Critical Animal Studies and Theory – serie

Screening the Nonhuman draws connections between how animals represented on screen translate into reality. In doing so, the book demonstrates that consuming media is not a neutral act but rather a political one. The images humans consume have real world consequences for how animals are treated as actors, as pets, and in nature. The contributors propose that altering the representations of animals can change the way humans relate to non/humans. Our hope is for humans to generate more ethical relationships with non/humans, ultimately mediating reality both in terms of fiction and non-fiction. To achieve this end, film, television, advertisements, and social media are analyzed through an intersectional lens. But the book doesn’t stop here. Each author creates counter-representational strategies that promise to unweave the assumptions that have led to the mistreatment of humans and non/humans alike.

Animals and War: Confronting the Military-Animal Industrial Complex is the first book to examine how nonhuman animals are used for war by military forces. Each chapter delves deeply into modes of nonhuman animal exploitation: as weapons, test subjects, and transportation, and as casualties of war leading to homelessness, starvation, and death. With leading scholar-activists writing each chapter, this is an important text in the fields of peace studies and critical animal studies. This is a must read for anyone interested in ending war and fostering peace and justice.

The Intersectionality of Critical Animal, Disability, and Environmental Studies:Toward Eco-ability, Justice, and Liberation is an interdisciplinary collection of theoretical writings on the intersectional liberation of nonhuman animals, the environment, and those with disabilities. As animal consumption raises health concerns and global warming causes massive environmental destruction, this book interweaves these issues and more. This important cutting-edge book lends to the rapidly growing movement of eco-ability, a scholarly field and activist movement influenced by environmental studies, disability studies, and critical animal studies, similar to other intersectional fields and movements such as eco-feminism, environmental justice, food justice, and decolonization. Contributors to this book are in the fields of education, philosophy, sociology, criminology, rhetoric, theology, anthropology, and English. If you are interested in social justice, inclusion, environmental protection, disability rights, and animal advocacy this is a must read book.

Superheroes and Critical Animal Studies explores and puts into dialogue two growing field of studies, comic studies and critical animal studies. The book’s aim is to create a form of praxis that people can use to actualize many of the values superheroes strive to protect. To this end, contributor chapters are divided into sections on the foundation of superhero representation and how to teach it, criticisms of particular superheroes and how they fall short of truly protecting the planet, and interpretations of specific characters that can be read to produce a positive orientation to the nonhuman world and craft strategies to promote liberation in the real world. Altogether, the book produces a form of scholarship on the media that is both intersectional in scope and tailored to have an impact on the reader beyond theorizing superheroes for theorization’s sake.

Gender and Sexuality in Critical Animal Studies explores nonhuman animals’ experiences of gender, physiological sex, and sexuality while in nature and captivity. The contributors analyze nonhuman oppression issues such as reproductive freedom, deconstructing dichotomous thinking, and promoting animal liberation within and beyond the academy. The scholar-activists featured in this collection investigate injustice in news stories, literature, and other media that shape human perceptions and treatment toward nonhumans. Each chapter confronts problematic social constructions of gender, physiological sex, or sexuality by applying literary theory, cultural studies, disability studies, queer studies, ecocriticism, and more to promote justice and equity for nonhuman animals.

An essential read for activists, community organizers, and justice scholars Critical Animal Studies and Social Justice: Critical Theory, Dismantling Speciesism, and Total Liberation is a collection that combines scholarship and activism in nine ground-breaking and provocative chapters. The book includes contributions from around the world influenced by critical theory, feminism, social justice, political theory, media studies, environmental justice, food justice, disability studies, and Black liberation. By promoting total liberation and liberatory politics, these essays challenge the reader to think about new approaches to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. The contributors examine and disrupt many of the exclusionary assumptions and behaviors by those working toward justice and liberation, encouraging the reader to reflect on their own thoughts and actions.

While the dominant cultural narrative depicts the history of hunting, capturing, and killing of other animals as beneficial for human development, historical and contemporary evidence shows otherwise. This book reveals that the human practice of stalking, killing, exploiting, and eating other animals led to the social construction of a malev(i)olent and predacious form of masculinity and the start of human social stratification and oppression. Thereafter the course of human social development was placed on a deformative trajectory, leading to warfare, the emergence of deadly zoonotic disease, and terrorist-based colonial and imperialist orders. Primarily spread throughout the world by way of European conquests, and leading to the rise of capitalism, hunting and this violent and rapacious form of masculinity is continually promoted as ideal training for warfare and global domination, especially in the United States. As US-driven global violence and destruction accelerates in the 21st century, challenges to this dominant form of masculinity and its caustic capitalist progeny are essential for creating a peaceful and sustainable world.