Meeting the Feral Gaze
if you would like a little soundtrack to your reading experience, please hit play below
Song: Beastars Original Soundtrack - #48 BEASTARS -wolf and rabbit-
Figure 1. Paru Itagaki, BEASTARS volume 1, 2016. Digitally printed on stock paper.
Lack of control, inability to stop from killing, murder for pleasure, murder for meat, murder out of desire, all engender human relationships to nonhuman beings. With ferocity a grey wolf also finds himself in this situation when he is consumed by his hunting instincts as a carnivorous canine to hunt, capture, and devour a white bunny. Eyes wide with surprise at finding themselves in this predicament, both the wolf and the rabbit confront unexpected death (see fig.1). For the wolf, it’s causing death, for the rabbit it is experiencing it. Humans rarely have this moment of being aware of the destruction of ecosystems and nonhuman species across the globe. Even more rarely is there a sense of shock or concern about this happening. However, humans do encounter, visualize, and dream of animals frequently in animated films, giving their house pet a bowl of food as they angrily demand sustenance from their owner’s all-powerful hand, or see the myriad of anthropomorphic creations in art. BEASTARS (2016-20), the hit manga and anime (2020-2021), is just another instance of humans reaching out to visualize the nonhuman and rendering themselves amidst it. Surprise, worry, and anxiety about the current demise of global climate change is certainly valid, but continuously fails to illicit change (Saab 120). But, amid this calamity, massive communities of people turn to fanart, works on paper, manga, all dealing in the anthropomorphic to find comfort, meaning, and friendship with the nonhuman.
A vast array of methodologies have been created that address the fallible idea of humans as sovereign over lay animals (or Nature). This binary has been critiqued through a demystification of the idea of nature as a supreme or unknowable other through processes of listening and collaboration as seen in Rose, Braidotti, and Harraway. New-materialist philosophy has been harnessed by almost all thinkers on the Anthropocene to illustrate how bodies, cultural texts, and relationships consist of a shifting, porous, and ever -assembling radical materiality that has been ignored for centuries by Western philosophical discourse. Simultaneously, the ability to harness technology or even to have queer performances of sexuality or gender is something that is not unique to humans. Our human bodies are increasingly affected by biopower, our engagement with online creation, and purchasing of many forms of media digitally (Springer, Woodward, Stone). Queer performance is clearly not limited to just the human (Halberstam, Hird] and thinking about the ways nonhuman performances of sex and sexuality enrich existing human sex and human creations of anthropomorphic visual media (BEASTARS, furry pornography [Austin], and anthropomorphic art) is a meaningful and enriching act that enacts posthuman feminist forms of wild desire (Halberstam). In the last chapter of Braidotti’s Posthuman feminism, she stresses the importance of changing current academic discourse of posthuman feminism to be more plural in celebrating varied scholarship and disparate methods. I am directly responding to these invocations. Using fan perspectives situated in affect theory, indigenous scholarship, queer theory, cyber feminism, and digital creation of a fan site enacts my attempts to “get a life” (Braidotti 242). Braidotti incites the academic community of posthuman feminists to infuse as much “critique and creativity, energy and passion [] to activate modes of collaborative interconnectedness, mutual interdependence, care and infinite compassion that may enhance our collective ability to pull through this” (Braidotti 242). This predicament is the troubling state of human imperial destruction of beings at the intersections of the nonhuman, “less” than human, non-white, and subaltern. But, I hope to utilize a widely read, personally loved, and visually accessible graphic novel to demonstrate to readers how posthuman feminist perspectives abound (and are able to be harnessed for change) amidst anthropocentric cultural production. The existing scholarship on this subject has only engaged either furry fan perspectives or fine art interpretation in the service of academic theorization (Austin, Ferrando). I seek to reconcile these differences in my project and enact interdisciplinary, accessible engagement with anthropomorphic creation through this essay and fan site creation.
