Transfections of Animal Touch

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Transfections of animal touch,

techniques of biosecurity
a
Nicole Shukin
a
Department of English , University of Victoria , British Columbia,
Canada
Published online: 27 Sep 2011.
To cite this article: Nicole Shukin (2011) Transfections of animal touch, techniques of biosecurity,
Social Semiotics, 21:4, 483-501, DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2011.591994
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Social Semiotics
Vol. 21, No. 4, September 2011, 483501
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Transfections of animal touch, techniques of biosecurity
Nicole Shukin*
Downloaded by [Computing & Library Services, University of Huddersfield] at 01:16 04 October 2014
Department of English, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

(Final version received 9 May 2011)
Animal touch in the broadest sense, biological touch across species lines
emerges as a biosecurity threat within contemporary contexts of pandemic alert.
At the same time, animal touch is increasingly invested with therapeutic, healing
value within neoliberal economies of affect. This article develops two genealogies
of animal touch toward historicizing the way it has come to mean and matter in
the present. The first genealogy traces the production of animal touch as a
biohazard during the 2009 swine flu scare as well as the increasingly environ-
mental techniques of biosecurity that emerged to ‘‘conduct’’ or govern the risks of
animal touch, giving specific attention to hand sanitizer. The second traces the
installation of petting areas within the space of the modern zoo, areas specifically
devoted to animal touch as a technology of affect. Whether animal touch is
framed as a matter of biosecurity or pursued for its tenderizing and therapeutic
effects, at stake in the biopolitical practices of both hand sanitation and petting is
the phantasmatic sovereignty of the human hand over the sense of touch.
Keywords: pharmakon of animal touch; biopower; environmentality; conduct of
touch and feeling; biosecurity; pandemic alert; petting zoo; hand hygiene;
neoliberal life
Your health is in your hands. (Public health messaging beneath hand sanitizer dispenser
at Canadian airport during 2009 swine flu crisis)
Introduction
In March 2009, an outbreak of H1N1 (a novel strain of swine flu) erupted in the local
environs of several massive hog farms in the Mexican state of Veracruz. The factory
farms in Veracruz are owned by a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, Inc., one of the
largest hog producers in the global empire of ‘‘animal capital,’’ as I have described it
elsewhere (Shukin 2009). A US-based company, Smithfield opportunized on the
neoliberal signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement 15 years earlier
(in 1994) by opening a number of hog plants notorious for their abysmal
environmental and social effects in Mexico. The swine flu outbreak ignited
pandemic fears around the arrival of the long-predicted event of a zoonotic disease
capable of leaping the so-called species barrier, a line between animal and human
populations previously thought to be biologically impassable. State and supra-State
responses to what would indeed come to be pronounced as a Level 6 pandemic
by the World Health Organization (WHO) a pandemic pronouncement later
challenged in the British Medical Journal, among other places (Cohen and Carter
*Email: nshukin@uvic.ca
ISSN 1035-0330 print/1470-1219 online
# 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2011.591994
http://www.tandfonline.com
484 N. Shukin
2010) occurred across numerous political and biopolitical scales. What follows
sidesteps the official discourses and techniques of health governance mobilized at
civic, national and global levels, and instead zooms in on a particular Internet image
that circulated on the scale of everyday responses to the pronounced pandemic. For
reasons that will be elaborated, the image constitutes a peculiarly compelling site to
begin critically engaging with the semiotics and securitization of animal touch under
the shadow of zoonosis.
Animal touch in the broadest possible sense, human physical contact with other
species has emerged as an affectively charged locus and biological ‘‘hot zone’’ of
neoliberal life. In the time of pandemic threat accruing to historically novel diseases
such as HIV/AIDS, SARS, avian and swine flu, animal touch emerges as a focal
object of biosecurity and biopower. As Philipp Sarasin (2006) notes, Richard
Preston’s sensationalist origin story of the zoonotic leap of the Ebola virus from
animal to human in his 1994 novel The hot zone has had an inordinate influence on
biosecurity policy in the United States. As the Internet image in question also
suggests, however, the social meaning of interspecies touch accommodates a complex
oscillation across a spectrum of sense, on each end of which stand the two extremes
of zoonotic threat and therapeutic promise. These are two of the contradictory
semiotic and material burdens that the pharmakon of animal touch has come to carry
within contemporary cultures of neoliberalism. The ascription to animal touch of the
power to transmit either a pathogenic or a curative message to humans is deeply
consequential for both non-human and human populations, given the life-and-death
stakes of investing animal bodies with killing or healing properties. That Egypt
ordered the slaughter of the nation’s entire population of approximately 300,000
pigs to avert the spread of swine flu in 2009 and that mandatory vaccination for
human populations was under serious consideration in several jurisdictions across
the globe gives some indication of the high stakes involved when the pathologiza-
tion of interspecies contact converts into political affect.
Building on Michel Foucault’s initial theorization of biopower as a ‘‘technology
of power centered on life’’ (1980, 144), as well as on the work of various scholars in
the fields of sensory, surveillance and animal studies, this paper makes an initial
foray into animal touch as a biopolitical quagmire that has not yet been closely
examined in relation to technologies of security and governmentality. How does
power operate on and through the field of touch, and, more specifically, forms of
touch coded as repellently or desirably ‘‘animal’’? How do techniques of power seek
to govern or to ‘‘conduct the conduct’’ of animal touch (to borrow from Foucault’s
broad definition of governmentality1), through existing and emergent practices that
range from private pet-keeping to public petting zoos, from medical biotechnologies
mining animal genetic material to the pursuit of what the WHO terms ‘‘biorisk
reduction’’ on a global scale?2 To put it slightly differently, what kind of political
reason (or affect) could possibly attain to the impossible project of regulating, in the
interests of the intertwined global health of human populations and neoliberal
economies, the costs and benefits of a field of animal touch that is effectively
coextensive with embodied life itself ? As Jacques Derrida puts it, ‘‘the haptical,
unlike the other senses, is coextensive with the living body’’ (2005, 53). Finally, under
what circumstances might an emergent order of political reason or feeling either find
justification for globally enforcing exceptional biosecurity measures against risky
animal touch or, conversely, flexibly allowing for its de-regulation in neoliberal
Social Semiotics 485
sacrifice zones such as the one in Veracruz, Mexico, where many claimed that the
first human cases of H1N1 were contracted from flies bred in the effluent from
nearby hog facilities?3
These are some of the questions underpinning my effort, in what follows, to
historicize the social meanings and material stakes of animal touch. I seize on a
statement by Constance Classen that has been pivotal to the theorization of sense:
‘‘The fundamental premise underlying the concept of an ‘anthropology of the senses’
is that sensory perception is a cultural, as well as a physical act’’ (1997, 405). Classen’s
statement can be extended to a zoo-anthropology of animal touch whose supple-
mentary premise might be that sensory cultures always imbricate innumerable species.
Just as Anne Cranny-Francis and others working in the field of sensory studies have
sought to deconstruct the ‘‘conventional separation of the senses’’ by examining the
tactility of sound, among other things (Cranny-Francis 2008), so a zoo-anthropology
of the senses might begin by resisting the conventional separation of the species.
Pig kiss
Without further ado, let me turn to the Internet image that helps to focalize the
intricated issues of animal touch and biopower. Posted on the World Wide Web at a
time when the 2009 swine flu scare was at a pitch, the image consists of a photograph
snapped at what I perhaps willfully assume, for reasons that will become clearer
shortly, is a children’s petting zoo (Figure 1). The photograph catches a toddler of
indeterminate sex in the act of kissing or is it licking? the snout of a pig through
the wire mesh of its pen, and is labeled ‘‘Kiss the (swine flu) pig.’’4 In part poking fun
at the culture of pandemic fear in which interspecies touch can trigger inordinate
alarm, the initial post was ironic in tone. However, comments contributed by Internet
viewers in response to the photograph were more unanimously etched with a
grammar of disgust ‘‘eeewww!’’ and with censorious remarks concerning the kind
of guardian who could fail to monitor against the child’s wet breach of conduct.
Figure 1. Pig kiss.

