Nina Bresser

3609006

Dr. Domitilla Olivieri & Dr. Kathrin Thiele

RMA Gender & Ethnicity

Somatechnics: Bodies and Power in a Digital Age

Amersfoort

26-01-2015

Tranimal Trajectories: Re-Configuring Trans-Embodiment Through

a Companion Species Figuration.

Fig. 1: Tranimal, photograph by Austin Young, 2009-2013.

2

3

– “Appreciation of the complexity is, of course, invited. But

more is required too. Figuring out what that more might be is

the work of situated companion species. It is a question of

cosmopolitics, or learning to be polite in responsible relation

to always asymmetrical living and dying, and nurturing and

killing.” – Donna Haraway (2008, p. 42).

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1. Introduction

The subject and nature of the situated material body is rapidly

returning to a broad variety of interdisciplinary academic

inquiry. The question of Being and the matter of ontology seem

to have made their return after decades of being considered

impossible in light of the prevalence of postmodernist1 and

poststructuralist thinking (Spivak, 1976, p. xvi). In the

context of gender studies, the renewed opening up of

ontological inquiry might resemble the opening of an old wound

acquired in the battle against biological essentialism,

inadequately bandaged by a social constructivist paradigm that,

as it turns out, cannot stop the bloody subject of matter from

exceeding its epistemological limits. Exuding the confinement

of its bandages, the material body productively stains the

interdisciplinary academic agenda, begging it for new ways of

engagement, and, perhaps, new possibilities to heal.

As transgender studies scholar Susan Stryker (2006) asserts,

the by now established academic field of transgender studies

aligns itself to a growing body of interdisciplinary research

that engages critically with the matter of the body. Mapping

its most profound contributions to this engagement, Stryker

states transgender studies helps to explicate the

1 In the context of this paper I will continue to use the term

‘postmodernist’ rather than ‘postmodern’ when I refer to an academic

discourse or paradigm (postmodernism) rather than to a temporality or

contemporary condition (a postmodern era). I will continue this linguistic

decision in my use of the terms ‘posthumanist’ and ‘posthuman’.

5

interpenetration between soma and techne in its elaborate

conceptualizing of how the body comes to be culturally

constructed and ‘known’ through and via the specific techniques

that shape and position it (p. 12). Continuing this line of

thought, such conceptualization contributes to a broader

academic project of repositioning the body as a meaning

generating force within all knowledge production (p. 12).

Feminist scholar Donna Haraway has elaborately theorized the

intra-action2 between soma, techniques and episteme – that is,

the academic framework by which any exploration of the

preceding trajectories is governed (as explained by Sullivan,

‘Somatechnics, or Monstrosity Unbound’, 2006).3 Starting with

an invitation to situated, embodied feminist knowledge

production in her famous essay ‘Situated Knowledges’ (1988), her

equally renowned ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1991) conducted this

exercise in the specific context of a posthuman era, proposing

critical posthumanist engagement as imperative for any sound

futurity project. In her later essay ‘The Companion Species

Manifesto’ (2003) as well as in her more elaborate book “When

Species Meet” (2008), Haraway fully re-immersed her academic 2 The term ‘intra-action’ was coined by feminist quantum physicist Karen

Barad and refers to the interpenetration that takes place when matter

meets. Rather than conceptualizing such encounter as an interaction between

two stable entities, intra-action describes the way such entities affect

each other in an ongoing process of co-constitutive materialization (2007,

p. 90; 2012, p. 7). 3 In the context of this paper my referencing will include the title of the

article when it concerns a digital publication that does not include page

numbers. This is in accordance to the MLA standards.

6

inquiry into the quicksand of ontological engagement,

establishing the argument that the worldly entanglement of

soma, technique and epistemology always exceeds the boundaries

of ‘the human’, and is equally co-constituted by ‘non-human’

matter and agency. Ontology here becomes a shared process of

multi-species critters that all contribute to the

materialization of the world they are of. This onto-

epistemological4 narrative gave a new dimension to critical

posthumanist thinking, making non-anthropocentric political

engagement imperative.

Combining transgender studies’ investment in the material-

semiotic5 becoming of the human body with Haraway’s specific

posthumanist investment in the onto-epistemological becomings

of companion species, interdisciplinary scholars Eva Hayward

and Lindsay Kelley initiated the narration of an onto-

epistemological narrative that could account for the ways in

4 The term ‘onto-epistemology’ was coined by feminist quantum physicist

Karen Barad (2007) and refers to the crucial entanglement of ontology and

epistemology, thereby posing the argument certain epistemological

narratives lead to certain materializations rather then others, and, as

shall become clear in the course of this paper, perhaps even the other way

around (p. 90). 5 The term material-semiotic will be used in the context of this paper to

point to the crucial entanglement of linguistic-discursive mechanisms of

signification and the materialization of living matter. My understanding of

the term is derived mainly from Donna Haraway’s (1988) use of the term to

rethink human and non-human bodies as active, meaning and matter generating

agents, rather than mere resources upon which meaning can be projected or

enforced (p. 594).

