Ecofeminism, Second Edition: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth 9781501380778, 9781501380761, 9781501380808, 9781501380792

Table of contents :
Cover
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
Epigraph
Contents
Illustrations
Contributors
Acknowledgments (first edition)
Acknowledgments (second edition)
Preface
Note
1 Ecofeminist Footings Carol J. Adamsand Lori Gruen
Ecofeminist philosophy: A brief overview
Sentiment in patriarchal spaces
The reign of reason
Emerging feminist analysis of connections with animals
Disappearing women
Intertwined feminist activism: The 1970s and 1980s
Making connections: Race, gender, class, species
The Anthropocene
Who tells the story of resistance?
#MeToo and animal rights
The problem of white supremacy and cultural appropriation in the animal movement
Ethics of care
Notes
part one Affect
Introduction
2 Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals Josephine Donovan
Feminist animal care theory
Response to criticisms and elaborations of feminist animal care theory
A standpoint theory for animals?
A dialogical ethic of care for the treatment of animals
Acknowledgments
Notes
3 Compassion and Being Human Deane Curtin
Introduction: Compassion vs. rights
Arguments against compassion
What makes morality possible?
Turning empathy into compassion
Defining compassion
The Stoic objection to compassion
Food as a compassionate practice
Acknowledgments
Notes
4 Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too: The Politics of Emergent Afrocentric Ecowomanism Shamara Shantu Riley
The problem of nature for Black womanism
The politics of nature–culture dualism
The role of the environmental-isms in providing the foundation for an Afrocentric womanist agenda
Emergent Afrocentric ecowomanism: On the necessity of survival
Emergent United States Afrocentric ecowomanist activism
Emergent Afrocentric ecowomanist activism in Africa
Afrocentric ecomotherists: Ecowomanist potential?
Moving beyond dualism: An Afrocentric approach
Acknowledgment
Notes
5 Joy Deborah Slicer
Story telling
Humor
Play
Kip
Being
Courage
Notes
6 Eros and the Mechanisms of Eco-Defense pattrice jones
Steps to an ecology of eros
Reproduction and its discontents
Consciousness of lost limbs
The animal problem
The return of the repressed
Acknowledgments
7 Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care Sunaura Taylor
Being cared for
Disabled, domesticated, and dependent
Disabled, domesticated, and valuable
Acknowledgments
Notes
8 Facing Death and Practicing Grief Lori Gruen
Ecofeminism, extinctionism, and exterminism
Living and dying
Practicing grief
Acknowledgments
Notes
part two Context
Introduction
9 Inter-animal Moral Conflict and Moral Repair: A Contextualized Ecofeminist Approach in Action Karen S. Emmerman
Afterword 2020
Notes
10 Michael Vick, Race, and Animality Claire Jean Kim
Notes
11 Caring Cannibals and Human(e) Farming: Testing Contextual Edibility for Speciesism Ralph Acampora
Acknowledgments
Notes
12 Ecofeminism and Veganism: Revisiting the Question of Universalism Richard Twine
Why universalism now?
Intersections of animals, nation, and racialization
Ecofeminists discussing animal advocacy and universalism
Contesting “contextual”
Notes
13 Why a Pig? A Reclining Nude Reveals the Intersections of Race, Sex, Slavery, and Species Carol J. Adams
The genealogy of the reclining nude
David Harvey’s The Conditions of Postmodernity (1997)
Michael Harris’s Colored Pictures: Race and Representation
Nell Painter’s History of White People
The function of animalizing and racializing: That’s why a pig
Acknowledgments
Notes
14 Toward New EcoMasculinities, EcoGenders, and EcoSexualities Greta Gaard
Toward an ecological masculinity
Eco-masculinities, ecosexualities, and their contemporary expressions
Inviting explorations: Eco-erotophilic anarcha-feminist masculinities
Acknowledgments
Notes
part three Climate
Introduction
15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals: Tracking Gender in Animal Studies Susan Fraiman
Why this shame?
Real men don’t like animals
Feminists that therefore we follow
Acknowledgments
Notes
16 Black Feminist Ecological Thought: A Manifesto Chelsea Mikael Frazier
17 The Animals Call it: Listening to the Climate Crisis Fiona Probyn-Rapsey
The politics of listening
Into the wreckage
Attention
Settler colonialism
“Really listen hard”
Notes
18 Global Atmospheres of Violence: Shifting Terrains of Othering in Ecofeminist Multispecies Witnessing Kathryn Gillespie and Yamini Narayanan
Introduction
Atmospheres of violence: Creating animal others
Othering animals in feminist research
Conclusion: Toward multispecies witnessing on shifting terrain
19 Maximum Plunder: The Global Context and Multiple Threats of Animal Agriculture Mia MacDonald
A sinking ship
The tragedy in Brazil
Viral resistance
Rigid, flawed, and vulnerable
A new vision
Acknowledgments
Notes
20 Upsetting Boundaries: Trans Queer Interspecies Ecofeminisms Leah Kirts
Scaffolding gender
Degendering the body
Embodying futures
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

ecofeminism second edition

i

ii

ecofeminism feminist intersections with other animals and the earth second edition Edited by Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen

iii

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2014 This edition published 2022 Volume Editor’s Part of the Work © Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen, 2022 Each chapter © Contributors, 2022 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. xix–xx constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Jason Anscomb / rawshock design All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Adams, Carol J., editor. | Gruen, Lori, editor. Title: Ecofeminism : feminist intersections with other animals and the earth / edited by Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen. Description: Second edition. | New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021042618 (print) | LCCN 2021042619 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501380778 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501380761 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501380792 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501380785 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Ecofeminism. | Animal rights–Moral and ethical aspects. | Nature–Effect of human beings on. | Women and the environment. Classification: LCC HQ1194 .E274 2022 (print) | LCC HQ1194 (ebook) | DDC 304.2082—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021042618 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021042619 ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-5013-8077-8 978-1-5013-8076-1 978-1-5013-8079-2 978-1-5013-8078-5

Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

iv

Wrenching an ethical problem out of its embedded context severs the problem from its roots. . . . In a sense, we are given truncated stories and then asked what we think the ending should be. However, if we do not understand the worldview that produced the dilemma that we are asked to consider, we have no way of evaluating the situation except on its own terms. Re-specting nature literally involves “looking again.” We cannot attend to the quality of relations that we engage in unless we know the details that surround our actions and relations. If ecofeminists are sincere in their desire to live in a world of peace and nonviolence for all living beings, we must help each other through the pains-taking process of piecing together the fragmented worldview that we have inherited. But the pieces cannot simply be patched together. What is needed is a reweaving of all the old stories and narratives into a multifaceted tapestry. Marti Kheel 1993

v

vi

Contents List of illustrations

ix

Notes on contributors

xi

Acknowledgments (first edition)

xvii

Acknowledgments (second edition)

xix

Preface

xxi

1

Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen

Ecofeminist Footings Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen

1

Part one Affect Introduction to Affect 2

Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

Josephine Donovan

47

3

Compassion and Being Human Deane Curtin

69

4

Ecology is a Sistah’s Issue Too Shamara Shantu Riley

89

5

Joy

6

Eros and the Mechanisms of Eco-Defense pattrice jones

7

Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethics

8

Deborah Slicer

107 123

of Care Sunaura Taylor

141

Facing Death and Practicing Grief Lori Gruen

161

Part two Context Introduction to Context 9

Inter-animal Moral Conflict and Moral Repair: A Contextualized Ecofeminist Approach in Action Karen S. Emmerman

181 vii

viii

Contents

10 Michael Vick, Race, and Animality Claire Jean Kim

197

11 Caring Cannibals and Human(e) Farming: Testing Contextual Edibility for Speciesism Ralph Acampora

215

12 Ecofeminism and Veganism: Revisiting the Question of Universalism Richard Twine

229

13 Why a Pig? A Reclining Nude Reveals the Intersections of Race, Sex, Slavery, and Species Carol J. Adams

249

14 Toward New EcoMasculinities, EcoGenders, and EcoSexualities Greta Gaard

265

Part three Climate Introduction to Climate 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals: Tracking Gender in Animal Studies Susan Fraiman

283

16 Black Feminist Ecological Thought: A Manifesto Chelsea Mikael Frazier

313

17 The Animals Call it: Climate Crisis, Gender Crisis, and Ecofeminist Listening Fiona Probyn-Rapsey

319

18 Global Atmospheres of Violence: Shifting Terrains of Othering in Ecofeminist Multispecies Witnessing Kathryn Gillespie and Yamini Narayanan

335

19 Maximum Plunder: The Global Context and Multiple Threats of Animal Agriculture Mia MacDonald

355

20 Upsetting Boundaries: Trans Queer Interspecies Ecofeminisms Leah Kirts

373

References

391

Index

429

Illustrations Figure 1.1 Sanctuary Prints. March 2014. Photograph by Cheryl Wylie at VINE Sanctuary. Figure 1.2 Scala Naturae by Mark Dion.

xxiv 5

Figure 1.3 Anti-suffrage postcard. Published by SB, courtesy of Glasgow Women’s Library, 2015-92-2.

13

Figure 1.4 Feminists for Animal Liberation Banner and Marchers at the March on Washington, 1990. Photograph by Bruce A. Buchanan.

21

Figure 1.5 Land Mammals graphic. Courtesy xkcd.com.

30

Figure 1.6 A Snapshot of VINE’s Multispecies Community. Photograph by VINE Sanctuary.

41

Illustration 1: Compassion by Suzy González.

44

Figure 6.1 Lamb ALFie offers a tender greeting to arriving calf Maddox at VINE Sanctuary. Photograph by Kathy Gorish.

134

Figure 7.1 Self-portrait with Chicken by Sunaura Taylor.

140

Figure 8.1 Several Activists Hold Deceased Animals During NARD Memorial Ceremony. Photograph by Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Media.

160

Illustration 2: Mother by Suzy González.

178

Figure 11.1 The Rites of Dionysus by Tom Shaw. Photograph by Kenneth Allen.

214

ix

x

Illustrations

Figure 13.1 “Ursula Hamdress” photograph by Jim Mason of image from Playboar.

248

Illustration 3: Growth by Suzy González.

280

Figure 17.1 An Eastern grey kangaroo and her joey who survived the forest fires in Mallacoota. Mallacoota Area, 2020. Photograph by Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Media.

318

Figure 19.1 Sheep being loaded onto trucks from the sale yards. Australia, 2013. Photograph by Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Media.

358

Contributors Ralph R. Acampora is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hofstra

University, USA. He is the author of Corporal Compassion: Animal Ethics and Philosophy of Body (2006), editor of Metamorphoses of the Zoo: Animal Encounter After Noah (2010), and co-editor of A Nietzschean Bestiary (2003). Recent interests of his include the hermeneutics of spectatorship at zoos, moral issues pertaining to the built, including biotechnical, environment, and the ontological status of nature. A vegetarian who tries to be vegan in an overwhelmingly omnivorous and carno-crazed culture, he does not eat friends, lovers, or close kin (of any species). Carol J. Adams is the author of numerous books including her germinal The

Sexual Politics of Meat (1990), as well as Burger, Protest Kitchen (both 2018), and others. She is the co-editor of several anthologies on feminist theory and animals. She has been an activist against domestic violence, racism, and homelessness, and for reproductive justice and fair housing practices. A new generation of feminists, artists, and activists respond to her work in Defiant Daughters: 21 Women of Art, Activism, Animals, and The Sexual Politics of Meat (2013) and The Art of the Animal: 14 Women Artists Explore The Sexual Politics of Meat (2015). www.caroljadams.com. Deane Curtin is the Hanson-Peterson Professor of the Liberal Arts and

Professor of Philosophy, emeriti, at Gustavus Adolphus College, USA. While on sabbatical writing his chapter in India he coordinated two projects at the request of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. At the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala, he coordinated a project to translate the major texts of Western philosophy into Tibetan for the first time. He also designed and taught a core ethics course based on the Dalai Lama’s book Beyond Religion at the Dalai Lama Institute for Higher Education in Bangalore. Josephine Donovan is Professor Emerita of English at the University of

Maine, USA. She is the author or editor of sixteen books and numerous articles. With Carol J. Adams she co-edited The Feminist Care Tradition in xi

xii

Contributors

Animal Ethics (2006), Beyond Animal Rights (1996), and Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (1995). Her most recent work includes The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals (2016) and The Lexington Six: Lesbian and Gay Resistance in 1970s America (2020). Forthcoming is The Inside Story: Animals, Mind, and Matter. Karen S. Emmerman is part-time faculty at the University of Washington,

USA, in Philosophy and the Comparative History of Ideas. She is the Education Director of the University of Washington Center for Philosophy for Children and Philosopher-in-Residence at John Muir Elementary School. Her current research involves applying ecofeminism to the complex dimensions of managing obligations to animals when they conflict with important familial and cultural traditions. She has written journal articles and book chapters on moral arguments against zoos, interspecies moral repair, human/animal conflicts of interest, and philosophy for children. karensemmerman.com. Susan Fraiman is Professor of English at the University of Virginia, USA,

specializing in feminist theory, cultural studies, and the anglophone novel. Her work is committed to recognizing women’s contributions and validating concerns demeaned as “feminine,” including care work and other forms of domestic labor. Her most recent book, Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins (2017), looks at homemaking under duress by queer, working-class, immigrant, and homeless figures. Other books include Cool Men and the Second Sex (2003) and Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (1993). She is the editor of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey: Norton Critical Edition (2004) and author of articles in such places as Critical Inquiry, PMLA , Signs, New Literary History, and Feminist Studies. Chelsea Mikael Frazier is a Black feminist ecocritic—writing, researching,

and teaching at the intersection of Black feminist theory and environmental thought. As Founder and Chief Creative Officer at Ask An Amazon she designs educational tools, curates community gatherings, gives lectures, and offers consulting services that serve Black Feminist Fuel for Sustainable Futures. She is also an Assistant Professor of African American Literature in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, USA. Her scholarship, teaching, and public speaking span the fields of Black feminist literature and theory, visual culture, ecocriticism, African art and literature, political theory, science and technology studies, and Afrofuturism. She is

Contributors

currently at work on her first book manuscript—an ecocritical study of contemporary Black women artists, writers, and activists. Greta Gaard is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, USA. Her work emerges from the intersections of ecological feminism, environmental justice, queer ecologies, and critical animal studies. Gaard’s first anthology, Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature (1993), positioned multispecies justice as foundational to ecofeminist theory, and was followed by Ecofeminist Literary Criticism (1998) and Ecological Politics: Ecofeminism and the Greens (1998). Recent work includes her co-edited volume, International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism (2013), her monograph Critical Ecofeminism (2017), and the BifrostOnline special issue on Coronavirus and Climate Change (2020). She is co-editing a volume on Contemplative Practices and Anti-Oppression Pedagogies for Higher Education (2022). Kathryn Gillespie is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Kentucky, USA, in Geography and the Applied Environmental and Sustainability Studies Program. Her work explores the everyday geographies of violence in which humans and other species are entangled. She is the author of The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 (2018) and co-editor of Vulnerable Witness (2019), Critical Animal Geographies (2015), and Economies of Death (2015). She has also published her work in such journals as Hypatia, Gender, Place, and Culture, Animal Studies Journal, Politics and Animals, and Environment and Planning A. Lori Gruen is the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan

University, USA. She is also Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and founder and coordinator of Wesleyan Animal Studies. She is the author or editor of over a dozen books, including Ethics and Animals: An Introduction (2011, second edition 2021), Entangled Empathy (2015), Critical Terms for Animal Studies (2018), and Animaladies: Gender, Animals, and Madness (2018). In addition to her ecofeminist and animal ethics scholarship and activism, she has been teaching incarcerated students for over a decade. www.lorigruen.com pattrice jones is a cofounder of VINE Sanctuary, an LGBTQ-run farmed

animal sanctuary that works within an extended, ecofeminist understanding of the intersection of oppressions. She is the author of Aftershock: Confronting Trauma in a Violent World (2007) and has published essays in Confronting Animal Exploitation (2013); Sister Species (2011); Sistah Vegan (2010);

xiii

xiv

Contributors

Contemporary Anarchist Studies (2009); Igniting a Revolution (2006); and Terrorists or Freedom Fighters (2004). Claire Jean Kim’s first book, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean

Conflict in New York City (2000), won two awards from the American Political Science Association. Her second book, Race, Species and Nature in a Multicultural Age (2014), examines the intersection of race, species, and nature in impassioned disputes over how immigrants of color, racialized minorities, and Native people in the U.S. use animals in their cultural traditions. She has written numerous journal articles and book chapters and co-guest-edited, with Carla Freccero, a special issue of American Quarterly entitled “Species/Race/Sex” (September 2013). Leah Kirts is an independent writer on queerness, food, and veganism. Their

work on anti-carceral queer veganism has been published in Queer and Trans Voices: Achieving Liberation Through a Consistent Anti-oppression (2020). Their food writing has appeared digitally and in print for publications such as Jarry Magazine, Edible Communities magazines in New York City, Good Food Jobs, and Tenderly. Mia MacDonald is Executive Director and founder of Brighter Green, a

New York-based “action” tank that works to encourage policy change on issues that span the environment, animals, and sustainable development. Its work has a particular focus on equity and rights and countries of the global South. Mia has spoken at conferences and symposia in Latin America, Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, and United Nations bodies. She has taught at and created new courses for the Environmental Studies program at New York University, the Earth Institute of Columbia University, and the Human Rights program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. She is contributing editor for Environment magazine and has published widely in a range of media. She also worked closely with Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai, including on her bestselling autobiography, Unbowed (2006). She has a master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School. www.brightergreen.org. Yamini Narayanan is Senior Lecturer in International and Community Development at Deakin University, Australia. Her work explores the ways in which (other) animals are instrumentalized in sectarian, casteist, and even fascist ideologies in India. Yamini’s research is supported by two Australian Research Council grants. Yamini’s work on animals, race, and development has been published in leading journals including Environment and Planning

Contributors

D, Environment and Planning A, Geoforum, Hypatia, South Asia, Society and Animals, and Sustainable Development. Yamini is founding convenor of the Deakin Critical Animal Studies Network. She is a lifelong Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics (FOCAE), an honor that is conferred through nomination or invitation only. Fiona Probyn-Rapsey is Professor in the School of Humanities and Social

Inquiry at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Fiona’s research connects feminist critical race studies and animal studies, examining where, when, and how gender, race, and species intersect. She is the author of Made to Matter: White Fathers, Stolen Generations (2013), and co-editor of three books: Animal Death (2013), Animals in the Anthropocene: Critical Perspectives on Non-human futures (2015), and Animaladies; Gender, Species, Madness (2018) with Lori Gruen. Fiona is also series editor (with Melissa Boyde and Yvette Watt) of the Animal Publics book series, http://sydney.edu.au/sup/ about/animal_publics.html. Fiona is currently Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council project (2021–4) with Professor Lynette Russell (Director of Indigenous Studies, Monash University, Australia), examining the cultural impacts of introduced animals in Australia. Shamara Shantu Riley was a first-year graduate student in political science

at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA when she published her first paper, “Ecology is a Sistah’s Issue Too: The Politics of Emergent Afrocentric Ecowomanism” (1993). She also participated as a member of Women Working for Progress, a multicultural student organization working for social change. A former opinions columnist for The Daily Illini, the University’s independent student newspaper, Riley contributed many articles on social justice issues, including on the environment and womanism. Deborah Slicer is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Montana,

USA, where she directs the Masters Program in Environmental Philosophy. She has published most recently on the moral value of quiet, on Thoreau, on poetics, and on animals and ethics. Her collection of poetry, The White Calf Kicks, won the 2003 Autumn House Poetry Prize, judged by Naomi Shihab Nye. The author has completed a related book-length project, The Joy of Animals: Play, Humor, and Moral Life. Sunaura Taylor is an artist, writer, academic, and mother. She works at the

intersection of disability studies, environmental humanities, animal studies, environmental justice, and art practice. She is author of Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (2017), which received the 2018 American

xv

xvi

Contributors

Book Award. Along with academic journals, Taylor has written for a range of popular media outlets. Her artworks have been exhibited at venues such as the CUE Art Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution, and is part of the Berkeley Art Museum collection. She is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant, a Wynn Newhouse Award, and an Animals and Culture Grant. She is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Society and Environment, in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. Richard Twine is a Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences, and Co-Director of the Centre for Human-Animal Studies (CfHAS) at Edge Hill University, UK. Currently writing a book on the Climate Crisis and nonhuman animals, he is author of Animals as Biotechnology—Ethics, Sustainability and Critical Animal Studies (2010), and editor (with Nik Taylor) of The Rise of Critical Animal Studies—From the Margins to the Centre (2014), as well as articles on the animal-industrial complex, ecofeminism, veganism, and the climate crisis.

Acknowledgments (first edition) A

fter the death of our dear friend Marti Kheel on November 19, 2011, a community of mourners came together online and at memorials on both coasts in an embrace of compassion and care that lifted us up personally and enlivened us politically to share the insights of ecofeminism. We are deeply grateful to this extended community and to the Kheel family for facilitating this renewal of ecofeminist theory and practice in the wake of Marti’s death. To build on the conversations that were happening, we organized a conference “Finding a Niche for All Animals” at Wesleyan University in 2012. We are grateful to all of the participants at the conference for sharing their recollections, their new ideas, and their excitement about making the world better for animals and the earth. Some of the papers presented at the conference are reworked in the chapters in this volume and we thank those contributors as well as those scholars and activists whose papers were not ultimately included. We are grateful to the sponsors of the conference: Wesleyan Animal Studies, the College of the Environment, the Ethics in Society Project, the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, the Center for the Study of Public Life, and the Philosophy Department at Wesleyan and the Animals and Society Institute, Feminists for Animal Rights, Arnold S. and Ellen Kheel Jacobs, A. J. Jacobs, Jane Kheel Stanley, and other members of the Kheel family. Lynn Higgs and Hilda Vargas provided outstanding logistical support for which we are so grateful. The conference would not have happened without the unwavering support of Jane Stanley and Batya Bauman, who also created a new website for Feminists for Animal Rights (http://www.farinc.org/) after the conference. We thank three anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their thoughtful suggestions. We are particularly grateful to Kevin Ohe, Haaris Naqvi, and Laura Murray at Bloomsbury for their enthusiasm and encouragement in publishing this book. xvii

xviii

Acknowledgments (first edition)

The night Marti died, Carol and Lori began a conversation about mourning and remembrance. That night Lori suggested the idea of holding a conference. Carol wishes to acknowledge the roots of this book in that sad night; and how the work of collective mourning allowed for the emergence of many of these important essays; that this book exists is due in great part to Lori’s spirit, insights, and skill, as well as her deep understanding of ecofeminist philosophy and activism. LG and CJA, November 26, 2013

Acknowledgments (second edition) W

e’d like to offer a big thank you to the students who have so enthusiastically used the first edition of this book and generated demand for even more ecofeminist literature. Thanks, too, to the activists, students and teachers who are picking up this edition for the first time. We thank all the contributors included in this new edition. It’s been a joy to work again with those who wrote essays for the first edition, and to have the opportunity to include the work of our new contributors. Thank you to Suzy González for the art that opens each section of the book. Thanks to photojournalist Jo-Anne McArthur and the team at We Animals Media, Kale Ridsdale and Vanessa Garrison; to VINE Sanctuary for the photographs highlighting aspects of sanctuary life at their Vermont sanctuary; to the Glasgow Women’s Library for the use of the anti-suffrage postcard image; to Mark Dion and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery for the use of Dion’s artwork Scala Naturae, and Sunaura Taylor for the use of her artwork, Self-portrait with Chicken. Amy Martin, our Bloomsbury editor, has been a dream to work with in the process of re-imagining and expanding Ecofeminism. We thank Amy and the anonymous referees for their insightful guidance with this new edition. We also appreciate the ongoing support of our work by Harris Naqvi, Editorial Director, Bloomsbury Academic USA. We thank the entire Bloomsbury team who oversaw the production of the book, Ben Harris our copyeditor, and Merv Honeywood and the production team from RefineCatch. During this grave time in our lives, as we find ourselves in year two of the COVID-19 pandemic, and are aware of the ever-increasing environmental toll of our human-centeredness, we are grateful for work such as this, in which we are reminded that we are part of larger scholarly/activist communities that are doing their best to help us think about and protect the planet and all who inhabit it, even while we mourn all who have been lost. xix

xx

Acknowledgments (second edition)

We did not know, when we began work on this new edition, that what was envisioned as a revision of the first chapter, “Groundwork,” would evolve into a new chapter altogether. In writing “Ecofeminist Footings,” we have had the delightful experience of weekly conversations, often many hours long, in which we explored and debated ecofeminist theory and activism. We are so grateful for yet another reason for us to spend time together, albeit virtually. Lori wants to thank Carol for never throwing anything out and thus having an archive that is so deep and full of memories and knowledge, like Carol herself. LG and CJA, April 28, 2021 Chapter 2 originally appeared as “Feminism and the Treatment of Animals: From Care to Dialogue,” Signs 31, no. 2 (2006): 305–29. Published by permission of the author and the University of Chicago. Chapter 4 originally appeared as “Ecology is a Sistah’s Issue Too” in Ecofeminism and the Sacred, edited by Carol J. Adams. (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1993). Published by permission of Bloomsbury Academic. Chapter 15 originally appeared as “Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals: Tracking Gender in Animal Studies” in Critical Inquiry 39, no. 1 (2012): 89–115. Published by permission of the author and the University of Chicago. An earlier version of Chapter 16 appeared as “Black Feminist Ecological Thought: A Manifesto” in Atmos, October 1, 2020.

