The Politics of Interspecies Affects: Writing Half-Humans in the Case of Lü Bicheng, 1920s-1940s

• In Event: 215. Interspecies Intimacy: Evolving Human-Animal Socialities in Asia

Abstract

The ecofeminist Carol Adams in her seminal work The Sexual Politics of Meat argues that the Great War period was a “golden age” of feminist critiques of the intimate relations between the violence of war and the exploitation of animal bodies. However, few studies after Adams have examined the non-Western feminist voices on the intimate relations between women and animals under the crisis of modern wars. This paper aims to bring fore the Chinese women’s contribution to the rethinking of human-animal relationship by looking at the case of Lü Bicheng (1883-1943), who was known as a poet, an activist of women education and one of pioneers of animal protection movement in China. Through examining Lü’s writings and practices on animals between the two world wars, this paper focuses on the pain of “half human (ban renlei)”, a term which Lü appropriated from the English term sub-human to re-name animals. It looks at how Lü, as a single Chinese woman who travelled in the shadows of war and imperialism, connected her own embodied experiences of pain and fear to the suffering of animals under slaughtering and vivisection. Moreover, the paper explores the question why Lü turned from Western discourses of animal rights to Buddhism to search for a new ethics of “half human”. This paper argues that Lü’s thoughts and practices on “half human” provides an alternatively way to understand humans and animals not as biological units, but an ethical process towards a compassionate community of all sentient beings.

Author

• Xi Chen, University of Toronto