SPECIES SPECTACLES:

ABSTRACT
This residential research group will be primarily concerned with coordinations—systematic blends, equivocations, and others—among animality, race, and sexuality. For instance, we emphasize ways in which racialities may be found in both animalities and sexualities, or how all three interplay.

The animal figure shimmers, rematerializes here and there as a multilingual, interdisciplinary being, mirroring us; the cyborg becomes ever more alive and, in some cases, self-aware as such; we think increasingly around the posthuman. Yet there seems no lack of reactive drives to segregate symbolic fields of "animal" and "human" in the interest of maintaining stubborn taxonomies of difference along lines of gender, race, sexuality, statehood, class, ability. Taking as a point of departure the formal, symbolic, and ontological play consigned to animality itself and beginning with a transnational mode of analysis, "Species Spectacles" invites reconsideration of specific literary, political, cultural, and other arenas heretofore presumed to be populated only by figural humans, even as such figures quietly shift from one species identification into another.

We will follow conceptual vectors of (post)coloniality and/or (post)humanity that animalize exogenous sexualities and sexualize exogenous animals; it is these which are so often racialized, subtly or spectacularly. Among the questions addressed are: What are such vectors' relation to the international "sexualities" comprising ever-changing variations of trans-national, trans-racial adoption? How do urban and rural containments such as "Chinatowns," "ghettoes," and institutions such as prisons, produce and maintain queer animalities? When and where are such tropes not affectively charged and/or animated in relation to colonial impulses? When does disability—glossed cynically as pathology, partiality, old age, contagious disease and, alternatively, as machinic cyborg and as natural variation—come into play? When is human "animal sex," whether bestial or queer or rapacious, racially intensified? How are interracial dramas depicted animally and sexually? How are particular "animal" species racialized through specific trajectories of "human" engagement; how do artists work such proximate borders? Animality, here, must be considered as a complex thing, material, plastic, and imaginary, in co-formation with other concepts such as wildness, monstrosity, bestiality, barbarity, and tribality, as well as what it means to be human.

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