Authored by Micaiah Bilger via The College Fix,

Relationships between dogs, cyborgs, and lesbian feminists are the subject of a new scholarly paper by a State University of New York professor.

Published March 8 in the Journal of Lesbian Studies, the title of the analysis is “Queer canine becomings: Lesbian feminist cyborg politics and interspecies intimacies in ecologies of love and violence.”

The author, Chloe Diamond-Lenow (pictured), is an assistant professor of women’s and gender studies at SUNY Oneonta, and uses the pronouns “she/they,” according to her bio on the public university website.

Basically, the professor’s argument seems to boil down to this: Dogs provide a positive relational experience for many LGBTQ people. However, the government also uses dogs and robo-dogs, or cyborgs, to commit unjust violence against marginalized people. Therefore, the relationships between dogs and humans are complex.

According to the abstract, the paper offers a “queer lesbian feminist analysis” of “lesbian-queer-trans-canine relationalities” and “the interconnected queer becomings of people, nature, animals, and machines amidst ecologies of love and violence in the 2020s.”

“The entanglements of violence and love in these queer dog relationalities provide insights into the complexities of queer and lesbian feminist worldbuilding. Lesbian and queer feminist cyborg politics can help theorize the potentials and challenges of these interspecies entanglements,” Diamond-Lenow writes.

The professor argues that the government is using “dogs and robot dogs for radicalized and imperial violence.”

At the same time, “dogs help articulate queer gender, sexuality, and kinship formations, and as such, queer worlds for gender, sexual, and kin becomings,” according to the abstract.

Her analysis focuses on two things: “first, the state instrumentalization of dogs and robot dogs for racialized and imperial violence, and second, quotidian [“everyday, commonplace”] queer and lesbian-dog relationalities and becomings”:

“In the first, the article traces how dogs are weaponized as tools of state violence and proposes a queer lesbian feminist critique of white supremacy and militarization that can also extend to a critique of the violence committed through and toward the dogs.

“In the second, the article analyzes how, within lesbian, non-binary, and trans-dog intimacies, dogs help articulate queer gender, sexuality, and kinship formations, and as such, queer worlds for gender, sexual, and kin becomings.”

Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist and Manhattan Institute fellow, first noticed the paper and wrote about it on X. Here’s what he had to say:

Diamond-Lenow teaches a class called “Feminist and Queer Theories of the Non/Human” at SUNY, according to her bio.

She also has written about “racialized borders of humanity and animality and frames of heteropatriarchal nationalisms in U.S. militarism during the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the ‘war on terror,’ with particular attention to dogs.”