Episode 40: Fluency in Fear
with author Amie Souza Reilly
Amy is joined by Amie Souza Reilly, author of Human/Animal, for an eye-opening discussion about stalking and safety, about how patriarchy thrives on women's fears and about what we actually have to be afraid of.
Our Guest
Amie Souza Reilly
Amie Souza Reilly is a visual artist and multigenre writer from Connecticut. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Wigleaf, HAD, The Chestnut Review, The Atticus Review, Catapult, SmokeLong Quarterly, Barren, Pidgeonholes and elsewhere. She holds an MA in English Literature from Fordham University and an MFA from Fairfield University, and is the Writer-in-Residence and Director of Writing Studies at Sacred Heart University. She is the author ofHuman/Animal and works as the Director of Writing Studies at Sacred Heart University.
Amy Allebest: Have you ever felt stared at? Have you ever been followed? Have you ever felt unsafe in your own neighborhood or even in your own home? Today we're talking about fear, and specifically about stalking. As the feminist scholar Pumla Gqola once wrote, “Patriarchy runs on fear. Fear of being an outsider, fear of being brutalized, fear of being too much, too inadequate, too vocal, or too different.” I'd be willing to bet that many of you listening right now have felt these types of fear and the social control that flows from them. I know I have. To help us explore this relationship between patriarchy and fear, as well as violence, colonialism, white supremacy, and more, we're going to turn to the work of a fabulous essayist, Amie Souza Reilly, who wrote a book about her experience living through 943 days of stalking and aggression, all taking place in and around her own house. The book is titled Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays. It's a beautifully crafted, haunting account of living through years of harassment, of constant pressure, and routines of violation. But it's also a book of reflections, a dissection of language, a beautifully illustrated questioning of our culture, and ultimately an indictment of the fear which patriarchy thrives on. I'm so excited to be discussing this book today with the author, Amie Souza Reilly. Welcome, Amie!
Amie Souza Reilly: Amy, thank you so much for having me.
AA: Amie Souza Reilly is a visual artist and multi-genre writer from Connecticut. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Wigleaf, HAD, The Chestnut Review, The Atticus Review, Catapult, SmokeLong Quarterly, Barren, Pidgeonholes and elsewhere. She holds an MA in English Literature from Fordham University and an MFA from Fairfield University, and is the Writer-in-Residence and Director of Writing Studies at Sacred Heart University. Again, Amie, thanks for being here. I'm wondering if you can start us off by introducing yourself to us a little bit more personally. Tell us where you're from, where you grew up, what brought you to your writing, and eventually you can get into the subject of the book, how you first ended up living in the situation where the book unfolds.
ASR: Sure, absolutely. I'm a lifelong Connecticut resident. I mostly grew up here in a really small town in what's known as “the Valley”, so an inland portion of Connecticut. And even though we stayed mostly in one town, we moved around a ton. I lived in that same town in like five or six different houses. Then I moved to the town where the book’s events take place after my undergrad, so in the early 2000s, and have lived there ever since. And the house where all of those events take place is the house that I bought after I got married in 2014. It's right in the downtown section, and we ended up there because my husband and I were both commuting into New York City, so it was walkable to the train, and that was our big selling point. It's a really charming, little old house. It was really close to where my son would eventually go to school, and it seemed really idyllic at the time.
AA: Perfect. Thank you so much. As we've already mentioned, the story that you share in the book is a story about stalking, about being stalked. Let's start with some basic definitions. What constitutes stalking? And then bring us into the book and explain the situation that you found yourself in.
ASR: Yeah, I think “stalking” is one of those words that we kind of throw around a lot. But I think what it really boils down to for me is thinking through ideas about consent. Stalking would just be following in a way that lets the person who you are following know that you're trying to scare them or intimidate them. There's certainly nothing accidental about it. I think it's putting somebody else in a position where there's a power imbalance, and that even if a boundary is established, or even a kind of understood social contract is breached in some way that isn't consensual, that would move us from just a coincidence of following to a more violent understanding of stalking.
AA: Yeah, that's a great definition. And before we get to the actual situation that you found yourself in, maybe we'll talk about fear a little bit more generally. Near the beginning of the book, you write, “I'm a woman who often feels afraid around men. My fear is gut-deep, learned through culture and history, and also from my mother.” Let's unpack that first, that kind of underlying fear that maybe predates this ongoing event that you write about in the book. If you could tell us more about this fear of men from culture and history, and also from your mother, how are these lessons being taught to you throughout your life?
