Dispatches from the Bestiary
Here is a list of incorrect things –
The Fall, ‘Wings’

what does it mean to embrace feral, to be embraced by feral? – doggy pong, hot breath, rough tongue – are you afraid? face to face with the wealth of her negative affects – the disappointments, the rage, the isolation and anxiety – do you run a mile? or do you see the opportunity to puncture the malign functionality, the manufactured consent of contemporary life? for example: heterosex as the trite condition of limit that produces womanhood. to fail this framework is to be unwoman, animal, thing. feral is the thingness that haunts both her acceptable form, and the acceptable forms of her feminism, organised around accommodation and concession as opposed to rejection, mutation and militant refusal. put it another way: the yoking of animality and womanhood transmitted through art and culture via the ideologically charged woman-as-animal metaphor (cow, bitch, pig, chick, bunny, shrew, etc). the feminised animal is already ‘an abject creature, upon whom are ascribed aspects of otherness’ (Donovan, 2016). the feral female is inferior for being woman, yet figured as doubly so for not living up to the woman she’s supposed to be. failure squared. all those shitty signifiers of race and class – accent, grammar, our prole physicality – are intimately linked to perceptions of femininity, sexual availability and moral worth. to be queer, classed, racialised, aged, or disabled is to be evicted from the hallowed precincts of the feminine, to join the legions of the feral. don’t cry. instead: how dykes undo gender. queer as anti-theatre, queer as fuck-your-pinkwashed-feel-good-picnic-my-people-are-dying. you cannot be assimilated into the airbrushed and agreeable rainbow capitalist borg. you denounce and incite. you are a saboteur, a walking provocation, you stick in the throat of neoliberal culture. feral must manifest what claude cahun called ‘the courage to be repulsive’. don’t “live your truth”. there’s no such thing. their “beauty” is a singular lapse of moral and political nerve.

+

these thoughts drive me back to the bestiary. feral as an allegory for herself. falls between the literal and the figurative. falls, entangled in herself. what is this book of beasts in which she is trapped? the physiologus, the grandaddy of all medieval bestiaries, is a moralising riff on aristotle’s more matter-of-fact – yet still wildly off-beam – natural history. both sets of text were oriented towards the accumulation of knowledge about the natural world, but aristotle’s medieval imitators seemed driven by the need to situate that knowledge within the compass of a christian metaphysics. feral says they were afraid of the Fall. one of adam’s original perfections was an encyclopaedic knowledge of nature. this knowledge was lost at the Fall, and bestiary texts often feel like a sweaty attempt recuperate that kind of unattainable mastery (Harrison, 1999). the animal becomes fixed in language and in form. our nature is knowable through – and equivalent to – the commentary that accretes around it. feral falls through. the meaning swoon in reason. if god spoke, and, as in paradise lost, ‘the earth obey’d and straight/ op’ning her fertile womb teem’d at a birth/ innumerous living creatures, perfect forms’ (Milton, 1667), then what should the good encyclopaedist make of or do with those multiple imperfect forms? corralled within yet excluded from prevailing conceptions nature. for example, the ‘yena’, ‘hyaena’, ‘gulo’, ‘leucrota’, ‘crocuta’, ‘corocotta’, leucrocuta’, ‘akabo’, ‘alzabo’, ‘zabo’, ‘ana’, ‘belbus’, ‘lupus vesperitinus’, ‘zilis’, ‘lacata’, ‘hyen’, etc. the hyena flickers across the bestiary, a savvy escapist, a quick-change artist, a deceitful, shape-shifting mutant. the profusion of her appearances speaks to an obsessive anxiety, not only about the protean nature of the hyenic body, but about naming itself, and our need to locate particular kinds of human domination within and through language. if the need to nail the hyena to the page is, in part, a contest of mastery, then perhaps her very multiplicity is an expression of doubt as to the ultimate victor in that contest. etymologies are crucial components of bestiary texts, but prone as they are to elaborate invention and bizarre distortion, they form ever-more baroque and desperate attempts at capture and containment. attempts the hyena skilfully evades (de Hamel, 2008).