Note: Image circulated on the Internet during the 2009 swine flu scare.
486 N. Shukin
The toddler’s oral overture breaches, firstly, the wire fence separating the two
species in the space of the petting zoo. However, more than a physical breach
rendered quasi-taboo within the social context of pandemic alert, the child’s act also
transgresses the proper conduct of touch encoded in the semiotics of ‘‘petting.’’ Part
of the transgressive quality of the child’s act stems from the fact that contact was not
governed by the human hand, arguably the sovereign organ of touch when it comes
to the tricky business of engaging in intimate relationship with other animals without
abrogating the species paternalism that underpins ‘‘petting.’’ The toddler seeks to
know the pig by tonguing it, a mode of sensory knowing that is itself culturally
encoded as animal and normatively disciplined out of young children as part of the
work of differentiating them from other animals; that is, making them human. Once
human, moreover, in contemporary western culture touching animals with the mouth
is often only socially sanctioned when it involves the eating of their dead flesh.
In the philosophical and cultural imaginations of the West, as Derrida contends
in a text that itself includes what Geoffrey Bennington describes as the deconstruc-
tionist’s ‘‘lurid dream’’ of kissing Jean-Luc Nancy on the mouth (Bennington 2008,
167), touch popularly signifies the very antithesis of semiosis in as much as it
represents the fantasy of a culturally unmediated presence of two bodies to one
another, or a ‘‘co-immediacy’’ (Derrida 2005, 179). This metaphysics of presence
construes the sense of touch as ‘‘animal’’ in its ostensibly sheer givenness.
The perception that touch is a sheerly physical and therefore animal mode of
communication is what constitutes, arguably, its healing (not to mention killing)
powers. Without a popular belief in the unmediated vitality of animal touch,
therapeutic practices that involve bringing the sick, elderly, abused, grieving, stressed
or lonely (or people suffering from any number of elusive affective disorders
associated with late capitalism) into contact with animal bodies would arguably lose
much of their force. Consider, for example, the therapeutic touch offered by farms
that have shifted from agricultural or livestock production to post-industrial services
that include providing healing doses of creature comfort whose potency at least
partly hinges on the belief that the touch of non-humans is unmediated and innocent
of culture, politics and economy. To point to just one example, Animal Touch farm in
Hampshire, England offers ‘‘structured and informal sessions, allowing our guests to
benefit from one-to-one interaction with our delightful farm animals’’ (Animal
Touch n.d.). As stated on the farm’s website: ‘‘Our aim is to provide a peaceful and
secure environment where people can just ‘be’ with our animals.’’ Among the
photographs included on the website is one showing an elderly woman beside
a worker who holds the piglet that has been chosen for her therapeutic session
(Figure 2). In juxtaposition with the pig in the first Internet image, it becomes clear
that, far from inherent, the touchability or untouchability of particular species at
particular historical moments is profoundly contingent on imaginaries of health and
disease, as well as on shifting political economies of animal capital. If the healing
touch of Jesus stands as a religious touchstone for ‘‘tactile therapies’’ (Classen 2005,
347), in the present it is the bare, sacred life of the animal that is increasingly vested
with talismanic healing power. Yet in line with Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of
homo sacer, as bare biological life the animal is also subject to being killed with
impunity rather than sacrificed (Agamben 1998). Not every animal carries this
biopolitical double burden to the same degree; in the West, paradoxically, it is family
farm animals like pigs and cows that become charged with therapeutic value even as
Figure 2. Animal Touch, a UK charity that provides therapeutic sessions with animals.
they are subject to shifts in political economy that replace family with factory farms
like those in Veracruz, Mexico. Indeed, their therapeutic value may partly arise out of
this historical shift in political economies of animal capital, romanticized at the
moment new economic rationalities force an older order of family farms to reinvent
itself.
Numerous sense theorists have drawn attention to the almost fathomless character
of touch, pointing to the aporia it already opened in Aristotle’s ancient study of the
senses by virtue of his inability to unify its manifold physical and metaphysical
qualities. In On the soul, Aristotle acknowledged the irreducible sense(s) of touch with
these enigmatic words: ‘‘that they are manifold is clear when we consider touching with
the tongue’’ (quoted in Derrida 2005, 5). As Mark Paterson notes, while touch may
tend to initially suggest ‘‘[t]he immediacy of cutaneous contact with the skin surface’’
(2007, 1), it quickly becomes apparent that touch extends beyond the field of material
sensation to encompass manifold ‘‘metaphorical senses’’ (2007, 3). Paterson empha-
sizes, in particular, ‘‘the conceptual slippage between touching and feeling, between
touch as cutaneous contact and a more metaphorical notion of being affected
emotionally, being ‘touched’’’ (2007, 67).
The meaning of animal touch likewise stretches across tropological, biological and
affective registers. Resistant although the manifold senses of touch may ultimately be
to capture, animal touch is nonetheless subject to biopolitical techniques within
cultures and economies of neoliberalism that reveal competing interests in both
regulating and de-regulating its effects. Troubling the metaphysics of presence attached
to animal bodies in the West is crucial to the work of beginning to historicize the
pharmakon of animals’ healing and killing touch within contemporary contexts. It is
the double-image of animal touch as inherently pathogenic and therapeutic that
competes in the Internet photograph as it shows a sympathetic encounter between
child and pig suddenly turning pathological, mutating into a potential disease vector.
Wet and dry: securitizing touch

