On page 36, Derrida writes, “More precisely, of sexual differences, that is to say, what for the most part is kept under wraps in almost all of the grand philosophical-type treatises on the animality of the animal. This opening, on the threshold of sexual differences, was the very track left by the hedgehog and the agrammatically masculine ant, but more than that, in the most recent text, where it is precisely a matter of nakedness.”

I found these lines fairly provocative, perhaps in part because Derrida’s work has a strange relationship to gender and feminist theory. Merging these ideas with the commoditisation of animals (more importantly the atomization of animal bodies into animal flesh, fur, bone, and so on), to what degree does capitalism (and the commodity of animal reproduction, if not reproductive labor) render the animality of the animal either more or less human, or perhaps more or less gendered?