Orthodox Transgressions: The Ideology of Cross-Species, Cross-Class, and Interracial Queerness in Lucía Puenzo’s Novel El niño pez (The Fish Child)

El niño pez (The Fish Child), a 2004 Argentine novel about an interracial lesbian couple narrated by a dog, illustrates some of the central challenges and desires of animal studies, particularly those involved in overcoming humanism, sexism, and racism. By presenting the readers with a story of same-sex, interclass, and interracial coupling narrated by an eloquent pet dog, The Fish Child appears to stage a series of sexual, interspecies, and class transgressions. However, the novel instead stages a central problem of our neoliberal times: simply violating traditional boundaries and hierarchies is not inevitably transgressive of the social order but can actually represent hegemonic ideologies. Putting this Argentine novel in dialogue with Anglo-European animal and queer studies, we demonstrate some of the transnational commonalities and epistemological challenges of speciesism, sexism, and racism.