Reviewed by: Bad Dog: Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice by Harlan Weaver Nathaniel Otjen (bio) Harlan Weaver, Bad Dog: Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021, 240 pp. $99 cloth, $30 paper. Despite decades of labor in the environmental humanities and adjacent fields, scholar-activists working among the convergences of human groups and other species continue to find themselves explaining why the pursuit of social justice and animal wellbeing are united in common cause. Offering one of the most compelling recent analyses that demonstrates why equity for marginalized people and animals must be pursued together, Harlan Weaver's Bad Dog: Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice joins a growing collection of monographs that attend to the necessary and urgent interdisciplinary work of multispecies justice. Embracing the anti-normative and disruptive politics of queer theory to critique the normativities produced through the so-called "pit bull" breed, dog rescues, and canine cultures of the United States, Weaver challenges what he calls the "episteme of rational man," "like race" logics that compare animal abuse to human suffering in ways that erase or minimize human mistreatment, and "zero sum" logics that erase species harm by prioritizing human suffering over the hardships faced by other species. Instead, Weaver proposes modes of getting along together premised on embodiment, affect, and intimacy that he names "queer affiliations," an alternative to the "innately hopeful or promising" (p. 130), and often hetero and homonormative, constructions of "family" and "kinship." Published in the University of Washington Press's feminist technoscience series, Bad Dog will interest feminist science studies scholars, queer and trans* theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics, along with academics who practice within and adjacent to fields such as women's and gender studies, critical race studies, American studies, multispecies studies, animal studies, disability studies, cultural studies, and environmental studies. Drawing upon intersectional thought established by women of color feminisms and the boundary-disrupting work of feminist and queer theory, the monograph brings together ethnography, autoethnography, and discourse analysis to tell more equitable stories from the multispecies contact zones where people and dogs meet. Bad Dog is "a book with legs," to borrow Eileen Myles's memorable phrase.1 An impressive array of original concepts and terms animates the monograph's four chapters, providing scholars with new lenses to examine multispecies worlds. Perhaps the most important idea to emerge from Weaver's book is "interspecies intersectionality," a powerful analytic for studying "the confluence of race, gender, sexuality, and species" (p. 15). Beginning from the observation that "relationships between humans and nonhuman animals not only reflect but in fact actively shape experiences of race, gender, species, breed, sexuality, and nation" (pp. 7–8), interspecies intersectionality [End Page 105] locates "the workings of power, oppression, and experiences of identity that precede and emerge through . . . interrelatings" (p. 13). In a particularly insightful treatment, Weaver discusses how narratives about Black men and "pit bull" dogs in the United States converged to shape public attitudes toward the former NFL player Michael Vick and the dogs he fought. Vick, a Black man, and the dogs, a collection of beings problematically grouped by appearance whose bodies became synonymous with fighting and violence, were made legible to one another through the frames of race, animality, criminality, victimhood, and innocence, a series of associations that Weaver terms "becoming in kind" (p. 101). Diverging from the common practice of euthanizing dogs recovered from fighting rings, the dogs from Vick's kennels were rehabilitated and placed in white, wealthy, hetero households. Such a move, Weaver observes, not only required a shift in the dogs' "relationship to the categories of race and nation" (p. 113), but also depended on "saviorist storying" (p. 39) that coded adopter households as the proper saviors of damaged dogs while implicitly marking people of color, queer folks, and low-income households as improper sites for these dogs. By critiquing saviorist storying and the "normative logics" (p. 130) associated with becoming in kind that persist in dog rescues and rescue cultures, Weaver pursues more equitable modes of adopting, training, relating, living with, and knowing. In addition to the dozen or so original concepts introduced throughout the book, Bad Dog excels...
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Oct 1, 2024
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