Criminals as Animals from Shakespeare to Lombroso

I Am Nobody Here: Institutional Humanism and the Discourse of Disposability in the Lives of Criminalized Refugee Youth in Canada

“…Criminalized people are commonly denied rights that others enjoy and this is accepted because of their dehumanized status. Tracing the persistent image of criminals as “beasts” from the 16th century until today, Olson (2014) underlines how describing a perpetrator as “savage” or as a “beast” suggests they are instinct-driven, bestial, and inherently vicious. According to 19th-century Lombrosian criminology, it could be proven empirically that certain criminals resembled vicious animals and savage people.…”

“…The concept of the criminal was thus constructed in literature and law as a category of subhuman existence that could be treated viciously and against which “Man’s” ethical identity could be defined. Media headlines such as “Hunted Beast: Rapist Sought after Attack” and images from Abu Ghraib Prison of an American soldier leading a naked Iraqi man on a leash demonstrate that the equation of criminals with nonhuman animals and the treatment of prisoners as beasts are not behaviors of the past (Olson, 2014). Further, in her study of the “politics of caging,” Morin (2015) argues that caged bodies in zoos and prisons are seen as wild, dangerous bodies that require caging and enclosure; inside the cage prowls a brute—a coarse, cruel, violent, dangerous beast that lacks self-control.…”

“…Critical scholars have shown how racialized people, children, poor people, criminals, refugees, and persons with disability are dehumanized through social and legal processes that construct them as savage, irrational, and lacking in self-restraint (e.g., Canton, 2010; Mawani & Sealy, 2010; Mitchell & Snyder, 2003; Naffine, 2012; Olson, 2014; Thobani, 2007). Since the denial of humanity to non-Western peoples was a central aspect of colonization, most scholars see the struggle to assert a shared humanity as a crucial aspect of anti-colonial and anti-racist discourse (e.g., Razack, 2008; Wynter, 2003).…”

“Like a Lamb Ripe for Slaughter”: Female Body, Law and “Domestic” Animals in Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites

“…On the subject of the animalisation of a human being before the law, the novel, therefore, does not merely examine the tradition of discursively associating criminals with ''animals'' and ''beasts'' (see Olson 2013); it draws clear parallels between the "mundane violence of everyday life'' (Wolfe 2012:10) directed at animals, ''domestic'' and otherwise, and the violence of the law that intersect on the convicted woman's body. From the moment the law touches herand it only ever touches her to punish -Agnes is still, or even more so, a body, but not necessarily a human being, despite her capacity for (poetic) language 3 : she becomes "too embodied but not quite human enough'' (Glover and Kaplan 2009:82).…”

Shakespeare and Animal Studies

“…Most of those metaphors and references are devoted to the use of animals to express aspects of human identity, a role animals played throughout the middle ages, and which also featured prominently in classical texts dear to early modern readers Greta Olson. finds Richard III compared extensively to animals like dogs, boars, toads, and spiders in order to cast him as a verminous criminal (“Richard III's Criminal Animalistic Body”; Criminals as Animals ), while Karen Raber investigates Richard's “boarishness” to discover the array of associations – biblical, classical, historical – that animal taps into in casting Richard as his nation's nemesis (“The Tusked Hog”).…”