Get ready for the ultimutt dream team: Dr Sarah Parker (Loughborough) and Dr Hannah Roche (York) share their clever mewsings on queer pets and their keepurrs in this pawesome episode. Although a cat called Winky, a poodle named Basket and Whym Chow, the chow, are clearly the alphas of this episode, other Modernist animals and their human companions feature as well: from Gertrude Stein to Radclyffe Hall to 'Michael Field', we’ve got the whole pack! We retrieve their literary hisstories to reflect on how ruff the discrepancy between different timelines of human and non-human animal lives can be, but Hannah and Sarah also read furrmidable love poetry for pets, and talk about the pupstar status most of these animals had in their humans’ lives. At the tail end of the conversation, we all share some furvourite texts and films. Apparently, I need to watch She-Ra!

Texts, people and pets mentioned:
Sarah Parker’s The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889-1930 (Pickering and Chatto, 2013)
Michael Field: Decadent Moderns, edited by Sarah Parker and Ana Parejo Vadillo (Ohio University Press, December 2019)
Sarah Parker’s “Women Poets and Photography, 1860–1970” (National Portrait Gallery)
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/about/photographs-collection/featured-collections-archive/women-poets-and-photography/
Hannah Roche’s The Outside Thing: Modernist Lesbian Romance (Columbia UP, 2019)
Gertrude Stein
Radclyffe Hall
Djuna Barnes
Alice B. Toklas
Basket
Man Ray
Basket
Marie Laurencin
Una Troubridge
Fido
Fitz John Minniehaha
Hedgehog Warwick
Donkey Hilary
Parrot Cocky
Winky
Amy Lowell’s “Chopin”
Romaine Brooks
Thelma Wood
Cat Dilly
H.D.
Bryher
Ekphrasis
Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood
Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Duke University Press, 2009, 92-93)
Joyce’s Ulysses
T.S. Eliot
Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s Works and Days
Whym Chow
Jack Halberstam’s Wild Things
Homo Sapiens 141: Dan Savage Part 2
Stein’s Paris France
Picasso
Michael Field’s “Trinity” Whym Chow, Flame of Love (written 1906, published 1914)
Amy Lowell’s “To Winky”
Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Sarah E. Kersh, “‘Betwixt Us Two’: Whym Chow, Metonymy, and the Amatory Sonnet Tradition.” Michael Fields: Decadent Moderns, 2019.
Caroline Baylis Green, “Sentimental Coatings and the Subversive Pet Closet: Michael Field's Whym Chow: Flame of Love” (2018 blog post)
https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/article/sentimental-coatings-and-the-subversive-pet-closet-michael-fields-whym-chow-flame-of-love
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (Netflix)
Alison Bechdel’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength

I’m not kitten: You absolutely must follow Hannah (@he_roche) and Sarah (@DrSarahParker) on Twitter. If you’d like to see (p)oodles of queer pets, you could also check out @Lena_Mattheis (Twitter) or @queerlitpodcast on Instagram.

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:
1. Which of the authors mentioned are you already familiar with? Do you remember non-human animals featuring in their writing and life?
2. Why do you think writing about pets is often classified as ‘whimsical’ or in some way less relevant?
3. Please read the final scene of Djuna Barnes’ novel Nightwood (1928). What function do you think the dog has here?
4. What are potential roles that can be ascribed to pets in a queer household? What is problematic about these?
5. Please look up Jack Halberstam’s work on wildness and compare his position to Donna Harraway’s Companion Species Manifesto. You may want to refer to the Queer Lit episode with Jack as well.
6. Do you think queer people have a different relationship to pets? (You may want to consider queer temporality, empathy, and queer childhoods in your response.)