Domestic scenes and species trouble:

on Judith Butler and other animals

Abstract

In this paper I seek to illuminate the obscure region within which other animals dwell in the philosophy of Judith Butler and, in so doing, demonstrate why the inclusion of nonhuman animals is fundamental to the ethical domain, as without it the normative privileging of the white Western heterosexual human male is inevitably reinforced. Through a critical engagement with Butler's work, it soon becomes clear that the constitution of the human subject in fact depends upon the inculcation of a normative network of "killing ideals" that excludes animals, women, and people of color. In contrast to Butler, however, I argue that "the human" is never the simple effect of regulatory reproductive power, but rather that "humanness" is itself a regulatory norm—a norm, moreover, through which all other norms must pass in order to reproduce themselves as "natural". As a result, I argue, ethical responsibility demands that an "I" open its self to the risk of being judged socially non-viable and thus nonhuman. To respond ethically, in other words, necessarily entails the risk of becoming-unrecognisable within structures of meaning reproducing viable ways of being, as exemplified here by the life—and untimely death—of Venus Xtravaganza.