Biopolitics, traditionally understood as management of the human population, has been extended to include nonhuman animal life and posthuman life. In this article, we turn to literatures that advance Foucauldian biopolitics to explore the mode of government enabled by the dog of the US presidential family – the First Dog called Bo Obama. With analytical focus on vitalisation efforts, we follow the construction of Bo in various outlets, such as the websites of the White House and an animal rights organisation. Bo’s microphysical escapades and the negotiation thereof show how contemporary biopolitics, which targets the vitality of the dog population, is linked to seductive neoliberal management techniques and subjectivities. We discuss ‘cuddly management’ in relation to Foucauldian scholarship within organisation and management studies and propose that the construction of Bo facilitates interspecies family norms and an empathic embrace of difference circumscribed by vitalisation efforts that we pinpoint as ‘doggy-biopolitics’.

The biologisation of Bo While it is uncontroversial to speak of animals as biological beings, an emphasis on humans’ animal characteristics is generally believed to depreciate the value of human life. Dogs are in contrast liminal creatures, often described as instinct-driven organisms and descendants of wolves, on one hand, and persons and full-fledged members of human families, on the other (Redmalm, 2014). In this section, we turn to PETA’s critical stance towards the president’s choice of dog to show how doggy-biopolitics – norms concerning breeding practices and optimisations of dog life – are linked to presidential subjectivity. We suggest that the biologisation of life that is characteristic of biopolitics in this case allows for a special emphasis on empathy by a biopolitical concern extended across species borders, and a simultaneous depoliticisation of controversies around the categorisation of life. When the Obama family openly discussed the choice of their first First Dog, they considered whether to get a shelter dog or a so-called hypoallergenic breed, due to Malia Obama’s allergies. Barack Obama made this dilemma public and pointed out that it might be difficult to find a dog of hypoallergenic breed in a shelter, because ‘obviously, a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me’ (msnbc News, 2016). Barack Obama’s humorous comment was followed by media reports on how comfortable he was talking about his own mixed biological background (NBCNEWS.com, 2008). The animal rights organisation PETA (2009a) picked up on Barack Obama’s ‘mutts like me’, comment and acknowledged that Barack Obama had spoken highly about mutts but still expressed concern that he would go for a specific breed with certain qualities. PETA (2009c) thus stressed the issue of animal rights by connecting it to a humanist anti-racism discourse, saying that ‘loving and caring for a member of a different species also teaches compassion for those who are like us in so many ways, except that they are in a different type of body and have a somewhat different culture’. PETA’s own President Ingrid E. Newkirk wrote a letter to Barack Obama about racism, suggesting that ‘[n]o one needs to tell you that this country is proud to be a melting pot and that there is something deeply wrong and elitist about wanting only a purebred dog’. The ultimate consequence of this elitism, she argues, is that ‘[m]illions of Great American Mutts – the dog that should be our national dog – are set to die in our nation’s extremely overcrowded pounds and shelters for lack of good homes’. That is also why the Obamas should look for a homeless puppy of unknown ancestry in a shelter, since that is what ‘[c]ompassionate people nationwide’ do (PETA, 2009b). PETA delivers a rhetorical dilemma to the president, since he will risk appearing as the opposite of compassionate – unsympathetic or even inhumane – if he does not take on a shelter puppy. This alternative voice can be understood as part of PETA’s ‘ethical askesis’, and Bo may even offer a sort of ‘point of resistance’ (Munro, 2014: 1134): [I]f we as Americans were treated the same way that we treat mutts – essentially, ourselves in the dog world – then we’d all be locked up, wasting away in cages, and hoping for someone to take us for ‘walkies’. If we can’t be true to mutts, then we can’t be true to ourselves. (PETA, 2008) When the Obama family in spite of PETA’s demands ‘accepted a Portuguese water dog as a gift from Sen. Ted Kennedy’, PETA (2009d) announced its disappointment with the Obamas. The story does not end there but continues in 2011, when Barack published the long version of his birth certificate. PETA (2011) was again fast to pick up on the anti-racism discourse and repeat its wish for an increased acceptance of mixed-breed ‘paperless’ shelter dogs (Figure 6). Download Open in new tab Download in PowerPoint The below advertisement, in which PETA replaces the eyes of a dog with the eyes of Barack Obama, makes the quest for empathy even more evident. While Barack and PETA have partly different aims with their use of the figure of the mutt, they both share an emphasis on empathy, which today, as Pedwell (2012: 286) points out, ‘has become part and parcel of being a self-managing and self-enterprising individual within a neoliberal order’. The mutual emphasis on empathy thus resonates with the logic of neoliberal rule. Both Barack and PETA speak in terms of an empathic embrace of difference and engage in an affective politics. According to Pedwell (2012: 289), ‘in cultivating “empathy,” citizens fuel nationalism by developing a marketable skill which not only contributes to American economic competitiveness