Empathy Through Interspecies Transcreation

Abstract

As a vegan ecofeminist working in literary animal studies, what matters most to my research at the moment are texts that decenter the anthropos from their worldview, avoiding a compensatory humanism that, as Rosi Braidotti warns in The Posthuman, simply confirms the human/animal binary whilst denying the specificity of animals altogether. When the voice of the narrator/ poetic persona succeeds in translating an other-than-human animal experience into human language, readers encounter an instance of what I call “interspecies transcreation,” an opportunity for empathy and ecosocial change. In this article, I consider representations of other- than-human animals in literature written by women to explore the extent to which they challenge or reproduce the logic of colonization articulated by Val Plumwood in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature and elsewhere. I have chosen a few texts written by Spanish poets committed to the animal cause.