Houlden 1
Shandell Houlden
PhD Proposal
Supervisor: Dr. David Clark
Jan. 20, 2014
War Dogs: Biopolitics and the Weaponization of Love
An injured veteran from the war in Afghanistan looks out from the cover of a
2014 issue of National Geographic Magazine. She is in uniform and bears a medal of
honour, a mark of her selfless service and patriotism. The soldier, Layka, is a retired
military service dog, a survivor of four point-blank gunshot wounds, and one of
thousands of service dogs working alongside U.S. and Canadian human soldiers. With
the proliferation in the past decade of the military use of dogs both in battle and as
therapeutic companions for soldiers suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
(PTSD), war dog narratives have become increasingly prevalent in mainstream media.1 In
spite of this rapidly growing archive, as Hediger has recently observed, there remains a
dearth of theoretical work engaging war dog discourse (Animals and War 2), even though
both dogs and canine-human relations have become centrally important subjects in
critical animal studies (CAS).2 Moreover, with the exception of two recent edited
collections, each titled Animals and War, CAS has only just begun exploring the histories
and discourses of the meeting of non-human life and armed conflict.3 Outside of these
particular examples, to ask what role animals play in war has been a question often
unasked in much current scholarship on the biopolitics of war, as biopower has
traditionally been seen as particularly managing human bodies. Indeed, while Hediger’s
recent work on the war dogs in Vietnam (“Dogs of War”) opens up the question of multispecies biopolitics, and Shukin’s work on pastoral power troubles anthropocentric
divisions between species (“Tense Animals”), much remains to be done. My dissertation
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is located precisely at this over-determined cultural, historical, and theoretical juncture.
Through analysis of documentary film, journalistic accounts, memoirs, and photography
of war dogs, I seek to reveal the way such archives reflect and sustain the political
conditions which produce human subjects who, if not desire, then condone, the otherwise
intolerable violence of war. In doing so, my research maps a shifting topology of what
Agamben calls bare life, or that life which structures political systems through its very
exclusion (7). This problem of bare life, I suggest, becomes especially visible through
attention to the affective registers that mark human-canine relationships during wartime.
My work will uncover how war dog discourses are deployed to construct militarized
subjectivities, and what is it about dogs specifically that proves especially effective for
such a biopolitical mobilization.
My analysis turns on three key questions, which I examine in three chapters. The
first chapter of my dissertation undertakes an analysis of war dogs in relation to biopower
as it manifests in photographic and filmic representation. Drawing from the forthcoming
documentary film Canine Soldiers (Schiesari 2015), as well as the aforementioned
National Geographic issue, I suggest that war dog discourses have the effect of radically
militarizing the domestic. This process of militarization turns on Butler’s insistence that
we must pay attention to how and what images and texts frame, that is, what is excluded
from the frame and what remains unnoticed in normative readings, and to what end (6-7).
In a provocative reversal of the exclusionary effect of framing, images of war dogs draw
the domestic into the on-the-ground realities of war by virtue of our normative, familiar
relations to dogs as “pets.” To be clear, this is not domestication or normalization of
war—war is not neutralized by these images—but is in fact entirely the opposite. By
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bringing an exemplary figure of “the domestic” onto the battlefront, any sense of
separation between war and home is shown to be false. For subjects who primarily
experience war at a distance, such a reversal produces intense anxiety as the threat of war
is mapped onto domestic stability and security, and it is this anxiety that is leveraged for
maintaining support for war without any apparent end.
In the second chapter of my dissertation I turn my focus on the specificity of the
human-canine relationship. In particular, I analyze the affective economies shared in
wartime by dogs and humans to reveal specific techniques of pastoral power, or that
power by which some are “taught the government of others” and others learn “to let
themselves be governed by certain people” (Foucault 151). Here I build on Kuzniar’s
reading of various dog-related aesthetic archives to outline the melancholic human
relationship to dogs. The frequently disavowed loss that defines this relationship
manifests in provocative ways in war dog discourses, which I explore through analysis of
the recent collection in The Atlantic (2014) of images of war dogs working with Coalition
forces, as well as journalist Rebecca Frankel’s (2009) photo essays tracking military
service dogs in Afghanistan and Iraq. In their reliance on the trope of “man’s best friend,”
these images capitalize on the affect shared by dogs and humans to produce a
sympathetic perception of war by virtue of association with the positive qualities like
courage and loyalty that give shape to human-canine relationships. In other words, war
dog discourses mark a disturbing weaponization of love, even as real war dogs become
targets of actual weapons. Such a weaponization of affect, I argue, is typical of neoliberal
operations given shape by biopolitical complexes that paradoxically valorize nonhumans
while also reducing them to instruments of war.
