The prefix “trans-” surrounds “animal” with a pluralizing effect: tranimals. This portmanteau word describes creatures at once real and imagined who traverse taxonomic categories. This essay considers two of many threads of trananimality: the transgenic and the prosthetic. Artist Jodi Clark imagines the Menagerie à Trois as a space for carnal humanimality, where sexual entanglements commingle with chimeric forms. This menagerie à tranimals extends Clark’s ever-expanding Menagerie à Trois by articulating a framework for contemplating and indexing humanimal networks of engineered (...) organisms while simultaneously attending to the agency-in-captivity experienced by prosthetic and transgenic tranimals. The results of genetic interventions, transgenic tranimals have been engineered to serve a range of roles in biomedical research. Prosthetic tranimals are not always born with their modifications, but are instead engaged by other human and non-human animals by way of mechanical devices and symbiotic systems. These physical bonds destabilize concepts of part and whole: synecdoche becomes an important way of conceptualizing the labour performed by tranimals. Tranimals signal entangled relations, framing potentially infinite configurations of cooperation and adaptation. Visitors to this menagerie are encouraged to rethink the ethical and moral space created by becoming with tranimals. (shrink)

This article explores the formation of a tranimal, hippopotamus alter-ego. Confronting transgender with transpecies, the author claims that his hippopotamus “identity” allowed him to escape, all at once, several sets of categorization that govern human bodies. He starts with an account of how his metaphorical hippo-self is collectively produced and performed, distinguishing the subjective, the intersubjective and the social. The article then investigates the politics of equating transgender and transpecies, critically examining the question of the inclusion of “xenogenders” in (...) the trans political movement. Finally, the author returns to the magical power of metaphors, arguing that metaphors do materialize insofar as the flesh does not remain unchanged by them. Analogizing his hippo-self to a “cut” as theorized by Eva Hayward – a regeneration of the boundaries of the self – he offers a final crossing to the world of fiction by showing how the His Dark Materials trilogy outlines an aesthetics of porosity, which suggests that the self is, as much as a novel, a work of fiction. (shrink)