CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Szczygielska, Marianna |
|---|---|
| Title | Queer(ing) Naturecultures: The Study of Zoo Animals |
| Summary | My PhD project aims at exploring how the concept of “Nature” is constructed in relation to sexuality. More specifically, I analyze both popular and scientific discourses on gender variant nonhuman animals and same-sex sexual behavior among animals in zoological gardens. I am interested in the process by which the zoo becomes a site equipped with a set of “technologies” that, through discourses on nature and animals, shape identities and politics. I go as far back as the late eighteenth century when the zoo underwent transformation from a private menagerie to the modern enterprise of a public zoological garden, which involved scientific, economic and political goals. I look closely at evolutionary discourses emerging at that time. Following Foucault, I argue that sexuality plays a central role in scientific truth-making. With my research I also show that the category of the nonhuman animal is crucial in negotiating the boundaries of humanness and that this process necessarily happens through the mapping of sexual, gendered, racial, and classed subjectivities. I do this by focusing on contemporary cases of “queer zoo animals” that have become centers of public debates on naturalness of homosexuality and gender in the Euro-American context. Through my project I aim to reveal that we have always inhabited an interspecies world, where “nature” is never a politically innocent category and the specific implications for current thinking about sexuality and gender, and sexual politics of discourses about queer zoo animals. |
| Supervisor | Renkin, Hadley Zaun |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/szczygielska_marianna.pdf |
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