ABSTRACT This interview was especially produced to be published in pensar/escrever o animal: ensaios de zoopoética e biopolítica, edited by Maria Esther Maciel (Florianópolis: editora ufsc, 2011). It is divided in six parts: Pigs for Situated Knowledges; Subjectivity for Zoo-Ethno-Graphers; Entanglement or Identification?; Playing Cats Cradle: Multispecies Feminist Theory; Out of the Garden and into the Humus: Queering the Compost Pile; Staying with the Trouble: Killing without Making Killable?

Multispecies Companions in Naturecultures:

Donna Haraway and Sandra AzeredoѰ in Conversation

February 2011

Open and vulnerable, capable of astonishment and invention, hungry for learning how to inherit the terrible burdens of genocides, exterminations, and extinctions without repeating them in a need to become innocent and pure—these are as much my concerns now as they were in the 1980s. But this time I have a fine dog to herd me onto tracks that she might find more promising… Donna Haraway

I. Pigs for Situated Knowledges

Sandra:

I gladly accepted Maria Esther’s invitation to do an interview with you as part of

this book on thinking with / writing the animal. The experience of having you as my

advisor in the program History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa

Cruz in the eighties, left a deep mark in my work and my life. So, preparing the questions

for this conversation through the Internet was much more than a mere intellectual task. It

ended up being an experience of becoming with you, of thinking with you.

Donna Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California at Santa Cruz since 1980. Her teaching and research explore the cat’s cradle knots tied by feminist theory, science and technology studies, and animal studies. Ѱ Sandra Azerêdo is tenured professor of the Psychology Department at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, where she teaches feminist theory and social psychology. Her research explores the gender, race and class relations involved in the violence against women.

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I met Maria Esther in 2008, at an international seminar on Gender at the Federal

University of Santa Catarina, in Florianópolis. She teaches at the Faculdade de Letras, at

the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, and you became a strong

connection between the two of us due to your work on companion species. Maria Esther

has been doing research on zoo-literature and I have learnt a whole lot on this theme by

reading her work. Of course I had read a lot of stuff on animals in novels, poems, art in

general –animals are everywhere in all kinds of art and in life—but I had never thought

that “animals are good to think with,” as you write. Thus, preparing for this interview –

reading (and re-reading) your work and Maria Esther’s1 and Derrida’s L’Animal que donc

je suis (À Suivre),2 which both of you quote in your work, is making me enter a new

world where animals and humans meet in ways that affect all of us and, most

importantly, co-constitute us, as you argue.

An important question concerning this co-constitution refers to the asymmetric relations

between humans and non-human working animals. So let me begin with this question.

Recently in a Rural University in the interior of Minas Gerais, Margarita Ramos,

a friend for whom I had been advisor in the Graduate Program in Social Psychology, took

me to see the place where the pigs were kept. There was a special place for the sows

who3 were reproducing –nursing their piglets or waiting to give birth. I was shocked to

find those enormous hogs with iron bars around their bodies to keep them lying down so

that their piglets could suck their teats. The only movement those poor females were able

to make was raise their heads a little bit away from the ground. They reminded me of a

scene in Clockwork Orange, in a lab experiment that was producing a mixture of humans

and another species. One of the tied females who would soon be giving birth to had a big

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basket under her tail where her babies piglets would emerge from her body. Margarita

and I were so disturbed that, after I left the next day, she went back to talk with the vet

responsible for such a cruelty. He said that they need to tie the females because otherwise

they will step on the piglets. And, besides, he added, the bars were not that tight! He also

commented that he was sick and tired of those animal rights’ folks.

In When Species Meet,4 you cite a story which is very much like that on the

Brazilian “gestation crates” (that is the term used for those veritable torture boxes) for

confining sows (2008: 319-20 n52; information from

www.sustainabletable.org/issues/animalwelfare/). Your writing made me think that,

having been banned throughout the European Union but being still the norm in the United

States, those practices continue in Brazil reflecting our lasting post-colonial relations with

the U.S.

My first question for you, then, is related to the raising and using and killing of

other species –that you refer to as “working animals of labs and agriculture” in your

interview to Jeffrey Williams in The Minnesota Review (2009-2010: 158)5. In your

acknowledgements in When Species Meet you write that “[w]orking animals, including

food-and fiber-producing critters, haunt me throughout this book. Response has hardly

begun.” It seems that response is one of your key words for relating to the animal’s

suffering, in fact, to what you consider “sharing suffering”. Along with curiosity, these

words are the mantra of companion species, as you say. In the concluding chapter of that

book (“Parting Bites”), writing about the feral pig roasting in Gary Lease’s back yard,

you list the precautions that Lease took in doing the hunt and his being “fierce about

killing with as little terror and pain as his skill makes possible” (298). Writing on the

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book by Peter Singer on “animal liberation,” Márcio Alemão in a recent issue of an

important Brazilian leftist weekly magazine, Carta Capital,6 argues that the production of

animals with short life would be a major genetic advancement of all times. He also argues

for a “humanitarian killing”, that he defines as “a way of killing without pain or

suffering” (2010: 83).

Since you criticize the humanist bias of the commandment “Thou shall not kill,”

which applies only to humans, especially men, making all the other critters “merely

killable” (2008: 78), including women, who, as Margarita showed in her thesis,7 in the

Brazilian civil code until recently could be killed by their husbands if guilty of the crime

of adultery, I thought, at first, that although there seems to be a preoccupation with the

suffering of animals in both yours and Alemão’s argument, you would not use the

expression “humanitarian killing” as he does. However, you suggest that a “humane

treatment” would be part of the solution for this cruelty with the hogs. Although humane

and humanitarian are not exactly synonyms, they both emphasize humanistic values, and,

besides, ironically, humane means “characterized by kindness, mercy or compassion”

(American Heritage Dictionary, 1985). I can only understand your use of “humane” here

in relation to your notion of “companion species,” even when you bracket the word

(2008: 267), as pointing “to an ongoing ‘becoming with’” (2008: 16) and your not

wanting to be a posthumanist nor a postfeminist, since, as your write, “urgent work still

remains to be done in reference to those who must inhabit the troubled categories of

woman and human” (17). Urgent work indeed!

In sum, would you describe the way those sows are kept as part of a logic that

makes them killable? That is, would the problem for you be less that they are producing

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food for us, but that there is not any relation of companion species in the way they are

producing food? How does your notion of right as inherent in the relationship illuminate

these tense (and many times cruel) relationships?