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which the bodies of transgendered or transsexual6 humans and

non-human animals co-constitute each other, sharing processes

of transformative materialization. In order to account for the

specific location from which they aim to understand such

contemporary processes of ‘multi-species trans-morphic

ontogenesis’, they coined the term ‘tranimal’ (Chen et all,

‘TRANimals: Theorizing the Trans- in Zoology’, 2009).

This paper is concerned with an exploration of the tranimal as

a contemporary figuration and actor in present political,

academic and artistic engagements with the subject of human and

non-human ‘trans-embodiment’. In the first chapter I aim to

position the tranimal in close proximity to the work of Donna

Haraway, exploring which trajectories of shared investment

might exist between her theory of companion species on the one

hand, and transgender studies as a critical postmodernist

interdisciplinary field on the other. Proposing the

6 There exists a wide range of definitions of the terms ‘transgender’ and

‘transsexual’. Stryker (2008) has defined the term ‘transgender’ as “(…)

the movement across a socially imposed boundary away from an unchosen

starting place (…)” (p. 1). As immediately becomes clear here, this

definition can be deployed to describe a wide variety of non-normative

sex/gender identifications, embodiments, and practices. The term

‘transsexual’ might in some instances be included under the term

‘transgender’, in which the latter assumes the position of an umbrella

term. In the context of this paper I will use the term ‘transgender’ as an

umbrella term when the sources concerned address the subject of trans-

embodiment outside the narrower frame of surgical modification. The term

‘transsexual’, then, will be used to point to a specific instance of

‘trans-embodiment’ that includes surgical modification of the body.

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trajectories of ontology, soma techniques, discourse, language

and episteme as the properties of the tranimal, the second

chapter will be dedicated to an analysis of how the tranimal is

put to work in the work of Eva Hayward (2006; 2010), thereby

crossing the disciplinary boundaries between transgender and

animal studies. In the last chapter I will propose a

consideration of the tranimal as a possible starting point for

non-anthropocentric political engagement, considering the

question of whether such engagement may contain an invitation

to the realization of cross-species social justice. The

threefold research question working across the inquiry

presented in this paper reads: (1) how does the contemporary

figuration of Eva Hayward’s (2006; 2010) tranimal relate to

Donna Haraway’s (2003; 2008) theory on companion species; (2)

how does this figuration enable a re-configuration of ‘trans-

embodiment’; and (3) how may this reconfiguration relate to a

political project of cross-species social justice?

2. Tracing Tranimal Trajectories: From Cyborg to Companion

Species & From Transgender to Animal Studies

As mentioned in the introduction, the tranimal as a

contemporary figuration developed by Eva Hayward (2006; 2010)

holds close proximity to Donna Haraway’s (2003; 2008) theory of

companion species. In this first chapter I aim to articulate

the specific interdisciplinary location from which the tranimal

might be said to emerge, tracing the intellectual strands that

inform its analytical and political properties.

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For an adequate understanding of the tranimal’s proximity to

Haraway’s work, I would first like to offer a short exploration

of the trace that exists between Haraway’s figuration of the

cyborg and her later theory of companion species. In her famous

essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1991)7 Haraway proposes the figuration

of the cyborg in order to account for an already materialized

contemporary ontological reality, as well as to make an

invitation to a critical feminist futurity project (p. 150). As

established organic binary oppositions – such as “(…) mind and

body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and

private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and

civilized (…)” – have been ‘techno-digested’ by modern

technologies (p. 163), the cyborg’s ontological narrative is

one of radical pollution, thereby proposing a political

affirmation of “(…) permanently partial identities and

contradictory standpoints” (p. 154). The cyborg is ‘post-human’

and ‘post-gender’: resisting unitary definition, the prefix

‘post’ signals a more modest engagement with such trajectories

as always already techno-digested, and polluted (p. 150).8

7 The full title of this article reads: ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science,

Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ (1991).8 Following this line of thought, I suggest the cyborg can also be seen as

‘post-race’, ‘post-species’, or, for that matter, ‘post-everything’: as a

figuration the cyborg resist pureness of analytical categories, instead

inviting an analytical lens that always already envisions phenomena in

their radical related-ness to the material-semiotic fabric of life in

general.

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In ‘The Companion Species Manifesto’ (2003)9 Haraway remarks that,

although the cyborg can surely account for some instances of

‘living within contradictions’, it does not fully succeed to

tell an ontological narrative that takes all matter of worldly

life into account (p. 11). Further explicating the concept of

companion species in her book “When Species Meet” (2008), Haraway

proposes an ontological narrative that positions cross-species

intra-actions at the core of situated forms of being. All

living creatures, so she argues, only come into being through

an ongoing process of touching and intra-acting, co-

constituting each other in the flesh (p. 16; p. 71). Her theory

of companion species defines ontology not only as always

already ‘polluted’ in its exceeding of established species and

body boundaries, but also as radically undetermined: not a

static state of ‘Being’, but an ongoing process of ‘becoming’

is what characterizes the ontological narratives of situated

beings. Because all matter emerges in response to ‘other’