+

hyenas are like weeds. like bad ideas. you cut them down and they spring back up, twice as virulent and feisty as before. poltergeists. vermin. never quite exorcised from territory or consciousness. they are a haunting, an incursion. sir Walter Raleigh, in his history of the world (1614), claims of the hyena that it was excluded from noah’s ark. according to Raleigh, only ‘pure’ species were saved, not mongrels or hybrids. stranger still, hyenas somehow reproduced themselves after the deluge, through the unseemly union between a dog and a cat (White, 1984). Hyena, a swaggering survivalist, pivoting between and strutting across categories of species and sex, so that ‘we might marvel at how the hyena changes function, and a moment ago a female, taken from behind by a male, is now a male’ (Ovid). hyena as Valerie Solanas, erupting with queer and prescient rage to tell us we no longer need men, that ‘retaining the male has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction’ (Solanas, 1967). the likely source for the myth of the hyena’s sex-shifting ability is the female spotted hyena’s genitalia. her clitoris extends an astonishing eight inches, and is shaped and positioned exactly like a penis. they can even get erections. further, the spotted hyena’s labia has fused to form a false scrotum, swollen with fatty tissue. as if that were not sufficient, the female spotted hyena is unique among mammals in that she has no external vaginal opening, instead she must urinate, copulate and give birth through her multi-purpose “pseudo-penis”. this last often entails fatal consequences for the hyena, with ten percent of first-time mothers dying in childbirth; for her cubs things are no less precarious: the hyena’s birth canal is twice the length of similar-sized mammals, with a sharp turn halfway down. up to sixty percent of cubs suffocate during birth as a result. female spotted hyenas are “unnatural” and ill-adapted mothers; they are bigger and more aggressive than their male counterparts, whom they dominate sexually. the sight of a large, aggressive “male” animal, giving birth through its “penis” is undoubtedly the foundation for the myth of the hyena’s hermaphroditic flex. but. even now, long after the originating misconception has been corrected, unease persists. it isn’t merely that hyenas flip our relentlessly naturalised gender norms; their bodies actively sabotage the biological processes out of which and through which gender categories are constituted and maintained. i’ve read more than one paper, asking, with varying degrees of levity, what can possibly be the “point” or the “purpose” of an animal “designed” to die in childbirth; whose body is so actively hostile to the life it incubates? the subtext is that hyenas are aberrations, both surplus and counter to the ends of evolution. hyena becomes a queer clarion because she demands a painful expansion in the canon of the natural, or else because she destroys it out-right. for all of us with bodies that betray and fail the reproductive imperatives demanded of them, the hyena can be an icon. while writing hyena! jackal! dog! (2021) my obsessive hyenic research led me back to ireland. specifically to the area around cork, 45,00 years ago. there were hyenas in ireland 45,000 years ago. in the national museum of ireland in dublin, i stared at a prehistoric hyena jawbone, and at the grey, granular thunderstone of its faeces. it is indicative of my mental state at the time that i found these commonplace traces strangely moving. moving because they were commonplace. they represented the limitless horizon of a land not yet named or freighted, and of a creature not yet subject to scrutiny and classification. …

+

the feraltern queer is doubly useless. an avatar of perverse persistence, a joke against god, a hyena: that patron saint of non-normative reproduction. to an extent all identity is performative, but queer identity is performative in highly specific ways. it resists, to paraphrase Peggy Phelan, the balanced logics of finance: ‘it does not save; it only spends’ (Phelan, 1993). the feraltern queer recycles itself, cannot be healed, only transformed, made new. we improvise and reinvent, until we are – once more – all spectacle and no self. smaller and more fabulous with every iteration. bijou means jewel. the damage inflicted upon us, we alchemise into fresh resources. we are a kind of circular miracle; queer is generative but not reproductive, it manifests excess without the organising principal of lineage or heredity. if the body is the clock and the calendar, then queer-time is an impossible feral futurity, always emerging, forever deferred. to ‘spend’ and spin towards no recognisable end, but the pursuit of strange affinities, and new, as yet unimagined forms of social relation.

