Disidentification with the human and/as doing creature hope

UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
Dayne B. Alexander (Creator)
Institution
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
Advisor
Danielle Bouchard

Abstract: The purpose of this thesis is to imagine a posthumanist ethical comportment in the wake of injury and in the face of species disgust. I specify a posthumanist ethical comportment versus a posthumanist ethics to recognize the multiplicity of ethical bearings and beings with others rather than a single compact, deployable ethics. There is not a right, ethical answer to unethical situations and to speak to this impossibility to also to speak to the incoherency of beings and hopes. This thesis is a part of the always failing project of dismantling the human and the violences that accompany humanisms through the unknowability of creature-beings. I bring together the work of scholars in feminist theory, queer theory, posthumanist critical animal studies, ecofeminisms, performance studies, critical race studies, and feminist science studies, tracing the implications of their work for posthumanisms and each of their relationships to my concepts of disidentification with the human and/as doing creature hope. I particularly draw on the work of José Muñoz and his conceptions of disidentification and hope. Unique in its open analysis beyond racialized or gendered analogy, this thesis examines the function of suffering in posthumanisms, what interspecies hopes, fears, pleasures, and anxieties reveal about the human, and interspecies sexual intimacies that might be known as bestiality, in order to imagine what it means to treat others well. Critiquing notions of empathy and ethics that rely on likeness or proximity to the human or human affinity or knowledge practices, I explore what it means to have and practice creature hope.

Additional Information

Publication
Thesis
Language: English
Date: 2016
Keywords
Critical Animal Studies, Disidentification, Ecofeminism, Hope, Posthumanism
Subjects
Human-animal relationships $x Moral and ethical aspects
Human-animal relationships $x Philosophy
Animals (Philosophy)
Animals $x Social aspects
Humanism
Speciesism
Suffering
Hope

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