Preface E

cofeminism addresses the various ways that misogyny, heteronormativity, white supremacy, colonialism, and ableism are informed by and support pernicious anthropocentrism, and how analyzing the ways these forces interconnect can produce less violent, more just practices. In the 1990s, ecofeminists worked to remedy a perceived problem in feminist theory, animal advocacy, and environmentalism, namely a lack of attention to the intersecting structures of power that reinforce the “othering” of those thought of as “women” and “animals” and the ways this othering contributes to the destruction of the environment. Though sometimes called “utopian” or “concerned with too many issues,” ecofeminist theory exposes and opposes forces of oppression, showing how problematic it is when these issues are considered separate from one another. In large part because of misunderstandings, ecofeminism fell out of favor for a number of years. But now ecofeminism is attracting renewed attention as the impact of human activities on the more-than-human world worsens. Ecofeminist theory helps us imagine healthier relationships; stresses the need to attend to context over universal, overgeneralized judgments; and argues for the importance of care as well as justice and emotion intertwined with reason, in working to undo the logic of domination and its material and practical implications on all human beings, other animals, and the planet. This second edition further deepens these significant insights. The first edition of Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth, published in 2014, emerged from our collective mourning of the loss of one of ecofeminism’s foremothers, Marti Kheel, who died in 2011. Her death catalyzed conversations about where ecofeminism had been and where it might go. Noting that the excitement and vigor of early ecofeminist work had been lost to a new generation of activists and scholars and that misinterpretations and misrepresentations dominated the discussion when ecofeminism did come up, we felt it was time to reintroduce the “power and promise” of ecofeminism.1 We came together at Wesleyan University in 2012 for a conference celebrating what ecofeminism had accomplished, looking at the creative tensions within activism and xxi

xxii

Preface

scholarship, with the hope of moving ecofeminist theory and practice forward. Because the interest in ecofeminism has grown so significantly since the first edition appeared, as have multiple environmental crises crying out for ecofeminist interpretations, we felt we should update and expand the volume. We replaced the opening essay entitled “Groundwork” with “Ecofeminist Footings.” “Groundwork” focused largely on the historical connections among social justice work, suffrage and debates between feminists, and the complex relations between human liberatory stuggles and animal liberation, all explored through an ecofeminist lens. While we still see “Groundwork” as an important resource, we had new thoughts to bring to the rapidly changing world, full of so many social and ecological problems. We are always indebted to history and that was our motivation for creating the timeline that you will find on the right side pages of this book. Here we identify important moments in the struggles for recognition, respect, and justice for women, Black people, people of color, indigenous people, workers, as well as the struggle for animal and earth liberation. Of course, we haven’t captured all the important events, it isn’t meant to be a complete list, but we hope it will provide readers with a way of further contextualizing ongoing work to make us all freer. We have also included a new section on climate that addresses one of the most significant ecological problems—climate change. This new section also addresses questions of the climate of reception for feminist, Black feminist, and ecofeminist ideas and practices within the animal and environmental activism and scholarship. We have replaced Josephine Donovan’s essay from the first edition, “Participatory Epistemology, Sympathy, and Animal Ethics,” with her classic essay “Feminism and the Treatment of Animals: From Care to Dialogue.” We have added an important early discussion of ecowomanism by Shamara Shantu Riley, entitled “Ecology is a Sistah’s Issue Too.” Some of the essays that appeared in the first edition have been updated, some titles have changes, as have some of the illustrations. For this new edition, we commissioned Suzy González to create three art pieces to introduce each of the sections of the book. Ecofeminist praxis continues to provide ethical guidance to challenge inequities arising along racial, gendered, and species boundaries. At a time when human violence and encroachment as well as climate change threaten to permanently alter the earth, with devastating consequences for all the beings that live on it as well as those who fly in the skies and swim in the seas, the insights of ecofeminists continue to be crucial for our thinking

Preface

about and acting to protect the planet. We hope that this updated and expanded edition adds to our conversations and actions.

Note 1

This is a reference to Karen Warren’s important essay from 1989. Karen, another germinal influence for ecofeminism, died in 2020.

xxiii

Figure 1.1 Sanctuary Prints. March 2014. Photograph by Cheryl Wylie at VINE Sanctuary.

xxiv

Ecofeminist Footings Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen

E

cofeminism is a robust philosophical practice with engaged, activist roots. Ecofeminists can be found around the world— planting trees in Africa, protecting indigenous crop seeds in India, challenging cattle-raising economies in South America, rescuing animals from catastrophic fires in Australia, working to end environmental racism in the United States, leading lively discussions on college campuses, pushing for climate action in legislative bodies, and fighting the earth destroying forces of patriarchal capitalism in the streets. Ecofeminism posits that the domination of “nature” is linked to the domination of “women” and that both dominations must be eradicated. (Of course there are a number of ways to understand both “nature” and “women”.) Analyzing mutually reinforcing logics of domination and drawing connections between practical implications of power relations has been a core project of ecofeminism. Ecofeminism has a rich history in feminist struggles against militarism, capitalism, racism, colonialism, environmental destruction, and patriarchy. Ecofeminists, over decades, have addressed these overlapping, interconnecting issues. Here are just a few examples: Rosemary Radford Reuther (1975) Women must see that there can be no liberation for them and no solution to the ecological crisis within a society whose

11,000–9,000 BCE. The domestication of sheep, the first animals to be used as food, is thought to begin.

1

1

2

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

fundamental model of relationships continue to be one of domination. They must unite the demands of the women’s movement with those of the ecological movement to envision a radical reshaping of the basic socioeconomic relations and the underlying values of this society. Karen Warren (1987) Ecological feminism is the name given to a variety of positions that have roots in different feminist practices and philosophies. These different perspectives reflect not only different feminist perspectives (e.g., liberal, traditional Marxist, radical, socialist, Black, and Third World), they also reflect different understandings of the nature of and solution to pressing environmental problems. Despite important differences among ecofeminists and the feminisms from which they gain their inspiration, there is something all ecofeminists agree about; such agreement provides a minimal condition account of ecofeminism: there are important connections between the domination of women and the domination of nature, an understanding of which is crucial to feminism, environmentalism, and environmental philosophy. A main project of ecofeminism is to make visible these “woman-nature connections” and, where harmful to women and nature, to dismantle them. Ynestra King (1989) The goals of harmonizing humanity and nonhuman nature, at both the experiential and theoretical levels, cannot be attained without the radical vision and understanding available from feminism. The twin concerns of ecofeminism – human liberation and our relationship to nonhuman nature – opens the way to developing a set of ethics . . . Ecofeminism uses its ecological perspective to develop the position that there is no hierarchy in nature: among persons, between persons and the rest of the natural world, or among the many forms of nonhuman nature . . . Ecofeminism draws on another basic principle of ecological science – unity in diversity – and develops it politically. Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies (1993) Ecofeminism is about connectedness and wholeness of theory and practice . . . We see the devastation of the earth and her beings by the corporate warriors, and the threat of nuclear annihilation by the military warriors, as feminist concerns. It is the same masculinist mentality which would deny us our right to our own bodies and our own sexuality, and which depends on multiple systems of dominance and state power to have its way. Ariel Salleh (1997) In a time of ecological crisis, ecofeminists worldwide have become agents of history/nature. They give voice to a subversive politics, aware of its own

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

3

situatedness and transitionality. In epistemological terms, I would say that ecofeminism expresses an embodied materialism . . . Ecofeminism is more than an identity politics, it reaches for an earth democracy, across cultures and species.

Criticisms of the white, settler, patriarchal worldview and its impacts on all women, people of color, poor people, other animals, and the more-thanhuman world, in ways that overlap and intersect, was not new, but the coining of the word “ecofeminism” provided a term for discussing the connections.

Ecofeminist philosophy often starts with a discussion of the value dualisms that have structured Western thought. Karen Warren describes these value dualisms as “disjunctive pairs in which the disjuncts” are oppositional, exclusive, and organized hierarchically (1997, 20). Val Plumwood elaborates, “Dualism makes difference the vehicle for hierarchy, it usually does so by distorting difference” (1993, 59). She explains that a dualism “results from a certain kind of denied dependency on a subordinated other. This relationship of denied dependency determines a certain kind of logical structure, in which the denial and the relation of domination/subordination shape the identity of both the relata” (41). The dualistic structure of Western thought constructs “a devalued and sharply demarcated sphere of otherness” (41). Among the dualisms Warren, Plumwood, and other ecofeminists identify are culture/nature; male/female; mind/body; master/slave; reason/emotion; and human/nonhuman. The purpose of the dyads is not only to demarcate and perpetuate difference, but to mark those with power and those available to be exploited by those with power. These binaries also constrain our thinking about other ways to understand our relationships with each other, other animals, and the rest of nature. Critical analyses of and resistance to dualistic and hierarchical conceptual frames are central to ecofeminist philosophy. As Ynestra King noted in 1983, the dialectical relationship between the subjugation of women and the subjugation of nature is supported by these hierarchical dualisms and must be resisted at all levels. Unfortunately, ecofeminist criticisms of these dualisms sometimes have been construed as endorsements. Ecofeminist analysis has often been mistaken for a prescription of favoring the abject sides of the man/woman and culture/nature binaries, in an attempt to reverse the value dualism. That those considered women are thought to be closer to nature is one of the ways

6th century BCE. Jainism, whose tenet is noninjury of living creatures, originates.

Ecofeminist philosophy: A brief overview

4

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

that patriarchal power has diminished both. Early on, there were some ecofeminists who sought to revalue women and nature by celebrating the constructed connection, while also critically analyzing the ways that this association justified domination. There isn’t anything “essential” about these connections, and to think that elevating those who are devalued is perpetuating the dualism is one of the ways that dualistic thinking infects our imaginations. Value dualisms that empower one side and dominate the other are necessary for maintaining oppression, both because, as Warren suggested, they are exclusive and because they maintain fictitious binaries. For instance, the man/woman dualism inscribes a gender binary that precludes the possibility of gender fluidity, reifies a fiction that one must be either/or, and fails to notice the fact that other-than-human beings don’t constitute their lives via human binary conceptions of gender. Using common terminology, like man and woman, should not be construed, without further discussion, as accepting a binary construction of gender nor as an endorsement of the patriarchal values associated with the terms. Of course, ecofeminists recognize that every claim we make is unavoidably influenced by a range of cultural understandings and valuations. Ecofeminists, like everyone else, acquire particular views in particular places at particular moments in time. The culture, history, and society in which we emerge as thinking, feeling, acting embodied subjects shapes our concepts, opinions, hopes, and aspirations. How we categorize and interpret the world around us has much to do with our context which in turn shapes our understanding, explanations, and interpretations of the world. Given that people are situated in various contexts, ecofeminists reject “essentialist” claims and claims to universal applicability. In addition, ecofeminist theory stresses the importance of concrete and contextual mutual identification and mutual affirmation, of interdependence, and of empathy and compassion. Ecofeminist philosophy is responsive to the existence and desirability of other-regarding interests and is committed to being as inclusive of different lives and experiences as is possible. One of the important ways that ecofeminists have sought to value different lives and different experiences is by rejecting hierarchical views of value. Recent work exploring parallels between animalization, dehumanization, and racism further illuminates why hierarchical approaches pose particularly troubling problems.1 Consider the hierarchical Great Chain of Being. Though this idea has historically been used for a variety of different purposes, basically the Great Chain of Being puts white cis-men right below God at the top of a supposedly “natural” hierarchy, with other humans below them, animals below the humans, plants below the animals, and inanimate things below plants.

Figure 1.2 Mark Dion. Scala Naturae. 1994. Painted wooden structure, artifacts, plant specimens, taxidermy specimens, and bust 117 x 39 3/8 x 93 3/4 inches; 297.2 x 100 x 238.1 cm. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles.

5

25–220 CE. A Chinese mural incised on a stone slab shows a kitchen scene where tofu is being produced.

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

6

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

Within the categories that contain humans and animals there are often thought to be “natural” hierarchical divisions too. Claire Jean Kim discusses the ways that scientific racism operates in these long-standing fictions, where white men are above non-white men and then below those men are African men, more or less equal to chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. She writes, “the ape comparison was more than just a forceful metaphor meant to denigrate . . . the Negro.” It was the white man’s placement of the African man “in the human/animal borderlands where he was variously seen as subhuman, not quite human, almost animal, actually animal” (Kim 2015, 35). Value hierarchies rank beings in virtue of the qualities or capacities they might share with those at the top of the hierarchy. This hierarchical way of thinking is central to liberal humanist scholarship as well as mainstream discussions of animal ethics. Hierarchical ideology can appear expansive, the men on top may want to include people of other races in political communities because they share qualities that those on top find important or they want to include animals in moral considerations because like humans they are sentient and experience pains and pleasures. These hierarchical ways of thinking often get taken up by those who mean well, but they nonetheless erase other ways of living, experiencing the world, and valuing ourselves and our relationships. These hierarchies don’t simply enable, but also reify ableism, heterosexuality, settler colonialism, and whiteness. And they are fundamentally anthropocentric—as it is human qualities that are those that form the pillar of the hierarchy.

Sentiment in patriarchal spaces Many feminists have worked against patriarchal hierarchies and over the course of centuries have acted on shared commitments with other social justice and nonviolent movements. One can see the strong sense of the transformational power of feminism to challenge domination in the activism of previous centuries, as feminists of all races, ethnicities, and classes involved themselves in anti-racist work, labor organizing, struggles for better public health, and more humane treatment of animals. Yet, when women raised their voices in public about the lives and experiences of those being exploited, harmed, or disrespected, particularly when it came to animals, they faced a hostile environment. Brigid Brophy, a feminist writer and novelist, expounded on the “The Rights of Animals” for the readers of the London Sunday Times in 1965. Without explicitly calling attention to her feminist arguments, Brophy subtly drops gendered allusions throughout her piece as she argues that “the

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

7

relationship of homo sapiens to the other animals is one of unremitting exploitation.” She refers to “a fantasy—and a fallacy—about our toughness” and refers to “full-blooded”—often a stand-in for “vigorous, aggressive, muscular, strenuous”—all marking attributes traditionally linked with masculinity. Brophy then makes this reference to masculinity explicit, “The bull-fighter who torments a bull to death and then castrates it [sic] of an ear has neither proved nor increased his own virility; he has merely demonstrated that he is a butcher with balletic tendencies” (Brophy 1965, 20). She explains that it is “superstition and dread of sentimentality” that influence all our questions about the animals, and acknowledges that her readers will see her as killjoy, a crank, a sentimentalist, especially after learning she is a vegetarian. This, she is sure, will get her associated with spinsters; she may be expressing what Fiona Probyn-Rapsey has coined “an animalady.” Lori and Fiona describe animaladies as “sites of tension produced by acknowledging how our relationships with other animals are damaged . . . Animaladies also express political and psychological discontent, familiar from feminist theorizing about violent systems of power” (Gruen and Probyn-Rapsey 2018, 1–2). Animaladies highlight the nexus of gendered concern for animals with distorted and distorting sentiment. Brophy brings to our attention the value dualisms that impede hearing women speaking about animals’ lives. This influenced how people in the Western world talked about gender, animals, and ethics. When seventeenthcentury philosopher Spinoza complained that care for animals was “womanish”—“The objection to killing animals was ‘based upon an empty superstition and womanish tenderness, rather than upon sound reason’ ”—the perverse abjection of compassion through associating it with women, and associating women with care for animals—was in place (cited in Adams 2015, 60). Diana Donald’s Women Against Cruelty: Protection of Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain shows how, throughout the nineteenth century, institutions like the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) used sentimentality to keep women from leadership. Men who led the British anti-cruelty associations from 1820 to 1870 excluded women because they feared being tainted as “sentimental” (Donald 2020, 111). Many of the issues women advocated received the label of “sentimental” so automatically because the men in power in the animal movement wanted to avoid the taint of this association; if they appeared to represent women’s concerns, they became de facto sentimental. Donald finds: “The stereotype of the unbalanced, foolishly doting female animal lover—always set in antithesis to the rational, moderate and well-judging male—was as common at the end of the nineteenth century as at its beginnings” (2020, 257).

535 Earliest reference to wheat gluten (given the name “seitan” in 1961) appears in a Chinese agricultural encyclopedia.

8

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

Across the Atlantic, two months after Brophy argues for the rights of animals, humorist Jean Shepherd spews the negative words Brophy anticipated, and the stereotype Donald identifies, in a story for Playboy about a vegetarian, describing “a tiny indignant-type little old lady wearing what looked like an upturned flowerpot on her head, and I suspect (viewing it from this later date) a pair of Ked tennis shoes on her feet,” who wore a pin that read “DISARM THE TOY INDUSTRY.” She was “a Vegetarian type. No doubt also a dedicated Cat Fancier,” whose dental plates clattered as she ate. She rummages through her burlap handbag—no, not rummages, “clawed”— and hands him a pamphlet, gathers her stuff, and tells him as she leaves, “Those who eat meat, the flesh of our fellow creatures, the innocent slaughtered lamb of the field, are doing the work of the Devil!” Brophy was not wrong in predicting how her words would be greeted. They were being greeted that way at that time in mid-twentieth century, and as Donald shows, had been greeted that way for more than a century. (And Shepherd’s short story became the basis of one of the most popular U.S.-based Christmas movies, A Christmas Story.) Shepherd’s short story addresses the question of how do women enter the public sphere and articulate an ethics of care when the public sphere has been defined in terms of patriarchal values that dismissed women who try to enter it and has instrumentalized the other animals? His answer: do so and expect to be ridiculed. At the end of the nineteenth century, Linda Gardiner, one of the activists involved in protecting birds for the Society for the Protection of Birds in Great Britain—a group advocating bird-watching in place of killing of birds—devised a way of recording birdsong in musical notation. She complained that enemies of their causes “still wielded an ancient but deadly weapon against herself and the Society’s other female leaders, who might be ‘kept under by . . . constant application of the term “sentimentalists” ’ ” (Donald 2020, 257). Patrolling “sentiment” by reason maps onto a dynamic that exists with other dualisms. Val Plumwood helps us think about the ways these dualisms gain another register of meaning through this mapping. She writes, “the postulate that the sphere of reason is masculine maps the reason/body on to the male/female pair; and the assumption that the sphere of the human coincides with that of intellect or mentality maps the mind/body pair on to the male/female pair.” These then influence how the public and private spheres are perceived. Plumwood writes: In the case of public/private; the linking postulate connects the sphere of the public with reason via the qualities of freedom, universality and

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

9

No surprise then, that in the mid-nineteenth century, “the prevailing view— in the RSPCA as in other charitable organizations—was that women’s reforming energies were best expended in the private sphere, and in inconspicuous supportive functions” (Donald 2020, 70). Another way that British women’s activism was impeded and judged by the men who led animal groups, besides the public/private dualism, was the view that women were forwarding issues that were “not of sufficient importance to insure a successful gathering.” This was the case with the issue of “bearing reins” (an aristocratic fetish that required that reins for horses run from their backs over their head, painfully forcing the horses’ heads toward their chest, impeding their breathing, hurting the horses’ backs and leading to respiratory problems). The Liverpool RSPCA Ladies’ Committee wanted to pursue this issue, but the male leaders said no, it lacked “sufficient importance.” Novelist Anna Sewell showed her disagreement with such calculations as the men employed: one of the most dramatic scenes in Black Beauty, published that same year, was the bearing rein scene. Within a few years of the book’s publication, several Western countries banned the bearing rein. According to novelist Jane Smiley, “Black Beauty helped people see animals in a new way.” She explained, “As soon as you say that an animal has a point of view, then it’s very difficult to just go and be cruel to that animal . . . [It showed] readers that the world is full of beings who should not be treated like objects” (quoted in Norris 2012). Ironically, women of Sewell’s time had found their point of view dismissed. In The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice, Bonnie Smith refers to the “ ‘meat and potatoes’ of great history” (2000, 71), meaning the topics that were deemed important by the emerging class of professional historians (political history, matters of the nation-state, and the triumph of great leaders) rather than the issues that interested “amateur historians.” The division between the professional and amateur historians followed gender lines, and the public/private dichotomy. In writing the history of animal activism in the nineteenth century this division is reproduced by the “meat and potatoes” history that focuses on the establishment of institutions like the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in the United States and the RSCPA in Great Britain.

1441 European selling of African peoples begins.

rationality, which are supposedly constitutive of masculinity and the public sphere; and connects that of the private with nature via the qualities of dailiness, necessity, particularity and emotionality supposedly exemplified in and constitutive of femininity and the private sphere. (2001, 45)

10

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

The reign of reason The exaltation of reason—so central in Western philosophy and the sciences—was, and continues to be, a profound obstacle to making the world more just and compassionate. Even though many have argued that more reason will bring us closer to justice, the masculinized, dualistic conception of reason inevitably undermines such efforts, as it necessitates a troubling mis-valuation of the beings and capacities on the opposite side of the binary. Genevieve Lloyd, in the late 1970s, reflecting on the Man of Reason, wrote: The idea that the rational is somehow specially associated with masculinity goes back to the Greek founding fathers of rationality as we know it. Aristotle thought that woman was “as it were an impotent male, for it is through a certain incapacity that the female is female.” This intrinsic female incapacity was a lack in the “principle of soul” and hence associated with an incapacity in respect of rationality. The claim is not of course that women do not have rationality, but they have it in an inferior, fainter way. They have rationality; they are distinguished from the animals by being rational. Yet they are not equal to men. They are somehow lesser men, lesser in respect of the all-important thing: rationality. (1979, 19)

As Val Plumwood notices, reason contrasts systematically with nature . . . Nature, as the excluded and devalued contrast to reason, includes the emotions, the body, the passions, animality, the primitive or uncivilized, the non-human world, matter, physicality, and sense experience, as well as the sphere of irrationality, of faith and of madness. In other words, nature includes everything that reason excludes. (1993, 20)

Abstract reasoning is also the capacity that historically has served to justify the hierarchical ranking of beings. White men are positioned as closer to the divine based on their supposed capacity for pure reasoning, while other people—who are viewed as more influenced by the passions and perceived therefore to be “closer to nature”—are ranked lower. Other animals, who are generally thought to lack reasoning capacities, are ranked lower still. To maintain their position at the top, straight cis-gendered white men distance themselves from sentiment and emotions and their association with femininity and little old ladies in tennis shoes. This way of thinking precludes the possibility of just relations. When Peter Singer begins his book Animal Liberation with two British women who invite him to tea and appear sentimental about pets, but not

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

11

animals used for food, he appeals to reason. Singer explains that “the portrayal of those who protest against cruelty to animals as sentimental, emotional, ‘animal-lovers’ has had the effect of excluding the entire issue of our treatment of nonhumans from serious political and moral discussion” (1975, ix). Brophy might have said in reply “to the contrary, it is the construction of political and moral discussion as rational and manly” that has resulted in the exclusion of animals from “serious” ethical discussions. The hierarchical thinking that is implicit in this central value dualism between reason, on the one hand, and emotion, nature, animals, etc., on the other, raises challenges for those working to revalue those beings and qualities that have been ranked lower. One of the most central challenges tends to get overlooked—especially by those advocating for a “rationalist” approach—and that is how to “expand” the sphere of who or what is considered valuable, when reason and cognition are valued so highly they are positioned as the only way to make claims on behalf of others. How can all be included in the realm of justice, especially those who “lack” reason, and at the same time have rationality so highly valued? Those who will be included, it seems, will be “second-class” members of the valued group. These non-rational or less rational beings are sometimes referred to in animal ethics literature as “moral patients.”2 Animals, the cognitively disabled, and others may lack the valued reasoning capacities of those on top, and that has led to them being thought of as “lesser.” As Sunaura Taylor writes, “Despite Singer’s focus on sentience, in the end he re-thrones rationality . . . Within such a framework [animals and intellectually disabled humans] invariably become judged and consequentially categorized as less valuable” (2017, 128). Ecofeminists, along with disability rights advocates, reject this value hierarchy. The boundary between reason and sentiment is itself quite porous and it may be that the insistence on the higher value of reason is, in part, an anxious attempt to defend reason from the intrusion of sentiment. But reason and emotion are, as Lori argues in her book Entangled Empathy, co-constituted and mutually informing. Reason can aid in assessing, understanding, and altering emotional states and emotions work to direct our attention, motivate reflections, and action. Indeed, it is often emotions that alert us to injustice. Rather than trying to maintain a strong distinction between reason and emotion, recognizing their interconnected strengths can bring much-needed focus on actual ethical experiences, concerns, and practices. Simultaneously reasoning about and caring about what matters allows us to better understand and address ethical concerns, not in isolation from the context in which they occur but within those contexts. Those contexts in turn shape beliefs (thought to be reason’s mental states) and desires (thought to

1493 Columbus’s second voyage introduces cows to the space now known as North America, before that time the people living there did not consume mammalian milk or cow’s meat.

12

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

be emotion’s mental states) and this realization has led ecofeminists to theorize about the importance of context and the value of exploring the connections between both sides of the reason/emotion binary, as well as the other binaries that have come to problematically shape our understanding and relationships.

