Interspecies America

Iconic interspecies encounters define environmental and American cultures within the Smithsonian National Zoo. The legacies of the Zoo’s animal life extend beyond its representation and historical infrastructures, yet scholarly analysis of zoos as cultural institutions has neglected embodied interspecies relationships between humans and non-humans. This project brings American studies and the environmental humanities into conversation with queer theory and animal studies to challenge the two-dimensional narratives of institutional progress and the civic impact of zoos. I analyze the zoo as a twentieth century knowledge institution that generates and genders the work of zookeeping, the reproductive politics of conservation, and individual histories of animals. In contrast to most scholarship on the zoo that emphasizes it as alternately a space of leisure or cruel containment, “Interspecies America” engages the zoo as a powerfully contradictory site of cultural, scientific, and market production. I argue that zoos mediate US identities, cultures, and environmental futures where human and non-human animal bodies navigate the complex networks of nature and nation. I use three interspecies encounters as cases studies to frame my account of zoos as important mediators of American identities, cultures, and vitality: the Manifest Masculinity of William Temple Hornaday’s bison conservation in 1887; the gendered lives of “zoo wives” Lucile Quarry Mann, Elizabeth Crandall Reed, and the white tiger Mohini in the mid-20th century; and the techno-scientific reproductive management of giant pandas Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing during the Cold War era. Across these cases, individual zookeepers and directors became intimately involved in animal husbandry and breeding; attuned in contradictory ways to animals’ needs and potential as capital for zoos, themselves. In doing so, zoo exhibits become participatory spaces of knowledge creation, as human and non-human animal bodies interact, collide, and even attempt to avoid each other—often in ways that are ideologically skewed and which limit more ethical conceptions of life across species lines.