Donna:

Yes indeed, the sows are systematically “made killable”— or perhaps even more,

forced to live and multiply to the greatest possible extent—and the extent of their pain

and suffering is only part of the outrage. They are forced to generate value and to be

valuable, at whatever cost to them (or to most of the people who must also work in these

systems, or to the lands and waters that are polluted by the intense animal-factory

production systems). If all that can happen without the pigs’ objection, then all the better,

so the logic goes. If no pig squealed too loudly and too incessantly, then everything must

be fine. If they can be remade genetically so as to live only so long as they are valuable,

all the better. If they can be made stupid and non-reactive by whatever genetic or

technical means, fantastic. The pigs are systematically made killable—or forced into

living and multiplying on and on and on, so that birthing, raising, and killing are all three

a scandal—by being made incompetent, by being rendered into an “it,” a unit of

production, whether that “it” is in pain or not. The pigs (and, of course, many other

animals and people) are rendered killable and exploitable in production and reproduction

by being rendered into beings who cannot be subjects and objects of their own lives,

beings without history, without naturalsocial relationships that matter, without time,

beings without labor or play.

All of these—history, labor, play, subjectivity and objectivity, sociality—are

important humanist categories with complicated and non-isomorphic histories, and they

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all need to be radically recrafted, reheard, retouched, rewoven (not thrown away in a

weird move to purification), but without the conventional human exceptionalism and

motivated ignorance about world-making multispecies “becomings-with.” Such

“becomings-with” are, in fact, the mortal world, the only one we have; and so caring for

“becomings-with” is not optional. Our problem, in my view, is to engage seriously with

the enormity of the actual practices through which working animals (and their people) are

rendered incompetent in order to render them valuable. We, whoever we are who come

into recognition and responsibility for these practices, must act without perpetrating yet

more multispecies, human-animal-plant exterminations, obliterations, reductions, and

genocides.

For me, using the word “we” is both an invitation and a question: who will be

collected together in this “we” to make more livable worlds together? Is this “we” one

that deserves a future, or is it an excuse not to look deeply at the conditions of

exploitation necessary to sustain it? Is there a “we” for working people and animals in

agriculture in diverse contemporary worlds? How?

Returning to your question: for the sows, the situation in the European Union is

less good than you describe, and it is marginally less bad than what you describe in the

US. Also, postcolonial relations are important, but not the whole story in Brazil’s current

practices, I think. In the EU gestation crates are in the process of being phased out by

2013. That means many EU sows are still confined in extraordinarily small spaces and

will be for pig generations and pig-human years to come. Sweden and the UK have

banned the gestation crates entirely already; Denmark will follow in 2014, New Zealand

by 2015. In the U.S. gestation crates have been banned in Florida (since 2004), Arizona

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(2006), and California (2008), and they are being phased out in Maine and Oregon.

Probably more important, the largest pork producer in the U.S., Smithfield Farms,

announced in 2007 that it will phase out its gestation crates over ten years in its almost

200 pork factory farms.8

Ten years….and we—the non-innocent “we” that invites us, even compels us, to

care—are supposed to be impressed! Every consideration is given the pork industry to re-

equip itself to meet “new”— minimally animal-tolerable, minimally humanly-bearable—

legal regulations, technical system design, and market demands for less cruelty-soaked

food. Even these too-small but important changes are the result of intense political and

scientific struggles, not to mention the re-education of affect and moral sensibilities, i.e.,

the nurturing of the capacity to feel and think with other mortal beings, not just about

them. Animal behavioral scientists in the agribusiness sector fight with each other over

whether animals can thrive in conditions of extreme forced production, including

gestation crates for pregnant and lactating sows. In the conditions in which these sows

are forced to live and reproduce, without gestation crates they will crush their babies. Is

the solution to restrain the sows or to change the conditions of living and dying radically?

Why should that be a hard question? Cheap, year-round pork for the industrial human

masses and rising global middle classes? Doesn’t that sound a bit like cheap bread to

keep the working masses quiet in the history of capitalist exploitation for a long time? It

is an ugly multispecies, multinational story.

The scientific struggles over animal welfare inside the belly of the monster are

very interesting, but much too limited. Scientists (and many other people) in other

knowledge ecologies make much stronger demands on experimental design and on good

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questions to pose to and with the animals, the people, the land, the plants, the microbes,

and the technologies. While late industrial human beings slouch grudgingly toward

coming soul-to-soul and flesh-to-flesh with contemporary working animals in the animal-

industrial complex, how many pregnant and birthing pigs will spend their lives in forced

reproduction with almost no ability even to move their own bodies? How many male

piglets will be castrated and de-tailed without anesthesia and raised without their feet

ever touching the earth or their minds ever stretching to meet an interesting pig question,

posed by people or by other critters? What does it matter if the pigs are in China, the US,

Brazil, or somewhere else, wherever the cheapest inputs and the easiest moral-emotional-

legal-political ecology favors the greatest technocapitalist market “success”? It matters

because none of these sites are unlinked from the others; pigs are global social-material

travelers in every sense of the word. How can this not be an urgent feminist issue as well

as multispecies-flourishing issue for just about everybody?

In recent years the Brazilian pork industry has become a strong competitor in the

world market, complete with all the required technoscientific apparatus for materially and

semiotically “forgetting” that pigs are somebody, not something. I think of the

veterinarian whom Margarita Ramos talked with who insisted that the gestation-crate

bars confining the sow you both saw “were not that tight.” That same vet might have a

much loved dog or cat at home, or in another context might take pleasure in teaching a

child or telling a news media reporter that biological investigation has shown that

competent pigs are as socially, cognitively, and emotionally rich and complex as dogs—

probably considerably more so, in fact. In Brazil as elsewhere, the technoscientific

agribusiness apparatus includes veterinary medicine in both its emotional and cognitive

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formations, as well as professional and activist category-work that separates linked

matters like human and animal flourishing, sustainable ecologies and biodiversity, labor

conditions for people and animals, feminist attention to reproductive and sexual coercion,

market demands, racialization and animalization (and mechaniziation) as the means for

“dehumanizing” beings, etc.