Emerging feminist analysis of connections with animals At the end of the nineteenth century, British women began to recognize the relationship between how they were positioned in society and how other animals had been positioned. They might have lacked the ecofeminist language of value dualisms and the interactions among them, that is, the way reason/emotion, male/female, and human/animal were being mapped onto each other, but women, as the majority of activists for animals in both the United States and Great Britain, nonetheless discussed these connections. In 1892, for example, when Shafts, a working-class, feminist newspaper, reviewed Henry Salt’s book, Animal Rights, the writer Edith Ward argued that “the case of the animal is the case of the woman.” She explained that the similitude of position between women and the lower animals, although vastly different in degree, should insure from the former the most unflinching and powerful support to all movements for the amelioration of the conditions of animal existence. What, for example, could be more calculated to produce brutal wife-beaters than long practice of savage cruelty towards the other animals? And what, on the other hand, more likely to impress mankind with the necessity of justice for women than the awakening of the idea that justice was the right of even an ox or a sheep? (1892, 41)

Hilda Kean in “Smooth Cool Men of Science” shows how animal issues, especially anti-vivisection, were linked to the rise of feminism and socialism from the late nineteenth century. In general, Kean argues, animal issues were picked up by progressive rather than reactionary forces. Frances Power Cobbe, a forceful activist who protested vivisection and wife-beating, recognized “the connections between vivisection, pornography, and the condition of women” (Kean 1985, 129). She participated in protests against vivisection and founded the Victoria Street Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection.

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

13

Figure 1.3 At the same time that women who organized on behalf of animals were speaking out, the suffrage movement became more prominent. Those who opposed women’s right to vote caricatured their efforts as animal-like or partly animal for their temerity in entering, claiming, and challenging patriarchal public space. Anti-suffrage postcard. Published by SB, courtesy of Glasgow Women’s Library, 2015-92-2.

1543 The beginning of the Scientific Revolution in the Western World, introducing a mechanized view of nature.

Diana Donald writes, “Animal protection had by the 1890s become so closely identified with feminist causes that women’s associations linked to wider national movement often adopted policies on animals that differed from those of their male colleagues” (2020, 229). Donald suggests “concern for animal suffering, a traditional female trait, had deepened and become more vocal as an effect of women’s painful struggle against patriarchy” (230). Remarkably, in the early twentieth century, anti-vivisection riots in London united trade unionists, feminists, and animal advocates. Groups that had often competed for public attention were linked in protest against the vivisection of a dog. Through their experience of being subjected to torturous forced feeding during hunger strikes in prison, English suffragettes found themselves identifying with vivisected animals. Coral Lansbury, in her

14

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

important book The Old Brown Dog, explained: “Women were to be the strength of the antivivisection movement, and every flogged and beaten horse, every dog or cat strapped down for the vivisector’s knife reminded them of their own condition.” And not just suffragists—workers, too, found themselves identifying with animals as victims. Activists and writers both saw “workers and animals sharing the same fate” (Lansbury 1985, 82). Isabella Ford’s pamphlet “Women and Socialism” was published a year after the Brown Dog riots. As Hilda Kean explains, it is perhaps best known for the links she makes between class and sex oppression. Yet the connections she draws between the experiences of women and domestic animals are also perceptive. Isabella Ford laments the effects of industrialisation that has led to a misunderstanding of nature. She evokes the experience of non-human animals to illuminate the experience of women: “In order to obtain a race of docile, brainless creatures, whose flesh and skins we can use with impunity, we have for ages past exterminated all those who showed signs of too much insubordination and independence of mind.” (1995, 29)

The same year as the Brown Dog Riots in London, across the Atlantic at the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) annual meeting, a vegetarian milliner requested that the Treasurer of the NAWSA stop wearing bird feathers in her hat. This suffragist declared, “Nothing would persuade me to eat a chicken, or to connive at the horror of trapping innocent animals for fur” (cited in Adams 2015, 142).

Disappearing women In the eternal patriarchal quest for fathers, and a recapitulation of the forces that influence gendered history, the development of the contemporary animal protection movement usually tells the story of its beginning with the publication of Singer’s Animal Liberation in 1975. While Singer’s work has certainly had tremendous impact, as has the work of other philosophers like Tom Regan, in an effort to legitimize concern for other animals within the tradition of analytic philosophy, they relied too heavily on a division between reason and emotion and the gendered associations that attend to each. This framing relegates to the background, or to the private realm, feminist relational commitments to empathy and care. In an essay he wrote in 1982, Singer acknowledges his indebtedness to Roslind Godlovitch, an Oxford graduate student in philosophy. He even says

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

15

he had “been wanting to write something to make people more aware of the injustice of our treatment of animals, but had been deterred from doing so by the feeling that since so many of my ideas had come from others, and especially from Ros, I should allow her to publish them” (Singer 1982, 8). Singer notes that he made some suggestions to Godlovitch; he “spent a lot of time trying to help her clarify and strengthen her arguments. In the end she went her own way . . .” C. Lou Hamilton points out:

Godlovitch’s inspiration was Brigid Brophy. Together with her husband Stanley, and John Harris, she created a collection, Animals, Men, and Morals: An Inquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans (1971) inspired by Brophy’s “Rights of Animals” article. Singer reviewed that book for the New York Review of Books in 1973—and from this review came his 1975 Animal Liberation. But the need for “fathers” means that the question of who actually influenced Singer goes unasked, and Brophy’s influence is largely unacknowledged.3 (As is the important work of Ruth Harrison, whose 1964 book, Animal Machines, is the first inquiry into the twentieth-century development of industrial agricultural practices. Harrison was one of the contributors to Animals, Men, and Morals.) Meanwhile, the spectral figure of the little old lady in tennis shoes returns periodically to reinforce the boundary between reason and emotion, leaders and followers, and men and women. Cleveland Amory, founder of the Fund for Animals (later folded into the Humane Society of the United States), was known for saying “we aren’t little old ladies in tennis shoes” anymore. After the March for Animals in 1990, young male activists were quoted in the Washington Post proclaiming this same idea. In 2008, Wayne Pacelle, head of the Humane Society of the United States, was featured in the New York Times Magazine. “ ‘We aren’t a bunch of little old ladies in tennis shoes,’ Pacelle says, paraphrasing his mentor Cleveland Amory. ‘We have cleats on’ ” (Jones 2008). With that quote and that speaker we find toxic white masculinity in the animal movement on three fronts – the speaker, the negation of (aging) women, and the gripping violence attached to the shoes. White men entering the animal rights movement in the 1980s and early 1990s often chose to distinguish themselves from the grassroots women who had been keeping it alive by their assertion that the movement was no longer

1611 The British begin bringing cows to their colonies, starting with the Jamestown colony in Virginia.

This looks to me like a pretty clear case of a woman having a great idea that a man later takes all the credit for. Singer is at pains, of course, to stress that Ros Godlovtich’s ideas were not the same as his (they were by implication inferior, less well thought out); but nonetheless “helping” her try to “clarify” her ideas, which she herself was “unsure” of, served to solidify Singer’s own intellectual and moral position. (Hamilton 2019)

16

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

sentimental. In this view, men were the redeemers of a previously weaker movement made up of predominantly women. If we trace the animal movement only as far back as Singer’s book, there are no old women with tennis shoes who have to be acknowledged as the mothers of the movement. What is lost is not just women’s voices, but the role of feminism and specifically ecofeminism in addressing linked oppressions.

Intertwined feminist activism: The 1970s and 1980s During the 1970s, theoretical and activist connections with animal issues increased in a variety of ways. Tracing human mistreatment of other-thanhuman animals to patriarchy, feminists argued that the emerging animal activism required a feminist analysis. At the same time, ecofeminist theory offered insights that helped activists argue their point. In the early 1970s, Connie Salamone, a part of the Vegetarian Activist Collective, began to write about the connections between the experience of the other animals and of women. By 1974, Salamone had travelled around the United States and to Europe, “to bring her plea of including an interspecies solidarity into the emerging feminist manifestoes” (McAllister 1982, 364). She started “Vegetarian-Feminists” which urged feminists to resist the exploitation of animals and to stop eating meat. In 1975, Carol’s essay on feminism and vegetarianism, and the role of patriarchy in the treatment of animals, appeared in The Lesbian Reader. She then interviewed more than forty feminists who were also vegetarians in order to uncover the reasons they had adopted a vegetarian diet. Many of them articulated an ecofeminist perspective that located animals within their analysis. One said, “Animals and the earth and women have all been objectified and treated in the same way.” Another explained that she was “beginning to bond with the earth as a sister and with animals as subjects not to be objectified.” A third reported, “Feminists realize what it’s like to be exploited. Women as sex objects, animals as food. Women turned into patriarchal mothers, cows turned into milk machines. It’s the same thing” (Adams 1991, 89–91). Some feminists in the early 1970s were influenced by their anti-Vietnam war, nonviolence activism to become vegetarians and began thinking about the relationship between the oppression of women and people of color both in the U.S. and overseas, as well as animals and the earth. The 1971

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

17

publication of Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet was also influential. As one of the feminists Adams interviewed noted, “by eating meat you are exploiting the earth and to be a feminist means not to accept the ethics of exploitation.” In 1976, feminists organized a Women and Spirituality Conference in Boston; this was the first feminist U.S.-based conference that provided only vegetarian food and featured a workshop on feminism and vegetarianism, although not without some angry responses and letters to the Washingtonbased feminist newspaper, Off Our Backs. It was felt that the feminist organizers were imposing their private beliefs on others—a perception influenced by the oppressive public/private dualism. One of the early works of ecofeminism that inspired feminists was Rosemary Ruether’s New Woman, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation (1975), in which she argues that patriarchal civilization is built upon the historical emergence of a masculine ego consciousness that arose in opposition to nature, which was seen as feminine. Ruether explains, “Sexism and ecological destructiveness are related in the symbolic patterns of patriarchal consciousness” (1975, 196). Further, Ruether recognized how “the dominant race, class, and sexual caste”—ruling-class men—model their selfimage after ego or consciousness. Subjugated groups, on the other hand,are perceived through similar stereotypes, not because they are alike, but because the same dominant group (ruling-class males) are doing the perceiving. All oppressed peoples tend then to be seen as lacking in rationality, volition, and capacity for autonomy. The characteristics of repressed bodiliness are attributed to them: passivity, sensuality, irrationality, and dependency. (4) In 1980, Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature appeared, offering further insights into the overlapping oppressions of women and nature. Merchant wrote, “we must reexamine the formation of a world view and a science that, by reconceptualizing reality as a machine rather than a living organism, sanctioned the domination of both nature and women.” She showed how patriarchal thought took an especially deadly turn in the Early Modern era when it was powerfully rearticulated in Cartesian objectivism, which divided the world into mind and matter, and held matter to be of lesser value than mind, spirit, or reason. This dualistic split sanctioned the domination of women and nature in its reconceptualization of female nature as a machine rather than a living organism. This mechanistic view meant that nature was able to be manipulated, a conceptual framework that was “fully compatible with the directions taken by commercial capitalism” (Merchant 1980, 193). The Death of Nature provided a powerful understanding of the patriarchal control inherent to the treatment of animals as machines both in vivisection experiments and intensive agricultural farming techniques.

1619 Captured Africans are brought to Virginia, then an English colony, marking a turning point in the Atlantic trade in human beings.

18

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

A feminist group for animals, the British-based LAIR (Lesbians for Animals’ Irreducible Rights) was founded in 1978 and took its name from one of Brigid Brophy’s essays. Their commitment to work against animal experimentation coincided with Merchant’s articulation of how animals had been reduced to mere things, machine-like automatons who were believed to lack inner spirit, sensitivity, or feelings. Their anti-vivisection leaflet continued to be a popular resource for several years after they first authored it. They energetically tried to educate about animal experimentation and other forms of animal oppression by creating leaflets, postcards, and badges (which they brought to the Feminist and Gay Bookstores in London), contributing articles to magazines and newsletters, and carrying a “Women against Vivisection” banner at rallies. They were disappointed in 1981 at the Lesbian Conference in London by how few women turned out to attend their presentation on anti-vivisection. Around this time, they changed their name to League for Animals’ Irreducible Rights to open the organization to women who weren’t lesbians. But recognizing that league communicated “establishment undertones” and rejecting the “false ‘respectability’ usually associated with such denominations,” they chose simply to be LAIR. In 1979, they started Gay Vegetarians but when it attracted more men than women, they became worried that “women’s energies not be absorbed into yet another male domain,” and they passed responsibility for that group onto a gay man. They changed LAIR’s name to Women for Animal Liberation “when it became apparent that a positive representation was necessary within the Women’s Liberation Movement.” They designed a special poster and postcards on the subject of women and animal liberation, “since the consciousness raising we had hoped would have emerged within feminist circles had not happened by 1980.” They also developed a questionnaire for vegetarian feminists and hoped to create an edited collection on the topic. Their work, they reported, was sometimes viewed by feminists with amusement, indifference, or “downright disapproval,” and this “lack of support on the part of feminists has often been disheartening, depressing, demoralising.” But they also saw “signs of recognition with the women’s liberation movement both here and abroad” that the time was now to become involved. “Vegetarianism, like lesbianism and feminism, is not a phase that, we, lesbian/feminist/vegetarians go through. It is a political and ethical commitment.” They summarized a tenet of their organization: “The exploitation and oppression of animals is a direct result of opportunist patriarchal attitudes and of power control,” and should be opposed. Sally Gearhart, whose utopian novel The Wanderground, published in 1978, had immediately become a lesbian-feminist classic, began to speak on

behalf of animals. She told a 1981 rally on World Day for Laboratory Animals at Letterman Army Institute of Research, San Francisco: “I’m here because I now see that there are fundamental connections between women’s rights and the rights of nonhuman animals, and I want to talk about those connections, about the dehumanization that I feel is going on in all of us, and about my own change from being just a lesbian and a feminist activist, to being an animal activist as well.” Towards the end of New Woman, New Earth, Ruether warned women to “look with suspicion on the symbolic role they will be asked to play in an ecological crisis analyzed within patriarchal culture.” She argued that the restructuring of the psychology and social patterns “which make nature ‘alien,’ will tend to shape women, the patriarchal symbol of ‘nature’ into romanticized servitude to a male-defined alienation” (1975, 203). While this isn’t exactly what happened as the contemporary animal rights movement grew, adherence to sex-stereotyped roles evolved along with the movement. By the early 1980s, as more and more animal advocacy groups emerged, it became clear that the budding movement, though rhetorically attuned to sexism and racism, was not inclusive in leadership or makeup. The visible spokespeople, theoreticians, and writers were overwhelmingly white men. As these white men assumed leadership roles, women (mostly white) were often relegated to more traditional roles for women, a division that recapitulated, in a new way, the public/private dualism that influenced the nineteenth-century movement. Organizations operated with hierarchies, in which, as Marti Kheel put it, “a small, elite group makes all the major decisions which the rank and file obediently carry out” (1984, 2). Marches, conferences, and mobilizations repeated this pattern, embracing at times problematic speakers for their celebrity value. Kheel continued in her critique: But is there not something strange about a movement that feels compelled to establish its credentials through association with the “stars”? Haven’t feminists been involved in enough movements that produced “stars” or were run by leaders? Isn’t this, after all, one of the aspects of patriarchy that feminists are fighting against? (1984, 2)

Kheel concluded that “Women must be aware of the problems inherent in working in a movement dominated by men.” In the early 1980s, other feminist groups committed to changing the status of animals began forming besides the London-based LAIR/Women for Animal Liberation. In the United States there was World Women for Animal Rights, founded by Connie Salamone on the East Coast, and Feminists for Animal Rights founded on the West Coast. In addition, there was Canadian Feminists for Animal Welfare, the Australian Feminists for Animal Rights,

19

1662 Virginia legislators draw on Roman law concerning domesticated animals to assign children born of enslaved mothers the mother’s status instead of the father’s.

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

20

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

and the British Women’s Ecology Group, which had a special emphasis on “understanding the present human predicament and mass animal suffering (vivisection and factory farming, etc.)” from the perspective of the “systematic crushing of the Feminine Principle by patriarchal power.” Ecofeminists concerned with other animals began arguing that animals are individuals, with feelings, needs, and the capacity to love and to suffer. Batya Bauman who directed the activities of Feminists for Animal Rights (FAR), including editing its newsletter, from the late 1980s, explained its dual purpose: to bring a feminist perspective to the animal rights movement, exposing sexism in the movement, and to imbue an animal-caring consciousness in the feminist movement. On the one hand, the feminist movement knew all about patriarchy but made no connections between the ways animals are treated and the patriarchal values it worked, indeed existed, to replace. On the other hand, the animal rights movement knew all about how horribly animals are treated but knew little or nothing about patriarchy—the rule of the fathers which existed from ancient times right up to the present—and its values and perceptions that are responsible for such mistreatment. To the animal rights movement, the understanding FAR brought was that the perception and treatment of animals was a patriarchal equivalent to its perception and treatment of women. Or, it could be said, the other way around, that the treatment of women, in patriarchy has been similar to the perception and treatment of animals. (in Adams and Gruen 2014, 16)

Agreeing at heart with the principles of many of the feminist organizations for animals, some feminist writers in the 1980s echoed the argument that man’s control over women, animals, and nature is definitional to patriarchy. Elizabeth Fisher’s Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society (1979) contends that “the sexual subjugation of women, as it is practiced in all the known civilizations of the world, was modeled after the domestication of animals . . . Animals . . . may have been the earliest form of private property on any considerable scale, making animal domestication the pivot also in the development of class differences.” And Marilyn French’s Beyond Power (1985) argues that “patriarchy is an ideology founded on the assumption that man is distinct from the animal and superior to it. The basis for this superiority is man’s contact with a higher power/knowledge called god, reason, or control. The reason for man’s existence is to shed all animal residue and realize fully his ‘divine’ nature, the part that seems unlike any part owned by animals—mind, spirit, or control” (1985, 341). Other writings also appeared including Connie Salamone’s “The Prevalence of the Natural Law Within Women: Women and Animal Rights”

and Jane Meyerding’s “Feminist Criticism and Cultural Imperialism (Where does one end and the other begin),” both published in 1982. Meyerding contributed a radical feminist analysis of the status of animals, identifying patriarchal hierarchy as not only dividing people from one another, but also separating them “from other animals, planets, and the earth itself” (1982, 15). Norma Benney’s “All of One Flesh” appeared the next year, making historical and contemporary connections between women and animals. Benney identified “the female animal” as “the most exploited” (1983, 146). Despite these observations, the environmental movement, as well as those developing its theoretical foundations, attempted to elevate nature at the expense of animals, all women, and people of color, and indigenous people. In 1985, Kheel published a stunning critique of this regressive approach in Environmental Ethics: “The Liberation of Nature: A Circular Affair.” Kheel was responding to environmentalists in general and to J. Baird Callicott’s statement that “Environmental ethics sets a very low priority on domestic animals as they very frequently contribute to the erosion of the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic communities into which they have been

Figure 1.4 If anything stands as a touchstone for a moment when feminism and animal activism came together, it is the 1990 March on Washington when more than 25,000 people marched to the United States Capitol. Seventy five percent of the marchers were women, though only six out of twenty speakers were women (and that included three performers). Feminists for Animal Rights commissioned a lavender banner shown here, with Batya Bauman, Carol, and Marti Kheel in the center of the group holding it. Photograph by Bruce A. Buchanan.

21

1790s The Age of Revolution included, for some advocates, a challenge to tyranny, slavery, and animals’ oppression.

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

22

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

insinuated.” She challenged the concept of holism that viewed “the ‘whole’ as composed of discrete individual beings connected by static relationships that rational analysis can comprehend and control.” Kheel recommended that writers in “environmental ethics might spend less time formulating universal laws and dividing lines, and spend more time using reason to show the limitations of its own thought.”

Making connections: Race, gender, class, species The end of the 1980s and the 1990s witnessed a flourishing of ecofeminist thought and action. Ecofeminism was emerging as an important philosophical and theoretical approach grounded in activism, and around the world people organized against myriad ways that environmental destruction was threatening their communities and disempowering women. Feminist scholars contributed an important intervention into rationalist approaches to animals by introducing feminist ethics of care theory to the philosophical discussions. And, twenty years after the first U.S. Earth Day, the United Nations issued its report on climate change that recommended reducing CO 2 emissions worldwide, warning that global temperature rise might be as much as 2°C in thirty-five years. By the end of the decade, Worldwatch Institute reported that the largest mass extinction of species was occurring, according to seven out of ten scientists. Rosemary Ruether describes how “Among ecofeminists the connection between the domination of women and the domination of nature is generally made on two interconnected levels, the cultural-symbolic level and the socioeconomic level” and asks: How has the domination of women’s bodies and women’s work by ruling class men been interconnected concretely with the exploitation of land, of water, or animals? How have women as a gender group been colonized by patriarchy as a legal, economic, social and political system? How does this colonization of women’s bodies and work function as the invisible and unrecognized substructure for the extraction of natural resources for the enrichment of the male ruling class? How does the positioning of women as the caretakers of children, and of small animals, the gatherers of plants, the weavers, the cooks, the cleaners, the waste managers for men in the family, function to both inferiorize this work and to identify women with a non-human world that is likewise inferiorized? Such ecofeminist analysis

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

23

reveals the way that the cultural and symbolic patterns by which both women and nature are inferiorized and identified with each other function as the ideological superstructure by which the economic-social-legal domination of women, land and animals is justified and made to appear “natural” and inevitable within the total patriarchal cosmovision. Elite men, in different ways in different cultures, create hierarchies over subjugated humans and non-humans, men over women, whites over Blacks, ruling class over slaves, serfs and workers . . . Global ecofeminism shows how this pattern of impoverishment of nature and of emiserated humans are interconnected in a worldwide economic system skewed to the benefit of the rich beneficiaries of the market economy (in Adams and Gruen 2014, 11–12).

On September 3, 1991, a fire broke out in the Imperial Foods Processing Plant in Hamlet, North Carolina, that killed and processed chickens. The plant had never had a safety inspection; the managers kept the doors locked and the windows boarded during the day, and the sprinkler system failed. The fire, starting with a poorly repaired hydraulic hose to a deep-fat fryer, spread quickly with the grease and oils on the floor as stimulants. Twenty-five workers died, many of them near the locked fire exits; as a Smithsonian article on the fire reported, “12 were African-American and 18 were women, many of whom were single mothers.” In fact, many of the women who died were AfricanAmerican, and many of the African-Americans who died were women. In this tragedy, and the reporting on it, we find an illustration of what Kimberlé Crenshaw called “intersectionality,” a term she introduced two years earlier in a law review article, arguing that Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender. These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot

1824 The first Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is founded in England.

These questions were explored in a number of ecofeminist writings that appeared in the 1990s, such as Carol’s The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990), Karen Warren’s 1991 special issue of Hypatia on ecofeminism, Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993), Greta Gaard’s edited collection Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature (1993), Vandana Shiva’s collection Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health and Development Worldwide (1994), Noel Sturgeon’s Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action (1997), among others.

24

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated. Thus, for feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse to embrace the experiences and concerns of Black women, the entire framework that has been used as a basis for translating “women’s experience” or “the Black experience” into concrete policy demands must be rethought and recast. (Crenshaw 1989, 140)

Race and gender together influenced the makeup of the victims of the Hamlet fire. Bryant Simon’s The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives (1975), explains that African American women remained concentrated at the bottom of the labor market. Most still cooked and prepared food, though not so much in other people’s homes as they had in the past. Now they were doing so in the small food-processing plants and slaughterhouses popping up along state and county roads across the Carolinas and other rural sections of the nation.

At the time of the fire, “75% of the line ladies were African American at the Imperial plant” (1975, 130). (Line ladies loaded the conveyor belts with the pieces of dead chicken they pulled apart, a repetitive motion often causing injury.) Prior to Crenshaw, the Combahee River Collective (CRC)—a group of Black lesbian feminists active in Cambridge, Massachusetts—talked about interlocking oppressions in 1978 in their “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” They wrote: “The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking” (Taylor 2017, 15). Though this statement did not use the word “intersectionality,” KeenagaYamahtta Taylor says, “the CRC did articulate the analysis that animates the meaning of intersectionality, the idea that multiple oppressions reinforce each other to create new categories of suffering” (2017, 4). Class, too, had an impact on the Hamlet fire victims. In 1991, “poor whites, poor Blacks, and poor Native Americans—Latinos had yet to move into the state in large numbers by 1991—now competed, quite often, for the same jobs.” Applicants were “by definition, part of a cheap, easily disposable, and interchangeable labor supply” (2017, 130). Like undocumented immigrants in the twenty-first century who hesitated to complain about safety issues at the slaughterhouses where they worked knowing they could be fired, at Hamlet as well as elsewhere at the end of the twnetieth century, there was concern that employees would lose their jobs if they “confronted the managers of the

plant about the safety violations.” In other words, “they were ideal workers to process chicken parts at fast speeds in dangerous conditions and keep quiet about it” (130). The ecofeminist and Black feminist uses of “intersectionality” share commitments to examine and theorize structures of dominations, ideologies that obscure various harms, and recognize the complexity of overlapping oppression. Ecofeminism’s critique of interconnected oppressions would consider, as well, the context of the southern United States as a favored geography for these slaughterhouses. These states lacked the environmental health and worker safety enforcement resources to oversee these plants. Ecofeminism would add species, too, to the way interconnected oppressions operate. The year after the Hamlet fire, per capita consumption of dead chickens surpassed the per capita cow consumption in the United States. (It was only in the 1960s that per capita consumption of cows surpassed per capita consumption of pigs.) Bryant Simon explains: Each bird, each leg and thigh part, each skinless boneless breast, and each nugget and gold fried fillet . . . was a product of what might best be called poultry capitalism’s tightly wound economic system that generated relentless competition among producers and manufacturers; the ceaseless exploitation of farmers and slaughter and processing plant workers; the industrialization of animals themselves, the constant innovation of biologists, marketers, and, in the end, lower consumer prices hiding a host of unseen and unaccounted-for external costs. (2017, 78)

At the same time that Black feminist intersectional theory was emerging, ecowomanist thought was being developed. Delores Williams’s “Sin, Nature, and Black Women’s Bodies” appeared in 1993 and examined “the correlation between the defilement of aspects of the natural environment today and the defilement of black women’s bodies in the nineteenth century.” Strip-mining exhausts the earth’s body, she writes, and “the practice of breeding female slaves exhaust[ed] black women’s bodies.” She describes “the formation of a national consciousness that considers black frightening, dangerous, repulsive, and a prime candidate for destruction.” She observes, “in this kind of consciousness, nothing black can be violated, because illegality and disaster are associated with blackness” (Williams 1993, 28). The same year, Shamara Shantu Riley’s “Ecology is a Sistah’s Issue Too: The Politics of Emergent Afrocentric Ecowomanism” (see pp. 89–106) appeared, which is seen by many as a foundational ecowomanist writing. Riley argued that “the social construction of race, gender, class, and nonhuman nature in mainstream Western thought are interconnected by an ideology of domination.” She notes how Black women were associated with animality historically in

25

1847 The word “vegetarian” is coined at Ramsgate, England from the Latin “vegetus,” meaning “whole, sound, fresh or lively.”

