ABSTRACT
The interdisciplinary field of animal studies shares much in common with feminist and queer theory. In the simplest terms possible, animal studies’ foundational stance of questioning human dominance in every realm of existence (including critical theory) bears structural resemblance to feminism and queer theory’s shared effort to interrogate the hegemony of patriarchy. As literary scholar Susan McHugh explains, “Nonhuman nonheteronormativity presents a profound challenge not just to identity forms but more importantly to disciplinary habits of thinking of human subjectivity as the default form of social agency” (McHugh 2009: 155). From a more materialist perspective, ecofeminist Carol J. Adams argues that there is an essential connection between patriarchal culture and meat eating; for Adams, the oppression of women and the oppression of animals “are culturally analogous and interdependent” (Adams 1990: 90). We might locate another region of common concern in the domain of sexuality. The
evidence is all around us, and the issue merits analysis more than ever in the digital era: animal images, like images of women, obsessively center on questions of sexual behavior. It is a commonplace to observe that the internet’s raison d’eˆtre is porn … and cats. Though these two categories (internet porn and animals on the internet) might seem unrelated, what happens if we consider their commonalities? (Indeed the porn-animal confluence has spawned many a meme and Tumblr site: visit the BarelyFeral Tumblr for starters.) Not just cats but animals in general thrive (as images) in digital culture. Animal reproductive habits function as one of the major motifs in nature documentaries, and YouTube is filled with animal mating videos. Although it is impossible to determine the amount of internet traffic devoted to it, pornography is now receiving sustained critical attention from feminist scholars working in the burgeoning field of porn studies (Grebowicz 2013; Williams 2014). While Constance Penley, Celine Parren˜as Shimizu, Mireille Miller-Young, and Tristan Taormino are handling the topic of feminist porn elsewhere in this volume, this article aims to interrogate the convergence between animals, gender, and sexuality in contemporary digital culture. In order to find a point of focus on this large topic, I concentrate on a rather singular case study: the web series Green Porno (2008-9), directed by and starring Isabella Rossellini. Green Porno crystallizes a set of concerns shared by feminism, media studies, and post-
humanism, including sexuality, anthropomorphism, and the performative female body.
Each episode in the series takes the form of an educational film, presenting information about the mating habits of certain animals (insects and sea creatures, specifically). But Green Porno’s style of visualization is nothing like the staid presentation of facts one finds in the old-school classroom film. Instead, the series features Rossellini herself dressed as each animal-earthworm, firefly, barnacle, anglerfish-in colorful costumes made out of simple materials such as paper, foam, and lycra. There is no attempt at realism, and yet the series succeeds in educating viewers about animal reproduction while at the same time reveling in its polymorphously perverse blurring of human/animal and male/female boundaries. Green Porno is unique (and uniquely delightful), yet it is one of countless “novelty” videos to go viral in the hothouse environment of early social media in the late 2000s. As such a digital novelty, it is both exceptional and symptomatic. The fact that it is about sex, gender, and animals is what makes it of interest here. Animal studies emerged as an interdisciplinary field in the humanities in the 1980s, the
same era that fueled much feminist film theory. But until recently, animal studies has been much less influential than feminism; it has been gaining momentum in the last decade as related critical paradigms in posthumanism and the nonhuman have been gaining critical traction. Of course, there are many feminisms; likewise there are many perspectives within animal studies. Rather than trying to sketch an overview of animal studies’ many forms, and rather than arguing for one or another version as the best approach, this article is motivated by the question: What do images of animals share in common with images of women in the digital era? I argue that Green Porno is an example of feminist performance that uses the figure of the animal to challenge normative concepts of sexuality. John Berger’s article “Why Look at Animals,” first published in 1977, is arguably the
foundational work of critical animal studies. In it, Berger makes the now-canonical argument that while animals have disappeared from everyday life in modernity, they have reappeared as signs of themselves in a set of specific practices: zoos, pets, children’s toys. If he were to rewrite his essay now, Berger would most certainly address the proliferation of animals on the internet. Berger’s essay was not explicitly feminist, nor did it engage with questions of gender, but it did establish the key point that when you look at animals (zoo animals in particular), “you are looking at something that has been rendered absolutely marginal” (Berger 1991: 24, italics in original). It is only a small step to recognize that the question of marginality or minoritarian status (whether actual, imposed, or strategic) has been one to which feminist film theorists have returned repeatedly over the years. One of the key arguments of animal studies is that animals are rarely, if ever, represented as
animals; rather they are constructed by and through their relationship to the human via anthropomorphism, allegory, or other anthropocentric constructs. Science might seem to come closest to the goal of objective representation, but even scientific images fail to represent animals as animals (see Daston and Galison 2007). Instead, scholars have argued, following Berger, that animals disseminate an idea of “nature” rather than nature itself. And “nature,” as Raymond Williams famously wrote, “is perhaps the most complex word in the language” (Williams 1983: 219). We might start by pointing out that the word frequently exists as a category through which to define what or who counts as “human.” Akira Lippit writes,
