Bad Dog: Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice by Harlan Weaver (review)

Abstract

Despite decades of labor in the environmental humanities and adjacent fields, scholaractivists 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