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

26

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

Western culture during the quarter of a millennium in which Black people were held as property in labor camps. Riley identifies the functioning of environmental racism in the United States and on the African continent, giving examples of deforestation, soil erosion, chemical contamination. “By environmental racism, I mean those movements among African Americans and Indigenous peoples (mostly spearheaded by women of these groups) that are struggling against toxic dumping and environmental pollution that is concentrated particularly in the areas where poor people of color live.” She offered specific examples of Black women’s organizations addressing environmental issues, from the work of Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement (who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004), and the National Black Women’s Health Project. In 1994, Sylvia Wynter published “No Humans Involved – An Open Letter to My Colleagues.” It begins: You may have heard a radio news report which aired briefly during the days after the jury’s acquittal of the policemen in the Rodney King beating case. The report stated that public officials of the judicial system of Los Angeles routinely used the acronym N.H.I. to refer to any case involving a breach of the rights of young Black males who belong to the jobless category of the inner city ghettos. N.H.I. means “no humans involved” (1994, 42).

Wynter goes on to point out how the conception of the human is white and Eurocentric. Two decades later, Syl Ko will draw in part on Wynter’s work to develop her theory about how race and animality are co-constituting. She summarizes one of Wynter’s points: “Although there have been countless ways of expressing human activity throughout history, the model we take for humankind is that devised by colonial Western Europe. On this model, there is the human (white, Western male with the ideal human counterpart: the white, Western female) and “its human Others—that is, Indians, Negroes, Natives [and, I would add, Jews and Muslims].” Ko offers the insight that the notions of “human” and “animal” are racially constituted. The racial hierarchy tracks not just a color descent but also a species descent. At the top of the hierarchy sits the white male human and at the bottom sits the shady and necessarily opposite figure of “the animal.” These two poles signify two contrary moral statuses—the closer your category is to the white male human, the more you “matter.” The closer your category is to the shady, vague “animal,” the less you “matter.” (Ko and Ko 2017, 66)

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

27

Questions about who and what matters and how to understand matter take on quite distinct resonances in this new geological epoch, controversially called the “Anthropocene.” Ecofeminist philosopher Christine Cuomo has raised alarms about the ease with which this epoch of “man” has been accepted and geographer Kathryn Yusoff powerfully highlights the ways that race and colonialism are both ignored and entrenched in this new geological classification. The Anthropocene names the new time period when human destruction of earthly matter becomes the defining feature of our time. But it is not all humans who are engaged in the catastrophic planetary extraction and destruction nor are all humans equally involved in contributing to our environmental crisis. Moreover, the extractive activities of a select group of anthropos is not new. The transformation of the planet and its inhabitants by an entitled few did not suddenly emerge in the last hundred or so years, but has been part of white patriarchal settler colonial privilege for hundreds and hundreds of years. Explicitly identifying who is included and who is excluded from anthropos and ethically challenging the destructiveness of the specific groups responsible, rather than acquiescing by accepting the new nomenclature of this era, is an important ecofeminism project. The beginning of the new epoch of the Anthropocene has not been definitively determined. Scientific teams are searching for “the golden spike”—a line or sign in rock or ice—that marks a distinct change from one epoch to another. (The golden spike of the ice age is a line in a cliff in Tunisia where the result of a meteor impact is visible; the golden spike of the Halocene is a line of pollen in the Antarctic ice core.) The current favored origin of the Anthropocene is 1952 when the United States and the Soviet Union began detonating nuclear weapons, but the Anthropocene Working Group still needs to determine the location of the golden spike (Hersher). Yusoff reminds us that “Origins draw borders that define inclusion and exclusion, and their focus is narrow, narrating a line of purpose (read Progress) and purposefulness (read Civilization), while overlooking accident, misdirection, or the shadow of geology of disposable lives, waste, toxicity, contamination, extinction, and exhaustion . . . the origins of the Anthropocene are intensely political . . .” (2019, 24–5). The politics of naming the epoch and determining its origin obscures the deep violence of the ecological crises and the “geological extraction hierarchies” that rank wild animals, enslaved African bodies, indigenous lands, fossils used for fuel, and other minerals as matter to be taken, used, and disposed of.

1865 Ratification of the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution that abolished slavery except as a punishment for crime.

The Anthropocene

28

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

There is an invisible agent that carries those Golden Spikes, in their flesh, chains, hunger, and bone and in their social formations . . . there are a billion Black Anthropocenes that are its experiential witness and embody its modes of mattering that have no resource to the agency of history . . . The Golden Spike is not an abstract spike; it is an inhuman instantiation that touches and ablates human and nonhuman flesh, inhuman materials and experience. (Yussof 2019, 59–60)

This new epoch, whatever the date of its origin ultimately is determined to be, solidifies whiteness and “man” and the legacy of colonial and environmental destruction that he has wrought. Of course, challenging the sensibility of adopting the “Anthropocene” as our current epoch is not a denial of the fact that some humans have brought the planet to the brink. Pollution is destroying the oceans, extractive industries and deforestation are devastating animal habitats. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are heating the planet and creating a climate crisis that is not only threatening animals who live on the ice, in the seas, and others in those ecosystems, but is creating climate refugees, new climate related diseases, and is basically threatening the life ways of humans and nonhumans alike. Fracking and oil extraction and transport have generated protests. One particularly well-covered protest was against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). In 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe began organizing, litigating, and protesting against the proposed DAPL that was slated to run through their land. Joining with them were ally Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota citizens, under the group name “Chante tin’sa kinanzi Po.” The Sacred Stone Camp was founded by Standing Rock’s Historic Preservation Officer, LaDonna Brave Bull Allard and others, and provided staging grounds for the water protectors to stop the crews who were there to build the pipeline. The hashtag #NoDAPL soon appeared and people from around the country joined the protest in solidarity. For a while, work on the pipeline stopped. The protests and the support they engendered united the issues of Indigenous rights, water pollution, climate change, and fossil fuel use. With the rallying cry, “ ‘Mni wiconi’ (meaning ‘water is life’ in Lakota),” the protest offered a different worldview of water—neither commodity or resource to be used for industrial purposes (Roller). A militarized force tried to end the protests and blockades by using— among other tactics—pepper spray, high-pitched sirens, attack dogs,4 rubber bullets, tasers, large tanks, surveillance helicopters, raids, arrests, and water cannons in freezing weather. At the same time as the militarized crackdown on the water protectors occurred, white paramilitaries were found not guilty

for their armed takeover of federal land in Oregon. Alicia Garza, cofounder of the Black Lives Matter movement said, “If you’re white, you can occupy federal property . . . and get found not guilty. No teargas, no tanks, no rubber bullets . . . If you’re indigenous and fighting to protect our earth, and the water we depend on to survive, you get tear gassed, media blackouts, tanks and all that” (Eversley). The DAPL was originally to run through Bismark, North Dakota, a community where more than 90 percent of the population was white but that changed when concerns were expressed about contamination of the town’s water supply. The new route for the pipeline—running from oil fields in North Dakota to an Illinois oil depot—was slated for the Sioux’s ancestral lands, where it would traverse, as their lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers stated, “landscapes that are sacred to the Tribe and carry great historical significance” including sacred stones (Standing Rock Sioux Tribe v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers 2016, 9–10) while also harming the Missouri River, “which is central to the culture, religion, and economy of the Tribe” (17). Although the pipeline was completed in 2017, Zoë Roller’s “Water Justice Crises and Resistance Strategies” points out that “Tribal opposition to territorial encroachment at Standing Rock reflects centuries of Indigenous resistance to colonialism in the Dakotas.” She notes: Indigenous opposition to extractive industries continues to gain momentum. Across North America, from Canada to the Gulf Coast, Indigenous-led activists, joined by other affected communities, are working to make pipelines and fracking and mining operations unviable. (Roller 2020)

When President Joe Biden took office, he stopped the pipeline and as of this writing the courts have ordered a full environmental review to determine what will ultimately happen. Another environmentally destructive industry and a large source of greenhouse gasses is animal agriculture. An estimated 200 million animals are killed daily in land-based factory farming and the number of animals killed in the sea is even larger. Much of the fishing industry has adopted the intensive farming methods used for chickens, cows, pigs, turkeys, and sheep. According to the Food and Agriculture Association (FAO) of the United Nations, globally, intensive production of animal flesh, eggs, and mammalian milk contributes 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.5 Cows (both those used for their flesh and for their milk) are responsible for about 65 percent of the “livestock” industries emissions (FAO 2013). The massive intentional slaughter of animals in the food industry represents an unfathomable amount of death. The Humane League calculated that if humans killed each other at the same rate we slaughter animals we’d be extinct in seventeen days.

29

1865 On Christmas Day, Union Stock Yard opens in Chicago, beginning the centralizing of animal slaughter.

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

30

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

Figure 1.5 Land Mammals graphic. Courtesy xkcd.com.

In the wild, the rate of death for animals is now being called a “sixth mass extinction.” In 2019, the United Nations reported that around one million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction (UN Report 2019). The northern white rhino, the Javan, Sumatran, and western black rhinos are effectively extinct. Orangutans in Borneo and Sumatra are expected to be extinct in roughly a decade. Various tortoises, bats, and many amphibians have been classified as extinct. Insects are going extinct at alarming rates. Polar bears, giant pandas, Cross River gorillas, and other megafauna are at great risk, as are hundreds of less charismatic creatures like eels, clams, and birds. There is a catastrophe unfolding around us. Fortunately, activists around the globe have mobilized to hold governments and industries to account. Students are resisting and striking, and groups like Extinction Rebellion are demanding change, including a just transition that prioritizes the most vulnerable people and indigenous sovereignty; establishes reparations and remediation led by and for Black people, Indigenous people, people of color and poor communities for years of environmental injustice, establishes legal rights for ecosystems to thrive and regenerate in perpetuity, and repairs the effects of ongoing ecocide to

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

31

prevent extinction of human and all species, in order to maintain a livable, just planet for all. (Extinction Rebellion)

Historical memory is fraught and unstable, influenced by stereotypes and dualistic categories, including the gender binary that privileges those who are thought of as “real” men (Dembroff) and their words over those who are categorized as women and theirs. The misperception that began in the 1990s that ecofeminism was both essentialist and structuralist continued into the twenty-first century. Enabled in part by this continuing misreading, many failed to take the insights and influence of ecofeminism seriously, sometimes ignoring them altogether. Greta Gaard’s “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism,” initially presented at Wesleyan’s 2011 Sex/Gender/Species conference, provides an intervention against the erasure of ecofeminist theory. Gaard writes, “These omissions in ecocritical scholarship are not merely a bibliographic matter of failing to cite feminist scholarship, but signify a more profound conceptual failure to grapple with the issues being raised by that scholarship as feminist, a failure made more egregious when the same ideas are later celebrated when presented via non-feminist sources” (Gaard 2011, 3). She raises important concerns about name calling (ecofeminists are referred to as “strident,” “anachronistic,” or “parochial”) and suggests that this tactic is not only destructive of scholarly community, “anti-feminist name-calling may indicate the speaker’s own lack of familiarity or even hostility to feminist perspectives” (17). Susan Fraiman was also at the Sex/Gender/Species 2011 conference at Wesleyan and developed her work questioning “the framing of animal studies in opposition to emotionally and politically engaged work on gender, race, and sexuality.” She provides an important critique of the gendered omissions and distortions in the story of the beginnings of critical animal studies in her essay “Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals: Tracking Gender in Animal Studies” (Fraiman 2012, 283–312). We have reprinted the essay that grew out of her presentation in Section 3. The field of animal studies, and particularly critical animal studies, grows out of ecofeminist theory. But this history is often ignored or distorted in many discussions in animal studies. The result is not only the disappearance of ecofeminism, but the appropriation of ecofeminist ideas in which embodied authorship disappears. For example, some of the most prominent work being

1866 The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is founded.

Who tells the story of resistance?

32

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

done in animal studies is critical of much of Singer and Regan’s work. But the ecofeminist critique is leapfrogged over. Writing of Cary Wolfe’s Animal Rites, Fraiman suggests it “effectively authorizes its critique of speciesism and models for contemporary animal studies by means of a revamped genealogy—one skewed to privilege Derrida and disregard the groundwork laid by ecofeminism” (2012, 294). Gaard also points out, “Current developments in allegedly new fields such as animal studies and naturalized epistemology are ‘discovering’ theoretical perspectives on interspecies relations and standpoint theory that were developed by feminists and ecofeminists decades ago.” In 2019, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, Siobhan O’Sullivan, and Yvette Watt conducted a large, broad-ranging international survey of animal studies scholars that revealed a predominance of women in the field, prompting a discussion of Maneesha Deckha’s insight that “the animal advocacy movement should be regarded as a women’s movement” (Deckha 2006, 58). They argue that unlike in other disciplines where feminist scholarship might be seen as “transformative” or “additive,” the “feminist work in [animal studies] has been constitutive of the field itself” (207 [our emphasis]). They offer this conclusion, “Like the animal advocacy movement, [animal studies] as a field has had a history of overprivileging male voices, suggesting that what is at play here is not so much a glass ceiling for women as a ‘glass elevator’ for men” (212). In the first edition of this volume, we wrote of animal activism: “Many ecofeminists have discovered that this community has been particularly resistant to addressing issues of oppression within its ranks, including racism, sexual harassment, and sexual violence perpetrated by one activist upon another and ignored by the white, male ‘leaders’ that continue to be at the fore of the movement over 30 years after the early criticisms of exclusion and privilege were raised.” In her 2011 book, Women and the Animal Rights Movement, Emily Gaarder described two competing frameworks within animal advocacy. “The first names the oppression of animals as the most crucial social justice issues of our times. This framework focuses on animal liberation as its central, indeed its only, goal . . . Expressing ‘human’ concerns about gender, race, or class is considered divisive to the movement, and even selfish” (Gaarder 2011, 152). The second framework, Gaarder describes, “names the oppression of animals as part of a broad, intersecting web of inequality that encompasses gender, race, class, and environmental concerns . . . This framework considers the participation of diverse groups of people within animal rights as an important aspect of its relational web.” Gaarder found that a “good number of women animal activists believe it is important to connect animal rights to related social issues” (154).

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

33

As part of a larger cultural process of addressing sexual exploitation, we witnessed a flourishing of an anti-sexual violence movement within animal rights. One major difference between serial sexual exploitation in the animal rights movement and society at large is that, in the animal activist movement, women outnumber men by four to one. In addition, over the past forty years, a masculinizing of the animal rights movement transpired in leadership, campaign strategies, and rationales, including a fetishism of white men’s authority. These developments helped to institute misogyny in theory and practice. Well-known and highly placed white men in the movement advocated for the first framework Gaarder identifies, maintaining a singular focus for the movement and viewing the introduction of other issues as divisive. They benefited from the power dynamics that hierarchical value dualisms awarded them, being white spokesmen representing “rational” approaches to animal activism in place of “emotional” ones. By exhorting a singular focus on animal exploitation, they attempted to shut out feminist and anti-racist analyses that insisted on considering how oppressions were overlapping. Many of these same men arguing for such a narrow focus were also the ones engaged in sexually exploiting others. During this liminal time, when the kind of privileges or entitlement that have come from living within a dualistic oppressive worldview are being exposed and challenged, some dualisms have continued to frame the discussion of sexual exploitation: community/individual; abuser/victim; public/private. The dualisms we critique leave their traces on our conceptualization of abuse creating an us/them framework that might appear to cede power by reinforcing hierarchies. Thus, the dualisms influence the conversation about change. The result has been that we become stuck within the conceptual resources we have at hand, including viewing accountability in an individualistic way. In their, and many others’ acts of sexual exploitation, abusive men in the movement benefited from the public/private dualism: what they did in public was so important to the movement—or so it was claimed—that their violent acts in private should not be named. A reversal of culpability evolved: it was women speaking out about their experience as survivors of sexual exploitation who were seen as “hurting” the animal movement, rather than the men who chose to rape, sexually abuse, or harass women in the movement. The public/private dualism also complicated naming abusers because to do so can put survivors and their advocates at risk of being sued for libel, and no matter

1873 Joseph Glidden patents barbed wire, the “Devil’s Rope,” changing the capacity of colonization to conquer space by using the body of the fenced-in being against itself.

#MeToo and animal rights

34

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

how frivolous the threat may seem, such suits can tie up resources and time for years. How do you make abuse public and work to stop it using transformative justice in a world committed to power dualisms? Ideally, accountability in the movement would have followed many of the expectations of accountability developed by activists against sexual violence: ●

The exploiter takes responsibility for naming and telling the truth about what they did.

●

The exploiter shows empathy for the victims, acknowledging the harm that has been done through deep and sincere regret for the damage done to the survivor, the organization, and the movement by the actions.

●

The exploiter accepts full responsibility for causing and rectifying the situation.

●

The exploiter stops all behavior that is controlling and sexually exploitative of another.

●

The exploiter accepts the consequences for having betrayed one’s position within the movement.

●

The exploiter makes restitution.

According to principles of transformative justice, we need to see harm as a structural and systemic problem; this requires that exploiters answer to the movement and not just to the person they victimized. Activists tend to be highly skeptical of the legal system and view the carceral system as racist, cruel, and unjust. It neither provides redress for survivors nor helps perpetrators to recognize the harm they’ve caused. Instead, those who are harmed look to models in which perpetrators work toward transformative and restorative justice. Abusers might be asked to agree to participate in a process where they are confronted with their actions and encouraged to take steps outlined by abuse survivors to address the survivors’ needs and also to address their own behaviors. Perpetrators may be asked to seek counseling to address their abusive behavior, seek treatment for substance abuse if their abuse is linked to use of alcohol or another drug, to cover the cost of medical treatment or counseling that the survivor had to seek as a result of the abuse, to stay away from events the survivor may wish to attend in order to allow the survivor to feel safe, or any of a number of other measures aimed not at harming or punishing the perpetrator but at providing healing for both parties. Structural and systemic problems require structural and systemic solutions, not individual solutions. When perpetrators refuse to be genuinely accountable for their actions, activists who support restorative justice are still reluctant to

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

35

rely on police and courts as a solution. Instead, operating on the premise that a person who refuses to be accountable for abuse is likely to abuse again, they seek community support, encouraging the community to not welcome the abuser into its spaces, gatherings, and conferences. This allows the survivor some modicum of safety. But in the absence of community support, it is almost impossible for such approaches to be effective. In the case of many prominent white abusers in the animal rights movement, they continued not only to participate in the movement, but to retain or transfer their leadership roles, even after their abusive behavior became public. At times, efforts to seek restorative justice and demand accountability have resulted in reinforcing the power of perpetrators, who have effectively employed the same terror tactics, manipulation, and domination in their backlash strategy against their accusers as they did in their initial abusive behavior. They are able to do that because we have become locked into a very constricting conceptual framework that protects and preserves the power of white men. Not just the abusive behavior, but the structure and system that keeps white men in power, is the problem (see, for example, Kaba 2021 and Russo 2019).

The animal rights movement has used analogies from the experiences of oppression of other groups, such as the experiences of Black people who were held as property, or of the Jewish peoples and others who were targeted for Nazi Germany’s death camps. These analogies inadequately reflect reality, exploit one oppression in seeking another’s liberation, and reveal the activists’ lack of faith that animals can represent their own needs to be free from oppression. Analogies perniciously exploit another’s suffering to serve the needs of animals (see, for example, Adams 2015; Kim 2018). In the 2014 edition, we referred to a national conference Anastasia Yarbrough had attended in which she experienced how the movement continued to use “the struggles of people of color and women as a means to motivate” without knowing much about the lived experiences of oppression. After listening to white affluent plenary speakers repeat the same comparisons of racism and speciesism over and over again without the

1875 The National Anti-Vivisection Society is established in Britain.

The problem of white supremacy and cultural appropriation in the animal movement

36

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

slightest insight as to how racism operates in America, their comparisons made me feel more violated and misused than usual. How dare they talk about racism in this superficial way when they’re not even willing to address how it’s unfolding at this conference? How dare they use the plight of my people to justify a righteous enterprise for animal rights? How dare they use animals and people of color in this way? (2014, 35)

Perhaps these analogies arise from the belief that animal rights activism is the teleological fulfillment of human rights activism. Some of his readers— who then became animal activists after reading Animal Liberation—conclude Peter Singer has made a teleological statement, in his preface. To wit: “There’s been Black Liberation, Gay Liberation, Women’s Liberation. Now let’s talk about Animal Liberation.” Reading this, they conclude, “Well Black Liberation, Gay Liberation, Women’s Liberation that’s been done. I need only to focus on animals.” The belief in teleological fulfillment supplants an understanding of how oppressions may be linked. This results in evangelical-like activism that relies on analogies rather than a movement that seeks to transform social relations among people as well as between people and the other animals. Racist oppression is not an example to be exploited for the liberation of the other animals. Aph Ko points out that “the racial grammar of the [vegan] movement is white” (Ko and Ko 2017, 13). This racial grammar is at work in the practice of lifting up as an example people whose experience of animalization becomes a metaphor for another’s (the animals’) oppression. This causes the experiences of oppressed people to disappear as materially relevant in and of themselves. One of Aph’s goals, she writes, is “to de-center white-centric campaigns that normally came to people’s mind when anyone talked about blackness and animality. In other words, I was getting tired of paying the cost for some white people fucking up the conversation.” A blog called Thug Kitchen could be Exhibit #1 of whites fucking up the conversation. In 2011, the anonymous blog appeared, using black slang to describe vegan recipes. The vegan bloggers chose the word “thug” even though earlier that year Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager, had been killed, and the term “thug” was used to justify his killing. When Martin’s killer was acquitted the following year, the Black Lives Matter movement emerged in protest. At the same time, a “thug-like” appearance became a recurring justification for whites looking to excuse the killing of Blacks by the police. When Thug Kitchen was published as a book in 2013, and the authors were unveiled as white, they were criticized for their blackface performance and failure to recognize how they trafficked in stereotypes. Vegans of color, including critical race theorist Breeze Harper, vegan social justice activist

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

37

Christopher McJetters, and noted vegan chef of the African diaspora Bryant Terry responded. Terry wrote, “Whites masking in African-American street vernacular for their own amusement and profit isn’t just the tired trope of cultural exploitation, which has a rich tradition going back beyond the bêtes noires of the moment.” He explained that even more problematical than their appropriation of Black culture was their misrepresentation of AfricanAmerican food. Terry sees “a diverse and complex culinary tradition with nutrient-rich foods like collards, mustards, turnips, butter beans, black-eyed peas, green beans, sugar snap peas and the like at the cuisine’s core” (Terry 2014b). Over the next six years, critiques of Thug Kitchen appeared; all the while, the white authors found ways to belittle the critics, change the subject, assume a posture of being the victims, not the victimizers, and claim racial innocence. Only in 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death—yet another Black man killed by white policemen—and the increased discussion of white supremacy this murder prompted did the authors drop the name. Part of their long reluctance to change the name can be attributed to their acceptance of value dualisms. They argued that they were reaching so many people with their recipes and approach. In this, white people, engaging in blackface, were seen as more acceptable in a white supremacist world, than the vegans of color developing and expanding a cuisine that did not originate in white kitchens. Settler colonialism imposed white European dietary practices on the colonized. For instance, it is mainly descendants of northern Europeans who can digest milk from cows (Wiley 2004, 508). The majority of the world’s population cannot. In the United States, the National Dairy Council has recognized that “approximately 100 percent of all Native Americans, 90 percent of all Asian Americans, 80 percent of all African Americans, 53 percent of all Hispanic Americans, and 15 percent of all Caucasians are ‘lactose maldigesters’ ” (510).6 This universalizing of European bodies by exhorting nourishment from dairy products (and other animal products) has been called bio-ethnocentrism, food oppression, and nutritional racism. It actively involved the suppression of Afro-diasporic vegan cooking traditions, Meso-American cooking traditions, and other Indigenous plant-based traditions.7 As Michael Wise and others have shown, “one of the primary means to achieve the subordination of Native people in the nineteenth century was to colonize them through their stomachs” (Wise forthcoming). Feminist legal scholar Jessica Eisen describes how settler colonialism included “[t]he violent and deliberate imposition of European agriculture and foodways on indigenous populations” and the “racialized promotion of milk” (Eisen 2019, 75).

1878 Anti-vivisectionist Frances Power Cobbe writes “Wife Torture in England.”

38

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

Aph and Syl Ko offer an important alternative to the perpetuation of white-centered arguments for veganism. In alternating chapters, the sisters introduce us to Black veganism, “a socio-political movement that rearticulates black oppression through the lens of animality and race” (2017, 76). “Black veganism is a methodological tool to re-activate our imaginations”. This tool can bring down the master’s house because “Racism is simultaneously anti-black and anti-animal, as seen by racial ideology’s elevation and celebration of ‘the human’ and ‘humanity’ particularly as Western and white” (140). Syl explains that in writing their book, the sisters built “on a very long tradition of black and brown thinkers, activists, scholars, citizenintellectuals, and artists who have, from the beginning, seen the human/animal binary in effect in racial oppression.” Just as Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism claimed that the Negro had been “an invention of Europe,” so “the category animal was also a colonial invention that has been imposed on humans and animals.” Syl continues, “So, the ‘human’ or what ‘humanity’ is just is a conceptual way to mark the province of European whiteness as the ideal way of being homo sapiens. This means that the conceptions of ‘humanity/human’ and ‘animality/animal’ have been constructed along racial lines” (2017, 23). As a result, “animals did not inform our notion of ‘animality.’ ‘Animality’ informed our notions of animals” (141). Colonization is, in part, the violent dispossession of people. In North America, settler colonialists stole the land from Native Americans and people who were not killed or captured were relocated to reservations. In addition to the violence against bodies and the destruction of cultures, colonization is also ideological, as Wynter and Césaire argue. The ideological function of colonialism is multidimensional and it impacts all areas of life.8 When we recognize the ways colonial ideologies have shaped social infrastructures, which in turn shape our social relationships as well as our conceptual schemas, we can begin undoing or unthinking colonialism. As Val Plumwood describes in an essay entitled “Decolonizing Relationships with Nature”: the sphere of “nature” has, in the past, been taken to include what are thought of as less ideal or more primitive forms of the human. This included women and supposedly “backward” or “primitive” people, who were seen as exemplifying an earlier and more animal stage of human development. The supposed deficit in rationality of these groups invites rational conquest and reordering by those taken to best exemplify reason – namely, elite white males of European descent and culture . . . In this sense, a culture of rational colonization in relation to those aspects of the world,

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

39

whether human or nonhuman, that are counted as “nature” is part of the general cultural inheritance of the West (Plumwood, 1993), underpinning the specific conceptual ideology of European colonization. (2003, 52)

This conceptual ideology is one that “naturalizes” the value dualisms that ecofeminists are critical of, but that are often not assessed as products of colonization. In a sense, our minds have been colonized by these dualisms that both justify and reproduce patriarchy.

Part of the decolonizing work that ecofeminists are doing is to look for new grounds for ethical and political engagement. Many ecofeminists who focus on our relationships with other animals lean toward a version of care ethics. The feminist care ethics tradition rejects abstract, formalistic, universalizing normative principles in favor of situational, contextual ethics, allowing for a particular understanding of a situation (see Twine, 229–246). Care ethics recognizes that most humans and animals operate within interdependent, ecological support systems, as opposed to the more detached, individualism prominent in other ethical theories. Care ethics attends to relationships, including relationships of power, in contrast to standard ethical discourse that by and large ignores structural concerns. An ethics of care focuses on the particularity of caring relationships, informed by difference in context, as well as the racial, economic, ethnic, cultural, and differently gendered experiences of individuals and those they care for. That the theory was developed by women as an alternative to what looks like detached, alienating theories, in a social context in which gender is assumed to be binary, may have lent a certain insight to the theory, but it isn’t a “feminine” theory or a “woman’s ethic.” Though thought by its critics to privatize or personalize responses to injustice, the feminist care ethics approach recognizes the distinct perspectives of individuals while developing a more comprehensive analysis of their situations. By attending to the specific contexts in which systems of power operate, the feminist care tradition, like all ethical traditions, is concerned with justice in conditions of injustice. Ironically critics who believe care is distinct from justice issues, don’t assume that those concerned with justice lack care. Feminist care ethics that includes other animals has provided political analyses of the reasons why animals are used and abused. It urges us to

1892 Edith Ward’s Review of Henry Salt’s Animal Rights published in Shafts, a British feminist newspaper.

Ethics of care

40

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

attend to other animals in all of their difference, including differences in power within systems of human dominance in which other animals are seen and used as resources or tools. It analyzes and critiques the economic, political, racial, gendered, and cultural underpinnings of systems of animal exploitation, commodification, and cruelty. While it does not rely on a fantasy of “natural” care attaching to any one’s biology, it has offered a way to value caring relationships, whether they are maternal, otherwise parental, or some other sort, including caring relations between humans and other animals and between other animals, either within or across species. In The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader, Josephine Donovan and Carol Adams identified core principles undergirding a feminist ethic-of-care approach toward the other animals, noting: “Humans have a moral obligation to care for those animals who, for whatever reason, are unable to adequately care for themselves, in accordance with their needs and wishes, as best the caregivers can ascertain them and within the limits of the caregivers’ own capacities” (2007, 4). These sorts of caring relations are particularly robust at sanctuaries that provide permanent care for animals who, for any number of reasons, aren’t able to live in more natural places. At VINE Sanctuary in Vermont, over 700 rescued animals, including cows and their children, an emu family, a father and son pair of alpacas, many birds—including chickens, ducks, turkeys, and doves—goats, sheep, and others live together in a multispecies community of extended crossspecies care. Rather than separating the cows from the sheep from the chickens from the goats, the animals at VINE have the opportunity to form friendships and relations of care with whomever they chose, including the humans who provide them with food, medical attention, and clean shelter. In a study done at VINE, researchers noted that the animals “operate with a very different norm concerning physical space and contact [than humans]. Individuals often touch, sniff, lick, rub, and peck one another, including strangers. They jostle and push to get at food, or to vie for attention. They push, chase, grunt, hiss, and honk when they want someone to move. Their modes of communicating and learning are more embodied and direct than human discourse-based interactions” (Blattner, Donaldson, and Wilcox, 15). At VINE and other sanctuaries, including those for former research animals, like monkeys and chimpanzees, animals are encouraged to be themselves within the context of care, to develop their own norms and relationships with others. Caring for animals at sanctuary by allowing animals to develop their own relationships of care not only provides a window into care across species but also allows humans to get a better sense of who other animals are, in their

Figure 1.6 A Snapshot of VINE’s Multispecies Community. Photograph by Cheryl Wylie at VINE Sanctuary.

particularity. Lori developed a particular version of an ethic of care that she calls entangled empathy that provides a way of thinking about how to develop caring attention toward others. Lori suggests that the process of careful empathetic attention to another can provide a more balanced and accurate account of the moral experiences one is having with others. Entangled empathy with other animals involves reflecting on proximity and distance, thinking and feeling, sameness and difference. One has to attend to the individual personality and the history and relations that the other is in; often, that is not easy to do without expertise and observation over a period of time. Many, perhaps most, current discussions of what we owe animals fail to attend to the particularity of individual animal lives and the very different sorts of relationships we are in with them. Entangled empathy keeps us mindful of differences in context and differences in particular experiences, and provides insight into how we can improve our relationships with other animals. It is a method for one self to perceive and to connect with a specific other in their particular circumstance, and is a central skill for being in ethical relations. Care and empathy are at the heart of ecofeminist ethics and allow ecofeminists to solve a variety of problems that other ethical theories can’t. When certain features of a situation are taken as given, when the background conditions that led to the moral problem are overlooked, certain potential solutions are obscured. The capacity for moral imagination itself becomes limited and this limitation may cause us to fail to see our way out of a moral problem.

41

1906 A statue to the Brown Dog unveiled in London, leading to protests that involved suffragettes, labor unions, and anti-vivisectionists working together.

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

42

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

We are always in relationships with others—other humans, other animals, the land, and the networks we form and that form us. Traditional ethical theories tend to ignore these centrally important relations, often positing that we are in the world as thinkers and actors without having come to learn how to think and act. This often leads to the bizarre idea that what we accomplish, what we achieve, or what happens when we fail is all done alone. Traditional theories tend to ignore or downplay not just the meaning of the relationships we are in, but the way those relationships shape who we are. Insofar as traditional ethical theories cut us off (or truncate the story, in Marti Kheel’s terms) from the moral problems we are confronted with; from a rich understanding of the lives of those in need; from the people and other animals we care about and are in entangled relationships with; from the communities and practices that are meaningful and valuable in our lives; and from the possibility of becoming more fully in tune with the rich and complicated world in which we live, they can’t help us solve the environmental crises we face. Ecofeminist theory, building on affect, context, and attending to the climate, both political and atmospheric, can help us go on.

Notes 1 2

3

4

5

See Bennett, Boisseron, Deckha, Kim, Ko, Livingstone-Smith, for example. “Moral patients” are generally thought to contrast with “moral agents.” The latter are actors who think, plan, and do things, the former do things, but may not think or plan well enough or at all. On occasions, individuals may move from being moral patients to moral agents, and vice versa. Robert McKay is one scholar who has acknowledged Brophy’s importance. Referring to her 1965 “The Rights of Animals” essay, he suggests: “It would not be unjust to claim that the contemporary Anglophone animal rights movement properly began with a literary act by Brigid Brophy” (152). The use of dogs was a reminder of how dogs were used against Civil Rights protestors and earlier against people held as property when they ran away from the people who enslaved them in the southern states (see Boisseron 2018). During 2021, Richard Twine presented his findings that emissions were 16.5% but has since suggested that the metrics are incomparable and therefore the figure is incalculable. See Twine 2021.

Chapter 1 Ecofeminist Footings

7 8

Besides the failure to see that the majority of the population cannot digest milk from cows and the subsequent pathologizing of them, the problem is that normalizing the drinking of cow’s milk has health consequences. “Characterizing lactose intolerance as abnormal appears to reflect the belief that the experiences of whites define the baseline of normal, and any departure signifies an unusual and undesirable condition. This framing, in addition to perpetuating a belief in white physical superiority, serves the interests of the dairy industry and the USDA, because it allows for the continued promotion of dairy products to individuals and communities upon whose health and quality of life it has a detrimental effect” (Freeman 2013, 1262–3). See books by Harper, Terry 2014a, Brueck, Calvo and Esquibel, and writings by Serrato and Robinson. In addition to Aimé Césaire, see Franz Fanon and María Lugones.

1907 Isabella Ford’s pamphlet “Women and Socialism” appears in a publication by the International Labour Party.

6

43

Compassion by Suzy González.

44

part one Affect Introduction This section, “Affect,” contains chapters from leading theorists and activists that address how our emotions and embodiment can and must inform our relationships with the more-than-human world. The chapters explore compassion, care, interdependence, joy, eros, vulnerability, and grief. The feminist care tradition focuses on affective connections, including compassion and empathy, and shows how these connections have a cognitive or rational component. We can make empathetic mistakes or our compassion can be directed in the wrong ways; our deliberative and epistemic capacities help to channel our affective engagements appropriately. Ecofeminist attention to these affective connections resonates with but is not the same as what is now called “affect theory” that began as a view in psychology focused on the neuroscience of emotions and then was taken up by theorists who were drawn to materialist interpretations of experience. By attending to responsive bodies as sites of organized, nonintentional subjectivity, affect theory may prove particularly useful in understanding the agency of other animals and this is important for ecofeminists who are concerned about the dangers of anthropocentric projections of sameness onto others. But ecofeminists want to avoid the dualisms that appear in much of the writing of affect theorists who maintain distinct divisions between the systems of reason and emotion, intention and embodiment, cognition and affect. It is by now familiar to most people who have thought about the ethical and political grounds for our obligations to the other-than-human world that reason alone, as it understood in the limited Western definition of it, cannot motivate and sustain a rejection of destructive anthropocentric practices. The feminist care tradition in ethics was developed as an alternative to the rightsbased justice accounts that had dominated discussions within the academy 45

and in social justice movements. Though many feminists saw “care” as a necessary complement to “justice,” the justice/care debate was often framed in binary terms, where our responsibilities and motivations were seen as a matter of justice or as a function of our capacities to care. Ecofeminists identify dualistic thinking (that creates inferior others and upholds certain forms of privilege as in the human/animal, man/woman, culture/nature, mind/body dualism) as one of the factors that undergirds oppression and distorts our relationships with the earth and other animals. So the feminist care tradition in animal ethics, critical of dualistic thinking, challenged the reason/emotion binary and the elevation of abstract, universal principles deduced through detached reasoning over particular sympathies and sensitivities to the plight of those whose lives and well-being are in jeopardy.

46

Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

2 I

n recent years feminists have brought care theory to the philosophical debate over how humans should treat nonhuman animals. Care theory, an important branch of contemporary feminist theory, was originally articulated by Carol Gilligan (1982) and has been elaborated, refined, and criticized extensively since it was first formulated in the late 1970s. Since I and others applied care theory to the animal question in the early 1990s (see esp. Donovan and Adams 1996), it has established itself as a major vein of animal ethics theory (the others being liberal rights doctrine, utilitarianism, and deep ecology theory). It also has received close scrutiny from the philosophical community, which has yielded pertinent criticisms. This article is an attempt to respond to these criticisms and thereby further refine and strengthen feminist animal care theory. Although focused on the issue of animal treatment, my analysis may have implications for care theory in general. As it is my conclusion that many of the critiques have

1910 Toronto suffragists open a vegetarian restaurant to raise money for their suffrage activities.

Josephine Donovan

47

48

Chapter 2 Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

misapprehended the original message of the feminist animal care theorists, I hope to reposition the discussion to emphasize the dialogical nature of care theory. It is not so much, I will argue, a matter of caring for animals as mothers (human and nonhuman) care for their infants as it is one of listening to animals, paying emotional attention, taking seriously—caring about— what they are telling us. As I state at the conclusion of “Animal Rights and Feminist Theory,” “We should not kill, eat, torture, and exploit animals because they do not want to be so treated, and we know that” (Donovan 1990, 375). In other words, I am proposing in this article that we shift the epistemological source of theorizing about animals to the animals themselves. Could we not, I ask, extend feminist standpoint theory to animals, including their standpoint in our ethical deliberations?

Feminist animal care theory Feminist animal care theory developed in reaction against the animal rights/ utilitarian theory that had by the 1980s established itself as the dominant vein in animal ethics (Singer 1975; Regan 1983). Rooted in Enlightenment rationalism, liberal rights theory and utilitarianism, feminist care theorists argue, privilege reason (in the case of rights theory) or mathematical calculation (in the care of utilitarianism) epistemologically. Because of their abstract, universalizing pretenses, both rights theory and utilitarianism elide the particular circumstances of an ethical event, as well as its contextual and political contingencies. In addition, rights theory, following Kantian premises, tends to view individuals as autonomous isolates, thereby neglecting their social relationships. It also presumes a society of rational equals, a perspective that ignores the power differentials that obtain in any society but especially in one that includes both humans and animals. Finally, both rights and utilitarianism dispense with sympathy, empathy, and compassion as relevant ethical and epistemological sources for human treatment of nonhuman animals. Feminist care theory attempted to restore these emotional responses to the philosophical debate and to validate them as authentic modes of knowledge. It also, following Gilligan, urged a narrative, contextually aware form of reasoning as opposed to the rigid rationalist abstractions of the “one-size-fitsall” rights and utilitarian approach, emphasizing instead that we heed the individual particularities of any given case and acknowledge the qualitative heterogeneity of life-forms. Finally, implicit in feminist animal care theory—though perhaps not sufficiently theorized as such—is a dialogical mode of ethical reasoning, not

unlike the dialectical method proposed in standpoint theory, wherein humans pay attention to—listen to—animal communications and construct a human ethic in conversation with the animals rather than imposing on them a rationalistic, calculative grid of humans’ own monological construction. Feminists—indeed most women—are acutely aware of what it feels like to have one’s opinion ignored, trivialized, rendered unimportant. Perhaps this experience has awakened their sensitivity to the fact that other marginalized groups—including animals—have trouble getting their viewpoints heard. One of the main directions in feminist legal theory has insisted that legal codes drawn up based on male circumstances often do not fit the lives of women, whose differing realities and needs have not been recognized in the formulation of the law (West 1988, 61, 65; 1997; MacKinnon 1989, 224). Just, therefore, as feminism has called for incorporating the voices of women into public policy and ethical discourse, so feminist animal advocates must call for incorporating the voices of animals as well. Dialogical theory, therefore, means learning to see what human ideological constructions elide; to understand and comprehend what is not identified and recognized in these constructions; to, in short, attempt to reach out emotionally as well as intellectually to what is different from oneself rather than reshaping (in the case of animals) that difference to conform to one’s own human-based preconceptions.

Response to criticisms and elaborations of feminist animal care theory Before further developing the dialogical aspect of feminist animal care theory, I would like first to address recently proposed critiques and refinements of that theory. Such discussion will, I believe, help to elaborate the modifications in care theory I am proposing here. I begin with the criticisms. A continuing criticism of care theory in general is that the individual experiences of caring on which it is based are not universalizable. Robert Garner, for example, labeled care theory “problematic” because, although he acknowledges that “contextualizing animal suffering in particular cases” (2003, 241) is enriching (citing in this regard Marti Kheel’s proposal that all meat eaters should visit slaughterhouses to experience emotionally the circumstances that produce their food [Kheel (1985) 1996, 27]), such an individual experience cannot, he claims, be “universalize[d] to appeal to those who have not had that particular experience” (Garner 2003, 241).

49

1915 Four American vegetarian feminists travel on the Ford Peace Ship from the United States to Europe.

Chapter 2 Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

50

Chapter 2 Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

Garner’s criticism is a variation of Immanuel Kant’s objections to care theory’s eighteenth-century counterpart, sympathy theory (see Donovan 1996). Kant argued that sympathy is an unstable base for moral decisionmaking because, first, the feeling is volatile; second, the capacity for sympathy is not evenly distributed in the population; and third, sympathy is therefore not universalizable (1957, 276–81). Instead, he proposed that one should act ethically out of a sense of duty and that one’s sense of what is ethical be determined by imagining what would happen if one’s actions were universalized. For example, if one were to universalize one’s own lying as an ethical law, it would mean that everyone could lie, which would effect an adverse result, making one realize that lying is wrong. This is the so-called categorical imperative (302). Kant therefore rooted the idea of universalizability in the individual decision-maker—“the moral agent in lonely cogitans” (Walker [1989] 1995, 143)—who attempts to imaginatively universalize his or her own ethical inclination in order to ascertain a moral imperative. Garner, however, seems to imagine an abstract arbiter (the philosopher perhaps) apart from the decision-maker who does or does not universalize from the instance of a person revulsed by a slaughterhouse. While there seems to be some confusion among proponents of universalizability as to who is doing the universalizing (see Adler 1987, 219–20), the question is a crucial one for feminists, who have become suspicious of universalizing theories precisely because of who has traditionally done the universalizing and who has been left out. Indeed, many ethic-of-care theorists have dispensed with the universalizability criterion altogether, seeing it as incompatible with the particularistic focus of care (Benhabib 1987; Walker [1989] 1995). Margaret Urban Walker suggests in fact that a rigid application of universalized norms may result in “a sort of ‘moral colonialism’ (the ‘subjects’ of my moral decisions disappear behind uniform ‘policies’ I must impartially ‘apply’)” ([1989] 1995, 147). Nevertheless, if generalizing is done from a feminist point of view, as in Kheel’s argument—in other words, if we take seriously the perspective or standpoint of a marginalized individual as opposed to contending that such a perspective is invalid because not universalizable—I would argue that it is not illogical to contend that one might easily generalize from an individual ethical reaction, extending that reaction to others similarly situated, thus positing a general or universal precept. Thus, one might reason: if others could see the horrendous conditions in this slaughterhouse, they, too, would be revulsed and moved to take an ethical stand against such practices—for example, to condemn the slaughter of animals for food as morally wrong, to become vegetarians. Moreover, one can likewise generalize from the

Chapter 2 Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

51

treatment of one cow in the slaughterhouse to contend that no cows should be treated in this way. Thus, through the use of the moral imagination one can easily extend one’s care for immediate creatures to others who are not present. These remote others are not, however, the abstract disembodied “others of rational constructs and universal principles” envisaged by Kantian rights theorists but rather “particular flesh and blood . . . actual starving children in Africa,” as care theorist Virginia Held pointed out with respect to remote suffering humans (1987, 118). In other words, the injunction to care can be universalized even if all the particular details of an individual case cannot be so extrapolated.1 The real question that is raised in applying care theory to animals then becomes who is to be included in the caring circle? Or, to put it in other terms, who is to be granted moral status? I will argue below that status should be granted to living creatures with whom one can communicate cognitively and emotionally as to their needs and wishes.2 In an article generally sympathetic to feminist animal care theory, David DeGrazia points out correctly that “much feminist [animal theory] work construes moral status . . . in terms of social relations” (1999, 126), unlike more traditional moral theory, which relies on an entity’s property (sentience, agency, etc.). He considers that this idea, while proposed some twenty years ago by Mary Midgley, has not been seriously discussed but has “potentially enormous” implications, as it represents a major shift in ethical thinking about moral status (126). DeGrazia, however, misrepresents Midgley in making his point. Midgley does argue that we should give serious moral consideration to those with whom we have emotional or social ties (including animals), acknowledging that as a practical matter one is often limited to caring for those around one, but she doesn’t claim that primary concern with one’s immediate circle should automatically override all other ethical considerations. In fact, she states quite the opposite (Midgley 1983, 23). DeGrazia, however, construing Midgley to favor those near over those remote, warns that “excessive weight [given] to [personal] social bonds” (1999, 126) raises once again the question of universalizability: if one favors one’s immediate circle (which may include animals)—an attitude that is sometimes referred to as “kin altruism”—won’t this “destabilize the moral status of many humans: unloved loners, people from very different cultures or highly isolated countries” (126), not to mention unlovable animals? This criticism echoes Tom Regan’s objection to care theory, articulated in The Thee Generation: “Most people do not care very much what happens to [nonhuman animals] . . . Their care seems to be limited to ‘pet’ animals, or to cuddly or rare specimens of wildlife. What then becomes of the animals toward whom people are indifferent?” (Reegan 1991, 96).

Circa 1915 Feminist, vegetarian, pacifist Charlotte Despard offers vegetarian meals at the cheap meals service she provided on her property.

52

Chapter 2 Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

Pace DeGrazia and Regan, most feminist animal care theorists have not in fact argued for prioritizing one’s immediate circle; rather, they have proposed that care and compassion is a practice that can and should be applied universally—a categorical imperative, if you will—to all animals (human and non). As I argue below in furthering this contention, knowledge of one’s immediate animal entourage, as well as one’s own experience of suffering, provides a point of reference to which the reactions of remote others may be compared and analogized on the principle of homology. Garner offers a second criticism of care theory, namely, that it fails to provide a specific guide for action. He asks, for example, if it prohibits meat eating (2003, 241). It is hard to believe, given the volume of ecofeminist vegan/vegetarian theory that has emerged in the past decade, that anyone could doubt the answer to this question.3 Garner wonders, however, if animals raised humanely (with care) and slaughtered humanely (but nevertheless slaughtered) would be acceptable under care theory (241), for the animals would be receiving compassionate treatment during their lives. Garner’s question points to a misapprehension of care theory that I believe a dialogical theory will help to correct. From the point of view of a dialogical ethic of care, the answer to Garner’s question would clearly be no, for if we care to take seriously in our ethical decision-making the communicated desires of the animal, it is apparent that no animal would opt for the slaughterhouse. A Jain proverb states the obvious: “All beings are fond of life; they like pleasure and hate pain, shun destruction and like to live, they long to live. To all life is dear” (Jaina Suˆtras [1884] 1973, I.2.3).4 Humans know this, and a dialogical ethic must be constructed on the basis of this knowledge. Caring must therefore be extended to mean not just “caring about their welfare” but “caring about what they are telling us.” But what if, Garner continues, one encounters a situation in which there is a “conflict of caring, whose interests should we choose to uphold?” (2003, 241). In particular, he raises the issue of animal research, which may benefit humans and thus satisfy a caring ethic for humans if not for animals. Deborah Slicer, a major feminist animal care theorist, explored this issue thoroughly in her nuanced article, “Your Daughter or Your Dog?” (1991). Slicer makes the salient points in the feminist animal care argument: much of the research is, to be blunt, worthless (i.e., redundant and trivial), and, as is becoming increasingly evident (even more so since Slicer’s article appeared), “animals often do not serve as reliable models for human beings and . . . it can be dangerous to extrapolate from results obtained from one species to another” (117). One might argue that stressing the uselessness of the research evades the basic dilemma posed by Garner. I would counter, however, that a feminist animal care ethic insists that the political context of decision-making is never

Chapter 2 Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

53

irrelevant and that ethical decisions must include an assessment of that context (in this case, the questions of who benefits from the research economically and how reliable are the research results published by thusly interested parties). One might pose Garner’s hypothetical differently to avoid the question of tainted, useless research. What if caring for immediate creatures whom one loves clashes with one’s concern about remote others? My response is not intended to be evasive, but I would argue that lifeboat hypotheticals that pose questions of this type—while ostensibly designed to clarify moral thinking and values—abstract so egregiously from the particulars of any given situation as to hopelessly distort it. Indeed, nearly always, the conflicts described can in reality be negotiated in accordance with the particular circumstances of the case and settled as “both/ands” rather than “either/ors.” Moreover, it is also apparent, as Slicer, Kheel (1989), Vandana Shiva (1994), and others have pointed out, that truly beneficial human health measures, such as cleaning the air, water, and soil from the poisons injected into them by agribusiness and chemical corporations (including, of course, most centrally, factory farms), are ignored, while animal experiments of dubious value are pursued with vigor (largely by profit-driven corporations and collaborating universities). Here is a case where, once again, seeing the political context aids in clarifying an ethical issue far more than a lifeboat hypothetical does. In addition to criticisms, there have been in the recent past several refinements of feminist animal care theory, to which I now turn. In his law review article, “The Role of the Rational and the Emotive in a Theory of Animal Rights” (1999), Thomas G. Kelch, a law professor and the first to apply feminist animal care theory to the law, argues that one should grant rights to those for whom one feels compassion (empathy/sympathy). The determination of who shall be granted rights or moral status (i.e., who shall be included in Kant’s “kingdom of ends”) is seen therefore to depend on humans’ emotional assessment of creatures’ capacity to suffer. Kelch thus places the emphasis on the emotional reactions of the human subject. This distinguishes him from Regan and Peter Singer, who, as noted, emphasize rational inquiry as a means of determining moral status. In the case of Regan, such determination grants rights to “subjects-of-a-life” or to those who are conscious and self-directive (Regan 1983, 243–8); in the case of Singer, it is to those creatures who have “interests” in not being harmed (Singer 1975, 8, 18). Relying heavily on feminist animal care theory, especially on the articles collected in Beyond Animal Rights (Donovan and Adams 1996), Kelch argues, “On the issue of whether it is fitting to attribute rights to animals in order to protect them from ill treatment, we might ask whether we feel

1915 Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which depicts a feminist-vegetarian-pacifist utopia, published.

