Good Night, Zoo: A Children's Guide to Humanimal Spaces

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BUFFALO Legal Studies Research Paper Series

Paper No. 2014 - 012

Good Night, Zoo: A Children's Guide to Humanimal Spaces

Irus Braverman SUNY Buffalo Law School

In Ulrich Gehmann and Martin Reiche (eds.), Virtual and Ideal Worlds Part II (forthcoming, Columbia U Press).

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Good Night, Zoo A Children’s Guide to Humanimal Spaces

IRUS BRAVERMAN

Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real.1

The first page of Good Night, Gorilla, a children’s book by Peggy Rathmann,2 is vibrant and splashy. “Good night, Gorilla,” says the zookeeper, turning away from the cages, not seeing the young and smiling gorilla stealing the brightly colored key ring from his belt. In the cage, we see a tire, a bicycle, a small stuffed toy in the shape of a gorilla, and what looks like a children’s book on whales with its pages wide open. The gorilla climbs out of his pen, and along with a mouse, who courageously carries a banana bigger than himself on a string, follows the zookeeper through the zoo. At each cage, the zookeeper—nametagged “Joe”—says good night to the elephant, the lion, the hyena, the gi-raffe, and the armadillo (a range of exotic zoo animals, notably all mammals). In the space between one page and the next, the gorilla has freed another animal to follow along after the keeper. Every animal, save the lion and the armadillo, are kept company in their cages by small, stuffed, simulacra of themselves (the lion is licking on bones and the armadillo has a Sesame Street Elmo toy). The keeper leaves the zoo to go to his home, which is situated just across a lawn from the tall pink gate of the zoo, and the animals all follow him into the house, standard expectations of physical dimensions notwithstanding. Inside, the zookeeper’s wife is already asleep, and does not open her eyes as her husband and the gorilla climb into bed with her. “Good night, dear,” she says, switching off the lights, and a chorus of “Good night” responds, although none apparently come from Joe himself. The woman switches the light on to see the gorilla grin-

1 Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1980), 238. 2 Rathmann, P. (1994)


160 | IRUS BRAVERMAN

ning at her from the side of the bed. Flipping the page, we see the woman lead-ing the animals back into the zoo, then returning home with a, “Good night, zoo,” failing to see the gorilla and the mouse once again following her back to her domicile. The gorilla turns to the reader and presses a finger to his lips, sig-naling our complicity in this arrangement. “Good night, dear,” says the woman, and the zookeeper finally responds “Good night,” as the gorilla and the mouse crawl back into bed in between the couple, the banana eaten, this interspecies grouping asleep at last. On the nightstand the family photo that was vague in the previous pages is finally focused: it features the family of the zookeeper, his wife, and… an infant gorilla. Like many other children books, Good Night, Gorilla is a bedtime story. As such, its narrative depicts the twilight zone between day and night and between awake and dream states. Alongside this liminal temporal dimension, the book al-so explicates and challenges the boundaries between captivity and freedom, liv-ing and nonliving things, feminine and masculine and, most importantly perhaps, between city and wilderness, home and zoo, and human and nonhuman animali-ty. Good Night, Gorilla illustrates such bounded spaces, but then, gently, almost unnoticeably, questions these boundaries. To borrow Donna Haraway’s title, this book considers what happens When Species Meet, creating a hybrid space where the real becomes virtual and the virtual becomes real. The Zoo in the City: Wild Animals Invading the Human Bedroom

Utopias and dystopias seem to be the only scenarios possible, and yet the future is likely to lie in between: complex, messy and contested.3

It is no coincidence that most zoos are situated in the city: it is precisely at the heart of human civilization that nonhuman animals must be displayed, acting as spectacles for human dominance over nature.4 Since the zoo is the site where wild animals are brought into the city and yet not allowed to be wild, they repre-sent a “variably constructed and opposed nature … [which] inscribe[s] a cultural sense of distance from that loosely defined realm.”5 Zoos, then, are the “urban simulacra” which mediate human experience of animal life and cause “real live animals . . . [to] actually come to be seen as less than authentic since the terms of

