Description
Book SynopsisIn Genealogy of Obedience Justyna Włodarczyk provides a long overdue look at the history of companion dog training methods in North America since the mid-nineteenth century, when the market of popular training handbooks emerged. Włodarczyk argues that changes in the functions and goals of dog training are entangled in bigger cultural discourses; with a particular focus on how animal training has served as a field for playing out anxieties related to race, class and gender in North America. By applying a Foucauldian genealogical perspective, the book shows how changes in training methods correlate with shifts in dominant regimes of power. It traces the rise and fall of obedience as a category for conceptualizing relationships with dogs.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Preface Introduction: Canine- Human Intensifications, Periodizing Dog Training in the US Since the 1850s 1 Periodizing Dog Training with Foucault 2 1850–1910: Shaping the Dog’s Soul 3 1910–1970s: The Emergence and Strengthening of the Disciplinary Regime 4 1980s–2000s: From Governmentality to Self-Governmentality: Biopower, Behaviorism and Care of Self 5 2000–2015: Beyond Behaviorism: Affirmative Biopolitics 1 The Gentle Way in Punishment: Transcending Animality/ Performing Animality in Early US Pet Dog Training Manuals, 1850–1900 1 Dog Training in the Nineteenth Century 2 Canine Sagacity 3 The Gentle Way in Punishment 4 Canine Minstrelsy 5 Conclusion 2 Hunting Dog Manuals: The Pointer as a Work of Art in the Age of Biopolitical Reproduction, 1845–1909 1 Sports Hunting 2 The Notion of Breed and Hunting Dogs 3 Polishing Instinct: The Pointer as a Work of Art 4 S.T. Hammond’s Training or Breaking? 5 Hunting in Black and White 3 Culture of Instinct: Emergence of the Disciplinary Regime, 1910–1946 1 Was Most Modern? 2 Police Dogs 3 Most’s Masculine Methods 4 Nietzsche Goes to the Dogs 5 Should American Dogs Bite? 6 Conclusion 4 The Rise and Fall of Obedience: From Helen Whitehouse Walker to the Dawn of Positive Training, 1933–1984 1 Leading Others: Tools of Discipline 2 Governmentality 3 Training You to Train Your Dog: Layers of Human-Canine Discipline 4 The Soul of a Trainer: Crossover Trainers, 1980s–2000s 5 Off the Leash 6 Feeling Power and Positive Dog Training 5 Power without Coercion: From Governmentality to Self-Governmentality, from Discipline to Self-Control, 1984–2000s 1 Had Foucault Read Skinner? 2 Training as a Practice of Freedom 3 Doggie Zen: Dog Training and Technologies of the Self 4 From Discipline to Control 5 Accounting for Affect/Accounting for Gender 6 Countermodernity: Resistance to the Positive Training Revolution, 1980s–2000s 1 Disciplining Affects: The Dog Whisperer 2 Vicki Hearne: On the Nature of Freedom 3 David McCaig: Pastoral Dissent 7 Be More Dog: Towards an Affirmative Biopolitics 1 Do More with Your Dog 2 Are We Having Fun Yet? 3 Affirmative Biopolitics 4 Garrett, Foucault and Radical Behaviorism 5 Beyond Behaviorism 6 Beyond Agility 7 Back to Ethology, Back to the Body 8 Conclusion Conclusion: The Death of Obedience References Index
