Animalization

Previous research finds roleplaying games, as well as the wider spectrum of geek culture that they exist within, to be defined by discourses favoring a white, heterosexual, cis-male viewpoint, drawing up and reproducing stereotypes and tropes that are inherently misogynist, homophobic, and racist. Heretofore, research into discourses of gender, sexuality, and race in roleplaying games has focused overwhelmingly on market leader Dungeons & Dragons (1971-ongoing), largely neglecting to scrutinize other well-established titles that may adhere to or break from the same tendencies. This thesis attempts to bridge part of that gap by looking at the fantasy roleplaying game Exalted (2001-ongoing), a game with a reputation for challenging conventions of the genre and the medium. Scrutinizing a dataset of 31 sourcebooks making up the majority of the material published for the second edition of the roleplaying game, the thesis uses a method of multimodal feminist post-structural discourse analysis to unpack dominant discourses within the roleplaying game text. Putting findings in context with theory, the thesis finds that the second edition of Exalted reproduces many of the same discourses found in roleplaying games and in wider geek culture: In text and images, women are constructed as normatively young and beautiful and as adhering to a pre-set, limiting and commodified set of roles matching Irigaray’s (1985) virgin, mother, and prostitute; women who fail to adhere to these roles are routinely Othered as are racial, sexual, and gender minorities. This is entirely in line with similar findings for other roleplaying games, suggesting that even active attempts to subvert genre tropes and discourses may result in reproducing said tropes and discourses. This extensive study of a major roleplaying game edition may provide a significant launching point for research into the continued evolution of roleplaying games and geek culture.

Uncanny valley (不 気 味 の 谷 ) is a notion introduced by the Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori in 1970. The basic claim of his hypothesis states that the anthropomorphic machines cause uncanny effect due to their imperfect resemblance to the human. Humanoids seem almost like people, but exactly the distance of this almost provokes hot debates. There are two trends in robotics, animation, architecture, and computer games. The first trend seeks to overcome the uncanny valley, constructing such an incredible machine that perfectly mimics human actions. The second trend – Masahiro Mori takes this side – consciously constructs non-anthropomorphic machines. The machine’s appearance, structure, shape, proportion of the parts, and motion must be visibly different from the human ones. The term uncanny valley appears in a European context soon after its introduction, due to Jasia Reichardt’s translation in 1978. She is an art critic and curator who is interested in the role of cybernetics in art. The joint between the uncanny valley in robotics and the legacy of Freud and Jentsch is established with this translation at the intersection point between aesthetics and science. This link opens new fields to theoretical and aesthetic imagination.

Keywords: mimesis, uncanny, uncanny valley, Bukimi no Tani, doubles, mimetic machines, likeness, unconcept, negative anagnorisis, heterogenesis

Resumen: En este trabajo se analiza la relación entre mujeres, animales y sacrificio en Bacantes de Eurípides a través de la animalización de Ágave y el colectivo de ménades, por un lado, y del tratamiento del sacrificio en relación con Penteo, por el otro, a fin de percibir estrategias de perversión ritual.

Abstract:  In this work we analyze the relation between women, animals and sacrifice in Euripides’ Bacchae via the animalization of Agave and the maenads, on the one hand, and the treatment of the sacrifice of Pentheus, on the other, in order to perceive strategies of ritual perversion.

Materially as well as metaphorically, fat is seemingly ubiquitous in Donald Trump's America. Rather than simply a rude comment to make about someone's appearance or capacity for self-control, the word refers to a form of matter and style of metaphor that helps structure divisions between America and the world, as well as among Americans themselves. To support this claim, this article outlines a broad cultural imagination relating to fat -- a fat imaginary -- that structures common global perceptions of Americans and America, as well as assessments of Trump himself. With sources traceable to traditional agricultural motifs, metaphors relating to fat often connote processes of fattening that evoke ideas about consumption, as well as devouring and animality. To see how the fat imaginary informs contemporary political discourses, the article probes the "fat American" as a consuming figure on the world stage, as well as media representations of Trump as a devouring monster.

This chapter speaks to the peculiar valence the  Melusine figure--a mythological woman-serpant hyrbid--holds in the feminist art scene in late twentieth-century Vienna. The essay’s core is an analysis of three artworks from three genres: Barbara Frischmuth’s short story “Adder” (“Otter,” 1982), Elfriede Jelinek’s novel The Piano Teacher (Die Klavierspielerin, 1983), and visual artist VALIE EXPORT’s short film Man & Woman & Animal (Man & Frau & Animal, 1973). Each of these works, while not usually associated with the figure of Melusine, evoke and critically deploy certain basic elements of the Melusine myth. These elements resonate across the legend’s historical transformation and into the present: the bath-setting as a ritualized space of abjection; the constitutive role of the concealed male gaze, typically framed through a hole in the bathroom door; and Melusine’s status as a human-animal hybrid, along with the shocked, angry, or disgusted reaction this stirs in the onlooker.

