US Military Nationalism and the Intimate Public Sphere: The Role of the Dog in US Militarism

Abstract

In the context of the US ‘war on terror’, racialisation intensifies a porous boundary between the categories ‘human’ and ‘animal’. Dogs deployed within this war are folded symbolically and materially into a species-infused racialised nationalism, instrumentalised as tools of intimidation, equipment to be cared for, pets to be loved, and heroes to be honoured. Ubiquitous discourses about these dogs as ‘sacrificing heroes’ valorise the dogs’ lives and present them as ‘quasi-liberal subjects’, contributing to frameworks that link love for dogs with US military nationalism. These discourses echo in celebrations of the combat roles of these dogs, in mourning practices honouring them, and in acts of consumer citizenship. They reproduce an affective investment in US nationalism while effacing the cruelty of the US militarism, producing a sentimental narrative of war. They reveal how a toxic blend of animalisation and racialisation creates differential frames of precarity and grievability in the sentimentalised biopolitics that underpin the mutually constitutive formations of US nationalism and militarism. The article demonstrates the role of the figure of the dog in constructing an intimate public sphere saturated with affective frames of nationalism in the US ‘war on terror’.

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