3 Redford, K. et al. (2013) 4 Acampora, R. (2005): 75, Berger, J. (1980): 26, Braverman, I. (2012): 71-91, Wolch, J. (1998): 129 5 Anderson, K. (1998): 28

GOOD NIGHT, ZOO | 161

authenticity have been so thoroughly redefined.”6 “Zoos tell us, something, then, about the construction of metropolitan cultures and identities, of what it was, and is, to be a modern city dweller.”7 Moreover, if the city is a human zoo, the zoo is a reproduction of the modern city.8 Desmond Morris argues that North American zoos are a product and symbol of the alienation of urban life: overcrowding, anx-iety, aggression, and nervous disorders characterize both.9

Zoo critics such as Jennifer Wolch and Christopher Philo argue for a new sense of geography and urban space that can adequately account for the presence of nonhuman animals in city life. Wolch, in particular, has argued for “zoöpolis,” a model that “asks for a future in which animals and nature would no longer be incarcerated beyond the reach of our everyday lives, leaving us with only cartoons to heal the wounds of their absence.”10 Good Night, Gorilla may be just such a cartoon, and yet the interactions between human and nonhuman animals modeled in this speculative projection go beyond the generic cityscape of Wolch’s critique, envisioning a space of interspecies coexistence. Humanimal Escapes Alongside their subjection to civilization’s power, wild animals are also objects of romantic admiration. They are our exotic others, hinting at our boundaries, at our limitation as humans. They are also our only way out of our human selves and hence, “zoos increasingly provide an escape for their visitors by transplant-ing them from the urban space in which they live into a completely different ge-ographical space that is natural and wild.”11 This is an interesting goal as zoos are usually perceived to be places of non-Nature, or places of virtual naturality. Thus, the boundaries of city and wilderness, home and zoo, and human and non-human animality begin to collapse.

To manage our complex psychological relationship toward wild ani-mals, humans erect and regulate spatial and classificatory boundaries. Although situated within the city’s borders, the zoo is its own separate zone, encircled by physical walls (pink in this story) and a less physical, perhaps, but no less im-portant, wall of rules that regulate the unfortunate occurrence of an animal es-cape from the zoo into the city. Clearly, the boundary between the zoo and its surrounding city represents an extremely fragile space that must be constantly

6 Wolch, J. (1998): 128 7 Braverman, I. (2012): 28 8 Baratay, E., and Hardouin-Fugier, E. (2003): 224 9 Quoted in Braverman, I. (2012): 28 10 Wolch, J. (1998): 135 11 Braverman, J. (2012): 7


surveilled. With this need for regulation and surveillance, it may come as no sur-prise, then, that this border between zoo and city resembles the surveillance boundaries of Foucault’s “panopticon.”12 The boundary between the zoo and its surrounding city in Good Night, Gorilla adds the institution of the zoo to the list of hierarchical structures, like the army, schools, hospitals, and factories, that Foucault argues have evolved through history into manifestations of the panopti-con.

Yet alongside the fear, there is always an immense temptation: What might actually happen when wild animals and humans cross the spatial, legal, and taxonomic divides? What would take place when species meet? Such “meet-ings” have occasionally occurred despite the provisions—and were mostly fatal. That is, they either resulted in the death of the human involved, such as the inci-dent of the child who was killed by a pack of African wild dogs when he fell into the enclosure at the Pittsburgh Zoo,13 or in the death of the nonhuman animal, as in the tiger escape at the San Francisco Zoo in 2007.14

