Interspecies Boundary Crossings

Welcome to the afternoon webinar on Human-Animal Studies, on the theme Interspecies Boundary Crossings, on Thursday 22.4.2021 at 13.00.

Programme:

13.00 Opening words
13.05 Helena Duffy: Chicken in Stripy Uniforms: From the Holocaust to Industrial Farming, and Other Human-Animal Metamorphoses
13.45 Katri Aholainen: Literary animals in Yrjö Kokko’s ”bird books” as material-discursive phenomena
14.25 Vilma Mättö: Human–animal hybrids represented in Late Medieval church paintings
15.05-15.20 Discussion

All welcome! Please register by 20.4. via email to Helinä Ääri (hekaki[at]utu.fi). You will get the Zoom link by 21.4.

Abstracts:

Chicken in Stripy Uniforms: From the Holocaust to Industrial Farming, and Other Human-Animal Metamorphoses
Helena Duffy, PhD

In this paper, I will examine Hélène Cixous’s little commented on narrative, The Day I Wasn’t There (2000), which interweaves a number of different forms of exclusion, directed at both animals and humans. In the narrator’s meditation on alterity, triggered by an encounter with an abandoned three-legged dog, the ‘animal crip’ becomes a cipher for her own Down Syndrome (trisomique) son, who died at the age of one some forty years earlier; her own exclusion as a Jew in French Algeria; the Nazis’ persecution of Jews; and, finally, man’s ongoing ill-treatment of farm animals. My ambition is to try to unravel this complex web of metaphors, where human and animal otherness become interchangeable as do victims and victimisers.


Literary animals in Yrjö Kokko’s ”bird books” as material-discursive phenomena
Katri Aholainen, MA

In 1950-1966 the Finnish author and photographer Yrjö Kokko wrote four “bird books” Laulujoutsen (1950), Ne tulevat takaisin (1954), Ungelon torppa (1957) and Alli (1966). These books focus on telling stories of waterfowls in Finland, mainly about whooper swans and several species of diving ducks. All these books mix (auto)biographical and fictional elements, and they all include photos taken by Kokko.  Kokko had an education in veterinary sciences and was interested in biology as well as in literature and folklore. In my doctoral dissertation I focus on these entanglements of literary traditions, Finnish folklore and biological knowledge in Kokko’s text and photos, to understand the non-human agency of birds in Kokko’s books and art-making practices. To do so, I draw on Karen Barad’s ideas of posthuman performativity. By that I understand literature as a material-discursive phenomenon, which emerges through human and non-human agencies. In my presentation I will consider especially the possibilities of Barad’s concepts of intra-action and agential cut in reading literary animals.


Human–animal hybrids represented in Late Medieval church paintings
Vilma Mättö, MA

Throughout the Medieval Period pictorial motifs depicting composite creatures, i.e., hybrids, were essential part of the visual culture. Various imaginative portrayals mixing human and animal body parts were mostly used as the visualisations of sin and vices due to the idea of animality as the lower (and rejected) half of the human condition. Finnish and eastern Swedish parish churches from 15th and early 16th century also include a large number of paintings representing human–animal hybrids, but for the most part this material has been dismissed in previous research and no extensive study on them has yet been made. In my doctoral thesis I aim at analysing this imagery with relation to the whole pictorial program which decorates the church building. What functions do these hybrid motifs have and how do they mediate between the main visual narrative and the viewer?