Start Date
26-3-2024 4:20 PM
End Date
26-3-2024 4:45 PM
Location
Museum Education Room
Name of Faculty Mentor
James Winchester
Abstract
Have you ever considered what it would be like to lose your humanity? In the movie The Cat Returns, our protagonist Haru is whisked away to a kingdom of cats after rescuing their prince from being run over by a car. The king wants to marry her off to his son, so reasonably he gradually transforms her into a cat. After she is rescued by her new cat companions, she is returned to the human world with only the memory of her brief separation from humanity, an experience that leaves her with a lingering sense of purpose and vigor; an eroticism for life. There are many communities today that explore situations just like hers, often taking the form of art, writing, imagination, and an important one that many people seldom like to admit; pornography. As Patricia Taxxon said in her YouTube video On the Ethics of Boinking Animal People, “I was treated like a failed human being my entire life and you’re surprised that my response was to become a dog and fuck other dogs.” Sometimes one of the best ways to secure our human identities is to explore the inhuman with our mind, soul, and body.
In this paper I aim to explore modern communities that like to experience humanity through our most animalistic traits and features, combining human and beast into one. I will show how such communities are deeply related to and often a gateway for attaining eroticism as Audre Lorde defined it, “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” I will argue that these communities, as shoved away to the outskirts of society as they often are, can be some of our society’s richest pools of eroticism in a barren capitalist desert.
Included in
Furries and Beyond: The Eroticism of Becoming Inhuman
Museum Education Room
Have you ever considered what it would be like to lose your humanity? In the movie The Cat Returns, our protagonist Haru is whisked away to a kingdom of cats after rescuing their prince from being run over by a car. The king wants to marry her off to his son, so reasonably he gradually transforms her into a cat. After she is rescued by her new cat companions, she is returned to the human world with only the memory of her brief separation from humanity, an experience that leaves her with a lingering sense of purpose and vigor; an eroticism for life. There are many communities today that explore situations just like hers, often taking the form of art, writing, imagination, and an important one that many people seldom like to admit; pornography. As Patricia Taxxon said in her YouTube video On the Ethics of Boinking Animal People, “I was treated like a failed human being my entire life and you’re surprised that my response was to become a dog and fuck other dogs.” Sometimes one of the best ways to secure our human identities is to explore the inhuman with our mind, soul, and body.
In this paper I aim to explore modern communities that like to experience humanity through our most animalistic traits and features, combining human and beast into one. I will show how such communities are deeply related to and often a gateway for attaining eroticism as Audre Lorde defined it, “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” I will argue that these communities, as shoved away to the outskirts of society as they often are, can be some of our society’s richest pools of eroticism in a barren capitalist desert.