Matt Cornell

Jules Sturm and Joost de Bloois

Concepts for Cultural Analysis

June 13, 2014

Contacting Chicken: Animal as Metaphor in Anthropornography and Abu Ghraib

Humans use animals for meat, clothing, companionship, labor and as ingredients in

household products. Our most pervasive use of animals, however, is in language, as

metaphors for describing the human experience. This practice is based on an elementary

division between humans, who have access to language and symbolic thinking, and

nonhuman animals who are believed to possess neither. Due to their alterity, animals are a

convenient metaphor for describing human Others and thus for reinforcing relations of social

domination. This process depends upon anthropomorphism to endow animals with human

traits and zoomorphism, which helps to animalize (and dehumanize) the Other.

These practices of representation through animality also contain a paradox. Humans

cannot be completely separated from animals. Ever since Darwin’s Origin of the Species, we

have understood that the human is also an animal. For this reason, animals make for

sometimes troubling metaphors. Anthropomorphic and zoomorphic representations can result

in hybrid depictions of humanity and animality, queering the boundary between human and

animal.

This essay is concerned with the metaphorical use of animals to describe feminized

and racialized Others. I will focus on two objects through which to develop this idea. The

first is a Burger King ad campaign for chicken sandwiches, which stages an anthropomorphic

fantasy of a feminized animal. My second object is a photograph from the Abu Ghraib prison

torture scandal, where American soldiers enacted imperial and colonial fantasies through

Cornell 1

zoomorphic stagings of animality. I will situate the former in a tradition of anthropomorphic

advertising that mimics the aesthetics and power relations of pornography. My analysis will

show how the site succeeds to feminize and other the animal while paradoxically inviting our

identification with it. I will locate the images from Abu Ghraib prison in an equally

contradictory process, where Iraqi prisoners are feminized and animalized in the name of

civilization, but where their tormenters become “like animals.”

After first introducing each object, I will trace discussions of the animal as metaphor,

with a specific focus on the case of the chicken. I will elaborate my specific interest in this

concept through feminist theorist Carol J. Adams’ idea of anthropornography and Jacques

Derrida’s theory of carnophallogocentrism. I will then return to both objects for a close

reading of how animals figure in the fantasies they stage. My goal is to analyze how the

animal as metaphor works to define the Other and how it feeds back, complicating ideas of

what it means to be human.

In order to consider both of my objects, I ask you to travel with me to April of 2004

and to a seat in front of your computer screen. Most likely a friend sent you this link, or

perhaps you stumbled upon it in a chat room. When you click on the link, you are greeted

with the text “contacting chicken.” The site is called Subservient Chicken (Fig 1) and after

the page has loaded, you are confronted with a puzzling image. You are looking at what

appears to be a live webcam feed from a nondescript living room—possibly that of a

bachelor’s apartment. A person in a chicken costume stands at the center of the room. The

costume is similar in some respects, to that of an ordinary corporate or athletic mascot. The

mask has a yellow-brown beak, a prominent red comb and wattle and large expressionless

green eyes on each side. The torso is downy white with reddish brown hackle feathers falling

over the person’s shoulders, like a mane of hair. The wings are worn on the back and attached

by brown straps laced around the arms.

Cornell 2

Figure 1

There are, however, two unusual features. First, there is a silver band wrapped around

the left leg suggesting those commonly used to identify chickens raised on farms. There is

also a maroon garter belt, fitted around the waist with straps attached to the tops of the

chicken feet. The leg band reminds you that this costume represents an actual chicken kept in

captivity. The garter belt signals that the figure is also human. One suggests the inescapable

slavery and slaughter of a factory farm, while the other suggests human expressions of

femininity and kinky sexuality. Both possibilities are embodied in this hybrid figure.

Subservient Chicken stands upright in the middle of the room, “wings” at its sides,

head nodding. The white walls are bare. The ceiling is low. There is a cream colored carpet.

To its left is a red armchair. Behind it, there is a matching sectional sofa and a small wooden

end table with a lamp. Against the back wall are a dark wooden bookshelf, a bright floor

lamp and what appears to be a barstool. On its right is an entertainment center dominated by a

Cornell 3

large TV. This room is both its stage and its cage. Subservient Chicken is waiting for your

command.