ASR: I love this question because it was making me think a lot about childhood experiences that I hadn't really thought about too deeply when all of this was happening with our neighbors. I certainly wasn't thinking about, like, “Well, when I grew up–” But thinking about this right now made me remember all of the “stranger danger” kinds of conversations that we had growing up. I was born in 1979, so definitely a young child in the ‘80s, but I have really clear, visceral memories of kids on milk cartons. I looked it up recently, and there was this PSA, like a short little commercial that was put out by the American Medical Association with little girls standing on a sidewalk in a beautiful suburban neighborhood, and this big car rolls up and this man rolls down the window and is like, “Come in, I have candy.” And I remember that being part of watching Saturday cartoons. And my mom and my friends’ moms were all the same way. If I were to walk down the street to a friend's house, I had to call when I got there so she knew I was safe. We didn't go anywhere alone. We did not answer the phone if our parents weren’t home, or if we did answer the phone, we didn't tell them that our parents weren't home, up until I was in my late teens. There's a really great article by Paul Crenshaw and Salon from a couple years ago where he talks about children of the ‘80s and “stranger danger” and what it was like to grow up in that period. And, I mean, that hasn't stopped. People younger than me I think would have those kinds of thoughts, but it's also about mass shootings and people driving through crowds, and I think we just sort of exist in this culture of fear. So when I was trying to consider the ways I understood fear, it kind of came back to those ideas from way back, like the America's Most Wanted TV shows that we watched as kids, like, something bad could happen.
AA: Yeah, me too. I'm the same. I'm basically the same age as you are, and I recall the same things. And I know that some people our age had more of a free-range childhood of playing night games and running around and going home when the streetlights came on, or whatever. There were people like that, but my upbringing was much more like yours. My mom needed to know where I was at every moment. She was very, very, very afraid of us being kidnapped. And I'll add a gender piece. I don't know if this resonates for you too, but I remember always being on alert, like, “I could be kidnapped any second.” And it was definitely always by men. And in fact, I remember being told, “If you feel like you're in danger, look for a woman who looks like she's a mom.” So the message was that women are safe and men are unsafe. That's definitely something that I absorbed through my childhood.
ASR: Yeah, I remember that too. And it seems so natural and normal.
AA: Well, and it's kind of backed up by data– not kind of. It is backed up by data, right?
ASR: Yeah. And I remember thinking, you know, being a 12, 13, 14-year-old teenager and thinking my mom was overreacting, but when I was eight, a guy drove up to our bus stop pantsless.
AA: Oh no.
ASR: So the thing that we were afraid of did happen. And I think I was older before I put those two things together, but she wasn't even able to protect us. And all of these things that our moms did to try to protect us from didn't work. I mean, my sister was with me, and we were told, “always go somewhere with your sister,” but we were still vulnerable kids. I don't know, there's a strange tension, a sort of nostalgia that I hear people say about going out and playing until the streetlights come on, but I don't think it was that easy. There was that fear in there. And as much as I think now, like, I don't want my son to look back and think “My mom was always afraid,” but also maybe you should be. Things do happen.
AA: Yeah, it’s a tricky balance to know how to parent your kids to be cautious and safe, but not unduly terrified all the time. So after writing about your mom and your childhood, you write, “I anticipate feeling afraid, or at least wary, in meeting rooms and in bars and on elevators and in parking garages, because these are places where I have been shouted at, leered at, groped, and followed.” I'm wondering if you'd be willing to tell us about those experiences, maybe getting older in your life, and sadly, I'm sure many listeners will be able to relate to those.
ASR: I mean, I don't want to delve deeply into some myriad of traumas and all the pieces on your show, but I'm interested in this sort of understanding that people are going to relate to because it is ubiquitous, I think, in some ways. But fear and panic of what is possible, that doesn't go away. There needs to be a certain awareness everywhere that we go, I think. There's this sort of inherent understanding that non-men have about the physical presence or the potential of violence that is there when there's a man in the room. It’s something that isn't just taught to us by our mothers, but is also a real thing. And to answer this question with an anecdote that I think might get me closer to what I'm thinking through, I just did a reading of this book at this amazing coffeehouse in New Haven, and it was a very small group of folks that I already knew. It was a very cool way to do a reading where it felt more like a conversation. So it was a mix of people I know from work and from teaching and from different art spaces, and it was moderated by a really dear friend of mine who I met during grad school who's a man, and he was asking me questions about violence and art, questions that were natural and organic to come up when reading this. But all of a sudden there was this clear gap. And this woman in the audience who is a wonderful, very close friend of mine was like, “The thing is, I think that women would read this book and they don't need anything else explained. And that men, unbeknownst to them, have never really had to think about what happens when you walk into a room.” And the whole room got really silent for a minute and then all of a sudden the women in the room all kind of nodded and said, “This whole book just makes sense to me and puts words to experience.” And my friend, the moderator, and a couple other men who were there were like, “Well, I'm not sure. I still don't think I understand it fully.”
