Fiona Probyn-Rapsey | University of Wollongong (original) (raw)

Books by Fiona Probyn-Rapsey

Bloomsbury NY, 2018

Do depictions of crazy cat ladies obscure more sinister structural violence against animals hoard... more Do depictions of crazy cat ladies obscure more sinister structural violence against animals hoarded in factory farms?

Highlighting the frequent pathologization of animal lovers and animal rights activists, this book examines how the “madness” of our relationships with animals intersects with the “madness” of taking animals seriously. The essays collected in this volume argue that “animaladies” are expressive of political and psychological discontent, and the characterization of animal advocacy as mad or “crazy” distracts attention from broader social unease regarding human exploitation of animal life.

While allusions to madness are both subtle and overt, they are also very often gendered, thought to be overly sentimental with an added sense that emotions are being directed at the wrong species. Animaladies are obstacles for the political uptake of interest in animal issues-as the intersections between this volume and established feminist scholarship show, the fear of being labeled unreasonable or mad still has political currency.
Table of contents

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments

Distillations
Lori Gruen (Wesleyan University, USA) and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey (University of Wollongong, Australia)
Part I: Dismember
1. Just Say No to Lobotomy
Lori Gruen (Wesleyan University, USA)
2. Making and Unmaking Mammalian Bodies: Sculptural Practice as Traumatic Testimony
lynn mowson (University of Melbourne, Australia)
3. There's Something About the Blood…: Tactics of Evasion within Narratives of Violence
Nekeisha Alayna Alexis (Independent Scholar, USA)
4. Erupt the Silence
Hayley Singer (University of Melbourne, Australia)
5. The Loneliness and Madness of Witnessing: Reflections from a Vegan Feminist Killjoy
Katie Gillespie (Wesleyan University, USA)

Part II: Disability
6. Ableism, Speciesism, Animals, and Autism: The Devaluation of Interspecies Friendships
Hannah Monroe (Brock University, Canada)
7. Metaphors and Maladies: Against Psychologizing Speciesism
Guy Scotton (Independent Scholar, Australia)
8. The Horrific History of Comparisons between Cognitive Disability and Animality (and How to Move Past It)
Alice Crary (New School for Social Research, USA)
9. The Personal Is Political: Orthorexia Nervosa, the Pathogenization of Veganism, and Grief as a Political Act
Vasile Stanescu (Mercer University, USA) and James Stanescu (American University, USA)
10. Women, Anxiety and Companion Animals: Toward a Feminist Animal Studies of Interspecies Care and Solidarity
Heather Fraser (Flinders University, Australia) and Nik Taylor (Flinders University, Australia)

Part III: Dysfunction
11. The 'Crazy Cat Lady'
Fiona Probyn-Rapsey (University of Wollongong, Australia)
12. The Role of Dammed and Damned Desire in Animal Exploitation and Liberation
pattrice jones (VINE Sanctuary, USA) and Cheryl Wylie (VINE Sanctuary, USA)
13. Duck Lake Project: Art Meets Activism in an Anti-hide, Anti-bloke, Antidote to Duck Shooting
Yvette Watt (University of Tasmania, Australia)
14. On Outcast Women, Dog Love, and Abjection between Species
Liz Bowen (Columbia University, USA)

Afterword: Discussion
Carol J. Adams

The white fathers of Aboriginal children, many of whom were removed under the policies of assimil... more The white fathers of Aboriginal children, many of whom were removed under the policies of assimilation, are the main focus of this book. As well as highlighting the culture of secrecy and racialised shaming that surrounds them, the book uncovers stories of white fathers who hid their children from the authorities, who requested their children’s return from institutions and who resisted the injunctions against miscegenation, interracial marriage and cohabitation that State, Territory and Commonwealth governments pursued. The book puts textual flesh on these white fathers through an examination of letters, government archives, biography and autobiography. It examines how the twin terms of Australian settler colonialism (assimilate and segregate) operated at multiple sites of everyday life; from the intimate, to the bureaucratic, from small towns to national headlines.

