(Re-)Imagining Farmed Animal Characters in and Through Science and Speculative Fiction

This chapter elaborates on the affordances of science and speculative fiction texts (sf) in representing farmed animals. It describes postanimal figures appearing in sf to convey how animal and technological elements hybridize within emerging subject forms. A postanimalist lens to reading these figures is designed as an animal-sensitive, analytical tool which may complement Donna Haraway’s cyborg figures (1985) and her anti-category of companion species (2003, 2007). Literary thought experiments on postanimality point to the fact that real-world farmed animals may already be “postanimals,” given their long histories of domestication, human-bred physiques, and in many cases bioengineered genomes. The chapter terms this ambivalent sf trope a “biotechnological enablement”: On the one hand, postanimal figures put assumed human-animal boundaries up for debate and gain additional capabilities following their modification. On the other, figures such as Margaret Atwood’s headless chickens with multiple drumsticks demonstrate that technological progress outside of literature rarely serves the interest of living animals. Illustratively, condensed readings of two classic, and two more recent texts suggest that sf aesthetics may alienate readers from “livestock” figures, whereas they familiarize them with science-fictional, liberated versions of their farmed animal companions—a core contribution to deindustrializing their imagination.