In the face of all this, the world’s poor people—rural and urban—are often the

pivotal keepers of both biological diversity in farm animal kinds and also working

knowledge of animal caretaking outside the apparatus of global and national

technocapital.9 Working to enhance the well being of these pressed and often devastated

people and their animals (and plants) is at the heart of intersectional feminist politics, in

my view.

Overall, Brazil overtook the US in 2004 as a world meat exporter (beef, pork,

chicken, etc.). Contract growing, industrial concentration, feed and breeding stock

monopolization, and cheap labor divided by gender, region, and race/ethnicity are crucial

to this world system in Brazil, as elsewhere (Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Brazil,

Canada, the US, the EU). Farmers have very few degrees of freedom to resist this highly

capitalized human-animal-plant extractive industry, which is also highly subsidized by

agricultural state policies. The US and Europe have significant domestic markets for

more expensive meat raised with more expensive standards of care and labor; even so, in

these very wealthy regions the difficulties of reform, much less of more radical change, in

the meat-industrial complex are huge. Globally, the UN’s Food and Agriculture

Organization estimates that one-third of pigs are forced to live and die in industrial

factories, and the figure is rising fast. Global monopolization in the animal genetics and

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breeding industries is a very important part of the problem. For example, in concert with

Metamorphix, Monsanto is the biggest world player in agribusiness pig genetics. Small

producers in Brazil and elsewhere, including people who live and die in working

relationships with pigs— and with whom pasts, presents, and futures are at stake—are

under tremendous pressures.

In the face of all this, why am I not a vegan feminist activist? How dare I and

people like me kill and eat pigs (or other animals, maybe especially fish, if we take both

animal pain and also ecological damage seriously)? These questions haunt me, as well

they should. Killing is an ontological relationship; all the partners are done and undone in

the intra-actions of killing. Subjects and objects are constituted in killing, as well as

birthing and nurturing. Killing shapes who is in the world in more ways than one.

Breeding, raising and killing working food and fiber animals shape an immense world of

trouble, where I am trying to understand if “killing without making killable” can make

sense. If it is not killing but “making killable” that is inexcusable, what does that mean?

Is it possible, individually and collectively, to kill in non-innocent respect, or is that an

excuse for refusing the depth of change needed, especially but not only in the rich regions

of the world?

I am not talking only about animals here, and that frightens me. How can I

support women’s rights—and the means to exercise them—of reproductive freedom,

including killing very young humans called fetuses, and not own up to the demands of

“killing without making killable,” for example? I do maintain that abortion can be killing

without making killable; I also think breeding and killing pigs for food can be killing

without making killable, but only under stringent conditions of socialmaterial,

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naturalcultural practice. Respect is a practice tuned to mortality; respect is not an easy

thing; it is not an abstract idea. Respect requires staying with death as much as with life

in order to care for the complexity of becomings-with. Abortion and raising animals for

food are not analogous in most ways, but they both demand that the conditions of

accepting death as well as life—of killing as well as making live—be faced without

recourse to a stance of innocence. I think right-to-life politics in both human and animal

worlds aims for innocence, not respect and responsibility.

I know I am committed to the fraught, historically situated, multi-species working

practices of living and dying in human-animal agriculture. I am in every way opposed to

and active against most contemporary industrial factory-farming human-animal

entanglements, both locally and globally. However, I am appalled by the notion that the

myriad domestic working animals, individuals and kinds, should not exist except as

rescue, pet, or heritage remnants, and by the related position that all these diverse human-

animal ways of living, dying, nurturing, and killing should be banished from our presents

and futures, as well as despised in our pasts. I am appalled by the lack of respect for

human-animal labor implied in what to me seem to be right-to-life positions in some

versions of animal liberation thinking about animal agriculture. Feminists especially need

to be leery of right-to-life positions that turn out to be full of exterminisms and

genocides—the killing of kinds, of genres, of both human and nonhuman “peoples.”

The whole knot of what is involved in a set of practices must be taken on and

judgments (and radical changes) made there, inside mortal knots, face-to-face with the

beings and ways of living and dying that are at stake. And even after that, there is no

innocent place to stand, no making killable to relieve the trouble, and I think, no

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abolitionism that stills the soul either. There is still the open of life and death practices of

conjoined and asymmetrical mortal labor.10

“Humane” is a very interesting word, and I am drawn by its Latin ties to the earth,

to the soil, to humus—to the warm stuff in which many things gestate and consort, the

pile of compost that becomes humus to make other plants, animals, microbes, and people

flourish. I am not drawn to the Greek tones of “homo,” which suggest something like

“the one and the same,” the “self-identical”—in short, something like “Man himself” and

Man who makes himself. I probably take much too much pleasure playing with

etymologies, but I loved finding that the Latin tones of “homo/human” resonate with an

old Proto-Indo-European word, “guma” (plural, guman), which means someone who

works the earth for food, a plowman in that sense. The word suggests bridegroom or

husband (plowing the female earth), but words are malleable; they are compost to

unexpected relationalities. Guman can mean earthling, earthy, in the soil, in the mud, full

of active passionate matter, mattering in relationship with other earthlings, humus to a

more livable mortal world. So, if I could, I would write not “humane” but “gumane”! To

be “g/humane” must be a material multispecies practice, just as human nature is a

multispecies relationship, a becoming-with, not a thing-in-itself. Not husband, but humus.

But you asked about humanitarian killing by people of animals: can there be such

a thing? Yes, I do think there can be; but the only issues are not compassion, kindness,

minimizing pain, and other important matters. The fundamental question is more

whether the whole practice of living and dying together this way, for all the partners

(human and not, animate and not, organic and not, technical and not) is “gumane”—

humus for worlds-in-relationship entangled in respect, in holding-in-regard reciprocally.

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In short, worlds for whose presents and futures “we,” that “we” of invitation and query,

must take responsibility. The issue, then, is shared flourishing (or not) and shared

suffering. It is possible to deny this sharing, but it is actually not possible to escape it.

I can’t leave your first question without going back to real sows and their piglets,

not in Proto-Indo-European word play to compost the dilemmas of humanism, but in

actual production facilities and farms. My guide is a brave feminist French scholar and

human-animal ethnographer and sociologist named Jocelyne Porcher, who studies both

factory-produced animals, including pigs and their people, and also farm-raised pigs and

their people. She is alert to the apparatuses of becoming-with, in all their material and

semiotic specificity and ontological effectivity. Porcher’s fundamental insight is that

suffering is contagious, infectious, relational; suffering is a practice of becoming-with.