Bounding with vivacity, stories and visual worlds combining the human and nonhuman into the anthropomorphic take many different shapes. Donna Haraway, known for creating the term “posthuman” through a creative body of research on human and nonhuman entanglements, in her recent book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene ends with a SF (speculative fabulation, science fiction, situated feminism) futuristic projection where humans use new gene editing technology to take genetic information from threatened species and combine their bodies together. This creates humans who are empathetic to the plight of these species through time: they see and experience the world in a hybrid version of what these species experience. This story sees human bodies being technologically attuned to our world’s most threatened species, threatened by human’s violent reign over the Anthropocene.
This empathetic attunement to the nonhuman, facilitated through merging bodies is seen in the furry community’s pornography, contemporary visual artists like John Bankston, Paul Peng, and Wangechi Mutu, and the animated and sequential world of BEASTARS. Furries are an international community of people who variously identify with anthropomorphic fantasies or performances (like blockbuster animated films such as The Lion King). Jessica Ruth Austin in her book Fan Identities in the Furry Fandom links furry community’s desiring of “human-nonhuman hybrid” to posthuman practice (Austin 124). By “displacing [] the human as the entire object of desire, [] the Furries are disregarding the humanist hierarchy which always puts humans firmly at the top” and “Furries gain [subsequent] gratification from replacing the human body in their pornography” (Austin 124).
Austin is primarily theorizing the posthuman in the furry community’s pornography, but I see BEASTARS and other contemporary art on paper similarly eliciting, activating, and then performing for viewers and artists a similar posthuman form of desire and way of being. Specifically, in regard to BEASTARS, the idea of going feral, or ferine (the state of being feral, going wild, losing to irrational desire, lacking in control) subverts heteronormative forms of desire as all characters within BEASTARS navigate relationships between carnivores and herbivores who have uncontrollable, feral instincts to eat prey and run from predators. Yet, these desires become activated in a posthuman way on the manga’s pages but also for the way the figures activate these feral desires in human subjects reading. THESIS (potentially mention Braidotti ideas of successful posthuman writing here to transition into thesis, come back).
Figure 2. Paru Itagaki, BEASTARS volume 6, 2017. Digitally printed on stock paper.
Any reconciling of anthropomorphic art’s feral ways of being against universal ideas of human sovereignty not only deals with resisting agendas of human repression of the nonhuman, but human sovereignty is always already a white imperialist project that associates non-white bodies with that of the animal. This association has not only been a theoretical project: chattel transatlantic slavery and subsequent/contemporaneous global contemporary colonial economies’ disproportionate extortion of lower-class non-white labor. Afro-pessimist discourses, like anthropomorphic art and furry pornography, often rejects ideas of traditional ideas of humanity and personhood altogether. Zakkiyah Jackson investigates how “in place of assuming the virtuousness of human recognition or humanization, [she] interrogate[s] the methods upon which an imperialist and racialized conception of ‘universal humanity’ attempted to ‘humanize’ blackness. In the case of slavery, humanization and captivity go hand in hand.” Then referencing Saidiya Hartmen, “humanization is not an antidote to slavery’s violence; rather, slavery is a technology for producing a kind of human” (Jackson 96). In an afro-pessimist worldview, granting all subjects humanity is not seen as a tenable answer to eradicating inequitable systems of power. Rather, as Calven Warren suggests, “that Black being incarnates metaphysical nothing, the terror of metaphysics, in an antiblack world” (Warren 5). Warren uses Heidegger’s formulations in Being and Nothing to articulate Blackness as nothing. This theorization works to undo the white, universalizing forms of being that centers practices of ownership, will, enlightenment, and the sovereign to be human. I see anthropomorphic art operating in collaboration in the undoing of white sovereign humanitarian projects.
John Bankston, a San-Fransisco based queer Black artist, takes children’s coloring books, inserts bestial episodes of cruising, queer gathering, roleplaying, and broader undefinable forms of performance, then fills in the lines with crayon, pastels, watercolors to channel wild nothingness to resist white normative ideas of sexuality and desiring in favor of communitarian, riotous, weird play. Bankston links Black bodies and animality with Black figures having discernible animal characteristics. By creating representational narrative storytelling in his works and depicting men exclusively in fantastical costume, outside, and in dialogue, he creates worlds of characters that evoke, through their materiality, early 2000s coloring books, but in their actions, create a sequential narrative like comic books or manga. These, described by the artist, “sustained narratives” create animal/human hybrids which perform desire throughout the pages and implicate viewers into their fantastical happenings (Watching Hands Artist: John Bankston).
