Piet & Soya the Cow
A Queer Interspecies Encounter
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.28007Keywords:
animal drag, care ethics, human–cow relations, intersex embodiment, interspecies performance, queer and trans* studies, vegan feminismAbstract
This essay weaves together artistic and scholarly modes of inquiry to propose a queer ethics of care, love, and attunement across species boundaries. It is grounded in a collaborative artistic research project that explores diverse perspectives on human-cow relations, beginning from the premise that queer, nonbinary, and trans* perspectives can offer distinct and generative strategies for confronting and disrupting the gendered structures of oppression in industrial animal production. Combining photography, film, theory, and performative writing, this essay documents a live encounter between Piet — an intersex bovine living in a meadow in the south of the Netherlands — and Soya the Cow, the vegan queer-feminist drag persona of Swiss performance artist Daniel Hellmann. Staged by the authors as a one-day interspecies performance in the spring of 2024, and filmed by the Utrecht-based transgender advocacy and filmmaking collective De Transketeers, this encounter offers a speculative exploration of what this essay calls a trans*species ethics of care—one that attends to embodied experiences and modes of being that resist conventional classifications of gender and sexual variance, not only among humans but across species differences. It models more responsive and egalitarian ways of relating to the more-than-human beings with whom we share a multispecies world, while foregrounding how gender and animality are co-constituted within, and against, anthropocentric norms.
Downloads
References
Adams, Carol J. The Pornography of Meat: New and Updated Edition. Bloomsbury, 2020.
Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. Continuum, 1990.
Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Arlander, Annette, Bruce Barton, Melanie Dreyer-Lude, and Ben Spatz, eds. Performance as Research: Knowledge, Methods, Impact. Routledge, 2017.
Bagemihl, Bruce. Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
Beech, Lucy, and Tamar Novick. “Sex Panic and the Productive Infertility of the Freemartin.” Technology and Culture 64, no. 4 (2023): 1071–92. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2023.a910995.
Bohlen, Jillian, Stephanie Butcher, and Lucy Ray. Evaluating Conformation and Growth of Commercial Dairy Heifers. Bulletin B1573. University of Georgia Cooperative Extension, March 13, 2025. https://extension.uga.edu/publications/detail.html?number=B1573.
Briggs, Laura. Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption. Duke University Press, 2012.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004.
Butler, Judith. Who’s Afraid of Gender? Allen Lane, 2024.
Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Duke University Press, 2012.
Cornips, Leonie. “The Animal Turn in Postcolonial Linguistics: The Interspecies Greeting of the Dairy Cow.” Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics 6 (2022): 209–31. https://iacpl.net/download/cornips-jopol-62022/.
Cornips, Leonie, and Louis van den Hengel. “Place-Making by Cows in an Intensive Dairy Farm: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Nonhuman Animal Agency.” In Animals in Our Midst: The Challenges of Co-Existing with Animals in the Anthropocene, edited by Berenice Bovenkerk and Jozef Keulartz, 177–201. Springer, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63523-7_11.
Cornips, Leonie, and Harry Wels. “Changing Bodily Practices in Interspecies Communities with Dairy Cows and White Lions: Methodological Challenges in Co-Constructing Meaning.” Ethnography. Published ahead of print, November 4, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381251383291.
Coulter, Kendra. “Beyond Human to Humane: A Multispecies Analysis of Care Work, Its Repression, and Its Potential.” Studies in Social Justice 10, no. 2 (2016): 199–219. https://doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v10i2.1350.
CRV. “Good Confirmation: Healthy and Productive Life.” Accessed March 16, 2026. https://crv4all.com/en/service/confirmation-and-linear-traits.
Donovan, Josephine. “Feminism and the Treatment of Animals: From Care to Dialogue.” Signs 31, no. 2 (2006): 305–29. https://doi.org/10.1086/491750.
Donovan, Josephine, and Carol J. Adams, eds. Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals. Continuum, 1996.
Donovan, Josephine, and Carol J. Adams, eds. The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader. Columbia University Press, 2007.
Fisher, Berenice, and Joan C. Tronto. “Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring.” In Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives, edited by Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson, 35–62. State University of New York Press, 1990.