Before returning to examine how the first Internet image brings animal touch into
view as a historical object of biopower, I want to briefly trace a sensory bias within
488 N. Shukin
the two interdisciplinary subfields of animal studies and security or surveillance

studies areas that have exploded over the past decade although seldom in
conversation. Rarely are ‘‘the question of the animal’’ and the politics of security
considered in their interimplications, despite the frequency with which potential
pandemics of zoonotic origin are invoked to justify emergency levels of biosecurity
and biosurveillance. Moreover, both fields are arguably marked by an ocularcentrism
and concomitant ‘‘neglect of the haptic’’ (Paterson 2007, 8) that is best confronted in
tandem rather than separately, for reasons that I hope will become clear below.
A privileging of the visual in animal studies is apparent even from a cursory
glance at two texts that possess near-canonical status within the field: John Berger’s
(1992) early essay ‘‘Why look at animals?’’ and Jacques Derrida’s (2002) later text
‘‘The animal that therefore I am (more to follow).’’ Berger’s essay argues that the
one-way gazing at animals institutionalized in the space of the zoo is exemplary of a
momentous loss in capitalist modernity; namely, the loss of an enigmatic look that he
holds previously passed between humans and animals: ‘‘That look between animal
and man, which may have played a crucial role in the development of human society,
and with which, in any case, all men had always lived until less than a century ago,
has been extinguished’’ (1992, 26). Berger’s nostalgia for the charged ‘‘look between
animal and man’’ has spurred countless subsequent examinations of visual themes,
frames, and encounters.
Despite the radical intervention it makes into western philosophical and cultural
discourses on ‘‘the animal,’’ Derrida’s ‘‘The animal that therefore I am’’ likewise
perpetuates an ocularcentrism by opening, as it does, with an infamous scene of the
philosopher emerging naked from his shower only to find himself met, in his full
frontal nudity, by the ‘‘bottomless’’ gaze of his female cat (2002, 381). Derrida terms
this encounter in which, as both a philosopher and a man, he is exposed to and held
spellbound by the fathomless eyes of his feline companion, an ‘‘animalséance.’’ An
animalséance ultimately pivots around a visual encounter that involves, figuratively
or literally, being ‘‘caught naked, in silence, by the gaze of an animal, for example the
eyes of a cat,’’ with the animal likened to a ‘‘seer, visionary, or extra-lucid blind
person’’ (2002, 372). The anteriority of the animal’s gaze the fact that it is always
already looking at the human, unsettling the priority and superiority of ‘‘man’’ is
what, in Derrida’s view, philosophy has assiduously avoided in the West. Yet as I have
noted elsewhere, the visuality of the animalséance depicted by Derrida has a strangely
de-materializing effect: his cat is reduced to a set of bottomless eyes and the human
animal encounter drained of biological touch (Shukin 2009).
Aside from some significant exceptions, then, in animal studies technologies of
power are most often associated with technologies of vision. A similar claim might be
made in relation to studies of security and surveillance, as I will show in a moment.
But first, let me draw attention to an alternative primal scene of animal studies that
self-consciously counters the field’s fascination with visual communication across the
species divide. I refer to a carnal kiss dramatized by Donna Haraway in The
companion species manifesto, a scene of what she calls ‘‘oral intercourse’’ between
herself and her pet sheepdog, Ms Cayenne Pepper. Here, encounter is biologically
laced with infectious staph, with all of the risks and pleasures of microbial exchange:
Ms Cayenne Pepper continues to colonize all my cells a sure case of what the biologist
Lynn Margulis calls symbiogenesis. I bet if you checked our DNA, you’d find some potent
transfections between us. Her saliva must have the viral vectors. Surely, her darter-tongue
kisses have been irresistible . . . Her red merle Australian Shepherd’s quick and lithe tongue
has swabbed the tissues of my tonsils, with all their eager immune system receptors.
(Haraway 2003, 23; original emphasis)
This scene of ‘‘transfection’’ a term that keeps trans-species touch and affection
resolutely enmeshed in the biological risk of microbial infection certainly recalls
‘‘kiss the (swine flu) pig’’ by confronting readers with an exchange that transgresses
the unspoken rules of animal touch. Both kisses ground a critical distinction that can
be put into play between ‘‘wet’’ and ‘‘dry’’ animal touch. I borrow, here, from a
related distinction made by Cary Wolfe between wet and dry variants of
posthumanism. Dry posthumanism, for Wolfe, refers to approaches that ‘‘emphasize
the historical particularity of the phenomena of posthumanism . . . while focusing on
specific technological developments.’’5 In wet approaches to posthumanism, Wolfe
contends that ‘‘the emphasis falls instead on how the ‘human’ is enmeshed in the
larger problem at once biological, ecological, and ontological of what Derrida
calls ‘the living.’’’
While attentive to the risk of oversimplifying, wet posthumanism can be aligned
with a field of biological touch within which humans are irreducibly vulnerable to the
transfections of the living; transfections that are at once the very condition of life and
the possibility of death. Conversely, dry posthumanism can be associated with what
could be termed ‘‘technological touch’’; that is, touch that seeks to transcend life’s
biological limits through advances in techné. A distinction between wet biological
touch and dry technological touch can be immediately complicated by acknowl-
edging that they are, in actuality, inextricable; the recurrence of health stories about
microbes on one’s computer mouse bespeaks the difficulty of cleansing technological
touch of biology, while the language and enterprise of ‘‘biotechnology’’ is only the
latest iteration of the impossibility of ever accessing bios without the mediations of
techné. I put the wetdry distinction into play, however, to underscore a growing
contradiction in neoliberal life between discourses that position touch within the
messy milieu of the living as an urgent matter of biosecurity, while taking a laissez-
faire approach to biotechnological touch conducted by the market-motivated life
sciences.
Perhaps due in part to the influence of Foucault’s seminal analysis of Bentham’s
prison Panopticon, those working in security and surveillance studies have been
prone, like those in animal studies, to equating the workings of power with visuality.
Consider recent critiques of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance, viewed
either as extending the police gaze of the State over more and more of everyday space
and time or, following the disciplinary logic of panopticism theorized by Foucault, as
acting on populations who conduct themselves as if constantly monitored by hidden
cameras regardless of whether or not they are in place (Hier 2010; Hier and
Greenberg 2009). Yet with bios now explicitly foregrounded in the idioms of
‘‘biosecurity’’ and ‘‘biosurveillance,’’ there is both an indication that panopticism has
become more penetrating in its reach and a hint that it may be important to examine
how ‘‘apparatuses of security’’ may not just be functions of the visual, but
environmental dispositions involving more of the senses, particularly through the
conduct of touch and feeling (Foucault 2007, 45).6 As I will suggest at the end of this
section, the unprecedented ubiquity of hand sanitizer in public spaces rapidly
490 N. Shukin
normalized as a fixture of many social environments during the swine flu crisis in
2009 offers one concrete example of how governmentality can work through the
sense of touch.
First let me situate, in the most cursory fashion, the expansion of security into
biosecurity, an enlarged project of securitization within which animal touch emerges
as a ‘‘hot zone’’ of neoliberal life. No longer restricted to securing a national territory
or citizenry threatened from without, biosecurity also involves more than ‘‘the
government of populations’’ described by Foucault (2007, 67). If Foucault to some

