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Accepted Paper:
Posthumanism and animal policy – how cultural ideas serve economic and political goals
Katarzyna Marcol
(University of Silesia in Katowice)
Kinga Czerwińska
(University of Silesia in Katowice)
Paper short abstract:
The aim of this paper is to analyze public discourse that reveals the use of posthumanist attitudes towards animals for political purposes, the spreading of conspiracy theories and at the same time negating the posthumanist attitude towards animals in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Paper long abstract:
The posthumanist attitude is more and more visible in Western culture, that is assumed to be a critique of anthropocentrism and which defines also new concepts of human and animal coexistence. It is sometimes used by politicians as a tool to win the favor of a specific group of voters. Slogans calling for the protection of animals and bills to ban fur farming and limit ritual slaughter are often tools in the political game for domination. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that in the face of the threat to humans with a virus transmitted by animals, the posthumanist axiology that places humans in the role of a collaborator in relations with animals, becomes useless.
In the paper we will analyse a public discourse, which reveals the use of posthumanist attitudes towards animals for political purposes (e.g. the concept of animal welfare as political blackmail), spreading conspiracy theories (e.g. banning mink farming in the context of monopoly of companies utilizing meat waste) and the simultaneous rejection of the posthumanist attitude in the face of the pandemic (e.g. mass slaughter of mink due to transmission of the COVID virus).