Animal, Human, Alien (WisCon 30 Panel)

Panelists

Elizabeth Bear (moderator), Liz Henry, Tom La Farge, Ursula K. Le Guin, David D. Levine, Lisa Tuttle

Panel Description

Let's talk about books which explore animal/human boundaries as a way to explore gender and, often, race. Books where women become animals, or animals take on a narratively feminine gender role. Examples would be Carmen Dog, Troll, Mister Boots, books like that. What roles do we project on animals? The trope of the telepathic companion animal as perfect Wife, or as the externalization of the heroine's object position and disempowerment. What are the boundaries of sentience? In fact, animals, aliens, and AIs all explore this idea.

Transcript Notes

Original transcript notes by Laura Quilter - please correct or fill in or add commentary

EB: animals as allegory

UKL: the farther back you go in history the more stories are about animals

LH: ??

DL: farmkids seeing animals having sex

TLF: animals - different kinds of animals have different kinds of expressive gestures. they're very clera - and that makes them suited for allegory. ... like puppets; they signify clearly & thru a particular gesture. ...

EB: ties back into david's earlier point; you think about animals carrying something out. ... gendering: Do animals carry out a narratively feminine role as it says in the panel?

? I mentioned david brin w/ cordwainer smith.

DL: the animals are the servants, the permanent lower class ... also in dr. moreau

UKL:

DL: women are just shaped kind of like men but never really will be. if you read critical work around cordwainer smith there might have been a unification of people & underpeople, and some kind of religious climax perhaps. the underpeople may represent or serve same role as feminine underclass of women, the servant, the provider, the ones who keep everything going even tho they're not acknowledged. most of the fun stuff that happens in cordwainer smith stories is interaction b/w people & underpeople;

EB: hold that thought b/c lisa's looking thoughtful

LT: hard to say b/c you seem to be discussing this as animals about a place to talk about gender. but what i'm thinking is, no they're not, no they're not. now i know they've been done. cordwainer smith, certainly carmen dog, a lot of about male/female relationship. but i think is maybe that's useful in the past, but what's going on in the moment is a different look @ relations; not about men/women , but adults/children, or just about one individual vs. another individual. reading temple grandon's book animals in translation. autistic / working w/ animals for years; designed more humane methods for slaughterhouses b/c she's figured out how animals respond to thing. she calls it the cow's eye view. so she sees what pigs see from their perspective, why do pigs balk. so she feels she has a special affinity for animal consciousness b/c of her autism. i have a problem with some of her comments that autistic people are more like animals or their brains are. she obviously doesn't see that as a negative thing, but the autistic spectrum ... but what seems most interesting to me anyway is less a fairly simplistic look @ gender relations and more a way of understanding other people. b/c for one thing she is a human being but she feels very different from most other human beings. however i think MOST human beings have this feeling; most people don't feel 'i'm a part of the group; i'm just like everyone else.' because if you look at a group, my broyfriend years ago, stoned at the time, said "doesn't it seem strange to you that coolidge union is the only one not talking?" you live with them but they're very obviously not seeing the world the way you are.

audience: temple grandon talks a lot about not feeling the same way other people do. she feels pain when plate glass windows break. she may really feel quite different b/c she has to come up w/ elaborate metaphors to get in the headspace of non-autistic people.

TLF: about connection b/w animals & gender, and children and those who hacve been subject to other people's power - what animals bring forward & i think it's by their evident mortality is a radical innocence - i'm talking in social terms. there's a social innocence - not necessarily to women - but something projected upon women as a residue of victorian attitudes, but in a more general way children & animals are not culpable in the same way the powerful feel they are. and therefore animals like women or children or possibly mammalians of the ET sort can serve to bring forward that idea of innocence and maybe also of mortality that goes along with it.

UKL: i think you're absolutely right but a curious counterexample is watership down. where he took famous study of rabbit society and reversed the gender. it's perfectly well known that in rabbits that the does run everything and the bucks just run around and, you know what rabbits do. the women run rabbit society. in watership down it's all guy rabbits, they're all men, they're all very macho except this one that's less so, and they go off to found a new colony and it doesn't even occur to them until about page 300 that they forgot something and what did they do, they went & stole them from somebody. i had to re-read that book which i hated the first time and hated even more the second time, but that came out about the same time as feminism, and he turned all these macho guys into rabbits and got away with it, and all these people said what a dear sweet fantasy. eeeuuuuh.

