Richard Twine

Intersectional disgust? Animals and (eco)feminism

This paper explores tensions between feminisms on the issue of nonhuman animals. The possibility of a posthuman or more-than-human account of intersectionality is explored through the retelling of an encounter with a feminist academic colleague and her experience of disgust toward a book I was carrying (Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, Adams and Donovan, 1995). I argue that such disgust responses can be read as the affective embodiment of unacknowledged human/animal hierarchy and act to impede intersectional theory and politics. Moreover this disgust response is paradigmatic of a certain feminist disavowal of ecofeminism misread as a stereotypical representation of essentialist thinking. Reversing this I argue that it is humanist disgust rather than ecofeminism that may be seen as ‘out of date’ especially when one appreciates how the more-than-human have come to occupy a significant place in both feminist work and the broader humanities and social sciences. In conclusion the paper claims that feminist engagement with nonhuman animals is entirely consistent with its multi-faceted interrogation of dualist ontology, and, whilst the ethics of this engagement may be complex, it is no longer tenable for feminist work to exclude nonhuman animals from its understanding of sociality, politics or ethics.

Physiognomy, Phrenology and the Temporality of the Body.

In the sociology of the body, the analysis of physiognomy is a neglected topic. The idea that one can judge the character of another from their facial or bodily characteristics is a pervasive phenomenon. However, its historical and cultural spread does not entail that we inevitably tie it to notions of human essence. This study focuses upon a particular periodic resurgence of physiognomic discourse in the West, at the end of the 18th and the entirety of the 19th century. In contrast to previous arguments, I argue that physiognomic discourse was able to exploit 19th-century phrenology as a conduit for its own perpetuation. I point out that the perception of the other that physiognomy promotes is largely based upon an atemporal view of the body. I suggest that this physiognomic perception remains an entrenched but changeable component in contemporary relations between self and other.

Genomic natures read through posthumanisms

This chapter sets out arguments and histories of posthumanisms to use their tensions as a way to think about ‘nature’ in genomics. I argue that genomics frames ‘nature’ ambivalently in ways that are both faithful to and undermining of Enlightenment understandings of nature. New biotechnological innovations and their associated imaginaries have become the scene for much speculation on the ontological status of the ‘human’. Genomics is paradoxical for the human (and humanism) since on the one hand the human genome project professed to reveal the ‘human’, but, simultaneously, prior assumptions about a notion of human nature appear increasingly fragile in the face of genomic visions of human ‘enhancement’. Yet it would be a considerable mistake to assume that these material incursions upon both ‘nature’ and bodily fl esh have been the prime reason why the ‘human’ has been called into question. I contend that this point signals a distinction within the posthumanist terrain – which is both historical and political – between transhumanism and critical posthumanism. Whilst neither of these terms, as we shall see, encompass a wholly coherent set of ideas and certainly feature differences of note within their terrain, the intention here is to examine their distinction as a useful way to think how ‘nature’ is conceptualized in genomics. We should be careful from the outset when thinking about ‘genomics and nature’ not to settle into a notion of ‘nature’ as somehow separate from ‘culture’ or the ‘human’. I use the term genomics broadly not merely to refer to sequencing projects but also to include related fi elds such as comparative genomics, metagenomics and hybrid embryos. The various constellations of posthumanist thought are invested in rethinking the ‘human’ albeit in different ways. I shall argue that transhumanism is generally faithful to Enlightenment understandings of ‘nature’ in dualist terms, whilst the critical posthuman project generally attempts to unravel dualistic ontology. The term ‘humanism’ itself has various meanings during different historical periods but is characterized by moral ambivalence as both a supposed foundation for human freedom from oppression and superstition as well as a partial and exclusionary discourse. My specifi c deployment here, common to the overlapping fi elds of critical posthumanism and animal studies, is of human-

Animals on Drugs: Understanding the Role of Pharmaceutical Companies in the Animal-Industrial Complex

In this paper I revisit previous critiques that I have made of much, though by no means all, bioethical discourse. These pertain to faithfulness to dualistic ontology, a taken-for-granted normative anthropocentrism, and the exclusion of a consideration of how political economy shapes the conditions for bioethical discourse (Twine Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 8(3):285-295, 2005; International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food 16(3):1-18, 2007, 2010). Part of my argument around bioethical dualist ontology is to critique the assumption of a division between the “medical” (human) and “agricultural” (nonhuman) and to show various ways in which they are interrelated. I deepen this analysis with a focus on transnational pharmaceutical companies, with specific attention to their role in enhancing agricultural production through animal drug administration. I employ the topical case of antibiotics in order to speak to current debates in not only the interdisciplinary field of bioethics but also that of animal studies. More generally, the animal-industrial complex (Twine Journal for Critical Animal Studies 10(1):12-39, 2012) is underlined as a highly relevant bioethical object that deserves more conceptual and empirical attention.

