Animal Bodies, Technobodies: New Directions in Cultural Studies, Feminism, and Posthumanism.

As do most areas of critical literature, cultural studies usually takes the human subject as a given. Recently, however, calls to enrich the field through non-anthropocentric inquiry that extends beyond humanist parameters have become more frequent. These calls find a robust response in two recent anthologies: Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World, edited by Jodey Castricano; and Bits of Life: Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology, edited by Anneke Smelik and Nina Lykke. Both texts take cultural studies as their primary organizing anchor, taking care to highlight and appreciate the interdisciplinarity of the field and its relationship to feminist studies in excavating ideas and valuations of difference, alterity, and abject status.