Date of Award
9-6-2024
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English
First Advisor
Suzanne Bost
Abstract
This dissertation describes human-animal relationships as sites of political longing and meaningful failure in the context of twentieth and twenty-first U.S. fiction and media. I locate three tendencies of imagination prevalent in writing about bonds between humans and other animals: collaboration in regional modernity, refamiliarization in consumer capitalism, and transformation in rationalist patriarchy. These expressions of desire for a different way of relating, I argue, open important windows into the places where current power structures generate suffering and distress. I also emphasize the compelling but imperfect nature of these expressions. The texts and images in this dissertation offer attempts to imagine a more liberatory set of human-animal and human-human relationships than those we currently know, but they never quite succeed. There is a key tension here between an expressed longing for a liberatory mode of relating and the failures of imagination or language that emerge in the speaking of them. Rather than treat this tension as a neutralizing force, however, my goal is to draw out the intensity of the imagined animal bond as a site for what Donna Haraway calls “staying with the trouble.” Ultimately, this project is working toward a methodology that can hold the energy generated by a longing for change together with a strong rejection of the ways the individual expression of that longing must inevitably fall short of full liberation, seeking a way to critique these relationships without abandoning their affective power.
Recommended Citation
Hawkins, John Charles, "Warm Bodies, Strong Attachments, and the Search for Better Bonds: The Politics of Human-Animal Entanglements In U.S. Fiction and Media" (2024). Dissertations. 4143.
https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/4143
