panel 2
Udderly Queer: An Artistic Exploration of Trans*Species Care Ethics
Udderly Queer: An Artistic Exploration of Trans*Species Care Ethics
Louis van den Hengel and Leonie Cornips with Piet & Soya the Cow
This panel merges artistic and academic modes of inquiry to develop a queer ethics of care beyond human exceptionalism and sexual, racial, and species hierarchies. It showcases the collaborative efforts of scholars, artists, practitioners, and nonhuman animals working toward more egalitarian and compassionate forms of coexistence within a multispecies world. We explore diverse perspectives on human-cow relations, starting from the premise that queer, non-binary, and trans* perspectives hold unique potential for crafting an interspecies care ethics that confronts and dismantles the gendered dynamics of oppression in industrial dairy farming. Through artistic research, multispecies ethnography, and theoretical inquiry drawing from fields such as queer ecocriticism, Black vegan feminism, and human-animal studies, this panel seeks to make a distinctive contribution to the ongoing “posthuman turn” in care theory (Bozalek, Zembylas & Tronto, 2021), while dialoguing with Maurice Hamington’s recent exploration of veganism and posthuman care (Hamington, 2024, pp. 178-199).
The panel includes two paper presentations and a film screening. The first paper is presented by Leonie Cornips, a sociolinguistics researcher who has advanced the “animal turn” in linguistics through her work on cow languages and multispecies ethics. Leonie will discuss how dairy cows communicate with humans and one another, while introducing the story of Piet – an intersex “bull” with both male and female characteristics – whom she has cared for since 2021. The second presentation is by Louis van den Hengel, a scholar working at the intersection of care ethics, aesthetics, and gender and diversity studies. Louis’s paper draws on queer, trans*, and drag community perspectives to elaborate the concept of trans*species care ethics. The paper will introduce the work of Swiss artist Daniel Hellmann, who explores human-animal relations through his alter ego Soya the Cow, a feminist vegan drag persona.
Following this, we will screen an art film that documents a performative encounter between Piet and Soya, co-created by Leonie, Louis, Daniel, Piet, Piet’s herd, Piet’s caretakers, and the Utrecht-based filmmaking and transgender advocacy collective De Transketeers. Staged as a one-day interspecies performance in May 2024, this encounter is an embodied exploration of a posthuman ethics of care, striving toward more inclusive and ethical relationships with the other-than-human beings with whom we share a multispecies world, while highlighting the fluidity and intricacy of gender and animality beyond anthropocentric norms.
References Bozalek, V., Zembylas, M. & Tronto, J. (Eds) (2021). Posthuman and political care ethics for reconfiguring higher education pedagogies. Routledge.
Hamington, M. (2024). Revolutionary care: Commitment and ethos. Routledge.
Louis van den Hengel (they/them) is Associate Professor of Care Ethics & the Arts based at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands. They have published widely in the fields of feminist new materialism, critical posthumanism, human-animal studies, feminist ecocriticism, and queer ecology. Their current research examines the socio-political and ethical value of twenty-first century performance and live art by bringing contemporary feminist, queer, ecological, and decolonial perspectives in conversation with the philosophical and mystical thinking of Simone Weil. Additionally, Louis is the lead organizer of the international Care Ethics Research Consortium conference on “Care, Aesthetics, and Repair”, held in January 2025.
Leonie Cornips (she/her) is a Sociolinguistics Researcher at NL-Lab/the Meertens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Languageculture in Limburg at Maastricht University. She studied Dutch Linguistics at the University in Amsterdam and received her PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 1994 for a dissertation on syntactic variation in the standard Dutch spoken in Heerlen (Limburg). Her research interests include bilingual child language acquisition, multilingualism and identity construction through linguistic practices, and she has recently also focused on animal languages, in particular cow languages and interactions.
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
Contact info Louis van den Hengel
Images homepage: Merel Visse, Christine Leroy
design website: Johanne de Heus and Marielle Schuurman