ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 explores how the centring of white, upper/middle-class men has permeated animal activism across intellectual, organisational, and radical typologies, following feminist thinkers such as Carol J. Adams. This history of white, masculine rationality as a legitimiser of beyond-human care is critiqued in the archives of Richard D. Ryder. The challenging relationships with/in the archive are considered in this chapter and theorised through a ‘befriending’ not only of the material archive, but of the people therein and beyond the archive, despite critical engagements with these historical geographies. This chapter attends to the materiality of the contemporary archive to question what constitutes an archive, especially in the archiving of activist movements that are often omitted from or reshaped by institutional memory. This chapter asks questions about archival relationships to power, and how this shapes historical narratives to create powerful stories by smoothing out multiplicity. Feminist and class politics, as well as the whiteness of the animal activism archive, are also considered. Drawing on archival evidence of women thinkers such as Roslind Godlovitch and Brigid Brophy, as well as a critical perspective on the Oxford Group's (self-)centring in historical narratives to critique the oversaturation of masculinised animal activist histories.
