I present a paper, "Interspecies Consent, Dirty Hands, and Collective Fantasy," at The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) 2021 conference.

Here is a link to a pdf of the paper.

Abstract:
This paper considers the circulation of discourses of consent in the environmental humanities at large through a reading of Radhika Govindrajan’s 2018 ethnography, Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas. Questioning the appearance of liberal forms of subjecthood in critical attempts to describe animals "as they are" this paper argues that a politics of consent cannot not actually be made to meaningfully serve a politics of anti-violence. The logic of consent is transactional, founded on the primacy of the individual—a figure which in its propertied, possessive form was fortified by racialized expropriation and dispossession. To invoke the animal's inability to consent then is to traffic in the racialized apportionment of reason. However, an ascription of the ability to consent to nonhumans does not meaningfully transform the individualized and legal frameworks on which the term's coherence relies. Rather than reinforcing the conceptual tidiness of consent, this paper forwards the argument that the project of elaborating inter- (and intra-) species relations cannot be defined by an implicit valorization of clarity and purity. The paper argues that the concepts that have normatively inscribed themselves in genres of writing about the nonhuman must be reflexively examined and unsettled—not as a means to a purification of critical discourse, nor as the means to the invention of a better or truer language, but as means to account for the collective fantasies that animate such critical projects in the first place.

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