Many zoos prepare for natural disasters by organizing plans for recap-turing escaped animals, as in the cases of the Tama and Ueno Zoos in Japan, which regularly stage drills whereby employees dress up as animals and “es-cape.”15 However, in the case of Nikica the hippo, who escaped her pen at a pri-vate zoo in Montenegro when the pen flooded, and in the case of the Lake Supe-rior Zoo in Duluth, Minnesota, where a polar bear and a seal escaped during a flood, the animals either moved to high ground (the polar bear stood on top of his enclosure), or simply relocated to other human spaces. According to the Guardian, Nikica the hippo was in fact “being fed at the swimming pool of a restaurant owned by Pejovic [the zoo owner] and his brother” during the flood.16

In March 2012, a silverback gorilla named Koga escaped its enclosure at the Buffalo Zoo into the keepers’ space, biting a keeper in the process. “A vet-erinarian used a handheld blowpipe to sedate Koga through a porthole,” writes a reporter, while a SWAT team cleared the area.17 “That was the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my career,” said the SWAT team’s Captain to the news crew.18 Ko-ga is a zoo-born gorilla. He has never set eyes on an African savannah and, for that matter, he had never before left his cage. “What drove Koga to try to escape its enclosure?” I asked the zoo’s director shortly after this event. “Curiosity,” she responded, explaining that once the wild animals manage to get out, this curiosi-

12 Foucault, M. (1995): 197 13 Begos, K. (2012) 14 Fagan, K. et al. (2007) 15 BBC 2010 (2012) 16 The Guardian (2010), Mother Nature Network (2012) 17 Gulley, N. (2013) 18 Gulley, N. (2013)


ty quickly replaces itself with a strong desire to get right back into the familiarity of their cages.

Good Night, Gorilla centers on both the human desire toward—and the human fear of—animals that cross the lines, yet presents a totally different sce-nario for what happens when they do. When the animals in this story escape from their zoo enclosures, they simply walk through the zoo gate and across the small green lawn straight into the bedroom of their human zookeeper and his wife. The zookeeper’s wife seems to be the only one aware of, and disturbed by, this transgression. This role of the zookeeper’s wife is in conflict with Donna Haraway’s feminist metaphor of the “cyborg,” which troubles the traditional lim-its of female identity politics. Haraway’s cyborg questions any separation of the “human” from, for instance, the “animal” or the “machine,” as the cyborg is part human and part machine.19 So, whereas the cyborg “does not dream of commu-nity on the model of the organic family […and] would not recognize the Garden of Eden,” the zookeeper’s wife seeks to keep the Oedipal family unit in tact.20 Using her husband’s flashlight, she takes the gorilla by the hand (with all the other animals following closely behind) back across the lawn and into the zoo (figure 1). “Good night, zoo,” she exclaims, seemingly relieved to reestablish the spatial divide that will allow her to rest for the night. But the gorilla is not so easily constrained. He somehow manages to get out and follows the woman back across the lawn and into her bedroom. I will return to the role of the gorilla in this story later.

Figure 1. Zookeeper’s wife leading gorilla by the hand across the lawn from home back to zoo, with the other animals following closely behind.21 Another key characteristic of the book that blurs the human/nonhuman divide is

19 Haraway, D. (1991): 150 20 Haraway, D. (1991): 151 21 Used by permission of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.


its minimal use of human language. In the entire book, the only words uttered are “Good Night,” in various combinations: “Good Night” to each of the ani-mals, “Good night, dear,” “Good night, zoo,” and “Good night, gorilla.” In fact, most of the book’s pages contain no words at all, again producing a virtual space whereby animals and humans interact differently than in the conventional, spe-cies-limited and speech dominated space of modern city life. As Haraway notes, many biologists of the twentieth century followed the Enlightenment discourse of reason in their determination that “human biology was the prerequisite of a development of an elaborate way of life, for which the differentiations separating humans and apes were bipedalism, tool use, and speech.”22