Understanding snacking through a practice theory lens.

This article approaches snacking from a practice theory perspective in order to understand how this reframing may afford new insights. In doing so it also contributes to sociological thinking on eating practices and their reproduction as well as reflecting upon the ontological assertions of practice theory and its theory of social change. In particular this article argues that the re-conceptualisation serves to clarify a sociological research agenda for eating practices associated with snacking. It is argued that setting snacking within routine temporalities and spatialities and as bound up in the recursivity between practices and relations is especially important for thinking about snacking sociologically. In common with applications of practice theory in the field of sustainability transitions the aim is to move beyond individualistic assumptions of behaviour change and instead situate snacking as an eating practice with health implications that has emerged within the social, temporal, economic and cultural organisation of everyday life.

Thinking across species—a critical bioethics approach to enhancement

Drawing upon a concept of ‘critical bioethics’ [7] this paper takes a species-broad approach to the social and ethical aspects of enhancement. Critical Bioethics aims to foreground interdisciplinarity, socio-political dimensions, as well as reflexivity to what becomes bioethical subject matter. This paper focuses upon the latter component and uses the example of animal enhancement as a way to think about both enhancement generally, and bioethics. It constructs several arguments for including animal enhancement as a part of enhancement debates, and considers some connections between human and animal enhancement. The paper concludes in a plea for an ‘enhancement’ to our critical abilities to examine some of the underlying social, moral and ethical assumptions bound up in varied anticipated ‘enhanced’ futures.

The Rise of Critical Animal StudiesFrom the Margins to the Centre

The volume is structured around four sections: engaging theory doing critical animal studies critical animal studies and anti-capitalism contesting the human, liberating the animal: veganism and activism.

Materially Constituting a Sustainable Food Transition: The Case of Vegan Eating Practice:

Informed by several intellectual turns and sub-areas of sociology this article explores veganism as a practice and argues that its nascent social normalisation can be partly explained by specific modes of material work with food performed by vegan practitioners. Based primarily on interview data with UK-based vegans the research identifies four modes of material constitution – material substitution, new food exploration, food creativity and taste transition – which are of particular importance in strengthening links between the elements of the practice. The article argues that these are significant for offering an explanation for the recent growth of vegan practitioners in UK society and that they are also of value to the broader endeavour of understanding sustainable food transitions and intervening for more sustainable food policies.

The Animals & Society Institute Fellowship: Catalyzing Work in Human-Animal Studies

The Animals & Society Institute (ASI) launched its Human-Animal Studies Fellowship program in 2007. The aim of the Fellowship is to support research pertaining to relationships between humans and other animals, thereby helping to establish Human-Animal Studies (HAS)2 as a robust academic field. ASI’s leadership appreciated that a program that created a network and brought researchers together for a short time would be an important tool for building capacity in HAS, an emerging transdisciplinary research area, composed of geographically disparate scholars (many of whom are early in their careers). The inaugural 2007 Fellowship took place in Raleigh, NC, at North Carolina State University (NCSU), which had the added benefit of being the home of Professor Tom Regan (who actively participated and supported the Fellows throughout their time there) and his archive at the NCSU library. Subsequently, the ASI fellowship program moved around the United States, supported by HAS scholars at Michigan State University (East Lansing, MI), Duke University (Durham, NC), and Clark University (Worcester, MA), before establishing a home in 2011 at Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT).

Leonardo's Choice - Genetic Technologies and Animals Carol Gigliotti (Ed) Springer, 2009

If one surveys the social science and humanities literature on biotechnology over the past decade one discovers a dearth of books on the potential consequences of biotechnology for nonhuman animal life. This is an omission that not only speaks to the mundane anthropocentrism of contemporary scholarship to which (critical) animal studies addresses itself, but given the rather obvious enmeshments between human and nonhuman animal life in myriad social domains can also be read as a question mark around the quality of said anthropocentrism. If one was serious about anthropocentrism one would have to, anyhow, take nonhuman animals seriously.