Other Forms of Life: On Blackness, Interspecies Interaction, and Communicative Possibility in Digital Culture

• In Event: Technology and Communication Then and Now

Description for Program

In Sharon Holland’s An Other: Black Feminist Considerations of Animal Life, she asks: “What happens when Black people do things with animals?” For Holland, animal and human life are intertwined in ethical relation. In this presentation, I extend this prompt to examine what happens when Black people do things with animals on social media. Contributing to the burgeoning scholarly field of the Black Outdoors, I analyze human-animal interactions at the dynamic intersection of organic environments and virtual ecologies. The presentation looks to racialized scenes of interspecies engagement by exploring the online activities of “Black People Pets” – a social network that is connected by a shared interest in, and love for, companion species.

Specifically, I detail the myriad ways in which dogs figure into Black domestic experience as exhibited within digital media. My focus on canine content reflects Donna Haraway’s understanding of the lives of humans and dogs as being bonded in significant otherness. I specifically argue that, not dissimilar from the defiant stance of Black Lives Matter, “Black People Pets” signifies on dominant logics of antagonism between Black folks and animals that are rooted in antiblackness, by instead promoting forms of kinship through canine care work online. Such intimate domestic scenes upend dominant hierarchies of animacy in their linguistic and gestural play, offering up techniques and/as technologies for alternative empathetic ways of being and being with others in quotidian environments.

Author

• Brandy Monk-Payton, Fordham University