Tranimacies: Intimate Links Between Animal and Trans* Studies (Angelaki: New Work in the Theoretical Humanities)

Tranimacies is a neologism that pushes and pulls together transness and animality so as to better germinate unruly, wily, perverse relationships between them, and their spawn. Through tranimacies the book aims at rethinking the linking of liberation struggles amongst former colonized peoples and lands, minoritized genders and sexualities, racially marked persons and non-human animals, and does so in a variety of geopolitical and temporal sites. This rich compendium includes original scholarship and dialogues as well as poetry, comix, bioart, and performance documentation.

The composite term of tranimacies enmeshes several everyday and scholarly concepts: transgender, animal, animacy, intimacies. This edited volume’s bundle of theoretical and artistic works insists on the beating heart of embodied experiences and political pulses at the core of these concepts. The authors show that tranimacies are spread throughout what Mel Y. Chen describes as the "animacy hierarchies" that delimit zones of possibility and agency, confounding the vertical order with transversal movements. As an intervention into the burgeoning debates within and across trans, animal, critical race, and posthuman studies this publication seeks to destabilize the logic of "turns" in critical theory, and through sticky intimacies uncover how animality, race, and gender underscore the humanist production of meanings. By taking a decolonial approach (in the main, but not exclusively) the authors hope to shift debates in animal studies towards accounting for and delinking from colonial mentalities. Three poems interweave our selection of chapters, which together forge three lines of inquiry defined by a certain ethos: transhistories of the present, lessons from the bestiary, and #animatingephemera.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

Eliza Steinbock, Assistant Professor Cultural Analysis, Leiden University, Netherlands. Author of Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (Duke, 2019), co-editor of Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis: Aesthetic Resilience (Routledge, 2020), project-leader of "The Critical Visitor" consortium, developing intersectional approaches for inclusive heritage (2020-2025).

Marianna Szczygielska, Postdoctoral Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany. Author of scholarly publications on the history of zoos, human-animal relations and queer studies, and feminist activism, co-editor of "Plantarium: Human-Vegetal Ecologies" special issue for Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience, (2019).

Anthony Clair Wagner, Senior Lecturer Design, Linnaeus University, Sweden. Author of several articles on trans, monstrosity and art, for example "Visible Monstrosity as Empowerment," in Transgender Studies Quarterly 2.2. Workshop leader of the Monster Workshop and artist.