I think there's just enough of an electricity in the room. I don't think that men are necessarily aware of our understanding that violence could always happen, because if they don't think that they have the possibility to bring that violence, then why would that be something that crosses their mind? So it was really interesting to see that unfold in real time and understand that if a colleague comes up to me in the copy room and I don't know he's there right away, I always jump. And countless times it's happened and the man will laugh, and my heart is racing, even though it's somebody I've known for decades. And I think that that's that kind of ingrained fear that is part of this whole patriarchal culture that we're so entrenched in.
AA: Yeah. Thanks for sharing that anecdote. I do think so many listeners will relate to that, and I've had conversations, I mean, it took years with my husband for us both to realize that gap. We would have conversations and just kind of miss each other, and it took years for me to realize that I didn't even know what I was carrying around, let alone that I would need to explain it to him. Because he had no idea, just absolutely oblivious. And that's part of the privilege of being a man walking around. You don't have to think about it and you don't realize anybody else does. Thanks for walking us through that.
“men, unbeknownst to them, have never really had to think about what happens when you walk into a room...”
ASR: That's so true.
AA: Now let's have you bring us into the book and explain the situation that you found yourself in. How did you end up in the scenario that you write about, and at what point did you realize that boundaries were being crossed?
ASR: So, my husband and I got married – it was my second marriage – and we both lived in different parts of the same town, and we knew we wanted to start over and start fresh. So we looked at a bunch of houses, and this one was just, you know, like when you meet a person and they make you feel good. Like, “Oh, this is so charming and sweet.” So we bought the house, we started to move in, and we were bringing our things in. And looking back now, I'm sure anybody who goes through any kind of long drawn-out traumatic event says, “Looking back, I should have known better.” But looking back, we should have known better. Right after we signed the papers for our house, the real estate agent was like, “You should probably know that the guys who live next door don't really live there. They own the house, but they also live somewhere else. But when they're around, they're a little weird, but they're mostly harmless.” And we were like, “Okay. Neighbors are strange.” And then when we met the people who we had bought the house from, they wanted to meet for drinks, which I thought was just cool and neighborly, but looking back now, it was their way of warning us. They said something similar to what the real estate agent said, which was like, “You might want to keep your distance from them. They're a little bit odd.” And then once we moved in, the woman next door was like, “Has anybody filled you in on those guys next door?” And the little hairs on the back of my neck started to stand up. But, I don't know, I kind of really at that point believed in the sort of unspoken social codes of living in the suburbs.
Then we knew we were in trouble when one of the brothers followed my husband on his morning commute. They were on the same train and he was sitting behind him and he was talking about us on his phone. And even at the time we were like, “Thousands of people take the train, this could just be a coincidence and he’s just a weird dude who's talking about his new neighbors.” And then they were in our backyard. We didn't have a fence when we first moved in, and I looked out the back windows and they were just standing there with their lawnmower, and then we found out that they had been rifling through our trash. And that's when we were like, “This is definitely more than just a little strange but mostly harmless. Something's up here.” But we were in. We couldn't get out.
AA: Mm-hmm. As much of the story as you're willing to talk about, and I would suggest that readers buy the book and read it, so you don't need to give away all the spoilers, but if you're willing to share some of the story, it's a really instructive and fascinating and kind of horrifying story.
