Animal Drag : Power, politics and the performance of animality

This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to Animal Drag – a critical and conscious performance of animality – through chapters that trot, squawk, slither, and crawl through analyses. Each chapter illuminates how Animal Drag, through its social and material interruptions, critiques multiple categories of being and doing, especially species. -- .

Animal Drag asserts that performing animality is a political act, capable of de-stabilising humanism and constructs of othering, especially species. The volume trots across and crawls through human-animal studies, posthumanism, theories of drag and thus queer theories of performance and adornment too, to argue that critical and conscious acts of animality challenge the audience to reconsider societal shapings of the nonhuman and the human-animal divide. Historically, those othered have also been considered nonhuman. In doing so, Animal Drag also squawks with many other “minority” studies that have worked with Critical Animal Studies as part of illuminating problematic binaries, but through a series of single acts that disrupt these through the one performance. Together, it weaves a wider discourse on the social and material semiotics of “doing human”, to hopefully generate a wider web of care. -- .