ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how feminist forms of knowledge emphasizing the value of contextual, emotional, and embodied understandings can recognize and respond to animal and human oppression. Ecofeminist writers have helped us understand that the categories of gender and sexuality create and contest our understanding of animals and, by extension, humans. The tools of gender and sexuality studies allow us to talk about how certain kinds of animals are gendered and, in turn, how the dehumanization of marginalized people has historically been a colonial tool of violence. To see these dynamics at work, we will examine two case studies: one about the crazy cat lady, and one about the cats of Istanbul. The first will show how the historical association between women and cats—as witches, as liminal creatures—is used to exile “unruly” or “undomesticated” women from human social worlds. The second case study looks at how cats themselves are sexed and gendered by their human caregivers (as fathers, mothers, and jealous wives). We will also see how differing religious and cultural norms allow cisgender men to take part in animal rescue in Istanbul without the same fears of social stigma faced by cat ladies in the U.S. The insights of scholars who study how gender and sexuality intersect with animals, race, and religion allow us to see new and sometimes disturbing dimensions of seemingly ordinary interactions we have with animals.