Speech, or logos, has been the dominant marker of nonhuman differ-ence since Aristotle; this was also the reason why Jeremy Bentham’s prioritiza-tion of suffering over reason was so revolutionary. “Logocentrism is first of all a thesis regarding the animal, the animal deprived of the logos,” writes Jacques Derrida of the previously dominant strain of discourse on the animal, “this is the thesis, position, or presupposition maintained from Aristotle to Heidegger, from Descartes to Kant, Levinas, and Lacan.”23 Between the minimal use of human language and the spread of that use across species boundaries, Good Night, Go-rilla takes advantage of the virtual space of the children’s book to provide hu-man and nonhuman animals with vehicles for interspecies communication. With such minimal use of human language in the book, other modes and means of communication open up and become more important. In fact, the aesthetics of the children’s book communicates with the reader in ways that elide traditional, logocentric logic. The vibrant images and colors and the liminal setting between daytime and nighttime that constitute the dreamspace of the book rely on mood to affect the reader. The children’s book, thereby, becomes a vehicle for inter-species communication that goes beyond traditional human language. Inside the Zoo Good Night, Gorilla resides in three distinct yet interconnected spaces: the zoo, the house, and the lawn. Despite their clear demarcation, the images and colors that constitute these three spaces blur and fuse. Good Night, Gorilla is vibrant and cheerful in its three spaces. The zoo and the cages are immersed in a deep lush green that continues in the space outside of the zoo, which is similarly lush; the inside of the gorilla cage is green, and so is the zookeeper’s uniform; the in-door living room through which the animals enter into the bedroom is painted in

22 Haraway, D. (1989): 214 23 Derrida, J. (2008): 27


green, and a pink balloon flies from the mouse up to the sky in the first scene and reappears almost in every page of the book, weaving together the book’s three spaces into one interspecies interface.

If the space of the zoo represents the wild and other within the city, and the houses and humans represent the social and the artificial, the lawn is the lim-inal space in between: it is, conceivably, both natural and artificial, domestic and industrial, private and public, and city and country. Moreover, the lawn is proba-bly the quintessential American landscape. Indeed, “fifty-eight million Ameri-cans enthusiastically plant, weed, water, spray, and mow an estimated twenty million acres of lawn.”24 Given the domesticizing role of the lawn as an exten-sion of the American house, it is hardly coincidental that Rathmann chose the lawn to figure in between animal/zoo and human/city spaces.

The book’s depiction of the zoo also draws on the actual design of the urban zoo as it was and as the author likely knew it at the time she wrote the book (the book was published in 1994, concluding ten years of work). Essential-ly, Rathmann’s zoo consists of a set of relatively small cages containing individ-ual animals, each cage painted in a distinct vibrant color. Inside the cages, most of the animals have human artifacts and toys to keep them company (see, e.g., figure 2). This was indeed what most urban zoos in North America looked like, albeit not as cheerful, at the time of the book’s writing. In zoos during the nine-teenth and twentieth centuries, “bars and cages encoded a bold sense of separa-tion between the penultimate categories of keeper and kept.”25

Figure 2. Caged gorilla stealing zookeeper’s keys; mouse with pink balloon in center.26

24 Bormann, H., Balmori, D., and Geballe, G. T. (2001) 25 Anderson, K. (1998): 41 26 Used by permission of G.P. Putnam's Sons, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.


Immersion design, currently the bon ton of zoo design, was not commonly used in zoo design back then. In immersion, the cages are typically hidden so that the zoogoer may feel immersed in the animal’s habitat. Contemporary zoo design, according to prominent zoo designer Jon Coe, is a place of “stunning realism and authenticity,” with naturalistic scenes to immerse the zoogoer and realistic func-tions to enrich the animal.27 A bicycle at a gorilla exhibit—as this book has it—would probably be considered a gross violation of the principles of naturalistic immersion design, as well as a problematic anthropomorphizing of the animal, and so would the animal’s miniature stuffed simulacrum.