ASR: Okay, so we moved in. My son was six, so he was going into first grade. I had just gotten into graduate school, my husband also worked in the city, so he and I were both commuting on different trains from Connecticut into Manhattan. We were kind of starting over. And after the trash can and the lawn mowing started to happen, they would stand– We shared a driveway, which was like one big paved space. So whenever we were in the driveway, if they were home, they would start to come out of their house and stand in the driveway. And there would be a lot of sort of subtle ways for them to let us know that they were looking us up or knew information about us that we hadn't told them. Like, I would be leaving and one of them would use my middle name. Which, I mean, it's public record, but it's just not something that you do. A lot of the uncanny, uneasy feeling was just like, this is just not something that people do, but it's not inherently illegal or wrong, or even outwardly violent. My mom did a lot of babysitting for us back then, so they learned my mom's schedule and then they would start calling her by name, which again, if you do enough Google research, you can find out who my mom is, but what a strange thing. Because we are all creatures of habit, they learned our schedule fairly quickly so they knew what days I was going to school and would show up at the times that I would leave so that they would pull in as I was leaving. They said a lot of really strange things like, “We knew you were nice people because we saw the way you decorated your old house,” which was like, we didn't live together, so I wasn't even sure whose house they had looked into, but both of us were selling houses, so it could have just been an open house thing. And I'm also guilty of going into my neighbor's houses when there's an open house and the house is for sale, because I'm nosy too.
So there was a lot of room for interpretation and a lot of me trying to convince myself that I was overreacting. Until I wasn't. Then there was a moment where I was leaving with my son in the car, and I was in a rush and I didn't want to deal so I didn't say hello when they started shouting their “hello”s. So one of them came around and when we got back he trapped me in my car and he wouldn't let me open the door and wouldn't let us out. He was shouting about what a terrible mother I was and what a rude person I was and, you know, how could anybody like me raise a child? And that was the moment where I was like, “I have no idea how we're going to get out of this, but we need to get out of this situation. It's gone way beyond just strange.”
AA: Yeah. In the book you also quote Pumla Gqola saying that “fluency in fear, and making us police ourselves, is how women are kept in check.” I think that is such an important idea, so I'd love for you to help unpack that for us. How is fear used to control women, and who or what is creating that fear?
ASR: This is such a good book. It's called Fear Factory, it's excellent, everybody should read it. I don't think it's just women, but I do think that women do kind of universally fear this, and I think it's that fear is used to control people in all kinds of spaces. And I think in order to kind of unpack what she's saying, it's really useful to think about power. Because if women are afraid of men, then men can maintain or regulate the power that they already have. In this situation with the neighbors, keeping me afraid of them let them do whatever they wanted. They walked through our yard, they continued to terrorize other neighbors, they continued to shout because they knew I was afraid and I wasn't going to do anything about it.
But I think about all of the spaces where we can be afraid and how that maintains some sort of level of, you know, primarily white straight men holding power. It happens in all kinds of different ways. If you are afraid that you're going to lose your job, then you're going to do whatever it is that whoever's above you wants, to keep you in check at work. And, of course, there are all kinds of ways that this overlaps with race and class and the ways that if you are afraid, you will stay in line and do what it is that those people in power expect. I was just reading this really interesting article about the return to– and maybe this is something since we're at the same age, I remember in the ‘90s when there was so much pressure on us to be so skinny and Britney Spears was considered chubby, like all of this body stuff and how that's coming back.
AA: Yep.
ASR: And how that's connected to fear and power. And if the media says that women need to be skinny again, then it shows a sort of masculine dominance over our bodies. I think it's just one of many tools of the oppressor to keep people out of these powerful spaces.
AA: Yeah, for sure. And that leads me to another question, which we kind of hit on before, of how we should teach our kids and that balance of wanting them to be safe and cautious but not scaring them. So if we take this in a gendered direction, we need to specifically teach girls to be wary and be able to keep themselves safe. But the book has me asking the question, does teaching girls to be afraid of men actually make us safer? Or how can we teach girls and women to be safe without reinforcing patriarchal fear and control? Because, like in the example of these brothers that were kind of psychologically terrorizing you, they wanted you to be scared, right? So then if we are teaching girls and women to be scared of men, does that just reinforce what they're wanting and reinforce that patriarchal structure?
ASR: I think it does, and then we're stuck in that same balance of like, “Be careful, but don't limit yourself.” And maybe this is because I'm the mom of a son, but I think that if we're going to settle on these sort of gender essential ideas of bringing up our children, I think it comes down to consent. And maybe this isn't an either/or but more like a both/and, we need to teach consent from the very beginning and not wait until kids are teenagers and the sex talk happens. But consent is something that I think should be taught right away. All touching needs to be asked. You have to get an “okay” first. If somebody tells you, “I don't like that,” “I don't like when you touch my hair,” then that needs to be something that children are allowed and encouraged to do. And then the adults need to follow through and listen.
