Mick Hartley

Every day a new surprise. From the Journal of Lesbian Studies – Queer canine becomings: Lesbian feminist cyborg politics and interspecies intimacies in ecologies of love and violence:

This article offers a queer lesbian feminist analysis attuned to lesbian-queer-trans-canine relationalities. Specifically, the article places queer and lesbian ecofeminism in conversation with Donna Haraway’s work on the cyborg and companion species to theorize the interconnected queer becomings of people, nature, animals, and machines amidst ecologies of love and violence in the 2020s. It takes two key case studies as the focus for analysis: first, the state instrumentalization of dogs and robot dogs for racialized and imperial violence, and second, quotidian queer and lesbian-dog relationalities and becomings. In the first, the article traces how dogs are weaponized as tools of state violence and proposes a queer lesbian feminist critique of white supremacy and militarization that can also extend to a critique of the violence committed through and toward the dogs. In the second, the article analyzes how, within lesbian, non-binary, and trans-dog intimacies, dogs help articulate queer gender, sexuality, and kinship formations, and as such, queer worlds for gender, sexual, and kin becomings. The entanglements of violence and love in these queer dog relationalities provide insights into the complexities of queer and lesbian feminist worldbuilding. Lesbian and queer feminist cyborg politics can help theorize the potentials and challenges of these interspecies entanglements.

Trans-dog intimacies??

The author, Chloe Diamond-Lenow, is an Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Study at SUNY Oneonta. "They specialize in feminist and queer theory, postcolonial animal studies, affect theory, cultural studies, and theories of intersectionality. Some of the classes they teach include “Queer Theory,” “Trans and  Women of Color Feminisms,” “Trans Lives and Constructs of Conformity,” and “Gender, Power, and Difference"."