My Little (Homo)Nationalist Pony: A Critique of Zoophilia Alok Vaid-Menon May 2012

 
                           	
  
My	
  Little	
  (Homo)Nationalist	
  Pony:	
  
         A	
  Critique	
  of	
  Zoophilia	
  
                           	
  
              Alok	
  Vaid-­Menon	
  
                           	
  
                   May	
  2012	
  
                           	
  
                           	
  

Vaid-Menon 2

Introduction

       In 1994 Mark Matthews published The Horseman: Obsessions of a Zoophile in which he

defended the rights of ‘zoophiles’ – an identity label for humans who experience sexual and

romantic relationships with non-human animals. Since this book the word ‘zoophile’ has been

taken up as a point of identification and community building for human animals who experience

not only sexual, but also romantic feelings for non-human animals. In her article “The

Predicament of Zoopleasures: Human-Non-human Libidinal Relations” (2009) Monika Bakke

argues that zoosexuality is “disruptive of the anthropocentric order” (228). Bakke makes a

distinction between bestiality -- sex acts “located within a scheme of anthropocentric cultural

codes in which human animals occupy the position of the Subject, while non-human animals

occupy the position of the Object” – and zoophila stating that “in zoosexual relationships animals

gain the status of a partner rather than a victim of human lust” (225). While Bakke’s analysis

must be celebrated in its commitment to expand sexuality “understood in terms of instinct and

biological compulsion for orgasmic release to sexuality as plentitude open to otherness” (223),

her valorization of zoophilia as a paragon of ethical interspecies relations is misguided.

       In a study of zoophiles conducted in 2003, researchers found that all participating

zoophiles were white and predominantly men living in the United States, Australia, New

Zealand, and the United Kingdom (Williams & Weinberg 2003: 525). What does it mean for

scholars like Bakke to celebrate the radical post-anthropocentricism of zoophilia when the

majority of self-identified zoophiles are white Western men? What kind of bodies, what

positionalities (temporally, geographically, socially) are embraced in the post-human turn? Most

scholars who acknowledge the whiteness and homogeneity of the zoophile community refer to it

as a side note. The identities of zoophiles are not central to their analysis or theorizing. It is my

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contention that zoophilia – and post-humanist thinking more holistically – is still implicated

within a violent logic of Western capitalism, whiteness, and (neo)-colonialism. Only in

contextualizing zoophilia within this milieu of interlocking power hierarchies can we better

understand the radical (or lack thereof) potential of this type of relationality.

       In this paper I will provide a necessary intervention to queer projects like Bakke’s that

participate in de-racinated and ahistorical post-humanist theorizing. I will not revisit debates on

how non-human consent is or is not manifested as discussed by Adams (1995), Beirne (1997),

Francis (1997), Kiraly (2003) and Peter Singer’s essay “Heavy Petting.” My interest is more in

understanding the logic of (white) zoophiles and how this particular way of knowing assumes

consent. With a critical lens inspired by post-colonial and queer ecofeminist criticism I will

review Robinson Devor’s documentary Zoo (2007) alongside a history of (sexual) colonialism

and demonstrate that rather than being an ethical model of non-anthropocentric relationality,

zoophilia is actually a manifestation of white neo (colonial) sexual violence.

What does a queer body look like these days? Queer Post-Humanist Discourse

       Bakke’s work is part of a larger post-human ‘turn’ in Gender & Sexuality / Queer

Studies. In 2008 Myra Hird and Noreen Giffney co-edited a cutting edge anthology Queering the

Non/Human. The editors argue that: “The essays in Queering the Non/Human similarly argue for

a new way of looking at the world, a perceptive optic…which shatters received notions about

what it is that constitutes us as human in the first place.” (Giffney & Hird 2008: xvii). In her

preface to the anthology, Donna Haraway argues that queer is a useful heuristic for dismantling

human subjectivity. She notes that “queering has the job of undoing ‘normal’ categories, and non

is more critical than the human/non human sorting operation” (xxiv). The contributors to the

anthology all agree that the time has come for Queer Studies to interrogate its anthropocentrism

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and begin to incorporate non-human subjects into its analysis. Recently there has been a

proliferation of work that shares this perspective. In Medieval Identity Machines, Jeffrey Cohen

argues “queer theory is undoubtedly the most radical challenge yet posed to the immutability of

sexual identities” yet despite this Queer Studies has “limit[ed] itself to the small contours of

human form” (Cohen 2003: 40). For him, “the body is not human” neither is it “inhabited by an

identity or sexuality that is unique to or even constrained fully within the flesh” (41). For

scholars invested in the posthuman question queer presents a particularly compelling opportunity

to push further beyond the human form. ‘Queer’ “comes to signify the continual unhinging of

certainties and the systematic disturbing of the familiar” (Giffney & Hird 2008: 4). ‘Queer’

becomes a facilitative metaphor for “talking about affective relations between human and non-

human animals and for thinking about the [non-human] animal as a symbol for representing non-

normative love and the resistance to normative hegemonies” (10).

       What remains striking is that none of the essays included in Queering the Non/Human

directly address the question of bestiality or zoophilia. Within studies of sexuality, Bakke is one

of the few scholars to critically and theoretically engage with this subject. It does seem striking

that Queer Studies has privileged theories of homosexuality and neglected to incorporate

analyses of bestiality considering their historical connections. Rydström (2001) shows us how

the differentiation between homosexuality and bestiality is a relatively recent historical

phenomenon. He argues, “bestiality was never modernized” (73) in that its human perpetrators

did not come to constitute an identity category and were instead institutionalized as pathological.