Take a “real” gorilla exhibit as an example. The award-winning Gorilla Forest exhibit at the Louisville Zoo (figure 3) was designed to immerse zoogoers in an experience of the Congo rainforest. Unique design features use illusion to bridge the audio and tactile barriers between human and animal. For instance, the gorillas may choose to press a button to broadcast their own sounds into the atrium.28 “The big idea,” zoo designer John Coe told me, “is to try to make the gorilla areas and the public areas indistinguishable from each other, all one fami-ly.”29 Whereas at the Louisville Zoo, the one family narrative is promoted through erasing the cage within the space of the zoo, in Good Night, Gorilla the mingling happens at the human home, and cages continue to exist at the zoo. In this sense, the book freezes in time the spatial design of zoos before the strong-hold of immersion design.

Figure 3. Humans watching gorillas, gorillas watching humans at the Louisville Zoo’s gorilla exhibit.30

27 Braverman, I. (2012): 35 28 Braverman, I. (2012): 7 29 Braverman, I. (2012): 7 30 Courtesy of the Louisville Zoo.


Whereas today’s daytime public exhibit in North American and European zoos looks quite different from their portrayal in Good Night, Gorilla, their nighttime spaces are altogether different. Most zoo animals, and the larger ones in particu-lar, reside within what is referred to in zoo terminology “holding areas,” and not in their outdoors exhibit as Good Night, Gorilla implies. This practice, zoo pro-fessionals have told me, is intended to protect zoo animals from both the city’s wild animals and its humans.31 Holding areas are typically situated inside build-ings. And because they are inaccessible to the public, they do not include natu-ralistic elements and are typically not green. For example, the gorilla holding ar-ea at the Buffalo Zoo contains a television and a fish tank to keep the gorillas en-tertained (figure 4).

Figure 4. Television and aquarium, gorilla holding area, August 2009.32

31 Braverman, I. (2012): 81 32 Courtesy of Cyndi Griffin / Buffalo Zoo.


Primate Visions The role of transgressing the lines is assigned in this story to the gorilla for a rea-son. In Good Night, Gorilla, the gorilla is not domesticated, but it seems that he is domestic—or at least, under the purview of the domestic. In Primate Visions, Donna Haraway explores the intimate relations and fascination of humans with apes, suggesting that this taxon is “a taxonomic and therefore political order that works by the negotiation of boundaries achieved through ordering difference.”33 While early instances of primatology, predicated as they were on their contem-porary cultural ideologies, privileged a “self-making dialectic of culture and body” in which differences between human and ape were absolute, more recent narratives in primatology “privilege continuities and patterns of dynamic rela-tionships.”34 These changing origin stories muddle the bio-social divide between human and animal. Physically and symbolically, the gorilla is thus part of the human family. Here, it features in the zookeeper’s family pictures, which in an earlier page depict the gorilla held in a nursing position by the woman during his infancy. Indeed, scientific studies suggest that over 99 percent of the most criti-cal DNA sites in humans and chimps are identical,35 suggesting that humans and higher primates belong to the same species. John Locke already documented sto-ries of forbidden couplings, such as women who “have conceived” by apes or baboons, with certain slave protagonists utilizing these stories to dehumanize Af-rican women (“sometimes [orangutans] endeavor to surprise and carry off Ne-groe women into their woody retreats… an oran-outang husband [would be no] dishonor to an Hottentot female” 36).

“Focusing for a moment on the bedroom scene,” writes Susan McHugh about documentary projects surrounding domestic spaces shared by humans and nonhuman animals, “indicates how the different agents populating stereotypical-ly human scenes of sexual intimacy complicate notions of agency in the lives of companion species.”37 While a gorilla is not a traditional “companion animal,” it might qualify as a “companion species,” what Donna Haraway identifies as non-human animal species that determine and are determined by “a story of co-habitation, co-evolution, and embodied cross-species sociality.”38 These stories are necessary, McHugh argues, because “amid the de/sexing regulative norms that increasingly define human-animal cohabitation, these everyday struggles of

