| Chapter 1: | An Introduction to Polarity, Ambiguity, and Kinship |
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their speci-al differences, constituting a crossing of the human-animal and speci-al borders that is crucial to the practice of science dealing with the ways in which animals can contribute to human health. Because they are included in the laboratory context on the basis of their mammalian similarity with humans and because their bodies are operated upon in the stead of human bodies to create knowledge that is applicable to human bodies, rats and mice appear in the laboratory as human homologues—human biokin (i.e., mice and rats and humans can be regarded as closely related at the level of their biology) and genekin (i.e, scientists considered rats and mice and people to be closely considered in terms of gene homology). Humans and animals are blurred in the establishment of pan-mammalian genes and biological collinearity in the lab, but the establishment of animals and humans as genekin and biokin produces another division, between animate beings and inanimate equipment.
Speci-al ratness and mouseness are subsumed under the generic position of mammalian membership and genetic and biological relatedness to diminish the human-animal division as well as to yield a hierarchy of bodies wherein one mammalian embodiment is in the service of another. The subsumption of speci-ality and the marking of devalued mammalian being is accomplished in the making of the analytic animal, in which all elements of speci-ality are removed from the way the animal is understood in the laboratory. As much as mammalian membership is the bridge by which rodents and humans are connected (in their similar bodies, their equivalent DNA structures, their gene similarity, and the ease with which rodents might be engrafted with human substance to yield humanised animals), it is equally the ground upon which rodents’ difference from humans is hierarchically presented. Acampora (2006) argued that the location of rats and mice as nonspeci-al, purely mammalian equipment in the laboratory indicates the firm maintenance of the human-animal divide. The location of the mouse or rat in the position of mammalian equipment means that the mouse is understood not as a ‘mouse’ but as a mammalian biological unit—genetic equipment.
Mammalian membership not only situates rats and mice as human kin and as mammalian units of equipment, but it also qualifies them for