Surrealist Leonora Carrington’s proclamation that she was born a ‘female human animal’ (Carrington 1998a: 372) situates her as an artist and author who identified as a hybrid, bringing her into conversation with a posthuman and feminist politics. In her essay ‘What is a Woman?’ (1970), Carrington intimates that her human–animal positioning is not mere aesthetic choice but rather an ontological state, a political manoeuvre that disrupts humanism’s normative models of the Vitruvian white man. It signposts a call to action aimed at women in order to forge an alliance with the natural world against what she perceives as patriarchal ‘Masters’ (Carrington 1998a: 375).

Carrington’s remedy for an imminent apocalypse induced by a tyrannical male anthropos demands adopting a multiplicity of perspectives and ontologies for her proposed hybrid and ‘humanoid female’ (Carrington 1998a: 373):

Carrington’s call to action provokes both a politics of transgression and a rebellion in her attack upon the ‘destructive lies’ of ‘Our Masters’. Moreover, she catalyses a dynamic that requires alliance and sympoiesis, where she suggests that women and ‘organic life’ are kin that must come together to ensure ‘the survival of life’. As I argue in this chapter, the politics exhibited in ‘What is a Woman?’ aptly introduce the hybrid human–animal themes of Carrington’s short stories – laying the ground for characters who embody such transgressions and alliances in a manner that anticipates a posthuman approach. Crucially, I posit that Carrington employs the human–animal hybrid figure as a feminist catalyst for change: one which transgresses and subverts the ‘passive’ position that she critiques in a manner that demonstrates a strategy in confronting ecological crisis, whilst at the same time forging a feminist politics that contributes to contemporary environmental debates.