‘I am on Guard’: The Making of Race, Gender and Affect in Human-Dog Relations in South Africa

Abstract

This article will analyse human-dog relations in the post-apartheid White South African suburbs to show how they operate in the production of racial and gendered difference. The analysis draws primarily on my experience as a White woman growing up in the suburbs and my work as a dog walker, as well as interviews with the owners of two dog day-cares in Cape Town. Given this locatedness, the article tracks the affective and biopolitical effects of human-dog relationality to consider how they work in the socio-spatial structuring of the White suburbs. To begin, it uses Donna Haraway’s understanding of relation across difference in interspecies ‘becoming’, augmenting this with Harlan Weaver and Sarah Ahmed’s respective theorisations of the work of affect between bodies. It outlines White discourses of fear around crime and security and describes the spatial organisation of the suburb, which informs dogs’ socialisation/enculturation with White people, and their hostility towards Black people. As such, suburban dogs become part of a racialised species kinship, in which they are cast as White people’s companions, while protecting private property and White bodies. Drawing on Ahmed and Fanon’s work on phenomenology, the paper considers how dogs reproduce the historico-racial schema so that Black subjects are made to feel vulnerable in White space. Finally, it looks at gendered racialised narratives of threat and the construction of White women as objects of protection in relation to the imagined threat of Black men. By analysing these modes of relation, this paper hopes to show how interconnectedness yields an ethical responsibility towards others, across differences of race and species.