Suffering is affective and effective; it touches across difference; it makes a difference.

Suffering constitutes all the beings in the relational knot. The relational knot in animal

farming is not a matter of sentimentality but of ontology. Based own her own and others’

empirical studies of contrasting worlds of pig production, Porcher writes, “Scientific

considerations on ‘animal welfare’ fail to take into account the possible transmission of

suffering between human beings and animals in these systems. Workers are considered in

managerial terms only, whereas it is the very meaning of work with animals that needs to

be questioned. Shared suffering is also overlooked in the critique of industrial systems,

which focuses primarily on their environmental impact and consequences on public

health and, more recently, on the implications for occupational health.” 11

For example, Porcher converses with women working in pig production in

Brittany; she listens to what they say and do and how they say and do it. This sociologist

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enters into the questions of comfort and suffering of animals and people in workplaces,

both industrial and not. Porcher also talks with workers in a factory facility in Québec,

Canada. She stays with the people and animals in their practices and their successful and

failed communications. Porcher takes the formation and management of inter-subjective

and inter-objective bonds between animals and people at work as empirically important

questions for a sociologist. Not to do so is to do sub-standard sociology. Pigs and people

are subjects and objects to each other, just as people are subjects and objects to each other

in every kind of living and dying together. Which sorts of subject/object co-making are

compatible with historically situated, non-innocent flourishing is the question, not

who/what is subject and who/what is object. Porcher asks how different sorts of closeness

and distance are managed. She insists, “The relationship with farming animals has never

been an easy one and, like human beings, animals suffer from the violence of social and

human relations” (p. 5). Working people know this, and they can become physically,

morally, and emotionally ill from the consequences, as can the animals. Porcher tracks

the transmission of pathologies between workers and animals, and she pays attention to

the consequences of hiding or denying the suffering in euphemisms like “animal

welfare.” Porcher details precisely how industrial animal production has nothing to do

with animal husbandry, which “involves a positive and lively relation to animals. It is

based on the desire to live with animals, to share their existence in its beauty and

tragedy” (p. 16). Animal husbandry is a multispecies “gumane” relationship, not a

question of Man and Animal. That kind of husbandry, as humus, is an actual practice

shown in Porcher’s studies of still-existing farmers in France.

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For Porcher, the imperative is to study “relationships,” not ”interactions” as in the

conventional mechanical, behaviorist paradigm.12 Suffering is a relationship; substituting

pain for suffering in our attention is an avoidance of that fact. Institutionalized surplus

violence is a coercive, widespread, contagious, multispecies web of relationships which

cannot be changed by separating the living beings into separate categories for attention

by separate professionals and separate activists measuring separate variables.

I am instructed by what Porcher identifies as a “multiple recognition deficit” in

the animal-industrial complex, which, she stresses, begins with the failure to recognize

the animals. Literally, to recognize them as somebody, not something. Failures to

recognize pile on each other, producing a political, ecological, ethical, emotional,

philosophical, scientific, and physical “multiple recognition deficit.” This is a deficit in

becoming-with; it is not necessary and it can be changed, no matter how huge and

complex the problem is. That “the established disorder is not necessary” is precisely

what critical theory teaches us. It is its greatest gift, and not exclusively a humanist gift.

II. Subjectivity for Zoo-Ethno-Graphers

Sandra:

In an interview with Judith Butler, published originally in Signs: Journal of

Women in Culture and Society (v. 23, n.2, p. 275-286), Baukje Prins and Irene Meijer

contrast yours and Bruno Latour’s use of “actor” with Butler’s use of “subject,” noting

the “humanist” character of the latter notion and the “hybrid” character of the former. As

they say, “Contrary to subjectivity, agency is not a human prerogative”. Butler’s answer

points to the need to take into account the duplicity of the notion of the subject –the

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presumption of agency and the submission to rules that precede her/him—but she does

not address the question of subjectivity being a prerogative of humans. Although you do

not discuss the question of subjectivity directly in your work, you do insist in not

separating subject and object in the sciences, suggesting that this separation is present in

the way “thinkers who are concerned with the subjugation of animals to the purposes of

people” regard domestication. As you write, these people “tak[e] themselves to be the

only actors,” reducing “other organisms to the lived status of being merely raw material

or tools. (…) One can be somebody only if someone else is something.” And this is

shown up “grammatically … in editing policies of major reference books and

newspapers. Animals are not allowed personal pronouns such as who, but must be

designated by which, that, or it” (2008: 206). In Brazil, there are even specific words to

refer to body parts of animals –“beiço,” rather than “lábios” (lips) or “focinho”, rather

than “nariz” (nose)—and these words are used for people in relations based on racism. In

her book on the Written Animal, Maria Esther argues that “in the symbolic register, the

animal can only be captured as an it. Its subjectivity, or whatever else that we call animal

subjectivity, is not inscribed in the human language” (2008: 76).13 She cites a poem by

Jacques Roubaud showing that “the pig’s knowledge about himself is manifested through

an awkward ‘I’ inside a language that does not belong to him” (75)14. Roubaud’s poem

says: Pour parler, dit le cochon, / ce que j’aime c’est le mots porqs: / glaviot grumeau

gueule grommelle / chafouin pacha épluchure / machon moche miches chameaus /

empoté chouxgras polisson (2008: 87).

How, then, would you address the question of subjectivity, taking into account

your notion of the co-constitution of human beings and animals that are not human

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beings? Do animals other than humans have “subjectivity?” Is the “I” (self) an essential

pronoun to refer to the subject? Or can we use the “it” as well? In other words, is there an

animal subjectivity?

Donna:

Both “actor” and “subject” are mixed and duplicitous, if not tri-plicitous (or

more)! Folded into each other two or more times: in Latin “plicare” is “to bend” or “to

fold.” “Implicated”: folded into each other again and again, like the layers of a well

buttered brioche or croissant! Involved or connected: duplicitous. Both “actor” and

“subject”—as well as “acted upon” and “object”—are the sedimentations of intra-actions

(Karen Barad’s very useful term)15 or of co-minglings , co-makings, and co-constitutions

with no preformed units to function as actors or subjects (or objects), whether in

humanist genres or otherwise. Becoming-with is the name of the game on terra;

becoming-with is terran worlding, in science fiction and in every other serious material-

semiotic practice. We are all the still-moving sedimentations of intra-actions. Nothing

about this is especially restricted to human beings, or, for that matter, to animate beings.

