Abstract
Elaborating a concept of “species panic” and its intrinsic relation to interspecies desire, this article couples the concerns of animal studies and posthumanism with those of queer and transgender theory, synthesizing these positions through their shared commitment to unstable frameworks of gender, sexuality, and embodied identity. It argues that humans, androids, and electric and “genuine” animals do not exist in isolation in Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? On the contrary, they occupy shifting positions on a series of spectrums, where human, animal, and machine bleed into one another. If one accepts the novel's invitation to think the androids as a species, the plot of Do Androids Dream becomes a dramatization of interspecies desire. After arguing that interspecies desire is, in multiple senses, queer and that Dick's androids serve as exemplars of trans embodiment and offer models for reconceiving bodily existence, the author concludes that Dick's portrayal of species-transgressive sexual explorations is not a priori radical.
