"Disability activists and scholars in disability studies have long been uncomfortable with comparisons between animals and people with disabilities and chronic or terminal illnesses. Given the long history of dehumanizing and animalizing people with disabilities, disability advocacy includes reclaiming the humanity and basic human rights of disabled people. It can therefore be difficult to be confronted with the suggestion that animals are often treated similarly to the ways that people with disabilities have been treated. Recent work in disability studies has nonetheless called for greater engagement with animal studies as a field. But this book argues that certain forms of animal advocacy can lead to greater discomfort than others, including veganism and abolitionist animal rights. The book argues instead for a more nuanced and historically and culturally situated approach, staying with the trouble of what the author calls disanimality, the feeling of discomfort that comes from overly simplistic comparisons. Other forms of animal studies-drawing upon the fields of posthumanism, biopolitics, and animality studies-have better potential for more complex and productive inquiries. While theoretical questions and implications are foregrounded in each chapter, examples are drawn from contemporary U.

S. and Anglophone novels, films, and memoirs, each suggesting particular situated sites of disanimality. The book ultimately reveals that closer attention to the ways that disability, illness, and animality meet in these contexts can point toward new ways of developing posthumanist disability, illness, and animal studies, as well as more potential for coalitions between advocacy movements"--.