extent glimpsed the enlarged biopolitical purview of security in his discussion of the
life ‘‘milieu’’ of a population, he never sufficiently explored security’s environmental
dispensation (2007, 21). In the view of one critic, Foucault’s ‘‘error’’ in his 1977/78
Collège de France lectures was to articulate his subject as the series ‘‘security,
territory, population’’ rather than as ‘‘security, environment, population’’ (Medovoi
2010, 129). Foucault’s error consists, that is, of hesitating to think through the
expansion of security’s purview from territory to the larger life-conditions connoted
by environment. Brian Massumi seeks to extend Foucault’s thought beyond its
limitations in this regard by bringing into view ‘‘the figure of today’s threat’’:
immanent disturbances arising out of global quagmires of nature-culture, the
indistinguishable sources of transfection (Foucault 2007, 73). Massumi describes
the figure of today’s threat as ‘‘the suddenly irrupting, locally self-organizing,
systemically self-amplifying threat of large scale disruption. This form of threat is not
only indiscriminate, coming anywhere, as out of nowhere, at any time, it is also
indiscriminable’’ (2009, 154).
Symptomatic of this new species of indiscriminable threat, for Massumi, is a
telling moment of political speech. It arose during an address belatedly delivered in
New Orleans by George W. Bush in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, in which he
rhetorically likened the hurricane’s capricious blow to the threat to homeland
security posed by terrorist attack and promised that ‘‘National Guard units recently
returned from Iraq would spearhead the ‘armies of compassion’’’ in New Orleans
(Massumi 2009, 154). For Massumi, Bush’s speech brings into view an environmental
continuum of threat as the expanded object of security, a continuum that no longer
distinguishes between culture and nature, (or as he puts it, between the poles of ‘‘war
and the weather’’) and that ‘‘annexes the civilian sphere to the conduct of war’’
(2009, 158).
In Life as surplus: Biotechnology and capitalism in the neoliberal era, Melinda
Cooper similarly interrogates a ‘‘neoliberal politics of security’’ that effectively
collapses natural disaster (‘‘the weather’’) and acts of terrorism (‘‘war’’) into
an indiscriminable ‘‘catastrophe event’’ that justifies pre-emptive action on the
scale, ultimately, of aggressive pre-emptive war. Reviewing a series of recent US
policy documents, Cooper shows that their ‘‘implicit conclusion is that public health
crises indeed natural disasters of all kinds require the same kind of full-spectrum
military response as deliberate acts of terror’’ (2008, 93). Exposing the neoliberal
politics of security inscribed in these documents, Cooper writes:
What it provokes is not so much fear (of an identifiable threat) as a state of alertness,
without foreseeable end. It exhorts us to respond to what we suspect without being able
to discern; to prepare for the emergent, long before we can predict how and when it will
be actualized; to counter the unknowable, before it is even realized. In short, the very
concept of the catastrophe event seems to suggest that our only possible response to the
emergent crisis (of whatever kind biomedical, environmental, economic) is one of
speculative preemption. (2008, 83)
Biosecurity thus responds to a perceived spectrum of threat that includes everything