but also furnishes articulations of American cultural and ethical exceptionalism’. Just as Pedwell would have us expect, the political moves towards empathy and equality never result in radical programmes – rather the other way around. If PETA would follow through with the comparison implicit in their advertisment, PETA would be suggesting that the way the dog population is violently controlled is analogous to the state’s control of undocumented immigrants by means of incarceration and forced deportation. Such an interlinking of animal rights rhetoric and radical cosmopolitanism would then imply a radically different world order for both humans and other animals. Now instead, with the humorous juxtaposition of breedism and racism, the issue of structural discrimination is put on a par with the matter of which dog a father should choose for his daughters. Simultaneously, the parallel breeding and killing of dogs of industrial proportions are reduced into a discussion of the fate of an individual dog. Thus, a part of doggy-biopolitics is the way the intervention on an individual dog turns the focus from controversial issues via dog-centred reason, making difficult political questions into private matters of pet keeping. When Obama chose a purebred dog, Bo’s reproductive capacities also came up on PETA’s agenda. PETA argued in an article at their website that it would cost more to regulate the surplus dog population than it did to fight the Iraq War. PETA asked the president to ‘Please show that you understand this by making the first dog the last dog of his line and having Bo neutered’, and continued by making an analogy to previous White House sex scandals: ‘Sex in the White House has been the topic of past scandals, but with a simple “snip,” the first dog can set a new tone and a great example’ (PETA, 2009c). PETA (2009c) argued that the sterilisation would be of universal gain: ‘This will set a fine example for the world to follow, and Bo will be the happier for it’. So eager was PETA (2009c) that the organisation even sent ‘a coupon good for one free sterilization at PETA’s SNIP clinic, which you are welcome to use or pass on to a member of your Cabinet or someone in a low-income neighbourhood of Washington, D.C’. Biopolitics arose around human sexuality, coupled to norms about extramarital sex and its assumed uncleanliness and degeneration, characteristics that were especially associated with low-income groups and the underclass (see further Foucault, 1978–1979/2010: 66f). By targeting reproduction via norms, for example, the creation of a nuclear family, biopolitics seeks sexual self-control (Sandilands, 1999). As Foucault pointed out in History of Sexuality (Foucault, 1976/2002: 50–51), sexuality is a meeting point for disciplinary tactics and biopolitical strategies, and in this case, both human and canine life are emphasised as entailing reproductive capacities in need of management. By making a connection between dog reproduction and excessive human sexuality, PETA is able to associate the overproduction of dogs with the same repellent characteristics. By making the Obamas responsible for how Bo’s reproductive system should be managed, they also aim at distributing this moralised construction of the canine population to the wider population. In one rhetoric move, PETA demands that the president prevents his dog from procreating, suggests that the president refrains from extramarital relations (i.e. adheres to a ‘compartmental sexuality’; see Foucault, 1978: 46) and offers the whole population, with an emphasis on those in low-income neighbourhoods, a chance to reflect upon canine sexuality. PETA offers us their visions of collective subjectivity, as they ‘hope for a better future self’ of the president (cf. Costas and Grey, 2014: 915, 932). In comparison to Costas and Grey (2014), this future self is in a quite political move given to someone else, still possibly functioning as an illusion of Barack for PETA to flee to. PETA’s action can thus be understood as part of a wider biopolitical natalist policy for dogs – a way to manage the surplus dog population with wishes to optimise it reciprocally to the human population. Some humans are thus governed and biopoliticised hand in hand with enhancements of the dog as species to ‘help them achieve their full canine potential’ (Haraway, 2008: 61). Doggy-biopolitics, like other posthuman vitalisations, widens what biopolitics of today can legitimately target. In PETA’s rhetoric – and in Obama’s ‘mutts like me’ comment – the First Dog is treated as a biological being whose genetic composition and reproductive function (and its eventual removal) are believed to be an ethical and political choice that will affect the wider human and canine population. The way in which Bo is biologised allows both the president of the United States and PETA to address Barack’s ‘race’ in an uncontroversial, humorous way that takes the edge off the issue – or meets resistance before it occurs (Barratt, 2008). The biologisation of Bo thus facilitates the proliferation of a canine natalist policy which itself could be potentially controversial, but instead makes possible a status quo in the sociobiological tale of human–dog relationships in which humans still have sovereign control over the canine population, in spite of the mutual disciplining going on between dogs and owners.

Acknowledgements This article has been fruitfully developed with help of generous colleagues at The Radical Foucault Conference, University of East London, 8-9 sep. 2011, and The Stockholm Discourse Seminar, October 21, 2010. We are also grateful for an interesting and helpful review process and detailed comments on an earlier draft by Ulrike Marx.