Abstract

This essay dwells in the interstitial space between human and nonhuman species attributions to consider the dense political and theoretical activity that the domain capacitates. It begins by discussing the bifurcated funding work of the Arcus Foundation – LGBT rights and great ape conservation – as a means of examining how currently prevailing species divisions that putatively work through expansive notions of embodiment in actuality deploy the same logics present in colonial schemes of bodily division. It then relatedly considers an intimate transspecies relationship between a human, Sandra Herold, and a chimpanzee, Travis, which ended tragically. The essay then puts the concepts of trans* and animacy into productive tension to explore how life and liveness become contingently associated with certain bodies through shifting processes of racial and sexual division. Building from these conceptual framings, it preliminarily introduces a new analytic tool, trans*plant, to facilitate more comprehensive analyses of how bodies move across media, and what those movements facilitate in terms of reproducing or disrupting embodiment categories that rely on naturalized understandings of bodily difference.