In this essay I argue that the contemporary cultural obsession with cat Internet videos exposes the politics of commodifying pets in postmodern, or late-capitalist, pet-keeping. I take as exemplary of this phenomenon Walker Art Museum’s Cat Internet Video Festival, which after its inauguration in 2012 toured the country through 2016, drawing crowds in the thousands. The larger frames of the festival – such as what the audience sees when they arrive, the ordering and categorization of the videos, and the festival’s sponsors – function as a form of training that affirms human domination over pets. Using Foucault’s notion of pastoral power, a power of care that regulates conduct, I claim the manipulation of feline subjectivity prevalent throughout the videos makes them more desirable for human consumption, thus perpetuating and increasing the commodification and domination of pets.
