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B O O K

R E V I E W

Locating a Tranimal Past

A Review Essay of Tranimalities and Tranimacies
in Scholarship

M . D A L E B O OT H

Abstract This review essay surveys the current state of tranimal historiography, paying specific
attention to Jens Rydstroms Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880
1950, several essays in the edited collection Centering Animals in Latin American History, and Leah
DeVuns GLQ article Animal Appetites. Ranging from the medieval to the modern, these texts offer a
glimpse at an emerging branch of tranimal studies rooted in historical methodology and analysis.
Keywords trans-, transgender, tranimal, history, animal studies

This essay probes both the relationships between the human and nonhuman and
the theoretical frameworks by which scholars are beginning to conceptualize tranimals, tranimacies, and humanimality. From the onset, it is important to
recognize the challenge of defining terms in a field that has emerged in critical
relation to the taxonomical impulses that underlie definitions themselves. Yet it
seems safe to suggest that when we speak of tranimals and tranimacies, we speak
of becomingof moving and movements, of crossings and borders, of alterations and meldings. This process of becoming has been and remains a focus of
trans studies; its coupling with critical animal studies has yielded new theoretical
frameworks for understanding modes of embodiment and being. In a relatively
short span of time, theorists from across disciplines have laid the fundamental
groundwork in tranimal studies. Works such as Joan Roughgardens Evolutions
Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (2004) and Bruce
Bagemihls Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity
(1999) not only highlight the unnaturalness of confining understandings of
sexual difference to a two-sex model but also emphasize the diverse ways nonhuman lives traverse sex. Texts such as Carla Frecceros Becoming-Dog (2011),

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DOI 10.1215/23289252-2867805 2015 Duke University Press

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Natalie Corinne Hansens Humans, Horses, and Hormones: (Trans) Gendering

Cross-Species Relationships (2008), and Donna Haraways The Companion Species
Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003) question where the human
ends and the nonhuman animal begins. Most recently, The Transgender Studies
Reader 2 devoted an entire section, titled Transsexing Humanimality, to inquiries
into cross-species and transsexed lives (Stryker and Aizura 2013: 14598). With
numerous forthcoming works scheduled for publication, historians and theorists
have much to look forward to in the coming year.
Yet most work concerning tranimals, tranimacies, and humanimality
focuses on the present and the timeless. Is there a tranimal past? How might
interrogating the past through a tranimal gaze transform history and its practice?
What happens when the posthuman combines with the precolonial? Or when the
boundaries of the human overlay the boundaries of either time or place? There is
much for historians to learn from Eva Haywards (2008) musing on the anatomical potentiality of starfish, Mel Chens (2012) coupling of critical animal and
affect studies, and Myra Hirds (2008) insistence on a new materialist framework
that shuns anthropocentric forms of thinking. These theorists offer historians
radically different ways to approach the historical subject and perhaps new subjects altogether. The following texts are models of just such inquiries. Jens
Rydstroms Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880
1950 (2003), the collected essays in Centering Animals in Latin American History
(Few and Tortorici 2013), and Leah DeVuns article Animal Appetites (2014)
offer a glimpse of what promises to be an exciting and developing field dedicated
to a history of tranimals, tranimacies, and humanimalities.
In Sinners and Citizens, Rydstrom (2003) illustrates how discourse on
sexual transgression in Sweden shifted from a sodomitic to a homosexual
paradigm in the first half of the twentieth century. Citing the Penal Code of 1864,
which defined unnatural acts as bestiality, homosexuality, and unnatural fornication between men and women (2), Rydstrom argues that a history of homosexuality in Sweden is incomplete without a critical consideration of the countrys
bestiality discourse. Rydstrom maps his analysis of this shifting sexual dialogue
onto the changing landscape of Sweden, from largely rural in the nineteenth
century to a land of increasing urbanity in the twentieth century.
The tranimal in Rydstroms textthough he does not identify it as
suchis the product of a perceived affinity between penetrated species. The
prominence of bestiality discourse, Rydstrom argues, led Swedish society to
associate the passive/penetrated man not with femininity as was common in
other European contexts but instead with animality. The courts did not consider the animal involved in bestiality cases to be an active accomplice in the
crime (320), and they thus treated the animal as a victim. Likewise, Swedish