from zoonotic disease to (bio)terrorist attack to volatile weather events. ‘‘The overall
environment of life now appears as a complex, systematic threat environment,
composed of subsystems that are not only complex in their own right but are
complexly interconnected,’’ writes Massumi (2009, 159). Swine flu and climate
change are two examples he gives of the new type of indiscriminable threat whose
etiology is so complex as to be ‘‘ultimately untraceable’’ (Massumi 2009, 160).
Moreover, he suggests that neither governmentality nor biopower may be adequate
to understanding the full-spectrum ‘‘ecology of powers’’ or environmentality that
responds to indiscriminable threat. While Foucault certainly sensed that govern-
mentality was mutating into environmentality, he never adequately developed his
premonitions. Writes Massumi: ‘‘Michel Foucault characterizes the dominant
contemporary regime of power, coincident with the rise of neoliberalism, as
‘environmental’: a governmentality which will act on the environment and system-
atically modify its variables’’ (2009, 153). Whereas Foucault theorized biopower in
relation to a general milieu of life that it worked to regulate, Massumi argues that
power ‘‘becomes-environmental’’ through the realization that ecologicalsocial
relationships are now so indiscriminately volatile as to be virtually unmanageable.
Environmentality presumes pandemic threat as a given reality, modulates itself to
operating realistically within that given toward ‘‘the regulation of effects’’ rather than
the control of causes (Massumi 2009, 153), and drives a species of self-interest that
takes the form of risk-calculations that are as affective as they are rational or
economic. For this reason, Massumi suggests that environmentality is an order of
political affect and not just reason.
It is with this brief history of biopower in view that wet animal touch emerges as a
problem within the reality of biosecurity. I conclude this section by glancing at one
potentially underestimated technology of security that emerges to conduct the
population’s sense of touch around the time of the pronounced swine flu pandemic.
Alongside intensified social campaigns urging everyday hygiene through handwash-
ing, dispensers for liquid hand sanitizer were placed by private and public actors
throughout social space as palpable signs of a population on zoonotic alert. Today,
airports, terminals, shopping malls, public washrooms and other high-flow public
spaces within the neoliberal global economy are studded with them.
Seemingly less sinister than CCTV cameras, in as much as they are not associated
with State surveillance, hand sanitizer dispensers are nonetheless equally if not more
embedded into everyday life by virtue of springing from the personal initiative of
concerned individuals and businesses as well as from State-led health campaigns.
Unlike the disciplinary character of hidden cameras, dispensers function as tactile
encouragements or prompts serving the project of consensual participation in the
priority of public health. Following Massumi’s theorization of the ‘‘full-spectrum
power’’ that emerges in response to the continuum of total threat (2009, 163), might
hand sanitizer in its environmental ubiquity compel consideration of some of power’s
more mundane techniques? Hand hygiene is one practice within a broader
environmentality of touch that seeks to ‘‘regulate the effects’’ of biological contact
492 N. Shukin
within and across species populations and to pre-empt the possibility of transfection
at the site of the sovereign organ of touch itself the human hand. The epidermic
layer of the human hand becomes a medicalized, molecular border in the cutaneous
contest of germ-warfare.
Under the shadow of zoonosis, the privatization of citizenship that Lauren
Berlant has interrogated in US cultural contexts takes the form of a biologization
(Berlant 2002). By this I mean the reduction of citizenship to intimate habits of
personal hygiene in the interests of both individual and population health. Biological
citizenship has been rigorously theorized in recent years (Rose 2007; Ong and Collier
2005). What is salient here is how hand sanitation comes to epitomize the
responsibilization of the biocitizen, whose social duty now revolves around the
personal priority of not contracting or transmitting disease.
Hand sanitizer thus works as a subtle material signifier of biocitizenship; its
liberal supply and conscientious use becomes a tangible sign of an individual’s,
corporation’s, or institution’s participation in ‘‘hygienic governmentality,’’ to borrow
from Berlant (2002), 175). Given its potency as a material signifier, where hand
sanitizer is placed also serves to socially tag some sites and kinds of touch as more
biologically hot, or wet, than others, creating a semiotized cartography of touch. The
hot zones that hand sanitizer codifies within the larger environment are sites and
practices deemed more microbially fraught than others, usually involving hand-to-
hand exchanges but also hand-to-handle contact, with certain objects or things
semiotically highlighted or extruded as ‘‘wet’’ within the built environment by virtue
of the placement of antibacterial sanitizer.
Beyond codifying zones of contagious touch within the social landscape, hand
sanitizer has an effect, not unlike the warning systems of the WHO and the US
Department of Homeland Security, of placing the public on permanent alert to
indiscriminate attack. In its very ubiquity, simultaneously biologically alarming and
arming the public, on a haptic low-level sanitizer serves the annexation of the civil
sphere to the conduct of war traced by Massumi and Cooper. The public sphere at
large is increasingly assimilated to a biological hot zone, with the suggestion that not
only hygienic conduct but avoidance of touch in public is the best practice of
citizenship. A social body biopolitically motivated by fear and avoidance of
biological touch results in the sensory impoverishment of a public sphere that
Berlant contends has already been reduced to the sentimentalized mediatization of
intimate, private lives. Indeed, during the 2009 crisis, social habits of touch like the
handshake and the kiss were among the casualties of ‘‘bioparanoia’’ (Critical Art
Ensemble 2008, 413). Into a material field of social life now framed as rampant with
possibilities for contamination, Purcell, the largest manufacturer of hand sanitizer,
pumps its product under the motto: ‘‘Imagine a touchable world’’ (Critical Art
Ensemble 2008, 413). Purcell gives an all-too-literal example of the tactile
dispensations of biosecurity.
Far from unrolling from sovereign decision or policy distinct, too, from
disciplinary power the haptic banality of hand sanitizer is indeed suggestive of
power in the mode of environmentality. While everywhere available as a pre-emptive
measure against the produced reality of contagious touch, its use is ultimately left to
individual discretion. Sanitizer promises to immunize through the easy and painless
habit of applying pharmaceutical product rather than through the invasive State
initiative of needle vaccination. The epigraph to this paper ‘‘your health is in your
hands,’’ text posted below a dispenser at a Canadian airport perhaps best

encapsulates the practices of biocitizenship and biological care of the self that
increasingly govern the field of touch.
This brief history of touch’s construction as biohazard within the context of
zoonotic alert can be complicated by tracing a competing history of affectionate
touch; that is, a history in which animal touch is encouraged within specific zoo
enclosures as a technology of feeling. As I will show in the next section, the petting
zoo comes into view as a more significant public space than it might at first seem
within this other genealogy of the conduct of animal touch.
Petting as a technology of feeling

