"As Marta Segarra rightly says in her recent and lucid essay Humanimales, the challenge of animal studies has been the transformation of the concept of subject, which, from the normative tradition, is circumscribed to man."
——La Razón

"Humanimales is devoted to probing a great fallacy: that of the barriers that says that the boundaries between human and non-human animality are indestructible. It asserts, on the contrary, that these encounters have been going on since ancient times, that the sort of invulnerable edge that separates them is full of cracks, breaks, slips and dialogues."
——The Observer

★French translation rights sold.
★Pushing the boundaries of what it means to be human.

What do we have in common and what separates us from animals - are we just another animal? Classical humanities, based on human exceptionalism, have given way to posthumanities, which include animal studies, as well as other perspectives that challenge the traditional notion of the human subject, such as gender, postcolonial and decolonial studies, ecocriticism or queer theory.

Thinking about us in our relationship with animals has philosophical consequences in areas such as science, affection, work and the development of specific health and food policies, all of which are areas of contact between humans and animals. Our world is built on these encounters, even if we seldom realize it.

This essential essay brings together part of the knowledge developed so far by those who have approached the human-animal relationship, and links it to history, political and social movements, new conceptions of gender, science and knowledge. The arguments, contradictions, contexts and even taboos that this interdisciplinary debate brings together help to imagine and qualify possible ethical assumptions on which to rethink our relationship with animals and, ultimately, with ourselves.

Marta Segarra

She is a research professor at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), at the Laboratoire d’études de genre et de sexualité (LEGS), and Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Barcelona. She has published essays and scientific articles, in French, English and Spanish, in the field of gender and sexuality studies, French literature and cinema, and cultural studies, and has been interested in animal studies for about ten years. She was able to train in this field at Cornell University and the University of California-Berkeley, where she was a visiting scholar in 2013 and 2018, respectively. In this area, she has published articles and collective volumes such as Demenageries: Thinking (of) animals after Derrida (with A. E. Berger, 2011).