"Don't be so Modest, You're a Rat": Anthropomorphism, Social Class, and Renegotiation

Reuben Dylan Fong

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"Don't be so Modest, You're a Rat": Anthropomorphism, Social Class, and Renegotiation in Ratatouille and Bee Movie

Abstract: One of the common fantasy stories involving anthropomorphized nonhuman animals in animated children's films is of humans and animals discovering they can communicate as equals. The human-animal relationship in the premise of these films exemplifies the idea of questioning and renegotiating ingrained social barriers. This article will analyze two such films (Brad Bird's 2007 film, Ratatouille, and Simon J. Smith and Steve Hickner's 2007 film, Bee Movie) using existing empirical research in child developmental psychology. I posit that these films use anthropomorphized animals and humans as allegories for the working class and middle class. These class allegories are often framed as ethnic stereotypes because children have a strong fluency of ethnic stereotypes from a young age. While these stories are ostensibly about the disassembling of social barriers, Ratatouille and Bee Movie ultimately model a heavy regulation on social mobility which largely reinforces existing status quos of class difference.

Keywords: Anthropomorphism, Children’s Films, Ethnicity, Human-Animal, Social Class

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Book Review: Hunnicutt, G. (2020). Gender Violence in Ecofeminist Perspective

Nathan Poirier

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Book Review: Hunnicutt, G. (2020). Gender violence in ecofeminist perspective: Intersections of animal oppression, patriarchy, and domination of the earth. Routledge.

In this book, Hunnicutt illuminates how gender violence is entangled with violence against nature and nonhuman animals. The book is structured in somewhat of a "funneling" approach where each chapter is positioned as more-or-less a subset of the previous one(s). In this way, Hunnicutt's thesis that gender violence, even on the interpersonal level, is inseparable from wider human domination over nature in general.

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Tacit Knowledge Within Equine-Assisted Intervention (EAI)

Catharina Carlsson & Daniel Nilsson Ranta

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Tacit Knowledge Within Equine-Assisted Intervention (EAI): How Social Relation Theory and Emotional Work Theory Provide Access to an Elusive Form of Knowledge

Abstract: This paper aims to analyze the central features within equine-assisted intervention (EAI) and the primary concepts of Goffman´s theories of social identity and Hochschild´s theories of emotional work. Analyzing a dialog with participants viewing the video recordings of their own EAI sessions, led to the conclusion that relating to the horse as a subject counteracts impression management interpreted as a shift from surface acting frontstage where emotions have exchange value, to deep acting backstage where emotions have utility value. The boundaries between backstage, where the participants show their actual social identity and frontstage where they display a virtual social identity are fluid. The results indicate that the staff members are regarded more like fellow humans acting backstage, resulting in less distance to the clients. Further research is needed to investigate the processes in EAI when the emotional work seems to be changed, whether backstage or frontstage, which could change the purpose as well as the effects of EAI.

Keywords: Backstage, Emotional Work, Equine-Assisted Intervention, Frontstage, Social Identity

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