And I think that if we can think through less about teaching via these gender roles and more just the sort of basics of how much space are we taking up and how can we listen and take care of each other in a consensual way, then, I mean, it's not going to go away. Certainly this all sounds like a utopia that is impossible. But my son is 17 now, so I watch him and wonder, “What is his life like outside of my house, and what is he thinking about as he moves through the world?” And if there's anything I hope he has it’s this understanding that there's a respect that is necessary regardless of gender. And I feel exhausted, a little bit, of the “How are we going to protect our girls? when I'm really like, “Can't we just teach our boys better?” I think that that might be more what I would hope would happen. How can I make sure my son knows that when he walks into a room full of women, he has a potential for violence, even though I know that he's a good kid and that that's not something that I think would happen. I need him to know that the girls in his classroom might be afraid. I want him to know that. If somebody says, “I don't like that,” then that's the end of that conversation. And it's not just about bodies, but language. If somebody says, “Please don't call me that,” then it's not hard to not call somebody that, whatever that might be. I think maybe we're allowing boys to move through the world with this sense of power and privilege, and I think that maybe we should show them that that exists really early on.
AA: I totally agree. I think just the awareness, like we said, so that they're not getting to be full adults and married to a woman before they realize that that's maybe how the girls around them feel. They should know that in school, just realizing the historical precedent and the physical differences so that they can be active allies instead of just like, “I don't even know how I'm affecting other people.” It’s occurring to me, too, how important it is, like you said, regardless of gender, no matter who it is, that people know how to set boundaries and say what they're really feeling and be able to feel empowered in situations where maybe if they start to feel afraid because there's a physical threat, no matter who it is, they have the tools to stand up for themselves so that they can recognize the power dynamic and call it out. Just empowering everyone to ask for what they need and to never accidentally or purposely harm, even psychologically, another person, right? Just teaching everybody the tools.
ASR: Exactly.
AA: I'm wondering about another question, too. I'm thinking as somebody else reading the book, I'm envisioning a man who's skeptical and who might say, “Well, in your specific situation, the men who were stalking you and terrorizing you, they never actually physically hurt you. They never laid hands on you, so you're overreacting, you're exaggerating.” How would you respond to those sorts of arguments? And why do you describe the brother's actions as a form of violence?
ASR: This hasn't happened yet, so I'm hoping it never happens. And I hope that if it does happen, that the version of me who this happens to has the wherewithal to just walk away and not entertain that question at all. But I am really curious, when did we decide that, first and foremost, can't we just please believe women when they say that they're scared and that fear is a tool of power, and power and violence are inextricably connected?
AA: Yep.
ASR: And why? Why does it have to physically hurt before it counts as some kind of violence? I mean, one of the things that– nobody has said this to me post-book, but we did several times try to call the police, which was such a complicated thing to do because I knew they weren't going to do anything. There wasn't anything they could do. If the police came out to our house, then the brothers were usually gone by then. But because they hadn't actually touched me, every time it was, “Well, what do you want me to do? What do you think I can do about this? They're not doing anything.” And a lot of times they would be on their property line, which is also complicated and a weird thing to think about in terms of land and division. But if they were shouting at us from their side, then there really was nothing wrong except that everything was wrong.
I think it's really complicated to think about what constitutes violence. But maybe going back to the conversation we just had about consent, I'm saying, “This doesn't feel great and I am afraid, and I shouldn't feel that way at home.” Should be enough, but it never is. Everybody's looking for some kind of proof. But if we look at any kind of statistics about domestic violence, all of the non-visual or non-physical things that lead up to that, if we could listen then, we could stop the physical part from ever happening.
“How can I make sure my son knows that when he walks into a room full of women, he has a potential for violence?”
AA: Yeah, a hundred percent. I'm just thinking back to my own life and times that I was bullied and psychologically tormented. It is so damaging. That fear is very, very real, whether or not the person ever– it's different if the person crosses a physical boundary, but even just that, terrorizing you mentally, is terribly traumatizing. But you're right, it's just so, so hard. If there's no bruise, if there's no physical mark, then people don't take it seriously. It's so upsetting.
ASR: Well, I think that when you're the one who's afraid, I'm thinking about this more, but my physical reaction is the same whether I feel like somebody's going to actually punch me in the mouth or just say horrible things to me. It's the same kind of sweaty, shaky feeling. So our physical reaction is the same, even if theirs is not.