33 Haraway, D. (1989): 10 34 Haraway, D. (1989): 215, 336 35 Ferreira, A. (2008): 224; quoting from Hecht. 36 Quoted in Dayan, C. (2011): 118 37 McHugh, S. (2011): 124 38 Haraway, D. (2003): 4


narrative and visualization are … necessarily ongoing, in order to foster any meaningful dialogues about (let alone deliberation of) sex across species.”39

Figure 5. Final page of Good Night, Gorilla: the interspecies bed, with flashlight directing attention to family photo with gorilla.40 Debunking Boundaries, Making Life

The very concept of species is deeply fraught, the most recent scientific consensus being that there is no one authoritative definition of spe-cies.41

The proximity between humans and animals is sometimes tenuous. Boundaries are permeable, and taxonomies are necessary to ensure the order of things. But when the pressure is on… categories and terminol-ogies get muddled. The hierarchies no longer hold.42

Although this might be a stretch to the original intentions of the book—likely: that the picture on the nightstand can just as easily be that of a human “fostering” an animal, a perfectly ordinary experience for zookeepers, at least with small mammals—I would like to offer my own creative interpretation. I shall do so by asking the following, provocative, question: So what happens in the page after last of Good Night, Gorilla, namely, after the animal and the human sleep in the same bed? Perhaps a human-gorilla hybrid, or an interspecies chimera? Such a taboo fantasy that humanizes the animal and bestializes the human has often

39 McHugh, S. (2011): 125 40 Used by permission of G.P. Putnam's Sons, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC. 41 Ferreira, A. (2008): 223 42 Dayan, C. (2011): 116


found fictional and filmic expression.43 Although hybrids and chimeras share similar metaphoric meanings—that of genetic mixture—the processes through which the two come about are quite different. Whereas a hybrid is the product of breeding two different species such that “each cell in the hybrid body has a mix-ture of genes from both of the parents,” a chimera “consists of a combination be-tween two different species” such that “the genes of the two species do not com-bine as with a hybrid.”44 Carrie Friese notes:

The hybrid has long been viewed as problematic to the notion of species because these animals represent sexual reproduction between two dif-ferent kinds of animals, resulting in a genetic mixture at the nuclear lev-el. Chimeras are similarly troubling as genetic mixtures, but the mode by which these mixtures occur furthers the difficulty of classifying these biological organisms.45

Friese’s identification of critical and metaphorical potential of the genetic chime-ra or the hybrid follows in the tradition of Donna Haraway’s cyborg, a certain in-stance of the animal-machine hybrid. Chimeras, like hybrids, embody interspe-cies genetic mixture; however, unlike hybrids, chimeras are “cells and bodies containing DNA from different organisms or species through processes that dif-fer from sexual reproduction.”46

Hybrids and chimeras have existed for a long time. In Greek mytholo-gy, the chimera was a fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. The first human-made chimera was a mouse born in 1961—perhaps accounting for the presence of the mouse alongside the gorilla in the interspecies bed of Good Night, Gorilla. Myra Hird discusses the extent to which chimerism presents “challenges to western heteronormative notions of kinship” by extending the “notion of kinship to include non-human animals as well.”47 She notes that, “Of all the cells in a human body, 10 percent are eukary-otic (derived from bacteria) and 90 percent are bacteria.”48 Sagan states along the same lines that “the human body… is an architectonic compilation of millions of agencies of chimerical cells.”49 “We are all chimeras,” exclaims Haraway.50

43 Ferreira, A. (2008): 223 44 Seyfer, T. (2008) 45 Friese, C. (2010): 146 46 Friese, C. (2010): 146 47 Quoted in Ferreira, A. (2008): 224 48 Hird, M. J. (2009): 83 49 Sagan, D. (1992): 368 50 Haraway, D. (1991): 150