Gaard, Greta. “Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies.” American Quarterly 65, no. 3 (2013): 595–618. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2013.0040.
Halberstam, Jack. Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability. University of California Press, 2018.
Hamington, Maurice. Revolutionary Care: Commitment and Ethos. Routledge, 2024.
Haraway, Donna J. “Foreword: Companion Species, Mis-Recognition, and Queer Worlding.” In Queering the Non/Human, edited by Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird, xxiii–xxvi. Routledge, 2016.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Hayward, Eva. “Transecology?” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 11, no. 4 (2024): 542–46. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-11421174.
Hayward, Eva, and Jami Weinstein. “Introduction: Tranimalities in the Age of Trans* Life.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 2, no. 2 (2015): 195–208. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-2867446.
Hengel, Louis van den. “Queer Ecologies of Love: Ecosexuality and the Politics of Nonhuman Desire.” In The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sexuality, and Culture, edited by Emma Rees, 330–45. Routledge, 2022.
Hird, Myra J. “Animal Trans.” In Queering the Non/Human, edited by Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird, 227–47. Routledge, 2016.
Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York University Press, 2020.
Joosten, Ties. “The ‘By-Product’ of the Dairy Industry: Three Calves Slaughtered per Minute.” Follow the Money, September 24, 2022. https://www.ftm.eu/articles/by-products-dairy-industry-dead-calves.
Ko, Aph, and Syl Ko. Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters. Lantern Books, 2017.
McCartney, Nicola. “Animal Drag: The Critical and Conscious Performance of Animality.” Humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 259–87. https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.12928.
Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, and Bruce Erickson. “Introduction: A Genealogy of Queer Ecologies.” In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, 1–47. Indiana University Press, 2010.
Noske, Barbara. Humans and Other Animals: Beyond the Boundaries of Anthropology. Pluto Press, 1989.
Padula, A. M. “The Freemartin Syndrome: An Update.” Animal Reproduction Science 87, nos. 1–2 (2005): 93–109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anireprosci.2004.09.008.
Phelan, Peggy. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. Routledge, 1997.
Puig de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Quinn, Emelia. “Notes on Vegan Camp.” PMLA 135, no. 5 (2020): 914–30. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2020.135.5.914
Roughgarden, Joan. Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People. University of California Press, 2004.
Saito, Yuriko. Aesthetics of Care: Practice in Everyday Life. Bloomsbury, 2022.
Seymour, Nicole. “Alligator Earrings and the Fishhook in the Face: Tragicomedy, Transcorporeality, and Animal Drag.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 2, no. 2 (2015): 261–79. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-2867561.
Seymour, Nicole. Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
Seymour, Nicole. “Queer Ecology.” In Companion to Environmental Studies, edited by Noel Castree, Mike Hulme, and James D. Proctor, 448–53. Routledge, 2018.
Seymour, Nicole. “Toward an Irreverent Ecocriticism.” Journal of Ecocriticism 4, no. 2 (2012): 56–71. https://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/joe/article/view/392.
Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp.’” Partisan Review 31, no. 4 (1964): 515–30.
Steinbock, Eliza, Marianna Szczygielska, and Anthony Clair Wagner. “Introduction: Thinking Linking.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 22, no. 2 (2017): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2017.1322801.
Stryker, Susan, and Paisley Currah. “General Editors’ Introduction.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 2, no. 2 (2015): 189–94. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-2867437.
Szczygielska, Marianna. “Hyenas and Hormones: Transpecies Encounters and the Traffic in Humanimals.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 22, no. 2 (2017): 61–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2017.1322820.
Thompson, James. Care Aesthetics: For Artful Care and Careful Art. Routledge, 2023.
Tronto, Joan C. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. Routledge, 1993.
Weil, Abraham. “Trans*versal Animacies and the Mattering of Black Trans* Political Life.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 22, no. 2 (2017): 191–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2017.1322837.
Williams, Joshua. “Going Ape: Simian Feminism and Transspecies Drag.” Performance Research 21, no. 5 (2016): 68–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2016.1223452.
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Louis van den Hengel, Leonie Cornips, Daniel Hellmann, a.k.a. Soya the Cow (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
How to Cite
