With this in mind, the question turns back to inter-human relations: a culture that fails to find kin with and objectifies its resident animals will almost certainly do the same with its (and other) people. Is there a difference between the colonization of indigenous peoples and the surrounding wildlife? Invariably, the compartmentalism of identities and the natural world does not embrace deviations from a normative set of ideals. Thus, the concepts of mistranslation or misinterpretation - that is the failures in transferring and understanding - are a result of these reductionist taxonomies. The phenomena of oppression and objectification of the Other - of humans and animals - can be attributed to this process of mistranslation and misinterpretation. The deconstruction of such oppression involves the embrace of dissonance and of autopoietic relations (that emphasize interrelationships against structure).
Zoos are plagued by moral ambiguity. Their pervasive presence in cultures around the globe pays homage to the continued objectification of the natural world. Is it possible that they are more efficient in revealing how we distinguish ourselves from the rest of the environment than educating us on the nature of certain species? The cultural institution of the zoo, what it reflects and represents, is a misidentification with the animal world. Historically, they have offered humans representations of the natural world through anthropomorphized lenses. "Virtually no terminology for animal behavior...is entirely free of human (cultural, historical, etc.) associations," iterates Bruce Bagemihl in his book Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (4). Cultures not only judge the Other - colonized peoples, homosexuals, and often women - through reductionist schema, but also other forms of life.
If the institution of the zoo acts as a manifestation of a culture's interpretation of the animal world, the scientific studies of animal sexuality will nonetheless carry with them the ideals of the culture in which they are bred. Historically, Western science has used animal reproduction - the concept that animals have sex solely for procreation - as the framework for what is considered natural. What happens when we discover that they mirror our own (and often "perverse") sexual practices? "Ultimately...the plurality of homosexualities in both animals and humans suggests a blurring of the seemingly opposite categories of nature and culture, or biology and society," asserts Bagemihl (45). This pushes into focus the concept of queerness, not necessarily exclusive homosexuality, but "homosexualites" and what Bagemihl refers to as the "capacity for sexual plasticity" (44-5).
If the boundaries of sexual identity appear nebulous in nature then why are the lines so inflexibly drawn in human relations? Contemporary prejudices and ideologies need to be analyzed through the study of what came before. The paradox of history is that past struggles mirror present ones; those in the present can always learn something new from looking at the previous paths of others. However, the stories collected and (more accurately) rectified for the masses are often self-fulfilling and lack the perspectives needed to prevent past mistakes (or misinterpretations) from reoccurring. History is written by those who conquer and, consequently, a culture's learned history is predominately that of compartmentalized ideas, serving the interests of the few at the expense of others. Mistranslations and misinterpretations in language (and cultural memes) can catalyze the oppression of a people (or species). A passage in Deuteronomy, a book in the Bible, announces that, "There shall be no whore [kadeshah] of the daughters of Israel, nor a sodomite [kadesh] of the sons of Israel. Thou shall not bring the hire of a whore [zonah]..." (Crompton 40). This suggests that the word kadeshah became synonymous with the word for whore: zonah and that kadesh through further misinterpretations became associated with passive sodomy and degeneracy (40-3).
To further understand this phenomena one can explore the etymological roots of language. The word logos denotes rationality, or more specifically the "Word of God." It is derived from the Greek word lógos which means "a word" and from légein, "to gather, bundle." This association with the notion of the word, with opposing boundaries, rationality, and wisdom contradicts an important characteristic of words - as ambiguous in nature and subject to interpretation ("Logos"). This irony can help ease understanding of the feasibility of such immense mistranslations.
The sociopolitical differences between two cultures and traditions influence how and why mistranslations of words occur. Language is in its very nature a flexible construct, therefore translations into new contexts will carry with them different connotations from the originals. The issue here is not acknowledging that these misinterpretations occur, not paying homage to the roots, the history and rigidifying these terms (and also memes) in their new contexts. This bastardization of the word can account, at least in part, for why homosexuality became synonymous with the "Sin of Sodom" (Crompton 40-4).
In addition, what is crucial to understand that even when trying to think objectively, when conceptualizing one uses preconceived and pre-constructed concepts as foundations for objective thought. Donna Haraway expresses in The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, that,
Etymologically, facts refer to performance, action, deeds done...(19-20)
A fact is a past participle, a thing done, over, fixed, shown,
performed, accomplished...Fiction, etymologically, is very close,
but...fiction is about the act of fashioning, forming, inventing...
fiction is in process and still at stake, no finished, still prone to
falling afoul to facts, but also liable to showing something new
we do not yet know to be true, but will know.
Haraway offers a different method of conceptualization that embraces mistakes and a relational (as opposed to hierarchal) approach to human/animal reciprocality. Similarly, the theory of autopoiesis defines itself against a mechanistic and fixed view of the world and argues that organisms are irreducible with their environments. Using the process of metabolism, the world system regulates and interrelates (Margulis 267). In Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis, and Evolution the author(s) state(s) that, "...life does not 'adapt to' a passive physiochemical environment..." instead it, "actively 'produces and modifies' its surroundings" (280). A biological system cannot be reduced and deconstructed because the very nature of that system is reliant on the communication between various parts. This includes the organism's environment on the basis that this relationship renders the identities (or taxonomies) interconnected (278). In other words, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
History is never made up of one voice nor is it exclusively human in concern. Emphasis should be placed the interrelationships between organisms, on an autopoietic and multi-dimensional paradigm of socio-environmental relations.
[W]e have never been human; we and everybody else are
always already a crowd of intra- and interrelations... that no
matter where you hold still... what you find are relations in
process, and what you find are that the actors are the products
of those relations, not pre-established, finished, closed-off things
that enter into relationship, but rather we are what come out of
relating and go into the next relating...
Donna Haraway, "When Species Meet: An Interview with Donna Haraway"
If science is a product of the culture it was created in, then Western society's establishment of seemingly empirical knowledge is constructed to facilitate domination and exploitation. The compartmentalism of identity, sexuality, and nature promotes the mistranslations and misinterpretations that catalyze hierarchal (or patriarchal) relationships. "It's only humans who adopt identities," reveals renowned entomologist and sexologist Alfred Kinsey (Bagemihl 52). By embracing dissonance and queerness as inherent in the activity of life, one can undermine the taxonomic prescriptive paradigms that have motivated the oppression of the Other. Homosexuality and animals will continue to fall into this category (the Other) until this reductionist superstructure no longer holds its authority in the cultural consciousness.
Works Cited
Bagemihl, Bruce. Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.
Crompton, Louis. Homosexuality and Civilization. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.
Haraway, Donna. "When Species Meet: An Interview with Donna Haraway." Animal Voices. CIUT, Toronto. 22 April 2008. Accessed on 01 November 2009
Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis, and Evolution. New York: Copernicus Springer-Verlag, 1997.
"Logos." Dictionary.com. Accessed on 01 November 2009
2009
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