Donkeys and me: senior lecturer, researcher and activist, Dr Benedict Morrison

How does queer theory apply to donkeys?  

In a relatively short time, I’ve seen that the status of queer theory and queer academic inquiry has shifted. For a long time it was dismissed as silly, futile, rather self-indulgent, but over time it’s established itself as a really useful, productive form of inquiry. 

For me, the point of queer theory is always to make strange, to query, to interrogate, to put a question mark after whatever assumption is underpinning our knowledge.  

With critical animal studies, there are a lot of assumptions. For example, there is a rock solid binary opposition between the human and the animal. The human is somehow a thing apart, the animal ‘made good’, the animal who discovered reason and soul, and all these other extraordinary inventions that result in a politics of enormous cruelty. It allows us to dismiss other animals as mere bodies and resources that we can then exploit. 

I think that queer theory can usefully dismantle these assumptions and instead allow us to see ourselves as animals, as desiring bodies, as beings who are part of complicated kinship structures and ecosystems.  

Can you tell us more about the role of film? 

As a teacher and researcher, I’m interested in the way in which certain media, including cinema and literature, reinforce the attitudes which I would want to dismantle.

The animal is reduced to a set of crude symbolic meanings and narrative functions which reinforce the idea that they are there as a resource and have no individuality or significance in their own right. This means that we don’t need to attend to them ethically. 

But there is an increasing number of film texts and literature texts which are trying to do something else.  

Film has an interesting role to play. It’s an ideological apparatus, which we often encounter when we’re not at our most critical.

If we’re listening to a politician’s speech, we are sitting slightly forward in our seats, ready to pick it apart. When we sit down to watch a film, particularly if it feels a bit blockbuster, we relax into it. We never become totally passive, but we’re not at our most critical. And film plays an enormously significant role in shaping our political and ideological attitudes, including about ‘more than human animals’, as we refer to them in academic study. It shapes the way in which we encounter otherness. 

If we think about the number of kids’ films which contain representations of more than human animals, most children in the UK will almost certainly meet an animated donkey before they meet a donkey in the flesh.

So then the question becomes whether when they meet a donkey, they’re really meeting the donkey that stands before them or, instead, Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh or Donkey from Shrek or any of the other donkeys that they may have met on screen. 

If it’s the latter, then they are not seeing the glorious, individual, independent being that stands in front of them, but are imposing all the film representations that they’ve encountered before. They’re already programmed to discover in that donkey all the things that culturally we’ve decided the donkey represents - stubbornness, stupidity, sometimes humility. 

This is also why it makes total sense for people setting up a political lobby group to call it Led by Donkeys. Because almost all, possibly all, the donkeys that they have met have been on screens and in books.  

Film has the opportunity to do something different. If we’re looking at a painting of a donkey, there has to have been a human hand, a human eye and a human intellect interpreting what they’re seeing and translating it onto the canvas. 

In film, although there may be a human being who set up the shot and so on, to some extent it’s possible for the mechanical apparatus to take a non-human view and encounter the world in a way that is not straightforwardly about the human.  

Sounds like you’re talking about a “Donkey Gaze”? 

There is the possibility for film to explore different gazes, to represent the donkey eye as it does the human eye, if we use a certain amount of ingenuity. There are even ways, and you have to be careful so it is not exploitative, to put the camera on the back of a donkey and allow the donkey to determine what is going to be shot.

Now, obviously their approach to cinematography will be different from human cinematographers but there is a possibility of collaborating in film with other species in a way that’s much harder with most other media. There is a possibility to transform the way in which we document, learn about and engage with other species.  

What is your relationship with donkeys and how did it inform your work? 

When I was very young, my family lived with a donkey called Socrates, but I spent more of my time with horses. I have learned so much since and now my affection, admiration and respect for donkeys has become even higher. 

I was certainly very aware of the extent to which donkeys have borne cultural meanings. As well as being literal beasts of burden, they’ve borne the burden of a certain kind of representation.

It seemed like donkeys were a really interesting kind of case study for thinking about cinematic representation. Because if you say donkey, most people immediately reach for the same fairly small set of words which they think donkeys represent. 

The donkey is to some extent culturally understood as the being that isn’t quite a horse. They are the other of the other.

And, of course, as soon as you start engaging with the specificities, you realise that that narrative is just an indication of human ignorance. It has nothing to do with the realities of horses and donkeys. It’s just about a human incapacity to register the subtle brilliances of donkeys. 

You introduced a module focused on donkeys in film, how did this happen?

When devising the project, my colleague Fiona Handyside and I discussed ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ and the presentation of Jenny, the miniature donkey in the film. 

It’s a film about the complexities of friendship. The relationship between Colin Farrell’s character and Jenny is clearly a friendship: it’s not owner and possession. We both found that really remarkable and moving. It made us interested in representation of the more than human, but specifically the donkey and interspecies entanglement. So often it’s about the donkey working for the human, but in this film it was not.  

Our idea was that the students would encounter a set of theories and philosophies, followed by a series of films in which donkeys are represented, then would meet real donkeys at The Donkey Sanctuary. They could then observe and reflect on the specificity of donkeys and return to the cultural texts with a certain kind of authority on the inadequacies of the representation, the slide into stereotype and symbolism, etc. 

We had no idea whether The Donkey Sanctuary would think this was interesting, but they were immediately really excited and engaged. What was laid on for the field trip was absolutely extraordinary. It was a real dive into reading donkeys through their ear twitching, how they stand, move their tails and interact with each other. 

We were involved in the donkey-assisted activities, and had an opportunity to spend time with some of the geriatric donkeys. It was very moving being in the company of the donkeys. It was also so intellectually rewarding.  

One of the other aspects of the module is that it was learning beyond the classroom. Some students find aspects of university life stressful or anxiety-inducing and it was wonderful seeing these encounters between students, who are sometimes shy, anxious or nervous, with the donkeys. The donkeys were enormously generous in this regard. 

Our idea was very much that the donkeys would be collaborators and participants rather than objects of study.

We’re hoping now that there might be some kind of research project which emerges out of this collaboration, so we can go on working together in new and developing ways.  

Was there a moment that stuck with you?

When we were meeting the older donkeys, there was one donkey called Precious. Some of Precious’ senses may be failing, so he walks up and greets people by raising his head and placing his nose next to their mouth so that he can smell their breath.

It is an amazingly intimate and vulnerable gesture, because in order to raise your head like that, you’re exposing your neck. Precious doesn’t go up to everybody and you can’t march up to Precious. You just have to wait. He did come up to me and it was an amazing sensation, sharing breath and meeting somebody whose way of reading the world is so much about the olfactory; smell, a sense that I hardly use. 

What I hope for the future of cinema is that it finds ways to take these extraordinary, sensory, thoughtful, emotional encounters with reality, which are not human, and to celebrate them.

Maybe I’m just being sentimental, but it seems to me that if somebody encounters Precious in all his vulnerability, gentleness and generosity, the idea that they could then be indifferent to the thoughtfulness, sensitivity and suffering of a donkey is inconceivable.