Animal bodies and embodied visuality

This essay explores the relationship between touching and seeing through the lens of phenomenological experience, framed by the concepts of embodied visuality, haptic and optical images. It argues for the usefulness of the approach for thinking critically about human-animal relationships and the affective mediated experience of other subjectivities. With a focus on ‘touch’ it uses the 2017 Netflix film Okja to consider the sensual relationship between ‘subjective matter’ and the onscreen animal body. It discusses the different types of touch present in Okja and the processes of identification in terms of primary engagement with the sense and sensibility of materiality.