Philosophical critiques of humanist notions of interiority, self-presence and consciousness, together with anti-subordination scholars’ deconstruction of the phallicized white subject of humanism, challenge and de-center normative conceptions of the “human” subject. One of the urgent tasks of contemporary theory seems to be that of redefining or reconstituting the space originally occupied by this ostensibly unmarked metaphysical subject. Human and non-human interactions represent a particularly significant starting point for the analysis of new modes of being or becoming as individuated entities embedded in racialized, gendered and sexualized systems of power. Since they imply that traditional modes of relationality are severely disrupted and that heteropatriarchal anthropocentric assumptions must be abandoned in order to unblock channels of communication, these points of encounters between humans and other animals also provide potentially generative spaces for thinking about the pluralization of singularities, modes of becoming and being-with or even redefined notions of care and love for the Other—radical alterity. This panel engages with various questions about human and animal encounters from a feminist and anti-racist perspective: How do humans encounter animals—lives that are kin but not kind? In what ways are human encounters with animals always already determined by raced, classed, gendered and sexualized significations and material power relations? How might we gauge such encounters; what does a “productive,” “meaningful,” or “sustainable” encounter look like? Does the encounter itself change the nature of the participants? What emerges in the interstices between living beings when species meet?
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