Interspecific Contact Scenes: Humans and Street Dogs in the Margins of the City

Abstract

The main subject of this paper are two recent Latin American films (La mujer de los perros by Laura Citarella and Verónica Llinás, 2015, and Los Reyes by Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff, 2018) that centre on street dogs in marginal urban zones of Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile. It will be argued that in both films exemplary forms of encounter between humans and dogs outside domestic environments can be examined, exploring the alternative ways of conviviality against the backdrop of the multiple layers of shared history between two companion species. In addition to the detailed analysis of exemplary scenes in both films, the concept of the interspecific “contact scene” (as a variation of the “contact zone”, a concept coined by Mary Louise Pratt) is proposed as a possible tool for the analysis of convivial constellations in Latin America.