The animal body as a frontier: politics, affect, and performativity in the human-animal relationship

Abstract

This essay offers a critical reflection on the role of nonhuman animals in contemporary politics, focusing on the tension between their increasing visibility as sentient beings and the persistent normative frameworks that reduce them to objects for human use. Drawing on philosophical and activist perspectives, the text analyzes performance as a tool of pro-animal protest, questioning its scope and limitations when it frames animals within human-centered notions of empathy, care, or victimhood. The essay explores performativity as a lens to challenge the bodily recognition regimes that define the human and the animal, proposing a multispecies politics that embraces the irreducible otherness of animals. It thus advocates for an ethics of encounter that does not seek to translate or domesticate the other but instead sustains the transformative power of difference.