matter, mutual responsibility is an integral part of all worldly

becoming (p. 71; also see Barad, 2012, p. 7). The proposition

of companion species is to envision an ethical engagement with

the inescapable touch of the human and non-human other as

ontologically determined and politically desirable (p. 42).10

9 The full title of this article reads: ‘The Companion Species Manifesto:

Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness’ (2003). 10 A short analysis of the image preceding the introduction to this paper (Fig. 1) might be illustrative to how the figuration of the tranimal

relates to the inquiry presented in the previous two paragraphs. In the

collaborative artwork ‘TRANIMAL workshop’ (2009-2013) by the artists Austin

Young, Squeaky Blonde and Fade-Dra, museum visitors were asked to dress up

as ‘tranimals’ in order to be photographed and made part of the exhibition.

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Following the requirements of companion species, Hayward’s

tranimal takes the onto-epistemological touch between the

becoming bodies of transgender humans and non-human animals as

its subject. The notion of ‘onto-epistemological touch’ that is

at stake exists out of two related trajectories inhabited by

the tranimal: First of all, the tranimal can figure as an

epistemological lens that brings a shared ontological principle

into vision, that is, a capacity for trans-morphism that is

actualized by certain non-human animals and transgender humans.11

Secondly, the tranimal can serve as a location from which to

The bodies that were materialized in the course of this project can in some

instances be seen as cyborg interpretations of the term tranimal: They

combine material-semiotic elements representing both mind and body,

imaginary and reality; human and animal; nature and culture; civilized and

primitive; man and woman; somatic and digital visual techniques,

redistributing gendered body parts beyond any desire for a readable

wholeness. Young’s tranimals are post-gender: a materialized “(…) monstrous

transgendered nemesis (…)”; the result of their own initiated transsexual

surgeries and reconstructions; patchworks of sexed, raced and ‘specie-fied’

body parts; thinking several axes of difference together into one artistic

material-semiotic framework (Haraway explained by Sullivan, ‘Somatechnics,

or Monstrosity Unbound’, 2006). However, Young’s tranimals as artistic

subjects do not necessarily extend into the trajectories inhabited by

companion species: the presence of actual and imaginary non-human animal

bodies that co-constitute the human bodies central to Young’s pictures does

not offer an opportunity for affective ‘touch’ or ethical response: the

other is represented as accessory; ornament; object. As a project governed

by postmodern queer politics, this artistic example makes it clear that a

mere engagement with human transgender embodiment via an ‘animalistic’

imaginary is precisely not what is meant with Eva Hayward’s deployment of

the tranimal as a location faithful to the legacy of companion species.

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view a certain position of vulnerability that is shared by all

subjects that fall outside the discursive framework of ‘the

human’ as an oppressive humanist category. The first trajectory

– a shared ontological investment in trans-morphism – informs

the second: ‘Trans-organisms’ are extra vulnerable to

diagnostic and pharmacological mechanisms of exclusion and

oppression, and might be forced to serve as disposable

‘experimental subjects’ (Kelley, 2014, p. 226). Bringing in yet

another trajectory on which the figuration of the tranimal

might be said to operate, the tranimal can also be taken as a

more literal embodied merging of animal matter with the bodies

of transgender humans when addressing the distribution of sex

hormones of animal origin – a dimension that requires

particular ethical-political engagement and is addressed by

Hayward (2014) as the phenomenon of transxenoestrogenesis (pp.

255-8).

In the proceeding chapter a deeper engagement with the

ontological and zoontological principle of trans-morphism as a

tranimal trajectory will be offered, whereas the contents and

ethical-political implications of transxenoestrogenesis as a

soma-technical companion species encounter will be further

explored in the third. For now, I want to propose a deeper

inquiry into the second trajectory mentioned above, namely the

notion of a position of vulnerability and exclusion that might

be shared by non-human animals and transgender humans. I will

11 In this instance, the term tranimal might also be used to signify these

specific non-human animals that ‘have a talent’ for trans-morphism as an

ontological potential.

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argue the conceptualization of such a position is posthumanist

par excellence and non-anthropocentric by invitation, crossing

the interdisciplinary boundaries of transgender and animal

studies.

Recalling the use of the prefix ‘post’ as a way of proposing an

engagement with a certain established category as always

already polluted and co-constituted by other phenomena and

matter, the adverb ‘posthumanist’ does not necessarily have to

make a project non-anthropocentric: posthumanist engagement can

very well adhere to a mere focus on the ontological becoming of

the homo sapiens (Rossini, ‘To the Dogs’,12 2006). It can also,

however, enable an anti-speciesist,13 non-anthropocentric critical

posthumanist engagement; such is the invitation of companion

species. When asked in an interview to comment on transgender

studies’ relation to posthumanist discourse, Stryker (2014)

comments:

“Through the operation of language, we move a body across the line that

separates mere biological organism from human community, transforming the

status of a nonhuman ‘it’ into a person through the conferral of a gender

12 The full title of this article reads: ‘To the Dogs: Companion Speciesism and the

New Feminist Materialism’ (2006). 13 With this term I do not mean to suggest critical posthumanism is in any

way against species, an argument Haraway’s term ‘companion species’ would

already contest. Rather, I aim to refer to a conceptualization of the term

‘species’ that is not hegemonic or biological essentialist, instead

defining ‘species’ as a specific relation to the dynamic materialization of

the world. This definition concurs with the one developed by Eva Hayward

(2006), who states that “[i]ndeed, species are relationships between

species (…)” (p. 181).

