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Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Women's Studies: An interdisciplinary journal

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Juliana Schiesari. Polymorphous Domesticities: Pets, Bodies, and Desire in Four Modern Writers
Rebekah Sinclair
a a

Claremont Graduate University Published online: 24 Apr 2013.

To cite this article: Rebekah Sinclair (2013) Juliana Schiesari. Polymorphous Domesticities: Pets, Bodies, and Desire in Four Modern Writers , Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, 42:4, 458-463, DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2013.772862 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2013.772862

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Womens Studies, 42:458463, 2013 Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0049-7878 print / 1547-7045 online DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2013.772862

BOOK REVIEW Juliana Schiesari. Polymorphous Domesticities: Pets, Bodies, and Desire in Four Modern Writers . Berkeley: U of California P, 2012.
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BY REBEKAH SINCLAIR Claremont Graduate University

In her theoretically sophisticated new book, Polymorphous Domesticities, Juliana Schiesari weaves strains of psychoanalytic, feminist, postmodern, and animal theory into a new literary model for reading the animal, gender, sex, and the home. Looking at four authors whose creative, interspecies relations defy norms of species and sex, Schiesari offers a way to identify the production of normative identity, as well as ways to imagine and create alternative possibilities for mutual kinship. Perhaps nothing seems so crucial for our sanity, so close to our deepest desires and values, and so important for our well being as the spaces we consider home. This is not only true for we bipedal species, but also for those who live in nests, dens, and cavesnames we too use for the spaces most familiar and sacred to us. But which bodies are allowed to inhabit these places with us, and the limited possibilities of kinship and intimacy with them, are functions of proximity and power. The multiplicity of hairy, slithering, eight-legged, feathered, and hoofed bodies we call animal are foremost among the subjects whose strategic exclusion and domestication initiate and organize the private domestic sphere. For Schiesari, domestication refers not only to creatures we name companions and friends, but also those who are objects of research, our gaze, and our plates. The domesticated are those lives whose death, edibility, test-ability, selective exclusion from or inclusion in our homes, subduing and containment in zoos allows us to maintain our idea of the domestic space as separate from the wild and the public, which remain ever the domain of men (5).
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For Schiesari, the norms that police interspecies relations in our domestic spaces are part of a discursive network that also regulates appropriate relations of sex, intimacy, desire, and kinship. One need not look way back to the transgressive relations and resultant burnings of witches and their familiars to see ways society is troubled by non-normative interspecies relations. We can look to the woman who lives down the street with a few too many cats. Her gure is culturally intelligible to us in part by being rendered sexually atypical in some wayundesirable by men, asexual, homosexual, etc. Our tendency to associate unusual, atypical creaturely intimacy with sexual deviance evidences the relationship between the discourse of animality, femininity, and sexuality. For Schiesari, domesticity and power authored by patriarchy have dened the private sphere by drawing ideological afnities between femininity, sexuality, and animality in ways that continue structuring the unequal status of men, women, and animals in society. Building on her archaeology of the co-constitutive domestication of animals and the creation of sexual and gender norms in her previous book,1 Polymorphous Domesticities creates a new literary model that reads from the speciesed marginsthe perspective of the animal other. This model pays special attention to the identities, sexualities, and intimacies that seem perverse, backwards, marginalized. It insists that while we cannot have unmitigated access to the interiority of animal others (or other animals), they are agents and subjects of their own lives whose relations with us constitute our identity. This literary model only understands who we are as human beings in a context where nonhuman beings have as much to tell us in a posthumanist world, and with as much urgency, as any of the classic thinkers or theorists (15). This method afrms that interspecies relationships transform the very core of our domestic space; explode our ideas about sexuality, desire, and intimacy; and open the limited, traditional idea of the

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In her previous work, Beasts and Beauties: Animals, Gender, and Domestication in the Italian Renaissance, Schiesari traced the modern construct of the patriarchal family back to the co-constitution of two forms or discourses of domestication, beginning in the Renaissance: the rise of the culture of domesticated animals contemporarily known as pets, and the creation of the home as a uniquely private enclosure where the pater familias rules over his own secluded (and largely homebound) world of women, children, animals, servants, etc.

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family to the more complex creaturely community from which it was carved. Polymorphous domesticity, the concept at the heart (or hearth) of Schiesaris method, gestures toward the preexisting ground of all community and intimacy before the repressions that prescribe the identities and limits of species, gender, and sex according to patriarchal norms. This concept is Schiesaris most important contribution to the creaturely bodies about which she is concerned, and to the multiple disciplines from which she draws. It is a witty, playful, and sexy perversion of Freuds idea of polymorphous perversity: the preexisting ground of all eroticism prior to the repressions that prescribe heteronormative sexuality. It is perverse because Freudin his personal and structural anthropocentrismwould not have condoned this revision. Freuds perversity relies on an instantiating human/animal distinction, where sexuality itself is the repression of animality by the human species (37). Schiesaris domesticity, on the other hand, refers to the overlapping, unregulated relations from which the concept of sexuality as such is carved. Her analysis suggests the human/animal divide at the heart of Freuds sexuality is merely another constructionone that has linked productions of sex, gender, and animal identity in unparsable ways. If her introduction sets up the concept of polymorphous domesticities as the ground of kinship possibilities, the books three chapters demonstrate the ways Edith Wharton, Djuna Barnes, Collete, and J.R. Ackerly reveal its existence through their deviance, and draw upon in it their lives and work. Using her literary model, Schiesari looks for non-normative moments of kinshipin sex, friendship, loveand uses them not as examples of perversity, but as exceptions that make evident the plain of possibility we all have access to but so anxiously repress. Signicantly, it is not only the authors, but also their creaturely companions who resist patriarchal domestic norms and nd joy by co-creating and reguring a domestic space full of novel familial bonds, interspecies community, and multivalent identities. If, as Schiesari suggests, we consider polymorphous domesticities the ground of innite possible familial relations with innite beings, then the acquisition of particular attributes that accomplish a heterosexual, homosexual, human-centric, etc. orientation

