“IF I BROKE DOWN THE WALL OF FLESH”: Blurring the Human/Animal Distinction in the Slaughterhouse through Ivano Ferrari’s Poetry

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If it is true that the slaughterhouse is an institution that remains “hidden in plain sight’, as argued by Timothy Pachirat, this chapter proposes to enter it through the words of Italian poet Ivano Ferrari, author of the collection Slaughterhouse, written during his employment as a worker in Mantua’s slaughterhouse. The chapter employs the framework of the indistinction approach to the animal question as theorized by Matthew Calarco to analyze Ferrari’s poems and highlight their antispeciesist potential. Through this lens, first, Ferrari’s writings reveal how violence is differentially and intersectionally distributed onto human (workers) and non-human (animals) bodies inside the slaughterhouse. Second, with a complementary move, attention is given to those poems unveiling trajectories that suspend the perpetuation of the human/animal distinction and speak of shocking reductions, of violent experiences dismantling human privilege and giving awareness that humans too are flesh and meat. Ferrari is labeled “poet of indistinction”, and it is claimed that his poems sing both the dimension of vulnerability with its ambivalence between unchecked violence and gateway for a non-anthropocentric ethos of care and compassion, and the dimension of potentiality, manifested in animal resistance and animal word, which enable a zoopoétique reading of his work.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationViolence and Harm in the Animal Industrial Complex : Human-Animal Entanglements
EditorsGwen Hunnicutt, Richard Twine, Kenneth Mentor
Number of pages13
PublisherTaylor and Francis Inc.
Publication date12.11.2024
Pages236-248
ISBN (print)9781032579771
ISBN (electronic)9781040254370
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 12.11.2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 selection and editorial matter, Gwen Hunnicutt, Richard Twine and Kenneth Mentor; individual chapters, the contributors.

DOI