Figure 3. John Bankston, Three Flowers, 2013. Oil on linen, 60 × 48 in | 152.4 × 121.9 cm.
In his work Three Flowers (2013, fig. 3) three figures live amidst a luscious tropical forest. All three of the men wear (or have grown?) what look to be baseball caps mixed with the sharp pointed beak of a toucan; one figure on the left seems to be growing a plant out of the backside of his head while extending a prosthetic extended leg. The other two figures provocatively stare at the viewer. These human/flower/animal hybrids refuse to cohere visually into any stable idea of the human: a robotic leg with nails driven into it, bird like head appendages, and the figure’s blossoming and blooming as “flowers” amidst the lush forest background.
Figure 4. Wangechi Mutu, Intertwined, 2003. Watercolor with collage on paper, 16 1/8 × 12 1/8 inches. Minneapolis Institute of Art.
This work creates something different than the human without fully abandoning it, enabling viewers to be activated through their intent gaze: what kind of pleasures are present in this new hybrid world? In Intertwined (2003, fig. 4) by Kenyan born artist based in New York and Nairobi, Wangechi Mutu, two hyena-human figures stand in embrace. Both figures hold a piece of what looks to be animal hide in their mouths while the right figure, nude, gazes at the viewer intently, incessantly. The left figure wears a bikini and snake skin leggings, looking musingly off into the heavens. In many ways the viewer has come upon these two figures, by walking up to the work and entering their space, but these figures do not shy away despite their intimate embrace or lack of clothing. They stare back at the viewer incessantly evoking “the insistent gaze of the animal, a benevolent or pitiless gaze, surprised or cognizant" (Derrida 4). As humans, trying to reach out to the nonhuman, or confronted by the return of a nonhuman gaze, a difficult, scary, treacherous path opens before us. Viewers are activated, unsettled. This space of viewers being unsettled is a site of potential collaboration with the nonhuman as these anthropomorphic figures successfully engage in visual conversation with the viewer, requiring listening, empathy, and vulnerability. This experience, so relegated to the “Other” through a universalizing human/animal divide, speaks back to us. Intertwined depicts this encounter with wild desire. We walk in on a human reaching out to the nonhuman/human hybrid, yet we catch this moment, or should I say the figures’ moment catches us: the viewer? They do not slink back in fear but rather stare back, questioning human sovereignty and potential judgement.
Wangechi Mutu’s “collages melt together the aesthetics of traditional African crafts with science fiction imaginary, bionic prosthetics, and Surrealism. Her visionary cyborgism is fully aware of the sexual and racial difference” (Ferrando 9). Mutu’s work responds to Afro negativist critiques of the human by utilizing both posthuman and Afrofuturist vocabularies to, in the words of the artist, “give the women [in her works] a kind of strength that the machine supposedly represents for the man. It’s like they’re taking it back and they become these cyborgs, these fierce female cyborgs” (Mutu CNN) In referring to the bodies in her work as cyborgs, a hybridity is invoked which renders the human body as “intertwined” with beings, technology, and the nonhuman world inconceivable. Viewers are met with the wild gaze of these cyborgs and hybrids. Viewers, in meeting the cyborg’s gaze, become enmeshed in an act of wild desire performed by these figures.
A wild form of desire inherently brings close death, the unknown, lack of control, obliteration of the rational or right and wrong: it “beckons and seduces” (Halberstam 1). The wild has been used in Euramerica to mobilize mass systems of violence against indigenous peoples and people of color in almost every colonial context. The pure, rational, and right world was that of white Christian colonizers, and the world of the wild, savage, dark was in all the non-white, to be “saved” lands. A discussion of wildness and desire sits close and often intersects with these violent histories. Importantly, in this closeness, there is an opportunity to work with these racist acts of violence, name the ways they create inequitable power systems, to foster an obliteration of these racist hierarchies and take-up subaltern and nonhuman forms of desire, and, as-seen in the work of Mutu, Bankston, and BEASTARS, refuses to even flatter a coherence the sovereign human.