Perhaps more than anything it is this pathology that should animate queer studies to engage more

with questions of non-human sexualities. Queer Studies reminds us of the historical and social

contingency of sexual desire and is cautious of any framing of certain sexualities/acts as

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‘perverse’ and others as ‘normal.’ A queer perspective encourages us to reject pathological

accounts of non-normative sexualities, reminding us that transgressive sexuality is defined

through hegemonic paradigms which it transgresses – paradigms which function at the level of

power and social control. Considering Seidman (2001)’s argument that queer politics is about

creating new forms of selfhood and intimate solidarity and remaking individual and collective

life by imagining bodies, selves, and intimacies that are formed and organized in a non-

normalizing social order – it seems a queer analytical framework should begin to incorporate an

analysis of non-human sexualities to explore alternative possibilities of relating and

conceptualizing desire.

       Queer Studies commitment to disarticulating sexuality from reproduction and focusing on

an ethics and politics of pleasure is particularly pertinent in regard to non-human sexualities. As

Balcombe (2006) points out in his recent work, Western science has largely neglected the libido

of non-human animals, privileging issues of natural selection and reproductive success over the

diversity of feelings, emotions and pleasures experienced by individual non-human animals of all

kinds (8). Balcombe reminds us that the Western anthropocentric tradition only focuses on the

satisfaction of human pleasures and is not concerned with non-human pleasure and sexual

agency. What sort of coalitions and relations against the reproductive mandate could be

envisioned between humans and non-human animals? Haroway (2008) reminds us that the

opening of non/human conversation allows for “the coming into being of something

unexpected…something outside the rules of function and calculation, something not ruled by the

logic of the reproduction of the same” (223). Furthermore, how could we incorporate the

pleasure non-human animals within queer activism? These questions are pertinent to the future

of not only Queer Studies, but also the queer activist movement.

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       Erotic relations between species also strike me as a particularly productive site of inquiry

considering Queer Studies – and the Humanities more broadly – recent emphasis on de-centering

the human subject and envisioning new ethical multispecies interdependencies and relations.

These sorts of relations have the capacity to create new forms of desire that can radically

decenter the human subject. As Grosz (1995) reminds us: “desire need not…culminate in sexual

intercourse but in production. Not the production of a child or a relationship, but the production

of sensations never felt, alignments never thought, energies never tapped, regions never known”

(29). These new types of desire may have the potential to decenter the human because our

current conception of desire “becomes prefigured in the pit of heteronormativity as an extension

of the Human subject narrowly conceived” (Giffney & Hird 2008: 9). Thus, emotional and

sexual relations with non-human animals could be a way to construct a new and more ethical

‘human’ subjectivity. Feminists have also similarly written about the need to develop new ethical

ways of relating to beings. As Donovan (2007) remarks, “the feminist ethic of care regards [non-

human] animals as individuals who do have feelings, who can communicate those feelings, and

to whom therefore humans have moral obligations” (2-3). Could we envision new models of

desire that incorporate non-human animals consenting to sexual acts and possessing desires to

have erotic/sexual relations with human animals?

       While this theorizing is necessary – especially in the larger queer project of de-

stigmatizing perverse desires -- problems arise when we only incorporate analyses of species,

gender, and sexuality, neglecting other critical perspectives. Problems also occur when our

theories become divorced of the realities of continuing systemic racism, capitalism,

(neo)colonialism, and other social hierarchies that the academy – and the human world more

broadly – are still implicated in. Any consideration of interspecies relations must incorporate an

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intersectional framework that addresses race, colonization, gender, sexuality, and other registers

of difference. An analysis of human/species relations must acknowledge the categories that have

historically denied the humanity of certain groups of people and must recognize how certain

populations (including queer and racialized subjects) are denied the privilege of humanity.

       In her piece Bakke (2009) argues “zoophilia…offers an alternative to phallogocentric

models of eroticism” and that this orgasmic sexual encounter does not “empower the subject nor

the human status of a master of animals” (228). In my paper I will supplement queer theory with

(eco)feminist, post-colonial, and anti-racist criticism to problematize Bakke’s conclusions and

provide an alternative reading of zoophilia. In her reading Bakke blithely accepts an

unproblematized and unmarked construct of ‘human’ which racialize the subjects of her inquiry

as white, Western, able-bodied, and heterosexual. In the desperate search for answers and new

ways of being ‘human’ and relating to non-human subjects, we must make sure not to accept

facile interpretations and must strive to make our models as inclusive as possible.

       I find contributions in post-colonial and/or queer eco-feminist thought to be particularly

promising for the queer post-human project. Post-colonial ecofeminists have long critiqued how

Western culture creates a false binary between human/nature that serves to justify the

exploitation of natural ‘resources.’ The Western definition of ‘nature’ is not necessarily rooted in

the ‘Earth,’ indeed, many subordinated ‘humans’ are naturalized as a way to justify their

exploitation. Ecofeminists have shown how “the conceptual linkages between women and [non-

human] animals, women and the body, or women and nature, for example, all serve to emphasize

the inferiority of these categories" (Gaard 1997: 116-117). Gaard argues that from a queer

ecofeminist perspective “we can examine the ways queers [and persons of color] are feminized,

animalized, eroticized, and naturalized in a culture that devalues women, [non-human] animals,

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nature, and sexuality” (119). The most critical point I draw from ecofeminism is the notion that

each characteristic of the ‘Other,’ is seen as “closer to nature in the dualisms and ideology of

Western culture” (119). Queer ecofeminism reminds us of how white (neo)colonial

heteropatriarchy does not only dismiss nature, but also appropriates the rhetoric of ‘nature’ for its

own pernicious and exclusive project. ‘Biological nature’ is often used as a justification for

exploitation of queer sexualities and women. Queers and cisgender women are urged to comply

with the mandate of reproduction because it is part of human nature. Informed by queer theory

we can see that the “the ‘nature’ queers are urged to comply with is none other than the dominant

paradigm of heterosexuality – an identity and practice that is itself a cultural construction”

(Gaard 1997: 121). Inspired by work in post-colonial queer ecofeminism, my reading engages

critically with the question of ‘nature’ as a potential for coalition building amongst oppressed

women, queers, people of color, animals, and other non-human subjects.

