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Katja M. Guenther

Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies
University of California, Riverside, USA

WELCOME!

My core areas of research, writing, and activism are feminist politics, human exploitation of non-human animals, and justice projects of various kinds, especially multispecies justice, disability justice, and gender justice. I am interested in understanding how and why inequalities of gender, race, class, dis/ability, and species reproduce so reliably, and what we can do to change these inequalities. I seek to develop scholarship that is useful because it challenges existing ideas, improves our understanding of important social processes, and/or imagines new possibilities. I believe that creating another world is possible. I hold a PhD in Sociology and work within interdisciplinary feminist, queer, and critical frameworks. I enjoy writing and teaching about feminist politics and movements (especially at the grassroots level), women's organizing, social inequalities of race, class, and gender, the state, feminist animal studies, disability studies, and death studies.

I am currently working on two projects. The first is Contested Cats: Free-Roaming Felines in the (Re)making of Los Angeles, a book which examines the intersections of power, inequality, and place, in the context of human relationships with two groups of cats in LA: pumas (aka mountain lions) and community cats (aka feral domestic cats). Building on feminist animal studies, queer ecologies, urban ethnography, and dis/ability studies, the book explores how structures of patriarchy, race, class, dis/ability, and anthroparchy influence human-animal entanglements and the meaning of those entanglements for place, or the feeling of identity, belonging, and character ascribed to a bounded area.

The second book, Beyond Animal Shelters, draws on my expertise on animal sheltering to argue that reform efforts do not and cannot work in the animal sheltering industry and that we need to radically reimagine how companion animals without a primary human guardian are cared for. I gratefully utilize frameworks from the prison and police abolition movements to show why the origins of US animal shelters in the problematic pound model—which focused on policing the animals of poor people—has set the sheltering industry on a particular path that reforms cannot reverse. I argue instead for thinking beyond animal sheltering and envisioning new alternatives to relationships between humans and companion animals.

My most recent completed larger project was When Animals Die: Examining Justifications, Envisioning Justice, co-edited with Julian Keenan. The volume contains leading-edge work by a group of scholars from diverse vantage points who consider issues surrounding animal death, including how animal death is interconnected with racism, colonialism, capitalism, and other systems of inequality. I am grateful to have contributed a chapter examining issues of life and death in the practices and beliefs of people involved in sterilizing (aka spaying and neutering) free-roaming cats.

My book, The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals, was published by Stanford University Press and was the 2021 recipient of the Distinguished Book Award given by the American Sociological Association's Section on Animals & Society. The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals takes readers inside one of the country's highest intake animal shelters. Over the course of three years of ethnographic research, I met thousands of animals, and saw the dramatic variance in the narratives assigned them and, ultimately, their chances for survival. The inequalities in how impounded animals are treated and whether they live or die are powerfully linked to human ideas about race, class, gender, ability, and species. By decoding the language and behaviors of shelter staff and volunteers, I explore internal hierarchies, breed discrimination, and importantly, instances of resistance and agency. Current efforts to help shelter animals largely fail to address the underlying causes of companion animal homelessness, such as poverty and precarity. The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals offers a radical reconceptualization of the problem of shelter confinement and death, demanding a new way of thinking about the relationship between humans and companion animals and forcing us to rethink our relationships with the animals we claim as "best friends."

My first book, Making Their Place: Feminism After Socialism in Eastern Germany (Stanford University Press, 2010) examines how gender and opportunities for feminist resistance vary across places and scales of governance. The book illuminates how feminist movements in two cities in eastern (formerly socialist) Germany, Erfurt and Rostock, utilized local understandings of politics and gender to enhance their possibilities for meaningful social change. The book chronicles the specific reasons why place matters, the importance of localized experiences during the socialist era, and how history shapes contemporary identities, cultures, and politics.

I have also written extensively on secular activism, particularly within the New Atheist Movement, a social movement focused on reducing the social stigma associated with atheism and irreligion and on enforcing the separation of church and state.

I am the co-editor, with Marta Maria Maldonado, of a special issue of Feminist Formations (2019) on critical feminist exits, or the relocation of critical feminist scholars across departments, institutions, and disciplines as an outcome of discrimination, bullying, harassment, and/or hostile work environment.

My scholarly work has been published in journals such as Disability Studies Quarterly, Ethnic & Racial Studies, Gender & Society, Mobilization, Politics & Gender, Signs, Social Problems, Sociological Forum, and Women's Studies International Forum, among others.

You can learn more about my publications (and access links to most of them) under the RESEARCH tab on this webpage.

Photo description: A middle-aged white woman with short reddish hair and glasses stands with her arms crossed at her stomach. She is wearing a dark sweater and trousers.