As seen in these works, this act of looking from nonhuman hybrids questions the human a.k.a. the “sovereign.” It upsets, displaces, and gestures towards the generative: outside of the ruling and dominant, and into the being-with others. Jack Halberstam in Wild Things the Disorder of Desire cites Derrida’s critiques of any binary of the sovereign (i.e. sovereign and the beast) by acknowledging how when the sovereign attempts to rule over his dominion (the beastial, slave, woman, child), the sovereign “must make decisions that are not obvious or inevitable and that therefore reside in the realm of the irrational, the unlikely, the unthinkable” (Halberstam 128). Sound familiar? By continuing to prolong sovereign power, the wielder must enter the wild (the irrational and unthinkable). In the sovereign’s domination, over let’s say the animal, there is a danger lurking in the shadows of the sovereign’s opposite. “Sovereignty, like bestiality is symbolized rather than inhabited by a figure like the king, and bestiality is symbolized by rather than attached to the animal. Furthermore, the attributes of all of the positions within this field of power can be switched around, and pleasure and power and conquest form a dense network of relations, erotic connections, and map contradictory relations to desire, domination, and duty” (Halberstam 129). As we have been confronted with the gaze of Legoshi, or Mutu and Bankston’s hybrids, there is a shifty power when we, the sovereign human, look upon the desiring look of the nonhuman/human hybrid. They do not look back with fear, but with something more inline with the generative nature of the wild. It beckons viewers into the feral— to come play, join the figures in the jungle, lose sense of the rational/irrational, give into desire.
When you go feral by viewing these works, you see other ways of being that enrich due to the obliteration of any semblance of clarity. This creative, libidinal space feeds upon interpretation endlessly, spurring on collaboration. Joining and attempting to listen to these other wild forms of sexuality enrich in more immediate, less philosophically theoretical ways. Myra Hird in Animal Transsex goes a bit feral in that she takes nonhuman forms of sexuality and gender seriously. Serious in that she radically listens by not enforcing human ideas of gender and sexuality onto the nonhuman but tries to listen with care through keen observation for the ways these animals perform sex and sexuality.
Barnacles have some radical sex. The large structure of a barnacle that you can see is sexually dimorphic or intersex, in that it has both male and female sex organs, but upon further inspection, one can observe thousands of microscopic male barnacles living inside these “females” (Hird 157). Well, not quite females in that they are intersex. This spectacular display of diverse sex and sex practices obliterates human definitions that are based in a binary of male and female with intersex in between the two. When male microscopic barnacles live in large numbers inside of an intersex female barnacle, how is this easily monogamous, straight, or queer? I use the word queer as in forms of human non-normative performances of sex and sexuality which do not consider ways in which sexuality is shaped by noncultural influences. In response to this humancentric queerness Hird suggests “we need to resist the temptation to name certain species as queer— queer barnacles, queer Schizophyllum, queer fish, queer lichen. It is much more interesting to consider how we might understand trans [transexual identity] in humans from, say, a bacterial perspective” (Hird 163). Taking a bacterial perspective or a barnacle perspective would drastically shape the way human sexuality is understood because bacteria have such diversity of sex and transsex practices. I describe these alternative, nonhuman centric practices, as feral. If a feral perspective is taken in viewing human sexuality, a vast interpretative world is invoked to creatively collaborate with and listen to enrich sexuality outside of limiting binaries of natural and unnatural, moral, and immoral.
