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Paper short abstract:

This proposal departs from a posthumanist perspective of bodies, gender, affects and politics to dig into the nature/culture divide, the current use of animals as political symbols and the political effects of hybridisation.

Paper long abstract:

With 20 years of difference, Matthew Gutmann (2019) and Susan Bordo (1999) discussed the “animality” of men and the consequences of considering that biology determines human behavior and that men are dominated by their impulses and instincts. The gendered and sexual division of men and women has always run along the division between culture and nature and the division between humans and other non-human animals.

On January 6, 2021, among the Trump supporters who stormed the Washington Capitol we found Jacob Anthony Chansley - also known as Jake Angeli. Shirtless, with a muscled and tattoed body and wearing a headdress made of coyote skin and buffalo horns, his striking image quickly swept the world. Numerous memes and copycats have filled the Internet since then and, in Spain, bull-headed men have participated in right-wing political demonstrations.

This proposal departs from a posthumanist perspective of bodies, gender, affects and politics and aims to dig into the nature/culture divide, the current use of animals as political symbols and the political effects of hybridisation. A posthumanist reading of hybrid bodies allows us to delve into the political quality of (male) bodies at a time when the American alt-right and European right-wing populisms are hardly comprehensible without taking into account their anti-feminism, their masculinism and, in general, their nationalism (ethnonationalism). Through human-animal hybridisation, three powerful systems of classification and identification (gender, ethnicity, nation) are linked, entangled and mixed today with strong political effects.