Goats, Badgers and Other Beasts

• Published in: Performance research 2017-03, Vol.22 (2), p.63
• Main Authors: Orozco, Lourdes, Parker-Starbuck, Jen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Animal behavior; Changes; Foster, Charles; Performance art; Posthumanism; Technology; Thwaites, Thomas
• ISSN: 1352-8165; 1469-9990
• DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2017.1315972

In this co-authored paper we propose a comparative investigation of two distinct acts of human to animal transformation involving technology and transposition. Unlike Deleuze and Guattari's well-cited 'becoming-animal', these transformations explore more literal becomings that investigate actual lives and behaviours of non-human animals. The article presents a critical exploration of Thomas Twhaites - the Goat Man - a UK based designer who lived for a year in the Swiss Alps as a goat transforming his body into that of the animal with the use of technology. The piece also engages critically with the work of ethologist Charles Foster whose last project has entailed living as a series of different UK indigenous species (badger, deer, fox). The article proposes these two interventions as performative acts that explore and expand the concepts of what it means to be 'human' and 'animal' in three different contexts: the technological, the personal and the ethological. The two examples offer opportunities to destabilise the human and the animal as distinct categories and engage directly with notions of the post-human and the post-animal. Embedded in a theoretical framework situated at the cross-roads of performance studies, animal studies and posthumanism, the paper also wants to challenge disciplinary boundaries and understands the scientific, performative and the personals spheres as valid and potential vehicles to become -human-animal.