Below the video feed is a text-entry box prompting you with “Get chicken just the

way you like it. Type in your command here.” When you click on the box, the prompt

disappears, leaving the space to be filled with your desires. You type a command and click on

the word “submit.” After a few seconds of lag, Subservient Chicken will respond,

pantomiming your command in an endearingly clumsy slapstick performance. It will mimic

animal appropriate behaviors like “peck the ground” and “lay an egg” and banal human

activities like “jump,” “sit” or “read a book.” After some time, you might try to stump the

chicken by commanding it to “tap dance” or “do yoga,” only to discover that it has been

trained to do these as well. Its cross-species repertoire includes “act like a dog,” in which the

chicken drops on all fours and holds up its leg, and “act like a gorilla” in which it hunches

over, fists balled and paces around the room.

Even your most juvenile fantasies can be carried out. Subservient Chicken will

respond to “pick your nose and eat it,” and “pee on the floor.” If you are bold or crude, you

will eventually find its limits. Sexually explicit commands like “masturbate” or “fuck

yourself” prompt the chicken to approach the camera and wag a gloved finger in your face,

chastising you. While urination is acceptable, Subservient Chicken will not engage in

scatological behavior. Variations on “poop” and “fart” result in further finger-wagging.

In spite of these restrictions, your darker fantasies are indulged. You can make the

Subservient Chicken simulate its own death—a dramatic and very human heart attack. You

can also command it to “march like a German soldier” or do the Nazi “goosestep.” If you

type the word “dictator,” the chicken will stand at attention and mimic a Nazi salute. There is

even a bit of subversive political humor in its vocabulary. Command the chicken to “find

weapons of mass destruction” (remember that this is 2004) and it will scamper about the

Cornell 4

apartment, looking behind the sofa, before returning empty-handed. If you have an

emancipatory spirit, you will sadly discover that Subservient Chicken is not interested in its

own liberation. Commands to “go vegan” or “join PETA” are met with a thumbs-down.

As you play with Subservient Chicken, you begin to notice that after each command it

returns to its default position in the center of the room, gently nodding its head. It is at this

point that you might realize you are not issuing commands to a live performer, but triggering

video clips of a pre-recorded performance. You are animating Subservient Chicken, playing

it as you would a character in a video game, but you are not actually controlling a living

being in real time. There is no sound accompanying the video. The chicken is like a slapstick

comedian in a silent film.

When you tire of the novelty of playing with Subservient Chicken, you may notice the

four prompts lining the bottom of your screen. “Photos” takes you to a gallery of five images

offering close-up photographs of Subservient Chicken. “Chicken Mask” encourages you to

print out your own paper chicken mask to wear. “Tell a Friend” allows you to share the site

with others. The final option is “BK Tendercrisp.” When you click on this, you are taken to

Burger King’s website and informed about a new chicken sandwich available “any way you

want it.” Subservient Chicken, as you are only now just realizing, is not an internet prank,

performance art, or a fetish website, but a viral marketing campaign for a global chain of fast

food restaurants. The apparent goal here is to sell you a chicken sandwich.

Within days of Subservient Chicken’s debut, the world will be introduced to images

from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. These photographs will proliferate on television news

and print media, and will be just a few clicks away from our curious chicken. Here also are

the aesthetics of pornography and sadomasochism captured in grainy digital images. As in the

ad campaign, hoods are used to dehumanize and women’s underwear to feminize the Iraqi

Cornell 5

male prisoners. Here too is the return of the animal, both in the form of actual dogs used to

terrorize the prisoners and in the staging of a detainee as a dog.

Figure 2

In this photograph (Fig 2), US soldier Lynndie England stands at the left of the frame,

her hair is cropped, a brown t-shirt tucked neatly into the waist of her camouflage pants. She

wears boots, a belt and a wristwatch on her left hand. Also in her left hand is a leash, which

extends diagonally down to the right hand corner of the frame where it is attached to the neck

of an Iraqi prisoner. England’s head is turned, her gaze averted from the photographer,

following the leash to the man on the floor. His face is in pain and his eyes appear to be

closed. He is naked and on his side, his bottom leg pulled up, apparently to shield his nudity.