If one begins to consider human sexuality from a feral point of view, i.e. attempts to inhabit the nonhuman perspective, this enacts an attempt at collaboration between the human and nonhuman: (thus) allowing the nonhuman to shape the human. Giving up human forms of sovereign power acknowledges the “qualitative difference between accepting the structural interdependence among species and actually treating the non-humans as cognitive partners and knowledge collaborators” (Braidotti 115). These pages of manga and works of fine art iterate sites of listening and play between human and the nonhuman. But, they encourage humans to get out of their shells and take in the agency, the power, lurking behind the feral gaze of these figures.
Figure 5. Patricia Piccinini, The Young Family, 2002.
Figure 6. Patricia Piccinini, The Bond, 2016.
Further entering the world of art, taking a step out of the two-dimensional, Australian artist Patricia Piccinini, in three-dimensional form, takes up a radical embodiment of a gaze that upsets ideas of human and nonhuman separation. Her work ascribes human attributes to animals, creating wonderful creatures which often disturb viewers because of the visceral detail their bodies are rendered in. These sculptures almost operate in reverse of much of the work I have shown. Instead of taking animal characteristics and putting them on bipedal human figures, Piccinini takes animal forms and adds human characteristics (Fig. 5 and 6). Often showing humans tending (giving care and caressing) these hybrid figures similarly maps a model of how to live with nonhumans. Her collaboratory visions are less interested in the sexual or romantic of the previous works but utilize a language of care. Yet, displaying a woman holding a hybrid interhuman figure questions traditional imagery in Euromerican art and art history of the Madonna and Child; “in some ways this approach re-humanizes the non-human others, while displacing the centrality of anthropocentric arrogance” (Braidotti 208) In describing the scenes of trans/interhuman/hybrid care, a “message of this transgenic and cross-species [work] is that it is crucial to nurture a culture of affirmation and joy and become loving posthuman subjects” (Braidotti 208) These hybrids similarly articulate alternative caring interspecies futures that are felt by viewers in the activated gaze these works exude.
Figure 7. Paru Itagaki and Studio Orange, BEASTARS season 2 episode 11, 2021. Animated video.
When these futures become visible and legible through these posthuman anthropomorphic works of feral art, how does one go forward into these horizons whilst embodying the play and care glimpsed and felt through these figures? Back to Beastars: in Chapter 82 of the manga and season 2 episode 11 of the anime (fig. 7), Legoshi harvests moth larvae to eat protein to become strong enough to defeat a bear who murdered his friend Tem, an alpaca. The luminescent moth illuminates the darkness, cascading light over Legoshi’s body and the immediate surroundings. The moth draws attention to how Legoshi’s previous acts, of eating moth larvae, mean the larvae will never turn into the dazzling moth he sees before him. He is cutting their lives short. After Legoshi begs for forgiveness and asks for punishment in return for his sin of eating a larva, the moth placidly responds: “Those words are meaningless to us insects… the only thing we value is a respect for life.” How to go about respecting these nonhuman beings amidst systems of power which encourage us to use nonhuman bodies and minds with impunity?
At the site of thoughtless destruction of the moth’s very own being, where Legoshi did not think about the life he was taking for granted, the shimmering of the moth illuminates “alongside some sparkling broken glass, pieces of puzzle [ca]catch our eyes, strewn across a concrete path, from a puzzle of the globe — fragmented, scattered, shattered –– fragmenting ecosystems—cascading extinctions [] not only life and life’s shimmer but many of its manifold potentials are eroding.” Australian indigenous posthuman scholar Deborah Bird Rose brilliantly theorizes ways of living modelled after the Yolngu concept of bir’yun (shimmering) and her own experience of being indigenous: The term bir’yun [translated from Yolngu as ‘brilliant’ or ‘shimmering’] — which does not distinguish between domains of nature and culture — is characteristic of a lively pulsating world, not a mechanistic one. Bir’yun shows us that the world is not composed of gears and cogs but of multifaceted, multispecies relations and pulses” (Tsing and Rose 55). This moth’s brilliant shimmering splays light across Legoshi’s fur, into the dark surrounding, and on the foreground. Legoshi’s fur scintillates, activated by the nonhuman light of the moth, creating refractions and refractions, evoking the “water, or the deep cosmos of the shimmering stars” (Malone 131).
