Harlan Weaver is a professor of gender, women, and sexuality studies. His research stems from the intersections of transgender theory, affect theory, critical race theory, and human–animal studies, to name just a few starting points. A doting pitbull owner and advocate, Weaver discusses how to understand and communicate identities and experiences in ways that are authentic and ethical. Working to unravel how identity formations not only co-exist but mutually co-constitute, Weaver shares his experiences of feeding himself and his canine companions while navigating convoluted food-scapes. We interviewed Weaver by Skype on September 23, 2016.
SAMANTHA KING: Thank you so much for joining us; we’re really excited you agreed to participate in our project. We’ll begin with the biographical: when and where you were born and raised; your formative, cultural, intellectual, and political experiences; and how you became an academic.
HARLAN WEAVER: I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. And I grew up at a time when the school districts were some of the worst in the country. So lots of my peers, white peers in particular, went to private schools, and I grew up in that intellectual culture, which gave lip service to a lot of social issues, with questions of feminism at the forefront—but in a way that was still very white. But I basically started off as deeply committed to feminism because I had a lot of rage. Then I went to college at Wesleyan in Connecticut, which was amazing; I loved it there. I majored in what was then “Women’s Studies” and is now called “Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.” And part of growing into that community for me involved collective cooking; that’s really when I learned how to cook and I mostly only learned to cook vegetarian food, because that’s what we ate. That’s where it started for me; so much for me of the good thinking and community building I’ve done has happened and continues to happen in the space of a kitchen. Which came in handy again later because my advisor in grad school at History of Consciousness at UCSC [University of California, Santa Cruz] was Donna Haraway. Donna, and pretty much all of Donna’s advisees, loved to cook, so we did a lot of cooking together and hanging out in the kitchen, and I still cook a lot. Also in addition to grad school, in my twenties and thirties, my cultural milieu was the queer community in the San Francisco Bay Area. The specific lesbian and trans cultures that I lived in were really activist-oriented. So especially during that time and in that community I witnessed a lot of key conversations and transformations, and understandings of community around what have been called the “border wars,” which was basically, How do trans folks fit into these communities? Are people leaving the communities when they transition, etc.?—debates which continue, in many ways, to this day. But then, what I saw was the active creation of space for trans-masculine folks in what had formally been mostly lesbian and self-named Dyke Bay Area spaces in a way that was a really positive political development. However, those spaces were not and still are less welcoming to trans-feminine women; there’s a lot more work that needs to be done there. I also spent a lot of time volunteering in animal shelters during that time, and part of that was I adopted my own dog, Haley. And shelter work, it’s extremely hands-on, intense physical and emotional labor. So even with all its troubles and flaws, I developed a deep connection to animal rescue politics in particular.
SK: Did you go to work with Donna Haraway because you knew you wanted to work on questions related to dogs or animals?
HW: Oh no! I went to work with Donna Haraway because I got into Hist Con! And because my favorite essay of all time is Situated Knowledges. I went to work with Donna because I was obsessed with thinking about knowledge politics and the relationship among knowledge politics, experiences of embodiment, and questions of identity. Of course, these issues come up a lot in animal studies stuff; for example, one of the key themes I see folks wrestle with is the question of how to put forward ethical knowledge about others and their experiences without further othering or erasing those others. Some theorists try to answer this and related questions or representation through the idea of “speaking for” animals, but, for me, “speaking for” involves a form of erasure that I dislike. In addition, “speaking for” prioritizes metaphors of speech in a way that ignores how nonhuman animals themselves communicate. But I was lucky in that one of the neat things about working with Donna was that I got to hang out with folks who came to work with her, and so I was introduced to Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, who shared her sense of “thinking with” with me when she came to Santa Cruz. As I got to enjoy hanging out with and, perhaps unsurprisingly, cooking with her, I came to think about a different approach that rested on a different preposition, “with,” rather than speaking or thinking “for” or “about,” which introduced a different kind of proximity and a sense of solidarity that I felt avoided the problems of “speaking for.” So, for me, coming into contact with folks working on those and similar questions was the main draw of working with Donna: thinking about philosophies of knowledge and eventually onto-epistemologies, which then came up for me more later when Karen Barad came to Santa Cruz.
