And What if Management Enters the Kennel?

Abstract

What happens when I touch my dog? What worlds have moved so that I, Letícia, a white, middle-class woman, a university professor, am now in contact with Sissi, a female, long-haired, grayish mixed-breed dog? When I touch her, is it just a chance encounter, or is it an immense history that made the conditions for this touch possible? What does it mean, and what does it produce, this encounter between our organisms, true ecologies connected in this long history of coexistence between our species 1 ?The questions that open this review may seem trivial, but they can be complexly problematized considering the work of philosopher and biologist Donna Haraway. For the American thinker, a touch like this deals with an uninterrupted chain of coexistence and codependence that tells us a story of embodied cohabitation, coevolution, and interspecies sociability. When I touch Sissi, I touch the history of coevolution between humans and dogs, a mundane story that is told in Biology and History books, but also in our genes. Both Sissi and I are particular and situated beings, heirs of tragic and happy encounters and misencounters, products of the history of species constitution, of economic and social transformations, among many stories and structures marked colonialism, ethnicity, gender, and class (Haraway, 2021). In these transformations, stories, and structures, I would add, many organizations have been and are present. They are in the modern technologies of creating subjects and objects of "pure race", in the production of a commodity culture that daily manufactures the so-called "pet industry" (whose marketed products, as it is known, include not only all kinds of goods and services, but the very lives of beings classified as ¹ Additionally, I would suggest another reading by the same author, which inspired me on the ideas presented here, also recently translated into Portuguese: Haraway, D. J. (2022). Quando as espécies se encontram. Editora Ubu.