Disappearing Bitches

Chapter 4 turns to the prosthetic memories of disposable bodies that are invisible from the prevailing approach to cloning as asexual reproductive technology, yet haunting the transnational pet-cloning complex. Upon the success of its first commercial dog-cloning project in cooperation with South Korean scientists, the California-based biotech company BioArts International announced that it was halting commercial dog cloning. Among other reasons, it raised the suspicion that its Korean rivals were returning retired gestational surrogate-mother dogs to dog-meat farms. These dogs disappear in the discursive-affective circuits between Eurocentric animal welfare discourse (which reduces the problem to Korea’s dog-eating culture) and the nationalist-cultural relativist reaction against such discourse. Tracing the affective remainders of these dogs between those moralizing their disgust with dog eating and those shamed for it, this chapter challenges the normalization of liberal bioethics by refiguring postcolonial bioethical subjects (and objects) as affective bodies permeable to human and nonhuman others.