SK: What do you see as the primary purpose of your academic work, and why do you do what you do?
HW: I have two dual themes going on; the first goes back to questions of trans embodiment. In grad school, I became really interested in combating the ways that feminist and queer theories, in particular, misunderstood and misread trans folks. One of the main critiques that a number of folks have made, and which also surface in challenges to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, is that trans bodies are made to stand in and do theoretical work as figures of resistance to gender norms, for example, in ways that disregard or elide the lived vulnerabilities that make trans lives so transgressive in the first place. My dissertation was about putting forward a different knowledge politics, or, borrowing from Barad, an onto-epistemology, rooted in an understanding of trans experiences in a way that was centered on how trans folks understand themselves, rather than understandings focused through the lenses of how nontrans folks perceive them—which were often really about questions of passing, and cultural and social legibility.
And then as an owner of the pitbull-type dog with clipped ears, Haley, I became very aware of the stigma around pit bulls. People said horrible things to us all the time. And granted this was in the early 2000s, and much has changed in terms of my day-to-day experience as an owner of the pitbull-type dog; I don’t tend to experience the kind of overt hostility now that I did then with my current dog, Annie, who, by the way, is much more of a handful than Haley ever was! In fact, now people tend to bring up the differently problematic trope along the lines of, “Oh! It’s about how you raise them,” reinforcing a troublesome nature/nurture divide. But before, in my early days with Haley, people would just literally not talk to us, or spit at us, and/or curse at us. So when I had Haley, I became very alert to the ways that stigma shaped her life and the possibilities that dogs like her even had, perhaps especially in terms of their prospects in most animal shelters; so many dogs are euthanized just because they’re pitbulls or pitbull types. And then there is the problem of BSL, or breed-specific legislation; we would drive places and I would have to literally look on a map to make sure it would be okay to let her out to pee.
So my experiences with Haley got me thinking about dogs and the experiences of dogs labeled as dangerous, and one thing that really stood out to me in these worlds were the kinds of connections that were made with race by both activists and anti-pitbull people. So pro-pitbull folks would leverage this language of “pitbull underground railroad,” and “canine racism,” and then anti-pitbull folks would also use messed-up racialized language about how these dogs are always owned by “thugs,” and “gangsters,” along with other racially coded terms. Or they might introduce problems of pitbulls and “white trash.” Those ways of framing and connecting pitbulls to race, and specifically black and brown masculinities, really pushed me to think about how to consider first race, and then, later, questions about sexuality, class, and gender, in the context of these discourses. So as part of my thinking on that front, I began by countering what I think is deeply problematic in a lot of earlier animal studies work: where race-related analogies loom large as ways to do animal advocacy. So, for example, you have books like Marjorie Spiegel’s The Dreaded Comparison, which pairs images of enslaved people and slaughterhouses. To me—and I think a lot of folks feel the same—I see such materials as appropriating images and language from human slavery to make arguments on behalf of animals. And when I talk about animals and race, I want to not do that kind of politically and intellectually problematic and appropriative work. Instead I try to do careful work based in the concerns of critical race studies and queer and gender and sexuality studies in a way that doesn’t borrow or appropriate language from marginalized peoples but rather thinks through these troubled connections in ways that foreground concerns of, say, critical race studies, together with those of animal studies.
Part of my work in trying to think through the concerns of marginalized humans and animals together is to counter the analogical or parallel thinking that happens about race and gender in this type of animal studies work. For example, speciesism was initially, and continues to be, defined through analogies with sexism and racism, as being akin to them. This sets them up in parallel, in a kind of simile, by using these other ideas to build up the idea of speciesism; because of how that “formula” of analogical thinking works, you end up putting them in parallel rather than in connection. In a broader, epistemological sense, I feel like those kinds of intellectual moves make it impossible to think questions of species together with race, gender, and sexuality because they’re held apart by the very nature of the formulation. So part of what I do is about producing a different analytical or theoretical framework where the concerns of marginalized humans and nonhuman animals are conceived of together and through each other, rather than apart.