“We are Zoophiles:” Whiteness and Zoophilia in the Film Zoo

       Zoo is a documentary film directed by Robinson Devor, which comes out of an incident

in 2005 in Enumclaw Washington, a rural community 45 miles southeast of Seattle in which a

Boeing engineer died as a result of a perforated colon after having anal intercourse with an

Arabian stallion. Known only as Mr. Hands in the film, the deceased man used his weekends as

an escape from a suffocating life style. Devor uses a combination of audio interviews with actual

participants and reenactments from actor stand-ins to attempt to shed some light on what actually

happened. The film delivers neither judgment of the practice. Shot in muted colors, Zoo has a

lyrical and poetic style with a moving sound track that gives the film an air of something

forbidden but also something eerily beautiful. Bringing a taboo subject out of the darkness and

subjecting it to some light, the film allows us to reexamine our preconceived notions about

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human relationships with non-human animals. Opening with an interview with Coyote, a coal

miner from Virginia who came to Washington to meet like-minded friends, the film examines

the phenomenon of the "zoophile" community, a group of isolated individuals where such

appetites are shared.

        Zoo first publically debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007 where it was

one of 16 winners out of 856 candidates. Following Sundance Zoo was selected as one of the top

five American films for the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. Sundance judges called it a “humanizing

look at the life and bizarre death of a seemingly normal Seattle family man who met his untimely

end after an unusual encounter with a horse” OC Weekly exclaimed that “Zoo achieves the

seemingly impossible: It tells the luridly reported tale of a pacific Northwest engineer for

Boeing’s fatal sexual encounter with a horse in a way that’s haunting rather than shocking and

tender beyond reason.” Similar views were expressed by other critics: the Toronto Star called it

“gorgeously artful…one of the most beautifully restrained, formally distinctive and mysterious

films of the entire festival.”

        While the film is undoubtedly an aesthetic masterpiece – seducing us with its pastoral

landscapes, its dramatic lighting, and sonorous background music – I am more interested in how

this film operates at the level of normalizing an aberrant sexual subjectivity of the zoophile and

how this film directly implicates whiteness in the construction of zoophile pleasure and identity.

In the first sociological analysis of zoophiles Williams & Weinberg (2003) remark, “these men

did not seem to fit the cultural conception that zoophiles were sick or dangerous people or ill

educated cultural rubes beset by a lack of social skills” (525). This reference to the ‘normal,’ to

the ‘humanization,’ to the ‘family man’ when discussing zoophiles are all important. It seems

that Zoo received the positive acclaim it did not simply because of its cinematic construction, but

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rather in the way that it defies our expectations: presenting a compelling and sympathetic portrait

of zoophiles, an image that is significantly different than our preconceived notions of the

perverse and demented zoophile. In this way the film remains complicit to the platform and

rhetoric put forth by the zoophiles, without challenging the basis of their arguments. The film

gestures to the fact that even though contemporary society might be uncomfortable with this

practice/community currently, eventually we may come to accept zoophiles. Indeed as Durkin

and Bryant (2002) remind us, there is every reason to believe that the zoophile subculture will

grow (192).

       I am deeply disturbed by this prospect not because I believe zoophilia is pathological, but

rather because I see the dominant type of zoophilia that has begun to emerge a pernicious

extension of white sexual (neo)colonialism. The rhetoric of the zoophiles in the film does

nothing to challenge a racist and colonial paradigm of sexual respectability and modernity; rather

it pleas for assimilation into this system. In what follows I will analyze the rhetoric put forth the

film and the zoophiles in it to argue that these discourses perpetuate oppressive paradigms, rather

than creating new ethical post-human subjectivites as Bakke would have us imagine.

Why is the Zoo full of White people? The Racial Construction of Zoophile Identities

       Toward the beginning of the film we learn about the racial demographics of the zoophile

community. “Most of the people who were part of our group were white, but we did have a few

who were black, there was a Hispanic who came once…” The white zoophile implicitly

acknowledges the (problematic) racial makeup of the community and uses a distinctly neoliberal

logic of tokenization to deflect any racial critique. Historically there are many recorded instances

of indigenous peoples and other peoples of color participating in bestial acts prior to white

colonization. For example, D’Emilio and Freedman (1988) write about how traditional snake

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dances of the Hopi of the Southwest involved bestiality (93). When then are contemporary

zoophiles – individuals who choose to identify with their sexual proclivities – predominantly

white? How is their understanding of non-human animals and attraction toward non-human

animals different? The white zoophile informs us that the community largely formed online –

individuals would find one another and connect and share videos and stories. After meeting

online, ‘zoophiles’ meet, have parties, and invite others over to have sex with non-human

animals. At one such staged party we see an American flag hanging outside of the house (once

again, the film primes us to associate zoophilia within the boundaries of national respectability).

What it is about whiteness that constructs this community? Why are racialized bodies excluded

from this community and its nationalist plea? In their sociological study of a zoophile

community Williams & Weinberg (2003) find that “some [zoophiles] claim…extreme affinities

to [non-human] animals, sometimes to the extent of believing that they ha[ve] animal

characteristics or that they [feel] like they [are] an animal” (528). The white zoophiles in the film

also share similar feelings. One remarks, “You could ask three zoos and get three different

definitions. The closest would be someone who feels they have a closer affinity to non-human

entities than their own.” It is my contention that experiencing this ‘closer affinity to non-human

animals’ is the extension of a white subjectivity in our colonial modernity– that the ability to

choose to identify with a non-human animal, rather than be interpellated as one, reflects white

privilege.