Much of the discussion on the Anthropocene has centred upon anthropogenic global warming and clim... more Much of the discussion on the Anthropocene has centred upon anthropogenic global warming and climate change and the urgency of political and social responses to this problem. Animals in the Anthropocene: critical perspectives on non-human futures shows that assessing the effects of human activity on the planet requires more than just the quantification of ecological impacts towards the categorisation of geological eras. It requires recognising and evaluating a wide range of territories and terrains, full of non-human agents and interests and meanings, exposed to the immanent and profound forces of change that give their name to the Anthropocene.
It is from the perspective of 'the animal question' - asking how best to think and live with animals - that Animals in the Anthropocene seeks to interrogate the Anthropocene as a concept, discourse, and state of affairs. The term Anthropocene is a useful device for drawing attention to the devastations wreaked by anthropocentrism and advancing a relational model for human and non-human life. The effects on animals of human political and economic systems continue to expand and intensify, in numerous domains and in ways that not only cause suffering and loss but that also produce new forms of life and alter the very nature of species. As anthropogenic change affects the more-than-human world in innumerable ways, we must accept responsibility for the damage we have caused, and the debt we owe to non-human species.

Chapters/Journal Articles by Fiona Probyn-Rapsey

Animal Studies Journal , 2022

In his Indigenous critique of the field of animal studies, Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree Nat... more In his Indigenous critique of the field of animal studies, Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree Nation) describes it as having an analytic blind spot when it comes to settler-colonialism, a blind spot that manifests through universalising claims and clumsy arguments about ‘shared’ oppressions, through assumptions that settler colonial political institutions can be a neutral part of the solution, and through a failure to engage with ‘Indigenous studies of other than human life’ (20). In the same article, he calls on decolonial projects to do more to include animality within their purview, to include critiques of animal agriculture and to incorporate critiques of anthropocentrism as ‘a key logic of white supremacy’. Belcourt’s critique of both Animal studies and decolonial projects on the basis of an unequal but mutual marginalisation is an important starting point for research projects like ours that hope to bring Animal studies and Indigenous studies approaches into dialogue about the cultural impacts of introduced animals. Our approach sets out to be ‘triadic’, always involving at least three sides; Settler- Coloniser, Indigene and Animal.

Borderlands , 2021

This article describes and analyses the Pelorus experiment, a recent restoration project in which... more This article describes and analyses the Pelorus experiment, a recent restoration project in which dingoes were used to eradicate goats on a Great Barrier Reef Island. Before they were taken to the island, the dingoes were implanted with a poison capsule that was intended to kill them after they had killed the goats; they were both pest and ‘pesticide’ (Mavhunga 2011). Subsequently, freehold land on the island was marketed as a tourism development site. We contextualise the Pelorus Island goat eradication program within the cultural–political history of carceral colonialism in Australia and show how this experiment relates to ideas about the special role that islands play in conservation. We also piece together the story of what happened to the goats and dingoes involved. Our analysis reveals the ways notions of animal pesthood and ecological restoration are co-opted by conservation and tourism interests. The Pelorus experiment illustrates how illusions of idyllic island sanctuaries, which appeal to contemporary tourism tropes of seclusion within a ‘pristine’ environment, are predicated on the violence inherent to, but obfuscated within, settler-colonialist visions of land for the taking and remaking.

EPE: Nature and Space, 2020

In early July 2016, two male dingoes were brought by ferry to a small island called Pelorus in th... more In early July 2016, two male dingoes were brought by ferry to a small island called Pelorus in the Great Barrier Reef, off the coast of north Queensland, Australia, as part of an experimental 'feral' goat eradication project. What was remarkable about this project was that the two dingoes released on the island had been implanted with a slow-release capsule containing sodium fluo-roacetate, commonly known as '1080'. These so-called 'Tik Toks', produced by a firm called Scientec, were designed to release their poison into the bodies of the dingoes in approximately 600 days, after they had served their purpose as goat exterminators. The public and political backlash that the Pelorus experiment aroused reveals a gap between the team's ambitions to 'set the platform' for the conservation of 'pristine' islands and community sentiment concerning animal cruelty. Just how this 'bizarre' experiment (as it was described in State parliament) gained ethics approval is one part of this story. Another relates to implants themselves and what this 'innovation' ('the stuff of horror films' as one petitioner described it) reveals about attitudes to 'killing for conservation'. The Pelorus experiment also shows us what is frequently concealed by eradication programmes, which is that they rely not on a single act of eradication, but a cycle of violence that we describe here as a form of 'feral violence'. In the case of Pelorus, the 'implants' tipped Conservation's motif from the romance of 'rescuing nature' to that of horror, imperilling the social licence that conservation projects assume.

