A fowl politics of urban dwelling. Or, Ybor City’s republic of noise

Abstract

This essay traces how Ybor City’s feral chickens are rhetorically and materially situated in urban space, and how Tampa’s Ybor City emerges as a “sanctuary city” for feral creatures. More specifically, I map how chicken advocates and chickens take part in constructing what an urban space should look, smell, and sound like, and whose “voices” are included in shaping the neighborhood. Michel de Certeau helps guide me to consider how chickens and their advocates attempt to foster a feral republic of noise, a place in which chicken feet and rooster crows frustrate anthropocentric constructions of place. “Chicken rhetorics” interrupt desires to create and sustain clean boundaries between urban and rural, guest and host, chicken and human, purity and dirt, political actor and agricultural product. “Fowl” assemblages perform “pedestrian speech acts that remix what it means to dwell in a multi-species urban space.”

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