Speculative Taxidermy

INTRODUCTION19

taxonomic ordering, taxidermy functioned as the still and silent token of
the exotic and marvelous life-forms inhabiting faraway lands—lands
culturally admired and treasured as much as they were mystified and
misunderstood.^19 On the surface, Victorian audiences, like those visit-
ing Deyrolle, were fascinated by the unusual and colorful bodies of ex-
otic animals that metonymically pinned the visual mapping of the far
expanse of land incorporated into the British Empire.^20 Therefore, to-
day, as Poliquin argues, taxidermy is understood by some as the emblem
of the very values that drove the imperialist spirit: “dominion, courage,
vigor, undaunted determination, triumph over the ‘untamed,’ and even-
tual victory” of patriarchal values.^21
Further problematizing Poliquin’s view with an emphasis on the new
world, Pauline Wakeham argues that

if taxidermy denotes a material practice—the dissection, hollowing

out, and restuffing of a corpse’s epidermal shell—its connotative specters

revive fantasies of white male supremacy in “the sporting crucible,” of

colonial mastery over nature, and of the conquest of time and mortality

through the preservation of the semblance of life in death. In this con-

text, taxidermy functions as a powerful nodal point in a matrix of racial

and species discourses, narratives of disappearance and extinction, and

tropes of aboriginality that have been crucial to the maintenance of co-

lonial power in Canada and the United States from the beginning of the

twentieth century to the present.^22

Similarly, Mark Simpson’s 1999 essay titled “Immaculate Trophies”^23 pro-
poses a reading of wildlife conservation in western Canada in which
taxidermy has played a conspicuous embodying role—a practice linked
to the discourses of health in which “the protection of nature assures the
fitness of white culture” and of which, ultimately, taxidermy represents
the paradox affirming racial recreation.^24 In The Empire of Nature, John
MacKenzie further exposes the connections between social class, gender,
race, and big-game hunting that regularly perpetrated the search for per-
fect museum specimens.^25 Most notably, Donna Haraway’s influential
essay “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden” firmly
positions taxidermy as the quintessential tool of patriarchal identity
construction in the United States. In her analysis of the technical and