This shimmering gestures towards how indigenous cosmologies, cultural practices, and ways of living “embrace the interrelationship of humans with the ‘more than human’ both past and present” (Malone 133). Looking and listening with play and care in collaboration with the nonhuman is in practice in the concept of shimmering. This is seen in Rose’s theorization using Isabelle Stengers’ “reciprocal capture [as an] event, the production of new immanent modes of existence’ [in which neither party] transcends the other or forces the other to bow down” (Tsing and Rose 51). There is no universal way of listening and being with these other species, but “if we were to hold ourselves open to the experience of nonhuman groups, we would see multispecies gifts in this system of sequence, synchrony, connectivity, and mutual benefit” (Rose 136). In other words, respecting these nonhuman lives through openness, listening, and being-with, positive outcomes are abound that enrich the communal nature of living.
The moth intercepting Legoshi in his act of eating visualizes and makes him go forward embodying a respect in his living with other forms of life different than him. Similarly, anthropomorphic art intercepts our gaze, upsetting a continued path of destruction by not looking away, or running but looking at. As fans of BEASTARS and posthuman artists make, they visualize ethical and caring blueprints for continued living with other species. These blueprints intercept and are active in eliciting action amongst viewers, upsetting their gaze with the ferine.
Rose describes how in her childhood she was brought up in a system of thinking that stressed the interrelation of humans and the nonhuman systems around them. For example, “in the case of the multiple benefits of the black plum: dingoes are important dreaming figures in the Victoria River Valley; emus are part of the matrilineal totemic system and so is honey. Similarly with panganpangun: turtles, fish and flying foxes are all food for people. Flying foxes are part of the matrilineal totemic system and are also linked quite directly with seasons (Rose 2005). Both of these plants benefit numerous living beings and are linked into other social and ecological systems.”(I don’t know hwo to site this). Rose demonstrates how Australian Aboriginal totemism “works with patterns that connect particular human groups with particular non-human species, generating interspecies consubstantial kindreds” (Rose 295)
These “kindred” relationships are embodied in the practices of Aboriginal people and are different from many other living practices in the Global North which over consume and over pollute and typically live distant from, and almost certainly not in collaboration with, nonhuman species. But, I see furry, posthuman, and Beastars fans as beginning a similar process to Rose’s ideas of totemism. Using nonhuman species in stylizing their art, while also having their work question the sovereignty of a white imperialist project of being human, they create visual worlds that illicit listening, play, and care for nonhuman species which create specific, local outcomes of living with. These visual patterns and myriad of patterns of behavior may disrupt disconnected humans lives and beckon them into the wild full of the feral.
/ In meeting the wild gaze of hybrid figures in art, white, exclusionary, and sovereign notions of the human, have been interrupted, allowing the lush sounds and sights of interhuman play to bound off into the deep forest. Reading BEASTARS riotous narratives of interspecies becoming-with, viewing Mutu’s posthuman Afrofuturist cyborgs, partying with Bankman’s wonderful men in the park, or cradling Piccinini’s adorably upsetting interhuman hybrids, this large viewing body is having a deep wood anarchic bonfire. Though once there, drawing upon the luminous shimmering of diverse indigenous practices of interwoven human/nonhuman ways of being, these posthuman beings can go deeper and deeper into the depths of enacting interhuman collaboration in this art and animanga communities of fans.
Figure 8. Paru Itagaki, BEASTARS volume 22, 2020. Digitally printed on stock paper.
In less feral terms, these works of art educate viewers in the ways of performing feral desire. They create blueprints for their respective communities of viewers to enact collaborative versions of living with care to interhuman ecosystems. Importantly, these works reach out to collaborate with all around them, trying to attune themselves to nurturing the differences at the intersections of the nonhuman, human, gender, race, class, sex (don’t forget the nonhuman) and sexuality. Just like the final panel of BEASTARS in volume 22 (fig.8), the feral gaze is turned toward the viewer for the last time. A carnivorous grey wolf’s large paws embraces the smaller frame of a benevolent white bunny, not to devour or destroy, but to go forward living together.
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