Pit Bull Promises

Abstract

This article addresses the problems and promises arising from the intersections among racialization, intimacy, and kinship in contemporary discourses about pit bulls. Beginning with an examination of how contemporary pit bull advocacy efforts draw from and contribute to racisms as well as white, heteronormative kinship formations, I turn to ethnographic fieldwork conducted in an animal shelter to describe alternative and promisingly queer affective attachments rooted in how the dogs themselves relate to both humans and other dogs. The “intimacy without relatedness” and “relatedness without kinship” involved in shelter dogs' worlds help me articulate how the provisional contacts and inhuman intimacies of an animal shelter can contribute to a larger queer and inhuman politics.