ABSTRACT
This chapter critically explores the intersectional relationship of women and animals via the discourses of stress and distress in both laboratory animal welfare and psychiatry. It uses the term ‘Animaladies,’ coined by feminists Lori Gruen and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey to reconstruct the historical rise of psychological mechanisms of control over nonhuman animals in the laboratory and of the psychiatric classification and treatment of women's pre-menstrual stress. The rise and eventual legalisation of psychological care over nonhuman laboratory animals is the site of emergence of the modern laboratory animal. Correlatively, it is also the site where the ‘female’ body becomes constituted and ‘cared’ for. Discourses of laboratory care over nonhuman animals are entangled both literally and metaphorical with a psychiatric discourse of care over menstruating ‘distressed’ women. Women and animals’ bodies are entwined in patriarchal pathological classifications.
