The Gender, Place and Culture Jan Monk Distinguished Annual Lecture: Feminism and animals: exploring interspecies relations through intersectionality, performativity and standpoint

Abstract

This article explores the ways and extent to which feminism helps investigate interspecies relations and the lives of animals in academic scholarship. It argues that animals need feminism. Indeed feminists are well suited and positioned to take on questions of and issues related to animal lives through key theoretical ideas and methodological approaches, namely intersectionality, performativity and standpoint. Extending such ideas and approaches to animal subjects fills gaps in animal studies literature and generates invaluable insights on the fundamental workings of power in society and the implications for both humans and animals. The article also argues that feminism should embrace animals and animal scholarship. Doing so generates new insights on societal relations of power and extends existing feminist boundaries regarding whose knowledge counts and how it is counted. Ultimately, an enhanced feminism–animal dialogue generates geographical knowledge that is comprehensive and reflective of the interrelatedness of all beings that shape individual, institutional and ideological realms.