On Intimacy with Dogs 

I am getting married to Pablo because I truly love him and because we have formed an alliance against those of you who think you know the way things should be. ... Living with Pablo will be the ultimate in gracious sexual living ... I won’t have to use the Pill ... no diaphragm, gel, foam, or abstinence.
— from Cosmopolitan Girl by Rosalyn Drexler

“Who is this Pablo?” you might ask. Why a dog! Although the narrator, Helen, truly believes that Pablo has clear advantages over human husbands, the canine also presents her with typical conjugal problems. A girlfriend warns Helen that she’ll be getting hitched to a lazy, unemployed slob.

Likewise whimsically parodying the norms of marriage and sex is Margaret Kemp Ross’s poem “I Married My Dog.” It recites the incidence of a conventional wedding (“I was simply beautiful / and my dog looked nice, too”), mundane nuptials (“We put on our nightgowns and fell asleep”), and a typical morning after. The bride arises first to greet her “husband” when he awakes. But when she says good morning, “he didn’t notice. / He just lay on the floor, eating.” She combats her fleeting disappointment by wedding her cat.

Both Drexler and Kemp Ross, by insisting on the appropriateness of one’s passion for a pet, sprightly challenge assumptions about what constitutes a marital-sexual relationship. They delight in silliness and satire as if to divert attention away from the seriousness of their provocation—that dog and woman indeed form “an alliance against those of you who think you know the way things should be.”

These two works redefine where intimacy, even eroticism, can lie and articulate a desire for a different passion, intensity, and tactile knowledge. In so doing, they present dog love as natural, not in the sense of normative, average, or socially prescriptive, but as unaffected and genuine, even as an ideal of harmony. If romantic attraction is ordinarily expressed as fascination with a mysterious someone of the opposite sex, Kemp Ross and Drexler seem to ask, why cannot this someone be of an opposite species? Mimicking conventional romance, Helen proposes that she and Pablo should “know everything about each other ... Here we are, just the two of us ... let’s open our hearts to each other.” Thus, at the same time that both works call into question the norms and prescriptions of heterosexual pairing, they also express a keen desire for the comforts of intimacy and domesticity. Although Kemp Ross and Drexler fantasize about heterosexual heterospeciality, their works resonate remarkably with a host of queer issues.

Dog love, like queer love, has the potential to raise the issue of social propriety. It is not a question here of bestiality: ever so delicately, Drexler and Kemp Ross make fun of the charge that they are advocating sex with animals. But, however sprightly, they do question the meaning of sexuality, commitment, and even marriage once one redefines “partnership” and once the distinctions between the species collapse.

Put differently, dog love has the potential of continuing and furthering the work of queer studies that interrogates the binaries—you are either masculine or feminine, gay or straight—that arise from inflexible gender and sexual identity categories. Our life with its fluctuating sensual needs, devotions, and obsessions can be complex and inconsistent in ways that call into question self-definitions based primarily on sexual preference. When the object of affection is a pet, male-female or hetero-homosexual binaries used to define one’s intimate self become less relevant. In other words, to admit that one’s object choice might not always be human diminishes the power of sexual identity categories that socially regulate the individual.

Pet love also reorients companionship and kinship away from the normative strictures of heterosexual coupling and the traditional family. Taken seriously, it calls for us to redefine bonds of privacy, succor, and habituation. Indeed, the relation to the dog cannot be restricted to the singular role of guardian, lover, companion, or child but incorporates all of those modalities and shifts between them.

More often than not, however, dog love is taken to be a meager substitute for a variety of human contacts—just as homosexuality has often been judged as the only option left to those regarded as heterosexually maladjusted. Marjorie Garber, in her chapter “Unconditional Lovers” from her book Dog Love, questions this assumption that affection for a pet is a second-class replacement for human companionship or kinship rather than something wholly different. She observes: “The point is perhaps not to argue about whether dog love is a substitute for human love, but rather to detach the notion of ‘substitute’ from its presumed inferiority to a ‘real thing.’ Don’t all loves function, in a sense, with a chain of substitutions? ... To distinguish between primary and substitutive loves is to understand little about the complexity of human emotions.”

Donna Haraway goes even further in questioning the assumption that dog love is a substandard replacement. In The Companion Species Manifesto, she rejects the logic of substitution entirely. “I resist being called the ‘mom’ to my dogs because I fear infantilization of the adult canines and misidentification of the important fact that I wanted dogs, not babies. My multi-species family is not about surrogacy and substitutes; we are trying to live other tropes, other metaplasms. We need other nouns and pronouns for the kin genres of companion species, just as we did (and still do) for the spectrum of genders.”