Environment and Planning E, 2020

A growing body of literature is concerned with ‘healing’ our cities, fostering an ethic of care f... more A growing body of literature is concerned with ‘healing’ our cities, fostering an ethic of care for urban nature and creating more socially and environmentally just cities. At the same time, urban biodiversity is the focus of an increasing number of projects at multiple scales. However, in contrast to the ethos of multispecies ‘entanglement’ and ‘becoming with’ that typically animates this research, large numbers of animals ‘entangled’ in the machinations of our cities constitute a ‘nature’ that remains mostly unseen. And yet, it is the local and global practices these animals are part of – associated with food, entertainment, education, companionship and research – and the persistent relations of use and exploitation that underpin them, that are most directly implicated in the ongoing environmental degradation, destruction of habitats and extinction of species that create the ‘problem’ of urban biodiversity. We therefore argue that a persistent anthropocentrism is hampering efforts to respond effectively to the findings and recommendations of the IPCC, IPBES, FAO and others. Based on a thorough literature search and review of 65 articles concerned with urban ‘nature’ and multispecies relations, we demonstrate a prevailing hierarchy in how, and more importantly which, nonhuman species are being represented. Parallels are noted from recent social movements and the work of scholars from complementary fields. We highlight the dangers posed by this selective remit of care and concern and suggest critical animal studies as a way to adjust the frame and extend the boundaries of dominant thinking about what constitutes ‘nature’. In conclusion, we call for researchers concerned with urban nature and biodiversity to adopt more critical and repoliticized understandings of ‘nature’ and multispecies relations – ones that are better poised to challenge practices involving commodified animals and slow the pace of environmental destructions and losses they are associated with.

Australian Feminist Studies, 2019

Abstract: The ‘pussy panic’ of our title is a phrase that belongs to Susan Fraiman. It is a diagn... more Abstract: The ‘pussy panic’ of our title is a phrase that belongs to Susan Fraiman. It is a diagnosis, a lament, and a warning about how Animal Studies (AS) is currently torn between rising academic respectability bestowed through the “installation of Derrida as founding father” (Fraiman, 93), and the neglect that this entails for AS’s deep roots in feminist scholarship going back decades, and across a number of disciplines (Gruen 2018). Finding that a ‘proximity to this feminized realm’ of ‘siding with animals’ can bring about a ‘pussy panic’ in male scholars, Fraiman draws a parallel between academic mainstreaming and the suppression of the ‘emotionally and politically engaged’ (93) work of earlier feminist writers. Inspired by Fraiman’s reading and her sense of a lingering pussy panic in the field of AS, we were interested to inquire whether or not the academic legitimacy the field deserves has also brought with it a privileging of men’s voices as it has developed over the years. In 2015 we conducted a large, broad-ranging international survey of AS scholars. From that larger survey, the issue of gender stood out and enabled us to investigate Fraiman’s observations further. Our data lends support to the idea that ‘pussy panic’ has indeed shaped the direction of the field so far.

Critical Terms for Animal Studies, 2018

Anthropocentrism refers to a form of human centeredness that places humans not only at the center... more Anthropocentrism refers to a form of human centeredness that places humans not only at the center of everything but makes "us" the most important measure of all things. As a core problem in Animal Studies, anthropocentrism is at once everywhere and nowhere, meaning that it is difficult to pin down precisely. To understand how anthropocentrism can be both everywhere and nowhere, we might each think about the space in which we are currently located. How is it structured with humans in mind rather than nonhuman animals? Take my home office as an example. My office at home is adjacent to an area of the Australian bush, part of Gundungurra country, one hour south of Sydney. From my office I can see and hear many species of birds (including chickens), and inside Alice and Billy (canine companions) often come in and sleep when I open the door for them. My home is designed and built on a human scale, with spaces and structures for ease of human use, just like the town and the city more generally, where encounters with animals are also conditional upon them fitting into structures and places that are not designed with them in mind. These structures are not just architectural in the strict sense, they are also manifestations of cultural beliefs about our place in relation to the other animals, that they fit in with us and not the other way around. These ideas, like the buildings we live in, might appear to have been there all along, preceding us and to a certain extent structuring the relations with animals that we find ourselves in now. It is the very intimacy and homeliness of anthropocentrism, the way it takes up residence as "our" residence, as "us," that makes displacing or challenging anthropocentrism such a tricky and Vital project. Just as you think you might have located anthropocentrism somewhere specific, it can go "dorsal" (Wills 2008); it's right behind you.

