NeMLA 2023 Panel: Animals of the Victorian Age: Queer Ecology and the Emphasis on Animal Kinship
In Animal Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Process (1892), Henry Salt argues that “Oppression and cruelty are invariably founded on a lack of imaginative sympathy,” which purports the notion of the “tyrant or tormentor” from ever having a “true sense of kinship with the victim” (16). In a similar way, Donna Haraway states in When Species Meet (2007), that “we are a knot of species coshaping [sic] one another in layers of reciprocating complexity all the way down” (42). Taking cues from Salt and Haraway, our panel will take up key features of human and animal relations and their intersection with the queerness of imaginative sympathy.