VICTORIA MILLIOUS: That’s great, thank you! You’ve addressed this a little bit, but how did you come to write about pitbull politics?
HW: It was really through adopting Haley and experiencing the stigma that was leveraged against her. This was not just what would happen during our daily walks, when people would cross the street, say messed-up things to us, throw things at us, etc., but also through our larger movements through space, as, for example, when we would drive to Montana to visit one of my friends over the summer and I’d have to be really careful not to stop in locations with BSL because I didn’t want her to be seized and euthanized. And I noticed the profuse connections with race I outline above, but I also began to think critically about animal rescue. I was struck, for example, by the fact that people don’t ever put air quotes around rescue when they’re talking about animals. One of my favorite interlocutors from my fieldwork used to say, “Unless you’re running into a burning building, you’re not actually rescuing them.” I agree, in part because with rescue you’re most often taking animals out of the supposedly benevolent hands of the state that was first trying to aid them and then trying to kill them through a pretty curious interface between animal shelters and grassroots/NGO-type “rescue” groups. So I became curious, witnessing this, about how animal rescue, however unthinkingly, inherits a complex history around salvation and saviorism that has so much to do with whiteness and histories of settler colonialism. More specifically, in the rescue worlds I saw folks inheriting these histories that they were completely unaware of through their repeating the rhetoric of salvation. And then I would also witness people in animal shelters routinely make comments such as the animals were “in jail,” or “on death row,” drawing from prison-related language with no attention to vast injustices of the prison-industrial complex. This language and understandings, in conjunction with the other race-related language I note above, both troubled and fascinated me, which is how I came to write about pitbull politics.
VM: Can you describe a key concept or idea that guides your thinking about multispecies relationships?
HW: My main concept is what I term “interspecies intersectionalities.” In it, I draw from Kimberlé Crenshaw’s early writings on intersectionality and the ways that that has been taken up by many people, and pair that with human–nonhuman animal relationships in particular. My basic thinking here is to try and understand how relationships between humans and animals don’t just reflect but actively shape experiences of race, gender, sexuality, nation, species, and breed. I’ve been taking that concept and, through my book project, pairing it with a term that I’m borrowing from Donna Haraway, which is multispecies justice. But I am doing this work with my own twist, in the sense that I’m interested in thinking toward, or thinking with, a kind of multitude which is very much about producing a theoretical framework of complex overlap and intersections and mutually implicated ways of knowing and being that counter the parallelism and analogical thinking evident in the framework of ideas such as speciesism that I mentioned earlier. My work is really about: How do you think marginalized humans and animals together? Lori Gruen is helpful for me to think with here, for she introduces, in a brief piece for The Huffington Post on Cecil the Lion, that the central problem is about zero-sum thinking. She notes that in the uproar following Cecil’s killing, people tended to ask questions like, “Why do people care more about animals than they do about impoverished African humans?” For me, one of the main interventions that emerge from my pairing of interspecies intersectionalities and multispecies justice is giving a framework that does not do this kind of zero-sum thinking where there’s not enough care, where you’re pitting one commitment against the other, instead of asking where these commitments—to animal welfare and racial justice, for example—are coming from, in a way that enables us to better understand and think them together.
VM: I look forward to reading that book.
HW: Me too, right?
SK: Well, in the meantime we’ve been enjoying reading your various articles. In fact, the next question is about The Tracks of my Tears: Could you talk about the resonances you’ve seen between trans species and trans affective politics?