Animaladies: Gender, Species, madness, 2018

While allusions to madness are both subtle and overt, they are also very often gendered, thought to be overly sentimental with an added sense that emotions are being directed at the wrong species. Animaladies are obstacles for the political uptake of interest in animal issues—as the intersections between this volume and established feminist scholarship show, the fear of being labeled unreasonable or mad still has political currency.

Abstract This paper examines data from a survey of Animal Studies scholars undertaken by the auth... more Abstract
This paper examines data from a survey of Animal Studies scholars undertaken by the authors in 2015. While the survey was broad ranging, this paper focuses on three interconnected elements; the respondents’ opinions on what role they think the field should play in regard to animal advocacy, their personal commitment to animal advocacy, and how their attitudes toward advocacy in the field differ depending on their dietary habits. While the vast majority of respondents believe that the field should demonstrate a commitment to animal wellbeing, our findings suggest that respondents’ level of commitment to animal advocacy is informed by whether they choose to eat animal products or not. We conclude that this reflects the breadth of the field as well as the fact that it is a relatively new area of study and as such is still evolving. In relation to the question posed in the title of this article – should we eat our research subjects? – it seems that Animal Studies scholars are divided on that issue; some do, some don’t, but for those who do eat their research subjects there is a degree of unease about the contradictions that such a choice implies.Watt, Yvette M.; O'Sullivan, Siobhan; and Probyn-Rapsey, Fiona, Should We Eat Our Research Subjects? Advocacy and Animal Studies, Animal Studies Journal, 7(1), 2018, 180-205.
Available at:http://ro.uow.edu.au/asj/vol7/iss1/9

In September 2015, I gave a talk at Siteworks, an arts festival that takes place at Bundanon (see... more In September 2015, I gave a talk at Siteworks, an arts festival that takes place at Bundanon (see Bundanon Trust https://bundanon.com.au/) on the South Coast of New South Wales about two hours south of Sydney, Australia. The theme for the festival was " The Feral Amongst Us. " In my talk, I started off by asking the audience about their relationships with companion animals; the response indicated that most had companion animals in their lives and cared about the quality of their relationships with animals. Asking an audience about their own relationships with animals is a common and useful strategy in Animal Studies talks (especially those for a general public) because it can help resituate (re-home?) the abstract " animal " into more relatable terms. It also makes the effects of categorical thinking palpable: relatability wears thin and often falls apart across categorical divisions and between them, such as those animals named " feral. " The text of my talk follows from this first engagement with the audience about their own companions and then describes five propositions on ferals. Animal Studies scholars tend to argue that the relationships that we form with our " pets " are a foundation for positive relationships and attitudes towards animals in general. Those who form attachments with pets and appreciate their pets as individuals with personalities (and all that that implies) are also more likely to feel uncomfortable with the thought of animal cruelty. That is why you'll often see animal advocacy groups refer to pets as a benchmark for better relations with animals. The comparison with pets is supposed to elevate and enhance our moral perception of the cruelty around us. And yet there is a persistent and profound disconnect between how much we respect and value the animals that are our companions and those that are treated as mere animal machines, kept in appalling conditions, often in factory farms for the purpose of making cheap meat. This disconnect between how we love our pets and how we mistreat animals in agriculture (who are just as likely to be persons like our pets) is puzzling and yet it is partly explained by the powerful role that categories play in how we relate to animals. Categorised as a " pet, " an animal has legal protection against cruelty. Classified as " livestock, " an animal is subject to the cruelties that comes with being seen as edible. Classified as " feral, " an animal is subject to even greater cruelties associated with being exterminable. This brings me to my first proposition regarding feral animals, which is that: Australian feral animals live and die between categories (neither wild, pet, nor livestock), in an ethical vacuum bordered by extraordinary violence AND a romance of the escapee. Feral animals no longer fit into any of the usual categories of wild, pet, or livestock; they have exceeded the usual categories and so they exist in a sort of ethical vacuum, which licenses extraordinary violence against them. They have exceeded and escaped from the domesticated sphere of humans. They have gone from best friend to traitor, enemy, meeting the full brunt of a human sense of rejection. Feral pigs, donkeys, horses, rabbits, camels have also gone beyond the category of livestock, defying human control and use. All ferals show resilience, intelligence, self-organization, and a capacity to evade human captivity—all of the things that contradict a

