Animalia Americana by Boggs Colleen Glenney;

Author:Boggs, Colleen Glenney;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NAT039000, Nature/Animal Rights, LIT004020, Literary Criticism/American/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

Biopolitical Commodities

The Life magazine cover featuring Barbara Bush and Millie invokes the political origins of Mother’s Day by depicting the first lady, but it uses sentimental iconography to displace the lived reality and abject labor of the working-class mother. Instead of forging bonds with other human women, Barbara Bush shares the solidarity of motherhood with her dog, Millie. By describing mothers’ affective agency as “puppy love,” the cover situates Mother’s Day in a saccharine commercialism that inscribes Howe’s vision of antipatriarchal family politics within conservative consumerism.22 Making motherhood revolve around the dog and her puppies places Millie in the service of an overdetermined commercial iconography that aims—but ultimately fails—to inscribe the photo in the heterosexual matrix that lies at the core of the modern nation-state.23

Although the Life cover photo is easily legible as a celebrity image, it is more difficult to discern what it and its title “Puppy Love” say about the relationships the photo depicts. The term puppy love is usually used figuratively to describe that first burgeoning of romantic attraction between teenagers. The term carries “contemptuous” overtones, as the Oxford English Dictionary informs us.24 Perhaps the best-known use of the term is Paul Anka’s 1959 hit “Puppy Love,” in which he wistfully reflects on the dismissal with which adults treat teenage affection.

Given these contexts, the use of the term puppy love as the title for Life’s cover in May 1989 strangely codes the relationships depicted as romantic. That raises the question of who exactly is experiencing “puppy love”: Does the term refer to the relationship between Millie and her puppies or to the one between Barbara Bush and the dogs, or is it the viewer who is expected to experience “puppy love” when confronting this image? Subjectivities multiply and become unsettled in affective relationships with pets. A search using the key word puppy love on Google Images renders, in addition to the occasional pornographic picture that explicitly connects “puppy love” to bestiality, images that show two puppies who presumably love one another and whom the viewer is expected to love. The images’ capacity to depict and elicit affection collapses the distinction between identification and objectification; it puts the puppies in the precarious position of anthropomorphized subjects and fetish objects. The puppies share with children that tenuous subjectivity of animated objects.25 Some of these photos replace one puppy with a child, breaking down the divide between the literal puppy and the figurative puppy. Functioning simultaneously as a stand-in for the puppy and for the viewer, this child becomes a mediator for an affection that crosses species barriers but also normalizes that boundary crossing by providing an anthropomorphic center.

Because this image of puppy love describes a sentiment and inscribes the viewer in the affect portrayed, it both infantilizes the viewer as a child and animalizes her as a puppy, all the while placing her in the adult role of lover and mother in relation to the animal. Placing Barbara Bush in the Life cover picture makes visible this lover–mother role:

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