Keeping Animals in Their Gendered Place: The Spatialization of Human-Animal Relations in the Laboratory Animal House, Circa 1947 to Present

This chapter takes a feminist intersectional animal studies approach to explore the historical formation of the spatial arrangements of the housing of nonhuman animals in the laboratory. I argue that the discursive and material production of these spaces is inherently gendered. I draw on the feminist geography of Doreen Massey to show how gendered socio-spatial relations render nonhuman animals and women as inferior to the masculine domain of rational science. This inferiority rests on dualistic assumptions of space and time, which allow for the continued exploitation of nonhuman animals.