FOR FULL ARTICLE SEE LINK TO THE URL ABOVE Under the remit of an expanded definition of sustainab... more FOR FULL ARTICLE SEE LINK TO THE URL ABOVE
Under the remit of an expanded definition of sustainability – one that acknowledges animal agriculture as a key carbon intensive industry, and one that includes interspecies ethics as an integral part of social justice – institutions such as Universities can and
should play a role in supporting a wider agenda for sustainable food practices on campus. By
drawing out clear connections between sustainability objectives on campus and the shift away
from animal based products, the objective of this article is to advocate for a more consistent
understanding and implementation of sustainability measures as championed by university
campuses at large. We will draw out clear connections between sustainability objectives on
campus and the shift away from animal based products. Overall, our arguments are
contextualised within broader debates on the relationship between sustainability, social justice
and interspecies ethics. We envisage that such discussion will contribute to an enriched, more
robust sense of sustainability—one in which food justice refers not only to justice for human
consumers and producers of food and the land used by them, but also to justice for the
nonhuman animals considered as potential sources of food themselves.

For the last 30 years in Australia, the extinction of the dingo has been a subject of great conce... more For the last 30 years in Australia, the extinction of the dingo has been a subject of great concern. But what this usually means is not that dingoes are being pushed to the brink because of gunshot or baits (though such persecution is happening[1]). In fact, it is not even so much a matter of dingo death but rather dingo birth, or the queer[2] relations of dingo and domestic/wild dog, that is the major concern. As Laurie Corbett once wrote: ‘cross-breeding is common and the pure dingo gene pool is being swamped’. His words (though he is by no means alone in expressing the fear of the genetic ‘swamp’), have resonated well beyond the contested science of dingo ‘purity’ within the academy, such that panic over hybridity now characterises dingo discourse at large. Almost everything that is said about the dingo, from conservation biology to art installations, pivots around a seemingly unshakeable truth that the dingo is becoming extinct by hybridizing with domestic dogs. It is this particular interpretation or use of the word extinction that intrigues me. How did hybridity become tangled up with extinction in this way, and how did it come to have such explanatory power despite the fact that numerous studies failed to establish either a definitive test for dingo purity or a reliable baseline to begin with? The ‘pure’ dingo is a taxonomic spectre that was formalised in the 1980s by dingo biologists, specifically Laurie Corbett and Alan Newsome, as I will discuss in part II of this essay. Their early work successfully branded the ‘hybrid’ as a threat to the dingo, and this idea has gone on to dominate dingo research for the last 30 years. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the link between hybridity and dingo extinction forms the ideological backbone of ‘dingology’, which is a term I use in the spirit of Donna Haraway’s ‘primatology is politics by other means’ (1984), to examine how dingology straddles a biocultural frontier, where race, gender and species intersect.

Live Export, Animal Studies, Australia and Indonesian relations

Discussion of standardisation as a practice that contributes to seeing some factory farmed animal... more Discussion of standardisation as a practice that contributes to seeing some factory farmed animals as 'already dead' - and discussion of albino animals in captivity - seen as exceptionally alive due to human care....

Bloomsbury NY, 2018

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments

Afterword: Discussion
Carol J. Adams

Animal Studies Journal , 2022

Borderlands , 2021

EPE: Nature and Space, 2020

Environment and Planning E, 2020

Australian Feminist Studies, 2019

Critical Terms for Animal Studies, 2018

Animaladies: Gender, Species, madness, 2018

While allusions to madness are both subtle and overt, they are also very often gendered, thought to be overly sentimental with an added sense that emotions are being directed at the wrong species. Animaladies are obstacles for the political uptake of interest in animal issues—as the intersections between this volume and established feminist scholarship show, the fear of being labeled unreasonable or mad still has political currency.

