What is it about?
What are the different ways of relating to the non-human creatures we share this planet with? How can we love them without making them subserve us? How might animal and queer theology help us reconsider our "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air"? A rereading of the medieval bestiary and its modernist afterlives offers us new means of understanding the underlying structures of human subjectivity, and how these are interfaced with the natural world.
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Why is it important?
The subjugation of non-human animals for certain human ends remains a problem to be addressed in contemporary society. Uncovering the underlying structures of subjectivity and the metaphysics that support such a relation of domination to the natural world can help us better understand how to initiate a general paradigm shift in human-animal relations.
Perspectives
This article has opened up some common ground where critical theory in animal and queer studies might confront certain important themes in theology. I hope that it might stimulate further discussion between critical theory and theology. While the work presented here is filtered through - and in some ways limited by - the literary texts and traditions it discusses, I offer it as one means of thinking through the problem of non-acquisitive love in relation to the animals we share this world with.
Zhao NG
Nanyang Technological University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: After Physiologus: Post-Medieval Subjectivity and the Modernist Bestiaries of Guillaume Apollinaire and Djuna Barnes, symplokē, January 2021, Project Muse,
DOI: 10.1353/sym.2021.0021.
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