       There is a history of white colonial powers dehumanizing people of colors. As Chen

(2010) reminds us:

       there [is] a long history of British and European associations of apes and monkeys with
       African subjects, fed and conditioned by the imperialist culture of colonial relations;
       these were underlain by an abiding pseudo-Darwinian mapping which temporally

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       projected non-European and non-white racialized groups onto earlier stages of human
       evolution (289).

This process of racialization and subsequent dehumanization was inextricably linked to

sexuality. The more ‘primitive’ the race was scene the more aberrant its sexual practice and even

its physiognomy were thought to be. “Black men became viewed as mythically well-endowed,

the large size of their genitals symbolizing their low levels of mortality” (Forman 2006: 125).

Consequently, all types of sexualities of people of color were demonized – not just

homosexuality or other non-reproductive sexualities. For example, white Christian missionaries

objected to the heterosexual practices of the Pueblo Indians, calling them ‘bestial’ because “like

animals, the female plac[ed] herself publically on all fours” (Gutierrez 1991: 72-73). Indeed,

Bland (2000) demonstrates how sexuality was seen as “the preserve of the racially ‘Other” (190).

By virtue of their racial composition (justified with the proliferation of racist pseudosciences)

‘Orientals’ were assumed to be “inherently bestial” (187).

       The dehumanization of racialized sexualities was central to the emergence of white

sexual respectability. The non-white man-oversexed, cruel, effeminate, barbourous “[stood] in

stark contrast to modern manhood with its emphasis on reason and restraint” (Levine 2003: 264).

Indeed, historians of sexuality reveal that the modern notion of sexual identity – “sex as the core

essence of the self and the mainspring of consciousness” – only began to exist in Western history

after the nineteenth century (Cock 2006: 1213). Post-colonial scholars have shown that the

“healthy, vigorous, bourgeois body” was defined against the “racially erotic counterpoint…with

reference to the libidinal energies of the savage, the primitive, the colonized” (Stoler 1995: 7).

People of color may be less keen to choose to identify as non-human animals, act on sexual

attraction with non-human animals, and most of all construct an identity and community based

off of sexual attraction to non-human animals considering the historically sexualized and racist

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comparisons to non-human animals they have had to undergo. White people who do not have

such a traumatized history of racialization and dehumanization have much more agency and

freedom to enter in such partnerships.

       The way that white zoophiles describe sexual encounters with non-human animals helps

better express the whiteness manifested in this type of zoophilia. It is important to remember that

“there is no essential, undifferentiated sexual ‘impulse,’ ‘sex drive,’ or ‘lust’ which resides in the

body due to physiological functioning and sensation (Vance 1990: 20). Queer Studies and other

social constructionist accounts of sexuality remind us that sexual desire – not just sexual identity

– is constructed by “culture and history from the energies and capacities of the body” (20).

Indeed, as queer psychoanalyst Tim Dean (2009) reminds us “any sexual taste can be acquired”

because “sexual fantasy is capable of colonizing virtually every object and space” (147, 149).

For Dean and other queer theorists, our capacity to fetishize is “an index of psychic

inventiveness” (149). If we accept the premise that sexual desire is constructed, how can we

better understand what it is about whiteness that desires intimacy with non-human animals?

       Roy, a participant in Williams & Weinberg (2003)’s study remarks that he enjoys having

sex more with non-human animals than humans because: “Humans have trouble accepting who

you are…they just want to change you. [Non-human] Animals do not judge you…they just love

and enjoy the pleasures of sex without all the politics” (527). Roy describes his sexual encounter

with non-human animals outside of the ‘politics’ of humans – for him, this sexual encounter is a

place of freedom, a place with less complications. Remarks from Zoo resonate with this feeling.

A zoophile in the film remarks, “Humans are so conditioned from the time we’re born to start

categorizing…Animals are just not going to do that. You’re either a good person or a bad

person.” He goes on to say that while having sex with a non-human animal:

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       you’re not going to be able to ask it about the latest Madonna album…you can’t discuss
       the difference between Monet and Picasso, it just doesn’t exist for their world. It’s a
       simpler and more plain world and in those moments you can get disconnected. It’s a very
       intense, wonderful kind of feeling. I don’t think anything can really compare to it

All of these zoophiles describe a sort of utopian space that becomes unlocked during sexual

intercourse with non-human animals. In this space that they create through the sex act they no

longer feel fettered by notions of Western taxonomies (categories, politics), nor Western culture

and its hierarchies of class (Monet, Picasso). Sex with non-human animals is seen as a process of

world making – of creating an escape from all of the judgment of (Western) human society. This

(white) longing for escape from the shackles of Western modernity has a history that is rooted in

the sexual white body. White infants were taught early on to exercise self-discipline over their

sexual body (Levine 2003: 261). Sex was one of the most widely remarked upon mechanisms for

measuring distance from ‘civilization’ (182). The more sexual desire a white colonial subject

(publically) articulated, the more disrespectful and condemned they were seen as their sexual

control and self-restraint was seen as central to their ‘modern’ and ‘developed’ identity. Queer-

desiring European men, such as Edward Carpenter and E.M. Forester, journeyed to the East in

search of the liberatory ‘Other,’ “freed from Western sexual taboos” (Bland 2000: 192). Oriental

men served as “traditional, primitive, sexually uninhibited, repositories of the escapist sexual

fantasies” of these white men (192). Because sexual desire was seen as a “premodern

phenomenon [relegated to bodies of color] that modernity and rationality had learned to contain”

we can interpret the historical white longing for the body of the racial Other as a desire for

indigenizing, for removing itself from the shackles of modernity.

