Pussy Panic versus liking animals: Tracking Gender in Animal Studies

Details

Susan Fraiman ‘Pussy Panic versus liking animals: Tracking Gender in Animal Studies’ Critical Inquiry 39 (2012), 89-115.

Comments

Please make any comments relating to this item here

Fraiman makes the point that the field of animal studies owes its emergence largely to women writers and feminists working in the field for the last 40 years, but that this debt is overlooked in more recent animal studies work that positions Derrida as the authorizing, making-respectable, forefather of the field. Fraiman draws attention to the ways that this story about the field’s emergence generates a bias against women authors who preceded him, and that it is also manifest in the gendered way that sentiment towards animals is repudiated. I wonder if a ‘pussy panic award’ might be introduced, awarded to scholarship that goes out of its way (seemingly) to avoid citing foundational feminist work in the field of animal studies, but that’s another story, and one that might trip me up here because of who and what I can cite in this entry! - FIONA PROBYN-RAPSEY