Disability, the animal, and the question of the "lack"

Long time since I've posted, but I've certainly been busy reading and writing and going to conferences. Right now we are having our annual international seminar on Gender Studies here at UFSC called Fazendo Gênero, which is in its 9th installment. I've had the pleasure of participating of a symposium within the event focused on culturar criticism, Border Studies and Silviano Santiago's concept of the entre-lugar, which was later adopted by Mary Louise Pratt as The Contact Zone.

I wrote my article on and talked about the sometimes tense contact zone between Disability Studies and Animal Studies. This has been explored by many scholars I have read, and the main dilemma seems to be that DS asks us to humanize our ideas of disability, while AS urges us to let go of the concept of the human as a yardstick for moral relevance and, sometimes, to pinpoint how dangerous it might be to a trans-species ethics to give higher moral consideration to humans regardless of their cognitive capacities. This last argument is, of course, based on the premisse that all our ethical systems are sustained by the concept of mental capacity, which supposedly is the only thing that can make you even realize that you're happy or suffering.

Temple Grandin's ableism

As an autistic animal scientist who seemed to problematize even further the connections between the disability critique and posthumanist thinking, Temple Grandin had always been a very interesting and intriguing character and author for me for a long time, when I finally found a reason to buy one of her books from Amazon. One of my Literature teachers in my undergrad program, Eliana Ávila, who was also in my BA dissertation committee, has recently become deeply interested in Disability Studies to the point that she founded a research group focused on the interconnections between post-colonialism and disability. She invited some of her students to present something in a future conference on Gender Studies about disability-related othering. And my publication-greedy self thought that that was exactly what I needed to finally start reading Temple Grandin, to analyze what she brought of interest to the posthuman/disability 'conflict', and to present her to the Brazilian academia.