In the world of species conservation and captive breeding programs, such distinctions between species and subspecies are often hotly contested. Chi-meras are mixtures at the level of mitochondrial DNA. “These biological organ-isms,” writes Friese, “call into question the very notion of ‘species’ itself,” since the genetic mixture of the chimera only shows itself in certain individuals of the species.51 The genetic division of chimerical individuals has created a parallel division between conservationists, who contest the importance of genetic differ-ence when it occurs in mitochondrial DNA. Friese marks this as a five-way split, where conservationists differ based on their relative responses to the issues of hybridization, the male-female split in inheritance of mitochondrial DNA, and the importance of mitochondrial DNA itself in determining species difference.52

De-extinction projects aim to “reconstitute the genomes of vanished species in living form,” essentially bringing back these species from extinction through a combination of “back-breeding,” cloning from cryopreserved tissue, and genetic hybridization using existing species.53 Reproductive technologies such as IVF and stem cell research as well as the emerging field of synthetic bi-ology are all “producing life”—either from another life form or from nonlife. The field of transbiology—a biology that is “not only born and bred, or born and made, but made and born—is indeed today more the norm than the exception.”54 Epilogue While Good Night, Gorilla takes place in a zoo, not a lab, the acts of movement across the supposedly uncontaminated border between the zoo and the home, here typified by the lawn, demonstrate that the interface between “animal space” and “human space” is not only possible but also inevitable: when the human family can encompass nonhuman animals, it becomes impossible to exclude them from the human home. In this way, the slipperiness of the distinction be-tween human and animal, and domesticated and wild animals reveals itself as an object of surveillance and regulation. As I have argued in Zooland, “The wild-ness of these animals, along with the presentation of their captivity at the heart of the modern city, is the zoo’s main appeal.”55 The zoo’s institutional survival thus depends on the survival of both captivity and wildness, and of city and wilder-ness, as bifurcated ideals. Captivity and wildness are codependent: if not for

51 Friese, C. (2010): 147 52 Friese, C. (2010): 153 53 Long Now (2013) 54 Franklin, S. (2006): 170-71 55 Braverman, I. (2012): 61


freedom, incarceration would make no sense (and vice versa).56 City and wilder-ness are similarly interlocked in a binary existence: if not for wilderness, the city would make no sense and vice versa. Accordingly, in the book’s last page, where the framed photograph finally becomes clear, we see the family portrait of Joe the zookeeper, his wife, and the gorilla. This is a fantasy of interspecies preg-nancy painted in primary colors.

Yet this family unit does not include a machine of reproductive tech-nology. In this sense, it is unlike the parable of technoscientific hybridity in Cha-ris Thompson’s “Confessions of a Bioterrorist,” which Aline Ferreira describes as “providing speculative visions of alternative family configurations as well as interrogating the ethical consequences of this dance of technology and species identity.”57 Also unlike the vexed and ethically fraught circumstances of the in-terspecies chimeras in the foci of Ferreira’s examples, Good Night, Gorilla pre-sents these possibilities within the dreamspace of a children’s book, where the presence of the gorilla in the family photos does not threaten or invalidate pre-conceptions of order but is portrayed, rather, as a perfectly natural occurrence. After all, children around the globe go to bed with an animal every night. The position of the gorilla (and the mouse) in the bedroom and in the fami-ly photographs in Good Night, Gorilla is not that of lover; rather, its placement as child still implies a cross-species narrative of intimacy. We are thus forced to ask: if the gorilla is in the family photos, why is he led back to his cage at the zoo? Acknowledgments I would like to express my gratitude to my wonderful research assistant Eleanor Gold for her ideas and enthusiasm. This contribution is dedicated to my daugh-ters Ariel and Tamar, who have patiently endured my numerous readings of this book and the endless questions that accompanied these readings. To them, who have been my greatest teachers on the futility of animal-human divide and on the richness of interspecies connections. The research for this article was assisted by the American Council of Learned Societies’ Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fel-lowship and by the Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy.

56 Braverman; I. (2012): 61 57 Ferreira, A. (2008), 231.


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Good Night, Zoo: A Children's Guide to Humanimal Spaces

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