Outside of my affinity for video games as liminal spaces for reimagining one’s body, dogs—specifically hunting dogs—were the first form of in-betweenness I had access to. Queerness and transitioning bodies were never visible or legible in my surroundings. Instead, I first encountered fluidity in these creatures, whose roles blurred the boundaries between nature and culture.
I write not from theory alone, but from lived experience. I came into awareness of my queerness and shapeshifting nature through the eyes of hunting dogs—beings cast into scripted roles, made to perform within someone else’s (hunting) game. A game that traps them between Being (nature) and Becoming (culture; hunting ritual). Over time, I learned to understand the hunting dog as a kind of NPC [1] (non-play- able character): instrumentalized yet vital, shaped by someone else’s desire, and still capable of engaging in fluid, naturalcultural dances [2] that dissolve this binary. This was a dance I intuitively participated in from an early age—a relational way of being, though I only became fully aware of it later.
Hunting dogs modeled, within hunting spaces, forms of presence throughdissociative methods, externalization, and relationality; techniques that disidentify from fixed selfhood to embody another’s desire. To survive within a culturally oppressive script, the dog exter- nalizes its own identity and adopts shapeshifting as a survival method—an implicit strategy found among many oppressed bodies and in-between identities. These performances—acts of LARPing (LARP - live action role-playing), of self-induced possession—overtake one’s identity within a meticulously choreographed space.
Like any social performance, hunting depends on the dog’s social education. In the hunt, the hunter is not merely a provider but a figure of toxic authority—a social father who trains the dog in the logics of violence, hierarchy, and control without allowing it to transcend the category of “animal”. While being confined to preliminary readings of nature, dogs are also brought into the domestic space of the nuclear family, turned into symbols of cultural status, and asked to embody human desires that suppress instinct.
The dog’s performance as an extension of the man’s cultural body—as a prosthetic of his desire—closely mirrors the shapeshifting demands of queer subjects who must navigate, survive, and resist within binary constructs. In these shapeshifting performances, hunters LARP into hypermasculine supermen, staging dominance in a tightly controlled drama. Dogs, meanwhile, are made to become (hunting) dogs, performing themselves into tools: hyper-functional, enraged, and attuned. Yet doing so requires a sensitivity that is specifically non-human, a somatic awareness of proximity and distance in relation to the hunt, the hunted, love, and the hunter’s figure [3]. In this way, the hunting scene becomes a triangulated framework—composed of hunter, dog, and spectator—each positioned differ- ently but co-implicated in the performative structure.
The dog’s participation in this structure intensifies experiences of possession and desire that exceed its agency. This is a desire that consumes the dog as an animal, only to mask the deeper necessity of performing cultur-
ally-driven roles as a means of survival. Dogs are woven into this triangular framework, transcending their animality by assuming companionship, while also laboring through their embodied animal capacities. Their inclusion in hunting rituals amplifies human prowess, granting access to nature’s organizational and strategic codes. Yet this relationship also exposes the extractive logics of hunting—a microcosm of broader colonial projects that objectify and exploit proximity to animality.
Through first-hand involvement, my understanding of hunting as a form of cultural becoming is of a space where initiating the chase becomes an act of resistance. What I’ve always found particularly compelling about the dog’s position in this choreography is its capacity to navigate transformation, rather than to produce a static identity. That ability—to shift between Being and Becoming—closely mirrors how queerness is lived: as continual adaptation rather than a resolution. In this liminality, hunting dogs be- came not just tools of possession but figures through whom queerness could emerge, survive, and be recognized.
To be a hunter, for a dog, is to survive. For hunters, the field is an enclosure: a curated totality where dominance is enacted upon those deemed killable. For dogs, this structure is inverted. Rather than exert dominance, they mediate these terrains through continuous becomings, without ever surrendering their animality. While dogs may appear to replicate the hunter’s chase, their pursuit holds potential for resistance. As beings who can embody human desire while remaining irreducibly animal, hunting dogs model an alternative kind of survival. This is not a failure to escape animality, but a conscious alignment with the naturalcultur- al dance—a survival strategy rooted in relationality, empathy, and attunement. To dismiss this as passive is to overlook the transformative potential of sensitivity as agency.
Hunting, then, is a stage where becoming the cultural is performed rather than embodied. While the hunter seeks to replace or transcend the human, the hunting dog embodies a different possibility: the rationalization of survival through shapeshifting. A way of navigating, rather than overcoming, the violent terrains of fear and control.
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- Footnotes
[1] “NPC” as in, a body that gestures agency through dissociated modes of participation. One
that pushes away from physicality to access alternative forms of presence within cultural
spectacles.
[2] Donna J. Haraway, "When Species Meet" (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
[3] G. W. F. Hegel, "Phenomenology of Spirit", trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1979).
Image: Taiz by Meii Soh. Photo: Eliska Klimesová. © and courtesy of the artist
