The Brooklyn Rail

Anticipatory heartbreak haunts even the most steadfast of loves, as timelines are inevitably cleaved from one another. While this truism is broadly applicable to mortal relations, I feel it most acutely in my relationship with my eight-year-old dog, Beckett, for whom years carry a different weight. Our ongoing propinquity has exposed me to the olfactory stories inscribed on building façades, the acute anxieties elicited by certain inanimate objects, the purr-inducing delights of a belly scratch, and the raw joy of sculpting a bone with one’s teeth. In our knotted lives, I repeatedly come up against limits to my ability to understand, much less articulate, his consciousness and embodied experience. I am reminded that acknowledging the validity and richness of ways of being we can’t fully comprehend isn’t only an intellectual exercise; it’s also an ethical framework, and a kind of love.

Among humans, bonds between people and dogs are typically viewed as “less than”: puerile stand-ins for the legitimate connection one might have with a partner or a child. This is not dissimilar from the ways in which queer love is often cast as a poor copy of the paradigmatic reproductive cisgender-heterosexual relationship. The family we make with dogs can intersect with parenting or partnering frameworks, yet invariably slips the collar of humanist categories. What word would I assign to my relationship with my dog, this specific day in, day out kinship of entangled alterities?

The work of various contemporary artists evinces the fluidity or multiplicity of dog-human relations and our inability to descriptively encompass them, which might be thought of as queer. In the creations of Joan Jonas and Pierre Huyghe, dogs—including Jonas’s poodle Ozu and Huyghe’s late Ibizan hound Human—are characterized as artistic collaborators. Fran Winant, whose painting of her dog was included in the first major lesbian art show in the US, has penned a poem about said canine with romantic overtones, a theme likewise taken up in Carolee Schneemann’s transgressive photographic series in which she kisses her cat. Emilie Louise Gossiaux, whose work I have reviewed in the Rail’s pages, makes art about her guide dog, whom she has described as a “sister, child, mother, protector, and best friend.”¹ As Mel Chen has astutely observed, we “do not imagine queer or queerness to merely indicate embodied sexual contact between subjects identified as gay and lesbian… [but rather] social and cultural formations of ‘improper affiliation,’ so that queerness might well describe an array of subjectivities, intimacies, beings, and spaces located outside of the heteronormative.”²

If affiliations between human and canine companions are to be seriously considered, that consideration must involve acknowledgement that these relations are deeply fraught. Dogs are controlled and contained, spoken for and projected upon. They are often treated as commodities: bred to be bought, with even adoption incurring a (nominal) fee, fetishized and objectified with a pet consumer economy ballooning around them. Purebreds (like Beckett, a pug) in particular embody “modern people’s misuse of other sentient beings for their own instrumental ends,” as Donna Haraway writes.³ And yet, a commitment to the messy work of what Haraway terms “significant otherness”—an ethics of relating that accounts for difference and complexity, as species live and die together—calls on us to stay with this trouble.⁴

The ways in which humans and dogs have been mutually shaped by their enmeshment, including indications that these species co-evolved metabolically and neurologically, upend anthropocentric claims that dogs are merely acted-upon and unsettle visions of “the human” as a hermetically sealed, exceptional subject defined in opposition to “the animal.” Haraway, who has suggested that dogs may have trained early humans to feed them, notes that we are “training each other in acts of communication we barely understand.”⁵ One summer night, I uncharacteristically stayed out until 6 a.m.; on our morning walk, Beckett, whom I had house-trained long prior, promptly lifted his leg and pointedly urinated on my sandal-clad foot. I got the gist of this unprecedented (and since unrepeated) message in our emergent lingua franca and was summarily trained.

One day in the not-so-distant future (pug lifespans average twelve to fifteen years), our cobbled-together language will fall into disuse; the thought prompts a kind of dehiscence in me, regardless of my efforts to queer the life/death binary in my own thinking. The trivialization of grief for the non-human animals with which we are entangled—not only common companion animals, but also those harmed and killed by the animal-industrial complex or the slow violence of anthropogenic climate change—is tied up with the larger question of who is deemed worthy of grief.⁶ Which kinships are socially significant? Which and whose losses matter? Who counts? The hegemonic (white, colonial, cisheteropatriarchal, anthropocentric) answers to these questions have enacted and sanctioned incalculable violence against so much life. With and far beyond Beckett, my queer heartbreak is compounded by seeing who and what is not counted, while knowing just how much they do.

1. Emilie Louise Gossiaux in conversation with Marcus Civin, “Emilie Louise Gossiaux: Interdependence,” Metal Magazine, 2023, https://metalmagazine.eu/post/emilie-louise-gossiaux.
2. Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 104.
3. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 96.
4. Donna J. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), p. 9.
5. Donna J. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, p. 2.
6. For more on this topic, see Judith Butler, “Precariousness and Grievability,” 16 November 2015, versobooks.com.