by Stacy Alaimo

About Stacy Alaimo

Stacy Alaimo is Professor of English and Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Director of the Environmental and Sustainability Studies program at the University of Texas at Arlington. Her publications include Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (2000); Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010), which won the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) book award for ecocriticism; and Material Feminisms (2008), which she coedited. She has served on the MLA Division of Literature and Science and the inaugural committee of the new MLA forum for Ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities. She is currently editing the Matter for the Gender series of Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks, and is writing two books: “Protest and Pleasure: New Materialism, Environmental Activism” and “Feminist Exposure and Blue Ecologies: Science, Aesthetics, and the Creatures of the Abyss.”

Animal

One English word, one Western concept—“animal”—somehow encompasses a vast array of creatures—sponges, spiders, capybara, camels, eels, eagles, ticks, tigers, octopi, orangutans, dinosaurs, and slugs—but it rarely contains humans. Western philosophy and everyday conceptual frameworks define the human against the animal, forcing the multitude of beings other than Homo sapiens into one category. Jacques Derrida notes the absurdity and violence of this ostensibly neutral term: