The Petriarchal Turn: Reassembling Domestic Life and Multispecies Families through Petriarchy on AI-Driven Platforms

The Petriarchal Turn: Reassembling Domestic Life and Multispecies Families through Petriarchy on AI-Driven Platforms

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ABSTRACT

This conceptual article theorises the petriarchal turn: the growing role of companion animals as nonhuman actors who shape domestic power, care, and capital, particularly within platform-mediated digital environments. Drawing on Actor–Network Theory, through Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law, Bourdieu’s theory of capitals, and Donna Haraway’s companionship, the article introduces petriarchy as a conceptual tool for analysing how pets organise household routines while generating, accumulating, and converting economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital through social media platforms. Methodologically, it advances a theoretical framework, illustrated through vignettes from digital pet cultures such as petfluencers, which highlight how leads, feeds, algorithms, and veterinary protocols, to name but a few, enrol humans and animals alike into value-producing actor networks. Pets are described as obligatory passage points within domestic assemblages, reconfiguring schedules, spatial arrangements, and affective labour, while social media platforms translate their cuteness and care into visibility and revenue. These processes redistribute authority and resources within families, intersecting with class and gender, as access to breeds, training, time, and platform literacy determines who can capitalise on nonhuman charisma, a traditionally human attribute. The article argues that the contemporary family should be reframed as a multispecies, digitally AI-mediated, capital converting assemblage. The article proposes testable propositions for empirical research on platform pet economies and calls for a critical agenda that recognises both the agency and vulnerability of animals.

Introductory Overview:

This article introduces a conceptual provocation informed by social theory. Notably, contemporary domestic life is increasingly organised by a petriarchy. This describes an analytic, not a gag. The term does not seek to displace or minimise the gendered structures named by patriarchy; nor does it suggest that animals rule households. Rather, petriarchy designates a specific configuration of multispecies domestic life in which companion animals, humans as co-habitants, and platform infrastructures jointly organise routines, redistribute labour, and convert forms of capital. It is therefore a descriptive device for tracing distributed agency and value-flows across species lines, consonant with feminist STS and animal-studies commitments to situated, accountable relations (Walby, 1990; Adams, 1990; Birke, 1994). In short, then, describing petriarchy and the petriarchal turn strives to offer analytical map of how nonhumans become points and centres of calculation within digital domestic economies. It is not intended to be confused with the children’s book The Petriarchy (See: Crawford, 2024), discussion of pets as surrogate children by the same name (See: Real Insurance, 2016), the rise in petriarchy products and thus trademarks (See: Sherson, 2023) or growing usage on Thai social media (See: NBT World, 2025); this work is not endorsed nor affiliated by those uses, but their thought provoking deployment nonetheless illustrates a growing cultural conversation about the power of pets in human lives. Hence, the concept in this article is a vehicle for a diagnostic mechanism useful for analysing multispecies households in which companion animals operate as consequential actors that have both agency and power over humans within networks of care. So, they focally dominate networks that are increasing entangled with platformed social media in the digital age. This concept, then, serves as a manifestation of Actor–Network Theory (ANT), proposed across work by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law, reflecting also Pierre Bourdieu’s capitals. Hence, this article affirms that pets participate in productive conversion of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital, and that this participation reorganises domestic routines, redistributes decision-making, and re-values mechanical, social and productive labour economies within modern families (Latour, 2005; Callon, 1986; Law, 1994; Bourdieu, 1986).