The essay critiques the hegemonic discourses of demonization and otherization in the texts of internal imperialism in India, the Smruti-Sruti-Puranas of Hinduism the imperial textuality of the caste empire the lasting one and the ancient one in the world. How the Hindu Sanskritic epics and Puranas and their rerenderings inculcate and legitimize  a violent otherizing mentality and caste Hindu consensus of genocide and perpetuate killing and annihilation of the other are explored with illustrations and examples from the present. How Mahabali was demonized as he was a just and egalitarian ruler and leader of the South Indian people who resisted the project of Varnasramadharma. How Lanka was demonized because it was a Buddhist country and how Mahisha was rendered an Asura and slain in sleep by the Hindu goddess and how she is worshiped for it; these are a few socio cultural questions discussed in the context of violent and genocidal cultural nationalism and ultra nationalism in India. How the pedantic pseudo academic mimicry of "Mavarata Pattatanam" and Gitagiri are Hinduizing and communalizing the secular society in Kerala and how the RSS and right wing agendas are being pushed through the right and left in Kerala and the Indian Constitution is subverted and suspended by undermining its social justice base are also under critical analyses. Published just before the Savarimala Sudra riots of 2018 the essay anticipates the damage done to Indian republic and the constitution by the pagan narratives.

[Extended Abstract]
For presentation at: 'Challenging Philosophies' panel, 'The State of Philosophy' conference, 03 April 2022, Duquesne University (online).
Conference website: https://thestateofphilosophy2022.carrd.co/

In this paper, I advocate for the inclusion within academic philosophy of texts, voices and materials from outside the field. I illustrate the benefits of this inclusion through a discussion of Sunaura Taylor’s 'Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation' (2017), and Joshua Bennett’s 'Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man' (2020). Finally, I consider the risks of this practice, using Emmalon Davis’ account of epistemic appropriation.

[Open file to view full abstract]

Abstract for panel: ‘Animals, Empathy, and Anthropomorphism in Saramago’s Work’ at the VII International Conference “José Saramago’s Philosophical and Sociopolitical Heritage” (Oct. 2022)

Seeing Dogs: Dis/ability and De/humanization in José Saramago’s 'Blindness'

Rhona J. Flynn (University of Vienna / Messerli Research Institute)

Two sighted characters are at the metaphorical and narrative centre of José Saramago’s 'Blindness' (1995) - not merely a human and an animal, but specifically, a woman and a dog. When all other humans lose their sight in an ‘epidemic of blindness’, the dog and the woman act as actual and metaphorical guides; as sighted figures, they maintain quintessentially ‘human’ qualities as everyone else descends into moral, physical, and social squalor. Blindness, as an embodied experience, is portrayed as utterly disabling. Simultaneously, blindness, as a metaphor, is used to represent ignorance, irrationality, and moral failure. This paper argues that both the literal and metaphorical representations of blindness Saramago deploys are damaging, discriminatory, and dehumanizing.

In 'Blindness', those who lose their sight are utterly lost, utterly dependent, morally and socially degenerate, physically and psychically filthy; defective, incapable and bereft. Blindness, as an embodied experience, is portrayed as a total, non-adaptive state, as near-total incapacity, as lack, tragedy, and disaster. This imaginary of a sighted author, who seems never to have engaged with the work and experiences of blind people, is not only factually wrong – it reinscribes and perpetuates the real and ongoing animalization of disabled people.

Simultaneously, the ’epidemic of blindness’ narrative, and the social collapse which ensues, is intended as an extended allegory of human ignorance and irrationality. The morally pure, instinct-guided, sighted dog acts as a compass for the catastrophically failing humans, and for the sole sighted (female) human remaining. The metaphorical equation of blindness with ignorance (and of sight with moral purity and superior knowing) only works because it rests upon discriminatory assumptions about ability and ‘normal’ human capacities, and deeply dehumanizing norms about blindness and atypical embodiment.

This paper critiques both the literal and metaphorical representations of blindness, in Saramago’s 'Blindness' (1995). I argue that Saramago’s animalizing caricature of the embodied and social experience of blindness, together with his weaponization of blindness as a metaphor for ignorance, promotes a viscerally dehumanizing and damaging position on disability in general, and blindness in particular.