Browsing by Author "MacKenzie-Dale, Britt"

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    Their Imperceptible Parts: Storytelling, Animal Agriculture, and Uncanny Kin
    (University of New Brunswick, 2024-08) MacKenzie-Dale, Britt; Effinger, Elizabeth; Jarman, Mark Anthony
    Industrial animal agriculture is heavily implicated in the warming of our planet and, as such, multispecies stories in the Anthropocene are increasingly urgent. Their Imperceptible Parts: Storytelling, Animal Agriculture, and Uncanny Kin is a creative writing dissertation consisting of a six-part short story collection with a critical introduction. The ecoGothic short story collection features farmed animals and the humans (disproportionally people of colour, refugees, undocumented immigrants, and members of the working class) who labour alongside them and traces the ways in which these industrial farming systems exploit vulnerable bodies. Conceptually framing these stories is the critical introduction that explores three key lines of thought that interrogate the human-animal relationship in the Anthropocene. First, I tarry with the fraught and historically contingent “fantasy figure of the human” (Wolfe 45), revealing that those considered nonhuman have always haunted hegemonic and dominant cultural narratives. Second, I explore how storytelling can be an affective methodology to interrogate the human-nonhuman dichotomy as inherently unstable, violent, and porous. I offer that the ecoGothic genre helps elucidate the real-world horrors that both humans and animals face within modern meat production and becomes a useful craft tool to investigate the multispecies intimacies, ontological slippages, and horrific corporeal demands of these haunted sites. Finally, drawing upon scholars working at the nexus of critical animal studies and labour studies, I explore how thinking of farmed animals as labourers can challenge human exceptionalism. With a focus on the affective force and transformative power of fiction, Their Imperceptible Parts suggests that literature can be a tool to probe the ideologies and impacts of intensive animal farming and bring to light the stories of those bodies that otherwise escape notice.