“Best Friends Again”

Chapter 3 critically examines the common approach to commercial pet cloning as a prosthetics of mourning in the age of genetic reproduction. Interweaving the media representations of an American woman who cloned her late pit bull (and was later identified as the protagonist of a 1970s “sex scandal”) with a philosophical thought experiment that invokes a cloned dog to reflect on violation of the singularity of a loved one in conjugal relationships, this chapter criticizes how the usual trope of cloning as replacement for the original entails biopolitical regulations of intimacy among humans and animals, intersecting gender, sexuality, disability, and species. In search of a different way of perceiving pet cloning, this chapter turns to the narrative of a pet owner who cloned his deceased dog to examine how he carries the memories of the dog through the fragmented and haunting embodiments evoked by its clones.