Scholarly Works

compiled by Arethinn

This page collects scholarly papers and theses/dissertations. Keep in mind that not only are these written by outsiders to the community, but that the lenses of academic disciplines and the need to attempt to back up a thesis can often lead to assertions and conclusions that may leave actual otherkin scratching their heads.

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Danielle Kirby has written several papers on otherkin.

Another frequent writer on otherkin is Joseph Laycock. See also this list of his works as of February 2012, compiled by Merticus.

The Spiritual Tolkien Milieu by Markus Altena Davidsen - Doctoral thesis at Leiden University, 2014. From the abstract:

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the organisation and development of the spiritual Tolkien milieu, a largely online-situated network of individuals and groups that draw on J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary mythology for spiritual inspiration. ... In short, with Tolkien religion as a case the dissertation aims to uncover the semiotic structures and processes involved in the construction and maintenance of fiction-based religion, and the social structures that support the plausibility of such religion.

Actual Otherkin may of course find this framing of their life experiences as some kind of weird offshoot of human religion to be eyebrow-raising, to say the least. Here are my own marginalia on Davidsen's paper.

On Being Non-Human: Otherkin Identification and Virtual Space by Devin Proctor - Doctoral dissertation at The George Washington University, 2019. From the abstract:

This dissertation examines digitally-mediated identity and community construction through the lens of the Otherkin, a group of several thousand people who identify as other-than-human. ... I argue the Otherkin characterize a larger shift in body-identification that is underway in many industrialized countries, away from bounded, biologically defined bodies and toward a more plastic, negotiable type of embodiment I am calling open-bodied identification, evidenced in growing numbers of people identifying as trans*, nonbinary, fluid, and neurodiverse. ...

The Otherkin experience an incongruence, i.e. “misfit” in the relationship between their corporeal bodies and their Selves, so they turn to Internet technologies to facilitate an “alignment” between the two. This dissertation traces Otherkin engagement with the techno-virtuality afforded by the Internet ... troubling conventional notions about our relationships with the virtual, our understandings of the Self, and what it means to be a human. Analyzing the Otherkin use of these technologies sheds light on the ways in which we all work to understand ourselves through the animist virtuality of the Internet.

Again, actual Otherkin might find themselves making a variety of faces as they read these approximately 375 pages... because really, this still frames everything as "well, obviously this can only be a weird human experience, because that's all there is," despite internal claims to take Otherkin on our own terms. Here are my own marginalia on Proctor's paper.

Last updated: 6/04/2021