Article
Author: Sunaura Celeste Taylor (UC Berkeley)
Vulnerability is a paradox. It is at once described as a quality that represents real danger, a condition that no one wants to be in, while increasingly being understood as a place of resistance, power, and generative ways of being in the world. Vulnerability points towards solidarity but it is also utilized to measure inequality. This essay explores the meanings and uses of the concept of vulnerability from the author’s positionality as a disabled person and artist, informed by disability studies, multispecies justice and environmental studies. Reflecting on the author’s practice of creating weekly paintings of animals endangered by systems of extraction and exploitation, this essay explores the possibilities and risks of vulnerability. In particular, the essay considers the differences between the concepts of endangerment and vulnerability, exploring how vulnerability, when constructed as a measurement of inequality and risk, evades the key concern of what it is that makes vulnerable or that endangers. The essay ends by reflecting on one of the artist’s weekly paintings, this one of deep ocean lantern fish. Tiny and glowing, these animals have survived for thousands of years as vulnerable embodied beings, but they are now at risk from a system that endangers them.
Keywords: Vulnerability, disability, extinction, endangerment, painting
How to Cite: Taylor, S. C. (2026) “On Vulnerability: Learning from the Animals”, Animal Studies Journal. 15(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.14453/asj.2223