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Beasts of Burden

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2018 American Book Award WinnerA beautifully written, deeply provocative inquiry into the intersection of animal and disability liberation—and the debut of an important new social criticHow much o...
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  • 07 March 2017
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  • Author platform: Taylor is well known in disability studies, arts, and activist circles and an experienced public speaker, with appearances at UC Berkeley, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture, California College for the Arts, the Chicago Cultural Center, and the New School, among others. She has been interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered and appeared in a popular segment with Judith Butler in her sister Astra’s documentary film Examined Life. She has received a Sacatar Foundation Fellowship, VSA’s Driving Force award, an Eisner Award, two Wynn Newhouse Awards, and grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and Culture & Animals Foundation. Her art has been exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution and the Berkeley Art Museum.
  • Cross-discipline audiences: The book will attract both animal rights and disability rights activists and scholars but can also be read as a book-length essay, appealing to readers of Eula Biss, Roxane Gay, and Leslie Jamison interested in personal yet intellectual and morally engaged writing.
  • Blurbs: We already have blurbs from Rebecca Solnit, who called the book "a startling, readable, sometimes hilarious inquiry into the human condition" and Carol J. Adams, who praises the book's "thoroughly original, brilliant narrative."
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    Price: $26.99
    Pages: 272
    Publisher: The New Press
    Imprint: The New Press
    Publication Date: 07 March 2017
    ISBN: 9781620971291
    Format: eBook
    BISACs: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Disability, NATURE / Animal Rights, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Disability, LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Subjects & Themes / Animals & Nature, Disability: social aspects, Animals and society / Animal rights - issues and debates
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    Praise for Beasts of Burden:
    2018 American Book Award Winner

    "Judith Butler meets St. Francis of Assisi."
    The New Yorker

    "I am not the same animal I was before I read this book."
    Alison Kafer, author of Feminist, Queer, Crip

    "Finally, finally someone has come along to undo all the damage Peter Singer has done. Beasts of Burden is a brave and brilliant book."
    Michael Bérubé, author of Life as We Know It and The Secret Life of Stories

    "Beasts of Burden is a game-changer."
    Marc Bekoff, author of Rewilding Our Hearts and The Animals' AgendaFeminist, Queer, Crip

    "This is a profound and wondrous book. Sunaura Taylor challenges us to rethink what is normal, what is natural, how to measure the value of a life—and how to imagine a world in which both human and nonhuman animals, resplendent in their differences and multiplicity, might flourish."
    Claire Jean Kim, author of Dangerous Crossings

    "A powerful blend of sometimes poignant, sometimes funny, personal stories and sharp, passionate writing."
    Lori Gruen, author of Entangled Empathy and Ethics and Animals

    "Sunaura Taylor will shake up your categories, turn your world inside-out, and tell you a lot of fascinating and important things you didn't know yet, about your own body and the bodies of others, human and nonhuman, under an inhumane regime. A startling, readable, sometimes hilarious inquiry into the human condition from a whole new direction, this book might be very, very important, a book to stand alongside The Body in Pain and The Human Condition."
    Rebecca Solnit

    "Sunaura Taylor has written an amazing book that acts both as an intervention into widely held beliefs about disability and animals and an invitation to reimagine ourselves. Her thoroughly original, brilliant narrative transformed my imagination."
    Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat
    Sunaura Taylor is an artist and writer based in New York City. She has written for AlterNet, American Quarterly, BOMB, the Monthly Review, Qui Parle, and Yes! Magazine. She has contributed to the books Ecofeminism, Defiant Daughters, Occupy!, Stay Solid, and Infinite City. Taylor and Judith Butler’s conversation is featured in the film Examined Life and the book of the same name, published by The New Press.

    Prologue: Chicken Truck

    Part One: Epiphanies
    1: Strange but True
    2: What Is Disability?
    3: Animal Crips

    Part Two: Cripping Animal Ethics
    4: The Chimp Who Spoke
    5: Ableism and Animals
    6: What Is an Animal?
    7: The Chimp Who Remembered

    Part Three: I Am an Animal
    8: Walking Like a Monkey
    9: Animal Insults
    10: Claiming Animal

    Part Four: All Natural!
    11: Freak of Nature
    12: All Animals Are Equal (But Some Are More
    Equal Than Others)
    13: Toward a New Table Fellowship
    14: Romancing the Meat
    15: Meat: A Natural Disaster

    Part Five: Interdependence
    16: A Conflict of Needs
    17: Domesticated, Dependent, and Dignified
    18: The Service Dog

    Acknowledgments

    Notes