“I must be mad!” cries Elizabeth Costello at the close of J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999). An author and animal advocate, Costello cannot reconcile how the atrocities of factory farming that keep her awake at night do not likewise haunt her peers. When picking up the character again over two decades later in The Pole and Other Stories (2023), Coetzee presents Costello in the grips of early dementia, which has brought her into even greater communion with the suffering of animals. As she discloses to her son, “I can’t put the image out of my mind, John. All those billions of chicks who are born into this beautiful world are by our grace allowed to live for one day before being ground to paste.” For Costello, fellow-feeling exists at the verge of a nervous breakdown, or what Sarah Salih aptly calls “breaking-with.”

Situated at the intersection of critical animal studies, disability studies, and gender studies, this panel explores what a “mad” reading practice affords the political project of animal liberation. When we don’t pathologize the mad, or otherwise tune our understanding of them to a tragic key, what insights about “the question of the animal” do they yield? What does animal advocacy look like when, instead of ducking the historical conflation between interspecies fellow-feeling and “madness,” animal studies scholars embrace a “mad” praxis? And how might doing so empower the joint political projects of Mad pride and animal liberation?

Submissions are welcome from across humanities disciplines, particularly those that address:

• interspecies fellow-feeling as madness, and vice versa;
• old age and other “creaturely” vulnerabilities;
• the writings of Mad subjects who experienced a strong affinity with animals (e.g., Roger Crab, John Clare, Franz Kafka);
• madness as a literary/filmic strategy of defamiliarization;
• shifting representations of gender and disability, and their relation to animality, throughout history;
• and literary/filmic representations of vegetarianism and veganism as madness.

Possible texts include (but are certainly not limited to): Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, and Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead—in addition to those referenced above.

This panel will be held in-person in Newport, Rhode Island. NeMLA 2027 convenes from March 6-9.

Please submit the following to https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22554 by September 30, 2026:

• an abstract of 250-300 words;
• a short bio;
• and your institutional affiliation, if applicable.

If you have questions or otherwise want to discuss if your work-in-progress is a good fit for this panel, I invite you to email me at the address above.