Turning to the enclosure that features in the Internet image of the pig kiss (Figure 1),
below I examine to what effect petting is institutionalized as a special addition to the
modern zoo. The desire for animal touch met or whetted in the petting zoo can be
read within a larger cultural history of modern affect within which therapeutic
dosages of nature are prescribed as an antidote to industrial capitalism and
urbanization. Nor is it mere coincidence that many petting zoos in the West opened
toward the middle of the twentieth century, a period not only of intensive
urbanization but also of emergent postindustrialism that would lead, as Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri contend, to the current hegemony of ‘‘immaterial’’ labor
over forms of material labor (2000, 141). As the human hand begins to emerge more
as a function of dry touch in the work of communication (typing, keyboarding, data
processing) while wet labor is relegated to a global underclass, nostalgia for an earlier
era of rural life and the authenticity of material labor it represents arguably also
conditions the appeal of a special petting section for children in many modern zoos.
If John Berger reads the modern zoo as memorializing a lost gaze between human
and animal, the petting zoo might more specifically be read as therapeutic treatment
for a lost relationship of touch closely bound up in the West with ideas of material
labor and rural life, among other things. Petting animals in the space of the modern
zoo becomes a way of making restorative contact with an ostensibly more authentic
culture of material labor as well as with the sympathetic magic of animal bodies. That
animals in petting zoos more than anything else encode nostalgia for the real or
imagined holism of farm life is suggested by the sheer number of public and private
petting zoos in the West that are named after some variation of ‘‘Old MacDonald’s
Farm.’’7
More crucially, touching animals in the space of the petting zoo is a means of
socially conducting or producing human affect: animal touch becomes a technology
of feeling designed to develop the sympathetic faculties of nascent humans and
citizens. A bourgeois faculty of feeling will be nurtured in the petting zoo, while in
the ‘‘other’’ enclosures that haunt the scene of the pig kiss that is, the hog facilities
in Mexico where many believed H1N1 virus first leapt from swine to human feeling
roused by animal touch constitutes a workplace hazard for those consigned to the
grueling work of killing.
Donna Haraway poses a key question in When species meet: ‘‘Whom and what do
I touch when I touch my dog?’’ (2008, 35). Echoing her question, whom and what do
children touch in the modern petting zoo? As with Haraway, who argues against the
fantasy of co-immediacy by insisting that when she touches Ms Cayenne Pepper she
494 N. Shukin
makes contact not with pure biology but with social histories of production and
power in which she is deeply implicated, the animals held out as objects of touch in
the petting zoo are far from innocent of history.
Like the museum, the modern zoo is a nineteenth-century colonial institution
founded on the plunder and display of exotic species from Europe’s colonies
(Rothfels 2002, Berger 1992). Historically, zoos were designed around the visual
spectacle and consumption of animal alterity; only trainers and zoo personnel could
touch animals. Given that zoos in the West were designed to exhibit non-human (and
human) others for consumption by imperial eyes, two things are noteworthy in the
later installation of a petting component into the visual schema. Firstly, the docile
creatures housed in petting zoos are familiar farm animals within the dominant
EuroAmerican tradition, domestic species inextricable from histories of colonial
settlement and the pastoral ideologies that often accompanied them. Secondly, these
domestic species are displayed not under the zoo-logic of visual observation barring
touch, but rather under a logic of sensory interaction with animals who embody the
familiar rather than the exotic. The inclusion of representative domestic species in an
institution historically designed to exhibit otherness suggests, among other things,
that toward the middle of the twentieth century physical contact with these species
had taken on something of the rare, distant, and other for a majority of urbanized
westerners whose lives and work were increasingly ‘‘freed’’ from the messiness of wet,
biological touch.
In the West, petting zoos started to appear around the second half of the
twentieth century. The London Zoo, founded in 1828, opened a petting section in
1938, and in that same year the Philadelphia Zoo became the first in North America
to open what it now calls a children’s zoo. The space devoted to interspecies touch
balanced the order of one-way looking that, according to John Berger, left many
children asking why the animals encountered in zoos always disappointed expecta-
tions (1992, 21). The fantasy of meaningful exchange across species lines that was
often disappointed in encounters with apathetic zoo animals behind bars or glass was
therefore renewed with the opening of an interactive space designed to involve more
of the senses, as well as more animated animals. As the Philadelphia zoo currently
puts it on their website:
Petting and feeding sheep and goats, watching chicks that just pecked their way out of
eggs, and seeing rabbits frolic in a kid-sized bunny village are just a few of the many
things youngsters can see and do here . . . In the farm area, kids can climb on a life-sized
tractor and play in the hay while learning about life on the farm and the important
connection between farm animals and people. (Philadelphia Children’s Zoo n.d.)
Feeding animals is an interactive tactic that guarantees at least a semblance of the

reciprocal interest that was lacking for so many children in their zoo experience, and
lures animals within close range for touching. Feeding an animal food pellets in the
petting zoo is also a paternalistic caricature of animal husbandry.
The expansion of zoo-techniques to sensory interaction involving animal touch
can be read within a history of technologies of power intent not only on the enclosure
and exhibition of animals, but on the conduct of human affect. Building on
connections made by numerous theorists between touch and affect (Paterson 2007;
Derrida 2005), petting can be understood as a technology of feeling that trains
children in sympathy. The conduct of touch here would seem to exist in direct
competition with the hygienic self-conduct compelled under zoonotic alert in as
much as it encourages the tactile stimulation of species fellow-feeling. However, the
production of affect through petting is arguably no less imbricated in the biopolitics
of a neoliberal global economy.
This claim can be unpacked by glancing back at two earlier technologies of
feeling at work in Victorian society, and by placing the modern petting zoo in
genealogy with them. In his essay ‘‘Petted things: Wuthering heights and the animal,’’
Ivan Kreilkamp argues that the Victorian novel and pet-keeping are two ‘‘cultural
forms’’ that developed in tandem (2005, 87), both contingent on acts of sympathetic
imagination. Both affection for domestic pets and acts of literary imagination require
an ability to identify with the non-human, a sympathetic capacity that Kreilkamp
historicizes in relation to Victorian social movements against cruelty to animals.
Kreilkamp contends that:
Emily and Charlotte Bronte in particular . . . understood the creative process by which
an author gives or invests life in a fictional character as one fundamentally related to the
imaginative act by which a human being grants ethical stature to the animal. (2005, 89)
Moreover, Kreilkamp suggests that in the Victorian era the capacity to feel with or
for animals became a privileged index of both English national character and
bourgeois subjectivity:
. . .it was not simply that cruelty to animals became newly defined as particularly un-
English, but that it became defined as particularly English or rather, particularly
bourgeois-English to witness, with condemnation and sympathy, the spectacle of
cruelty to animals . . . A class relationship is routed through a species relationship, and
vice versa, and the human and humane becomes defined not only against the animal, as
in earlier centuries, but in sympathy with the animal. (2005, 91)
Yet Kreilkamp immediately complicates the elevation of species fellow-feeling by

certain Victorians into a national and class distinction. He proposes that expressions
of fellow-feeling can end up compensating for rather than contesting what Derrida
calls the ‘‘carnophallogocentric’’ underpinnings of a social order that allows for the
‘‘non-criminal putting to death’’ of animals (Derrida 1991, 112):
Victorian culture, at the point that it has apparently achieved domination through
industry and technology over the forces of nature, redefines itself through its protection
of a category of ‘‘innocent’’ animals, animals associated with pastoral qualities who
become the victims of unenlightened English people.
[. . .]
This is still carnophallocentrism, then, but a carnophallocentrism that hopes to make up

for killing and eating the living by protecting a symbolic subcategory of animals not to
be eaten or mistreated. (Kreilkamp 2005, 92)
Building on Kreilkamp, the petting zoo can similarly be read as a space of

