Of companionship, curfew, and conflict: multispecies leisure in the age of COVID

Abstract

From public health policies designed to regulate outdoor exercise for canines and their companions to the booming market in ‘pandemic puppies’ and ‘COVID kittens’, multispecies relationships have featured prominently in the organisation of leisure in the viral environment. In what is conventionally understood as a separate set of circumstances, the uneven distribution of COVID-related morbidity and mortality converged with an especially brazen and brutal police killing in the summer of 2020 to place the pernicious character of contemporary racism on the global stage. Here, I analyse these contexts together in order to emphasise how entangled infrastructures of race, as well as class and sex, are fundamental to the regulation and experience of human-animal relationships. I make two main arguments: first, that the ‘becoming with’ of humans and animals is socially antagonistic, reflecting, reproducing, and sometimes subverting patterns of leisure mobility and access; and second, that multispecies relationships help shape the distribution of risk, harm, and wellness under racial capitalism.

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