54

Chapter 2 Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

compassion for their suffering. We might ask whether we feel attachment to them, whether we feel a sense of kinship to them, whether we feel awe at their resistance” (1999, 39). Kelch is clearly speaking generically here. In other words, it is a matter not of caring just for an individual animal in an individual situation or of an immediate circle but of caring in general. We know, he argues, that animals “have the kind of suffering and pain that are appropriately objects of this emotion [compassion]” (38). Kelch thus seems to grant moral status to creatures who we know feel pain because we empathize with their suffering. Although utilitarians have argued that sentience or the capacity to feel pain or pleasure is a “prerequisite for having interests” and thus for being granted moral status (Singer 1975, 8), Kelch’s position stresses the emotional response of the human determining that status.5 Instead, therefore, of proceeding to the calculation of interests proposed in utilitarian theory, where suffering is quantified in a balancing of interests (“the greatest good for the greatest number”), Kelch remains closer to the feminist animal rights position, which avoids mathematical calculations in ethical decision-making. The weakness of the utilitarian position in this regard was illustrated recently in an article by Singer and Karen Dawn, “When Slaughter Makes Sense” (2004), in which it is argued that the slaughter of 25 million ducks and chickens was ethically justified in order to halt the spread of avian flu (the argument was also applied to cows with respect to “mad cow” disease and cats with respect to SARS).6 The obvious speciesism of this argument is apparent if one considers that the slaughter of 25 million humans to prevent the spread of some disease would be considered outrageously evil. A dialogical ethic-of-care approach to this issue, by contrast, would insist that the wishes of the animals not to be slaughtered must be taken seriously in weighing their fate. The Singer-Dawn position apparently regards the wishes of the chickens and ducks in this case as trivial, thus pointing up a major difference between the feminist ethic-of-care approach and other animal defense theories. The feminist position puts the emotional response of caring up-front and center and does not dismiss it as irrelevant when big decisions have to be made. A dialogical extension of the ethic-of-care approach would, in addition, put front and center the feelings of the animals in question and not dismiss those desires as irrelevant to the argument. Moreover, as with other lifeboat hypotheticals (here implicitly posed as “would you slaughter 25 million chickens to save one child’s life?”), there is likely a “both/and” solution. There are undoubtedly other ways to control the spread of the disease than through mass slaughter.7 How do we control epidemics among humans? We don’t slaughter the infected. We quarantine them; we treat them medically; we take care of them. Granted, such solutions would likely be more costly, a

Chapter 2 Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

55

realization of which must lead us to conclude that the ultimate reason for the slaughter of millions of chickens, ducks, cows, and cats was that it was the most profitable alternative for agribusiness. Finally, therefore, I would argue once again that the larger answer to these sorts of questions lies in a consideration of the ultimate political causes for, in this case, the spread of the disease. If these causes were analyzed, it would be clear that the solution lies not, therefore, in more mass slaughter but rather in a cessation of the system that raises animals for slaughter to begin with and moreover in miserably unhealthy conditions. (In fairness, Singer and Dawn also make this point.) Another recent article that takes an approach similar to Kelch’s is one that extends feminist animal care theory to issues of child abuse. In “Protecting Children and Animals from Abuse: A Trans-species Concept of Caring” (1999), James Garbarino argues, citing my “Animal Rights and Feminist Theory” (1990), that “it is in their capacity to feel that the rights of animals derive” (Garbarino 1999, 9). He argues further that “any genuine understanding of the rights of children and animals must arise out of empathy. We (and they) feel, therefore we are entitled” (10). (Garbarino notes how, in his own experience, “there came a point where I could imagine the screaming of a fish—and then ceased to be able to cast that baited hook” [12].) “We should,” he urges, “conceptualize a generic empathy for the victimized as part of our core mission” (11). In an article published in 2004, however, Catharine MacKinnon proposes, in contradistinction to the above opinions, that the ability to feel pain should not be the criterion for moral status; one should not have to experience suffering, she argues, in order to be granted rights: “Why is just existing, being alive, not enough?” (2004, 271). Her point is that demonstrating that animals can feel will not prove any more effective in ending animal abuse than associating women with feeling has helped end women-battering. Women have, she points out, in fact been stigmatized as inferior in part because of their association with feeling. In other words, feminizing animals by showing them to be emotional creatures who suffer, she claims, will not effect their inclusion within the compass of who is to be granted moral status. I have to disagree with MacKinnon here and agree with the previous theorists, in particular Kelch and Garbarino, both of whom, as we have seen, would accord rights or moral status to those who can suffer and feel. In fact, as a strategy, evoking sympathy for an oppressed group has historically been an effective means of arousing moral indignation against oppressive practices. David Brion Davis attributes the abolition of slavery in large part to the “complex change in moral vision” effected by the sympathy movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries initiated by theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment (1996, 54). That movement succeeded in getting whites to see

1917 Susan Glaspell’s short story “A Jury of Her Peers” is published, in which women who accompany their law officer husbands to the scene of a crime recognize that the death of a bird was central to what happened.

56

Chapter 2 Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

Africans as persons like themselves for whom they could feel sympathy. Indeed, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin—which many (including Abraham Lincoln) credited as a major force in turning public sentiment against slavery—largely for the purpose of convincing the white reader that Blacks suffered just as whites did. A recurrent theme in the novel is that Blacks should not be considered as property/objects—as was held under existing U.S. law— but as subjects who feel similarly as whites. Little Eva, a central moral authority in the novel, tells her father at one point, “These poor creatures love their children as much as you do me” (Stowe [1852] 1981, 403), thus countering slave traders’ arguments that Blacks are not sensitive to pain or emotional suffering. “These critters ain’t like white folks, you know,” one trader remarks of a Black woman’s misery over a child of hers being sold at auction, “they gets over things” (47). As Marjorie Spiegel points out, “In the eyes of white slave-holders, black people were ‘just animals,’ who could soon get over separation from a child or other loved person” (1988, 43). Stowe, incidentally, also wrote a powerful article protesting animal abuse, “Rights of Dumb Animals” (1869). Thus, a strong argument for granting creatures moral status is to persuade oppressors that those they are oppressing are subjects who have feelings not unlike those of the oppressor. This positing of similarity or homologousness serves to make empathy or sympathy possible. If one sees the other as a creature who suffers in a manner like oneself, then one can imagine oneself in that creature’s situation and can thus imaginatively experience his pain. One thereby implicitly grants him moral status comparable to one’s own. But what of those with whom one has little in common and who may not appear to feel as we do (to reprise Regan’s critique that humans favor cuddly animals over those less appealing, like snakes and spiders, who may not exhibit recognizably humanlike emotions)? Here I believe we see the limits of theory based strictly on the sympathetic reaction. We need—and the rest of this article will be devoted to developing my case—to reorient or reemphasize that care theory means listening to other life-forms regardless of how alien they may seem to us and incorporating their communications into our moral reaction to them. In other words, even if we don’t feel the cuddly warmth we might toward a human infant—presumably the paradigmatic experience in care theory—we nevertheless can read other creatures’ language on the principle of homology, for their nonverbal language is very much like ours. In the case of snakes and spiders, for example, we can see by their body language (which is homologous to ours) that they experience terror and anxiety, that they shrink away from sources of pain, that they want to live. We must respect their wishes in any human decision-making about their condition.

Chapter 2 Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

57

In addition to Kelch’s, a second recent important and thoughtful exploration of care theory that requires a response is Grace Clement’s “The Ethic of Care and the Problem of Wild Animals” (2003). Clement explores the question of whether rights theory, which privileges autonomy, independent agency, and freedom from intrusion, might be more applicable to the situation of wild animals than care theory is, even though care theory, traditionally interpreted in maternalistic terms, might seem to be more applicable to domestic animals who are dependent on humans and in a position of lesser power. Clement’s nuanced conclusion is that each approach is necessary in both wild and domestic cases. Her discussion raises a number of interesting points that help to clarify the direction in which I would like to see care theory move. Clement suggests (probably correctly) that animal care theory evolved by taking domestic animals “as paradigmatic” (2003, 3) and wonders whether sympathy might be a more appropriate emotion for domestic animals than for wild ones. If, she proposes, the world of wild animals is one of “eating and being eaten,” following the characterization of deep ecologist J. Baird Callicott, “our sympathies would seem to be out of line with this fact” (Clement 2003, 3; see also Callicott 1987, 205). First, it must be pointed out that the characterization of nature as “red in tooth and claw” is a distortion (on this, see Midgley 1983, 24). In fact, one can argue equally well that the predominant practice in the natural world is one of symbiosis and cooperation. Nevertheless, it is indeed true that one’s sympathies for an animal being killed by another animal in the wild would seem to be misplaced, or at least vain. However, the contention itself risks falling into the naturalistic fallacy, misconceiving the purpose of human ethics. Feminist care theorists are not offering an ethic for all animate life on the planet. Rather, they are concerned with an ethic for the human treatment of nonhuman animals. They are not proposing an ethic for lions chasing zebras, but neither do they endorse that humans emulate lions or other animals in establishing their own ethic. What they propose instead is an ethic that ensures that humans do not themselves inflict suffering on creatures who we know can suffer or experience harm. Environmental ethicists such as Callicott classically fall into the naturalistic fallacy when they attempt to justify practices such as hunting by claiming they “reaffirm [humans’] participation in nature” (Callicott [1980] 1992, 56). While numerous ecofeminist criticisms of environmentalist justifications of hunting have been made (Luke [1992] 1996; Davis 1995; Kheel 1995), here I would like to apply dialogical care theory to the hunting issue. A dialogical ethic for the treatment of animals would argue that our ethic of how to treat the deer should be based on what we know of the deer’s wishes.

1934 The founding of Kimber Farms in California launches the modern genetics research laboratory and focuses on breeding chickens for specific economic traits, like heavy egg-laying.

58

Chapter 2 Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

If one reads and pays attention to the body language of the deer who is fleeing from the hunter, taking seriously the communication from the deer that she does not want to be killed or injured, one would have to conclude that the hunter should lay down his gun. One might object that this position risks itself falling into the naturalistic fallacy, which bases human ethics on alleged natural behaviors of animals in the natural world. But the difference is that in the dialogical approach it is not a matter of behaving like the deer or modeling human ethics on the deer’s behavior; rather, it is a matter of incorporating the deer’s position and wishes dialogically in the human ethical-decision-making process. What, however, if one receives mixed messages from animals: how then does a dialogical care ethic respond? In the case of the lion and the zebra, for example, it is clear that the lion is communicating a desire to eat the zebra, where the zebra is communicating a desire not to be eaten. How is the human to respond? Clement, I think persuasively, argues for a general theory of noninterference in the wild but proposes nevertheless that a human encountering an individual suffering animal in the wild should act to alleviate that suffering (2003, 7). I would further postulate that a human should attempt to protect weaker animals within her immediate entourage; that is, if one’s own companion animals are attempting to kill another animal, one should try to prevent it. A dialogical ethic does not assert that the animal’s position should be the only matter taken into consideration or that the human should automatically comply with the animal’s wishes. Ethical decision-making is in fact made dialogical by the introduction into the conversation of factors the human knows beyond the animals’ ken, which may be relevant to the ethical choice. In the case of domestic animals for whom one has assumed responsibility, such factors might include, for example, a decision to give one’s companion animal a vaccination, even though one knows the animal doesn’t enjoy going to the vet or receiving a shot. One nevertheless decides in this case to override the animal’s immediate wishes because one sees that the animal’s suffering is likely to be minimal and temporary and that the long-term result is likely to be beneficial to the animal, saving her from worse pain and suffering. One might object that such a decision-making process reprises the utilitarian ends-and-means logic that justifies lab experimentation on animals: local immediate suffering that leads to a later, greater good. But in fact the analogy doesn’t hold up. Lab animals are subjected to much greater and repeated pain, not to mention the stress of confinement, and a long-term, abstract good may well not result and certainly will not result for the individual animal who is likely to be killed as reward for her pains.

Chapter 2 Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

59

The final elaboration of feminist animal care ethics that I wish to comment on is MacKinnon’s “Of Mice and Men” (2004). MacKinnon characterizes the liberal animal rights approach as the “like us” or “sameness model” in terms that recall her similar critique of the inadequacies of liberal rights theory with respect to women in her celebrated books Feminism Unmodified (1987) and Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989). As in these works, she notes in “Of Mice and Men” that the liberal model of equality for all ignores substantive power differentials among unlike entities. Most powerfully, MacKinnon attacks champions of free speech, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, who have defended crush videos, for example, in which stiletto-heeled women crush live small animals to death to provide sexual titillation for the viewer. The ACLU argued in opposition to the recent federal law banning such videos (in interstate commerce) that the film itself is speech and therefore permitted under the First Amendment. Although MacKinnon doesn’t make this point in reference to the federal law, an implicit question is thereby raised: Whose speech is being overlooked here? This example graphically illustrates how a dialogical ethic of care would operate differently from traditional liberal constitutional doctrine. A dialogical ethic would argue that the wishes of the animals being crushed must be taken into account in human decision-making about their fate. (A similar point might be made with respect to another recent national event, the “mad cow” disease scare of late 2003 in which virtually no one expressed concern about paying emotional attention to the sick and injured “downer” cows’ own feelings about being dragged by chains and bulldozed into slaughterhouses, much less about how healthy cows feel about being slaughtered.) MacKinnon further develops her point by examining a 2000 California anti-snuff-video bill (which didn’t pass) that provided a consent provision for humans (i.e., if they consented to the acts being depicted, the bill would not apply) but not for animals. MacKinnon sarcastically comments, “Instructively, the joint crush/snuff bill had a consent provision only for people. Welcome to humanity: While animals presumably either cannot or are presumed not to consent to their videotaped murder, humans beings could have consented to their own intentional and malicious killing if done to make a movie, and the movie would be legal” (2004, 269). While the issue of human consent in such matters may be questioned (and has been by MacKinnon elsewhere, where she points out that such consent presumes an equal playing field and elides coercive circumstances like economic need, patriarchal brainwashing, etc. [1987, 180–3]), the bill’s consent provision inadvertently highlights the fact that no one asked the animals if they consented, which of course they would not. MacKinnon concludes this discussion by asking, “Who asked the animals? . . . Do

1937 First cow impregnated by artificial insemination.

60

Chapter 2 Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

animals dissent from human hegemony? I think they often do. They vote with their feet by running away. They bite back, scream in pain, withhold affection, approach warily, fly and swim away” (2004, 270).

A standpoint theory for animals? Because it offers a more theoretically sophisticated political perspective than care theory, standpoint theory, another significant vein in contemporary feminist theory, may prove a useful supplement to care theory regarding the ethical treatment of animals.8 Especially in its original articulation by Georg Lukács, standpoint theory would seem to be particularly apt for the dialogical focus I am proposing here. Lukács, a Marxist, developed the idea in his History and Class Consciousness (Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein [1923] 1971), in which he posited that the proletariat evinces a particular and privileged epistemology because of its commodification or reification in the capitalist production process. When a subject is treated as an object, Lukács argues, the experience necessarily evokes a critical consciousness born of the subject’s ironic knowledge that he or she is not a thing. In capitalist assembly-line production, Lukács notes, the worker “is turned into a commodity and reduced to a mere quantity. But this very fact forces him to surpass the immediacy of his condition” ([1923] 1971, 166). Beneath the “quantifying crust,” however, lies a “qualitative living core” (169) from which arises a critical, subversive consciousness. Lukács elaborates: “In the proletariat . . . the process by which a [person’s] achievement is split off from his total personality and becomes a commodity leads to a revolutionary consciousness” (171). Moreover, “corresponding to the objective consciousness of the commodity form, there is the subjective element . . . [and] while the process by which the worker is reified and becomes a commodity dehumanizes him . . . it remains true that precisely his humanity and his soul are not changed into commodities” (172). Feminist standpoint theory has generally—following Nancy Hartsock (1983)—rooted an oppressed group’s awakening critical consciousness less in objectification and more in bodily experience and in the practice or memory of nonindustrial craft-based labor (use-value production); however, for the purposes of developing a feminist approach to the animal question, the Lukácsian emphasis on reification as the primary element constitutive of the critical standpoint would seem more useful.9 When the theory is applied to animals, it is abundantly clear that they are commodified and quantified in the production process—even more literally

so than the proletariat, whose bodies at least are not turned into dead consumable objects by the process, though they may be treated as mechanical means. Where one immediately senses problems, however, in applying standpoint theory to animals is in the question of how their subjective viewpoint is to be articulated. For obviously, unlike human workers, animals are unable to share their critical views with other animals or to organize resistance to their objectification and (in their case) slaughter. However, the fact that workers rarely expressed a proletarian standpoint spontaneously or rose up en masse against their treatment (a perennial problem in revolutionary theory) suggests that the differences between the two cases may not be as great as they might at first appear. Often, as a practical matter, Marxist theorists have fallen back on the idea of an intellectual vanguard leading and educating the proletariat so as to recognize and act against the injustices that are inflicted on it (the most famous example here being Lenin’s idea of the vanguard party). And indeed a central question in feminist standpoint theory has been that of the relationship between the theorists articulating the standpoint and the women on whose behalf it is being articulated (see Hartsock 1998, 234–8). In the case of animals, it is clear that human advocates are required to articulate the standpoint of the animals—gleaned, as here argued, in dialogue with them—to wit, that they do not wish to be slaughtered and treated in painful and exploitative ways. And human advocates are necessary as well to defend and organize against the practices that reify and commodify animal subjects.

A dialogical ethic of care for the treatment of animals Ludwig Wittgenstein once famously remarked that if a lion could speak we couldn’t understand him (Wittgenstein 1963, 223e). In fact, as I have been proposing here, lions do speak, and it is not impossible to understand much of what they are saying. Several theorists have already urged that humans need to learn to read the languages of the natural world. Jonathan Bate has proposed that we learn the syntax of the land, not seeing it through our own “prison-house of language,” in order to develop appropriate environmental understandings (1998, 65). Similarly, Patrick Murphy has called for an “ecofeminist dialogics” in which humans learn to read the dialects of animals. “Nonhuman others,” he claims, “can be constituted as speaking subjects rather than merely objects of our speaking” (1991, 50).10 Earlier,

61

1938 Virginia Woolf’s anti-war Three Guineas published. It includes this aside: “Scarcely a human being in the course of history has fallen to a woman’s rifle; the vast majority of birds and beasts have been killed by you, not but us.”

Chapter 2 Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

62

Chapter 2 Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

phenomenologist Max Scheler spoke similarly about the necessity for learning the “universal grammar” of creatural expression ([1926] 1970, 11). Indeed, over a century ago, American writer Sarah Orne Jewett speculated about the possibility of learning the language of nonhumans, asking, “Who is going to be the linguist who learns the first word of an old crow’s warning to his mate . . . ? How long we shall have to go to school when people are expected to talk to the trees, and birds, and beasts in their own language! . . . It is not necessary to tame [creatures] before they can be familiar and responsive, we can meet them on their own ground” (Jewett 1881, 4–5). There are those, to be sure, who still raise the epistemological question of how one can know what an animal is feeling or thinking. The answer would seem to be that we use much the same mental and emotional activities in reading an animal as we do in reading a human.11 Body language, eye movement, facial expression, tone of voice—all are important signs. It also helps to know about the species’ habits and culture. And, as with humans, repeated experiences with one individual help one to understand that individual’s unique needs and wishes. By paying attention to, by studying, what is signified, one comes to know, to care about, the signifier.12 In this way, what Carol J. Adams (1990) famously termed the absent referents are restored to discourse, allowing their stories to be part of the narrative, opening, in short, the possibility of dialogue with them. The underlying premise here is that one of the principal ways we know is by means of analogy based on homology. If that dog is yelping, whining, leaping about, licking an open cut, and since if I had an open wound I know I would similarly be (or feeling like) crying and moving about anxiously because of the pain, I therefore conclude that the animal is experiencing the same kind of pain as I would and is expressing distress about it. One imagines, in short, how the animal is feeling based on how one would feel in a similar situation.13 In addition, repeated exhibitions of similar reactions in similar situations lead one inductively to a generic conclusion that dogs experience the pain of wounds as we do, that, in short, they feel pain and don’t like it. The question, therefore, whether humans can understand animals is, in my opinion, a moot one. That they can has been abundantly proved, as Midgley points out, by their repeated success in doing so (1983, 113, 115, 133, 142). Of course, as with humans, there is always the danger that one might misread the communication of the animal in question, that one might incorrectly assume homologous behavior when there is none. To be sure, all communication is imperfect, and there remain many mysteries in animal (as well as human) behavior. Feminist ethic-of-care theorists have explored some of the difficulties inherent in attempting to assess the needs of an

Chapter 2 Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

63

incommunicative human and/or the risks of imposing one’s own views or needs on her. But as Alison Jaggar summarizes, care theorists maintain that in general such “dangers may be avoided [or at least minimized, I would add] through improved practices of attentiveness, portraying attentiveness as a kind of discipline whose prerequisites include attitudes and aptitudes such as openness, receptivity, empathy, sensitivity, and imagination” (1995, 190). Understanding that an animal is in pain or distress—even empathizing or sympathizing with him—doesn’t ensure, however, that the human will act ethically toward the animal. Thus, the originary emotional empathetic response must be supplemented with an ethical and political perspective (acquired through training and education) that enables the human to analyze the situation critically so as to determine who is responsible for the animal suffering and how that suffering may best be alleviated. In her recent book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag warns that people do not automatically act ethically in response to pictures of other people’s pain (she doesn’t deal with images of animals). While she characterizes as a “moral monster” the person who through a failure “of imagination, of empathy” (2003, 8) does not respond compassionately, she nevertheless argues that various ideologies often interfere with the moral response. Too often, she claims, sympathy connotes superiority and privilege without self-reflection about how one is contributing to the suffering one is lamenting. She therefore urges that a heightened humanist political awareness must accompany the sympathetic response in order for truly ethical action to result. Photos of atrocity “cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect” (117) on who is responsible for the suffering and similar questions. Several of the contributors to the feminist animal care collection Beyond Animal Rights (Donovan and Adams 1996) argue in this vein for what Deane Curtin terms a “politicized ethic of caring for” ([1991] 1996, 65), one that recognizes the political context in which caring and sympathy take place. In my discussion of the celebrated Heinz hypothetical (in which Heinz has to decide whether to steal a drug, which he cannot obtain any other way, in order to save the life of his dying wife), I propose that “a political ethic-ofcare response would include the larger dimension of looking to the political and economic context . . . Thus the corporate-controlled health care system becomes the primary villain in the piece, and the incident should serve to motivate action to change the system” (Donovan 1996, 161). And, as Adams points out in “Caring about Suffering” (1996, 174), feminist animal care theory necessarily recognizes the “sex-species system” in which animal (and human) suffering is embedded. In his much-cited article “Taming Ourselves or Going Feral?” (1995), Brian Luke reveals how a massive deployment of ideological conditioning

1944 Dorothy Morgan coins the term “vegan” (the beginning and ending of the word vegetarian), a Western name for a phenenomen that preceded it. She and Donald Watson marry, help to found the Vegan Society, and promote veganism as a world view and a word.

