MERENDA-DISSERTATION-2020.Pdf

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. vTABLE 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, 1oppositionality 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 human exceptionalism,1 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 live in the Anthropocene, and humankind’s impact upon the earth grows greater and more destructive by the hour. 2oppressed and chronically sleep-deprived, I balance with my books and my laptop upon a planet pushed to the brink of cataclysmic extinction3 by the very paradigm of my people. On this stage of potential (probable?) obliteration, I am every hour (every moment) digitally deluged by push alerts of death and disaster, by headlines of pandemics, assassinations, the rising rates of suicide and addiction, by dispatched descriptions of storms, fires, bullets, bombs, terror, and terrorism, by news of laws designed to intrude, exclude, deprive, and disenfranchise, by pundits preaching wars and rumors of wars, and by prognostications of impending (if not immediate) nuclear annihilation. “Haec otia fovent studia” (“these days of peace foster learning”) is a Latin motto of academia, but the days in which I learn are not peaceful. These are the “interesting times” of which we were warned,4 and every moment feels swollen with pain and peril, with a sometimes unbearable poignancy, and with the pressing, urgent need for action, for change, for the actualization of potential. The passage of Warsan Shire’s poem that I share in epigraph tells of a wounded world; like so many, the awareness of multifarious 3 The Department of Defense’s “2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap” succinctly predicts that “[r]ising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict. They will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the globe” (Foreword). 4 While the existence of a Chinese proverb (sometimes categorized as a curse) focusing upon “interesting times” has never been verified, Robert Kennedy references it in his 1966 “Day of Affirmation Address” speech, stating: “There is a Chinese curse which says, ‘May he live in interesting times.’ Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind [sic].” Kennedy, in my view, aptly describes the current era—the interesting times—in which I write and research. 3hurting fills me with a heavy sense of precarity. Under this weight I struggle to find theory, to put together knowledges, even as doing so too frequently feels like whistling in the dark. Endogged Neither humans, as they currently exist, nor dogs would be here without each other. This pervasive and complicated interspecies connection reminds humans that they are not alone on this journey—and that they could not have walked it without a partner. Because of that powerful and humbling reality, humans are well served by recollecting this story. ―Laura Hobgood-Oster Whistling in this darkness, in this Anthropocenic shadow of human-made and seeming certain doom, my whistle is always answered, because I am companied in my project by canines. And companioned in this way, I am more than my standpoint—more than my global and humanly subjective position. Companioned by canines—endogged, if you will—I am both more and less than human, my body and being physiologically infused with dog, my research touched in every way by my canine companions: Pi and Abacus and Fraction, Lemma, Boolean, Tally, Julia, Mandelbrot, and Times—they are ever near.5 Pi and Abacus and Fraction, Lemma, Boolean, Tally, Julia, Mandelbrot, and Times—they are more than near; they are literally a part of me, as dogs and humans have been a part of each other for the last roughly 40,000 years.6 5 Some are near physically, some in memory. When I began this project my canine companions were Fraction, Pi, and Abacus. During the course of this project and through its completion, I gained in companions Lemma, Boolean, Tally, siblings Julia and Mandelbrot, and the strange, stray, skinny dog Times. Fraction and Boolean tragically died during this project. 6 The research of scientists such as Pontus Skoglund, Erik Ersmark, Eleftheria Palkopoulou, Love Dalén, Robert Wayne, Nikolai D. Ovodov, Susan J. Crockford, Yaroslav V. Kuzmin, Thomas F. G. Higham, Gregory W. L. Hodgins, Mietje Germonpré, Johannes van der Plicht, Enikö Kubinyi, Zsófia Virányi, and 4In these fraught times I often think of how much less my life would be without the company of dogs. This thought is only (literally) natural, because I am, as Laura Hobgood-Oster explains in epigraph, human because of my human ancestors’ affiliation with the dog, the survival and evolutionary development of my species directly dog-dependent. From the dawning of the Upper Paleolithic to the shadow of the Anthropocene, as very literal co-species, dogs and humans have been together. Eons ago, humans and dogs established a kinship, and the dog became the dog in relation to the human and the human became the human expressly because of—solely because of—affiliation with the dog. Together, dogs and humans spread prolifically, spread planetwide,7 spread personally to this little bit of land in far north Texas where my dogs and I make family. As an interspecies synergy, the dog-human dyad is both an absolute evolutionary success and utterly unique; as Temple Grandin writes, “Basically, two different species with complementary skills teamed up together, something that had never happened before and has really never happened since” (304). As far as science is aware, no other species has so directly, so intrinsically influenced the human evolutionary development. This is Ádám Miklósi calibrate the dog-human relationship to have begun roughly 30,000-40,000 years ago and considerably prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (and thereby considerably prior to the onset of human agriculture). This is a striking re-calibration of former theories presenting the dog-human relationship (generally in the terms of the human domestication of the dog) as occurring 15,000 years ago. 7 Unlike Neanderthal, who very pertinently, very pivotally had no dog companions. Anthropologist Pat Shipman rather dismally addresses this in her well researched book The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction. 