His left arm is draped over his shoulders, palm pressed to the cement floor. His right arm

extends out beneath him, an identification bracelet on his wrist, recalling the identification

band worn by the animal. Beyond the soldier and her captive, we can see the yellow walls of

the prison corridor, the cement floors scattered with paper. Along the right wall, the barred

Cornell 6

doors of six cells, like animal cages, hang open. They appear to be draped in linens hung out

to dry. Pink charts hang in pairs along the walls, suggesting the documents by which the

prisoners are managed. The image is at once posed and in disarray. This too is a stage and a

cage.

For all of their similarities and differences, the Burger King ad campaign and the Abu

Ghraib torture photo mark distinct uses of the animal as metaphor. Each stages a relationship

of cruelty toward the Other, but while the former depicts the animal as human, the latter

imagines humans as animals.

For as long as humans have used language, we have used animals to describe our

experience. Animals are the original muse and the original medium. John Berger suggests

that

the first subject matter for painting was animal. Probably the first paint was

animal blood. Prior to that, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the first

metaphor was animal…if the first metaphor was animal, it was because the

essential relation between man and animal was metaphoric. Within that

relation, what the two terms –man and animal – shared in common revealed

what differentiated them. And vice versa. (7)

Berger argues that what divides us from animals is our capacity for symbolic thought, but that

we inevitably take recourse to animals as our primary symbols.

Animal metaphors are intrinsic to describing and articulating human experiences, but

they also signify something outside of our grasp and thus beyond language. Akira Lippit

echoes Berger, observing that the animal is an “originary metaphor,” but further theorizes

that the use of animal metaphors gives humans access to the “unconscious of language”

(1113). Lippit describes this linguistic hybrid as animetaphor. “One finds a phantastic

transversality at work between the animal and the metaphor--the animal is already a

Cornell 7

metaphor, the metaphor an animal. Together they transport to language, breathe into

language, the vitality of another life, another expression: animal and metaphor, animetaphor”

(1113). This concept draws on the animal’s assumed connection to the irrational, the

unconscious and to nature. Humans, stuck in the rationality of language and culture cannot

describe the fullness of our experience without recourse to the mystery of the animal.

There are, of course, problems in the use of animals as metaphor. Human traits are

perceived in animals and then ascribed to them. Since animals are associated with nature,

animal metaphors can then be reversed to naturalize human cultural institutions. This has

been described as “a false metaphor” (250) by authors Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and

Leon J. Kamin. They write about how this process worked in human studies of ants:

While sociobiologists inherited royalty and slavery in ants from nineteenth-

century entomology, they have made the false metaphor a device of their own.

Aggression, warfare, cooperation, kinship, loyalty, coyness, rape, cheating,

culture are all applied to nonhuman animals. Human manifestations then come

to be seen as special, perhaps more developed, cases. (250)

In false metaphor, humans use animals to invent something called human nature. These

characteristics are then projected back onto the animal world.

Consider the chicken. A coward is a “chicken,” while a pro-war coward is a

“chickenhawk.” A poor excuse is deemed “chickenshit.” When we face consequences for our

actions, we say that “the chickens are coming home to roost.” When someone is old, we say

that they “are no spring chicken.” If we are very upset, we are described as “running around

like a chicken with its head cut off.” When we escape, we are said to have “flown the coop.”

When pondering the origins of a thing, we ask “which came first—the chicken or the egg?”

As Donna Haraway notes, when we discuss hierarchical systems of authority, we refer to a

“pecking order,” a term that is itself derived from behavioral studies of chickens (271).