Many Western languages use pair-wise terms to foreground action and passion, moving

and staying still, giving and receiving. Making these pairs into closed boxes is seriously

perverse, no matter how common. Sedimentations: these are the layers laid down and

folded again and again to make the earth’s flesh.

It is certainly true that those entities called animals, like women, do not register in

the Symbolic. Women and animals are not “in themselves” nor “for themselves”; they are

for others, they are about function, not being. Even though I do not remember her sparing

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a thought for animals, structurally Simone de Beauvoir understood all this and more in Le

Deuxième Sexe (1949). We all know this plot and this syntax. But this plot and syntax

are not necessary; they are not the fault of language itself; they are the fault of multiple

recognition disorder. Multispecies, intra-actional, intersectional feminism can come to

the rescue, even of the Symbolic! Who needs post-humanism (much less post-feminism)

when we can have something much better: companion species. Cum panis, with bread,

becoming-with in living and dying, killing and birthing, eating and being eaten…. This

is not a story for the Garden of Eden and its modern wedding chapels, but for

multispecies worlding on terra, with all its multitudinous plications. This is the story of

the contagion of suffering and flourishing and of the practical demands for the work of

recuperation in the face of all the genocides, the killing of beings and kinds, that we

human beings both inherit and continue to practice.

In my thinking, neither agency nor subjectivity is a human prerogative; and with

Butler, Barad, and others, I emphasize that “subjectivity” is not something one can

“have” or not. Neither is “agency,” whether figured in humanist terms or not.

“Interiority” is not a place; interiority is speculatively fabulated out of intra-actions.; it is

an sf state (science fiction, speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, scientific fact,

science fantasy, etc).

I turn again to Vinciane Despret, this time to her extraordinary essay “The

Becomings of Subjectivity in Animal Worlds.”16 She does something very simple there;

namely, she proposes that the capacity for subjectivity is not something to look for in the

nature of a being— say a Gabon grey parrot, chimpanzee, dog, or woman—but as

something made possible, invented perhaps, in the processes through which beings

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“render each other capable” of something that is perhaps new on planet earth. “To render

capable”: what an interesting idea for exploring intra-actions! Despret takes us to the

famous Gabon grey parrot Alex and his human interlocutor Irene Pepperberg, showing

that Irene took the trouble to pose questions that Alex took to be interesting. Pepperberg

also treated Alex’s performances directed toward her as significant, whether she

understood them or not. The result is that this parrot and this woman invented an

extended conversation that has perplexed professional human linguists more than they

enjoy. A specific parrot and woman talked to each other extensively in a language native

to neither of them. This achievement was initiated by Pepperberg’s deliberate mistakes,

misreadings, and mishearings that insisted on meaning where perhaps, at first, there was

none, or at least none in common. These companions species rendered each other capable

of situated knowledges—of situated capacities, whether or not it was in either of their

natures before they learned to recognize each other.17

Note that one of the big implications of thinking this way is that both parrot and

woman experience and shape situated histories in the strong sense. One is not in

historical culture and the other in the eco-evolutionary time of nature. Both experience

and enfold (remember “plier”) a becoming-with that changes them both and also intra-

acts with their whole naturalcultural world, which in this case includes various cognitive

scientists and many human and nonhuman others. This point does not turn on whether or

not the conversation Alex and Irene were having meets particular linguistic criteria set to

distinguish human language from animal communication. The point about both players

“having” or “doing” history turns, rather, on their co-constitution of the actual events of

the world—on their “worlding,” in my sf-inflected terms—in such a way that something

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happened that redid all the players in ways meaningful to them, and that something was

not determined by anybody’s “natures.” A material-semiotic event of becoming-with

actually happened in entangled re-worlding significant to and constitutive of the players.

As in Butler’s analysis of the question of agency and subjectivity, with Alex and Irene,

there is also a clear “duplicity of the notion of the subject —the presumption of agency

and the submission to rules that precede her/him.” There is no “god-trick” of creation out

of nothing here, no man-like autonomy, no special interiority; there is only ordinary

companion species worlding! The humanist categories like history and subjectivity have

a hard time with all this unless we are willing to rehear these categories without the tones

of human exceptionalism.

None of this means that somehow parrots and human people are just like each

other, and so fulfill some weird dream of a common language if someone would only get

the experimental design right. Difference and history-ladden specificities are everywhere

in this story of mortal entanglement, in which a stuttering, wonderful, flawed, partial,

effective practice of material-semiotic communication was cobbled together in such a

way as to matter to the players in a situated practice—and to us, in our situated inquiries

in multispecies feminist theory. Despret brought her insights from Alex and Irene

Pepperberg to her own research on situations in which people and animals work together.

In particular, in collaboration with Jocelyne Porcher Despret examined the everyday

practices of pig and cow breeders in France on farms where animals and people live in

thick relation to each other. Breeders were uninterested in “the” difference between

people and animals, but very interested in questions of achievement. Conversation, not

behaviorist or mechanical control, is a much more powerful trope for entering this world.

21

Only by permitting the animals to control many aspects of their lives, only by caring

about and learning to recognize what the animals were interested in, could the

achievements valued by the breeders come into fleshly being. The actual material-

semiotic apparatuses of work, of intra-action, are the focus of attention. Despret

emphasizes, “Therefore, the questions that breeders think should be addressed are not the

differences between human and non-human beings, but rather the differences between

situations, which offer both humans and animals different opportunities to accomplish

subjectivities” (p. 121). She concludes: “They [the breeders] translate not what cows and

pigs are…They indicate what animals become capable of in the practices through which

the breeders proudly define themselves: bringing into existence animals that nourish

humans in many ways. This includes the nourishing of diverse modes of existence and

becomings of subjectivities, the very thing that governed the choice of our inquiry” (p.

137). There is nothing innocent here, nothing exempt from hard questions of many

kinds. The only thing that cannot be endured here is the arrogance of human

exceptionalism that reserves the achievements and bondages of subjectivity to Mankind

and Its Symbolic.

