French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (working in relation and opposition to Freudian psychoanalysis in the revolutionary late 1960s) theorized the process of Becoming-Animal as a “line of flight,” a fugitive escape from oppressive social norms.  Upturning the enlightenment-era denigration of animals as dumb beasts, these thinkers value the radical otherness of non-human creatures with their different relationships to language, time, and our green-blue-brown planet spinning through space.  What’s so good about being human anyway, trapped in these social matrices we didn’t choose? Becomings-animal happen not when we pretend to be beasts, but when we – even momentarily – slip away from discursive formations of identity that frame us as human. In ecstasy, in rage, in terror, in trauma, in resistance – we nest and burrow into animal otherness, evading capture and categorization. Summarizing Deleuze, George Bruns says, “Becoming Animal is a movement in which a subject no longer occupies a realm of stability but rather is folded into a nomadic mode of existence in which one is always an anomaly, that is, inaccessible to any form of definition.”  

Enter Sloppy Bonnie –  an anomaly choosing a nomadic mode of existence, bent towards instability in the key of SQUAWK. Sloppy Bonnie may have been born an American woman but she’s at the wheel careening towards something else. What’s so good about being a woman, after all, when most of the attention is focused on just a few parts? Neither heroine nor villain, both victim and victimizer, Bonnie isn’t a character to emulate, but it’s hard not to respect her survival instinct. Like the T-Rex manifests today in its birdlike descendants, Bonnie hangs on by shapeshifting, trading one moment’s trapped ecstatic desperation for the next slip-and-slide out of town.   

There’s no ethical position for women in a misogynist patriarchy. Virgin or whore, mother or sister, queer or queen, hardheaded careerist or sacrificial caregiver, we’re set up to fail and the setup is millennia in the making, shaped by state violence, racial imaginaries, religious hangovers and colonial gender myths that coat our fleshy parts like sticky sweet barbecue sauce.  So many of our performances of womanhood aren’t chosen but compelled by fear of death and desperate hope for survival.  So many of our attempts at flight end up taking others down with us: crash, burn, sizzle. Pull away the crispy skin from the flesh and what’s underneath? Not woman or man or some neutral human unmarked by gender.  Not heaven or hell or nature or nurture.  It’s weirder and wilder than we think: being alive, being human, and being always-already animal at our tenderest sweetest places closest to the bone.