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This book explores a key mechanism of biopolitics by which forms of power ranging from state authority to familial intimacy get conjoined and worked out via animal representations. More specifically, it highlights the crucial role of animals in the ways Americans enact their humanity and regulate subjects in the biopolitical state. Drawing on the writings of Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson, the book explains how biopower thrives on the strategic ambivalence between who is considered human and what is judged as animal. It demonstrates the exceptionality and exemplarity of animals, as both figures of radical alterity and the embodiment of biopolitics, to the biopolitical state. In addressing the cultural and political dimensions of animal representations as well as their significance, the book brings American literary studies in dialogue with critical animal studies.

This chapter explores the biopolitical function of animal representations by focusing on two seemingly disparate historical and geographical moments: the criminalization of bestiality at the Plymouth Plantation and the bestialization of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. It argues that we must understand the crucial role that animal representations played for the production and negation of biopolitical subjectivity as and at the founding of a legal order premised on colonial violence. It examines bestiality through its historical definition as a synonym for sodomy and as the performance of sexual relations between humans and animals. Although it retains the use of the term “bestiality” for sex acts that cross species lines, the chapter adopts the term “animality” to discuss the structural and representational position that bestiality produces. Animals such as guard dogs can inhabit the position of animality, but they can also take on a mediating function between the structural position of humanity and the position of animality. The chapter locates the birth of American biopolitics in that mediation.

This chapter examines how the scene of bestiality gets rewritten as one of “puppy love” with the rise of sentimentalism in the nineteenth century and its permutations in the twentieth century. In particular, it considers the role played by theories of childhood education for understandings of subjectivity and the way in which infantilization—as a practice, as a strategy—maps animal relations onto psychological and commoditized object relations. The discussion focuses on Emily Dickinson's poetry and her experimentations with animal representations as they relate to affect theory, as well as her use of the explicitly humanist framework of liberal subject formation to radically rethink the parameters and representational modes of subject formation. The chapter shows how Dickinson, by engaging with the pedagogical and literary models that became a staple of childhood education in the nineteenth century, stretches our understanding of literary representation beyond symbolization by rethinking orthography as a confrontation with literal animals.

This concluding chapter summarizes the arguments of the book and relates them to later developments in animal representation. By tracing the effects of photography on cultural conceptions of animals, the book demonstrates photography’s centrality to contemporary discourses of animality. It also troubles the separation of the human and the animal that photographic technologies have helped to enable and the need to now look at the history and rethink the implications of this imposed and somewhat artificial separation.

This chapter examines the conflation of pets with children by focusing on the genre of animal autobiography—that is, autobiographies written from the perspective of an animal. More specifically, it rethinks the “history of sexuality” as a “history of bestiality” by analyzing the gender politics of animal autobiography. To this end, the chapter situates Millie's Book, as Dictated to Barbara Bush (1990) in relation to a broader genealogy of queer animal autobiography, with particular emphasis on works by Katharine Lee Bates and Virginia Woolf. It shows that animal autobiographies explore structures of objectification that unsettle the biopolitics they are meant to affirm, and that animal representations locate a queerness at the very heart of liberal subject formation. It also considers how pets suffer from a double animation—as commodities and as creatures—that situates them at the core of modern biopolitics and concludes by discussing objectification as a mechanism of biopower and the way animals can influence the subject via object relations.

This chapter explores the conception of animality and animal representation at work prior to the development of live animal photography. It analyzes two photographs taken by Welsh photographer John Dillwyn Llewelyn in Wales in the 1850s. Some of Llewelyn’s early animal photographs are iconographically indistinguishable from wildlife photographs. It is argued that to read them as such is to misread these images by reducing them to contemporary terms of understanding. More importantly, to do so is to miss their importance for highlighting the relations between photographic function, the development of photographic technology, and broader epistemic conditions. The chapter situates Llewelyn’s photographs within nineteenth-century animal photography and traces the development of the practice from the 1840s to the 1890s.

This book has explored the mediating role of “biopolitical subjectivity” in American literature and culture—and vice versa, the impact of animal representations on our understanding of biopolitics and subjectivity. From many vantage points, “biopolitical subjectivity” is a contradiction in terms: in current critical accounts, biopolitics is about populations, sovereignty, and violence, but most often not about subjectivity. The book has tried to offer a corrective of this view in two senses: first, in linking the emergence of biopolitics historically to the emergence of liberal subjectivity and, second, by suggesting ways in which subjectivity is the battleground as well as the byproduct of biopolitics. It has also discussed the central role of animals in the way in which we are taught to perform our humanity and in the regulation of subjects in the biopolitical state. As figures of radical alterity and the embodiment of biopolitics, animals are simultaneously exceptional of and exemplary for the biopolitical subject.