ABSTRACT
This chapter follows the author as I reminisce about an early acquired stigma against madness. Using critical animal studies to intervene into mad studies, I challenge the formulation of disease narratives using the example of mad cow disease in the United Kingdom during the late 1990s. Circling back through the structures that framed this chaotic period for both humans and animals, this chapter critically reframes the mainstream mad cow disease narrative using mad and disability studies scholarship to oppose sanist and carnist cruelty and violence. The pathologizing of the cattle involved is countered by attention to choreographies of resistance observed in cattle, what I call a “refusal to cow.” By projecting imaginative agential power onto the affected cattle, “Cripping Mad Cow Disease” reclaims space for anti-assimilationism among contained animal bodies.
