This is a holding page for the creative essay presented at the AAWP conference, Wednesday 27 November.
Abstract: What is it like to be a cow? Contrary to Robert Louis Stevensen’s “The Cow”, a cow does not wander calm fields, peacefully offering up cream for people to drink. Cows are subject to the rule of the human empire. They and their families are bred to support the empire with labour and with their disassembled bodies, as in Les Murray’s “The Cows on Killing Day”. Their children are either murdered or raised to continue the system of their oppression. Such treatment can only foment rebellion, but what would the bovine rebellion be like? Writing the rebellion from the inside, through bovine subjectivity, pushes toward the need for bovine poetics, a poesis embodied in the cow and emergent through their senses and “communicative zones” (Moe, Zoopoetics), which are not always their mouths. This paper explores fiction and poetry on or through the cow and argues that writing through bovine subjectivity calls for an empathetic leap into the body of the cow. This leap however cannot erase the tension inherent in taking the cow as a subject, which allows for a reclamation of bovine subjectivity while simultaneously retaining their position as subject to human consumption.