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THE CANINE-HUMAN INTERRELATIONSHIP AS A MODEL OF POST-OPPOSITIONALITY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF MULTICULTURAL WOMEN’S AND GENDER STUDIES IN THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE TEXAS WOMEN’S UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF MULTICULTURAL WOMEN’S AND GENDER STUDIES COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES BY KIMBERLY CHRISTINE MERENDA, BGS, MA, MA DENTON, TEXAS MAY 2020 Copyright © 2020 by Kimberly Christine Merenda DEDICATION For Pi ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project was supported and sustained by the wonderful mentorship, kindness, astonishing proofreading skills, and faith of my dissertation chair Dr. AnaLouise Keating. Dr. Keating believed in me before I knew how to believe in myself. Many, many thanks to my committee members, Dr. Agatha Beins and Dr. Stephen Souris. I appreciate Dr. Beins’ expertise and excellent eye for detail. As an undergraduate Dr. Souris encouraged me to go to graduate school and I will always be grateful for the confidence he had in me. Dr. Cheronda Steele’s calm empathy, her insights and strategies, were instrumental in the process and progress of this project. My sincere thanks to Maurice Alcorn who always read and responded kindly. My warm gratitude goes to Dr. Claire Sahlin for her enduring guidance and compassion and for always making time to listen. My children Sierra, Trinity, and Frankie came of age during the course of this project. I love, love, love my children, and their unwavering support strengthened and cheered me throughout the process of this project. Finally and fundamentally, there are my canine companions Fraction, Pi, Abacus, Lemma, Boolean, Julia, Mandelbrot, and Times. Together in these hard times, we make family. I will not forget those who helped make all this possible. iii ABSTRACT KIMBERLY CHRISTINE MERENDA THE CANINE-HUMAN INTERRELATIONSHIP AS A MODEL OF POST-OPPOSITIONALITY MAY 2020 This dissertation is premised on the theory that the predominant westernized social paradigm is rooted within a system of oppositionality, a way of believing, being, and behaving through which concepts and entities are set against each other in a binarily divided and ranked system of continual conflict and disparity. Oppositionality depends upon (and proceeds from) internalized and interpersonal division, disconnection, and the disavowal of commonality, and it affects both individuals and social institutions. Surveying predominant western philosophy and religion, my study argues oppositionality as a system of vast, intersectional social and planetary harm that has been instrumental in bringing about the current epoch of the Anthropocene. Despite the predominance of oppositionality, I argue that there are ideas that we hold, things that we do, and identities that we embody that elude or are quietly immune from oppositionality’s conceptualization and practice. These ideas, actions, and ontologies rise as anomalies, as outliers to the dominant system, and an examination of an anomaly can shift the predominance of oppositionality, enable consciousnesses and practices of post-oppositionality. iv Using textual analysis and Gloria Anzaldúa’s narrative genre autohistoria-teoría, I explore a speculated prehistoric pre-oppositionality of the canine and human co-evolution and explicate the contemporary canine-human interrelationship as an anomaly to westernized oppositionality—as a site of compelling implications, possibilities, and potentials. Utilizing recent data, I examine the startling reconceptualization of the dog in the United States within the last twenty years, theorizing this reconceptualization as demonstrating the dog-human interrelationship as a liminal space in which an increasing number of humans envision, experiment with, and enact post-oppositionality. As such, my dissertation speculates, the dog-human interrelationship is an anomaly to prevailing oppositionality and exists as a model of post-oppositional possibilities. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION………………………………………………………………………... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT…………………………………………………………… iii ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………….. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS…………………………………………………………….. vi Chapter I. SITTING WITH DOGS AT THE END OF THE WORLD………………………. 1 Endogged………………………………………………………………….... 4 The Autohistoria-Teoría of Dog Writing…………………………………. 7 II. OPPOSITIONALITY: THE BIG MACHINE…………………………………...12 Oppositionality: A Definition…………………………………………….. 13 Non-Paradigmatic Oppositionality………………………………………. 17 Resistant Energy………………………………………………………….. 20 Worldwide Malware and Conclusion……………………………………. 22 III. TRANSCENSION: WORDS MATTER………………………………………..26 The Cosmos………………………………………………………………... 