HW: I can try! I just participated in an interchange for the “Tranimacies” special issue of Angelaki, which Eliza Steinbock, Mariana Szczygielska, and Anthony Wagner are editing. They asked me to do that, and it was really hard! So, for me, trans affect comes from producing better understandings that emerge from thinking with affect and thinking of the ways that affect trans folks’ experiences rather than any questions of cultural legibility, etc. One of the key passages that really speak to my thinking on trans affect is a conversation between Jennifer Finney Boylan, the professor and famous novelist, and one of her best friends, Richard Russo—another famous novelist—which Boylan relates in She’s Not There. She describes her move to transition, and he replies something along the lines of, “Well, thanks for telling me, and when did you make this decision?” And she responds, “It was more of an erosion than a decision.” I think of that as an example of trans affect, as a ceding to a bodily movement, rather than, “Well, I’m going to decide to put on some different clothes tomorrow.” It’s also notable because one of the things you’ll notice if you start reading a lot of trans memoirs, as I did, is up until probably the late 1990s they all sound the same. This is because there was, and still is, a lot of medical gatekeeping, where you have to present with this particular narrative of being “trapped in the wrong body” for a long time. You also had to identify as heterosexual. You had to use that specific language adamantly, and if you didn’t, then you didn’t get hormones or any other kind of treatment. So in order to medically transition, people ended up telling these stories and I think—probably as expected—internalizing them, even if they weren’t necessarily true to their experiences. So one of the ways I tried to intervene in my dissertation by reading for trans affect was to examine how there is still stuff going on in the confines of language that seems, on its surface, very limiting. This is to say that I saw differences emerge in terms of ways of knowing and understanding embodiment in spite of the sameness of the language required by medical gatekeeping of being “trapped in the wrong body.” This is the sense of trans affect I’m working with. And this is where I struggle to connect it with trans species thinking—there is a certain kind of prediscursiveness to it that invites a lot of the critiques you hear of Deleuzian-style thinking, that in thinking with affect and bodily movements you are, in a way, unmarking bodies and therefore failing to address intersectionality. This is the struggle!
Because of this issue, I may not have very good resonances for you, but in terms of the trans species politics, one of the ways to bring in trans affect would be to take up interspecies affects in the ways that they both shape and reshape experiences of gender, race, sexuality, species, and breed. So, for example, we can talk about the specific kind of love that gets invoked in dog rescue cultures as something that comes out of a whiteness that is itself shaped by inheritances of colonization and colonial thinking. And that kind of human–dog love and dog rescue all inflect and then reshape that whiteness in ways that can be hopeful or not. And then you can bring this understanding to bear on the more troubling instances when, for example, you have folks who come to pay attention to species-specific injustices that they may not have noticed before, but they’ll do it through the appropriative mechanism I noted earlier, such as one of most striking images I found recently on Facebook of an “All Dogs Matter” rescue group.
SK: Oh God.
HW: Yeah! So there’s this emergent trend where, in plain speak, they kind of “double down” on the whiteness. They go into this interspecies relationship and emerge even more firmly entrenched in their resistance to recognizing racial injustices. So that’s one way to approach the question of resonance. But then there are also the transient kinships of animal shelter life where there are these moments of hope and ephemeral, yet promising, connections that happen in the broader expanse of very normative and troubling narratives. So in an animal shelter you have folks having really interesting moments and interactions with dogs, but they then leave. There is this kinship and affect happening in really interesting ways, but in a larger context of grooming these dogs to hopefully be adopted into what is an implicitly white middle-class “forever home,” with picket fences and all that. And this is because people have very set ideas about what makes a good home, that are very deeply shaped by class, politics, and the resources involved: whether you have a back yard or not, whether you own your home or not. Most shelters I know of—and this is also the shifting landscape of pitbull politics—won’t adopt out bully breed dogs to people who don’t either have a lease explicitly stating that they can have a bully breed dog, or own their own homes. And in a lot of urban areas that’s pretty much impossible. But within this broader landscape and aim of shelter life, you still have these really interesting moments of touch and intimacy.
