When We Encounter: An Ethnography Of The Relationship Between Young Urban Women And Their Companion Dogs

This study uses a riverside district in Nanjing,Jiangsu Province and the "Douban Dog Group" online community as field sites,and young women who "scientifically raise dogs" in first-and second-tier cities in China as research subjects.From a feminist and multi-species ethnography perspective,the study explores how the symbiotic relationship of two-way care between young urban women and their companion dogs is created and regenerated in the practical context of everyday life,and thus answers the proposition that "humanity is interspecies".The images are linked through several stories,a loose text that lays out and reproduces the life of a symbiosis of blurred boundaries between humans and dogs,urban landscapes and care technologies,where companion dogs open up a non-competitive,non-dominant,non-interest-exchanging,romantic space of trust and love for women in a tense,mobile modern industrial city,where dogs of such diversity and people create together What a variety of relationships are created between dogs and people,and what a variety of relationships are created between women who associate around dog ownership to form empathic communities,which in turn become involved in animal protection initiatives such as rescuing stray animals and stopping dog meat trucks.In addition to the traditional participant observation and interview methods,some of the material for this study was obtained from online texts and the researcher’s own auto-ethnography of dog ownership and dog walking.The study then uses the dog meat issue as an entry point to explore a complex politics that encompasses everything,considering the roles played by dog meat lovers,animal protectionists,dog meat vendors,farming techniques,laws,and governments,rather than the abstract line of "moral awakening" that divides the noble from the inferior.The final intention is to tell the story of how women have consciously The final intention is to describe how women consciously link indifferent marital intentions,active professional pursuits and dog ownership as a feminist practice and manifesto,and to analyse the structural dilemmas shared by the interspecies female-dog alliance in a patriarchal industrial city.