We are delighted to announce the publication of a new book chapter by Rubén Peinado-Abarrio in Women Who Write Animals, published by Brill.
Titled “An Animal State”: the Human-Dog Entity in Drifts (2020), the chapter offers a compelling posthumanist reading of Zambreno’s novel, centring on the intimate relationship between the autodiegetic narrator and her dog, Genet. Through this bond, the study explores how the text gestures toward a human–dog assemblage that challenges conventional distinctions between human and more-than-human animals.
Drawing on critical posthumanist and feminist frameworks, the chapter examines how experiences such as pregnancy, care, and cohabitation lead to a dissolution of bounded subjectivity. In particular, it engages with the concept of “decreation” to show how the narrator’s sense of self is reconfigured through relationality and shared affect. The domestic space emerges as a multispecies community in which meaning is produced collectively, rather than through hierarchical or utilitarian human–animal relations.
By foregrounding the animal subject and its entanglement with human experience, this work contributes to ongoing debates in posthumanist theory, animal studies, and feminist literary criticism. It also highlights how literary form itself can become a site for imagining alternative modes of being and belonging.
🔗 https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004754584-017
We warmly congratulate Rubén on this thoughtful and original contribution!