Live Export, Animal Studies, Australia and Indonesian relations

The Animal Publics series publishes original and important research in animal studies by both est... more The Animal Publics series publishes original and important research in animal studies by both established and emerging scholars. Animal Publics takes inspiration from varied and changing modalities of the encounter between animal and human. The series explores intersections between humanities and the sciences, the creative arts and the social sciences, with an emphasis on ideas and practices about how animal life becomes public: attended to, listened to, made visible, foregrounded, included and transformed. Animal Publics investigates publics past and present, and publics to come, made up of more-than-humans and humans entangled with other species.

Hecate, May 1, 2004

The following dialogue has been woven together after a few months of email exchanges with Margare... more The following dialogue has been woven together after a few months of email exchanges with Margaret Somerville in 2002. This was a curious way to hold a discussion with a writer so interested in questions of embodiment and relationship to place. Without the nuances of faces and bodies to embody and represent writing/thoughts, the potential for missing meanings was heightened somewhat; over email, a 'huh?' could possibly last for days rather than seconds. But the mode of this exchange is significant in also illustrating the role of imagination and play in questions of embodiment and place. Both of these elements feature in Somerville's work Body/Landscape Journals (1999), a ficto-critical text which seeks to investigate what she calls a 'postcolonial practice of writing'; writing which both seeks and questions an embodied settler belonging in a (post)colonised landscape. B/L J follows two previously published collaborative texts, The Sun Dancin' (1994) with Marie Dundas, May Mead, Janet Robinson and Maureen Sulter, and Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs (1990) with Patsy Cohen, both collaborations (1) having had profound effects on the ways in which Somerville now chooses to write. In the discussion that follows, Somerville elaborates on her navigation through feminist, postcolonial and poststructuralist connections and disconnections, as well as her strategies for achieving an embodied sense of belonging in the Australian landscape. FP: I'm interested in how you relate feminist methodologies to a 'postcolonial practice of writing' as you call it in B/L J. Many feminist and postcolonial critics are wary of bringing the feminist and the postcolonial together because both have been justifiably criticised for eliding questions of race in relation to those of gender and vice versa. In your work, questions relating to the differences between Western feminist and postcolonial frameworks arise frequently. To take just one example, on the subject of writing Ingelba you say that 'for these women, gender was not a structuring category of thought' (2) and yet you yourself work (albeit uneasily at times) with western feminist methodologies. Given this difference, how might you present the relationship between postcolonial and feminist interests in your work? MS: I am aware of the debates around feminism and Aboriginality, and that some Indigenous women have rejected feminism on all sorts of grounds, including that white feminists have erased race issues from their agenda. My intellectual thought has been fashioned in feminist debates around the question of difference, to which I believe feminism has contributed more than any other theoretical framework. However, if any framework is multiple it is feminism, and I believe that feminisms are probably so fractured now that those of us who have grown through the feminist debates of two decades no longer have a sense of any possible united theoretical position. I think feminist methodologies are different from feminism and are probably incorrectly labelled anyway. There is a whole range of methodologies that arises from a whole range of feminist positions, and some of these offer a highly tuned responsiveness to complex questions of difference and power relations. In my own development of feminist methodologies, I struggled to articulate questions of race from the beginning. I had come to feminism in a desert landscape with Aboriginal women. My awareness of myself as a woman in the landscape of this country was born side by side with those women. The first research project I undertook was Ingelba, so the two questions of race and gender were always inseparable in my work. My original research training, although in feminist methodologies, was within the tradition of interactive sociology; it wasn't until later that I took on board feminist poststructuralism when teaching in women's studies. I think the various theoretical frameworks and methodologies I have used have given rise to the approach in B/L J. …

Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2014

Animal Studies Journal, 2022

Sydney University Press eBooks, Oct 31, 2016

Preamble: Thanks to Deirdre, Amanda and Azille for inviting me to this conference – Gender and th... more Preamble: Thanks to Deirdre, Amanda and Azille for inviting me to this conference – Gender and the Anthropocene. This is my first time in South Africa, a country that has always loomed large in my political imagination. Like a lot of Australians, when I was young, I spent a lot of time thinking about race relations in South Africa, rather than looking at race relations in my own country! (I was obsessed by campaigns to secure Nelson Mandela’s release.) While my PhD focused on South African and Australian literature, I have not really spent much time writing or thinking about South Africa since then, so I am very much looking forward to being better informed by listening, learning and participating at this conference.

