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Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

Abstract

This piece examines how director Fabrizio Terranova's 2016 documentary Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival argues for embracing a framework of multispecies kinship between humans and non-human others. While telling the story of Haraway's life and her contributions to feminist scholarship, his documentary highlights various "contact zones" between humans and non-human animals in ways that destabilize the human/ non-human animal hierarchy and urge viewers to pay attention to the inevitability of non-human animal involvement in the process of becoming(-with). In my analysis of the film, I incorporate a variety of Haraway's works in addition to ideas from theorists of feminist film scholarship, critical posthumanism, and decolonial scholarship. In assessing the film's impact, I detail the experience of viewing it alongside my feline companion and consider his role in the knowledge-making process that comes from my engagement with the film. I conclude from my film analysis that non-human animals shape human practices as much as humans have shaped them. Learning to pay attention and respond to companion species is a part of our obligation as humans on a shared planet.

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