Preface
wild/feral/domestic
—Feral
The becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the animal the human being becomes is not.
Deleuze & Guattari¹
Feral: the process of returning to a wild state, escaping from captivity or domestication, or embracing morbid or deadly practices.
Domestication: the process of taming an animal, cultivating a plant for food, or making someone fond of and good at “home life” and the tasks that it involves.
I sit on the ground hunched over the coffee table with a three-month-old baby strewn across my lap. My shirt is stained with rings of breast milk, and my hair sheds constantly. Hormones, I think. Drooling and writhing around, my eyes dart between the baby, my computer screen, and our 9-month-old puppy who has an affinity for chewing nice writing pens and tearing apart books. PAY ATTENTION TO ME, she yells through her defiant acts. The baby grunts, lifts her head up as high as she can until the weight of it swings her back down and around into my arms. After a few more attempts, she gets frustrated and begins to cry, chirping several high-pitched warning calls to mom. “Oh no pupper,” my partner says. Not the first time we’ve referred to the baby as a dog and the dog as a baby. I search around for the pacifier, which I find laying under the coffee table piled with books on parenting that we haven’t read. The pacifier is disfigured and stippled with fresh bitemarks, so I shove my pinky finger in the baby’s mouth to suck on. She falls asleep immediately. I stare exhausted yet calmly satisfied at this little creature that I’ve made, feeling both physically torn apart—more like gutted from sternum to pelvis as opposed to torn limb from limb—and completely whole at the same time. I am a more elemental version of myself. Raw, gritty, grotesque, spontaneous, and joyful all at the same time; my experience of motherhood can only be described as feral.
Thus, it was with delightful serendipity that I picked up Rachel Yoder’s new novel Nightbitch, which explores the ferality of motherhood through a satirical fairy tale about a stay-at-home mom transforming into a canine. It traverses the oppressive boundaries of the domesticated sphere—for which there is no “outside” (i.e., no wild/er/ness) via Foucauldian thought—and instead offers a fictional account of feralization. The protagonist, an artist who gave up her “dream job” running a small gallery to take care of her child, begins to grow rogue tufts of hair, and her teeth seem to sharpen into ferocious points. As the narrative progresses, the protagonist gives into to her feral urges: biting, licking, romping, rolling, and roaming nightly through the suburban cul-de-sacs. It culminates in a transformative collective performance of feral femininity in which a group of naked women watch the protagonist devour a raw steak; a rather feral display of the monstrous-feminine. Although rather heteronormative—verging on cliché—in its surreal depiction of domestic motherhood, it also registers on a more Deleuzian plane of immanence as it meanders through mystical forests, engaging in a politics of sorcery aimed at dismantling Enlightenment logics. It embodies a feral performativity that can only be described as a particularly unruly form of becoming-animal, providing a useful entry point for conceptualizing the work that has been assembled in this curated collection.
Ferality is conceptualized within these pages as a process of becoming, an ontology of change or transformation. Becoming- is a recurrent act of deconstructing the boundaries between entities, drawing one element into the territory of another, changing its value and bringing about a new unity. In this sense, feral functions as both an adjective and a verb: a being and a doing. It is performative and political. It engages in a politics that is not simply concerned with how humans relate to each other and the natural world, but a politics that involves the direct management of forces that are ultimately determining. Becoming-feral involves embodied and performative acts of resistance to the politics of domestication. It not only maps the political forces and multispecies relations that are implicated in the various forms of colonial and capitalist exploitation that involve the direct management of entities, but it also fosters creative practices of collective becoming that muddle the wild/feral/domestic divides. Becoming-feral constitutes a line of flight away from individuated and subjugated life forms, which are policed by the logics of human exceptionalism, towards the messy mystical multiplicity of a world in common, a world of shared and multitudinal ecologies. The entries that occupy these pages constitute a prismatic and multifaceted perspective on the raw, gritty, grotesque, spontaneous, and joyful acts of becoming-feral in the Anthropocene.