WRITING ABOUT THE FOLLOWING TWO MEMOIRS JACKSON'S Track (1999) and Jackson's Track Revisi... more WRITING ABOUT THE FOLLOWING TWO MEMOIRS JACKSON'S Track (1999) and Jackson's Track Revisited (2005), I am reminded of a conversation that I had with a friend about my research project on the white fathers of Aboriginal children in the twentieth century. She remarked that it would probably be a short project given that they were probably all rapists or fly-by-nights. Taken aback by such a swift evaluation, though suspecting that there were probably lots of white Australians who felt the same way, I began to talk about Daryl Tonkin, the white father of nine Aboriginal children who stayed with his Aboriginal de facto wife and family, and is co-author, with Carolyn Landon, oi Jackson's Track. In short, I found myself presenting Tonkin as a kind of redemptive figure, whose narrative resists bituminizing along clear-cut racial and gender lines. The position of the white fathers can lead to further understanding on the part of white Australians about the atrocities suffered und...

Journal of Veterinary Behavior, 2019

Environment And Planning E: Nature And Space, Jul 7, 2020

Animaladies, 2019

If you ever work on a project about crazy cat ladies, you can expect some smiles of the wry, know... more If you ever work on a project about crazy cat ladies, you can expect some smiles of the wry, knowing kind, followed up by a flurry of crazy cat lady (CCL) memes, mugs, socks, and links to various CCL products. Many of them are pretty funny, especially the picture of the box of kittens labeled Crazy cat lady start up kit and the socks emblazoned with you say \u27crazy cat lady\u27 like it\u27s a bad thing. These jokes attest to a level of sympathy for and fascination with crazy cat ladies within popular culture. I\u27ve long been fascinated by the crazy cat lady as a cultural trope, a sort of folk devil whose appearance plays on broader anxieties attached to femininity and animality. Putting the memes, socks, mugs, pyjamas, fridge magnets aside for a moment, this chapter takes a more critical look at the CCL. I explore the current popularity of the CCL in three connected ways. Firstly, as a gendered cultural trope that is mobilized in both negative and positive ways to exemplify the feminization of concern for human-animal relations. Secondly, I examine how the CCL gets tangled up with the animal hoarder: someone who hoards or collects animals and keeps them as their self-declared rescuer, often to protect them from some other terrible fate (neglect and cruelty) that then becomes realized in her own hands. The research on animal hoarding is fascinating in this regard, because it essentially plays chicken and egg with the crazy cat lady, replicating gender stereotypes in its discussion of the disorder it attempts to outline. While animal hoarding literature situates the CCL as a dangerous obstacle to proper diagnosis and understanding of animal hoarding cases, I then take this idea one step further and discuss whether or not the CCL might be not just a cute face of the animal hoarder but also the folk devil for the industrial scale hoarding of animals that persists in factory farming situations. The three elements- crazy cat lady, animal hoarder, and factory farmer-are connected, I suggest, by a broader phenomenon of the intensification of animal keeping in Western modernity, a period in which animals are simultaneously more numerous, less visible but more intensively kept (Harrison 1964; Vialles 1994; O\u27Sullivan 2015; Pachirat 2015). In this chapter, I\u27ll pull on the thread of the crazy cat lady trope and see how she leads us to industrialized hoarding in the form of factory farming

Borderlands e-journal, 2004

... This is particularly the case in the event of white ressentiment. 12. In Australia white ress... more ... This is particularly the case in the event of white ressentiment. 12. In Australia white ressentiment would probably first conjure up an image of Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party. ... JaneHaggis and Suzanne Schech have argued that white women in particular (but ...

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

A talk delivered at the Bundanon Siteworks Festival in September 2015. Fiona makes 5 propositions... more A talk delivered at the Bundanon Siteworks Festival in September 2015. Fiona makes 5 propositions regarding the ethical and moral status of feral animals in Australia. Her final proposition is that feral animals are a big distraction from the institutionalised violence and environmental impacts of animal agriculture.

