Animality, Hybridity, and the Grammar of the Body in Late Eighteenth-Century Visual Satire

Abstract

Abstract: Late eighteenth-century visual satirists such as Isaac Cruikshank, James Gillray, and Richard Newton loved rendering powerful politicians, world leaders, and nations themselves as hybrid animals to critique abuses of political power through fantasies of bodily violence and humiliation. In the context of revolutionary fear and fervor, these fantasies targeted elites across the political spectrum; at the same time, they derived much of their satiric force from stereotypes of race, sexuality, and class, thus yoking the critique of power to questions about who counts as human and to what degree. In this way, the infusion of animal traits into human subjects puts animality at the center of a complex intertextuality that repeatedly asks where the human ends and the animal begins.