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courts often ruled the passive sexual partner in male sodomy trials not guilty,
while subjecting the penetrating partner to more severe charges. This coupling of
animality with innocence and passivity, and humanity with aggression and culpability, is an altogether unique association yet to be fully explored in the context
of queer sexualities.
Centering Animals in Latin American History, a collection of essays edited
by Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici, locates animals and human-animal relationships in Latin American history, while simultaneously challenging the modern
construction of dualisms such as the human-animal and wild-domestic (Tortorici and Few 2013: 5). The text is separated into three sections: Animals, Culture, and Colonialism; Animals and Medicine, Science and Public Health; and
The Meanings and Politics of Postcolonial Animals. While all the contributions
are worthy of attention, four essays in particular illustrate the possibilities and
limits of a historical inquiry into tranimacies and tranimals.
The first section begins with Leon Garca Garagarzas The Year People
Turned into Cattle: The End of the World in New Spain, 1558 (2013), concerning
Juan Teton, an indigenous spiritual leader in sixteenth-century Mexico. Teton
warned the Nahua against eating European livestock, prophesizing that they
would turn into the animal upon consumption. The threat of transformation
of crossing the boundaries of both human/nonhuman and Nahua/European
acted as a means by which to enact social control. Zeb Tortoricis (2013: 109) In
the Name of the Father and the Mother of All Dogs: Canine Baptisms, Weddings,
and Funerals in Bourbon Mexico examines what he describes as a sort of
transspecies sartorial drag, in which dogs took part in sacred rituals typically
reserved for humans. Tortorici argues that while the actual canine religious ceremonies solidified the boundaries between human and animal in a typically
carnivalesque fashion, the Mexican Inquisitions serious response to these ceremonies are evidence of the churchs anxieties concerning human/animal borders. For church leaders, the tranimality of the baptized pup or the canine
bridegroom stood as an affront to divinely ordained hierarchies of both nature
and society (102).
The second section of the text explores the intersection of the human and
nonhuman in the field of medicine and health. In Pest to Vector, Heather
McCrea (2013: 169) illustrates how the discourse on animal control in the name of
public health in nineteenth-century Yucatan mirrored the Yucatecan states
attempts to civilizeor humanize the indigenous Maya. In this period,
cholera and yellow fever epidemics ran alongside the Yucatans state-building
enterprise, and state officials routinely cast the indigenous Mayaalong with
animals and insects as vectors of disease and obstacles to modernity. By casting
the Maya as an inferior speciesa tranimal in many respectsofficials released

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themselves from any moral responsibilities based in ideals of shared humanity. In

