Disanimality: When Disability, Illness, and Animality Meet

If you are supportive of disability advocacy, should you also be vegan? Should your thoughts on euthanizing a pet be consistent with how you might think about humans in search of assisted suicide? Scholars in disability studies have recently called for greater engagement with animal studies as a field. But complicated questions remain. Disability activists have long been fighting to reclaim the humanity of disabled people, for example, who have historically been constructed in ableist terms as somehow less than human. Should disability and animal activism therefore be linked together? Comparing nonhuman animals to people with terminal illnesses and disabilities is inevitably offensive for some, while others might wonder why there shouldn’t be more solidarity between these movements. This talk seeks to unpack the discomfort these questions can produce, while also suggesting better ways of bringing together disability, illness, and animality, primarily by focusing on the concept of disanimality.