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status. (…) I think a lot of the violence and discrimination trans people

face derives from a fundamental inability on the part of others to see us

as fully human because we are considered improperly gendered, and thus

lower on the animacy hierarchy, therefore closer to death and inanimacy,

therefore more expendable and less valuable than humans. A transgender will

to life thus serves as a point from which to critique the human as a

universal status attributed to all members of the species, and to reveal it

instead as a narrower set of criteria wielded by some to dehumanize others”

(Stryker, as quoted by Dierkes-Thrun, ‘Transgender Studies Today’, 2014).14

First of all, Stryker here positions ‘the operation of

language’ as the locus for the attribution of ‘humanity’ via a

distribution of gender, asserting the status of ‘the nonhuman’

can be granted to members of the human species. Second, her

evocation of ‘the animacy hierarchy’ suggests such a mechanism

is part of an asymmetrical system that exceeds the category of

the human, affecting non-human bodies and lives as well. In the

last instance she offers the specificity of ‘a transgender

life’ as an entry point into this hegemonic system, dismantling

‘the human’ as an oppressive discursive construct that can

violate those who it excludes.

Leaving the meaning intended by Stryker aside, I suggest the

‘who’ concerned here can refer to humans as well as non-human

animals. As historian Wendy Doniger (2012) notes, non-human

animals have a long history of being ‘herded into words and

categories’ and ‘treated as trophies, food or experimental

objects’ in order to be made to vanish from ‘the human’ world

14 The full title of this article reads: ‘Transgender Studies Today: An

Interview with Susan Stryker’ (2014).

15

(p. 349). Again, the prevalence of language as an exclusionary

mechanism that confines (human as well as animal) ‘nonhuman’

life into the realms of the disposable and inanimate is

asserted here. Moreover, the specific linguistic phrasing of

Doniger’s argument – “(…) we have made them vanish from our

human world by the words and categories we have herded them into” (p. 349,

emphasis added) – suggests the idea that the matter of living

animal beings exceeds the limits of such words and categories.

In other words, living matter might be said to in some

instances exceed and proceed the discursive gesture of naming

and categorizing, thereby exhausting a merely social

constructivist paradigm. The idea that living animal beings may

‘expose the limits of linguistic representation’ and the

inadequacy of ‘naming’ as a humanist exercise15 might appear as

a productive strategy outside of a purely animal studies

context, were it allowed to cross disciplinary boundaries and

enter a critical posthumanist transgender studies project via

the figuration of the tranimal. This suggestion will be further

explored in an engagement with the notion of cross-species

trans-morphism as the ontological potential to move across

established linguistic and discursive categories; such is the

subject of the proceeding chapter.

I would like to end this chapter by addressing a possibly

dangerous trajectory the tranimal might come to inhabit, namely

15 The phrasing of this sentence is based on an argument made by critical

studies scholar Akira Mizuta Lippit (2000, as explained by Hayward, 2006,

p. 185). The full content of this argument will be engaged with in the

proceeding chapter to this paper.

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the (re-) naturalization of transgender embodiment, or, as

Hayward (2010) herself puts it, a “(…) hostile conflation of

queers and animals (…)” (p. 587). Although she acknowledges

this danger might occasionally haunt perverted interpretations

of the tranimal, Hayward (2006) emphasizes the invitation is

not to see human transgender and animal trans-morphic

embodiment as fundamentally the same, but rather to see them as

metonymic subjects whose soma-techniques, (zo-)ontologies,

phenomenological experiences and expulsion from language might

in some instances correspond (p. 183). Urging a creative

perspective on possible feelings of inconveniency – that in

fact already haunted the imaginary of Haraway’s cyborg as a

materialized ‘perverted apocalypse’ – she states tranimals

invite us to consider “(…) what the world could resemble if we

saw the borders separating selves [and] others as receptive,

magnetic to ‘those others whom we resemble though we may be

inclined to insist that we do not recognize them as our

coevals, our co-evils’” (Bartowski as quoted by Hayward, 2010,

p. 587). Referring to the notion of animal magnetism, the

invitation made here concurs with that of Haraway’s theory of

companion species: inviting us to conceptually ‘get over

ourselves’ and commit to an ontological narrative that

positions us as always already co-constituted and affected by

the human or non-human other, the tranimal as a companion

species informed figuration asks us to recognize, engage with,

and respond to, those others with whom we share a certain mode

of world-hood (Hayward, 2006, p. 187).

