture release and open farms events are, in this analysis, another manifestation of carefully choreographed zooësis, with its own history, its own repertoire, its own actors (the cows), and its own audience (ourselves and the other visitors with whom we share this experience).…”

3 Rotten to the Bone: Discourses of Contamination and Purity in the European Horsemeat Scandal

“…This bovine catwalk becomes, in the pasture release and open farm events, an arena of zooësis. Una Chaudhuri (2007a) has proposed the notion of zooësis in order to conceptualize how human culture uses 'the animal' , as trope and as body, in meaning-making practices. Zooësis does not only refer to the entire Western tradition of animal representations, but also to all culturally contingent human-animal practices such as dog shows, zoos, animal experiments, hunting, meat consumption etc.-each practice carrying its own history and its own repertoire; its own actors and its own audience (Chaudhuri 2007b).…”