The verve and sassiness with which Haraway, Garber, Kemp Ross, and Drexler approach the topic of dog love comes in part from their refusal to associate such affection with disgrace, for the dog is often regarded to be the repository of shame. Freud, for instance, remarked that the two traits of the dog that make it repugnant to man are its lack of shame about its excrement and lack of shame about its sexual functions. Even admittance of emotional reliance on the pet can be shame inducing since it can be regarded as an improper, unclean object of attention. The same has been said of other nonconventional, nonheterosexual attachments. Some individuals may find both dog love and same-sex love nonnatural merely for being nonheterosexual. But is dog love so shameful and nonnormative? Given that people of all kinds love their dogs, this outlet for affection can actually be outwardly safer and more accepted than same-sex love. It therefore can grant a domesticity and comfort otherwise lacking in a homophobic society.

To cast the matter in a different light, perhaps the reassurance and calm a canine companion brings arise because transspecial love transcends the constrictions that gender and sexuality place upon the human body. Pet devotion has the potential to question the regulating strictures and categories by which we define sexuality, eroticism, and love, though not in the banal sense that it offers different forms of genital stimulation, indeed quite the opposite. Dog love corroborates Jacques Lacan’s famous dictum: “quand on aime, il ne s’agit pas de sexe“ (“when one loves, it is not a question of sex”), whether “sex” be interpreted here as intercourse or as the sex of the person one loves. Those who have an ardor for dogs know that their passion is unavailable and inaccessible elsewhere. Being independent of gender and sexuality, this love is liberating.

Pet love can perhaps also be liberating because it redefines what we usually understand by the term “intimacy.” Clearly, to love one’s dog means to enjoy the sensuality of stroking and petting it. But this closeness means something far more profound. By virtue of its companionship, the pet offers nearness to one’s very self, a certain calmness or equilibrium, something Margaret Kemp Ross finds as she curls up with her cat on the couch. This private, quiet, deep-seated familiarity and co-situatedness indicates a type of “intimacy.” Synonyms for intimate include not only “close“ and “dear“ but also “innermost“ and “intrinsic.“ Intimacy allows the bond with the animal to be affirmed. It entails a self-exploration whereby one opens oneself to life with a wholly different species.

Elizabeth von Arnim, best known for her novel The Enchanted April, writes about this intimacy in her autobiography All the Dogs of My Life. Solitude and retreat figure as important resources for “Elizabeth,“ as her reading public knew her: “Moments of wonder and blessing. And I who had been afraid I might be lonely! Lonely? It was here, in the first complete solitude I had ever known, that I began to suspect that what is called loneliness is what I love best.” Unaccompanied walks with her dogs provide Elizabeth with a simple contentment: “[T]hese very things, just sun on my face, the feel of spring round the corner, and nobody anywhere in sight except a dog, are still enough to fill me with utter happiness. How convenient. And how cheap.” Part of her joy comes from her being alone: “How beautiful this security seemed to me, this enchanting security of knowing oneself unnoticed and unseen!” Solitude—in other words, the quiet composure of oneself in the sole presence of dogs—is thus set in direct opposition with loneliness.  She writes, “I for one am unable to imagine how anybody who lives with an intelligent and devoted dog can ever be lonely.”

These passages suggest that dogs compensate for the absence of human companionship. Elizabeth, though, with a succession of children, friends, suitors, and spouses in her household, consciously seeks solitude. Although she often fails and, for instance, finds herself remarried and living apart from her dogs, she tries to resist early twentieth century social norms. Solace for her lies outside gender strictures in the enjoyment of her widowhood, solitary walks, and writing, all inseparable from the presence of a dog. She recognizes “that need for something more than human beings can give, that longing through greater loyalty, deeper devotion, which finds its comfort in dogs.” Indicating how unconventional this desire for the nonhuman can be, she tells of a misunderstanding between herself and her husband when she voices her desire to be “complete”: “And he was, I am afraid, very much disappointed, in spite of there already being five children, when I explained that all I wanted was a dog.”  The fact that the relationship with a dog is here juxtaposed with procreation suggests that it is desexualized in the sense that it releases von Arnim from the male-female binary. In being with the pet, such divisions dissolve, leaving room for a different kind of tactile and emotional intensity.

von Arnim, like Drexler and Kemp Ross, explores a sensuality, pleasure, comfort, loyalty, and love consciously outside the norms of heterosexual cohabitation. In so doing these authors help us understand what the human need for closeness to dogs means—and of how transcendence can be found in their intimate companionship.

Alice A. Kuzniar is a professor of German at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She edited the volume of essays Outing Goethe and His Age (Stanford University Press, 1996) and authored The Queer German Cinema (Stanford University Press, 2000). Most recently, she published Melancholia’s Dog: Reflections on Our Animal Kinship (University of Chicago Press, 2006).