Piet & Soya the Cow: A Queer Interspecies Encounter

This essay weaves together artistic and scholarly modes of inquiry to propose a queer ethics of care, love, and attunement across species boundaries. It is grounded in a collaborative artistic research project that explores diverse perspectives on human-cow relations, beginning from the premise that queer, nonbinary, and trans* perspectives can offer distinct and generative strategies for confronting and disrupting the gendered structures of oppression in industrial animal production. Combining photography, film, theory, and performative writing, this essay documents a live encounter between Piet — an intersex bovine living in a meadow in the south of the Netherlands — and Soya the Cow, the vegan queer-feminist drag persona of Swiss performance artist Daniel Hellmann. Staged by the authors as a one-day interspecies performance in the spring of 2024, and filmed by the Utrecht-based transgender advocacy and filmmaking collective De Transketeers, this encounter offers a speculative exploration of what this essay calls a trans*species ethics of care—one that attends to embodied experiences and modes of being that resist conventional classifications of gender and sexual variance, not only among humans but across species differences. It models more responsive and egalitarian ways of relating to the more-than-human beings with whom we share a multispecies world, while foregrounding how gender and animality are co-constituted within, and against, anthropocentric norms.