| Title | Bouncing back? Kangaroo-human resistance in contemporary Australia |
|---|---|
| Authors/Contributors | |
| Publication Title | Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space |
| Date | 2023-03 |
| Abstract Note | This article explores how human and animal agencies shape the socio-ecological lifeworlds of kangaroos as cultural icons, native wildlife, problematic pests, and commercial meat in contemporary Australia. Kangaroos’ resistance to Western, colonial ways of knowing and ordering the world fundamentally challenged the classificatory logic and foundations of early natural science. Kangaroos’ biological and behavioral resistance to domestication and farming – the traditional loci of animal exploitation – speaks to their inherent wildness, at the same time as it reveals their complicated dependence on ecosystems adapted for introduced livestock. Meanwhile, kangaroos’ resistance to government-endorsed population control programs, and the contested logic of (over)abundance that justifies kangaroo culling, both challenges and legitimates human calculations of who and what “counts” as worth conserving or killing. In tandem, the sensorial and symbolic valences of kangaroo flesh, compounded with the growing voices of animal welfare movements, generate visceral and political resistance to kangaroo meat as an unpalatable foodstuff. The article further centers the polysemic valences of kangaroos as a form of resistance to symbolic unity and coherence. Existing as many things at once, kangaroos eschew classification and treatment as any one thing. Instead, their ontology multiplies across the many epistemologies vying to determine kangaroos’ actual being and future becoming. The article concludes by assessing the opportunities and challenges of centering resistance and its diverse epistemic, vitalist, symbolic, and carnal manifestations to understand animal lifeways and deathways amidst entrenched capitalist and colonial regimes, whose reproduction depends on the production of the non-human as “killable.” |
| Resource Type | Journal Article |
| URL | https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/25148486221084194 |
| DOI | 10.1177/25148486221084194 |
| Citation | Chao, S. (2023). Bouncing back? Kangaroo-human resistance in contemporary Australia. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 6(1), 331–354. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221084194
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| Link to this record | http://ikbe-library.unimelb.edu.au/bibliography/GBLRUQ32/ |