+

or, as Georges Bataille writes, in ‘the notion of expenditure’: ‘the term poetry, applied to the least degraded and least intellectualized forms of the expression of a state of loss, can be considered synonymous with expenditure; it in fact signifies, in the most precise way, creation by means of loss. its meaning is therefore closer to that of sacrifice.’ feral is the candle consumes itself. it is a poetics of risk, a poetry that risks. at risk. it is an art of discomfort and vulnerability. feral affect is the abandonment to a sadness and rage long repressed. it is the endless accumulation of that rage converted into furious delivery: compressed, snarling, flailing, contorted. it is the release of unappeased terror in manic intensity. it is the body, the self, as its sole resource. it is irrational, exhaustive and exhausting. Joyelle McSweeney tells us that her writing may amount to ‘a maximal, dandified, camp, ill-gendered, millenarian text’ whose sentences ‘run on past health to Death, a region in which the most blasphemous rituals take place’ and which demand ‘an undue attention to style, flair, garments, gestures rather than actions and plot, descriptions only of things that never were, an uncanny transporting voice not tied to any body, around which flesh accrues and decomposes, a text that does not choose life but might acquire it alongside death’ (2015).

+

this feral is a site and a mode of failure. it doesn’t fit the dominant culture’s masturbatory fantasy of the body as a neutral and broadly behaving instrument. feral encompasses forms, functions, and glitches ordinarily barred from the canon of classical aesthetics. feral will not reconstitute its wayward bodies as productive workers, model citizens, or ideal consumer subjects. it will not heal. it does not want to get better. feral is the suppressed, clandestine-grotesque body breaking out, ever-open and erupting. feral is multiple and polyvalent, it challenges ‘the individual, strictly limited mass, the impenetrable façade’ of the normative body so that it summons a commons, a collective, an us (Bakhtin, 1984). feral makes other others present in the present, is rampantly relational, an affective solidarity. feral is a failure, is the rejection of the statically perfected individual self as our highest cultural aspiration, will not serve the ends of identity politics, wants a hyenic grammar of irrational possibility. that is, wants to articulate a radical salvation that escapes the toxic logics of competition and success. …

+

in the bestiary i meet my own monstrous and failing body. that with which i was born and that which has been interpolated onto me through poverty, through cultural heritage, by sexuality and gender. composite beasts become spurs for thinking about excess, disability, and the ableist, normative recuperation of strange or suffering bodies. but they also point to barely imagined political possibilities. i orbit obsessively the idea of ‘a body of dissimilar bodies’ as referenced in the opening salvo from the ‘symbionese liberation army declaration of revolutionary war & the symbionese program’. In the context of a vanguard movement like the SLA this refers to the bringing together of various left-wing struggles – feminist, anti-racist, anti-fascist, etc.– but also to the spontaneous and autonomous functioning of individuals and small groups, working separately, disparately, by various militant methodologies towards the same radical and collective ends. yet ‘dissimilar bodies’ are also literal bodies, the bodies of those involved in the struggle: racialised bodies, gendered bodies, classed bodies, queer bodies, imprisoned bodies, bodies marked by the military industrial complex, bodies classified as killable waste. while the biological figure for political movements is an old one, in the manifesto it is performing highly specific work: summoning those bodies abjected by difference, and foregrounding the obtruding presence of those the state in its majesty prefers not to acknowledge, or regards merely as surplus or collateral. the idea of hybrid bodies, especially within the context of black struggle, also gestures to white hysteria surrounding miscegenation, as well as to the fear of queer contagion.

+

‘body of dissimilar bodies’ brings me back to the animal, and to Donna Haraway, writing in when species meet (2008) of our ‘becoming with’. here Haraway argues that organism is connected, bound together in what she calls ‘material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings co-shape one another’. there is a connection that is prior to the individual organism because every individual organism is constituted in and through ‘intra-and interaction’. in other words, all organisms are constituted in relation to many others, blurring the lines between an individual and a community of diverse organisms. this thought has implications, positing an ‘intra-action’ or an ‘encounter’ between human and nonhuman organisms from which we might learn ‘an ethics and politics committed to the flourishing of significant otherness’ beyond the rules of ‘function and calculation, something not ruled by the logic of the reproduction of the same’.

+

this flourishing is feral’s utopian aspect. and it bears upon what monsters and so-called monstrous forms can do: how their distortions signal to plenitude, to an excess of meaning that cannot be captured by the tired mimetic representation of everything the world calls “natural”. to encounter the body, truly, as a singular, unbearable, irreparable, unrepeatable event. to enter a state of shock that troubles your knowing calm, your complacency, your smug assurance. a shock that points to an insufficiency of theory, that shakes canons and the value systems that produce them. to receive the de-forming force of our deformity. as if there were no “ugliness”. only a hysterical excess of beauty.