other words, the state was free to controland exterminate, if necessary the
indigenous Maya.
The Meanings and Politics of Postcolonial Animals, the texts third
section, treats relatively modern notions of animal welfare and humanitarian
intervention in the nonhuman world. Lauren Derbys Trujillo, the Goat: Of
Beasts, Men, and Politics in the Dominican Republic (2013) is an exceptional
essay that confronts political tranimacies head on. Derby analyzes the crossspecies associations that dominated remembrances of Dominican dictator Rafael
Trujillo, nicknamed the goat, after his death in 1961. Trujillos opponents successfully merged the image of the dictator with a goat, an animal that carried a
thickly layered web of meaning that included the volatile, the erratic, and the
erotically insatiable, as well as the memories of the crianza libre (open range)
economy that thrived prior to state subjection. Touching on the precolonial lore
of shape-shifting monstrous beings, Derby draws on a long history of Latin
American tranimacies, the legacies of which remain evident in twentieth-century
political discourse.
Tucked into GLQs issue On the Visceral, Leah DeVuns Animal
Appetites (2014) locates tranimacies in medieval Europe amid discussions of
race, hermaphroditic bodies, and religious otherness. Natural philosophers in the
Middle Ages cited sexual difference as a key component in establishing humanness and affirming human superiority. Hermaphroditic bodies acted as an axis
point at which the disputed boundaries between male and female, Christian and
non-Christian, and European and foreigner converged. Medieval texts routinely
depicted Jews and Muslims as hermaphroditic beings partaking in eating and
sexual practices that aligned them with animals and, in effect, denied their
humanity. Perhaps the greatest takeaway from this pieceand there are many
from which to chooseis DeVuns observation that in some contexts, sexual
difference is wrapped up in the very construction of taxonomies of human and
nonhuman (461). This serves as a welcome reminder that history has the ability
to both complicate and re-frame current theoretical debates.
As evidenced by the above texts, tranimals operate in variable capacities
across histories. In colonial Latin America, the tranimal was at times an opossum,
described by Europeans in the Americas as a cross-species mixture of fox, owl,
monkey, and human (Tortorici and Few 2013: 8; Parish 1997). In this instance the
tranimal is utilized in an attempt to render the unknown the opossum more
familiar. Yet others called on the tranimal to do just the opposite, to emphasize
difference. The tranimal in DeVuns article signals difference at every turn: the
medieval hermaphroditic Jew was different from contemporaries in religion,
ethnicity, sex, and species. In Rydstroms text, the tranimal indicated relative

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innocence, victimhood, and the results of grotesque coercion, while in McCreas

essay, the tranimal pointed to culpability and malicious intent. With such a
breadth of functionality, the tranimal pushes historians to undertake the arduous
task of embracing contradiction amidst flashes of continuity.
Taken together, these histories illustrate the diverse, dynamic, and altogether promising future of tranimacy studies and tranimal historiographies. Yet
they also highlight the limitations of the discipline and the uncertainties it faces.
As is common with inquiries into the subaltern, it is easy to hear people speak
of tranimals yet difficult to hear the tranimals speak themselves. Such an issue
challenges historians to find new ways of reading and listening in the archives.1
Furthermore, a historical inquiry into tranimacies opens new comparative frameworks within which historians can parse varying sociocultural reactions to
nonnormative genders, sexualities, and species across geographic and temporal
spaces. In short, historians should follow the lead set by Sinners and Citizens,
Centering Animals and Animal Appetites and in doing so make apparent the
rich history of those whose embodiment and identity trans/ed borders of sex,
gender, and species.

M. Dale Booth is a doctoral student in history at Rutgers University. Booths research focuses on
the intersection of gender, sexuality, and natural history in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Britain.

Note
1.

In such a pursuit, tranimal studies would do well to look to the methodologies of

postcolonial studies.

References
Bagemihl, Bruce. 1999. Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. New
York: St. Martins.
Chen, Mel Y. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Derby, Lauren. 2013. Trujillo, the Goat: Of Beasts, Men, and Politics in the Dominican Republic.
In Few and Tortorici 2013, 30228.
DeVun, Leah. 2014. Animal Appetites. GLQ 20, no. 4: 46190.
Few, Martha, and Zeb Tortorici, eds. 2013. Centering Animals in Latin American History. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Freccero, Carla. 2011. Carnivorous Virility; or, Becoming-Dog, Social Text 29, no. 1: 17795.
Garagarza, Leon Garca. 2013. The Year People Turned into Cattle: The End of the World in New
Spain, 1558. In Few and Tortorici 2013, 3161.

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Hansen, Natalie Corinne. 2008. Humans, Horses, and Hormones: (Trans) Gendering CrossSpecies Relationships. In Trans-, special issue, WSQ 36, nos. 34: 87105.
Haraway, Donna J. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm.
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Weddings, and Funerals in Bourbon Mexico. In Few and Tortorici 2013, 93119.
Tortorici, Zeb, and Martha Few. 2013. Introduction: Writing Animal Histories. In Few and
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