AA: Yeah, for sure. And that leads me to another question, because you mentioned the incident, I think it was the first one where your husband was followed on the train and they were stalking and terrorizing your husband as well. But the effect was really different, and you call it gender-based violence in the book. The violences were gender-based violences. Can you talk about that a little bit more, the link of fear and violence in a patriarchal society and how it was gender-based when your husband was experiencing it also?
ASR: Yeah. If we're thinking about patriarchal structures, you can't remove the gender part of that. Maybe there's a way to look at or examine all violence as it relates to gender, but I think it's, I mean, I don't want to say “it's so interesting” because it's also just awful, but they followed my husband on the train, and he thought it was strange for sure. He called me from the office and he was like, “Wes was behind me on the train and this is what he said.” And I remember asking him later, “Were you scared?” And he was like, “No.” Which is so interesting, because it shows his male privilege. But then later on we were trying to get a restraining order, because it seemed like the only way that we could make anything happen, even though it was just a piece of paper and we were going to end up in the same place. But it would've shown that we had done something to get this behavior to stop.
So we put security cameras in, which was wildly expensive when we did it. And I was ethically opposed to watching my neighbors, but also terrified that something bad was going to happen. So we installed these security cameras on our front porch, and this was pre-Ring camera on the doorbell, so they were facing our shared driveway, and it's impossible not to see them. It's like a big mechanism, a big eyeball. So when the brothers pulled up and they saw it, I was inside watching it on the TV, which is also a very strange sort of reality. And my husband pulled up and they immediately attacked him by saying, “You must think I'm very sexy,” and “You want to look at me,” turning the camera into this voyeuristic, pornographic eye, instead of a surveillance and safety feature. So their whole argument was not like, “You can't do that” or “you can't record us,” it was, “What are you doing with this footage? You must have a crush on me. You must be in love with me.”
And of course in the moment I was like, “What is happening?” But when I step back and think about it academically and try to make sense of it, that was just a way of using heteronormative gender roles against him to try to make my husband feel small. It didn't work, and he was very much like, “No, dude, you gotta stop walking around on our property.” But in any instance that they could maintain their power, they're using all of the tools that we know. They're going to attack my husband's masculinity, but they would also do it with money and class things. They knew how much money we spent on our house and they knew what we did for jobs, and they had this sort of general understanding about our finances, which again, in some ways is public record, but in another way it's just not something that you do.
AA: No, it's super weird.
ASR: Super weird. So they would say things to us about money, like how much they had offered on the house and how much more that was than what we paid for it. And that they knew all the people who lived in our house before because they'd been there for so long, and that two families ago there was a bathroom renovation and they didn't have a lot of money, so the brothers bought their sink. So they would constantly say, “We paid for that sink in your downstairs bathroom.” That sink is still there, and I think about it every day. All of the ways that they could assert some level of dominance in all of the sort of categories that we think about, the intersectionality of race and class and gender certainly happened. But now that I look back on it, I can watch when it switched, like, when are they going to use class or when are they going to use gender? What ways are they thinking about my feminine body versus my husband's masculinity? It's all power.
AA: Mm-hmm. It's all power. Exactly. And this is one thing that I love about this. It's just so brilliant, I mean, you had this really awful experience, but then you've used it as a meditation on and a way to understand all of these really interesting systems of power. And you expand it beyond where I think people would expect you to be able to even find analogs and resonance in these really brilliant ways. And one of the things that you write is, “As I spin outward to grasp at all the ways my experiences are part and parcel to the whole history of white patriarchal settler violence, it is not enough to wear a feminist lens.” So, like you said, you're not just talking about gender and feminism, you're talking about class and race, and then you mentioned white settler violence. Could you break that down for us a little bit further?
ASR: Yeah. I had such a hard time. We had to get a fence and we had to put a physical boundary between them and us, and I think that's when I first started to really consider what that meant and ownership over land. It was odd. We had to call the city and the city had to come out with all these measuring tapes and things, and there had been a fence there once before and somebody took it down and they had to okay it with all of these other neighbors and all of it. It's all made up. It's all just pretend. Somebody 150 years ago divided that land up into parcels and that somebody was most definitely a white guy who was doing it for money. And none of this land belongs to any of us. I have some piece of paper from a bank that says that now it's mine, but no it isn't. Who am I? And I think it was such a struggle for me to feel both like, “I need these dudes out of my yard,” and also, “It's not even really my yard anyway.” And if I'm going to think about them as a symptom of white settler violence, then like I'm also part of it. I'm a white woman, I have lineage that goes back to those very first British colonizers. I am part of this system that created this and also harmed by it. I still don't really know how to wrestle with that, and I don't think there should be a resolution to that, but it’s just something to constantly sit with. But their obliviousness to their sort of white male dominance, I think, makes it almost easier for me to see both, like where I am complicit in it and also harmed by it.
