The Visual Politics of Pest Metaphor

• In Event: Resisting with/for/as the non/Human in Late Stage American Empire

Abstract

Cockroaches, rats, raccoons, and insects carry much cultural baggage on the political stage and in the public sphere as stand-ins for humans from marginalized groups as a way to discriminate, separate, and murder them in opposition to white, resourced, heteronormative society. They are also killed at rates on a scale that is unimaginable without a care or notice. I define “pest” as any nonhuman animal who is unwanted, out of place, considered lowly for purposes of Linnaean scientific hierarchies, and who perturbs humans in ways that are harmful (as in the case of being disease vectors, like rats) or aesthetically unpleasing (as in the case of possums). However, a few contemporary artists have become attuned to this phenomenon and have turned it on its head through multiple tactics of defamiliarization, anthropomorphism, and play.

While the broader field of Animal Studies has predominantly focused on charismatic megafauna and agricultural animals, often not even considering pest animals to be animals, art historians have begun to study artists who use animals as subject matter in recent years, as part of the environmental and posthuman turn in the humanities, such as Giovanni Aloi, Steve Baker, Ron Broglio, Stephen Eisenman, and Randy Malamud. But these scholars have yet to investigate thoroughly the ways in which metaphorical comparisons with marginalized animals proliferate prejudices against humans or how the bodies of animals used in art can shift public imaginaries of ecological destruction.

In this presentation, I examine how the works of Catherine Chalmers, Tazeen Qayyum, Dana Sherwood, and Jennifer Angus deconstruct the slipperiness between pests and othered humans, including immigrants, low-income, queer, and people of color. Chalmers collaborates with cockroaches; Qayyum develops a simplified pattern of pests; Sherwood bakes elaborate feasts for a consortium of nonhumans; and Angus uses the dead bodies of tropical insects. When viewed together, these artists articulate a model for reconfiguring public perceptions of the category of pest, and, in so doing, challenge human prejudices about communities most often metaphorically compared to pest animals.

Author

• Lindsay D Garcia, Brown University