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3. The Tranimal at Work: Restoring Language, Bodies and Vision

to beings

In the previous chapter it has become clear the tranimal is

partly based on a notion of vulnerability and an exclusion from

language and ‘humanity’ that might in some instances be shared

by both transgender humans and non-human animals. Working on

the intersection of transgender and animal studies, the

suggestion has been made the capacity to exceed and exist

beyond linguistic and discursive categories that may be

attributed to non-human animals might inform a similar capacity

in other forms of ‘trans-life’, including that of humans.

Moreover, it has been suggested the capacity to ‘move across

established categories’ might be an ontological characteristic of

all living matter, that only ever exists in a state of permanent

intra-action with worldly others. In addition, the idea of

trans-morphic embodiment has been proposed to refer to those

human and non-human animals that might have a special ‘talent’

to fulfill this ontological potential in the course of their

materialization. In this chapter I will further explore the

ontological trajectories of the tranimal by means of a more

detailed exploration of two essays by Eva Hayward, aiming to

see how the tranimal is deployed here as both an analytical

tool and a creative device to think more affirmatively about

companion species trans-morphic embodiment.

In her essay ‘Lessons from a Starfish’ (2006) Hayward sets out to

reconfigure ‘the ontological imaginary’ of post-operative

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transsexual embodiment (p. 183). Contemporary academic as well

as medical discourses that continue to adhere to the ‘trapped

in the wrong body narrative’, so she argues, keep transsexual

embodiment trapped in a negative imaginary. The prefix ‘trans-‘

too, she suggests, implies that the physical process of

transitioning can somehow be seen as an act of transcendence from

sex, gender, or the ‘old’ body altogether. Within this

imaginary the surgical cuts enacted on the body come to

represent a kind of amputation: an ‘absence of parts’ of the

body (pp. 182-3). This kind of negative imaginary positions

transsexual bodies as somehow alienated from themselves,

ontologically characterized by absence, mutilation and a lack

of affirmative agency. Part of this alienation is thus

generated through the ‘operation’ of language.

In order to shift this negative ontological imaginary, Hayward

engages in a zoontological exploration of a specific tranimal:

the starfish. Starting from the starfish’s unique ability to

‘grow itself back’ out of amputated limps, Hayward asserts both

starfish and post-operative transsexual humans “(…) share a

phenomenological experience of re-shaping and re-working bodily

boundaries” that is mobilized through a bodily cut (p. 184).

The starfish’s zoontological potential to regenerate its own

flesh as well as to rework its intra-action with the world

through a reshaping of bodily boundaries is in fact an act of

healing. Using the embodied trans-morphic potential of the

starfish to generate a new ontological imaginary in which the

transsexual human might share, Hayward proposes to see the

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surgical cut as a productive, healing property of the body,

rather than something that is done to the body or allows a

trapped subject to step out of the body (pp. 183-4). The prefix

‘re’ in ‘regeneration’ can linguistically account for a notion

of transformative embodiment that restores the body to itself

through the fulfilment of its own ontological potential. By

reinventing language to speak affirmatively of trans-morphic

embodiment as an act of healing, both transsexual humans and

starfish re-inhabit language, thereby ‘moving back into life’

(p. 186).

What is at stake here is thus the affirmative reconfiguration

of trans-morphic embodiment via a notion of shared processes and

experiences of worldly becoming. Methodologically speaking,

Hayward asserts that words enact certain materializations

rather than others, as her own exploration of ‘trans-’ versus

‘re-’ embodiment demonstrates. In her consideration of starfish

zoontology as a methodological gesture, Hayward brings in the

concept of the ‘animetaphor’. Asserting all living animal beings

are magnetic – that is, the material borders of their being

respond to, and are co-constitutive of, all matter of other

worldliness – this concept points to the idea human language

always already fails to contain the reality of animal beings and

is as such consumed by the ontological indeterminacy of the

living matter it attempts to confine (Lippit, 2000, as

explained by Hayward, 2006, pp. 184-5). Exposing the limits of

linguistic signification and discursive containment, the living

bodies of non-human animals “(…) are always restoring words to beings”

21

(p. 185, emphasizes added). As the genetic expression of the

starfish exceeds the linguistic-discursive categorical binary

of ‘wholeness’ (life) versus ‘partiality’ (death), Hayward puts

this tranimal to the task of ‘consuming’ the discursive and

linguistic constraints that are placed upon trans-morphic

embodiment, allowing human and non-human trans-lives to burst

back into life, both in flesh and in word:

“We, transsexuals and starfish, are animate bodes; our bodies are

experienced and come to be known through encounters with other animate

bodies. This is sensate intertwining – inter-corporal zones between these

bodies in language and in experience. Starfish and transsexuals share

world-hood both semiotic (as metonymic kinds) and phenomenological

enactments – is this not some form of inter-somaticity” (Hayward, 2006, p.

187)?

In this definition, starfish and transsexual humans indeed

become companion species: they come into being through a

process of onto-epistemological co-constitution, sharing

magnetic worldliness; experiences of trans-morphic embodiment;

and a need to escape their violent exclusion from language and

humanist discourse. But is this a form of inter-somaticity? In

the proceeding paragraphs I will explore a more literal example

of physical intra-somatic touch as a trajectory of tranimal

encounters, demonstrating how this may bring out the question

of non-anthropocentric ethical-political engagement more

explicitly.