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are produced through the resolution of conicts that have, as their aim, the suppression of anxieties. Thus one of the ways to witness (or read) the polymorphous domestic space is to watch the multiple, overlapping, non-rational processes by which subjects form, prioritize, and understand their relationships and their own identities. Precisely by looking at the ways these authors and their companions appropriate for themselves a space now unbound by sex, gender, and human/animal norms, it becomes clear that current forms of domestication and identity are but one possibility among many in the polymorphous community (13). Centrally, Schiesari and her model are motivated by an ethical impulse to create increasingly mutual, deeper relationships with those we call animalboth as a way of reducing violence performed on their bodies, and the violence that animality has justied against indigenous and other populations. But if we are talking about the animal in mutual relationship with humans, arent we anthropomorphizing? Isnt anthropomorphizing an inherently anthropocentric project even when used with the best of intentions? Schiesari not only anticipates this criticism in her introduction, but incorporates a self-reective anthropomorphism into the heart of her theory. For Schiesari, anthropomorphism, conceived as the projection of certain human traits onto others, is not limited to discussions of an originary ontological distinction between humans and animals which anthropomorphism either can or cannot bridge. Even Nietzsche famously called truth a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms (1965). Schiesari argues we are as likely to speak outside of anthropomorphism as we are to get outside of culture and language. In other words, anthropomorphism may not only be the way we relate to those without opposable thumbs or spoken language, but also how we relate to those with whom we do share speech. If so, then the refusal to extend certain traits to certain bodieseven as we willingly extend the absence of certain traits may be merely a matter of anthropomorphic degrees, selective repression, and stubborn refusal. In a move similar to that of Guyatri Spivak, Jaques Derrida, and J.M. Coetzee, Schiesari proposes we lean into the anthropomorphic impulsethe impulse to imagine the other as both resembling and differing from uswhile also remaining

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self-aware that they are projections (19). To this end, the possibilities of projection are not limited by the objects essence, but by our imaginations. By letting us get closer to animal realities, such a self-reective, self-critical [anthropomorphic] stance works to undo our own anthropocentric frames of reference via an eccentric or ex-centric anthropomorphism (9). We can embrace our similarity with other creatures, in a sense extending our humanity, but a humanity that is at the same time disassembled by the extension. As theoretically progressive as Schiesaris strategic anthropomorphism is, her claims could be radicalized slightly. Anthropomorphism assumes a unied concept of the human species and its capabilities in ways that foreclose the very human/animal deconstruction Schiesari argues for. A polymorphously domestic ground would be inconsistent with any anthropomorphism, self-reective or otherwise. In lieu of anthropomorphism, Spivak and Coetzee both suggest an instrumentalization of the imagination: a willingness to imagine oneself in the eyes of the other. Instrumentalized imagination resembles strategic anthropomorphism in its ethical impulse to extend, open, and undo our identity through imagining kinship with others. But it also demonstrates that imagining can be done without maintaining the human. This method assumes every individual can imagineand imagine others imaginingwithout needing to rout this through concepts of humanity. I would be delighted if Schiesari would continue to elaborate her method with this imagining in mind. Additionally, while Schiesaris use of psychoanalysis is refreshing in its commitment to the creatures we call animal and the possibilities of the polymorphously domestic space, psychoanalysis has a complicated relationship with anthropomorphism, and the universalism and structuralism that it portends. On the one hand, the subject in psychoanalysis does not itself have unmitigated access to other subjects, but interacts with the world through projections and self-creations. Yet on the other hand, psychoanalysis necessarily assumes a universal economy through which all subjects are constructed. It might even be argued that psychoanalysis requires the exclusion of the animal to determine the specicity of the Homo sapiens psyche. This anthropocentrism at the heart of the psychoanalytic economy cannot be assuaged merely by leaning

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into an anthropomorphism, especially if we maintain that projecting onto humans and animals are inherently different projects in either kind or degree. The usefulness of Schiesaris method could be increased substantially if she explicitly mapped out her use of psychoanalysis in the context of this dilemma. By creating a method that assumes existing domestic spaces are only the beginning of innite interspecies relations, Schiesari helps us trace the exclusion and repression of possibilities in literature and our daily lives. By leaning into an anthropomorphic imagining that promotes similarities and differences deconstructing the boundaries of the human by extending mutualitySchiesari goes a long way toward creating a technique of reading (and living) no longer subservient to speciesist and heterosexual norms. We are encouraged to perform our identities and live with other eshy, furry, hairy, and hairless bodies in ways limited only by our imaginations. Refreshingly, Schiesaris work unites the theoretical and political efforts of feminism, queer studies, and animal theory in spaces other than shared oppression, earthy impulses, and victimization. But much even more touchingly, she unites these three in a preexisting space of possibility that is as much about co-constitution as the possibility of mutual kinship. Works Cited
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On Truth and Falsity in an Extra-Moral Sense. The Portable Nietzsche . Ed. and trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Norton, 1965. Schiesari, Juliana. Beasts and Beauties: Animals, Gender, and Domestication in the Italian Renaissance . Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010.