'My Dog is My Home': multispecies care and poverty politics in Los Angeles, California and Austin, Texas. Issue 6 (3rd June 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Gillespie, Kathryn; Lawson, Victoria
• Is Part Of: Gender, place and culture. Volume 24:Issue 6(2017)
• Page Start: 774
• Page End: 793
• Publication Date: 2017-06-03
• Subjects: Care -- relational poverty -- animal studies -- homelessness -- structural violence -- property; Human geography -- Periodicals; Feminism -- Periodicals; Géographie féministe -- Périodiques; 305.305
• DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2017.1339021
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0966-369X

Abstract

Abstract: My Dog is My Home is an art activist project in Los Angeles dedicated to sharing testimonies about the redemptive bonds of care and love between homeless persons and their canine companions. These testimonies politicize the structural violence and oppressive norms about propertied citizenship and notions of home that operate to render homeless human and animal lives disposable and ungrievable. Informed by the experts' testimonies on multispecies homelessness and an engagement with feminist care theory, we bring relational poverty studies into conversation with critical animal studies to reject this framing of homeless lives as disposable and to trouble the idea of property as the fundamental basis for value. We problematize these notions by highlighting the insights gained from witnessing the entangled empathetic relationships forged between homeless humans and dogs. These relationships are not only a window into the political economic material conditions and discourses that reproduce homelessness and the animal-as-property. We conclude that studying these bonds offers a collective politics of multispecies mutuality, care, and love.