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In the third chapter I outline the ways that war dogs push back against their status
as bare life and in so doing make demands for a new ethics of alterity. Following
Foucault, Shukin has argued that the reification and play of species difference and
similarity serve as techniques of power for the management of both human and animal
populations (“Tense Animals 152”). This management occurs along the increasingly
permeable boundaries of bare life that the violence of war enacts, and which war dogs,
with their “category mobility,” typify in profound ways (“Dogs of War” 56). Through
what Debrix and Barder call a “biopolitical frame of representability,” particular lives
are secured through targeted frames of affect (6). In practice, those lives do not include
the lives of dogs; indeed, up until a legal change in 2000, U.S. war dogs were abandoned
overseas, suddenly no longer “man’s best friend” but instead treated as used-up objects to
be disposed of (“Dogs of War” 55). Yet war dogs, as vulnerable beings exposed to
violence, haunt military narratives to trouble the logic of human exceptionalism that war
as a biopolitical process sustains. To see a war dog and to attempt to understand the
experience of such a being is to be drawn into the lives of those dogs with whom we
share our lives, and for whom many of us would sacrifice much. In their faces we
recognize the faces of their species-mates on the frontline, and through them we are
haunted by our complicity in anthropocentric procedures of war. What all dogs demand
of us then is to take seriously what vulnerability means, particularly in relation to an
Other of such radical alterity that it is almost unfathomable to consider a canine life as
more valuable than any human life.
1
See for example Rebecca Frankel’s online column “War Dog of the Week” for Foreign Policy
(2009); the publication of no less than seven related non-fiction books in the last six years alone;
Houlden 5
A&E’s development of the show “Dogs of War” (2014 – ongoing); National Geographic’s recent
issue on the subject (2014), and the forthcoming documentary Canine Soldiers (Schiesari 2015).
2 Although war dogs remain under-analyzed, there is a growing body of theoretical work on
canines in general. Donna Haraway’s work is perhaps most well known (When Species Meet,
2007; The Companion Species Manifesto, 2003), but there are many others. For example, the
work of Debbie Bird Rose addresses questions of human-instituted species extinction in her work
on Australian dingoes (Wild Dogs Dreaming, 2013). Carla Freccero has developed a critical
framework she calls “carnivorous virility” which examines the intersections of masculinity,
virility and dogs (“A Race of Wolves,” Yale French Studies, forthcoming; “Carnivorous Virility,
or, Becoming Dog,” Social Text, 2011). Alice Kuzniar’s Melancholia’s Dog explores the fraught
nature of kinship and intimacy between dogs and humans (2013). Laura Brown’s recent work
historicizes the rise of pet-keeping as it occurred in the eighteenth century (Homeless Dogs and
Melancholy Apes, 2011). Joan Gordon explores dog subjectivity as it’s represented in science
fiction and which, following Haraway’s work on the cyborg, she orients through the figure of the
amborg (“Gazing Across the Abyss: The Amborg Gaze in Sheri S. Tepper’s Six Moon Dance,”
2008; “Animal Viewpoints in the Contact Zone of Adam Hines’s Duncan the Wonder Dog,”
Humanimalia, 2014). While this list by no means captures all of the work being done, it does
speak to the variety of approaches to thinking dogs taking place today while marking an absence
of work on dogs in the wars of the last twenty-five years in the Middle East.
3 See: Hediger, Ryan, ed. Animals and War. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2013; and
Nocella II, Anthony J, Colin Salter and Judy K. C. Bentley, eds. Animals and War: Confronting
the Military-Animal Industrial Complex. Toronto, ON: Lexington Books, 2014. Though both
books have chapters on military service dogs, their scopes are much broader and include accounts
of everything from horses to bees, with much attention to the historical role of animals in war.
One interesting thread that emerges there is of dogs and Nazi Germany, as in Robert Tindol’s
chapter “The Best Friend of Murderers: Guard Dogs and the Nazi Holocaust,” a theme which is
picked up in Clark’s forthcoming article “What Remains To Be Seen: Animal, Atrocity,
Witness,” Yale French Studies 127 (2015). A further significant stream on the intersection of war
and dogs stems from the now famous encounter between Emmanuel Levinas and Bobby, the dog
who visited the war camp in which Levinas was imprisoned during World War II. This
Continental-inflected discourse tracks the ambivalent relationship between Levinas’ humanist
ethics and animality, particularly as it manifests in Levinas’ moving essay “The Name of a Dog,
or Natural Rights.” See for example: Calarco, Matthew, Zoographies, 2008; Clark, David. “On
Being the Last Kantian in Nazi Germany: Dwelling with Animals after Levinas,” Animal Acts:
Configuring the Nonhuman in Western History, 1997; and Kendall, Karolyn, “The Face of a Dog:
Levinasian Ethics and Human/Dog Co-Evolution,” Queering the Non/Human, 2008.
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