Birds of a Feather

This exploratory introductory essay has thought about a gender in human-animal or animal sensitive history. It brings into conversation environmental history, natural sciences (ornithology, primatology), feminist science studies and queer ecocriticism. It explores the ways in which our shifting understandings of animals have contoured our understandings of our own species’ gender and sexuality and, vice versa, human heteronormativity and sexism have led us to impose categories on Nature that do not exist. What the other animals get up to and therefore what is understood to be ‘natural’ has a strange power over us. So rethinking what is ‘natural’ has real world impacts. Historically gendered stereotyping, predicated on a misunderstanding of the animal world, is harmful to boys and men as well as for girls and women – and to our understanding of the more-than-human world.