III. Entanglement or Identification?

Sandra:

Maria Esther quotes Guimarães Rosa’s writing that “to love animals is to learn to

be human” (2008: 60-61)18 and she seems to value her love and interest for animals as an

important basis for studying animals. You too make explicit your love for and interest in

animals as an important basis for your work. In fact, you have pictured yourself as

22

seeming “to think about and respond to little else” than dogs (2008: 7) and in your

interview with Joseph Schneider19 you explicitly declare: “I’m interested in animals. I’m

interested in human beings as animals. I am interested in animals that aren’t human

beings. I am interested in relations between them. I am interested in animals

independently of us” (2005: 117). Do you think love and interest for animals are essential

to engage in the study of companion species? How do you relate this interest and love

with your “cyborgness”, as Thyrza Goodeve puts it in How Like a Leaf?20 And that you

responded precisely relating it to your “sense of the intricacy, interest, and pleasure –as

well as the intensity—of how I have imagined how like a leaf I am” (2000:132). And, in

another occasion, you relate it to your fascination “by being an ape, and an ape among

apes” (2009-2010, 152). And, finally, that you “love the fact that human genomes can be

found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my

body” (2008:3). I think that, besides interest and love, there is also a strong feeling of

identification here, one that is obviously missing, for example, in the vet at the Rural

University in Minas, but that is also missing in the habit of using the names of animals –

especially dogs—as a term of abuse.21

Donna:

I’ve tried to get at a lot of what you ask here in my responses to the first two

questions, and so here I’ll be quick. I think more in terms of being implicated in each

other, folded into each other, entangled, than in terms of identification. The critters of

terra—species and other kinds, and also beings that don’t sort well into kinds—are not

the “same.” Nor do they relate by a clean tree-form of descent. They are webbed in

23

ecological-evolutionary-developmental intra-actions of many shapes, temporalities, and

kinds (including trees). I agree with you that in ordinary words, “identification,” that is,

appreciating the huge domains of similarity among terran beings, is a source of great

pleasure for me. These “identifications” touch me, as do the “differentiations.” It still

thrills me that a plum tree leaf and my flesh share a large part of our genomes, and also

go our own inimitable ways, genetically and otherwise. Far from worrying about

“biological determinism,” I am humbled, inspired, and motivated by the webbed

complexities and inventiveness of our planet, sometimes even by the doing of my own

species (or even fellow US citizens)! I am also humbled and motivated by terran

vulnerabilities; by the terrible costs of human stupidity and worse. To be folded together

in multispecies becoming-with—identified and differentiated with each other in that

sense, in love and rage in that sense—seems to me to imply and to require terribly

important affective, ethical, political, and scientific response. I call that feminism.

IV. Playing Cats Cradle: Multispecies Feminist Theory

Sandra:

This leads me to the next question that is a question of epistemology and that is

related to your feminism–feminist theory, feminist scholarship and feminist inquiry. In

his conversation with you, Schneider points to your writing in the new manifesto22 that

“dog writing is a branch of feminist theory or the other way around” (2005: 131). You

also say that “the notion of the cyborg was female, and a woman, in complex ways. It

was an act of resistance, an opposition move of a pretty straightforward kind” (2004:

321). And you write that OncoMouse™ “is my sibling, and more properly, male or

24

female, s/he is my sister” (2008: 76). So, feminism has been important to the directions

your work is taking. But what I am interested here is in the relations you are careful to

keep between theory and practice, not leaving politics out of academic feminism. You

say all this in your essay on “situated knowledges”, but it would be nice to know how

concretely this happens in terms of feminist scholarship after companion species meeting.

I noticed, for example, that, while the cover of Primate Visions reproduced two different

“open and vulnerable” hands, the cover of When Species Meet shows the whole profile of

a dog putting his/her hand on a human’s hand (with no profile). You told me that you

wanted Jim’s dog in the cover –that would be even more than a profile…

Donna:

I cheated, of course, in the ways I responded to your earlier questions: I had

already read this one! Everything I have tried to say in this essay-interview is a response

to your query about where “situated knowledges” are now, after the kin relations between

cyborgs and companion species are made inescapable for feminists, or at least for me and

the “we” shaped by these questions. Open and vulnerable, capable of astonishment and

invention, hungry for learning how to inherit the terrible burdens of genocides,

exterminations, and extinctions without repeating them in a need to become innocent and

pure—these are as much my concerns now as they were in the 1980s. But this time I

have a fine dog to herd me onto tracks that she might find more promising…

V. Out of the Garden and into the Humus: Queering the Compost Pile

Sandra:

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In Primate Visions, 23 you persistently refer to the intricate relations of the terms

animal, nature, body, primitive (which is related to primate) and female. You also

mention the Garden of Eden story of Adam naming the animals, which Derrida also

brings in his work, relating it to the nude animals that we are in contrast with the other

animals. Derrida refers to the second moment of the story, of Eve being made of Adam’s

rib since, after naming the animals, he was feeling lonely. I was reminded of that story in

a wedding I went to last November and was both amazed and upset that that story was

still being told in a wedding, especially after seeing a little boy entering the church

carrying the groom’s ring in a truck and a little girl carrying the bride’s ring in a doll.

Those are indeed powerful stories that do not let go Man’s centrality in the Garden of

Eden. How do you see this domination of animals and women starting in the Garden of

Eden and continuing in wedding ceremonies in Belo Horizonte in 2010?

Donna:

My guide is Ursula LeGuin, especially her “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.”24 Le

Guin’s essay shaped my thinking about narrative in evolutionary theory and of the figure

of woman the gatherer in Primate Visions. Story telling is so important, and re-shaping

the stories, as well as finding how many and rich they already are, is vital work and play.

The Garden of Eden is such a little and parochial story; we are so rich in story tellers,

from so many times and places, in so many situations of urgency and trouble as well as

joy, in such diversity of kinds and beings. The storied conversations are waiting to

happen, not by tourist appropriations, but by rendering each other capable. The sadness

of the wedding you describe has an antidote: multispecies story telling. Anna Tsing and I

26

taught a graduate seminar called Multispecies Story Telling in 2009, and it was very

empowering. Since then, I wrote a short piece rooted in LeGuin and Octavia Butler, two

of my favorite science fiction writers, called “Sowing Worlds: a Seed bag for

Terraforming with Earth Others.”25 Into the compost pile!