64

Chapter 2 Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

forestalls what he sees as the natural empathetic response most people feel toward animals. Children have to be educated out of the early sympathy they feel for animals, he contends; ideological denial and justifications for animal exploitation and suffering are indoctrinated from an early age. Luke catalogs the ways in which such suffering is rationalized and legitimized by those who profit from it (1995, 303–11). To a great extent, therefore, getting people to see evil and to care about suffering is a matter of clearing away ideological rationalizations that legitimate animal exploitation and cruelty. Recognizing the egregious use of euphemism employed to disguise such behavior (copiously documented in Joan Dunayer’s recent book, Animal Equality [2001]) would seem to be an important step in this direction. But it is not just a matter of supplementing care with a political perspective; the experience of care can itself lead to political analysis, as Joan Tronto points out in her call for a “political ethic of care” (1993, 155): “Care becomes a tool for critical political analysis when we use this concept to reveal relationships of power” (172). In other words, although Tronto doesn’t treat the animal question, if one feels sympathy toward a suffering animal, one is moved to ask the question, Why is this animal suffering? The answer can lead into a political analysis of the reasons for the animal’s distress. Education in critical thinking, these thinkers emphasize, is therefore imperative if an ethic of care is to work. We also need education, as Nel Noddings proposed (1984, 153), in the practices of care and empathy.14 Years ago, in fact, Gregory Bateson and Mary Catherine Bateson contended that “empathy is a discipline” and therefore teachable (1987, 195). Many religions, they noted, use imaginative exercises in empathetic understanding as a spiritual discipline (195). Such exercises could be adapted for use in secular institutions like schools (including, especially, high school). Certainly a large purpose of such a discipline must be not just emotional identification but also intellectual understanding, learning to hear, to take seriously, to care about what animals are telling us, learning to read and attend to their language. The burgeoning field of animal ethology is providing important new information that will aid in such study. In conclusion, therefore, a feminist animal care ethic must be political in its perspective and dialogical in its method. Rejecting the imperialist imperative of the scientific method, in which the “scientific subject’s voice . . . speaks with general and abstract authority [and] the objects of inquiry ‘speak’ only in response to what scientists ask them” (as Sandra Harding [1986, 124] characterized the laboratory encounter), humans must cease imposing their voice on that of animals. No longer must our relationship with animals be that of the “conquest of an alien object,” Rosemary Radford

Chapter 2 Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

65

Ruether notes, but “the conversation of two subjects.” We must recognize “that the ‘other’ has a ‘nature’ of her own that needs to be respected and with which one must enter into conversation” (1975, 195–6). On that basis and in reflecting upon the political context, a dialogical ethic for the treatment of animals may be established.15

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Erling Skorpen, who stimulated my thinking in this direction years ago; Carol Adams for planting the idea of applying standpoint theory to animals; the Signs editors and readers for their suggestions; and my dogs Aurora (1989–2007) and Sadie (1994–2010) with whom I once dialogued daily.

1

2

3 4

5

Regarding Kant’s other points, one might question whether a sense of moral duty and the capacity to reason are any more evenly distributed in the population than the capacity for sympathy. Indeed, care theorists, like most feminist theorists, believe that habits and practices are socially constructed, not innate (Kant’s point about sympathy being unevenly distributed implies that only or mostly women have the capacity); thus, they are teachable. I would argue then, following Nel Noddings (1984, 153), that if compassion practice were taught systematically as a discipline in the schools, it would become a widely accepted socially sanctioned basis for moral decision-making and therefore not dependent on the whim of various individual responses, thus replying to Kant’s concern about subjective volatility. By the term cognitive I do not mean restricted to rational discourse but rather including all communicative signs detectable by the human brain. See, e.g., Adams 1995; Donovan 1995; Gaard and Gruen 1995; Lucas 2005. As cited in Chapple 1986, 217. Jainism is an ancient Indian religion, a principal feature of whose practice is the vow of ahimsa (to do no harm to other living creatures). All Jains are thus vegetarians. Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, famously stated that the critical question regarding the moral status of animals is not “Can they

1945 A Case for the Vegetarian Conscientious Objector by Max Davis and Scott Nearing published.

Notes

66

Chapter 2 Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

reason? nor, can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” ([1789] 1939, 847 n.21). 6 Singer and Dawn also make the amazingly specious argument that the animals in question were going to be slaughtered anyway, so what difference does it make? 7 Saijai Phetsringharn, a duck egg wholesaler in Thailand, where the avian flu in poultry had reached epidemic status, argued, for example, that the way to stop its spread is to vaccinate the birds. Such vaccines do exist. (See Specter 2005, 53.) 8 Carol Adams initiated this line of thinking in her 1997 article “ ‘Mad Cow’ Disease and the Animal Industrial Complex” (see esp. 29, 41–2, 44). Adams takes a different tack than I do here, seeing cows as “alienated laborers” whose standpoint has been ignored. See also Slicer 1998. While care theory and standpoint theory derive from different philosophical traditions, they connect in their concern about paying heed to others’ misery. And in the original formulation of feminist standpoint theory, Nancy Hartsock (1983) identified as the feminist standpoint the female relational ontology that is at the heart of care theory. Where care theory and standpoint theory differ, however, is that the latter is more of a political theory that seeks to locate the causes of the misery and to confront and eliminate it politically; care theory is more of a moral theory aimed at alleviating misery in an immediate way. Both approaches are necessary, I argue below. 9 MacKinnon is the exception here. In “Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: ‘Pleasure Under Patriarchy’ ” ([1990] 1995), she proposes that “sexual objectification” be considered the basis for the emergence of a woman’s standpoint (135). For a survey of feminist standpoint theories, see Harding 1986, 141–51. 10 In the past few years a number of other literary theorists have begun exploring the possibility of a dialogical “animal-standpoint criticism.” See Josephine Donovan, The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals (2016). 11 This is to disagree somewhat with Thomas Nagel, who in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974) argues that we humans cannot apprehend “bat phenomenology” (440); i.e., we can only imagine what it would be like for us to be bats, not what it is like for bats to be bats. To an extent Nagel is correct, of course; it is a truism of epistemology that we are limited by our mental apparatus. However, I believe more effort can be made to decipher animal communications and that, while we may never fully understand what it feels like to be a bat, we can understand certain pertinent basics of his or her experience, sufficient for the

12 13

14

15

formulation of an ethical response. For an alternative view to Nagel’s, see Kenneth Shapiro’s “Understanding Dogs” (1989), which argues that we recognize the validity of interspecies “kinesthetic” communication. Although Val Plumwood proposes a “dialogical interspecies ethic” in her recent Environmental Culture (2001, 167–95) that would seem to be consistent with what I am proposing here, she inconsistently argues that it is ethically permissible to kill and eat nonhumans under this ethic: one can “conceive [them] both as communicative others and as food” (157). This would seem to defeat the purpose of a dialogical ethic, which is to respond ethically to what the “communicative other” is telling one, namely, and invariably, that he does not want to be killed and eaten. Here I am modifying classical structuralist terminology. In the locus classicus on the subject of knowing another’s inner states, “Other Minds” ([1946] 1979), J. L. Austin insists that a primary prerequisite for such communication is that one must have had the feeling oneself (104). Austin, however, like Nagel, abjures the possibility of knowing “what it would feel like to be a cat or a cockroach” (105). Noddings (1991) has, however, stipulated reservations about applying care theory to animals. See also my critique of Noddings’s position (Donovan 1991). Other theorists who have advocated and explored dialogical ethical theory include Martin Buber, Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and Mikhail Bakhtin. See further discussion in Donovan 1996.

67

Late 1940s The postwar development of intensive animal agriculture in industrialized countries begins having a lasting impact into the 21st century.

Chapter 2 Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals

68

Compassion and Being Human

Introduction: Compassion vs. rights

E

cofeminists share an assumption that the care/empathy/ compassion approach to ethics, one that highlights the centrality of affect, is somehow more fundamental than an abstract ethic of rights. An ethic of care is certainly more inclusive since it values the diverse ways that women and men tend to organize their moral experience. Also, since it does not begin with the assumption that ethics should be built on a feature that is uniquely human—human reason—it is less anthropocentric. But is it more fundamental in the sense that care goes deeper in our moral experience than rights? To answer this question we need to investigate the relationship between affect and rationality in a relational ethic of care. First, so we know what we’re talking about, some clarification of terms. By the rights approach I mean the view of moral functioning that is central to political liberalism, the philosophical view shared by otherwise disparate philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and John Rawls. On this view, individual rights are basic. Liberals are, therefore, committed to a strongly individuated rational self, the morally autonomous self as the holder of these rights. In turn, rights always imply duties. I cannot have a right to freedom of speech if I don’t also respect your freedom.

3

1956 The racialized promotion of mammalian milk is intensified by the adoption of the four basic food groups (milk; meat; fruit and vegetables; bread and cereals) by the United States Department of Agriculture.

Deane Curtin

69

70

Chapter 3 Compassion and Being Human

Liberals usually distinguish between positive and negative rights. Most of the central rights in the Western tradition are negative. As Justice Brandeis famously said, the most important right is “the right to be let alone.”1 That is, the right to privacy is basic in liberalism. Freedom of religion, for example, is basically the right to privacy, to be “let alone,” in making decisions about religious preferences. This is why the distinction between the public and private spheres of life is so central to liberalism. The public sphere should be minimal, just enough to establish basic fairness, behind the veil of ignorance in Rawls’s famous variant, so the private sphere can be maximized. I am free if society leaves me alone to choose substantive goods for myself. Positive rights, on the other hand, tend to be more localized. They operate within the context of functioning institutions. The right to an education, for example, makes a positive claim on society. It functions only within the sphere where there are educational institutions, and where there has been an agreement between state and citizenry to provide education. Positive rights are special cases, so most of what I will say about compassion vs. rights pertains to negative rights. I generally prefer the word “compassion” to care or empathy. For me, compassion is a developed moral capability, whereas care or empathy are closer to the natural capacities that make compassion possible. Humans, and many other animals, naturally have empathy for the suffering of others. Compassion, on the other hand, is a cultivated aspiration to benefit other beings. I use the word “compassion” in the way that the Dalai Lama articulates it in his recent book, Beyond Religion: . . . although compassion arises from empathy, the two are not the same. Empathy is characterized by a kind of emotional resonance—feeling with the other person. Compassion, in contrast, is not just sharing experience with others, but also wishing to see them relieved of their suffering. Being compassionate does not mean remaining entirely at the level of feeling, which could be quite draining. After all, compassionate doctors would not be very effective if they were always preoccupied with sharing their patients’ pain. Compassion means wanting to do something to relieve the hardships of others, and this desire to help, far from dragging us further into suffering ourselves, actually gives us energy and a sense of purpose and direction. When we act upon this motivation, both we and those around us benefit still more. (2011, 55)

This passage highlights two issues that I will explore here. One is that compassion is not only an emotional response; it blends reason and feeling

together. The other issue is that, in blending reason and feeling, compassion becomes more resilient than empathy. This resilience is what makes an ethical practice possible, and it is the core of the defense of compassion against the charges of political liberalism. Even this brief sketch of the two approaches to ethics points toward major differences between them. Whereas liberalism only makes sense on the assumption of a strongly individuated, autonomous self as the rights-holder, compassion grows out of a relational self. Whereas rights and duties are reciprocal between rights-holders, and therefore the moral domain is confined to those who can reciprocate (Kant’s rational “persons”), true compassion is defined by not being reciprocal. In fact, if we discover that a person’s motive was based on the expectation of repayment we take this as evidence that the motivation was not compassionate. Furthermore, since the divide between self and other is so central to liberalism, a core issue is egoism vs. altruism. The liberal picture is: should I rest content to benefit this autonomous agent, or am I obligated to leap over the self/other divide and help others? Given the relational self, the egoism/ altruism divide simply does not make much sense in the compassion perspective. In general, as the Dalai Lama says at the end of the quotation, helping others is also helping oneself. Ethics can then be seen as a practical collaboration with others, even others with whom we disagree. It is not a zero sum competition. Finally, I’ll suggest that whereas liberalism sees the task of ethics as providing rules through which we can distinguish good from evil, compassion sees the basic task of ethics differently. One model for an ethic of compassion is health. A final clarification: I will not argue that rights talk should be eliminated from moral discourse, only that compassion is more basic. Sometimes we hear that liberalism is so dear to Western moral intuitions that applying it universally amounts to a kind of liberal imperialism. Although I am somewhat sympathetic to this view, in the end I maintain that rights are useful in certain contexts.2 So understood, they are complementary to an ethic of compassion. In what follows, then, I discuss the contrast between negative rights and compassion, arguing that compassion is basic. It is the fundamental way in which we relate to other beings in the moral sphere of our lives. Rights have their place, but they are secondary. Although I cannot argue this fully here, I believe justice serves compassion. That is, the justice of any legal system we can endorse consists at least partly in that the justice it renders is compassionate.

71

1960 Iowa Beef Packers open their first slaughterhouse with an assembly-line based production system, making working in a slaughterhouse the most dangerous job in the United States.

Chapter 3 Compassion and Being Human

72

Chapter 3 Compassion and Being Human

Arguments against compassion As I read Western philosophy, there have been two basic arguments against the primacy of compassion, one epistemological and the other ethical. The first is familiar. It is endorsed most prominently by Plato. Rationality is universal, objective, impartial, and since we want ethics to guide behavior it cannot be subjective. It must depend on objective reason rather than subjective emotions. Compassion depends on the emotions. The ethical argument is in some ways more interesting and challenging. It comes from the Greek and Roman Stoics, from Spinoza, and, in its most extreme form, from Nietzsche. This view holds that compassion actually leads to destructive emotions and states of character, and therefore to immoral action. The Stoic version goes like this: any attachment to apparent goods outside oneself leads to suffering, since, by definition, we cannot control external events. Therefore, the key to a happy life is to depend only on oneself to the extent that one is rational. Compassion is an emotion that attaches us to outside goods. Therefore, it is contrary to a moral life. The Stoics add that in rejecting external goods we also cut off the main cause of human conflict, namely conflict over external goods: fame, fortune, etc. So rejecting compassion can lead to a peaceful life. Spinoza, Kant and Nietzsche pick up on the Stoic idea that compassion is a weakness that diminishes the possibility of a moral life. It does so by demeaning those who receive our compassion. Kant referred to compassion as an “insulting kind of benevolence” (Nussbaum 2001, 378). Compassion is a form of pity in which those who are superior look down upon recipients. It rewards moral weakness. Both of these arguments depend on the assumption that there is a categorical divide between reason and emotion. Reason is objective, dispassionate, and universal. Emotion is subjective, flighty, and dangerous to self and others. While there are substantive philosophical differences here, we also need to be alert to the possibility that Western philosophers assume culturally specific definitions of compassion. Many dictionaries define compassion in terms of pity. This is a mistake, a cultural bias, that can be corrected by looking at compassion across philosophical traditions.

What makes morality possible? There are deep biological reasons for the priority of compassion, reasons having to do with who we are in the world. Evolution has made empathy, and

Chapter 3 Compassion and Being Human

73

therefore compassion, possible for human beings. In the 1990s researchers at the University of Parma located the so-called mirror neurons in the F5 part of the brain. These neurons make empathy possible. So, if I yawn, many others in the room are likely to start yawning, even if they aren’t tired. Or, when a mother trying to feed her baby opens her mouth in sympathetic response to the baby’s mouth opening, this empathic response is due to the functioning of mirror neurons. As philosopher of science, Thomas Metzinger, puts it, “Thanks to our mirror neurons, we can consciously experience another human being’s movements as meaningful” (Metzinger 2009, 172). Of course, this basic biology can be thwarted by upbringing. If children learn that they cannot trust the adults around them, if the world seems dangerous rather than welcoming, these parts of the brain do not develop. In fact, one line of research is exploring the question of how much human social pathologies can be traced back to developmental issues with mirror neurons. Not surprisingly, recent research indicates that mirror neurons may be more active in women than in men. So, the converse may also be true, that nurturing can make empathy more active.3 To the claim of being fundamental, therefore, it is arguable that we would not be human, we would not be social (and therefore moral) beings at all, without the basic genetic capacity to share meaningful experience empathically with others. It even makes possible the understanding that there are others, who, like ourselves, need to be treated with understanding and care. Empathy is perhaps a/the defining characteristic of being human. It is what has allowed us to be spectacular successes from an evolutionary viewpoint. And yet, unlike the classical defining characteristic of being human that was supposed to wall humanity off from the rest of nature—Aristotle’s “rational animal, or Descartes’ “thinking thing”—taking empathy as basic exposes our interconnections to other beings. Contemporary science corrects the classic philosophical stance that human beings are categorically different from the rest of nature. Being human is a matter of degree rather than kind. Mirror neurons were discovered initially in macaques,4 and they are now known to exist in other non-human primates, in birds, and possibly in octopi. As Metzinger has pointed out, “The mirror-neuron story gives us an idea of how groups of animals—fish schools, flocks of birds—can coordinate their behavior with great speed and accuracy. . .” (2009, 173). Most interestingly from a moral viewpoint, the nonhuman others who interest us most, those who seem to “look back at us,” are beings with developed mirror neurons: bonobos, elephants, dolphins. In short, mirror neurons are the biological foundation for a social self, a self engaged in a world that is meaningful. This trait is hardly unique to human beings.

1960 Jane Goodall and her mother Vanne arrive at Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in western Tanzania.

74

Chapter 3 Compassion and Being Human

At a basic biological level, mirror neurons help maintain homeostasis, the basic biological ability to stay sufficiently balanced to survive. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio puts it this way: What does it take for a living cell to stay alive? Quite simply, it takes good housekeeping and good external relations, which is to say good management of the myriad problems posed by living. Life, in a single cell as well as in large creatures with trillions of them, requires the transformation of suitable nutrients into energy, and that, in turn, calls for the ability to solve several problems: finding the energy products, placing them inside the body, converting them into the universal currency of energy known as ATP, disposing of the waste, and using the energy for whatever the body needs to continue this same routine of finding the right stuff, incorporating it, and so forth. (2010, 41)

In short, we share homeostasis with even single-celled organisms, but it shows itself in humans and many other biologically complex creatures through empathy. Sociability helps us survive. For Damasio, the biological need for homeostasis is what generates “biological value” (2010, 48). Food and oxygen are nonmoral biological values required for survival. But Damasio further proposes that, “In an extraordinary leap, homeostasis acquires an extension into the sociocultural space. Justice systems, economic and political organizations, the arts, medicine, and technology are examples of the new devices of regulation” (26). This is indeed an “extraordinary leap,” from oxygen to justice systems. It raises the question of how biological empathy gets transformed into compassion.

Turning empathy into compassion While we have the basic capacity to empathize, compassion as a moral commitment must be developed. Just because we are creatures with mirror neurons doesn’t mean we develop the mature capability to act compassionately. In Martha Nussbaum’s terms, the capacity must be developed into an actual human functioning, a capability (2000). This process involves cultivation of the moral feelings in which our basic empathy comes to be employed skillfully. It is here, with the idea of moral skillfulness, that we meet the need to respond to the epistemological objection to compassion. If, as the critics assume, reason and emotion are categorically different, then empathy cannot

Chapter 3 Compassion and Being Human

75

be developed into compassion. Empathy is pure emotion, and therefore cannot guide moral development. This view, I believe, is a tragic mistake. In fact, when compassion flourishes, feelings and reasons blend and result in a moral practice. I want to begin, again, with Damasio because I think he makes a useful distinction between emotions and feelings. “Emotion and feeling,” Damasio says, “albeit part of a tightly bound cycle, are distinguishable processes” (2010, 109). Two important points here: emotions and feelings are tightly bound together in a cycle, and they are processes, not things. He continues:

It would be easy to misrepresent this subtle distinction, but I think the main points are clear. An emotion can result from a temporary disruption of homeostasis, for example, fear at the prospect of danger. The “fight or flight” mechanism that evolution has embedded in us is a basic way of trying to return to balance. There is certainly a cognitive element here. At some very basic level, there is a judgment: “Danger is present. Do something!” However, the judgment here isn’t an extended process of reflection. Extended reflection can result in death. The cognitive element also cannot be disentangled from action. It is a process that immediately motivates action. On the other hand, feelings are “feelings about emotion.” They are more reflective, and the cognitive element is more obvious. On the level of feeling I may ask, and have the time to ask, whether I really should have fought in response to the danger. Was there an alternative to either fight or flight? Was there an opportunity for negotiation? The same can be said about love and hate. Anyone who has experienced romantic love (a helpful evolutionary trait) knows how close this kind of love is to hate. One unfortunate word, or action, can radically reorient one’s world from romantic love to hate, in an instant. But isn’t there also a more reflective kind of love that is not so volatile in its response to unfavorable stimuli? A more reflective, compassionate, kind of love understands the causes and conditions of the situation, and isn’t so quick to resort to “fight or flight.”

1964 Animal Machines: The New Factory Farming Industry by Ruth Harrison published.

Emotions are complex, largely automated programs of actions concocted by evolution. The actions are complemented by a cognitive program that includes certain ideas and modes of cognition, but the world of emotions is largely one of actions carried out in our bodies, from facial expressions and postures to changes in viscera and internal milieu. Feelings of emotion, on the other hand, are composite perceptions of what happens in our body and mind when we are emoting. As far as the body is concerned, feelings are images of actions rather than actions themselves; the world of feelings is one of perceptions executed in brain maps . . . (2010, 109)

76

Chapter 3 Compassion and Being Human

Feeling, then, is emotion modified and cultivated. Emotions are immediate, bodily, social, empathic reactions. Feelings evolve out of emotions as a moral practice develops. We might say that emotions are nonrational (not, as they are often depicted, irrational). Feelings, on the other hand, are the paradigm in human experience of the integration of reason and feeling, thinking and doing. The problem with the epistemological objection is that it doesn’t recognize the distinction between emotions and feelings. Emotions are nonrational reactions; they are not irrational, as the objection would have it. Feelings about emotions have strong cognitive elements. But, unlike the abstract liberal view of moral rationality, feelings arise from and are directly engaged with action. Compassion is a cultivated feeling about emotion. It is a place where how we feel, how we think, and how we act come together. In other words, compassion is a cultivated practice, not an isolated, rational judgment about the world. It is a deep, ongoing pattern of engagement. As a practice rather than an isolated rational judgment, it can come to look spontaneous. This connects with ideas of virtuosity. Just as a great violinist practices for countless hours so that in concert the performance appears completely spontaneous, so it is with compassion. It becomes who we are, through countless hours of practice.

Defining compassion Part of the problem in talking clearly about compassion is that it is undoubtedly affected by social context, and by issues of race, gender, and class. Western philosophy, as I have noted, simply defines compassion differently from, for example, the Buddhist tradition as seen in the quotation from the Dalai Lama. So, it might help to clarify what I mean by considering the work of two philosophers whose work on compassion comes very close to mine, Martha Nussbaum and Lori Gruen. Martha Nussbaum has written a monumental account of compassion, thinking primarily in the Western tradition coming out of Aristotle. There is much in her account that seems right. She describes emotions (what I call feelings) as “intelligent responses to the perception of value,” and she continues: If emotions are suffused with intelligence and discernment, and if they contain in themselves an awareness of value or importance, they cannot, for example, easily be sidelined in accounts of ethical judgment, as so often

Chapter 3 Compassion and Being Human

77

I agree. However, as she goes on to define compassion, I have concerns: “To put it simply, compassion is a painful emotion occasioned by the awareness of another person’s undeserved misfortune. Compassion, in some form, is also central to several Asian cultural traditions” (2001, 301). The “in some form” here covers a lot of ambiguity. In at least some Asian traditions I don’t think compassion is a painful emotion, and the application of “undeserved misfortune” is not clear. Think back to the Dalai Lama’s mention of “compassionate doctors” who “would not be very effective if they were always preoccupied with sharing their patients’ pain.” His point seems to be that a doctor best serves her patient by not feeling the painful emotion that is associated with empathy. Nussbaum’s subtle account of compassion is designed to illuminate an Aristotelian, essentially tragic, view of life. Her compassion is the feeling we might experience from a great portrayal of Oedipus as he blinds himself, having discovered that the person with whom he has had sex is his mother. In the South Asian Buddhist tradition, one of the three main causes of dhukka (suffering) is the very fact that we are alive. So we cling to life despite the fact that our basic condition is to be mortal. Could this condition be accurately described as “undeserved misfortune”? Our mortality is just a fact, to which we need to adapt. It is not undeserved, as if there is some other option. So it shouldn’t be thought of as a misfortune. In some sense, it is our great “fortune” to have lived, although living is impossible without suffering. Typical of Greek tragedy, Nussbaum’s view finds compassion in places where things could have been different. That’s the “tragic flaw” that makes tragedy possible. Things could have been different for Oedipus. In contrast, I think there’s an element of Stoicism in some strains of Buddhist compassion: compassion requires us to develop skillfulness in adapting to reality. Only when we adapt to reality is there promise of relief from suffering. Continuing with Buddhist terms for a moment, this tradition holds that wisdom and compassion are the same thing, just viewed from two sides. Without wisdom, compassion is easily misguided. Compassion requires wisdom concerning the true causes of suffering. Conversely, without compassion, wisdom is coldly analytical. Compassion involves a fusing of judgment and feeling about such important life situations.

