Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies

Special Issue: ‘Rethinking the Species Divide: Disability and Animality in Literature and Culture’

Guest Editors: Liz Shek-Noble and Chelsea Temple Jones

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.

Possible topics for articles may include:
• Representations of human-animal assemblages in literature and film, and how such representations provoke reconsideration of disabled embodiment and phenomenology
• The benefits and conflicts emerging in the employment of service and/or emotional support animals by disabled people
• Controversies in the use of service and/or emotional support animals as represented in mainstream media
• The mutual exploitation of disabled people and animals in biomedical research
• Literary and non-fictional accounts of zoonotic diseases and their public health and individual health implications
• Historical and cultural changes to the concepts of animality, disability, and impairment
• Environmental responses to climate change, global waste, and food shortages and how such rhetoric may disadvantage both disabled-human and animal populations
• The construction of minority groups in literature, culture, and history using ableist and speciesist rhetoric
• Similar and different representational models for disabled people and disabled animals in popular culture
• The disablement of animals as a result of intensive farming, selective breeding, and captivity
• Representations of ageing and retired animals in literature and culture, and how such representations may undo the instrumentality and productivity-driven goals of ableist neoliberalism
• Speculative fiction that views the human race through the lenses of speciesism and ableism

Timetable:

31 August 2021: Submission of a 500-word proposal for articles plus a 100-word bio to the guest editors, Liz Shek-Noble and Chelsea Temple Jones: jlcdsdisabilityandanimality@gmail.com.

31 September 2021: Prospective authors are notified of the status of their submission.

14 January 2022: Full versions of selected papers are due to the guest editors.

May 2022: Finalists are selected. Decisions and revisions on submissions are sent to authors from the guest editors.

26 August 2022: Final, revised papers are due.