interspecies sympathy that affectively compensates for the carnophallogentrism of
the economy and culture at large. That is, species fellow-feeling aroused through
tactile petting arguably compensates for the cold economic reason that governs the
496 N. Shukin
lives and deaths of other members of the same species (pigs, cows, chickens) beyond
the walls of the zoo, under conditions that Derrida describes as ‘‘monstrous’’ (2002,
394). Monstrous is a word that surely also describes the conditions of the class that
precariously labors under this economic reason. The fellow-feeling excited in the
petting zoo can in this sense be understood as the humane supplement of neoliberal
economic reason.
At stake as well in the production of affect through animal touch is the
biopolitical project of making human(e) citizens. While seemingly too obvious to

bear comment, it is significant that children are the demographic targeted and
ritually conducted through the space of the petting zoo. If, as I suggested earlier, one
of the things that is touched when one pets a familiar farm animal in the zoo is
nostalgia for an earlier era of authentic, material labor involving animals, why is this
nostalgic touch performed by and inculcated in children? Certainly an argument
could be made for the kinds of vicarious touch and feeling that an adult population
and indeed, a nation channels through children. But more in line with a biopolitical
reading, petting arguably enlists children in the production of affect while disguising
the fact that feeling is socially produced rather than spontaneous, contingent on
animal touch as the tangible mode of production of the intangible qualities that
distinguish humans. Within the logic of the petting zoo, children arguably represent a
form of bare, unqualified life that is at once on a biological par with that of animals
and on the verge of being differentiated from it. If sympathy or feeling is one of the
intangibles that comes to qualify children as humans and as (bourgeois) citizens, this
capacity for feeling is not given but produced in this instance, through biological
contact with animals. As with the contradiction explored by Kreilkamp around a
Victorian sympathy for animals that in effect serves to distinguish members of a
class, nation, and species, a deep contradiction is protected in the modern institution
of petting in so far as it renders interspecies feeling instrumental to the culturally
qualified life of the human.
Let me again invoke a history of feeling within which this biopolitical perspective
on the conduct of feeling might make more sense. This time, of help is Susan
Maslan’s analysis of the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the
Citizen, a pivotal document in the modern history of biopower as it has been
variously elaborated by Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, and others.
Inscribed into the Declaration’s title, as Maslan notes, is a distinction between
‘‘man’’ and ‘‘citizen’’ as separate political categories, a distinction raising ‘‘inter-
pretive difficulties’’ that have been largely sidestepped in the West (2004), 361).
Contrary to the gist of the Declaration’s title, Maslan proposes that human and
citizen are not only not complementary subjects of right, they are often outright
oppositions:
When the individual is reduced to mere humanity, to the mere fact of birth, of biological
or, to use Arendt’s term, animal existence, he or she is no longer perceptibly human and
risks extermination. Thus, in a sense, to be only human, like the refugee, is to be the
opposite, not the complement of the citizen’’ (2004, 362)
In Maslan’s view, the Declaration seeks to ‘‘reconcile these two forms of existence’’
for enlightenment modernity. The petting zoo arguably belongs amongst the
biopolitical techniques that seek to articulate the categories of the human and the
citizen by manufacturing a humane subject out of the bare ‘‘animal existence’’ of

the child; that is, a subject qualified as human by their feeling capacity, above all else:
‘‘. . . despite commonplace assumptions about the Enlightenment, the primary
qualification for inclusion within the category of the human was the capacity to
feel, not the capacity to reason’’ (Maslan 2004, 358).
Thus it is again in line with earlier techniques of modern biopower that the
tenderizing effects of petting can be historicized as one means by which the qualified
life of the human and the citizen is developed out of the biological material of
children through the technology of animal touch.
The order of the hand

A latent tension has run through the above discussion between the hand and the
mouth, petting and kissing, and between efforts to keep the human biosecure within
the context of new environmentalities versus curious bio-exposures to wet touch. In
closing, I want to return to what might be called the sovereign order of the human
hand as it symbolizes the power to govern transfection, that potent figure supplied
by Haraway for touch across species lines that simultaneously connotes biological
risk and affectionate attachment. Transfection is unavoidable for embodied life;
Escherichia coli symbiotically residing inside the human gut are evoked by Haraway
as one illustration of the impossibility of disentangling ‘‘knots’’ of species within the
visceral conditions of life (2008, 3). While the human hand may in actuality
constitute a flimsy defense against transfection, this does not lessen the fact that
symbolically it carries great clout within philosophical and cultural discourses that
have worked to shore up a ‘‘human exceptionalism’’ in which it is axiomatic ‘‘that
humanity alone is not a spatial and temporal web of interspecies dependencies’’
(Haraway 2008, 11). Whether the hand defensively sanitizes against zoonotic disease
or whether it strokes animal bodies to stimulate the affect that qualifies one as
human, it stands as a privileged metonym for this exceptionalism.
In the Internet image I have been circling, it is apparent that even in one of the
spaces of modernity where interspecies touch as such is the objective, an unspoken
rule of the hand is in effect. Not just a physical enclosure, the ‘‘petting’’ zoo
semiotically encloses or erects specific cultural parameters around animal touch.
Comparing the sensory guidelines implicit in the modern petting zoo with those at
work in the modern museum can be instructive, in this regard. Like the imperial
institution of the western zoo, the museum also exhibits animals in its galleries of
natural history. Rather than alive, however, animals in museums are usually
taxidermically preserved specimens. And despite the tactile value that fur has
accumulated as a sense-object in the West, museum specimens are exhibited under a
prohibition against touch (in contrast with the invitation to stroke extended by the
petting zoo). However, as Pauline Wakeham suggests in her reading of a taxidermic
exhibit in Canada’s Banff Park Museum, prohibitions against touch in the space of
the museum can paradoxically function to opposite effect. She zooms in on a piece of
polite signage beside a wall-mounted bear skin in the Banff Park Museum, carrying
the injunction: ‘‘Please do not touch the animals!’’ Writes Wakeham:
[a]t the same time that the sign and the ropes attempt to discipline visitors to keep their
hands at their sides, such museological prohibitions of the use of touch effectively call
498 N. Shukin
this form of sensory apprehension into being. Whether the visitor actually transgresses
the ’’hands-off’’ prohibition or not, he or she is hailed to engage in an imaginary (and
also potentially real) tactile relationship with the bearskin. (2008, 72)
A converse point can be argued in relation to the petting zoo’s invitation to