       In the same way that bodies of color were historically used for white escapist fantasies,

bodies of non-human animals are currently being used for a similar project. Considering the

historical animalization of people of color, it is not too ambitious of a jump to see how the desire

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for interraciality could translate into a desire for interspeciality. Both interracial and interspecial

desire are unified by eliciting the feeling of the ‘primitive,’ of the ‘raw,’ of the ‘authentic’ for

white bodies that have been disciplined with the regulation of pleasure and hierarchies of

categorization of the Western world. From this perspective we can view white zoophilic desire as

an extension of neocolonialism. Whereas sexual exploitation of the racial Other was central to

the original colonial project, in our contemporary moment white desire still appropriates the

bodies of non-white others to experience transcendence from white/Western modernity. Just as

the ‘Oriental’ others of the diasporic white subjects of the empire had little consent/agency in

participating in the white man’s fantasy – non-human animals face a similar situation.

        Thus, the whiteness of the zoophile community raises several important considerations

for those of us invested in the post-human question. First, considering the historical

animalization of people of color in the colonial project and the denial of their ‘humanity,’ is it

ever truly possible for a person of color to participate in an interspecies relationship as we

understand it? Indeed, when people of color were seen to participate in bestiality it was seen as a

marker of them being ‘primitive’ or backwards’ (and I imagine such images today would still

elicit such responses). This goes to show that we must complicate our understanding of ‘human’

and how we appear eager to use it as a heuristic when entertaining the possibility of ethical

human/non-human relations. In putting forth zoophilia as the realization of post-human desire,

Bakke racializes ‘human’ as white and ignores histories of colonialism. She creates a way of

relating that is only currently accessible by white bodies, bodies that enjoy the privilege of

freedom to explore and appropriate the ‘Other.’ Next, this phenomena notes an emerging crisis

of whiteness and of the Western project of sexual modernity. Why does the desiring white

subject still yearn from escape? This symbolizes instability of (sexual) modernity and the need to

Vaid-Menon 16

envision alternatives. The only way that the white subject is able to experience these alternatives,

these heterotopic spaces, is through the exploitation of the animalized body of the ‘Other.

Whiteness & the Semantics of Sexual Politics

       Even though, as I have argued, zoophilic pleasure is experienced outside of the

boundaries of white/Western respectability, zoophiles still use the language of Western sexual

modernity to legitimize their identities and call for acceptance. Rather than viewing their

‘perverse’ desire as productive site to fundamentally challenge notions of sexual respectability

and propriety, white zoophiles insist on the normalcy of their desires and identities. Seidman

(2001) reminds us that queer politics should be critical of any political strategy that aims only to

redraw moral boundaries to include a deviant practice within ‘the normal’ – without challenging

the category of the normal and its disciplinary effects. In this section I will analyze the political

rhetoric put forth by zoophiles to demonstrate how it is part of a white imperialist project.

       Throughout the film zoophilia is accepted as an innate sexual desire that is central to an

individual’s personhood. “Why am I this way?” asks one of the zoophiles at the beginning of the

film. We can discern that his very conception of self, the core of his subjecthood is defined by

his sexual proclivities. This wasn’t always the case. He remarks that he “started when [he] was

16…and kinda liked it.” He “didn’t know it was zoophilia until [he] got on the internet” and has

been on the internet since. The ‘internet’ becomes a ‘site’ in which people with shared

sexual/romantic interests in non-human animals come to find one another and build community.

‘Zoophiles’ find each other online and then host parties to meet each other in person. These sorts

of gatherings happen in “hundreds of thousands of places across the country” and all ages are

welcome “as long as you’re old enough to drink!” A zoophile remarks that “it’s a pretty

much…classless society of [their] own little world – no one [has] different statuses.” When the

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zoophiles in the film started to meet together they’d discuss their frustration with the

stigmatization they have received in society for their sexual proclivities. This stigmatization has

made it such that many zoophiles feel uncomfortable ‘outing’ themselves to others.

       This question of visibility remains central to the appeal of the film. The trailer for the

film includes phrases like “he was a man like any other” and “What happens when who we

appear to be is different from who we are?” The film presents the zoophile as a ‘normal’

American subject who just happens to have this secret fetish. From the looks of him you

wouldn’t be able to tell that he has this desire because who he presents himself is not really who

he is. Once again, romantic/sexual desire is accepted as a core basis of identification. Desire to

non-human subjects is constructed as a transgressive desire, one that must be hidden. When the

zoophiles gather they also begin to think about their identities politically. They “talk about

constitutional freedoms” and about “politicians who thought they could control the morality of

the world.” The zoophiles maintain that they are not only moral beings, but law-abiding

respectable citizens. One remarks: “I wouldn’t accept money from anybody [to connect them

with my horses in order to have sex], then it’s prostitution and that’s against the law.” The

zoophiles tend to focus on the emotional aspects when making pleas for empathy or

consideration: “Sex was just a small component of it.” After the death of Mr. Hands the

government finds out about the zoophiles visiting the barn to have sex with the horses. A

zoophile exclaims, “One day I’m doing just fine and the next day I’m just an evil person. I

wasn’t breaking the law.” This man feels like he is being accused unfairly. He believes that the

government should not have interfered with his personal (romantic relationships): “I was evil

because I had love for my [non-human] animals more than most people do.” He points out the

government’s hypocrisy: how dare they criminalize him for his love?

Vaid-Menon 18

        This narrative arc is all too familiar: indeed, it is extremely similar to the rhetoric put

forth by the mainstream gay rights movement. This rhetoric has a history. These zoophiles are

only able to articulate their desires, their identity, and their politics in this way because of the

development of a very particular way of understanding sexuality and identity. It is crucial that we

familiarize ourselves with this history to contextualize why contemporary zoophiles are all white

and what this says about the status of Western sexual modernity.

