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The Feral Issue
ns 73-74 | Fall 2009/Spring 2010
 The "Feral Issue" presents work by a range of people, from those who have been doing animal studies all along to those newly exploring the field. If it has a leaning, it is to build a cultural materialist account of animals in our world. We hope that the writing here will give our readers a sense of what animal studies is and where it's going, and also add some new voices to its course.
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The Feral Issue
by Heather Steffen | ns 73-74
As evidenced by an extraordinary number of special issues, new journals, conferences, and courses, there has been a swell of academic interest in animal studies over the last decade. By now its wave seems to have crested, and everyone's watching to see what's been left on the beach. Like many subfields, animal studies might appear to have come from nowhere, bringing to attention scholarship and debates we didn't know were there until they suddenly showed up everywhere. But the history of thought about nonhuman animals probably began with the first humans (it certainly got going before Derrida gave his "Animal That Therefore I Am" lecture), and many have been working for years on projects we now recognize as animal studies. They have been joined by a recent group exploring theoretical questions about the posthuman, as well as one building a cultural history of animals. A key concern never far from the core of animal studies is the lives of actual animals and what humans do with them.
The "Feral Issue" presents work by a range of people, from those who have been doing animal studies all along to those newly exploring the field. If it has a leaning, it is to build a cultural materialist account of animals in our world. It features substantial interviews with Carol J. Adams and Donna J. Haraway, which map two lives deeply shaped by interactions with animals and recount their activist, scientific, and scholarly work. It gathers a cluster of essays that look at animals in literature, theory, the military, law, cultural history, and food production. Some invite us to reexamine familiar figures through a new lens, like Debra Hawhee's analysis of Kenneth Burke as a proto-animal studies critic or Susan McHugh's account of Jane Goodall's politics. Some stake out or criticize the field, like Boria Sax's surmise of the varieties of animal studies or Xavier Vitamvor polemic against the rush to Deleuzean theory. And several, like those by Matthew Axtell, Paula Harrington, Mark Feldman, and Dennis Soron, fill in aspects of the cultural history of animals. The issue also includes several reviews, for instance Joseph G. Ramsey's materialist critique of exposes of food production that leave blanched political possibilities, and poetry and fiction in which animals play a central role. We hope that the writing here will give our readers a sense of what animal studies is and where it's going, and also add some new voices to its course.
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Poetry/Fiction
- GPS for the Car-less | Nancy Ford Dugan
- Square | Rich Heller
- The King of All One-Liners | Tyler McMahon
Writing from Prison
- The People vs. The People | Doran Larson
- JCF Welcoms | A. Whitfield
- A Hidden Cost | Peter Mehmel
Interviews
- The Left Coast: An Interview with Mike Davis
- Scholarly Reporter: An Interview with Andrew Ross
The Feral Issue
Guest Edited by Heather Steffen
- Introduction | Heather Steffen
Poetry/Fiction
- This Treatment Isn't in Any Way Cruel | John Fried
- By the Wayside | Lydia Conklin
- Chuck among the Crabapples | Daniel Pinkerton
- Healer | Phil Gruis
- Becoming Animal | Josh Massey
- At a Hunting and Camping Store | Julie Porter
Interviews
- Vegan Feminish: An Interview with Carol J. Adams
- Science Stories: An Interview with Donna J. Haraway
Essays
- Who Patrols the Human-Animal Divide? | Boria Sax
- Kenneth Burke's Jungle Book | Debra Hawhee
- Unbecoming Animal Studies | Xavier Vitamvor
- Sweet Jane | Susan McHugh
- Bioacoustical Warfare | Matthew A. Axtell
- No Mongrels Need Apply | Paula Harrington
- Where the Wild Things Aren't | Mark B. Feldman
- Meat Consumption and Food Traceability | Dennis Soron
- Rattling the Capitalist Food Chain (On Food, Inc.) | Joseph G. Ramsey
- Animal Ethics and Literary Criticism (On Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am, Wolfe's Animal Rites, Rohman's Stalking the Subject, and Armstrong's What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity) | Robert McKay
- Death, Display, and Companionship in Animal Studies (On Haraway's When Species Meet, Koenigsberger's The Novel and the Menagerie, and the Animal Studies Group's Killing Animals) | John Miller
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