About Pigs and Girls: A Posthuman Reading of Bianca Pitzorno’s Children’s Novel Polissena del Porcello (1993)

This article examines the enduring presence of nonhuman animals in Bianca Pitzorno's children's literature, arguing that her portrayal of girlhood requires a posthuman reading to be fully understood. Drawing on Donna Haraway's concept of 'companion species', it investigates the relationships between girls and nonhuman animals in the novel Polissena del Porcello (1993), showing how these interspecies connections challenge patriarchal, anthropocentric, and adultocentric power structures. Through the transformative potential of 'becoming posthuman' (Braidotti 2021) within a shared 'contact zone' (Haraway 2008), these relationships foster alternative forms of agency and relationality while promoting ecological awareness. The undoing of gender, enabled by such cooperation, reimagines girlhood as a site of resistance against human exceptionalism and aetonormative surveillance. Ultimately, the article highlights the subversive potential of Pitzorno's ecofeminist poetics and proposes new methodological avenues for studying girlhood in her work.