| Title | FREAKS OF NATURE |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | USING DEEP REFLEXIVITY TO UNDERSTAND TRANSGENICS |
| Contributor | Lisa Jean Moore(author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.63308/63878687083054.ch09 |
| Landing page | https://www.whpress.co.uk/publications/2025/03/04/meam-2/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Lisa Jean Moore |
| Publisher | The White Horse Press |
| Published on | 2025-07-01 |
| Long abstract | The author defines herself as a medical sociologist who uses feminist qualitative methods to explore the entanglements of humans and non-human animals in a variety of ecological settings. In this paper, she explores the social, biological, sensorial and emotional entanglements of her relationship with transgenic goats. The first part of the paper exposes how and why artistic methods combine with her grounded theory and reflexive auto-ethnography approaches to produce news insights and enhance her production of ‘results’. For her, these creative methods are a way of deepening her understanding of the connection between mammals (human and non-human) and mothers (human and non-human) by blending her real-life experience with her imaginative speculation. The artistic techniques she uses are reading children’s books, vivid setting exercises and sensory free-writing, empathetic understanding and flirting with fiction. In the second part of the paper, she provides a piece of creative writing that indeed opens to new questions and offers new perspectives on the studied situation. |
| Page range | pp. 180–192 |
| Print length | 13 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
| Media | 3 illustrations |
| 1 video |
Lisa Jean is a feminist medical sociologist and SUNY Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Purchase College, State University of New York. Her books include a multispecies ethnography of honeybees, Buzz: Urban Beekeeping and the Power of the Bee with Marin Kosut. In Catch and Release: The Enduring, yet Vulnerable, Horseshoe Crab she examines inter-species relationships between humans and Limulus polyphemus (Horseshoe Crabs). These arthropods are integral to the biomedical and pharmaceutical industry. Our Transgenic Future: Spider Goats, Genetic Modification and the Will to Change Nature is based on three years of fieldwork studying goats genetically modified with spider DNA. These spider goats operate as living factories and lactate spider silk for military and biomedical purposes. As she becomes more confident with multispecies ethnography, she increasingly uses her own lived experiences, as a postmenopausal mom and an anxious human being, to cultivate her empathy for other living things.