Open AccessThe Ugly Animal
Author(s) -
Emily Snyder
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
humanimalia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2151-8645
DOI - 10.52537/humanimalia.9970
Subject(s) - disgust , human animal , politics , epistemology , power (physics) , aesthetics , environmental ethics , focus (optics) , psychology , sociology , psychoanalysis , philosophy , social psychology , political science , law , ecology , biology , physics , optics , anger , quantum mechanics , livestock
In this paper, I consider the importance of examining negative aesthetics for thinking about animal-human relations. Specifically, I concentrate on the ugly animal and ask: how might a focus on ugliness, disgust, and abjection help us to further understand animal-human relations in both theory and practice? I draw on the pigeon and pigeon feces to consider possible contributions from Donna Haraway and Michel Serres, for addressing my question. Ultimately I abandon Haraway’s respectful relationality, as well as Serres’s parasitic relationality, to consider what a politics of disgust might offer instead for a political and ethical approach to animal-human relations that is more practically attentive to discomfort, power, and conflict.