DL: bringing animals onto stage to represent things. rabbits represent cowardice. you can use a tiger or a horse or a lion to represent part of masculinnity or to represent the masculine in some way.

LH: one of the reasons you might want to argue w/ the panel description is b/c i wrote it and i was thinking about gender specifically but i think maybe what was going on when i outlined the panel description is that i was reading the tiptree award and seeing the way that tiptree was being used to create pwoer relationships. ... turning to TLF: it's not necessarily feminized but it often is. ...

TLF: to be feminized is to be oppressed

LH: i like what you said about people trying to establish power over ...

LH - the word for world is forest the people treating the little green people like animals. but i was specifically thinking about companion animals and what you expressed about othering ... and the thing sthat heroines of the book don't necessarily want to have.

EB: the other thing i've noticed is that if you have an animal character in the book people get very protective of it - people get very protective of animal characters. i've gotten mail -- there's a cat in hammered - and i've gotten mail from people who say i won't read the second two books unless you tell me the cat survives. locus felt it necessarily to spoiler the cat's fate in the review.

LH: can i talk about companion animal b/c it is what i was thinking about. i was thinking about andre norton ... giant telepathic weasels ... or stoats or something. bonds with horses, tamora pierce and alanna w/ purple-eyed kitten. yes -- the companion animal fantasy. your dragon is like your wife, or your abused child that you're rescvuing 7 caring for. so it's important in these books that the heroine engages in daily care of the animal, so you're always oiling your animals, etc. so women's role is to talk about relationship w/ animal.

LT: maybe it's important that idea of having a companion nanimal is that that is not going to be the relationship w/ another human being. maybe that was what men would have expected from a wife in the past ... but

EB: they may have their own ideas about your relationship

LT: but i wonder isn't this sort of fantasy the sort of fulfillment of a relationship we can't possibly have, not even with an animal; that's why it's fantasy; a telepathic dragon, or an external soul, or a little lady creature that comes & lives in your house. something we'd all like to have but we can't get it in this world.

LH: male wish fulfillment fantasies have the same thing. so it's like having a vehicle and a weapon, so like a gun and ca car.

audience: octavia butler's trilogy, people & animals mating, but so hard to believe that aliens are smart etc. b/c they're so animals. UKL: you think of those aliens as animals? audience: no but alien is in the title of this panel. it was a very sexual thing

EB: exploitative relationship & there is a critique of exploitative relationships

audience: mention shamanistic tradition of shaman becomes an animal and takes on those panels ... not being subjective, not lesser than, but taking on additional panels. that's what i remember from 40 years ago from reading andre norton that that was a powerful thing - particularly women becoming animals and not just to express the dangerous parts of themselves -

EB: octaiva butler's wild seed

UKL: i don't understand but dragons in earthsea books are on that line, some part of us that we have lost or don't know how to access.

audience/warblogger in front row: i just want to mention a whole bunch of different variants on human/animal in different fiction. sirius by olaf stapledon told by a hyper-intelligent dog having a love affairs w/ human woman he was raised with and gwen the crazy-making bitch he was raised with ... and love of his life he grew up with and he is a human, too stmart for dogs, not human; a fascinating book. clifford simak in city; when humans leave earth & have to completely re-adapt themselves ; they take their dogs with them who also get adapted. another human animal interrelationsh that really freaked me out was supergirl's superhorse; in ancient greece a centaur and a woman who fell in love with him ... and ties into john varley's centaurs in titan trilogy.

audience: suggestion (EB shut them down, said not on point, different panel)

...

audience: subject of animals in grief. one reason it's so often resented when an author kills off a character is that animals are ... if we've grown up with animals it's often our first experience with bereavement and grownups may not take it that seriously. ... testing out what's bearable

DL: sometimes a companion animal can be used ... threatening companion animal can be used as way to threaten character or as part of escalation

LH: i think that also relates to what lisa was saying about love & that maybe animal is a way to explore something about love that it's inappropriate to love a human being while depriving them of their agency

UKL: something about grief & love ... on to something very essential about why we write and read about animals and can't bear reading about killing pet in book and why author chickens out of rwriting it. we allow ourselves to feel our emotions about animals in a more honest & childlike manner.

