organization, social control, conflict, and cooperation. But in the process, sociologists have overwhelmingly privileged humans in their analyses and interpretations.
As I was trained in the humanist traditions of sociology’s sub-field of symbolic interactionism, my original research studies took the human as the starting point of all methods of inquiry. I am a feminist medical sociologist who was educated in grounded theory in the early 1990s by Adele Clarke, and I have occupied this strange position of not really fitting in as a legitimate member of either the sociological or cultural studies worlds. “She’s not sociological enough,” I’ve overheard more than a few times—particularly because my work resists quantification toward overarching meta claims, rules, or laws about “society.” And at the same time, my use of methods is often suspicious to cultural studies folks who fear it is a form of nonreflexive data generation and Truth (with a capital T) claims. Since my methods act toward the world as if it exists, no matter how it is constructed, I start my projects with what I consider to be material realities. These are contested, politically, and heterogeneously represented realities, and yet they are still material realities. I have shown that honeybees die, clitorises disappear in genital anatomy textbooks, and sperm counts decline. Understanding how we co-produce the conditions of these material realities and then work to interpret them is, in part, my job.16
I came of age intellectually at the time of what some academics called the “Science Wars,” which were characterized by fervent debates about scientific truth claims and social constructionism—as well as the rise of queer theory and the influence of interdisciplinarity and, more specifically, cultural studies in social science. I learned how to become a qualitative sociologist through methodological training that rejected strict adherence to positivism or the creation of singular and universal social facts. At the same time, my empirical training demanded that I measure things by relying on vaguely positivist tools to categorize and apprehend the social world. For example, establishing categories for sexual identity for an interview questionnaire required lengthy in-class debates about the formation and rejection of certain static, singular categories or statuses—endless debates about “What is a lesbian? What is bisexual?” The solution was “self-identification,” a sort of work-around to avoid a priori categories. Yet still, when conducting the interview, the informant was asked, “What is your sexual orientation?” And when writing up the analysis of the data, informants were neatly placed in categories as if they were self-evident and transparent—measurable, real, and singular. In other words, the category of “lesbian” always became reified or real in the process of trying to make it emergent through informants’ own words.
Over the last several years, my work has shifted toward a decidedly posthumanist frame where I feel the work resonates with the intellectual project of new materialism that considers all matter (human and nonhuman, objects, nature, technologies) as having agency or the ability or potential to make action happen. The move from humanism and speciesism means that relationality is not just between human beings but between humans and animals or between horseshoe crabs with one another, the sand, the sun, the tides. In particular, I frame this book as part of the new materialist writings exemplified by the work of feminist scholars such as Karen Barad, Mel Chen, and Jane Bennett.17 These scholars’ work demonstrates the active participation of the nonhuman and human, the animate and inanimate in social life and social order. Posthumanism de-centers the human being as the foundation of all ontological inquiry, challenges the self-anointed autonomy of the human species as rational selves, and seeks to construct a multifaceted idea of what it means to become human. Feminist new materialism, a form of posthumanism, engages with the relationship of matter to social and cultural interpretations. Matter is commonly understood as something distinct from our thoughts and sacred meanings; it is commonly defined as something that occupies space and has mass. Theorists in this area explore the ontology, or essence of being, of matter as deeply consequential for how the world comes to be known and enacted.
Horseshoe crabs and I are entangled in a world of becoming; as we intraact, we make each other up. As Catch and Release argues, human and horseshoe crab bodies materialize based on our interdependent relationships—polluting resources, generating commerce, exploiting medical capacities. We are enmeshed in heterogeneous worlds of the local, urban, global, ecologic, and geologic. In my earlier book, Buzz, Mary Kosut and I discuss how honeybees and humans are entangled in a world of pesticides, global food production, urban renewal, and species disintegration.18 The human/honeybee nexus also reveals our entanglement in a toxified world of interdependence. The cultural theorist Cary Wolfe, borrowing from Haraway’s cyborgs, argues that we have become fundamentally “prosthetic creatures” with an ontology that has “coevolved with various forms of technicity and materiality, forms that are radically ‘not-human’ and yet have nevertheless made the human what it is.”19 For example, I come to matter in collaboration with the honeybees that pollinated my food and worked to shape the industrial food supply. And even if I had never apprehended a horseshoe crab, they have fertilized the land before me and changed biomedical production, just as I have circumscribed the bees and crabs lives and bodies through my enactments of being human and using resources.
The animal familiars, including horseshoe crabs, who make us what we are, companion species who have helped stabilize our bodies, and our selves, remain entangled in complex multispecies worlds.20 For those of us whose health is fostered by government and corporate apparatuses, we exist in our current form as human because horseshoe crab blood has deemed our biomedicalization safe. Quite literally, our inoculated, pharmacologically enhanced, vaccinated bodies exist in their current status through a collaborated becoming with horseshoe crabs.
Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss is often paraphrased as stating that “animals are good to think with.” Here he means that human’s interpretations of animals can offer very fruitful structures and frameworks for generating concepts and establishing larger connections between ways of thinking. Humans use animals to think with when we create metaphors and similes—“she’s as busy as a bee,” or “he’s as brave as a lion”—or when we manufacture sports mascots. More specifically, academics use animals to think with as a means of understanding sociality. In my own collaborative work with bees and even in some ways with my research on sperm, I have used these nonhuman entities to reveal meta-level analysis about contemporary masculinity and types of endangerment.21
Social theorists are not the only ones, or the first, to see the wisdom in deep engagement with animals. While attending the celebration of the work of the 96-year-old Carl N. Shuster, Jr., the world’s leading authority on North Atlantic horseshoe crabs, in June 2016, I was struck by his captivating combination of philosophical, naturalist, and artistic sensibilities while speaking about horseshoe crabs. “You want to know what’s going on with the crab, you ask it. Heck, you want to know what’s going on with the ocean, you ask a crab, too. You have to get down there with them, and just watch them and for a long time. Over a long time, you will start to know things.”22
Horseshoe crabs are good to think with. In Catch and Release I make many connections among our contemporary biomedical, geopolitical, and ecological environments while also pushing my analysis and method to show we must move beyond seeing the bee, or the sperm cell, or in this case, the horseshoe crab as merely a lens that reflects and refracts human life. Rather I argue that, not only are the crabs among us, but they are also in us (through their blood), and they are in many ways becoming us as we are becoming them. I rely on meditations on my methodological choices and fieldwork notes to illustrate this enmeshment. From both a scholarly and personal position, I muse about the ways our fates are in some ways deeply entangled, and yet the crabs reveal deep human vulnerabilities—to toxins, the climate, the ocean, and time.
Human Exploitation of Crabs
Catch and Release investigates and grapples with these questions: How do humans exploit the crabs, come to depend on them, and fret about their welfare? How is it that humans are simultaneously saviors and villains in stories about the crabs? Have the crabs met their match in humans after 480 million years, or are humans, in their speciesist ignorance, insignificant to the crabs’ geologic legacy?
As
