Disanimality: When Disability, Illness, and Animality Meet

If you are an advocate for people with disabilities, should you also be vegan? How does your position on assisted suicide relate to how you think about euthanizing pets? Recent work in disability studies has called for greater engagement with animal studies, but disability activists and scholars have long been uncomfortable with comparisons between animals and people with disabilities or chronic and terminal illnesses. The long and problematic history of dehumanizing and animalizing disabled people has often led to the need to reclaim their humanity and basic human rights. What, then, should be the relationship between disability and animal rights?

Disanimality reveals how certain forms of animal advocacy can lead to greater discomfort for disability activists, such as universalist calls for veganism and abolitionist animal rights. The result can be what Lundblad calls disanimality, a feeling of discomfort which can be produced when overly simplistic comparisons are made between animals and people with disabilities. Disanimality argues instead for staying with the trouble of historically and culturally situated analysis, foregrounding posthumanist approaches to both animal and disability studies in relation to contemporary novels, films, and memoirs. Closer attention to the ways that disability, illness, and animality meet can lead not only to new theoretical tools and concepts, but also better potential for coalitions between advocacy movements.

Michael Lundblad is Professor of English-Language Literature at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is the author of The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture (Oxford), the co-editor, with Gro Ween of Control: Attempting to Tame the World, the editor of Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human, and the co-editor, with Marianne DeKoven, of Species Matters: Humane Advocacy and Cultural Theory. He is also the editor of special issues of New Literary History on "Animality/ Posthumanism/ Disability" and Tamkang Review on "Cetacean Nations".