touch. Indeed, the Internet image of the toddler’s pig kiss suggests that the license
to pet is paradoxically laced with an implicit discouragement against other kinds
of touch; namely, ‘‘oral intercourse.’’ Yet as with the prohibition against touch in
the museum, petting’s implicit directive that touch be conducted through the hand
can backfire precisely by invoking myriad other ways of touching. And to repeat
what I said earlier, curiously straying from the order of the hand is scandalous for
reasons that exceed the possible transmission of disease in a society on zoonotic
alert.
To comprehend the deeper scandal posed by licking or kissing as opposed to
stroking or petting animals, one only has to consult European philosophical
discourses that have isolated the human hand as a privileged metonym for
the culturally qualified life by virtue of the possession of language, thought and
writing that renders (some) humans exceptional. In his 1951 essay ‘‘What calls for
thinking,’’ Martin Heidegger relays one of the strongest philosophical statements on
the human hand:
The hand is something altogether peculiar. In the common view, the hand is part of our
bodily organism. But the hand’s essence can never be determined, or explained, by its
being an organ that can grasp. Apes, too, have organs that can grasp, but they do not
have hands. The hand is infinitely different from all the grasping organs paws, claws,
fangs different by an abyss of essence. Only a being who can speak, that is, think, can
have hands and can handily achieve works of handicraft. (1968, 16)
With Heidegger’s words, it is possible to discern the symbolic distinction of the hand
within a field of touch philosophically organized around an absolute difference
between animal prehension as a rudimentary ability to grasp for food, and a
heightened power of apprehension as the essence of the human. Heidegger seeks to
qualify the human hand as more than simply an ‘‘organ that can grasp,’’ relegating
physical touch to a lower animal order and aligning the human with a cultural
destiny. Haraway’s kiss with Ms Cayenne Pepper as well as the toddler’s pig lick is
scandalous because they return the human to a constitutive field of animal touch
that refuses the exceptionalism argued for by Heidegger. Referencing Alfred North
Whitehead’s notion of a ‘‘concrescence of prehensions,’’ Haraway writes: ‘‘Through
their reaching into each other, through their ‘prehension’ or grasping, beings
constitute each other and themselves’’ (2003, 6). What the mouth represents, at least
in the context of the two interspecies kisses glanced at in this paper, is precisely
shared animal prehension in resistance to the idea that the human is ‘‘different by an
abyss of essence.’’
Through a dual analysis of biosecurity in the mode of the self-conduct of touch
and petting as the humane supplement of cold economic reason, I have tried to
initiate a critical approach to the pharmakon of animal touch that implicates it in
the workings of neoliberal culture and economy. Yet the Internet image that has
been my touchstone in the end captures an instant of tantalizing ‘‘counter-
conduct’’ (Foucault 2007, 207), one that revives hope in the autre mondialisation
explored by Haraway, the alternative practices of world-making that challenge

those offered by current neoliberal models (2008, 3). The resemblance between the
healing touch of Jesus and that of animals in part hangs on the innocence and
unconditional love attributed to both; to challenge these attributes as they are
ascribed to animals, as Haraway does, is not to heap contempt on the possibility
that interspecies touch can have profound material and emotional effects for all of
the species involved. It is, however, to insist that the desire to purify animal touch
of politics and history does violence to the ‘‘worldly’’ character of transfection; that
is, the role it has to play in constituting alternatives to the realities of biosecurity
and human exceptionalism.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the two anonymous readers of this paper, whose careful feedback proved
invaluable.
Notes
1. In Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France 19771978, Foucault
defines conduct as follows: ‘‘Conduct is the activity of conducting (conduire), of conduction
(la conduction) if you like, but it is equally the way in which one conducts oneself (se
conduit), lets oneself be conducted (se laisse conduire), is conducted (est conduit) and finally,
in which one behaves (se comporter) as an effect of a form of conduct (une conduite) as the
action of conducting or of conduction (conduction) (2007, 193).
2. See the WHO website (WHO n.d.).
3. The claim that effluent-bred flies were the disease vector causing the initial cases of H1N1
was made, among other places, in the Mexico City daily Periódico La Jornada (Andrés
Timoteo Morales, ‘‘Granjas Carroll provocó la epidemia de males respiratorios en Perote,
según agente municipal,’’ 6 April 2009) and in the Veracruz-based paper La Marcha
(‘‘Granjas Carroll, causa de epidemia en La Gloria,’’ 15 April 2009).
4. http://www.buzzfeed.com/katcrystal/kiss-the-swine-flu-pig-contest-707 (accessed June 2,
2010).
5. Posthumanities Series (Editor, Cary Wolfe). http://www.carywolfe.com/about_post.html
(accessed June 28, 2010).
6. Foucault carefully distinguishes discipline from security in his 1977/78 lectures at the
Collège de France when he discusses the emergence and governing of an ‘‘absolutely new
political personage’’ and biopolitical subject: the population. He states: ‘‘. . . what we see
now is [not] the idea of a power that takes the form of an exhaustive surveillance of
individuals so that they are all constantly under the eyes of the sovereign in everything they
do, but the set of mechanisms that, for the government and those who govern, attach
specific pertinence to quite specific phenomena that are not exactly individual phenomena
. . . . The government of populations is, I think, completely different from the exercise of
sovereignty . . .’’ (Foucault 2007, 6667).
7. A simple Google search brings up 23,100 results for ‘‘Old MacDonald petting zoo’’ (March
2011).
Notes on contributor
Nicole Shukin is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. She is the author of Animal capital: Rendering life in
biopolitical times (Minnesota, 2009) and is presently working on a manuscript that examines
global states of ecological emergency in relation to economies of affect.
500 N. Shukin
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Department of English, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Figure 1. Pig kiss.

Wet and dry: securitizing touch

the two interdisciplinary subfields of animal studies and security or surveillance

government of populations’’ described by Foucault (2007, 67). If Foucault to some

Biosecurity thus responds to a perceived spectrum of threat that includes everything

hands,’’ text posted below a dispenser at a Canadian airport perhaps best

Petting as a technology of feeling

Feeding animals is an interactive tactic that guarantees at least a semblance of the

Yet Kreilkamp immediately complicates the elevation of species fellow-feeling by

This is still carnophallocentrism, then, but a carnophallocentrism that hopes to make up

Building on Kreilkamp, the petting zoo can similarly be read as a space of

biopolitical project of making human(e) citizens. While seemingly too obvious to

citizen by manufacturing a humane subject out of the bare ‘‘animal existence’’ of

The order of the hand

A converse point can be argued in relation to the petting zoo’s invitation to

explored by Haraway, the alternative practices of world-making that challenge

Durham: Duke University Press.

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