Cornell 8

Gender figures prominently in chicken language. A proud and arrogant man is the

“cock of the walk.” “Cock” is also slang for the human penis. Bachelorette parties are called

“hen nights.” A husband with a domineering wife is said to be “hen pecked,” where a

dominant man is said to “rule the roost.” A “chick” is a young woman. A “chickenhawk” is

an older man who sexually pursues younger men. Racialized variations describe women as

“dark meat.” Carol J Adams observes that “chicken also means whore, prostitute” and that “a

chicken ranch is a house of prostitution” (Pornography of Meat 31). Animal metaphors

inevitably find their way into meat advertising. Adams points to the fact that Frank Perdue

once advertised chicken with the seductive tagline, “Are you a breast man or leg man?” (The

Sexual Politics of Meat 87)

This fowl language has consequences for the chicken. We equate chickens with

cowardice, but Donna Haraway reminds us that in reality the “(c)hicken is no coward.

Indeed, this warrior bird has plied his trade as a fighting cock around the world since the

earliest days such fowl consented to work for people” (265). Unfortunately for the chicken, it

cannot object to being labeled a coward because the animal is defined by its lack of access to

language. Derrida observes that “(f)inding oneself deprived of language, one loses the power

to name, to name oneself, indeed to respond to one’s name” (388). The use of metaphor and

the linguistic process itself is the exclusive domain of the human. “Animal,” Derrida says, “is

a word that men have given themselves the right to give” (400).

Elaborating on the place of the animal, both in language and in patriarchy, Derrida

coined the word “carnophallogocentrism,” (Birnbaum and Olsson) a portmanteau describing

the centrality of meat eating, masculinity and language to Western society and subjectivity.

“We are all—vegetarians as well—carnivores in the symbolic sense” (Birnbaum and Olsson).

For Derrida, claiming the right to name animals, to use them as symbols and metaphors is

inextricably linked to our perceived right to kill and eat them.

Cornell 9

Derrida’s carnophallogocentrism overlaps with the ideas of feminist theorist Carol J.

Adams. Borrowing from William O’ Barr’s analysis of social biases in advertising, Adams

presents a model for understanding the hierarchies that form the basis of Western society. It is

composed of five categories, each with a set of opposed binaries. “A” is the dominant and

“Not A” is the subordinate or Other (The Pornography of Meat 39).

A= Dominant Not A= Subordinate

MAN/male woman/female

CULTURE nature

HUMAN animal

“WHITE” people of color

MIND body

As in Derrida’s formulation, humanity is defined by masculinity, power over animals and

language and rationality (here represented by “mind.”) This model also critically adds the

dimension of race to our understanding of intersecting oppressions. Traits in each column are

conflated with each other. This underscores that the privileged, dominant Western subject is a

white man, whose humanity is further defined through his rationality and culture. The

consequence for the subordinate side of the chart is that women and people of color are

perceived as lacking rationality, culture and full humanity. They are believed to be associated

with the body, with irrational nature and thus with animality. This proximity points to how

women and animals frequently find themselves mixed in metaphor together.

With this understanding, Adams argues that the oppression of women and that of

nonhuman animals are inextricably linked in patriarchal systems of domination. She

describes this theory as “The Sexual Politics of Meat,” or “an attitude and action that

animalizes women and sexualizes and feminizes animals” (The Sexual Politics of Meat 4).

Cornell 10

Adams’ coinage traces a dual process of zoomorphism and anthropomorphism. Women

become animals, and animals become women. Metaphors are indices of intersecting

oppressions.

Adams elaborates this theory through the linguistic concept of the absent referent, in

which a signifier refers to a missing signified. For Adams, there are three ways that living

animals are made into absent referents: first, through the literal consumption of meat, second

through redefining them (“we no longer talk about baby animals but about veal or lamb”) and

finally through metaphor (The Sexual Politics of Meat 66-67). Adams observes that animal

metaphors are frequently used to describe violence against women, noting that survivors of

rape and domestic violence will often say, “I felt like a piece of meat” (The Sexual Politics of

Meat 66-67). Adams describes the process in the following passage:

Metaphorically, the absent referent can be anything whose original meaning is

undercut as it is absorbed into a different hierarchy of meaning; in this case the

original meaning of animals’ fates is absorbed into a human-centered

hierarchy. Specifically in regard to rape victims and battered women, the death

experience of animals acts to illustrate the lived experience of women. (The

Sexual Politics of Meat 67)

For Adams, sexual violence against women and the oppression of animals intersect at the

absent referent.