Then the thing I’ve been thinking with most recently—have you read the new Vinciane Despret book? Or her Embodied Empathy essay, which I love? She writes about ethologists who use their bodies to understand animals. She talks about how Farley Mowat, for example, ate mice so that he could answer the question of whether and how wolves could survive when caribou migrate and they don’t. So he ate mice, which was his way of asking, through his body, this question. Although I should note that, according to Wikipedia, people don’t necessarily believe the Mowat version of that story. But Despret has helped me think with and understand the importance of bodies, human and animal, in interspecies relationships; the idea of using your body to better understand nonhuman animals that Despret highlights is super interesting to me.
Building from Despret, one of my favorite dog trainer writers is Patricia McConnell; she’s also an ethologist. In her dog training work she does these seminars, and one of the examples I really like that she gives is trying to teach a dog a good sit-stay. She’ll bring humans up on the stage and press into their space, without actually touching them— she just moves really close to them. And if you try it among yourselves, you don’t want to move! She uses that to make larger points about how, when you’re practicing dog training stuff, you should try it on a human first to see if you get the body timing right and then work with your dog on it. It’s really neat ’cause I’ve done it and have been like, “Oh! This feels really weird; now I know how Annie would respond to this technique better.” So in this, I see a bodily epistemology that’s also deeply affective because it’s really about bodily movement and how you feel as an embodied being, which is itself part of a larger ethics of positive reinforcement–style and, I would argue, a pretty feminist, dog training approach. And yet, those kinds of teachings are not very widespread. Folks have heard of Cesar Millan, but not many have heard of Patricia McConnell. However, McConnell’s stuff is really fascinating to me because there’s this bodily thinking going on in her approach that traverses species lines in a way that’s deeply affective. And yet, and this is a big yet, her type of approach is also undergirded by the fact that you need certain resources to be able to access that knowledge at all, and you need to be in a space where the norms that she’s teaching dogs toward are norms that are possible, and regarded as norms. If you’re in a space where, say, it’s impossible to take your dog out on a leash walk, it doesn’t really matter whether or not they behave well. And, getting more critical, we need to examine what “behaving well” means for different contexts.
Overall, my sense is that tracking affects in the ways that resonate with the knowledge politics of working from trans lives comes out of attending to those affective emergences that result from, for good and bad, interspecies relationships in the worlds of rescue in particular. That’s where the resonance happens. Then we can follow this by devising a politics that builds on the affects and the nonproblematic aspects and/or the more hopeful worldbuilding moments, those that don’t necessarily feed into or inadvertently inherit these histories of oppression and domination, and then promulgate those more promising affects and politics through practices and intellectual interventions; this would be where and how to move that resonance forward. That said, I admit that this connection between trans affect and interspecies intersectionalities is still a pretty tenuous one in some ways.
SK: It’s provocative how you’re challenging the kind of affect theory that is very detached from intentional thinking, and also challenging kinship theory and normative modes of kinship, while at the same time moving trans theory in new directions. It’s impressive that you’re holding all of that together.
HW: I think it’s seeping. Seeping would be a very hopeful description. But thank you, I appreciate that. I do think that bodily knowledge stuff is really neat especially when you think about the politics of dog training, because there is a world divided. You have the old-school trainers versus the positive-reinforcement types and the positive-reinforcement methods; in my reading, a lot of bodily thinking goes on in the latter. Which is interesting because those methods come out of behaviorism and classical and operant conditioning, which are notorious for the “Black Box” approach, where all you’re interested in is some cue or reinforcer that will make that next behavior more or less probable.
So on the surface it wouldn’t seem that positive-reinforcement trainers would be at all interested in how animals think, and yet all of those
folks are deeply interested in how dogs think, and the ways they go about conveying that to their human audience is just fascinating.
SK: It’s been quite helpful for me to read. We’re going to change tack a little bit here: Could describe your relationship to eating animal products? Has it been a preoccupation for you? How have your feelings and thoughts changed? And then I was also thinking about your notion of “becoming in kind,” which is really provocative. Whatever you want to tell us about that.
