Whose Consent Matters? Scientific Experimentation and The Monkey Problem of St. Kitts

Bri Matusovsky
Humanities and Social Sciences
UC San Francisco

Green monkeys (Chlorocebus Sabaeus) are considered invasive pests on the island of St. Kitts, where they were introduced as a by-product of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The increasing frequency of encounters between humans and monkeys, and related violence experienced by both humans and monkeys, combine to create what is known on St. Kitts as “the monkey problem.” I conducted 13 months of ethnographic research on St. Kitts at sites of human-monkey encounters, including two drug-testing facilities that use animal subjects. My project explores the social and cultural milieu of experimentation on monkey research subjects in scientific laboratories, where interpersonal sexual violence occurs at high rates among scientists and other employees. I also track the language of consent and non-consent, interpersonal relations, and sterilization and culling across scientific experimentation in the laboratory—where medical procedures are used to enact control on wild monkey populations.

My research builds on theories from posthumanism and animal studies, alongside their critique by Caribbean postcolonial theory and medical anthropology, forcefully engaging with issues at the crossroads of species(-ism), race(-ism), and transnational science. My dissertation offers a novel theorization of consent across nature, culture, and science, grounded in conversations across the anthropology of science, queer feminist theory, and Caribbean studies.