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SEV ERAL URBAN AMERICAN dog people have shared with me a peculiar passing fantasy of disability. They imagine equipping themselves with dark glasses and their pet dogs with harnesses in order to enjoy universal access to public transportation, restaurants, and parks otherwise forbidden to their canine companions. One asked, “Who would stop me?”1 The problems with this kind of imagining are legion. Not the least is how it demonstrates just plain ignorance of the difficulties facedby guide-dog users, who are often barred entry to public places even though the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) supposedly now guarantees their right of access.2 But two aspects of these fantasies intrigue me. One aspect is that these able-bodied people are clearly wanting to pass as disabled—or, more precisely, asvision-impaired and canine-assisted. In other words, guide-dog relations change social perceptions (of sighted dog owners at least), such that a person with a disability has an attractive, even enviable identity. And another curious aspect is that, whether the dog folks are aware of it or not, their fantasies closely follow the history of guide-dog fictions, a representational pattern that, even as it promotes the political rights of the canine-assistedblind public, also comes to contribute to the ongoing problems of perceiving what exactly is so special about service-animal partnerships. Longbefore public accesswas guaranteed for disabled people in the United States, this cause was effectively promoted through novels, films, and television shows featuring blind men with guide dogs. Dignifying the work of service-animals may not be the point of these narratives, but their consistentlypositiveportrayal of these creatureswaxesheroic, even saintly,throughout twentieth-century popular culture.These stories reflect no simple progress of modern animal agency in human company. Early examples enlist dog along with disabled man as comrades in a more general fight against social oppression. As the political struggle for disability Chapter 1 Seeing Eyes/Private Eyes: Service Dogs and Detective Fictions 27 rights gains ground, the stories change so that the dogs come to serve these tales more as symbols than as actors. This narrative history suggests that, though certainly appreciated by their owners and advocates for disabled people , service dogs gain this broader public affection (even beatification) at the expense of inspiring more profound changes in views of human–animal relations , in this case as enabling civic life. Bringing these stories together here, this chapter explores how they raise representational concerns about the interrelations of textual and political forms.Theirs is a rare history, which at odd moments synthesizes critiques of rights-based politics that now seem the separate provenances of disability studies and animal studies. And it remains rooted in the kinds of intimacies that these human–canine pairs share—consistently referred to in guide-dog literature in terms of irreducible partnerships or “working units”—that not only prove difficult to model in story and image but also confound conventional notions of rights relationships as negotiated by and for individuals. In short,these stories open upyet another unsettling dimensionto Hearne’s provocative question: How may a human enter into a rights relationship with an animal?3 Her concern is that animal-rights politics misses the point that training can maximize animal happiness, that movements to abolish training give such creatures the “right” only to be unhappy. Apart from raising the obvious question of how anyone knows when she (or anyone else) is happy, Hearne’s argument uncovers somelimiting assumptions about agency in training and social life that even haunt critiques of ableism and speciesism. Service-animal histories attest to the ways in which the exercise of some human rights requires animal assistance. For folks who make their way to the polls with the help of a dog, this intense, highly specialized training relationship most obviously creates conditions in which the political viability of rights models extendsbeyond individualbodies, atleast in principle.The ADA affirms that some people rely on service animals in order tohold jobs and otherwise contribute fully as citizens, that is, that their rights are predicated on the kinds of mobility that come only through constant companionship with a service animal. However, in practice, the struggle to exercise these rights reflects ongoing questioning about what happens to the human subject of these rights when a disabled citizen exercises them only through partnership with a dog, questions that are modeled through guide-dog fictions. What I want to highlight here are some particular elements in their narrative patterns that...

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