AA: Well, I think it's really important to see that, and a lot of people miss that. They don't ask that question. And it is kind of absurd when it's all stolen land for us to be measuring and dividing. Those are very much settler constructs, so I appreciate you bringing that to the foreground too. Okay, switching gears. This is also a book about language. And again, you go in all of these really fascinating directions. You write about the boundaries between human animals and non-human animals. And Native Americans would call them more-than-human relatives, right? And you write about names specifically. You write that “Not all acts of naming are gentle. When Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician Carl Linnaeus dubbed human animals mammals in the eighteenth century, despite the fact that only half of us can lactate, he did so in part because he was involved with a campaign to outlaw wet nursing, which in turn would keep women in the home.” I did not know that, and I thought that was so interesting. I'm wondering if you can expand on that idea a bit further and tell us more about your interest in naming, and in animal names in particular. And even your title, The Bestiary, was the framework that you were drawn to to tell the story. Can you tell us more about that?
ASR: Yeah, I learned about that in a book called Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. The whole thing is fascinating, and it made me think a lot about, like, I teach writing, so I spend my time thinking about language in lots of different ways. And something that I want my undergrads to think about is how their identity impacts the language they use. And in this Linnaeus example it's not for good, but we have this whole system of thought that we organize our whole, you know, European-American classification system on this one guy who was just involved in this kind of side gig. We all do that in various ways, and I was really interested in that because it seemed accidental. Like this was just sort of a coincidence that he was doing these two things, but now so much relies on that. And even the idea of classification was really complicated because that's just more rules that are made up. But I also understood the need to organize things.
And I think the bestiary structure made sense to me in a lot of different ways. Even as a kid, I was always really drawn to thinking about animals and drawing animals and writing about animals. And I think a lot of kids go through the “I want to be a veterinarian” phase, but I wanted to be a veterinarian in the way that made my heart hurt. I would think about it all the time. I wanted so badly to touch a deer. I just wanted to. Those were things that I thought about a lot. And then reading about Linnaeus and thinking about Linnaeus and classifications and what does that mean, and reading Derrida, thinking like, “Why do we need to name animals, and what is that about control?” And I had written about naming in a different project. I've always hated the way my name is spelled. I've always been jealous of Amys like you.
AA: Oh no!
ASR: My parents spelled my name wrong. I never got a cool vanity license plate. And it was always kind of interesting to me that I was born and then my parents were like, “We're going to call this wiggly little creature that,” and I'm stuck with it forever. I mean, there are legal ways to change it, but it’s a gift or blessing and then that's also coded in violence. If we think about enslaved women who didn't get to keep their children or who lost their names and lineage. And both of my husbands, my first husband and my second husband have the same last name.
AA: Oh, wow.
ASR: Just a strange, weird coincidence. But I remember I took my first husband's last name because I had had an estranged relationship with my father and I didn't want that name anymore. I've since kind of taken it back, but when I was thinking about that in my late twenties, I really just wanted my own name. I wanted to make something up.
AA: Instead of choosing between men. Which man's name do I have?
“What ways are they thinking about my feminine body versus my husband’s masculinity? It’s all power. ”
ASR: So there's all this kind of ownership and naming and that quickly crossed over to animals. So I think the bestiary form, it's just such a cool way of thinking through how we got here and how we use art to understand the world. The illustrations of medieval bestiaries are so weird and delightful and cross all these boundaries between reality and fantasy. And partially that's because there's no way that somebody in the hills of England would know what a zebra looked like, but also because there was nobody there to check their reality. And unicorns and mermaids were included, and that's really interesting to me. So I found that form to be kind of a comfort. But this is also a complicated structure riddled with power, but it's also a catalog. I don't know, I had so many thoughts that I needed something to organize them. So, this is inherently a catalog and then I'm creating a catalog of like, “Here's a list of ways I've been done wrong.” And that was a really long answer to what I think was a short question.