HW: I think about food a lot—mostly because I love cooking and I find it really soothing. My students and I have been talking a lot about how the world is falling apart right now, and we had this whole moment yesterday where we just wrote on the board all of our coping strategies. And one for me is cooking, and listening to podcasts. Together. Now I get Internet in my kitchen so I can also watch Netflix, which I didn’t used to, so it’s shifted a little bit, but the podcast is more soothing.
SK: Well, you must have really good knife skills, if you can watch Netflix and cook at the same time.
HW: I rewind a lot! Anyway, I do think a lot about food. I think less about vegetarianism and veganism than I used to, which is interesting because I find that, while they are really common in the rescue world, they are much less so in the training worlds I frequent. But I am an omnivore; I was vegetarian for a long time and then I got Haley and I was feeding her these pig ears and stuff, and I was like, “Oh. I can handle this,” because, through her, I came to find meat a lot less gross. And then I was dating someone who was really not into vegetarian stuff, and so I gradually shifted over.
In terms of consumption of animals, I do think it’s always complicated. I recently taught this really neat piece by Erica Weiss, “There Are No Chickens in Suicide Vests,” which talks about the shifting politics of veganism in Israel. And then we read Claire Jean Kim on Holocaust and slavery analogies and vegan activism, and as part of that I showed my students a video from Dr. Breeze Harper, who is a friend and colleague; she does the Sistah Vegan Project and I like her work a lot. And this sequence helped all of us think through how one of the ways food is so complicated lies in the reality of economic constraints, and the ways those have to do with the politics of whiteness and class, in terms of what you can afford to eat. There’s also geography; right now I live in the middle of Kansas and it’s hard to find good produce period, much less ethically produced. Then in a more body-wise way I have two really severe food allergies, to sesame seeds and tree nuts. And during grad school I developed a lot of food intolerances, so I spent seven years not being able to eat wheat or dairy and then I did this alternative treatment based in principles of traditional Chinese medicine that actually worked—which I learned about from Mel Chen. That treatment got me thinking about traditional Chinese medicine—which is everywhere in the Bay Area in a lot of ways—and so I began to build an understanding of food as medicine from that. So if you have a cold, eat a lot of daikon and onions to clear your lungs, for example. So for me, this added layer of epistemology, of understanding the nature of food, productively complicates the politics of eating. And, in sum, I think there are a lot of different ways to read food that come out of that mix.
But again, for me, basically it’s complicated and I generally do eat meat, and just try to be super honest about it: I eat nonhuman animals. But I also try and do so with an eye to the human and nonhuman labor in all its forms involved in that, as well as my own economic and time limitations. Right now where I’m living, there are a bunch of really neat local farmers who will sell you half a pig. I don’t have a refrigerator that large, but I’ll buy stuff from them. One of the things I think about in refusing to get pigs from factory agribusinesses is that it’s not just because of what they do to pigs, but also because of the recent history of ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids on slaughterhouses, which are very troubling. And then there’s the union busting that happens in those spaces as well. And so I try and concern myself with the ways humans are marginalized and oppressed through an entwined history and present of racialized capitalism and classism in those spaces, which you can see very clearly in Timothy Pachirat’s Every Twelve Seconds. There are also other problematic norms produced and reinforced there. My class actually watched one of those pig farm hidden camera videos the other day, and one of the things we talked about was how there is this hidden culture of toxic masculinity that the video revealed, which we then tied to not just the local factors of that particular labor and space but also the larger framework of racial and class politics that demand and produce that specific kind of masculinity through that setting.