VI. Staying with the Trouble: Killing without Making Killable?

Sandra:

I learned with you and Judith Butler that trouble is inevitable and that we need to

stay with it, finding the best ways to be with it. Let us close this conversation through

these wires with the need to stay with trouble. In your conversation with Schneider you

say that you are “drawn like a moth to the flame to those kinds of knowledge-making

endeavors where that messiness is inescapable.” I think your openness to dealing with

trouble and this messiness is very inspiring for us, feminists in Brazil, where abortion is

still a crime and where we are still struggling for reproductive rights, especially the right

of abortion. Going back to the sows reproducing in the farm in the interior of Minas

Gerais, I think that they could be used as figures to tell stories of how females have been

totally disrespected in our reproductive rights. But, as you suggest, we feminists have to

use the rights discourse more critically, especially in abortion politics, where we have to

face the trouble of “killing that way”, as you put it in the wonderful response you wrote

to Sharon (2008: 87). In his film, 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days (Romenia, 2007),

Cristian Mungiu likewise deals courageously with this question, when the camera focus

on the image of the fetus on the floor during some minutes (or seconds?). As he said in an

interview: “The most dishonest thing I could do to the audience would be not show the

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same thing that the personage was seeing in that moment”26. My article for a collection

on abortion politics was not accepted because I used this film to support my argument

that we need to deal with the question of killing in abortion politics. Thank god, it was

accepted for a much better publication, a special issue on gender of the journal Saúde em

Debate (2008). So staying with the trouble may open other worlds for us, really, as you

say. What do you think?

Donna:

Sandra, I want to end with your words and your bravery. Abortion rights and

responsibilities are under attack again in the U.S. too. The terrible responsibility of

killing in respect is what is at stake; the threat is a fetishized right to life that promises

more oppression and more killing, by sorting every living thing once again into

categories that make some killing insignificant and other killing murder. No killing is

insignificant. Not a pig, not a fetus, not a woman, not a man. Staying with the trouble of

that is terrifying and necessary. Life Itself will not get us out of this trouble, nor should

it. The trouble has to be situated in mortal, finite worldings, and that is relentlessly hard.

This worlding must be open to our “unknowing” if we are to be anything but brutal once

again.

Sandra:

Thanks so much for this conversation through these wires between California and

Minas Gerais, and even Paris, in the end!

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NOTES

1 Maria Esther Maciel, O Animal Escrito: Um olhar sobre a zooliteratura contemporânea. São Paulo: Lumme Editor, 2008. 2 Jacques Derrida, O animal que logo sou (A Seguir). Trad. Fábio Landa. São Paulo: EdUNESP, 2002. 3 In the questions that Sandra sent Donna, Sandra wrote, “THE COMPUTER MARKED AN ERROR HERE…” In response, Donna remarks, “Was the ‘error’ warning because you used a personal pronoun for the living sow? In English, you wrote ‘who’, not ‘which’; you gave this suffering pig the status of a living, sentient being and not of an object, an ‘it.’ Good for you!” 4 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 5 Jeffrey Williams, “Science Stories: An Interview with Donna J. Haraway”. the minnesota review, n.s. 73-74, Fall 2009-spring 2010, 133-163. 6 Márcio Alemão, “E se errar a martelada?”, Carta Capital, 11/10/2010, 83. 7 Margarita Ramos, “Assassinatos de Mulheres: Um estudo sobre a alegação da legítima defesa da honra nos julgamentos em Minas Gerais do ano 2000 a 2008”. Mestrado em Psicologia, UFMG, Belo Horizonte: May 2010. 8 To get started on this issue see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestation_crate and Mark R. Finlay, “Hogs, Antibiotics, and the Industrial Environmental of Postwar Agriculture,” in Industrializing Organisms, edited by Susan Schrepfer and Philip Scranton (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 237-60. In June 2011, Reaktion Books will publish an important book: Brett Mizelle, Pig, with a crucial chapter on pigs as “meat.” It is important to remember that the hyper-productionist biotechnologies and transformations of animals in confined animal feeding facilities, including the technology of gestation crates, is a post-World War II story tied to the rapid, state-subsidized, technoscientific, development of corn and soy agribusiness, and their globally shaped commodity prices, that drove farm animals off the land in the US and elsewhere. What seems timeless is in fact recent; that fact is important to re-open our imaginations to the processes and necessities of change now, after and still in the midst of this disaster. Of course, pigs have been “creatures of empire” in North America (Latin America and many Pacific Islands too) since the beginning of European colonization. The non-so-humble invention of barbed wire is a crucial player in the transformation of domestic working animals into capital on the rangelands of settler colonies and conquest nations. See the searing book by Reviel Netz, Barbed Wire: an Ecology of Modernity (Wesleyan University Press, 2009). For the story of pigs and other European domestic-animal colonizers on the east coast of what became the United States, see Virginia Anderson, Creatures of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2006). Pigs and their people can be extremely destructive; pigs are also co-makers of rich ways to live and die in companion species relationships with people that deserve a future. Pigs and Haitian people had a tremendously important relationship, brought to a violent end by the forced extermination of about 1.3 million competent creole pigs in 1982 backed by US public health authorities in a swine flu scare. See http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2407538368251439007# and get Brett Mizelle, Pig (Reaktion Books, 2011) as soon as it comes out! Pigs and their human beings are major actors in history, including urban history. Our working companionship and the complex obligations we contemporary humans inherit from those histories are deep and wide. 9 Urban working relations of people and animals are very important; the urban-rural binary is another of the modernizing polarities that make us stupid about the actual shapes of both historical and contemporary worlding. Alice Hovorka’s study of vital chicken-human relations in contemporary Gabarone in Botswana is exemplary; the importance to the food security of urban women and children is a big part of the story. Alice Hovorka, “Transspecies Urban Theory: Chickens in an African City,” Cultural Geographies 15 (2008): 95-117. See also Women Feeding Cities: Mainstreaming Gender in Urban Agriculture and Food Security, edited by Alice Hovorka, Henk De Zeeuw, and Mary Njenga (Practical Action Books, 2009). Jennifer Wolch, a feminist cultural geographer, coined the term zoopolis and wrote about anima urbis more than a dozen years ago. See Jennifer Wolch, “Zoopolis,” in Animal Geographies, edited by Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel (London and New York: Verso, 1998). Think also about the Egyptian state-forced murder/extermination of more than 300,000 pigs in Cairo during the “swine flu” scare in 2009 in a mass killing that impacted viciously on the Zabbaleen/garbage people of Cairo. Those competent pigs were crucial players in turning urban garbage into a way of life for many thousands of migrant humans and non-