Episode 13: Knowing Animals: "In this special Knowing Animals episode Siobhan O'Sullivan speaks ... more Episode 13: Knowing Animals: "In this special Knowing Animals episode Siobhan O'Sullivan speaks to Fiona Probyn-Rapsey about her paper 'Dingoes and dog-whistling: a cultural politics of race and species in Australia' which will appear in the Animal Studies Journal in coming weeks."

Hypatia, 2021

Emerging from a conference and exhibit with the same name, Animaladies collects the writing of an... more Emerging from a conference and exhibit with the same name, Animaladies collects the writing of an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars and artists, each doing exemplary intersectional work at some of the crossroads of gender, species, ability, race, and sexuality. The title, Animaladies, is a neologism coined by co-editor Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, which can be pronounced either "animal-ladies" or "ani-maladies." This single word thus invokes the three main threads of the volume, listed in the subtitle: gender, animals, and madness. In the editors' introduction, "Distillations," Lori Gruen and Probyn-Rapsey write of the "dis-ease of current human-animal relationships" and the fact that these relationships are "damaged" (1). Ironically, those who try to heal, escape, or transform these relationships are not only feminized but are themselves viewed as ill within a speciesist society. As they observe, the pathologization and feminization of animal activists not only discourages people from expressing care for animals, but also "distracts attention from broader social disorder regarding human exploitation of animal life" (2). Rather than attending to the harm to which animal activists are objecting, attention is diverted toward the activists themselves in the form of pathologization. As Gruen and Probyn-Rapsey also emphasize in their introduction, the simultaneous pathologization and feminization of animal activists is but one manifestation of the longstanding hystericizing of women, and activists who embrace the madness of caring for animals are part of a feminist tradition of taking up hysteria as resistance to patriarchal and speciesist power. Gruen and Probyn-Rapsey argue that the pathologization and feminization of concern for animals has not only served to dismiss, trivialize, and pathologize animal activists but also critical animal studies (CAS) scholars within the academy. As they aptly write, the animal liberation movement is not so much the "orphan of the left," as Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka have described it, as it is the left's "crazy aunt" (4-5). Animaladies is divided into three sections-"Dismember," "Disability," and "Dysfunction"-and in their introduction the editors reflect on the resonances of each word. Most interestingly, they observe that "dismember" speaks not only to the ways the bodies of animals are rent to become our food, but also to how animals are separated from one another-and particularly from their offspring-and their suffering is not remembered. More often than not, animal oppression is invisibilized, forgotten, or never born witness to at all. As Probyn-Rapsey and Gruen argue, animal activists and CAS scholars resist this dismembering not only by struggling to prevent the deaths and divisions of animals, but also by remembering the lives and deaths of animals; in so

The 2023 Conference of the Australasian Animal Studies Association will be held in-person at the ... more The 2023 Conference of the Australasian Animal Studies Association will be held in-person at the University of Sydney on the 27 th and 28 th of November 2023, as part of the Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

'Defined broadly, animaladies are sites of tension produced by acknowledging how our relationship... more 'Defined broadly, animaladies are sites of tension produced by acknowledging how our relationships with other animals are damaged. These relationships are damaged in a variety of ways, both by common attitudes of human superiority and by the violent and disturbing implications of these attitudes. Naming these damaged relationships as animaladies helps us to see how we might reframe both our attitudes and their consequences within various social contexts.' Lori Gruen and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, 'Distillations' from forthcoming Animaladies, Bloomsbury, 2018. Animaladies is a term inspired by feminist animal studies – work that is attentive to the role that gender, race, class and ability play in shaping a cultural politics of distraction and protest, which includes the scapegoating, shaming, and hystericising of animal advocates. Animaladies II will explore how various mechanisms (be they cultural practices, institutions, industries, policies) distract us from acknowledging the damaged relations between humans and animals. We are interested in papers that identify or propose methods and strategies for revealing, disrupting and tackling entrenched animaladies – with a view to transforming relations between animals and humans. CONFERENCE THEMES Please submit abstract (300 word limit) + bio (200 word limit) to animaladiesii2018@gmail.com by Monday 30th April.

Symposium: University of Sydney July 11 & 12, 2016 Keynote: Professor Lori Gruen