In her later essay ‘Fingereyes: Impressions of Cup Corals’ (2010),

Hayward offers a conceptualization of the word ‘species’ as

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impressions: Because species only ever come into being in

relation to each other, species are relations; they are

impressions made upon one another (p. 581).16 Taking this

ontological narrative to the shop floor, Hayward engages in a

multispecies ethnographical project at the Long Marine

Laboratory in California, describing her own becoming with cup

corals and the ‘impressions’ they made on her – a process she

describes as ‘trans-speciation’ (p. 581). Intra-acting with the

cup coral’s ‘haptic-optic’ senses, Hayward asserts their

particular ways of ‘sensing’, ‘feeling’ and ‘seeing’ radically

diffract and exceed human definitions of these sensory

trajectories. Capturing this zoontological pollution of the

humanist imaginary with the term ‘fingereyes’, Hayward proposes

to take this impression seriously as the starting point for an

alternative conceptualization of visuality as a property of,

rather than something located in, the body (p. 580; p. 582). In

emulation of the starfish, the cup coral’s embodied

zoontlogical difference and capacity to exceed human categories

of sensing, perceiving and interacting is put to the task of

restoring vision to living beings, conceptualizing this

particular sensory trajectory as a situated multiplicity of

senses.17

16 This standpoint concurs with her earlier mentioned work on starfish’s

zoontology, in which she states: “Indeed, species are relationships between

species (…)” (Hayward, 2006, p. 181). 17 Giving vision back to the body as its agential and embodied property, I

suggest this reconfiguration can be seen as a broader intervention into

disembodied academic practices. Such intervention might be positioned as a

response to Haraway’s (1988) earlier invitation to ‘situated knowledges’ as

opposed to the ‘cannibalistic eye’ created by “(…) the instruments of

23

As by now has become clear, the concept of ‘fingereyes’ emerged

from an intellectual and physical impression offered by the cup

coral as a living being. As Hayward points out, the

implications of such impressions generated by physical touch

open up the trajectory of non-anthropocentric ethical-political

engagement:

“Cross-species sensations are always mediated by power that leaves

impressions, which leaves bodies imprinted and furrowed with consequences.

Animal bodies—the coral’s and mine—carry forms of domination, communion,

and activation into the folds of being. As we look for multispecies

manifestations we must not ignore the repercussions that these unions have

for all actors. In the effort to touch corals, to make sense of their

biomechanics, I have also aided in the death of the corals I describe here;

this species-sensing is not easily refused by the animals” (Hayward, 2010,

p. 592).

Following Haraway (2008) in a consideration of lab animals and

human researchers as companion species (pp. 69-94), the

necropolitical dimension of Hayward’s intra-action with the cup

corals opens up the necessity of an ethical-political

engagement that exceeds the boundaries of human well-being. As

becomes clear in the previous quote, the cornerstones of such

engagement are recognition and responsibility: by addressing

the vital and deathly asymmetrical distribution of power

shaping this particular companion species encounter, it becomes

clear that – even though all living beings are constituted in

response to one another – their capacity to respond might differ

dramatically. The discursively established capability to

visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture” (p. 582).

24

respond, then, serves as a leading principle with regard to the

unequal distribution of responsibility (Haraway, 2008, p. 71). As

becomes clear here, the tranimal’s emergence out of a position

of vulnerability or disposable ‘experimental subject’ that

might be shared by both human and non-human ‘trans-life’ does

not necessarily makes a project of cross-trans-morphic-species

social justice imperative. As Lindsay Kelley (2014) argues,

“[t]rans- organisms are under the same knife, compelled to

navigate diagnostic and pharmacological landscapes” (p. 226).

In the companion species encounter described by Hayward,

however, it is the cup coral as tranimal that finds itself

under the knife of a transgender studies scholar that attempts

to reconfigure an epistemological narrative. In the proceeding

chapter I will further explore the position of the tranimal as

a suffering actor in human transgender soma-techniques.

4. A Political Tranimal: Companion or Sister Species?

In the preceding chapter it has become clear the academic

deployment of the tranimal inhabits a clearly ethical-political

dimension with the well being of its non-human animal co-

constituters. In this chapter I aim to investigate how the

tranimal as a material-semiotic configuration relates to the

possibility of non-anthropocentric cross-species social

justice.

