Animal metaphor : animality in discourses of nuclear war and species extinction.

This thesis analyzes the role animals play as objects of human discourse—in particular, their use as metaphor. This thesis examines two distinct animal metaphors. First, I examine the use of animal metaphor in nuclear war rhetoric to concretize a sense of catastrophe following the collapse of Mutually Assured Destruction. Second, I examine the use of animal metaphor in the cinematic context to persuade audiences to act more rapidly and aggressively on climate change. In both contexts, animal metaphors operate to animate a sense of human vulnerability such that it becomes desirable to separate oneself from a perceived animal openness to violence and catastrophe. This animating process simultaneously racializes the figure of the animal that troubles the presumed boundary between human and animal. Throughout this thesis I will complicate this often-assumed distinction between human and animal, revealing those categories to be co-constitutively and metaphorically related.