UC Santa Cruz

The title of this dissertation refers to the Norse myth of the two goats who pull Thor’s chariot, Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr, who can be eaten and then resuscitated. Their myth epitomizes the focus of this work, which explores instances where dead animal bodies are repurposed and configured as media, becoming representations of animals that are no longer alive. In these cases, however, the animal that is “brought back to life” is not the same that it was. Detached from its original existence, it finds itself vitiated and there is a slippage between what the animal used to be and how human intervention on its body changed its appearance and essence. In this system, animal bodies become screens onto which people project meanings and ideologies that have nothing to do with the animals themselves but have a lot to do with what the humans believe and, more crucially, want others to believe. As I demonstrate through this work, recovering these histories and shifting our attention to the dead animal body enriches established fields of animal studies and media and technology studies by showing how the Western tendency to subjugate is pervasive and unbound by dichotomies of life and death. Through technology, Western human attitudes of domination are articulated through the reanimation of dead animal bodies, but this operation benefits only a specific individual: male and white. Anchored in archival research and guided by a feminist ethic of care, his work seeks to provide insight into the ways in which human progress has been utilized to create absent referents (Carol J. Adams) of animals that are no longer alive, contributing to current debates concerned with human exceptionalism.