AA: No, not at all. That was great. That was great. And you expanded even further in a different direction also talking about animals in the idea of meat, right? Of feeling like meat, of being looked at like meat. And then you go into the gender politics of meat, which in particular stood out to me as a fascinating topic. I know there's a lot to cover, but could you help us broadly connect the dots of our gender politics and meat consumption?
ASR: Yeah. I read a book by Carol J. Adams called The Sexual Politics of Meat. A lot of it doesn't hold up. It definitely leans into a gender binary that we know isn't real, and it's definitely leaning into American and Western European understandings of gender and culture. But I hadn't really put together that expression of “You're gonna be dead meat.” What a weird, redundant phrase. Meat is dead. And what that meant about looking and the male gaze and horror films and what Mulvey said about gaze, and this sort of objectification of violence in bodies. I found all that really, really interesting. And there's a lot of really great Indigenous scholarship that looks at the way white people think about meat and vegetarianism, and the line is really on violence and power and control. And I was like, “There it is again.” This way that settler colonizer, white, patriarchal structure influences every aspect of culture, even what we're eating. And it served as a reminder to not stop thinking about, like, “Where did this come from, and why am I feeling this way? And where is the harm in that?”
It's a really fascinating book to read. It was so interesting to read that and hold on to her theories while reading Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which is slaughterhouses of the early twentieth century and there's a lot of gender and pregnancy and pregnancy loss and sexual assault, and that all seemed to fit in there. I reread Sarah Rose Etter’s The Book of X, which is a contemporary novel about women and bodies and disability. It's an amazing book. The women in that novel live on a meat farm where they harvest the meat from the ground so there's no killing of animals, but there's still this sort of violence of earth and the ground bleeds. I had never put those ideas together before. Now I feel like I've gone too far, I can't stop. But thinking about the never-ending ways that violence holds these things together and then we just move through the world with it.I've been doing a lot of thinking now about reading more Indigenous scholarship about hunting and meat and animals and the unity that is kind of missing from the white education that I have, and trying to retrain the way my brain is thinking about that.
AA: Mm-hmm. Yeah, really important. And this research led you to stop eating meat altogether, correct?
ASR: Yeah. I hadn't put that together with the neighbors, but that all did kind of happen at the same time. We had been reading about factory farming, like the environmental repercussions of factory farming, and all of a sudden I was like, “I don't think we can do this anymore.” But looking back and putting that on the timeline of what we were doing, we were living with the neighbors and it very much felt like there was so much violence out of our control that this was something that felt like we could do something more gentle inside our house by switching to a plant-based diet. I live in suburban Connecticut, so it was really hard for me to find ethically sourced meat that I could afford. It's really expensive and there aren't that many farms that do that out here.
AA: Yeah. Really, really interesting. And again, such important connections that you made. Well, we're coming to the end of our conversation, but before we wrap up, I'd love to turn to some action items, some suggestions that you might have for our listeners. And specifically I'm curious what forms of support were the most meaningful for you when you were going through this really terrible experience so that if people know someone who is going through something similar, they might know how to help.
ASR: Listening. I was so afraid and kind of weirdly ashamed of what we were living with, and I didn't really talk to anybody but my husband. But we created this open way of thinking through these fears and what they meant to us that was really, really supportive. I hope nobody goes through anything like this, but if you know somebody, it's just the act of listening and then believing without having to say, “I heard this story…” or “In my experience…” But just this space to talk about it openly and try to not couch the feeling, just allow the fear to exist without trying to diminish it was really important.
AA: Good. That's great advice. My last question is where can we find a copy of your book? Again, the title is Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays. I'd love to know where listeners can find it and also how people can find you, maybe social media handles or anywhere else that we can find the work that you do.
ASR: If anybody is interested, I would love, love, love if you would request it from your favorite independent bookseller or your local library. I mean, it's available on all of the major online places. The publisher is in Canada, they're Wilfrid Laurier University Press, and you could buy from them too. Please request it from all of your favorite local spaces. And I am on Bluesky @amiesouzareilly, and Amie is A-M-I-E, again because my parents spelled it wrong. Souza is S-O-U-Z-A and Reilly is R-E-I-L-L-Y. And that's where I do my posting, and then my website is the same. So there's contact information in there.
AA: Okay, awesome. And this will all be on the website in the show notes as well. Thank you so much, Amie Souza Reilly, thank you for your book and thanks for joining us today. It was just a fascinating conversation.
ASR: Thank you so much. This was fun.