In a parallel move, Adams provocatively describes the treatment of the animal Other

as “rape,” using human women as the absent referent in her own advocacy for animals. She

notes, for instance that “the bondage equipment of pornography—chains, cattle prods,

nooses, dog collars, and ropes—suggests the control of animals. Thus, when women are

victims of violence, the treatment of animals is recalled” (The Sexual Politics of Meat 68).

Adams proposes that the victim blaming discourse about the rape of women is echoed in the

Cornell 11

depictions of the slaughterhouse. “As the animals move closer to the actual act of slaughter,

the descriptions of the meat industry use language that implies the animals are willing their

own actions.” Animals are said to be “emerging” and “sliding” toward their executioners. For

Adams, this means that “the concept of seduction has prevailed; animals appear to be active

and willing agents in the ‘rape’ of their lives” (The Sexual Politics of Meat 84).

Throughout history, animals have often been described as sacrificing themselves for

our consumption. Modern advertising is rife with examples of anthropomorphic animals

depicted as willing collaborators in their own demise. A website called Suicide Food catalogs

hundreds of examples “of animals that act as though they wish to be consumed,” animals who

“identify with the oppressor.” The site has over 84 meat advertisements and logos, which the

editors have identified as sexy. These ads, many of them anthropomorphic cartoons, feature

animals who are sexually aroused by the prospect of being eaten, a narrative device that the

site labels “feastiality.” The site’s darkly humorous analysis of a product called “The Turkey

Hooker” (Fig 3) is typical:

Figure 2

Cornell 12

Any way you slice it, the flesh trade is a dangerous business for a turkey. You

never know who you'll run into out there. Hitting the stroll in her cook-me

pumps, this bird's got to keep her eyes open. She's out there trying to make a

living, hoping to attract the right "customers," but sometimes your number

comes up. Like here, in the purest equating of sex with violence we have yet

seen. The act of picking up—securing the services of—a turkey prostitute is

held synonymous with jamming a metal hook into her carcass and picking her

up from the roasting pan. The accompanying diagram serves only to make the

imagined horror explicit. The titillating becomes barbaric as the "pick up"

blurs into a matter of body disposal. Through sheer, penetrative power and

psychopathic derangement, the turkey's client/killer will shift the dead body

into position.

Suicide Food seizes on the anthropomorphic depictions of animals, narrating their inner

monologues, while suggesting that such advertising appeals to a cultural pathology for

cruelty. Ads like these comprise a distinct genre that Adams has dubbed

“anthropornography” in which sexualized animals express a desire to be eaten (The

Pornography of Meat 109). In anthropornography, with its seductive cows and perverted

pigs, the absent referent is women, and the sales tactic is an extreme form of

anthropomorphism.

I will now revisit our object, analyzing it with Adams’ formulation in mind.

Subservient Chicken can be seen as a sophisticated example of anthropornography, as it

depicts an anthropomorphic animal that refers to a feminized Other. It is important to note

from the outset, that while the website gives no indication of the character’s gender, Burger

King has elsewhere described him as male, indicating that Subservient Chicken is intended to

Cornell 13

be viewed as a crossdresser, with the added implication that wearing “women’s clothing” is

both pleasurable and humiliating for him. This marks a significant departure from

anthropornography, which often relies on exaggerated human morphology like pigs and

chickens with breasts to make gender representation explicit. The decision to gender

Subservient Chicken as male seems intended to make him comical rather than sexy, to

underscore his alterity. Subservient Chicken may be read not only as feminized, but also as

queer, and possibly transgender. The character’s hybrid morphology is similar to the

costumes worn by Furries, a human subculture for whom blurring distinctions between

species, goes hand in paw with the queering of gender norms.

This sense of hybridity carries over into the very design of the site, which contains

elements of pornography and video game. On the surface, the site has been designed, in part,

to mimic webcam pornography. Our commands are like those of the pornography consumer

typing his desires into a chat interface with a naked woman ready and willing to carry them

out. The limited vocabulary of commands and their proscribed responses mirror the limits of

any mediated encounter with a sex worker. The metal band around the chicken’s leg forms a

metonymic link with the leg shackles of sadomasochistic pornography, while the garter belt

signals Subservient Chicken’s femininity and sexual availability. Significantly, the site

operates in silence. Subservient Chicken responds to commands. Like a domesticated animal,

it understands some language but lacks the capacity to communicate in return. It is given

access to language only insofar as it can contort its body to fulfill our desires.

