Feminism and Animals between Production and Reproduction

Editors: Chiara Stefanoni (Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany), Federica Timeto (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italy).

This issue aims to explore and further develop a crucial nexus at the heart of feminist theory and practice: the relation between production and reproduction, which anti-speciesist feminism deepens through its attention to animal bodies. When we talk about animal bodies, we emphasize more than just the gendered aspects of these bodies and what relates women and animals in production and reproduction, which feminists have largely explored. Rather, we intend to recenter non-human bodies in contemporary analyses of the wider field of social reproduction, as well as expand and also contextually ground the consideration of animals and animalized bodies in the dynamics of social reproduction itself.

Since its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, the “animal question” – that is, the framing of human–animal relations as an ethical, social, and political issue – has been marked by a distinctly gendered connotation and by a close and complex entanglement with the history and transformations of feminist theories and praxes. Consider, for instance, the ties between anti-vivisectionism and the suffragette movement in England; and, more recently, in the 1970s, the crucial role of ecofeminism within the broader landscape of the so-called “new social movements” (the civil rights movement, environmentalism, gay liberation).

These feminist genealogies, never linear but always re-turning and intertwining, extend into the present: an explicitly articulated and self-identified antispeciesist feminism constitutes the core of Critical Animal Studies, amidst the legacies and actualizations of ecofeminism and materialist feminism, and the novel contributions of posthumanism, new materialisms, environmental humanities and political ecology. These contributions dynamize and consolidate a field that is, however, far from homogeneous, despite some common grounds: from the criticism of dualisms, universalism, and disembodiment to the focus on production and reproduction, which we address here.

If, on the one hand, the gendered aspects of reproductive labour and the animal surplus value have been very early acknowledged in (eco)feminist and material feminist theory, current feminist eco-socialist and intersectional analyses, which eventually expanded their analysis beyond the gender axis and beyond Western humanism, nonetheless still fail to  adequately account for animal agency and human-animal relations as crucial for social reproduction. On the other hand, new materialist feminist approaches, although more attentive to the non-human, often lack historical situatedness when discussing interspecies relations of production and reproduction.

Here, we welcome feminist positioned contributions (either theoretically, historically or empirically oriented) coming from a wide range of Social Sciences and the Humanities - including philosophy, cultural studies, sociology, legal studies, and history, among others -, that confront in novel and scientifically grounded ways these nexuses. Potential themes include, but are not strictly limited to:

• Animal bodies at work (e.g.: genealogies of animal exploitation; new perspectives on the exploitation of animal and animalized bodies in the Animal Industrial Complex; spaces and times of animal re/production; critiques of animal “gift” economies and forms of “encounter value”; visible and invisible animal work; crip theory and animal dis/abilities; violence and animal reproduction; degrowth and animal liberation; animal precarity);
• Symbolic and material technologies of species production (e.g.: biocapital and species capital; new technologies for the production of species; genomic editing and sexed bodies; nationalist ideologies and animal eugenics; the animal body as an intersectional battleground; species, biopolitics and necropolitics);
• Reproduction beyond nature and the heteronormative family (e.g.: the heterosexual norm and the production/reproduction of animal bodies; cis-heteronormativity and the natural sciences; the “work of love” in more than human relationships; zoophilia; interspecies kinship; the re/production of “monsters”; deviating genealogies; queer intimacies);
• Reproductive justice (e.g.: going beyond the framework of animal rights; interspecies life and the creation of liveability infrastructures; sustainable models without animal exploitation; the concept of “reprocide” and animals);
• Veganism and social reproduction (e.g.: veganist praxes in feminist and anti-colonial liberation; veganism and capitalist re-production; antispeciesist, utopian, queer-feminist societies; the experience of vegan communitarian kitchens);
• Care reconsidered (e.g.: new epistemological, ethical and political approaches to care and animals; historical and contemporary cases of interspecies care work, such as cross-species breastfeeding; pet therapy and animal agency; animals as housemates or inmates in human spaces; ethnographies of cat cafés or digital spaces);
• Overcoming the dualisms between production and reproduction (e.g.: postfordist economies of animality; contemporary examples of animal capital and rendering; animals as symbolic currency in the cultural field; the co-production of imaginary and actual animal bodies; the reproduction of animals in popular culture)

 

Articles are accepted in English, Italian, and Spanish. Please send your abstract of max 400 words included a list of at least 5 references and a short bio-note to the following addresses: chiara.stefanoni@leuphana.de and federica.timeto@unive.it

Information for authors: https://riviste.unige.it/index.php/aboutgender/information/authors

Timeframe

- Abstract submission deadline May 15, 2026.

- Notification of accepted abstracts: June 15, 2026

- Submission of first drafts (full papers): end of October 2026

- Peer review and notification of revisions (to authors): November 2026 - February 15, 2027

- Submission of final texts (after peer review): end of March 2027

- Editing and layout by May 2027 (issue Spring 2027)

 

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