Publisher's Synopsis
McHugh's investigations into fictions of people relying on animals in civic and professional life-most obviously those of service animal users and female professional horse riders-showcase distinctly modern and human-animal forms of intersubjectivity. But increasingly graphic violence directed at these figures indicates their ambivalent significance to changing configurations of species.
Reading these developments with narrative adaptations of traditional companion species relations during this period- queer pet memoirs and farm animal fictions-McHugh clarifies the intercorporeal intimacies-the perforations of species boundaries now proliferating in genetic and genomic science-and embeds the representation of animals within biopolitical frameworks.