        Reading Foucault, Cocks (2006) reminds us that “sexuality is the conceptual,

experiential, and institutional apparatus that modernity has built around the body and its erotic

pleasures” (1212). Only in the present era can we say that we have a ‘sexuality’ as the prime

essence of our self-hood. Modern sexuality became “surrounded by an array of scientific and

sociological disciplines that generated pervasive ideas about what were the normal attributes of

individuality, psychology, and sexual behavior” (Cocks 2006: 1212). As queer historical

scholarship -- including the work of Houlbrook (2005) and Chauncey (1994) -- remind us

heterosexuality became constructed and normalized as an appropriate type of sexuality, while

non-procreative sex acts like homosexuality became criminalized and linked with moral and

personal failure. Early ‘homosexual’ movements reveal much about the strategies that those with

‘perverse’ sexual desire had to employ in order to receive social approval (and normalization).

Gay activists employed a specific narrative of identity and respectability to become legally

recognized and accepted by the State. Jagose (1994) notes in her history of gay liberation that

homophile groups “argued that, apart from their same-sex sexual preferences, they were model

citizens, as respectable as heterosexuals, and no more likely to disturb the status quo” (30-31).

Houlbrook (2005) argues that this ‘respectable’ position “crystallized around three assumptions.

First sexual desire was located within a distinct domain of personhood…Second, it was innate

Vaid-Menon 19

and unchangeable…Third, it did not automatically place them outside conventional social and

moral codes” (197). This particular definition of homosexuality as a biological characteristic

enabled activists “to define their desires as a privatized condition rather than a social problem”

(257). Houlbrook effectively shows how this strategy mapped the homosexual body in the

‘private’ space that was articulated “upon a middle-class moral politics of space” (257). These

political strategies attempted to translate the demonized homosexual body into a respectable

citizen. The type of gay subject that these activists relied on was the liberal, humanist subject that

was recognizable as a legitimate citizen of the state. Same-sex desires were thought to be

manifestations of impulses “belonging to a distinct group of similar people” (Hall 2003, 43). In

conflating ‘actions’ with ‘identities,’ this discourse also created a similar mandate to come out:

the notion that one’s ‘real’ (sexual) self was closeted and had to be articulated with a particular

type of visibility to be rendered intelligible as part of the gay ‘community.’ After one came out

one agreed to be visible, but not too visible – to relegate their sexual desires to the ‘private’

realm. An essentialist approach to subjectivity allowed for early gay and lesbians to build

solidarity as a minority in order to counteract a prejudiced society.

       We can draw many parallels between the zoophiles contemporary pleas for acceptance

articulated in the film and the history of gay rights advocacy in the Western world. Both groups

were concerned with being recognized as ‘law-abiding’ citizens of the State. Both groups

communicated their sexual acts in the language of the liberal human subject, domesticating and

de-eroticizing the erotics of their desires, in order to be intelligible as a national subject worthy

of protection. It is my contention that this strategy of identity formation, assimilation, and liberal

rights based discourse is fundamentally rooted in the logic of colonial whiteness. Learning from

the limits (and violence) of gay politics informs my post-colonial critique of zoophilia. We must

Vaid-Menon 20

re-interpret histories (and contemporary manifestations) of pleas for sexual respectability as

indicative of desires for acceptance back into the white-imperialist nation State. We must re-

interpret the Western ‘queer’ (which I use here to refer to both homosexuals and zoophiles,

communities which share mutual displacement from normative heterosexuality) as subjects of

failed whiteness aspiring to regain this power and dominance.

        Indeed it is no surprise that as (Yep et. al 2003) remind us that even today “the most

vociferous widely published proponents of the assimilationist position [are] middle class,

European American, gay-identified men.” While there are many reasons why white men have

historically (and still continue) to identify with assimilative rhetoric and political strategies, I will

focus on questions of race and nationhood here. Post-colonial queer theorist Martin F.

Manalansan IV (1995) critiques the emergence of this modern white gay subjectivity arguing

that it relies on a developmental narrative that begins with an unliberated homosexual practice

and culminates in a liberated ‘out’ modern gay subjectivity. He reminds us how ‘gay’ only

becomes meaningful within the context of the emergence of bourgeois civil society and the

formation of the individual subjects, conditions which only occur with capitalist and Western

expansion (read: imperialism). In her groundbreaking book Citizen, Invert, Queer: Lesbianism

and War in Early Twentieth-Century Britain Deborah Cohler argues that when ‘lesbian’ began to

emerge as an identity through its relation to nationalism it emerged “complicit with and produced

through discourses of imperialist nationalism” (xii). Cohen reminds us that we cannot

underestimate the role of racial and imperialist anxieties in the development of modern gay

subjectivies. During the expansion of the British Empire the State participated in a type of gender

policing – one which tried to ensure ‘appropriate’ (and reinforced a male/female dichotomy) in

order to maximize heterosexual courtship and progeny, and therefore construct a strong and

Vaid-Menon 21

virile white nation. Individuals who did not participate in pro-creative sex acts became

constructed as sites of moral degeneracy, sites of failed whiteness in their inability to give back

to the nation. As Cohler (2010 reminds us, discourse about the sexual ‘invert’ also emerged from

discourses of masculine citizenship and racial health propagated by the nation (xiv). The

relationship between modern ‘gay’ subjectivity and histories of imperialism / neo-colonialism

are not limited to the Occident. Morgensen (2010) encourages us to recognize how “modern

sexuality arose in the United States as a method to produce settler colonialism, and settler

subjects, by facilitating ongoing conquest and naturalizing its effects (117). In arguing for the

legitimacy of their desires and dismissing the interpellation of perversity, Western white gay

subjects made pleas for acceptance to national and imperialist nation states. Their pleas can be

interpreted as a desire to be welcomed to the privileged subjectivity of whiteness. Indeed, Carter

(1997) and Terry (1999) explain how sexual sciences classified perversions by documenting

white subjects as degenerates who had regressed to prior stages of racial evolution. Thus, as

Morgensen (2010) rightly argues, “white sexual minorities [in their early activism] reversed

discourse on sexual primitivity in order to embrace it as a nature deserving recognition by

modern citizenship” (118).

