Madness, Femininity, Vegetarianism: Post-anthropocentric Representations in Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor

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This chapter explores the limits of fictional depictions of animal rights activists deemed ‘mad’ or ‘crazy’ because of their femininity and their preoccupation with nonhuman animals, who resist the oppressive carnist systems of representation and try—with varying levels of success—to function outside the parameters of heteronormative, non-neurodiverse, patriarchal structures. The aim to discuss the possibility of challenging and escaping the overlapping discriminatory apparatuses of ableism, carnism, and sexism, and representing such a scenario in literary fiction as well as in film. The examples used to discuss the issue of exclusion on the basis of gender and species are Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2018) and Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor (2019), which serves as an example of a movie adaptation in which the idea of madness is related to political reality and animal rights activism. What emerges from this contrast is a multifaceted representation of the fictional madness—strictly connected with animal rights activism. The main argument in this chapter is that different media allow for different levels of non-anthropocentric representations of nonhuman animals, with adaptation (fiction to film) proposed as a possible scenario for liberation of representation mechanisms.