There is increasing interest in scholarship that looks to intersections between disability studies and critical animal studies. Publications including Sunaura Taylor’s Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (2017), Maren Tova Linett’s Literary Bioethics: Disability, Animality, and the Human (2020), and the edited collection, Disability and Animality (Jenkins et al., 2020) have interrogated the mutual logics of ableism and anthropocentrism in the oppression of disabled-human and animal lives. Equally so, these monographs have broken new ground to propose how fundamental notions of being and community are reconfigured when questions of value and justice are allowed to cross species divides.
This special issue of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies invites articles that explore the myriad ways in which disability and animality are intertwined in literature and culture. A core question that the special issue poses is: How can disabled people (re)claim the animal as an inherent and vital part of their existence, rather than a category that must be denied or overcome in order to obtain the same rights as the non-disabled? This question follows on from Taylor’s provocative comment in Beasts of Burden that ‘Speciesism doesn’t necessarily keep people from wanting to identify as animal; dehumanization does’ (110). Other key questions of the special issue are: What conflicts are apparent between disability studies and critical animal studies as a result of human dependence on animals as a ‘resource’ to meet their service, nutritional, and/or medical needs? How can such conflicts be resolved with mutual benefit for both disabled people and non-disabled animals? Finally, the guest editors of the special issue welcome articles that explore how disabled animals in literature and culture may prompt humans (both disabled and non-disabled) to reassess the anthropocentric biases inherent in notions of productivity and autonomy.