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humans. The story is too complicated to tell here, but to start, follow links from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zabbaleen and watch the award-winning 2009 film by Mai Iskander, Garbage Dreams: Raised in the Trash Trade. 10 This paragraph is adapted from what I wrote for “Kiwi Chicken Advocate Talks with Californian Dog Companion: Annie Potts in Conversation with Donna Haraway,” Feminism and Psychology, special issue on “Feminism, Gender and Nonhuman Animals,” August 2010. 11 Jocelyne Porcher, “The Relationship between Workers and Animals in the Pork Industry: A Shared Suffering,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 24, no. 1 (2010): 3-17; published online February 5, 2010, http://philpapers.org/rec/PORTRB. See also Jocelyne Porcher’s YouTube videos of industrial pig treatment http://anthropopotamie.typepad.fr/anthropopotame/2009/05/une-vie-de-cochon.html and http://video.blog.lemonde.fr/2009/04/29/les-porcs-des-barbares/. 12 Xavier Boivin is a French animal scientist who is deeply critical of the conventions of experimental design and analysis in his field. For example, he notes that studies of sheep in regard to various interventions like shearing, muzzling, or laparoscopy fail to take account of relationships. The sheep are taken as animals-in-themselves without regard to histories, social or technical experience, and so on. Whether the sheep know the experimenter or whether they know each other is neglected in the design of the studies—this despite the fact that sheep are extraordinarily adept at recognizing and remembering individuals, both sheep and human. Thus, effects are attributed to operations and reactions, and relationships and responses with both animate and inanimate partners in becoming-with are made unknowable in the very studies that need to explore them. Shockingly, none of the studies Boivin examined explored the relationships of sheep and shepherd. See Xavier Boivin, “The Human-animal relationship, Stockmanship and Extensive Sheep Production,” in P, Goddard, ed., Improving Sheep Welfare on Extensively Managed Flocks,” Proceedings of a workshop held in Aberdeen, Scotland, 2003, pp. 11-19. Boivin’s work is examined in an extraordinarily wise and generative essay by the Belgian philosopher and psychologist Vinciane Despret, “Ethology between Empathy, Standpoint and Perspectivism: the Case of the Arabian Babblers,” available on http://vincianedespret.blogspot.com/, posted April 25, 2010. Despret is a close colleague of Jocelyne Porcher. See Vinciane Despret and Jocelyne Porcher, Etre Bête (Arles: Actes Sud, 2007). I am currently trying to study sheep-human worlds in Navajo country in the U.S. in terms of recuperation after repeated exterminations and genocides in indigenous-imperial encounters. I can find a great deal of information about the people, the land, the livestock, etc, but very little on the relationships between situated animals and human beings. The need for serious zoo-ethno-graphy is acute. This work will require the invention of new apparatuses of knowledge making, new practices for thinking-with outside the vice grip of human exceptionalism. 13 ... no registro simbólico, o animal só é possível de ser capturado enquanto um it. Sua subjetividade ou o que quer que chamemos de subjetividade animal, não se inscreve na linguagem humana. 14 ...o saber que o porco detém sobre si mesmo se manifesta através de um “eu” desajeitado dentro de uma língua que não lhe pertence. 15 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). So much of what I say in this interview is in intra-action with Karen’s work. Not least, the neologism “intra-action” itself, and it corollary, agential realism, is her invaluable formulation. We are playing cats cradle together, as I do with Vinciane Despret, and also with you, Sandra! 16 Vinciane Despret, “The Becomings of Subjectivity in Animal Worlds,” Subjectivity, Issue 23 (July 2008): 123-39. 17 On a much more humble level, I experienced something like this in learning to train with Cayenne, the dog of my heart. See “Training in the Contact Zone: Power, Play, and Invention in the Sport of Agility,” in When Species Meet (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2008), pp. 205-248 and notes. Rendering each other capable of what truly was not there before is an ordinary experience, if we only attend to the demands of intra-actions. 18 It is difficult to translate his poetic language: “Amar os animais é aprendizado de humanidade”, 60-61) . 19 Joseph Schneider, Donna Haraway: Live Theory. New York: Continuum, 2005. 20 Donna Haraway, How Like A Leaf: An Interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve. New York: Routledge, 2000.

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21 Freud tells a “crazy story” about this habit in Civilization and Its Discontents. Trad. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1961 (1930). As he writes, “It would be incomprehensible … that man should use the name of his most faithful friend in the animal world –the dog—as a term of abuse if that creature had not incurred his contempt through two characteristics: that it is an animal whose dominant sense is that of smell and one which has no horror of excrement, and that it is not ashamed of its sexual functions” (1961: 46 n1). 22 Donna Haraway, Compagni di specie: Affinità e diversità tra esseri umani e cani. Trad. Roberto Marchesini. Milano: Sansoni, 2003. 23 Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, 1989. 24 Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction," in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Place (New York: Harper and Row, 1989); first published in Denise Du Pont, ed., Women of Vision (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), but copyrighted in 1986 and circulated widely in feminist worlds. Le Guin learned about the Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution from Elizabeth Fisher, Women’s Creation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975) in that period of large, brave, speculative, worldly stories that burned in feminist theory in the 1970s and 1980s. Like speculative fabulation, speculative feminism was, and is, an sf practice. 25 Donna Haraway, “Sowing Worlds: a Seed Bag for Terraforming with Earth Others,” for Beyond the Cyborg by Helen Merrick and Margaret Grebowicz, Columbia University Press, under review. Anna Tsing, “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species” (©2006), available at http://tsingmushrooms.blogspot.com/. In this wonderful short paper, without the deceptive comforts of human exceptionalism, Tsing succeeds both in telling world history from the point of view of fungal associates and also in rewriting Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, ed. and intro., Eleanor Burke Leacock (New York: International Publishers1972). Tsing’s is a tale of speculative fabulation, an sf genre crucial to feminist theory. She and I are in a relation of reciprocal induction, that fundamental evolutionary-ecological-developmental-historical worlding process that is basic to all becoming-with. See Scott F. Gilbert and David Epel , Ecological Developmental Biology: Integrating Epigenetics, Medicine, and Evolution (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer, 2008). 26 Quoted in Sandra Azerêdo, “Os sentidos do aborto na organização social de gênero: posicionamentos por uma sociedade mais igualitária”, saúde em debate, v. 31, n.75/76/77, jan./dez. 2007, 76-86, p.85.