       We can see a similar logic at work in Zoo. Indeed, the language zoophiles use to

articulate their sexual desire is replete with appeals to the nation state and appeals to

characteristics of (racialized and imperialist) sexual modernity. When one of the zoophiles in

Zoo first describes the demographics of the zoophile community he makes sure to counter the

notion that zoophiles are some how un-American (read: primitive). He remarks, “I even talked to

soldiers that are in Iraq [who identify as zoophiles].” Immediately the viewer is reminded by

rhetoric put forth by the neoliberal mainstream gay movement: i.e. the figure of the ‘gay soldier,’

Vaid-Menon 22

who is put forth as a symbol of the patriotism of a supposedly ‘deviant’ sexuality. The zoophile

seems to be suggesting, if a soldier can be a zoophile, then we really do represent your (an

American audience) best interests and are one of you (an American subject). Such an image

makes us forget the violence that the American nation state and soldier exercise on people of

color, the environment, and non-human animals around the world. We are encouraged to ‘accept’

the patriotic zoophile, but racialized and non-human subjects are still not allowed until our

consideration of the national imaginary. The film continues to explore the personal narratives of

zoophiles it follows a similar logic of assimilation instead of challenging the very paradigm of

sexual respectability. One man talks about how he reconciled his zoophilia with his (Christian)

faith by rationalizing that “God doesn’t hate anyone. You treat your fellow man right, you don’t

hurt other people, and for the most part you’ll be okay.” This zoophile employs a strategic logic

of patriarchy and white supremacy which tries to recuse itself from incrimination by defining

violence as only physical rather than simultaneously social, emotional, economic, and affective.

As Deckha (2006) reminds us: “The Cartesian mind/body split has obvious adverse implications

for women, people of color, the environment and animals, beings who have been historically

reduced to their bodies” (22). The zoophile appears unwilling to entertain how his desires can

inflict other types of harm beyond (and perhaps more dangerous) than the physical. Furthermore,

in invoking the language of God and being a ‘good Christian’ the zoophile makes an appeal to

the normative, respectful Western subject without challenging how Christianity has been

implicated in histories of colonial violence.

       Early writings in Gay & Lesbian Studies and Queer Studies positioned the ‘homosexual’

subject as the ‘queer’ – a subject demarcated outside of the boundaries of nation and

respectability that had the potential to radically transform notions of sexual modernity and

Vaid-Menon 23

respectability by virtue of its position as ‘perverse.’ Bakke seems to locate similar radical

ambition in the figure of the ‘zoophile.’ Yet, we must historicize our desire to locate radical

transgression in subjects that are still implicated in histories of prejudice and violence. Over time

we have seen how white Western gay subjects have employed strategies to be folded into life,

normalcy, and the nation. Jasbir Puar (2007) notes how “some homosexual subjects are complicit

with heterosexual nationalist formations rather than inherently or automatically excluded from or

opposed to them” (4). Puar uses the term ‘homonormative’ to describe this phenomenon and

argues that the homonormative project is fundamentally about whiteness. She notes:

       the project of whiteness is assisted and benefited by homosexual populations that
       participate in the same identitarian and economic hegemonies as those hetero subjects
       complicit with this ascendancy. The homonormative aids the project of heteronormativity
       through the fractioning away of queer alliances in favor of adherance to the reproduction
       of class, gender, and racial norms. The ascendancy of heteronormativity, therefore, is not
       tethered to heterosexuals; neither is it delimited to white people, though it is bound to
       whiteness” (32)

The white zoophiles in Zoo are complicit within this project of homonormativity. The “own little

world” they create in parties with other zoophiles does not exist in a vacuum – rather it is

informed and constructed by oppression and violence. With their continual insistence on

‘normalcy,’ ‘patriotism,’ and ‘law-abidedness’ – zoophiles are unwilling to challenge the

mandates of nationalist sexual identity formations and insist on the integrity of their whiteness.

They remain complicit to these discourses and use it to advance their own aims. In the same way

that white gay men have historically been able to incrementally gain acceptance in the Western

world utilizing this framework, I anticipate that white zoophiles will have similar success in

employing these strategies. I foresee that over time, zoophiles will be able to ascend back into

whiteness and become legally recognized and protected.

       In making this claim I recognize that we must expand Puar’s notion of homonationalism

Vaid-Menon 24

to include non-human subjects. Thus, I propose the term zoonationalism to describe the

phenomenon of white zoophile subjects seeking integration into the white nation state. The

zoonationalist process is inherently exclusive. In the rejection of the erotic, the primitive, the

unruly, the non-identitarian of their desire and the acceptance on the sterile, the identitarian, the

respectability of their ‘identity’ and ‘citizenship’ zoophiles construct an imperialist political

project that continues to exploit the racial Other, but also the animal other. Puar (2007) reminds

us that the integration of white gay subjectivity in the national imaginary necessitates the

exclusion of racialized Muslim and immigrant bodies. Similarly, the integration of zoophilia will

similarly be exclusive – not only will it not include racialized subjects, but also the animals

themselves. Indeed, even though zoophiles profess to care for non-human animals, they rarely

argue for the political rights of non-human animals. Indeed, zoophiles seem much less concerned

with the status of non-human animals than they do with their own narrowly-defined sexual

interests in them. At the end of the film when the farm is shut done the zoophile owner remarks,

“I was evil because I had a love for my [non-human] animals more than most people do.” He

focuses on his own personal experiences of vilification and frames the injustice in terms of his

human body. He does not believe that the desires of his horses (who he professes to be sexually

and emotionally interested in human animals) have been unfairly stigmatized and discriminated

against. He refers to his non-human animals with a possessive pronoun: “my.” This occurs

throughout the film. Even though zoophiles say that they believe in the sexual agency of non-

human animals, they still view these non-human animals as their own possessions, subjects that

belong to them. What is more, in the film we are told that at the zoophile gatherings “people

would bring over mixed drinks, beer, some meat, and have a party.” Non-human animals are not

invited to this community building and political conversations. Indeed, the only scenes in which

