The Pagan Decadent Challenge to Victorian Speciesism
Dennis Denisoff

In 1973, Richard Ryder coined the term “speciesism” to describe the process of designating different rights to living beings according to their species. Since then, the term has continued to function within the animal rights movement as a conceptual tool for reframing humans’ attitudes of superiority in relation to other species. The dominant philosophical debates around the politics of animal ethics – initiated by theorists such as Ryder, Peter Singer, and Tom Regan – have focussed on establishing the similarities between humans and other animals and clarifying which of these similarities, if any, support animal rights. In my talk, I wish to destabilize the implicit anthropomorphism of this current methodology by turning to a crucial historical complement to the dominant animal rights movements in nineteenth-century Britain. Looking at representations of paganism in decadent literature and art, I contend that the decadents used such elements as the maenads, Pan, and imagined animal perspectives not only to challenge anthropocentrism and speciesism, but to undermine the humanist premise that could be found even in the animal rights movements themselves.