There have been many lists of related works by folk like Orion Scribner, House of Chimeras, Who-is-Page, and the editors of the Wildpath Library. We feel that many of these works lack accessibility, and often there is a need for a more clear resource that not only has a catalog of these works, but also has them archived and available to any curious nonhuman who wishes to read them!
Our community is beginning to leave its stages of infancy - whether it’s the explosion of kin-culture and MOGAI on late 2010s Tumblr, or the rapidly increasing therian population, nonhumans are beginning to take up visible space in the Queer conscious as well as a more prevalent role in shaping our own lives, communities, spaces, and politics.
The Library feels that it is up to fellow nonhumans to determine who we will be as a community. We provide resources, not only for internal research, but for external research that can be done on the grounds of the nonhuman subjects. We also aim to use this resource to promote more research and community projects, such that we might thrive in the emergent spaces we have begun to create.
The most reliable way to contact the librarians is via an email directed to libraryofmedusa@gmail.com, though we also have an account on Bluesky under @libraryofmedusa. If you have any concerns, questions, or contributions we strongly request that you reach out! This project is small and we aim to be community-led. Our current team is small and will certainly overlook things our users might notice!
The Library is a project of dubious legality. Though we expect that it would not be hard to determine who runs the project, currently we aim to retain anonymity.
Nonhumans have often been used as a “gotcha” for the right against the relatively more visible transgender community. This is unfortunate, both for us as nonhumans and as transgender folk, but as a library and archive we feel it is important to catalog and preserve these offensive pieces despite our disagreement with them and their contents.
With that being said -
Disclaimer:Much of the content in the Non-Academic Publications section comes from right-wing journalists and pundits, and uses nonhumans as a rhetorical tool. It is often offensive, harmful, and sometimes outright violent. If you are looking for genuinely educational material on nonhumanity, we advise staying in the Academic or Community Publications sections.
We prefer to lean on the side of over-preservation rather than under-preservation. Thus, any mention of nonhuman culture would entitle an article to go in the collection. To be more specific - any article that refers to alterhuman/otherkin/therian communities whose genealogy goes back to groups such as The Elf Queen’s Daughters or Alt.Horror.Werewolves will definitely hold a place within the collection.
We know, however, that nonhumanity did not begin, end, or remain within these groups. We are an expansive field, and The Library is still attempting to parse the bounds where its collection might end. Additionally, though not our primary goal, we would like to make a greater effort to archive nonhuman beliefs and experiences from prior to the contemporary conceptualization of nonhumanity.
One of the challenges we at the Library have encountered in this search is that many of these experiences are critically underrepresented in research. Many relevant beliefs and experiences are those of indigenous or otherwise non-Western spirituality, and are thus disproportionately neglected by academia - or in the worst cases, very little of the cultural practices survive in the first place. Though Native American beliefs in totem animals or the Igbo idea of an Ogbanje would likely be good fits for the library, these connections are something that we in the nonhuman community are actively developing - and bibliographies on these topics are hard to come by.
TL;DR - We’re working on it, slowly! It’s important to us, but our priorities lie in the communities that call themselves nonhuman in the modern era. If you feel there’s a topic we ought to include more material on, reach out and let us know!