5something amazing; it is also, in the context of our human present and future, something that I believe to be very important. Companions and kin, my dog companions and I are linked, skin deep and beyond. Dogs and humans have a mutual microbiome, and scientists theorize that canine and human microbiomes developed together, developed cooperatively (co-evolved, in fact, as did dogs and humans), and a modern human microbiome that is not infused with dog microbiome is in effect incomplete (and thereby less healthy).8 In addition, groundbreaking research shows that the ancient canine-human affiliation literally retrofitted both the human and the canine brain. Just one of the amazing dyadic reciprocities of the ancient canine-human affiliation, both the dog and the human brain shrank in tandem by about ten percent.9 In becoming the dog it is commonly known that the canine brain became smaller than the brain of the wild wolf, but what was not until recently realized is that at the prehistorical beginning of the dog-human interrelationship and in direct correlation to the dog’s reduction in brain size, the human brain too shrank. 10 In effect, the canine and human brains got together, both shrinking conjointly, delegating specific abilities so that each separate but intimately interconnected species 8 See, for further information, the works of Jack Gilbert, Rob Knight, and Anita Kozyrskyj. 9 Jon Franklin’s engaging and thought-provoking book The Wolf in the Parlor: How the Dog Came to Share Your Brain explores the multiple theories and implications of the mutual and synchronic shrinkage of canine and human brains. 10 In his book The Domesticated Brain, Bruce Hood considers and discards some of the conventional notions regarding the shrinking of the human brain, such as the beliefs that brain shrinkage is related to conditions such as nutrition and climate. 6cerebrally specialized, the trait given up by one species compensated for by the brain of the other.11 No two species have had a closer and more enduring physiological proximity than the dog and the human. Sitting here with the dogs, researching and writing during what could very well be, no hyperbole, the end of the world (at least as we humans know it), I think often of France’s Chauvet Cave, of the footprints photographed by prehistorian Michel-Alain Garcia. Imprinted nearly 30,000 years ago, the footprints are of a young human child and a dog as they walked together through the darkness of the cave, their way lit only by the child’s carried torch.12 The footprints show that the dog and the human child walk calmly, walk side by side, and I think of the two making their way together through the cavern, trusting each other through the dark. In the twenty-first century, from a couch in a small, cluttered room, Pi and Abacus and Fraction, Lemma, Boolean, Tally, Mandelbrot, Julia, and Times companion me as their ancestors companioned mine. It is both right and humanly natural that my project be dog-dedicated; it is, after all, multifariously dog-dependent, the personal and collective story-theory of an enduring and transformative kinship. 11 Spoiler alert: the midbrain which handles emotions and sensory data and the olfactory bulbs which handle smell became smaller in the human, while the corpus callosum which divides and connects the two brain hemispheres and the forebrain which is associated with so-called higher abstract thought, logic, speech, and strategizing was maintained in size by the human while decreasing in the dog. 12 Evidence shows that the child paused during the walk in order to clean the torch; the charcoal left behind from this cleaning aided scientists in establishing a date. 7The Autohistoria-Teoría of Dog Writing Personal experiences―revised and in other ways redrawn―become a lens with which to reread and rewrite the cultural stories into which we are born. ―Gloria Anzaldúa, Light Sharing breath and space with my canine companions, my project began with a question, a consideration of oppositionality that seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with dogs and dog-human affiliation: If westernized oppositionality as a paradigm has brought us to this place of pain and precarity, how can oppositionality be addressed (transcended?) in a way that does not helplessly (hopelessly) replicate the very stratagems of oppositionality? Amidst all these push alerts of doom, what can we do, what are we already doing to move beyond oppositionality? In the continual company of canines, this seeming non-dog-related research question began to entangle with my interest in the writing of feminist women scholars who explore in their work the unique canine-human interrelationship.13 These texts very 13 Many of these publications inspired and inform my project; these texts include but are in no way limited to: sociology professor Robbie Pfeufer Kahn’s Milk Teeth: A Memoir of a Woman and Her Dog; poet, writer, and gender equality activist Eileen Myles’ Afterglow: A Dog Memoire; professor of linguistics and literary criticism Vicki Hearne’s Adam’s Task and Bandit: Dossier of a Dangerous Dog; professor of zoology Patricia B. McConnell’s The Education of Will: A Mutual Memoir of a Woman and Her Dog, The Other End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs, and For the Love of a Dog; bioethicist Jessica Pierce’s The Last Walk: Reflections on Our Pets at the End of Their Lives; professor of science writing Ceiridwen Terrill’s stress-inducing memoir Part Wild: Caught Between the Worlds of Wolves and

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