7 - Voice, Responsibility, and Liberation

Summary

The final chapter of the book returns to the earlier themes of enmeshment and irreducibility, drawing on the issues explored throughout the book to consider what an animal-centric account of LGBQTNB politics might look like. We suggest that such an account must start by acknowledging species privilege if we are to make any progress in decentering human centrism. What, then, does this mean for gender and sexuality, given these are resolutely human categories of difference? This chapter argues that all bodies are marked by differences that are hierarchised: This applies between humans, between humans and animals, and between humans and the world around us. How we think about the ways in which bodies are marked thus provides us with a means to think about responsibility and accountability for practices of marking. In other words, one person’s practice of marking as a form of liberation (i.e., with regard to gender and sexuality) might be another person’s form of violence.