So, to go back to the pig farmers I know here, they are doing something differently, and yet that difference is made possible by certain resources and investments. Many of the “back-to-the-farm” folks are generally not folks that actually grew up in those areas but are white folks who transfer their capital there from other venues. I mean, it’s expensive to get land, and to buy a farm, and you end up investing a lot up front. So there’s the ways that folks who are entering these farming movements anew are doing so using inherited capital that comes out of centuries of oppression involving slavery and settler colonialism. There’s also, for me, a deeply troubling whiteness, and differently troubling gender politics, that goes into and makes possible spaces like farmers’ markets and CSAs [community supported agriculture], that I would say is actually of a piece with the problematic racial, class, and gender politics of agro-business. The dynamics of both are troubling in different ways and in ways that actually have similar roots. You can see it with the strawberry boycott right now. Indeed, one of the other interspecies intersectionalities, and becomings in kind, that I think is really neat to think with in this regard, is thinking with plants. So I am interested in examining the kinds of identities that emerge from strawberry picking in particular conditions, along with specific kinds of racial and class experiences. All of which is to say that, for me, the politics is more complex, and in a very productive and fascinating way, than “vegan or not vegan.”
VM: In relation to consuming nonhuman animals—do you want to tell us about what you used to feed Haley, what you feed Annie, and how you make those decisions?
HW: That was my question for you! Because I spend so much time thinking about what I feed my animals, and I thought, “How did this not come up?” That question I love; it’s something people don’t talk about that much in these venues.
VM: I am also the resident dog sitter; I’ve dog sat for a variety of faculty in the department and it’s just something always on the brain. The food, the feeding routines, the treat protocol conversations. . . .
HW: Yeah! Haley, like a lot of short-haired dogs, developed really severe food allergies when she was around seven, and the only thing that worked was to feed her the raw food diet. We worked with a really wonderful holistic vet, Dr. Cheryl Schwartz. She was one of the first in the country; she wrote Four Paws, Five Directions. She helped me develop a diet that was attuned to Haley’s bodily needs, in terms of reading her body through the lens of traditional Chinese medicine. It was interesting because I would only go to Dr. Cheryl very occasionally, for super long-term health stuff, because she was very expensive. And then we would go to our other vet who would excoriate me for feeding Haley raw meat, and I constantly felt caught between these two contradictory epistemologies in terms of understanding what was good for her. One of them that was very much shaped by industrial agribusiness, and the other shaped by what I knew, which was that she looked like she had hives if she didn’t eat this particular food. The other vet was very expensive also. And then sourcing that food was its own experience, trying to find a good source of goat meat led me to spaces I hadn’t been in before. So we ended up doing a lot of Halal meat shopping because that was where I could get the best meat for her, and where I was careful not to tell people that I was buying it for my dog, for obvious reasons. In some ways I feel like, when I have the money, which I don’t always, I put feeding my animals well before I put my own feeding—like many of us, no doubt! The other thing I’ve been doing with Annie, who, fortunately, has champion digestion; it’s amazing—if we were all so lucky!—is that she eats her meal every day through training. I put all her kibble in a treats pouch and we practice tricks, or go around and try to be okay when other dogs walk by—which isn’t always very successful. So our food relationship is really about a much deeper positive training relationship. It’s one of our ways of speaking and communicating; like, look, good things happen to dogs when they sit down. It’s basic operant conditioning, but leveraged for the greater good of her and our relationship.
VM: I commend you on that; there’s a lot of effort there. I’m glad you mentioned the extent of the cost and what’s involved in thinking through all these things, and then the practicalities—especially while working in the precarious labor environment of the academy.
HW: Yes! Sometimes with Annie it’s just learning how not to bark at dogs on TV because we’re really tired and we don’t have energy to leave the house.
VM: We’ve discussed this a bit, but we’re wondering if you could discuss if and how your writing about pitbulls, racialization, kinship, transgender affects, or other subjects has shaped your dietary practices or vice versa.
HW: Definitely not vice versa, yet. I can see it probably coming up when I get to the really amazing chapter of my book where I describe multispecies justice and interspecies intersectionalities together in all of their glory, but I haven’t written that yet. But in terms of the writing about pitbulls, not any more than we talked about: It makes me think more and more about how it is so complicated and how there is no black and white. You know, there are so many different ways to be unethical when eating. I’ve been bringing my students chocolate because our class happens right around the time everyone’s sugar low hits, after lunch. And I’ve been thinking, I need to make sure I’m bringing chocolate that doesn’t involve the problematic labor practices, the slavery-like conditions that I’ve read about. And it’s generally vegetarian—it’s not vegan—but even so. It just keeps getting complicated. And sometimes it feels like too much and other times I feel like, “Okay I can take it on!”
