Depictions
In 2007, Los Angeles artist Micha Cárdenas created Becoming Dragon, a "mixed-reality performance" in which a virtual reality experience was created to allow a person to completely experience life through the eyes of a dragon avatar in the virtual world, Second Life. After the performance, Cárdenas reported that "some of these people call themselves Otherkin, and feel deeply, truly, painfully that they were born as the wrong species, that they are foxes, dragons and horses. I would refer to them as transspecies."
Jean Douturd's short novel Une Tête de Chien features a spaniel-headed human protagonist described by Giffney and Herd (2008) as suffering from species dysphoria.
The protagonist of Julie Gonzalez's Wings (2005), a young adult novel, believes that he has trapped wings under his skin that wish to escape. He changes his name to "Icarus" to reflect this feeling.
In Gulliver’s Travels, the traveler meets the Houyhnhnms, a society of talking horses. Gulliver comes to admire these wise horses, while feeling repulsed by the local feral humans called Yahoos. This stirs feelings of misanthropy in Gulliver. He describes his conversion into a horse by means of emulating their culture, although he remains physically human.
Read more about this topic: Species Dysphoria
Famous quotes containing the word depictions:
“Surely, of all creatures we eat, we are most brutal to snails. Helix optera is dug out of the earth where he has been peacefully enjoying his summer sleep, cracked like an egg, and eaten raw, presumably alive. Or boiled in oil. Or roasted in the hot ashes of a wood fire.... If God is a snail, Bosch’s depictions of Hell are going to look like a vicarage tea-party.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)