By drawing on the iconography and language of sadomasochism, the site goes beyond

conventional anthropornography. Subservient Chicken seduces us, but seems to specifically

desire our cruelty in the form of humiliation. Endowed with the very human trait of

“subservience,” he appears to take pleasure in this disparate power relationship. The animal

doesn’t just sacrifice himself, but is depicted as an equal partner in his own subjugation. In

Cornell 14

this view of the site, the animal is not simply an object that we act upon and have spectral

dominance over, but he is also anthropomorphized, endowed with the agency of the human

masochist. Viewed through Adams’ theory, this is an ad which invites us to enjoy our power

over the animal, while using a feminized sex worker as its absent referent.

I contend, however, that the animal metaphor also works in reverse. Since it is part

video game, the animal can be seen as an avatar animated by the human player. The prompt

to print out and wear one’s own Subservient Chicken mask supports this reading of the site.

The player is Subservient Chicken, and is invited to identify with the animal. If we are the

chicken, then this game may also be a commentary on our own submission to social

conformity. That nondescript apartment with its trappings of modern life might be ours. The

banal activities like watching TV and picking one’s nose poke fun at our mundane existence.

If we follow this reading, the game depicts us as prisoners subject to constant surveillance, an

uncanny precursor to recent revelations of domestic spying in post-9/11 America.

The language of the user interface is also important here. We type a “command” and

then click on “submit.” When we click “submit,” are we also submitting? This language

evokes the vocabulary of sadomasochism, but also of social conformity. The “pecking order”

observed in chickens is being reflected back on humanity. It is significant that the chicken has

been programmed to respond to commands like “dictator” (which triggers a Nazi salute) and

“march like a German soldier,” (which causes the chicken to mimic a goosestep) human

behaviors that challenge the idea of free will, upon which we distinguish ourselves from

animals. Descartes viewed animals as machines or automata, a distinction that, in his view,

separated them from man. In Subservient Chicken, the player’s freedom of movement is tied

to his access to language. The animal falls into stasis whenever it is given a command it

cannot process. By asking us to play chicken, the game forces us to consider the idea of

humans as machine.

Cornell 15

The hybrid design of Subservient Chicken, which simulates both pornography and

game has the effect of collapsing the human’s separation from the animal. It is no longer

clear if we are meant to see the chicken as an Other or to incorporate it into our own

subjectivity. The metaphorical use of the animal here seems to cross the boundaries on

Dowd’s hierarchy, borrowing freely from A and Not A. The chicken is animal and human,

male and female. It crosses the divide of nature and culture. This is a very peculiar form of

advertising. If anything can be described as an absent referent in this advertisement, it is the

chicken sandwich.

Where Subservient Chicken uses the animal to refer to a feminized Other, in the more

sobering case of the Abu Ghraib prison photos, the animal is used to mark the racial Other as

both feminized and nonhuman. These images enact a fantasy which is deeply embedded in

colonial and imperial history, that of the West civilizing the racial Other. Feminist scholar

Melanie Richter-Montpetit notes that President Bush set the stage for these photos by

describing the War on Terror as a mission to “save civilization itself,” using metaphorical

language that depicted Arab Muslims as animals. For example, Bush announced that US

forces “would ‘smoke them out of their caves’ in the ‘dark corners of the earth’” (41). A

common trope in this rhetoric is to say of the enemy, that “the only language ‘they’

understand is violence” (42), recalling the most elementary division between humans and

animals—their assumed lack of access to language and rationality.