As has become clear in my exploration of Hayward’s encounter

with the cup coral, a companion species perspective does not

necessarily make an intervention into tranimal suffering

25

imperative. In this chapter I would like to revisit Hayward’s

deployment of the cup coral as tranimal in order to further

explore the possibility of cross-species social justice as a

tranimal trajectory. Establishing a link between non-normative

human sexualities and the sexual life of cup corals – whose

embodiment and sexual behaviour does not follow the

trajectories of heteronormativity – Hayward (2010) opens up a

possibility for cross-species solidarity: playing on the double

meaning of the word ‘invert’, that is, homosexual humans versus

spineless sea critters, she argues that cup corals and human

beings with non-normative sexual behaviour and desires are

subjected to the same mechanisms of exclusion and

epistemological violence (p. 589; p. 590). The idea that

different manifestations of exclusion and violence are the

product of the same interlocking mechanisms of oppression is

asserted by both ecofeminists and animal activists Lisa

Kemmerer (ed., 2011, p. 6) and Carol Adams (2010, p. 23),

resulting in Kemmerer’s theory of ‘sister species’. The

analytical, ethical and political imperatives of this theory

are clear: The violent materializations of asymmetrical power

relations can only be adequately addressed and countered by

arguing and acting against all inequalities; “(…) by our actions

or inactions, by our caring or our indifference, we are either part

of the problem or part of the solution” (Loyd-Paige as quoted in

Kemmerer, 2011, p. 4, emphasizes added). Following this line of

thought, there can be no affirmative reconfiguration of human

trans-morphic embodiment without opposing the deployment and

status of starfish and cup corals as ‘experimental subjects’.

26

As will become clear in the proceeding paragraphs, the concept

of sister species might be deployed as a critical tool to

explore the tranimal’s third and last trajectory, namely that

of transxenoestrogenetic soma-techniques.

In short, the term transxenoestrogenesis refers to the animal

origin of a large amount of sex hormones that are used in

transsexual healthcare. Drawing on Kelley’s (2014) definition

of the tranimal, this intra-action of transformative animal

matter with the bodies of transsexual humans can be seen as a

co-constitutive, companion species relation: “Within the

imagined correspondence between trans- and animal, nonhuman and

human, fragile lives are set adrift on currents of biomedical capital” (p. 226,

emphasizes added). The notion of ‘imagined’ correspondence

might be reconsidered in light of feminist philosopher Beatrix

Preciado’s (2013) theory on the ‘currents’ of the

pharmocopornographic era. As Preciado explains, the medical

discourse concerning transsexual transitions has its origins in

a “(…) game of cut-and-paste on the bodies of non-human animals

(…)” (p. 166). Having an origin in animal experiments, the

trans-morphic potential of animal bodies thus seem to lay at

the base of creating the possibility of human transsexual

embodiment. Contemporary hormonal soma-techniques continue to

carry this violent legacy. Describing her own use of the sex

hormone testosterone, Preciado states:

“Each time I give myself a dose of testosterone, I agree to this pact. I kill the

blue whale; I cut the throat of the bull at the slaughterhouse; I take the

27

testicles of the prisoner condemned to death. I become the blue whale, the

bull, the prisoner” (Preciado, 2013, p. 163, emphasizes added).

As becomes clear here ones more, recognition does not have to

avert the kill. In addition, the vulnerable position of the

experimental subject is ones more asserted to be posthuman in

character: the mechanisms of exclusion and oppression align the

whale, the bull and the prisoner, whose status as nonhumans

have enabled their use for the creation of hormone therapy for

those considered to be ‘human enough’. The intra-somatic

materializations enacted through such processes of asymmetrical

but mutual co-constitution – or co-undoing – between those

human and non-human lives implicated in biomedical, capitalist

hormone industries “(…) unite and separate them with the same

movement”, as Preciado puts it (p. 154). The question that

surfaces here is whether human and non-human tranimals are

indeed united in their material-semiotic becomings, but

simultaneously separated by the same animacy hierarchy that

their shared ontology seems to deny. As Amade M’Charek &

Grietje Keller (2008) note, “[t]echnologies (…) are at the

heart of enacting (possible) worlds and possible links between

individuals” (p. 62). Indeed, hormonal technologies constitute

a particularly tranimal relation, linking individual across

species boundaries. As the inquiry presented here shows,

however, relations do not have to result in a mutual sharing in

the decreasing of suffering.

5. Conclusion: Towards a Tranimal Manifesto?

28

In the first chapter of this paper I have positioned the

tranimal as a critical posthumanist, companion species

figuration, operating on the intersection of transgender and

animal studies. The notion of a trans-morphic ontological

potential has been established as the grounds for an onto-

epistemological narrative that takes into account processes of

ontogenesis as well as a position of vulnerability as the

shared trajectories of human and non-human animal ‘trans-

lives’.

Adopting the idea living animal bodies might exceed the

confinement of human language, discourse and categorical

organization, certain tranimals have been put to the task of

enabling a more affirmative onto-epistemological narrative of

human transgender and transsexual embodiment. It has also been

clear this transgender studies investment into the intra-action

between soma, technique and episteme has the potential to

exceed its disciplinary boundaries, instead proposing broader

interventions into the whole of academic knowledge production,

such as the establishment of a renewed relationship between the

body and the notion of vision.

In the last chapter the more necropolitical dimensions of the

tranimal figuration have been explored. It has there become

clear that the tranimal continues to be informed by

asymmetrical power relations, thereby adhering to Haraway’s

theory of companion species rather than Kemmerer’s sister

species. Although the tranimal does not make cross-species

29

social justice imperative, it offers a location from which to

critically, creatively and politely engage with asymmetrical

modes of worldly trans-morphic becoming.

