Furry Cartography: Performing Species

This essay traces vectors of desire that organize contemporary relationships between human and nonhuman species. Stalking Cat, tattooed and surgically altered to resemble a tiger, exemplifies a flight toward altered embodiment encompassing both the perpetual performance that body modification makes possible and the temporary, more limited performance that occurs within furry fandom. Temple Grandin helps to delineate another flight directed toward a posthumanist life-world that does away with the notion that animals do not think and that all humans think in the same way, or at least should do so. Drawing upon Braidotti's feminist reworking of Deleuze and Guattari, the analysis maps out the overlapping networks of performance and brings into focus the psychic and commercial snares that continually adapt in order to recapture and contain the desires moving through these maps.