Alongside this pattern of describing the racial Other as animal is a tradition of

feminizing “The Orient.” Edward Said observes that Orientalist fantasies of Eastern

“backwardness” also depict its “feminine penetrability, its supine malleability” (206). This

suggests “the Orient’s” availability to conquer and colonization by a masculinized West. In

the Western imagination and in its belligerent rhetoric, the enemy is defined by all of the

Cornell 16

characteristics in the Not A column. The Other is feminized, racialized and animalized. This

is the fantasy that is enacted in the image of Lynndie England and the man on the leash.

Returning to the photograph with these ideas in mind, Lynndie England is staged as

the human subject of the photo, while the Iraqi man is the objectified animal. Her clothing is

a mark of culture, while his nudity is a mark of animality. Derrida notes that this originates in

the Genesis myth, where the Fall of Man results in shame at being naked, leading to the

primary division between human and animal. “In principle, with the exception of man, no

animal has ever thought to dress itself” (373). England’s wristwatch is also a mark of culture,

of an active rational subject, measuring time. By contrast, the prisoner’s identification

bracelet signals him as a passive object to be measured and studied. Glimpsed in this scene

with the charts and open cage doors, he is depicted as an animal to be disciplined. The leash

indicates that that the task of civilizing and domesticating him belongs to England.

In this stark use of animal as metaphor, the man is a dog. Richter-Montpetit notes “…

that the most domesticated animal in the Euro-American context is the dog. Yet even when

domesticated, a dog is still a dog” (49). This reflects a proximity between humans and

nonhuman animals at the prison. Dogs also served alongside humans in Iraq and were

deployed to terrorize prisoners in some of the other photos. Investigations of the torture at

Abu Ghraib reveal other stagings of animality including prisoners ‘ridden like animals’”

(Richter-Montpetit 49) and a “seventy-year-old woman harnessed and ridden like a donkey”

(Deb 14). Many of the photos depict prisoners wearing hoods, which dehumanize them,

drawing attention to their naked bodies. Donna Haraway remarks “(i)t’s no wonder that at

least one U.S. soldier who tortured Iraqi prisoners was a chicken processor in her civilian

life,” drawing a link between the plight of the human and the plight of animals.

The figure of Lynndie England, however, poses a challenge to a simplistic A/Not A

reading of gender relations in the image. She is a woman exercising power over a man—a

Cornell 17

break with the discreet hierarchies in Dowd’s model. The presence of female torturers in the

photos has prompted some commentators to impose a hypersexualized narrative onto the

images. Right wing pundit Rush Limbaugh likened the scenes to the kind of empowered

female performance one would see in a Britney Spears or Madonna concert. Many joked that

the women resembled “dominatrices,” likening the images to sadomasochistic pornography.

None of these characterizations describe what I see in the image. England is presented

in this photo as desexualized. Her close-cropped hair and military dress are somewhat

masculine, especially when staged against the prisoner’s nudity. She also appears young and

slight of build, in contrast to the older, muscular and bearded man on the floor. England is

turned away from the camera, toward the prisoner, focalizing our attention on him. She does

not appear to be triumphant, but seems awkwardly posed to portray a relationship for the

camera. I argue that both England and the prisoner are presented as objects in this photo. The

fantasy depicted here is one of relational power, where England’s femininity—which is a

mark of her otherness—adds to the humiliation of the Iraqi man. Laura Sjoberg notes:

Sexual abuse of Iraqi men by American women communicates (whether it was

intended to or not) a disdain for Iraqi masculinities so strong that subordinated

American femininities are the appropriate tool for their humiliation. Sexual

torture is certainly about power, but were it only about power, there are plenty

of non-sexual ways to express power over people. Sexual torture is about

comparative sexual power; here, the sexual power of American masculinities

and militarized/masculinized femininities over their understanding of Iraqi

masculinities. (95)

England is a woman in an intensely masculine environment. Her femaleness—her Not A

status—serves to underscore and narrate the prisoner’s feminized status. Additionally, within

the context of the military prison and the Iraq War, England’s whiteness trumps the Arab

Cornell 18

prisoner’s masculinity. At least in theory, this relational power that England enjoys allows

her to claim more humanity in contrast to the animalized prisoner. The implicit message of

the animal metaphor staged in this photo, is that though she may be a girl, she is better than a

dog.

