Dances with Deer: The Deadly Entanglements of Becoming Deer in Jægersborg Dyrehave

Abstract: In the small Danish nature park of Jægersborg Dyrehave, there live over two thousand deer. During their lives, they become encounters for visitors, managers of nature, targets to be culled, meat to be eaten, and more. In this thesis, I explore what it means to be deer in Dyrehaven. By applying a posthumanist iteration of performativity, I argue that we need to consider ‘deering’ as a verb, an intra-active choreography of which deer, humans and matter are part. Deering, then, should be considered a continuous process of becoming-with. Through analysis of a bricolage of participant observations, interviews, conversations and netnographic research, I reveal how the becomings of the deer in Dyrehaven are always influenced by their relation to death, the materiality of their surroundings, and the power relations in which they are implicated. Additionally, I consider the limits to becoming deer, arguing that being alive or even having a body are not requirements for deering to be possible. Contributions of my work include empirical insights into deer-human-matter entanglements, a theoretical exploration of nonhuman performativity, and a consideration of the limits of the framework of agential realism.