27 Post-Oppositionality and Conclusion……………………………………. 28 IV. OPPOSITIONALITY 101……………………………………………………....33 Dualistic Thinking……………………………………………………….... 34 Comparisons in Dualism…………………………………………………. 36 Binary Thinking…………………………………………………………... 39 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………. 44 vi V. MAN AGAINST THE WORLD………………………………………………... 46 Anthropocentrism: The Big Bad………………………………………..... 47 Philosophy…………………………………………………………………. 49 Religion……………………………………………………………………. 53 Anecdote and Conclusion……………………………………………….... 56 VI. ANTHROPOCENTRISM AS INTERENTITIAL VIOLENCE………………. 59 Dehumanization…………………………………………………………... 61 Normative Oppositional Violence and the Forbidden Comparison…… 69 Anecdote and Conclusion……………………………………………….... 72 VII. THE AGE OF LONELY HUMANITY………………………………………..74 The Eremozoic…………………………………………………………….. 78 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………. 80 VIII. PARADIGM………………………………………………………………….. 81 Anomalies………………………………………………………………….. 85 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………. 88 IX. DOGS!................................................................................................................. 90 Significant Otherness……………………………………………………... 91 Commonality……………………………………………………………… 95 Conclusion……………………………………………………………….... 97 X. CANIS FAMILIARIS…………………………………………………………... 98 Kindred Species and Conclusion………………………………………... 101 XI. THE FAMILIAR DOG……………………………………………………….. 103 Dogs by the Numbers……………………………………………………. 106 Conclusion………………………………………………………………... 114 vii XII. A DOG MOMENT…………………………………………………………... 115 Human 2.0…………………………………………………………………117 Dog Medicine……………………………………………………………... 120 Academy Dogs……………………………………………………………..124 Anecdote………………………………………………………………….. 128 Digital Pawprint………………………………………………………….. 130 Conclusion………………………………………………………………... 133 XIII. BUT FOR THE GRACE OF DOG…………………………………………. 135 This Bridge We Call Dog…………………………………………………140 STORY: DOG YEARS…………………………………………………………….144 WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………... 180 vii CHAPTER I SITTING WITH DOGS AT THE END OF THE WORLD later that night i held an atlas in my lap ran my fingers across the whole world and whispered where does it hurt? it answered everywhere everywhere everywhere. ―Warsan Shire Theory is inevitably and indelibly imbued with the subjectivity of the theorist. My own project is fundamentally informed by the entangled dynamics of my physical and metaphysical location, my premise and purpose imbued both macro- and microcosmically with my situated perspective. Accordingly: I am a scholar. My academic discipline makes a study of subjects such as multiculturalism, women, gender, and social justice. My research interest is social oppositionality and consciousnesses of pre- and post-oppositionality as variously theorized by feminist scholars. Soon, as it is a premise of my project, I will thoroughly define and discuss oppositionality, but basically, 1 oppositionality is a predominant western way of believing, being, and behaving that sets concepts and entities against each other in a binarily divided and ranked system of continual conflict and disparity. I believe that oppositionality is a system of vast, intersectional harm. Expressed interhumanly, the oppositional programming integral to western society generates essentializing, arbitrary demarcations of social identity that separate and hierarchize human groups and individuals, positioning them in seemingly natural opposition to one another and causing them to interact through cartographies of inequity, disenfranchisement, violence, bias, and bigotry. Expressed beyond the realm of exclusively human interaction, oppositionality is directly responsible for the fallacy of 1 human exceptionalism, of anthropocentrism and the correlatory era of the Anthropocene. 2 Binarily detached from, set above and in opposition to nonhuman beings and entities, humankind commits unconscionable, annihilative acts against Earth and Earthly beings. Within this Anthropocenic age I subsist in the so-called western world—in a post-industrial federal republic marked by neocolonialism, by increasingly stark and cruel social disparities, by a growing ethos of dogmatism, anti-intellectualism, and what I cannot help but describe as heartlessness. A human woman contextually privileged and 1 RationalWiki defines human exceptionalism as “the belief that humans are categorically or essentially different than all other animals. It is often argued on religious grounds where humans are the product of special creation by God, though secular arguments have also been advanced in favor of this concept” (“Human Exceptionalism”). 2 Biologists Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer coined the term “Anthropocene” to describe a geological era within which humankind’s present and potential influence pose a clear and catastrophic risk to the planet and all planetary entities. We currently