4959 words (max 5000)

30

6. Literature

Carol Adams

“The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory”,

Continuum, New York & London, 2010.

Karen Barad

“Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of

Matter and Meaning”, Durham, Duke University Press, 2007;

‘On Touching: The Inhuman That Therefore I am’, in: “The

Politics of Materiality”, by Suzanne Witzgall (ed.), 2012 (a),

pp. 1-16, forthcoming, online available: <

http://womenstudies.duke.edu/uploads/media_items/on-

touching-the-inhuman-that-therefore-i-am-v1-1.original.pdf

> (12-04-2014), revised version of the essay ‘On Touching:

The Inhuman That Therefore I am’, by Karen Barad, in:

Differences, vol. 23 (3), 2012, pp. 206-223.

Mel Y. Chen, Natalie Corinne Hansen, Eva Hayward, Lindsay

Kelley, Katie King & Prema Prabhakar

‘TRANimals: Theorizing the Trans- in Zoontology’, Atlanta,

Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, 2009

(November), online available: <

http://www.litsciarts.org/slsa09/archive/slsa09-1132.pdf >

(17-01-2015).

Petra Dierkes-Thrun

31

‘Transgender Studies Today: An Interview with Susan

Stryker’, in: Boundary2, 20-08-2014, online available: <

http://boundary2.org/2014/08/20/transgender-studies-today-

an-interview-with-susan-stryker/ > (17-01-2015).

Wendy Doniger

‘Making Animals Vanish’, in: “Animals and the Human Imagination:

A Companion to Animal Studies”, by Aaron Gross & Anne Vallely

(eds.), New York, Columbia University Press, 2012, pp.

349-354.

Donna J. Haraway

‘Situated Knowledges. The Science Question in Feminism and

the Privilege of Partial Perspective’ in: Feminist Studies 14

(1988), pp. 575-599; ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science,

Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth

Century”, in: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature,

New York, Routledge, 1991, pp. 149-181; ‘The Companion

Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant

Otherness’, Chicago, Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003, pp.1-39;

“When Species Meet”, Minneapolis & London, University of

Minnesota Press, 2008.

Eva Hayward

‘Lessons of a Starfish’, in: “The Transgender Studies Reader”,

SusanStryker & Stephen Whittle (eds.), New York,

Routledge, 2006, pp. 178-188; ‘Fingereyes: Impressions of

Cup Corals’, in: Cultural Anthropology, vol. 25 (nr. 4),

2010 (November), pp. 577-599; ‘Transxenoestrogenesis’, in:

32

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 1 (nr. 1-2), 2014 (May),

pp. 255-258.

Lindsay Kelley

‘Tranimals’, in: ‘Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a

Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies’, by Paisley

Currah & Susan Stryker (special issue eds.), in: TSQ:

Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 1 (nr. 1-2), 2014 (May), pp.

226-228.

Lisa Kemmerer (ed.)

“Sister Species: Women, Animals & Social Justice”, University of

Illinois Press, Illinois, 2011.

Amade M’Charek & Grietje Keller

‘Parenthood and Kinship in IVF for Humans and Animals’,

in: “Bits of Life. Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and

Technology”, by Nina Lykke & Anneke Smelik (eds.), Seattle

& London, University of Washington, 2008, pp. 61-78.

Beatriz Preciado

“Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era”,

New York, The Feminist Press, 2013.

Manuela Rossini

‘To the Dogs: Companion Speciesism and the New Feminist

Materialism’, in: Kritikos: An International and Interdisciplinarity

Journal of Postmodern Cultural Sounds, Text and Image, vol. 3, 2006

33

(September), online available: <

http://intertheory.org/rossini > (17-01-2015).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

‘Translator’s Preface’, in: “Of Grammatology”, by Jacques

Derrida, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976,

pp. 8-74.

Susan Stryker

‘(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender

Studies’, in: “The Transgender Studies Reader”, SusanStryker &

Stephen Whittle (eds.), New York, Routledge, 2006, pp. 1-

18; ‘An Introduction to Transgender Terms and Concepts’,

in: “Transgender History”, Berkeley, Seal Press, 2008, pp. 1-

30.

Nikki Sullivan

‘Somatechnics, or Monstrosity Unbound’, in: Scan: Journal of

Media Arts Culture, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2006, online available: <

http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=83

> (17-01-2015).

34

7. Images

Fig. 1: Tranimal, photograph by Austin Young, 2009-2013,

photograph: ‘Tranimal’, by Austin Young, 2009-2013, as part of

the art project ‘TRANIMAL Workshop’, by Austin Young, Squeaky

Blonde & Fade-Dra, preformed at Hammer Museum, 2010 & Berkeley

Art Museum, 2011, photograph as published in ‘Photography:

Austin Young – Tranimal’, author unknown, in: HotOctopus: Music,

Men, Culture, Art, online available: <

http://hotoctopus.blogspot.nl/2013/03/photography-austin-young-

tranimal.html > (17-01-2015).

35