VM: Do you have a story about a time when your dietary practices have been the subject of awkwardness, celebration, or hostility?
HW: When I couldn’t eat dairy, or wheat, or sesame seeds, or tree nuts, I had a campus job talk once, and they were like, “Let’s go to this really great dinner place!” And if we had gone there, literally the only thing on the menu I could have had would have been the fifty-dollar steak. Which you don’t order when you’re a campus visitor, right? So I asked, “Would it be possible to go to that Thai restaurant just down the street?” They were super nice about it, but it was one of those things where you don’t want to be the difficult person when you’re applying for an academic job. But also, cooking is always a celebration in some ways; I’ve had so many dinner parties. When I was at Wesleyan I did the ASI fellowship there, which was wonderful, and my friend and colleague Juno Parreñas and I rented a house together and we would always have everybody over and cook together. We always just defaulted to vegan; we made a lot of sushi that summer. It was also really hot, so it suited in many ways. This goes back to Donna’s thinking on species and messmates—on eating together as a way of building kin, intellectual kin in that sense. But I also have a lot of really good friendships from that period of time.
SK: Is there a key dilemma or question that haunts you?
HW: I think it’s the one we talked about: How do you really, in a strong way, take on affect theories in the ways they’ve been taken up by so many folks, and thinking with animals the way that I think Vinciane Despret does a marvelous job of, and at the same time build in a critique based in interspecies intersectionalities? So my critique of Despret and Patricia McConnell, eventually, is that dogs can be racist and that much of the practice of rescue and training inherits and reinscribes legacies of racism and colonialism, and so I constantly wonder how to talk about this sense of deeply affective bodily knowledge building, and at the same time talk about race and class and gender formations that come out of that, because of this prediscursive or unmarked way that the affect theory can travel. It’s not remotely easy to bring it together with those very legitimate concerns about whiteness and rescue politics. So that would be my dilemma. Maybe someday I’ll fix it, and maybe it’s just not doable, which is fine too. I feel like if there’s anybody who has a clue how to do it, it’s probably Sara Ahmed, so I need to reread more of her work.
VM: In Becoming in Kind, you write, “I’m not positing that pitbulls are themselves racialized, a mood that ignores disparities and histories of violence and species.” Have you come across work that draws problematic moral equivalencies between racism and breedism?
HW: I would say I come across it more in the world. I mean, I hear it all the time. I feel like I’ve done a really good job recently of reading people who don’t do that: Claire Jean Kim’s stuff doesn’t do that at all. My class read some of Susan McHugh’s work that talks about the sled dog massacre in a really remarkable way. But the problematic equivalencies do come up constantly in the activism I witness. In fact, one of the reasons I do the work that I do is because there are so many ways that we relate with animals that don’t have to do with eating. So I don’t read a lot of stuff about the food, about veganism in particular, and I think that’s where a lot of those comparisons happen in intellectual work. I think if there were more people writing about training and pitbulls and stuff you might see more of that pop up, but I think I’m friends with all five of us. There just aren’t that many people doing it. I think if it were a more pervasive topic, I probably would have seen it.
SK: That’s one of the reasons why we’re trying to talk to people who don’t use veganism as a starting point or endpoint for analysis. It is interesting that many of our interviewees have turned out to be vegan, but we didn’t know that going in and it certainly wasn’t a criterion for participation.
HW: You know what’s funny, is I met Lauren Berlant at the SLSA [Society for Literature, Science and the Arts] in Europe, and she’s such a neat person, in addition to her thinking, which is fabulous. I asked her, “Why aren’t you an anthropologist?” Because she was so curious about everything and she was like, “Well, you can’t be an anthropologist if you’re vegan. You can’t turn down food as an anthropologist.”