The reaction of Rush Limbaugh, however, was not typical of the responses to the Abu

Ghraib photos. In the fallout from the torture scandal, one newspaper dubbed England “the

small town girl who became an all-American monster,” transforming her into an animal. The

treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was most commonly described as “inhumane,” which

Merriam Webster Dictionary defines as “not kind or gentle to people or animals.” Here, as in

all animal metaphors, the animal remains in close proximity to the human.

This essay has argued that the animal is one of the primary metaphors with which

humans describe their experiences. Through the animal, humans define and redefine what it

means to be human. Animals and humans, however, are not discreet categories, as humans

are also animals. This means that animal metaphors, whether in language or images, can lead

to contradictory meanings and complex significations.

I have attempted to trace some of these characteristics of animal metaphor in two

apparently different objects. Subservient Chicken may trigger many ideas, but its purpose is

resolutely trivial, while the images from Abu Ghraib could not be more serious. The former

has mostly passed under the radar of scholarship, while the latter has been closely studied and

exhaustively theorized. I chose to place them next to each other because of their temporal and

aesthetic proximity, but also because of their staging of animality. Both invite the spectator

into a power relationship characterized by cruelty, and both stage a fantasy of that

relationship using the figure of a feminized animal. In the case of Subservient Chicken, we

are invited to both view the animal as a feminized Other and to identify with its abject status.

In the case of the iconic photo of Lynndie England and her captive, the conditions of the

Cornell 19

female soldier’s humanity are negotiated on the animalized, feminized and racialized body of

her male prisoner.

This research paper went through many revisions, and there were some paths that

could lead to more fruitful research. I was particularly struck by recent studies into

postmodern subjectivities that make use of animals. Furries, therianthropes, “Bears,”

cosplayers and Otherkin are just a few of the subcultures where zoomorphic and

anthrozoomorphic identities are flourishing, and where boundaries of species and gender are

crossed. These cultural practices offer new insights into the possibilities and limitations of

animal as metaphor. They also suggest that many humans embrace the animal’s abject status

as a means of expressing their own feelings of alterity.

Cornell 20

Works Cited

Adams, Carol J. The Pornography of Meat. New York: Continuum International Publishing

Group Inc., 2003. Print.

Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory. 1990.

New York: Continuum International Publishing Group Inc., 2010. Print.

Berger, John. About Looking. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Print.

Birnbaum, Daniel and Anders, Olsson. “An Interview with Jacques Derrida on the Limits of

Digestion.” e-flux. Web. 13 June 2014.

Deb, Basuli. “Transnational Feminism and Women Who Torture: Re- imag(in)ing Abu

Ghraib Prison Photography.” Postcolonial Text, 7.1 (2012): 1-17. Print.

Derrida, Jacques and Wills, David. “The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow).”

Critical Inquiry 28.2 (2002): 369-418. Print.

Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Print.

Lewontin, R.C., Rose, Steven and Kamin, Leo J. Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and

Human Nature. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Print.

Lippit, Akira Mazuka. “Magnetic Animal: Derrida, Wildlife, Animetaphor.” MLN 113.5

(1998): 1111-1125. Print.

McKelvey, Tara. “A Soldier’s Tale: Lynndie England.” Marie Claire. Hearst

Communications, Inc., Web. 19 May 2009.

Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, 2014. Web. 13 June 2014.

Cornell 21

Richter-Montpetit, Melanie. “Empire, Desire and Violence: A Queer Transnational Feminist

Reading of the Prisoner ‘Abuse’ in Abu Ghraib and the Question of ‘Gender

Equality.’” International Feminist Journal of Politics 9:1 (March 2007): 38–59. Print.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism.1978. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Print.

Sjoberg, Laura. “Agency, Militarized Femininity and Enemy Others: Observations from the

War in Iraq.” International Feminist Journal of Politics. 9.1 (March 2007): 82-101.

Print.

Subservient Chicken. Archived at http://oneweakness.com/subservient-chicken.Web. 13 June

2014.

“Turkey Hooker.” Suicide Food. http://suicidefood.blogspot.nl/2010/04/turkey-hooker.html.

Web. 30 April 2010.

Cornell 22