Wild domesticated woman waiting for the return of cyborg salmon and seeking feral sociality and citizenship. Looking for like-minded others.²
It was in 2015 that I first proposed the concept of feral subjectivities, drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s conception of nomadic subjectivities and Nick Garside’s work on feral citizenship.³ It was a proposition to foster onto-epistemological ways of being that challenged the heteronormative, patriarchal, and capitalist ideologies that shape existing nature-culture relations. It was a proposition for a collective becoming-otherwise. It was also in 2015, at the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) conference in Moscow, Idaho, that I heard Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing co-present a talk titled “Tunneling in the Chthulucene” in which Tsing briefly introduced a new digital web-based project she was working on about feral ecologies, later developed into the recently published Feral Atlas.⁴ It is no coincidence that the concept of ferality emerged (for both of us) in relation to discourses around the Anthropocene. Ferality provides a generative opening to poke and prod the boundaries and limits of humanist onto-epistemological systems, particularly those that have contributed to the detrimental effects of human disturbance on a planetary scale, what Tsing calls the “Anthropocene problem” (e.g., capitalism, imperialism, colonialism).⁵ Indeed, what makes it such a powerful conceptual tool is that it can operate on different scales and across different dimensions. Ferality can be applied to acts, entities, relations, qualities, collectives, infrastructures, and futures. Feral is the perfect strong yet delicate tool to think (and become) with as we grapple with what Haraway described during her part of the ASLE presentation as the “situated complexities” of our times.
Feral is a strong and delicate tool to think with, and using it is political.
Pauline Briand⁶
While humanity was in the midst of grappling with the ultimate “feral foe” COVID-19, my BECOMING collaborators and I decided to put out an open call —a provocative and playful invitation, a few serious yipes and a playful growl—in search of others already engaged in the messy politics of becoming-feral in the Anthropocene.⁷ What we received as a response was an overwhelming array of diverse stories, experiences, and embodied performances that truly shifted and deepened our understanding of ferality: for some of us (human and nonhuman), ferality can be a site of resistance and an opportunity to engage in the process of becoming-minor; for others, ferality is unintentional, forced, often violent, and risky. We’ve come to understand becoming-feral as a continual process of becoming-other, intentional or not, that requires particular forms of performative collaboration, welcomed or not, and that remains always unfinished. We curated the submissions into a book of beasts (or a bestiary), an accumulative and malleable collection of entries that describe the feral characteristics and habits of particular animals, real or imaginary. Submitted by artists, biologists, scholars, historians, scientists, poets, naturalists, and activists, our hope is that the collection functions as an ongoing multidisciplinary multilogue that sparks further exploration into the ongoing politics of domestication, working towards a deeper understanding of their unruly, unintended, and unjust consequences, and who bears them.
Viral rabbits, irreverent ravens, anarchist sponges, atomic bees, feminist boss cows, and digital moose are just a few of the entities that occupy the pages of this book, representing a multispecies assemblage of feral subjectivities. Ironically, as I sit draped over my coffee table reviewing the feral entries that comprise this curated collection, my baby stares mesmerized at the screen while wearing an uber stylish mustard yellow sweatshirt that reads “tiny human” in bold serifed typeface, gifted to us at our baby shower. The posthumanist in me cringes, chuckles, and pauses momentarily to prod the complex jumble of thoughts and emotions that seep in towards the edges of my perception. There is no escaping my subject position, no sneaking around the biopolitics, no outside of the Anthropocene. So, let’s go rogue. Embrace ferality. This is an open invitation to join us in the risky business of collectively becoming-feral. So, get out your steak knives and snap on your baby bibs; these feral fairy tales will leave you with an itch to scratch and a bone to pick in the hungry politics of our complex world.
Chessa Adsit-Morris
Managing Editor, becoming—Feral
Assistant Director, Center for Creative Ecologies
—University of California, Santa Cruz
Endnotes
1. Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (New York, NY: Semiotext(e), 1987).
2. Epigraph from Leesa Fawcett’s essay “Feral Sociality and (un)Natural Histories: On Nomadic Ethics and Embodied Learning,” in Fields of Green: Restorying Culture, Environment, and Education, eds. Marcia McKenzie, Paul Hart, Heesoon Bai, and Bob Jickling (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009). Reprinted with permission by Hampton Press.
3. My research was published in 2017 as part of my manuscript Restorying Environmental Education: Figurations, Fictions, and Feral Subjectivities (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Also see Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge, UK: 2013); and Nick Garside, Democratic Ideals and the Politization of Nature (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
4. Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Saxena Keleman and Feifei Zhou, eds. Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), http://feralatlas.org/.
5. See Nicolas Nova and DISNOVATION.ORG’s new publication A Bestiary of the Anthropocene (Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2021), https://www.onomatopee.net/exhibition/bestiary_of-_the_antropocene/#publication_13127.
6. Nova and DISNOVATION.ORG, A Bestiary of the Anthropocene.
7. The Feral Atlas classifies the coronavirus as a “Feral Quality” due to its (mythical) origins and (moral/political) affects. See Tsing, Deger, Keleman and Zhou, Feral Atlas.