#Kathleen Kete

[empirearchives]

So I found this in The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth Century Paris by Kathleen Kete….

So I looked him up and found his Wikipedia page and…. Moustache the dog had a very eventful life. He was even awarded a medal from Lannes for his service :D

[oldbookist]

tagged by @oilan 💙💙

Five songs I’ve been listening to on repeat lately: the last great american dynasty and delicate by taylor swift, motivation (normani), ungodly hour (chloe x halle), montero (lil nas x)

Last movie watched: embarrassed to say it was legitimately soviet lord of the rings

Currently watching: hmm i don’t really watch tv...occasional episodes of falcon and the winter soldier and aot? the last series i actually finished was bananafish (with episodes of shoujo cosette interspersed throughout, which was a TRIP)

Currently reading: next on my to-read list is kathleen kete’s the beast in the boudoir because i told myself i can’t finish my “lesgle adopts a dog” fic until i read it.

no idea who’s been tagged already but @ranichi17 @shuangdaozhang @thinkofaugust if y’all want to give it a go?

[bogglebabbles]

Tagged by the lovely @wheel-of-fish to share my TBR list for 2021, thank you so much! Now this is mostly fantasizing since my brain hasn’t been cut out for books lately, but here are the ones I’d love to get around to, in no particular order:

The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (yes it’s still in progress do not @ me)

Stand There! She Shouted by Susan Goldman Rubin

Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

Both Circe and The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

Freshwater: A Comedy by Virginia Woolf

Perfectly Preventable Deaths and Savage Her Reply AND Tangleweed and Brine by Deirdre Sullivan

The Borrowers by Mary Norton

The Beast In The Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris by Kathleen Kete

The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway

The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck

Beowulf as translated by Seamus Heaney

And many more I’d love to get to that I can’t remember off the top of my head and that I don’t think are on my goodreads haha

I tag @loosedindecember @mampfmampf @skostbuster

[shhinprogress-blog]

Human and Animal

What distinguishes us, human beings, and animal? 

What is the relationship between human and animal?

How come, and since when, did human races exist above animal?

Representing Animals, edited by Nigel Rothfels, answers these questions. More accurately, it purposes idea of these thoughts：

1. Human never looks at animals as they are: 

“If our only access to animals in the past is through documents written by humans, then we are never looking at the animals, only ever at the representation of the animals by humans...We read humans writing about animals. Representation is always-already inevitable. But it also, and more significantly, means that the real animal can disappear. ” (A Left-Handed Blow: writing the history of animals, Erica Fudge)

2. Human use animals to represent themselves:

Nona C. Flores’s Animals in the Middle Ages: “show how animals were used to convey meaning - whether religious or profane - in medieval culture… look at one element of nature but yield much larger truths that reveal the medieval mind.”

Hilda Kean’s Animal Rights: “When humanitarians rescued stray animals, or deplored the treatment of cattle driven to slaughter…it tells us more about the political and cultural concerns of society at that time than about the plight of animals per se.”

“The idea that meaning can only be made through difference - which emerges in Saussure’s linguistic theory - leads to the inevitable conclusion that the human is only ever meaningful when understood in relation to the not-human.  We rely on animals for understanding ourselves.”

3. Therefore, in order to understand the relationship between human and animal, we must look into the social history.

4. Human dominion on animals: social class and power.

“Here we should note that in England lines of conflict over the treatment of animals could be shaped not only by class but also by a divide between state and local traditions in ways which echo the conflict between London and the counties in the age of Civil War and Revolution...The rural poor were allied in this issue with urban elites, not in opposition to hunting but in resentment of their exclusion from the sport. The history of hunting reminds us that it is the use of animals by social groups to assert power, as much as it is the development of particular behaviors toward non-humans, which is at issue in the narrative of European attitudes toward animals.” (Animals and Ideology: The Politics of Animal Protection in Europe, Kathleen Kete)

“That hunting was an enduring attribute of monarchy is made clear in the biographies of the early modern monarchs of England and France...James I liked to bathe his arms in the steaming blood of a dying deer, then anoint the faces of his entourage with its hot blood (Thomas 147,29)”

“Hunting had been a privilege of the ruling class since the establishment of manorialism.”

5. Capitalism and Animal:

“Marx specifically noted the role of animal protection societies within bourgeois Europe. Marx saw the universalism of bourgeois culture at work in organizations whose object was the reform of lower-class behavior. ‘Members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals … wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best.’”

5. Feminism and Animal:

“The leadership of anti-vivisection societies included very effective women. The Victoria Street Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection was led by Frances Power Cobbe…Within the Parisian animal protection society the issue of vivisection moved ordinarily demure female members to speak out in opposition.”

“The anti-vivisection movement emphasized the importance of feeling as a guide to understanding, rather than the use of the scientific method. It thus could serve as an interrogation of materialism, a rethinking of the aims and means of science. But the identification of women with animals abused by male science drew upon essentialist notions of female identity. It spoke to conventional binaries - women and nature, man and culture, feminine emotion and masculine reason - and, to an important degree, served a conservative purpose.”