ENCLOSING NATURE: BORDERS, BOUNDARIES AND TRANSGRESSIONS - Making Sense of Nature - page 162

politely known as zoophilia, with which it's not entirely synonymous). 9 This
will allow us to explore how making sharp distinctions between nature and
its antonyms is central to the formation of personal and group identities,
and also attempts to undo or breach those distinctions. It will allow us to
talk again about 'human nature' (as we did in Chapter 4) , and illustrate the
way that attempts to achieve semantic hygiene are integral to the process of
moral regulation - a process in which references to nature and its collateral
terms have long been (and remain) very important.
The conventional, highly negative attitude towards humans having a
physical relationship with animals is graphical testament to how central the
division between 'us' (people) and 'them' (non-humans) is in Western soci-
ety. As a boundary transgressing act, bestial behaviour makes obvious the
role that this and allied distinctions play in governing our self-understanding
and our actions. In using the term 'governing', I mean to emphasise the
normative and practical force of these distinctions - their capacity, when
reproduced by authoritative epistemic workers, to normalise thought and
behaviour. Though commonly portrayed as 'unnatural' (not to mention
immoral and disgusting), bestiality is better understood as unconventional -
as something that both reveals and challenges the norms of social discourse
and practice. It's one of many fronts in a semantic struggle over what it
means to be properly 'human' - a 'fit person', a 'decent individual' (see
Box 5.3 ).

BOX 5.3

MORAL REGULATION AND SEMANTIC BORDER CONTROLS

If you think about it for a minute, there are a great many examples of
how references to nature and its collateral terms are used by some to
govern 'proper' thought, identity and behaviour. Such references also
often secrete particular conceptions of what is 'beautiful', 'desirable',
'perverse', 'ugly' or 'disgusting' that are taken to be normal (and are
thus normative). Consider the following:

•

The well-known critic Francis Fukuyama (2002) expressed concern
that biotechnology, by permitting society to manipulate a person's
genetic offspring and their own body, will create a 'post-human
future'. The risk, Fukuyama argued, is that by interfering with 'nat-
ural evolution' and life's 'genetic lottery', a new 'underclass' may
appear of the sort depicted in the sci-fi films Gattaca (1997) and The
Island (2005). This would be a group of people identified biomed-
ically as having 'faulty' genes, even if this was not apparent to the
naked eye (i.e. phenotypically).