Vaid-Menon 25

we see zoophiles interact with non-human animals is during erotic encounters. This just goes to

show that the politicized body, the body of the ‘sexual subject’ still remains a white human,

while the body of the non-human animal remains hidden, put away in the stable. What is more,

even though zoophiles profess to care about the interests of non-human animals, they still

participate in the act of eating meat. Just as homonormativity and homonationalism define gay

rights as single issue asks (such as access to the institution of same-sex marriage),

zoonormativity and zoonationalism refuse to think intersectionally about all of the issues facing

non-human animals (including systematic cultivation and slaughter). This represents a larger

trend in the film: the political rhetoric around zoophilia in the film is centered on the human

animal experience of desiring non-human animals, not vice versa. The sexuality and sexual

agency of non-human animals is never explicitly politicized. Rather, it only becomes mentioned

when zoophiles describe their erotic encounters with non-human animals. Just as in the case of

homonormativity and the racial Other, with zoonormativity the body of the non-human animal

Other gets relegated to the (eroticized) sphere of the ‘private’ while the body of the white human

becomes the public symbol of this partnership, the body we welcome into the national imaginary.

A Turn to Affect: Revisiting the Colonial Project of Love

       At the end it features the perspective of a horse-specialist who comes to take care of the

horse that killed Mr. Hands. She remarks:

       I was trying to understand about this whole issue, so I started doing some research. In
       some of the things I read I came across the term zoophilia and I started kinda exploring
       that and doing some more research. IT was just interesting to learn that there are people
       who really have a love relationship for an animal not of their species. These people were
       talking about the extreme and loving care that they give their animal partner. I don't yet
       quite know how I feel about that, but I'm right at the edge of being able to understand it.

Her words mirror the process of the construction of the film: doing research, discovering that

zoophiles are not as ‘perverted’ as assumed, and developed an increased sympathy for the love of

Vaid-Menon 26

these partnerships. Even though the spectator might not know what their opinion is yet, they

develop an increased consideration, an increased willingness to be proven wrong. The final cut

of the film positions the spectator on top of a horse. We watch it beneath us and it is as if we are

riding (a word in this context which can have multiple meanings) them. The spectator is invited

to think about the research presented: can we not rationalize and come to accept love for such a

beautiful creature? It is the evocation of the language of ‘love’ and ‘kindness’ that I find most

interesting in the question of zoophilia. In this section I will link this rhetoric of ‘love’ to a

method of colonialism and white supremacy.

        Love is central to Bakke (2009)’s argument that zoophilia is a more ethical relationality

than bestiality. She reads the photos of Oleg Kulik and argues that “the heterospecies amily of

the future postulated by Kulik is particularly concerned with the sensuality and pleasure of the

human as well as the [non-human] animal partner, where the latter is not just an object of man’s

desire but a companion and lover” (236). For Bakke, zoophilia presents an opportunity to de-

objectify, to ‘humanize’ the animal. She wants to envision new possibilities where “the animal is

always a victim...of bestiality” and wants to imagine the potential for ‘humans’ and ‘animals’ to

re-imagine themselves differently, to make love (not just sex) together. This argument is also

discernable in the film. One zoophile remarks: “I always treated my animals as part of my

family. They are before I did. Look at the videos that they took of the horses. Did they look

neglected? No. It’s the love of [non-human] animals, that’s what zoophilia is. It’s just like if you

love your wife or kids, it’s the same thing.” This rhetoric of ‘love’ is corroborated in Williams &

Weinberg (2003)’s work on a zoophile community: “love and admiration were highlighted when

some spoke of [non-human] animals serving as human surrogates when love and affection had

been denied by peers or parents, or they themselves said they had problems with human

Vaid-Menon 27

intimacy” (528). In all of these discourses love is accepted as a humanizing affect, an ethical way

of relating to another subject. We see this in the work of Donna Haraway (2003) as well. In her

companion species manifesto Haraway attempts to shift notions of individual subjectivity to a

relational category that emerges in the encounter between different beings. She tries to replace

the ‘violent’ ‘abuses’ of bestiality with mutually affirmative “acts of love” (61). She calls for a

politics based on affect: one in which “acts of love…breed acts of love like caring about and for

other concatenated, emergent worlds” (61). Haraway makes an important post-colonial gesture

here in attempting to decenter the ‘individual’ subject, yet her politics of love is uncritical and, in

fact, reifies (neo)colonialism. In what follows I will problematize this discourse of love and

demonstrate how zoophile love is implicated within histories of sexual violence.

       Before continuing with my critique it is important to recognize that no matter how

normalized notions of ‘love’ are in our (Western) culture, love is a socially constructed concept.

Yet, hegemonic understandings of love “implicitly define what is appropriate and desireable…in

relations” Beall & Sternberg 1995: 426). Conceptions of love prescribe ways of thinking and

acting toward one’s ‘beloved.’ Thus, we must remain cautious of any discourse which simply

relies on an essentialist notion of ‘love’ and ask how one’s conception of ‘love’ is defined by

their geographic and social position. The type of ‘love’ put forth by Haraway and the zoophiles

in Zoo is a love that is centered in the experience of white privileged bodies – a love that actually

has the potential to be violent and neocolonial. In a previous section I made the parallel between

white zoophile attraction for the [non-human] animal Other and histories of white attraction for

the racial ‘Other,’ arguing how both desires exploit the body of the racialized/animalized Other

in order to escape from the boundaries of white Western respectability. In arguing this, I gestured

to the importance of contextualizing contemporary relations between human and non-human