DL: more mindful

UKL: not sure i accept that; it's simply more direct. ... unselfconscious

audience/charlie: since we're talking about animals & alien & gender what does it mean when a character in a book is half human and half something else. ... mentioning tehanu, all dragon, and all girl at the same time ... a gendered othering, failure to fit into gender rooles b/c you're not quite human. mr. spock. maybe animal part is your alien part.

UKL: whole thing about half-breeds.

DL: spock, belanna, worf, are all half-and-half

audience: wasn't dorothy chasing after toto - wondering if you would care to speak to that, the role of the animal leading the human, somehow the other world or adventure -

UKL: animal guide. jung talked about that a lot.

DL: just in terms of plot purposes that ties into unselfconscious. putting animal into danger forces author to force character to do something stupid

TLF: extremely interesting, probably has to do w/ fact that we feel animals are more fully in world than we are. d.h. lawrence , snake, really good poem. it describes snake coming out of a hole to drink, and his chasing it, and it goes back into hole

EB: specifically a venomous snake

TLF: he feels a deep sense of shame that he didn't welcome it to the world but its world is the earth. one thing we know about animals is that they have to adapt or survive. we have to do that too.

EB: anyone care to speak of animals as earth, ties into age-old feminism as earth

TLF: you just said it

UKL: men feel that women are more in tongue with "EARTH" mother nature and so on. men feel that. i'm not sure women feel that.

LH: we've been talking about some examples where animals are non-civilized where they're the opposite of civilization but actually many works maybe increasingly so acknowledge that animals or aliens or AIs have a different c ivilization one that we don't understand. we don't understand its rules but it has its own logic.

audience: animal guide into the earth - gender-related thing. there were tribes in central america who used to kill if someone died they would kill the family dog b/c the dog was a spirit guide. question which has to do with recent research on animal consciousness and how much we're beginning to learn about how conscious animals really are.

EB: my research is all about that

audience: makes me want to write a book about animal economics

audience: i think it was chimpanzees that introduced prostitution

audience: animals telepathic often used as foil for main character, someone you can talk to all the time - so how does gender of character affect relationship

DL: green dragon riders

...

EB: what about jennifer roberson's shapeshifter ... are they always the same gender. no they're not i don't think they are but i can't remember how that's handled. is it a total nonissue.

audience: horses & suzy mckee charnas.

audience: c j cherryh uses same-gender horse & rider pairings

aud: mercedes lackey.

? philip pullman's daemons are not really animals but they are usually not always the opposite gender

TLF: telepathic focuses on wish to be seen and loved. ... typical breakdown in this situation.

LH: telepathy is also important b/c usually probably there are a million excpetions but there is a pattern that only bonded person could hear it speak. unless you're married or Very Special. animal is silenced on a societal level.

EB: lady in green then Ben

aud/lady in green: slightly different direction but talking about all these things makes me think back to Tea With the Black Dragon; there we have an entity a dragon w/ ancient wisdom linked to the earth assumes a gender, an idealized male, who is a better companion for a female protagonist of novel than any male could be.

DL: whole gay boyfriend thing.

? ... animals as fear. fairy tales: kissing the frog, kind of horrible.

UKL:

DL: i've never been able to read that story without thinking that we tell little girls they should kiss the ugly frog and it will turn into a handsome prince

DL: you show a character is evil by having dog or cat react badly.

LH: tribbles.

DL: horses are nervous ... they're all more sensitive to us

EB: what about aslan & two girls' relationship ... anything other than xtian allegory?

audience: no

LH: slash porn.

audience: animals are people they are brothers & sisters & we need to respect them as such. therefore we do not have use the animal as toolk use it as foil.

EB: talking about literature

LH: from a specific culture

audience: the other worldview is not expressed much in literature. we talk about companion animals but think about relationship b/w lone ranger tonto & silver.

aud 2: what about david weber honor harrington & her treecat.

aud 3: telepathic treecat.

aud/Diantha Day Sprouse: in whole long ranger thing silver & tonto are both companion animals to lone ranger.

DL: who is closer to roy rogers, dale or trigger?

EB: legal problems w/ having dale stuffed & mounted

aud: after narnia, another book on everyone's hate list, watership down.

...

aud/Hal Duncan: Gilgamesh & Enkidu

External Links

• Sarah Monette's notes