232THIS IS NOT A HORSEat play in different human/animal relations are substantially shaped not
only by the variables proposed by the intertwining of these two power mo-
dalities, but also by the species of animals with which such relationships
are established. In the light of this proposition, it is important to note
that the animal presences and absences staged by It’s Hard to Make a Stand
all gesture toward intertwining transhistorical, transspecies, human/
animal sets of power/knowledge relationships of the type inscribed in do-
mestication, domination, and consumption. Claire Palmer’s and Stephen
Thierman’s original contributions to the subject attempt to substantially
reconfigure Foucault’s concept of docile bodies on human/animal studies
grounds.^33 Developed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish as a produc-
tive, constructive, disciplining, and ultimately optimizing technology of
power, the notion of docile bodies aimed at integrating the human body
into the machineries of production for the purpose of enhancing capitalist
productivity.^34 Foucault configures “the body as a machine: its disciplin-
ing, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the par-
allel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems
of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures
of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the hu-
man body.”^35 In light of this configuration, the discursive interminglings
between inanimate commodity, mannequin, and preserved animal skin
acquire further signification in the technical-industrial milieu.
In Foucault’s work, power and resistance are interdependent values. In
a broader context of power relations, Foucault identifies relationships of
domination and governmentality.^36 Relationships of domination are
characterized by a more stable and structured set of dynamics that sup-
presses the possibility of a reversal of roles, as could happen in govern-
mentality.^37 The biopower relationships that have led to the production of
the fur coat in It’s Hard to Make a Stand can be more aptly inscribed in the
relations that Foucault calls capacities: the type of unilateral power that
humans can exert on inanimate things.^38 His subcategorization of some
types of capacities as relationships of violence enables a more careful po-
sitioning of the human/animal dispositifs that It’s Hard to Make a Stand
enables one to retrieve. As Foucault states: “A relationship of violence
acts upon a body or upon things; it forces, it bends, it breaks on the
wheel, it destroys, or it closes the door on all possibilities.”^39 Relationships
of violence are totalizing and most readily identifiable within the context