236THIS IS NOT A HORSEIn animal studies, critiques of the process of domestication have fo-
cused on the roles horses and dogs have played as emblems of wealth. In
It’s Hard to Make a Stand the fur coat not only incarnates generic canine
morphology but more specifically alludes to the physiognomy of a hound.
As noted by Gary Lim in “ ‘A Stede Gode and Lel’: Valuing Arondel in
Bevis of Hampton,” hounds and horses (along with awakes) constitute a
particular class of gifts “associated with noble pursuit of war and the
hunt.”^49 Following this argument would lead to the recovery of transhis-
torical discourses in which social status appears indissolubly defined and
simultaneously perpetuated by the ostentation of materiality in the crys-
tallized form of the trophy. All three animal presences and absences sum-
moned by It’s Hard to Make a Stand ultimately appear ontologically
aligned as status symbols—literally and metaphorically objectified ani-
mals, commodities intrinsically and indissolubly intertwined to the
discourses of biopower that produce them.
Reiterating the problematics inscribed in these human/animal rela-
tions, Susan McHugh convincingly argued that the transhistorical prac-
tice of selective breeding (a defining base of practices of training and
domestication and a manifestation of the biopower relation at play in
paradigms of docile bodies), which tends to fix the human-favored re-
cursivity of genetic configurations produces “congenital physical disorders
or defects partially caused by heredity—including cleft palate, haemo-
philia and progressive retinal atrophy leading to blindness.”^50 According
to McHugh, the construct of the pure breed possesses a “power of illusion,”
a naturalizing ability to make invisible, which overshadows our everyday
experiences with dogs through the prioritizing of social class and gender
connotations.^51 It’s Hard to Make a Stand, in its nonaffirmative fragmen-
tation, maps the intrinsic contradictions and incongruities involved in
what Patton identifies as aesthetic-moral defenses culturally connoting
domestication and training as “ennoblement in the development of the
animal’s character and in the development of both the animal and the
handler’s sense of responsibility and honesty.”^52 This is an essential mo-
dality of anthropogenic darkness, akin to that theorized by Timothy
Morton in ecological terms—domestication and violence are revealed by
It’s Hard To Make a Stand as relentlessly looping upon each other in net-
works of discourses and practices. Acknowledging this darkness enables