1965 “The Rights of Animals” by Brigid Brophy published in The Sunday Times.

they have been in the history of philosophy. Instead of viewing morality as a system of principles to be grasped by the detached intellect, and emotions as motivations that either support or subvert our choice to act according to principle, we will have to consider emotions as part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning. (2001, 1)

78

Chapter 3 Compassion and Being Human

I want to cite just one historical example of the use of reason, or wisdom, in shaping compassion, because I think it is instructive. The great Buddhist philosopher of the eighth century, Śāntideva, wrote the source text for most thinking about compassion in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Just to give some idea of his influence, the Dalai Lama has said that, “Insofar as I understand anything about compassion I learned it from Śāntideva.” Not a bad book blurb. Śāntideva was deeply concerned with anger, because anger is overwhelming; it occurs in a flash, and it kills compassion. One of his most celebrated pieces of advice to soothe anger goes like this: Suppose you have an enormous problem that is causing you great distress. Śāntideva counsels, “If there is a solution, then what is the point of dejection?” On the other hand, “What is the point of dejection if there is no solution?” (Śāntideva, Crosby, and Skilton 2008, 50). In other words, stop wasting time with anger! If there’s a solution to your problem, get about solving it. There’s no reason for dejection. If your problem really can’t be solved there’s no reason for dejection either, since there’s no alternative. It’s just the way things are. On either alternative, anger is a waste of time. Now, whatever you think of this argument, I want to note that it is a rational argument. It has premises and a conclusion. But I think we would be misled if we think it is just an abstract, rational argument. Because, certainly, Śāntideva wants us to change our feelings about emotion as a result of this argument. Its blunt alternatives are surely meant to make us feel that there is something silly about anger, despite its all-consuming heat when we are in its midst. He is using reason to defuse intense emotion, to dislodge it from our overheated attention. As part of a practice, that is, not as a single isolated rational argument, Śāntideva clearly believes this kind of appeal can be transformative. It can alter the way we feel. If there’s anything to this kind of argument, it shows that compassion is not mere liking. It is not even simply “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.” That’s empathy. Compassion is a practice in which one engages deliberately and reflectively, through which one becomes skillful in identifying the true causes of suffering in others and in ourselves, as in Śāntideva’s analysis of anger. Compassion involves deep insight into the medicine that’s needed for the disease. It results immediately in action, when possible, to relieve suffering, and encourage wellbeing. As Śāntideva’s analysis demonstrates, however, compassionate insight also includes understanding of when it is possible to act. The second of Śāntideva’s options is to change one’s attitude, and thereby adapt to reality. Despite these cross-cultural difficulties in talking about compassion, I certainly agree with Nussbaum that in compassion feeling and insight work

Chapter 3 Compassion and Being Human

79

. . . entangled empathy is a process whereby individuals who are empathizing with others first respond with a precognitive, empathetic reaction to the interests of another . . . From these reactions, we move to reflectively imagine ourselves in the position of the other, and then make a judgment about how the conditions that she finds herself in may contribute to her perceptions or state of mind and impact her interests. These perceptions will involve assessing the salient features of the situation and require that the empathizer seek to determine what is pertinent to effectively empathize with the being in question. Entangled empathy requires room to correct empathetic responses. Entangled empathy involves both affect and cognition. The empathizer is also attentive to both similarities and differences between herself and her situation and that of the fellow creature with whom she is empathizing. She must move between her own and the other’s point-of-view. (2013, 226)

It is this ability to move between one’s own and the other’s point of view that distinguishes the immediate, precognitive empathic response from fully entangled empathy. As she says, “Entangled empathy involves both affect and cognition.” This distinction within empathy is motivated by the same concerns that cause me to distinguish empathy from compassion. The distinction between empathy and entangled empathy allows Gruen to respond to a familiar criticism. Critics may allege that the accomplished torturer feels empathy with his victim. Empathy is required to decide what sorts of pain will be particularly effective. However, we don’t think of torturers as paragons of virtue. So it appears that empathy isn’t as intimately engaged with morality as Gruen and I suggest. However, this criticism misses Gruen’s point that entangled empathy goes back and forth between first- and third-person perspectives, negotiating both affect and cognition. As Gruen says,

1968 Feminists and civil rights activists protest the “Miss America” contest. Feminists protest it as a cattle show.

together. In examining tragedy she also makes clear that compassion is invoked in cases that are central to life’s meaning. A stubbed toe calls for empathy, but probably not compassion. Philosopher Lori Gruen has also developed an account of ethics arising from the affects, which is particularly relevant and important here because her philosophical acumen is combined with experience involving nonhuman primates. Reflecting on many of the same concerns that motivate me—to bring the role of affects forward, to respect both similarity and difference in moral encounters, and to show that empathy can be moderated by reason— Gruen proposes a theory of “entangled empathy.” As she defines it,

80

Chapter 3 Compassion and Being Human

Empathy can be inaccurate and empathetic inaccuracies can take a variety of forms, both epistemic and ethical. Epistemic empathetic failures can involve overempathizing or incomplete empathizing. In cases in which over-empathizing occurs, the empathizer over-identifies with the emotions of another. This might occur between individuals who already have strong personal bonds—between friends, lovers, or between parents and their children or individuals and the other animals they care for. In cases of this type of empathetic inaccuracy, the empathizer exaggerates the emotional states of the one with whom she is empathizing. The empathizer may need to be less entangled. (2013, 227)

Again, this is an important point. Entangled empathy, since it balances affect with rational judgment, allows that there are cases in which the person who empathizes needs to be “less entangled” with the being with whom the empathizer is involved. So, what hangs on Gruen’s defense of entangled empathy and my defense of an ethic of compassion? It may be that Gruen and I are simply using different words for the same features of moral experience. I distinguish empathy and compassion partly because I depend on the distinctions found in neuroscience, whereas Gruen adopts terminology from experimental psychology. I also choose compassion because it is clearly understood within the Buddhist tradition, and I see no need to “reinvent the wheel.” However, entangled empathy and compassion are certainly getting at most of the same points. In most cases we agree. Nevertheless, I wonder whether the Dalai Lama, in the quotation I discussed earlier, is getting at something in addition to (not necessarily opposed to) the discussion of entangled empathy. What was he getting at when he spoke about compassionate doctors? Recall his remark: “After all, compassionate doctors would not be very effective if they were always preoccupied with sharing their patients’ pain.” If doctors constantly empathized with their patients’ suffering they would quickly be ineffective. They would suffer from “empathy fatigue.” The Dalai Lama is saying something here that should provoke our sustained reflection. In cases of developed moral skillfulness, compassion sometimes needs to be disconnected from empathy. I wonder whether Gruen’s description of entanglement fits these cases. Certainly it is a strength of her account that we can “negotiate” with empathic reactions: “Empathy can be inaccurate and empathetic inaccuracies can take a variety of forms, both epistemic and ethical.” But we are still negotiating with empathy here. No doubt, much of our moral experience does involve such skillful negotiations, but what the Dalai Lama calls “universal compassion” seems different.

Chapter 3 Compassion and Being Human

81

Imagine someone, like the Dalai Lama, who has devoted his life to compassionate engagement with those who suffer. He has seen more than 1.3 million of his own Tibetan people die at the hands of the Chinese government and military. Ninety-five percent of the monasteries in Tibet have been destroyed. It is illegal to speak Tibetan in school, and it is a crime to possess a shortwave radio, or a photograph of the Dalai Lama. Almost every day he meets personally with people who escaped from Tibet having been tortured. Most of those who escape know that they have paid the price of permanently losing contact with their families.5 Gruen’s account obviously makes sense if we are thinking about the Tibetan side of this picture. One cannot hear the life stories of many Tibetans and not feel empathy. Still, a central feature of the Dalai Lama’s teaching is that we should also act compassionately toward those who think of themselves as our enemies. He has even said repeatedly that we should value “enemies” more than friends because our enemies teach us compassion: “For a person who cherishes compassion and love, the practice of tolerance is essential, and for that, an enemy is indispensable. So we should feel grateful to our enemies, for it is they who can best help us develop a tranquil mind!”6 It is relatively easy to feel empathy toward family and friends. The real test of universal compassion is the ability to understand the causes and conditions behind even an “enemy’s” abuse and have compassion for their suffering. What makes universal compassion so difficult, and important, is that it operates in the space where compassion is disconnected from empathy. Or, consider another context where compassion must be disconnected from empathy—the case of women who survive abusers and somehow find a way back to health. First, of course, abused women must find a way to survive. They must get to safety and stop the immediate abuse. But, given the safety and space to reflect, doesn’t a victim of abuse often find that misplaced empathy was at the core of what allowed a pathological relationship to continue? Overwhelming violence combines in a toxic mix with an occasional hint of what’s represented as “love,” and the relationship goes on. So, the second step toward health is to see what is really going on and stop the misplaced empathy. Health begins when there are no more negotiations. Having stopped the negotiations over empathy, is it possible that something like compassion is required to establish real health? Without something like compassion, anger—toward self and other—will always remain at the center. Understanding the dynamics of abuse opens the possibility for the dissipation of anger. Health becomes available when empathy stops.7 It’s also relevant here to draw out at least one dimension of this account of compassion for radical politics. People who have been marginalized by

1968 Dick Gregory’s The Shadow that Scares Me published, in which Gregory writes, “If you can justify killing to eat meat, you can justify the conditions of the ghetto. I cannot justify either one.”

82

Chapter 3 Compassion and Being Human

systems of oppression might regard arguments for compassion with understandable frustration: the oppressive social category through which culture defines the oppressed usually includes the expectation that the oppressed should be of service to others. We can imagine someone saying, here I struggle to claim an autonomous sense of self-worth, and Śāntideva tells me that morality requires that I put my self into service for all other beings. That doesn’t sound like good news. This concern deserves serious attention, but I think at least the beginnings of an answer are already evident, namely in the very distinction between emotions and feelings about emotions, and therefore the distinction between empathy and compassion. Emotions are subject to abuse. Feelings, however, by definition, require a degree of cultivated skillfulness. If we were to fully unpack what is involved in skillfulness in such cases it would certainly include the element of skill in overcoming oppression, which is a form of suffering. What prevents being dragged down into empathy fatigue, therefore, is insight into the causes of suffering. This insight is what makes compassion universal. In the Buddhist analysis, there are three causes of suffering (the three poisons): attachment (greed), aversion (anger), and ignorance. I will not go into this analysis here. Discussions of this analysis are widely available. The point I want to make is that we need some understanding of the root causes of suffering if we are to act skillfully in response to suffering and avoid the paralysis of empathy fatigue. So, the Dalai Lama’s doctor example: a doctor would soon be fatigued if every case of the flu had to be treated as only an empathic response to each patient. There is something universal in the skillful treatment of disease, and that involves understanding that this is a case of the flu, as well as a unique being who is suffering with the flu. Gruen talks very clearly about cases of “empathetic inaccuracy” in which the empathizer needs to be “less entangled.” This is part of what I call skillfulness. I think we might agree that being less entangled in certain cases is a preventative to the caring fatigue. My concern is with what makes “empathic inaccuracy” inaccurate. It is not only that we have misunderstood the dimensions of a situation involving a concrete other. It may also be due to understanding the causes of suffering in general. Universal compassion depends on understanding such causes of suffering. Without this understanding it is hard to know what counts as inaccurate in a concrete situation that calls for compassion.

Chapter 3 Compassion and Being Human

83

We are now in a position to respond effectively to the second standard Western objection to compassion, that it is connected to pity, and therefore encourages moral weakness. Empathy, I have argued, is more basic to our moral experience than rights. It functions at the very source of what makes us human: sociability and meaning. Far from siding with emotions and neglecting reason, as the liberal account would have it, compassion is the model of how feeling and thinking are blended into a skillful moral practice. In contrast, the rights that are most pervasive in our moral lives are merely negative. They are designed to apply to a partial sphere of our lives, the public sphere, and they apply only as constraints. They tell us what not to do. They do not pertain to, arguably, the most important, pervasive sphere of our lives, the supposedly private domain of the home. Liberalism says that the home is a “man’s private castle.” And yet, for most of us, the home is the place where we learn to be social beings. Long before introduction to the impersonal world of rights and duties, we learn to exercise empathy, appropriate trust, and connection. The advocate of the moral objection might say at this point, this is exactly why compassion cannot be basic. Unlike the epistemological objection, which is based on a misunderstanding of the emotions, the moral objection raises serious questions about the limitations and dangers of an ethic based on compassion. Just because compassion begins in the home, and in our hearts, it can be distorted by both less than fully developed feelings, or by cognitive misunderstandings. Of course, the main response to this objection has already been given, in Gruen’s account of “empathic inaccuracy” and in my (the Dalai Lama’s) universal compassion. These are not just subjective responses to suffering. Real compassion does not involve pity. Pity is the unmodulated attitude of looking down on helpless others. Universal compassion, in contrast, sees the causes of suffering, in both self and other, and it therefore prepared to act to relieve suffering. Stated in my terms, just as the epistemic objection doesn’t understand the distinction between emotions and feelings about emotion, so the moral objection doesn’t understand the difference between empathy and compassion. However, the moral objection might cause us to make one concession. Since empathy, especially, can be challenged both by bias and by scale, we sometimes need a more impartial view of those we love. And in a globalized world we cannot always depend on common intuitions about what counts. Just and fair legal institutions play this role on a larger scale of offering basic

1969 Stonewall Riots occur in New York City. In response to raids by the police, the gay and trans community protests, paving the way for the Gay Liberation Movement.

The Stoic objection to compassion

84

Chapter 3 Compassion and Being Human

guarantees of equal participation. At their best, they can correct our biases. Justice is not, in principle at least, at odds with compassion. They are complementary perspectives. The only kind of justice worth having is justice administered with compassion.

Food as a compassionate practice Who is it, then, that engages in a moral practice? We know that for political liberalism it is a disengaged self, the strongly individuated self that can be the owner of individual rights. In contrast, the image that emerges from the above characterization of compassion is markedly different. Here we encounter a body-mind thoroughly engaged in a social world from the very beginning. In the terms I’ve used, it begins in evolution in the F5 part of the brain that has evolved to make social meaning possible. A significant finding of this sort of research is that our moral lives do not start in a solitary, Cartesian inner space that later becomes social. Empathy is constituted by its sociability. Its most basic function is to make the world of self and other meaningful. Our social selves are basic. In contrast to this picture of moral functioning, it is not surprising that politically liberal animal rights philosophers seem contorted, as if performing a feat in intellectual gymnastics, when they “extend” human moral standing to non-human others. In one famous account, some non-human others are “subjects of a life” (Regan and Singer 1989) if they are sufficiently like human beings in their ability to be self-conscious, rational beings. Rights are directed at humans, or, more precisely, persons (rational beings, including humans). Others get moral standing by analogy to us. Far from requiring moral extensionism, the compassion approach starts from a common source. We are far from alone in being able to experience empathy, and as Metzinger’s examples show, other species very likely show extraordinary kinds of empathy that are not very well developed in humans— for example, the shapes of flocks of birds in flight. Or, in Damasio’s terms, single-cell organisms exhibit biological value, the drive for homeostasis. At a much more complex level, “A number of mammals” have what he calls an autobiographical self, “namely wolves, our ape cousins, marine mammals and elephants, cats, and, of course, that off-the-scale species called the domestic dog” (2010, 26). The compassion approach begins with thorough engagement in a common physical and social world. Compassion grows out of insight into the connectedness of self and others. It is not, originally, directed exclusively toward humans, but toward all the co-inhabitants of the

Chapter 3 Compassion and Being Human

85

social world. From the very beginning, for example, the Buddhist moral universe has been “all sentient beings,” not just “persons.” In short, the issue of “other beings” is a core element in any richly developed ethics of compassion, not simply an add-on. What would this picture of an ethic of compassion look like when applied to our engagement with non-human others, and to food? Well, I suppose much of this is obvious. Compassion is a commitment to all sentient beings, not just humans. It begins in our deep-seated emotional connections to other beings. It has no need, therefore, to privilege rational personhood, and extend the boundaries of the moral to other beings if they are like us.8 Food is not a natural category. Much of what is edible and nutritious is not usually counted as food—other human beings, for example. On the contrary, much of what counts as food in the American diet is barely edible and far from nutritious. If Carol Adams’s work has shown us anything, it is that what we count as food is a deeply contested category. Gender, race, class, caste are all deeply imbedded. And so, our food practice becomes an avenue through which non-violence can be realized, where wisdom and feeling come to coincide. I have said for many years (Curtin 1991) that I think it’s best if we view this as a direction rather than a place. There are many vectors now, not only a more compassionate, therefore less violent eating practice, but environmental issues: how far does our food need to travel? How was it produced? Was there economic fairness for the producers? Is quality food, given the odds against it in our economic system, too expensive for those who are not among the economic elite? And things change. At one time a diet that included fish may have seemed somehow less violent and more sustainable. It’s hard to sustain that position now. So, a food practice calls for practical reason, constantly balancing competing factors. It calls for compassion, most of all for the direct victims of our dominant food practices, but also those who are exploited by the contemporary industrial food system. It should also evoke some compassion for ourselves as we work through this complex set of demands to achieve a life whose flourishing does not diminish the flourishing of others. And, if the Dalai Lama’s challenging ideas about universal compassion make sense, we need to practice compassion even for those who support the industrial food system, not in spite of the slaughter of billions of innocent beings, but because of it. As the philosopher Baruch Spinoza observed, “Hatred is increased by reciprocal hatred, and may on the other hand be destroyed by love” (Spinoza and Morgan 2006, 83). Finally, an overriding metaphor. The opponents of compassion ultimately see abstract rationality as providing rules by which we can distinguish good

1970s Medical experts recognize the majority of the world—nearly all Asians and Native Americans, and a majority of African American, Mexican Americans, and Ashkenazi Jews—have a reduced ability to digest the milk sugar lactose, making them lactose normal, though they are called lactose intolerant.

86

Chapter 3 Compassion and Being Human

from evil. If compassion starts from such a different place—the transformation of emotions into feelings—is its goal also different? Can it be that the friends of rights and the friends of compassion are talking about two different things when they use the word “ethics”? I suspect so. I think a compassionate food ethic does grow from a different source, and here again I cite Śāntideva. The basic Buddhist vow of compassion is: “I am medicine for the sick. May I be both the doctor and their nurse, until the sickness does not recur” (Śāntideva, Crosby, and Skilton 2008, 20). The Dalai Lama was invoking qualities traditionally associated with both the doctor and the nurse in defining universal compassion. Those who vow to engage the world compassionately need both a deep understanding of the causes of suffering, and yet also to engage this patient, this particular history, and this family . . . Really seeing what’s best, all things considered. Compassion is a form of practical therapy. The model for an ethic of compassion is health, not cognitive correctness.

Acknowledgments This chapter was written with the support of a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship and the United States-India Educational Foundation as well as a sabbatical from Gustavus Adolphus College for 2012–13.

Notes 1 2

3 4

5

See Olmstead vs. United States 277 U.S. 438 (1928). When His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, argues that the Chinese are violating Tibetan human rights when they torture political prisoners, this has a universal ring to it that may be more effective than appealing for compassion. I would note that His Holiness often does appeal to compassion and to rights. This was also a central feature of Gandhi’s moral claims against the British. In general, the topic of neuroplasticity is fascinating, and important to a complete account of moral development. Much of the original research in this area was conducted by opening up the brains of macaque monkeys. And research on sociability is often conducted on non-human primates who are deprived of social interactions. There are obvious moral problems with such approaches. I have spoken to many Tibetan refugees who learned only many years later from newer refugees that their entire families had died.

Chapter 3 Compassion and Being Human

8

See Dalai Lama, “Compassion and the Individual.” It might be objected that the comparison of the Dalai Lama with abuse survivors amounts to the inappropriate expectation that women be moral heroes. There is a difference between expectation and recognition. Universal compassion is necessary precisely in the most demanding cases where empathy is impossible or inappropriate. The problem here lies more with our preconceptions about what a hero is than with the actual achievements of women who find a way to health after suffering abuse. I would also point out that, while neuroscientists are now very comfortable with the idea that mind extends deep into nature— earthworms display mental activity—there is a clear divide with plants. Plants do not have neurons. I do not mean to suggest that an ethic of compassion is irrelevant to an environmental ethic, only that an environmental ethic raises different issues, which are outside the scope of this paper.

1971 Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé published, prompting many to become vegetarians.

6 7

87

88

Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too: The Politics of Emergent Afrocentric Ecowomanism Shamara Shantu Riley

B

lack womanists, like everyone in general, can no longer overlook the extreme threat to life on this planet and its particular repercussions on people of African descent.1 Because of the race for increased “development,” our world continues to suffer the consequences of such environmental disasters as the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown and Brazil’s dwindling forests. Twenty percent of all species are at risk of extinction by the year 2000, with the rate of plant and animal extinction likely to reach several hundred per day in the next ten to thirty years (Worldwatch 1987, 3). Manufacturing chemicals and other abuses to the environment continue to weaken the ozone layer. We must also contend with the phenomenon of

1971 Ronnie Lee forms the Band of Mercy (later called the Animal Liberation Front). In later years, the ALF’s tactics will be challenged by feminists for their violence and war-like framework.

4

89

90

Chapter 4 Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too

climate change, with its attendant rise in sea levels and changes in food production patterns. Along with these tragic statistics, however, are additional environmental concerns that hit far closer to home than many Black people realize. In the United States, poor people of color are disproportionately likely to be the victims of pollution, as toxic waste is being consciously directed at our communities. The nation’s largest hazardous-waste dump, which has received toxic material from forty-five states, is located in predominantly black Sumter County, Alabama (de la Pena and Davis 1990, 34). The mostly African-American residents in the 85-mile area between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, better known as Cancer Alley, live in a region which contains 136 chemical companies and refineries. A 1987 study conducted by the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice (CRJ) found that two thirds of all Blacks and Latinos in the United States reside in areas with one or more unregulated toxic-waste sites (Riley 1991, 15). The CRJ report also cited race as the most significant variable in differentiating communities with such sites from those without them. Partly as a result of living with toxic waste in disproportionate numbers, African Americans have higher rates of cancer, birth defects, and lead poisoning than the United States population as a whole.2 On the African continent, rampant deforestation and soil erosion continue to contribute to the hunger and poverty rates in many countries. The elephant population is rapidly being reduced as poachers kill them to satisfy industrialized nations’ ivory trade demands (Joyce 1989, 22). Spreading to a dozen African nations, the Green Belt Movement is seeking to reverse the environmental damage created by the European settlers during colonialism, when the settlers brought nonindigenous trees on the continent. As with United States communities of color, many African nations experience “economic blackmail,” which occurs when big business promises jobs and money to “impoverished areas in return for these areas’ support of or acquiescence to environmentally undesirable industries” (Meyer 1992, 32). The extinction of species on our ancestral continent, the “mortality of wealth,” and hazardous-waste contamination in our backyards ought to be reasons enough for Black womanists to consider the environment as a central issue of our political agendas.3 However, there are other reasons the environment should be central to our struggles for social justice. The global environmental crisis is related to the sociopolitical systems of fear and hatred of all that is natural, non-white, and female that has pervaded dominant Western thought for centuries.4 I contend that the social constructions of race, gender, class, and nonhuman nature in mainstream Western thought are

Chapter 4 Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too

91

interconnected by an ideology of domination. Specific instances of the emergent Afrocentric ecowomanist activism in Africa and the United States, as well as West African spiritual principles that propose a method of overcoming dualism, will be discussed in this paper.

Until recently, few Black womanists gave more than token attention to environmental issues. At least in the United States, the origins of such oversight stem from the traditional Black association of environmentalism as a “white” concern. The resistance by many United States Blacks to the environmental movement may partly originate from a hope of revenge. Because of our acute oppression(s), many Blacks may conclude that if the world comes to an end because of willful negligence, at least there is the satisfaction that one’s oppressors will also die. In “Only Justice Can Stop a Curse,” author Alice Walker discusses how her life experiences with the Eurocentric, masculinist ideology of domination have often caused her to be indifferent to environmental issues: I think . . . Let the earth marinate in poisons. Let the bombs cover the ground like rain. For nothing short of total destruction will ever teach them anything. (1983b, 341)

However, Walker later articulates that since environmental degradation doesn’t make a distinction between oppressors and the oppressed, it should be very difficult for people of color to embrace the thought of extinction of all life-forms simply for revenge. In advocating a reformulation of how humans view nonhuman nature, ecofeminist theorist Ynestra King states that, from the beginning, women have had to grapple with the historical projection of human concepts onto the natural, which were later used to fortify masculinist notions about females’ nature (1989, 118). The same problem is applicable to people of color, who have also been negatively identified with the natural in white supremacist ideologies. Black women in particular have historically been associated with animality and subsequently objectified to uphold notions of racial purity. bell hooks articulates that since the 1500s, Western societies have viewed Black women’s bodies as objects to be subdued and controlled like nonhuman nature:

1971 Birute Galdikas began her work with orangutans in Tanjung Puting Reserve in Indonesian Borneo.

The problem of nature for Black womanism

92

Chapter 4 Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too

From slavery to the present day, the Black female body has been seen in Western eyes as the quintessential symbol of a “natural” female presence that is organic, closer to nature, animalistic, primitive. (hooks and West 1991, 153)

Patricia Hill Collins asserts that white exploitation of Black women as breeders during the Slave Era “objectified [Black women] as less than human because only animals can be bred against their will” (Collins 1990, 167). Sarah Bartmann, an African woman also known as the Hottentot Venus, was prominently displayed at elite Parisian parties. While being reduced to her sexual parts, Bartmann’s protruding buttocks were often offered as “proof” that Blacks were closer to animals than whites. After her death in 1815, Bartmann was dissected, and her genitalia and buttocks remain on display in Paris (Gilman 1985). Bartmann’s situation was similar to the predicament of Black female slaves who stood on auction blocks as masters described their productive body parts as humans do cattle. The historical dissection of Black women, be it symbolic or actual, to uphold white supremacist notions is interconnected with the consistent human view of nonhuman animals as scientific material to be dissected through an ideology that asserts both groups are inferior. Because of the historical and current treatment of Blacks in dominant Western ideology, Black womanists must confront the dilemma of whether we should strive to sever or reinforce the traditional association of Black people with nature that exists in dominant Western thought. However, what we need is not a total disassociation of people from nature, but rather a reformulation of everyone’s relationship to nature by socially reconstructing gender, class, and ethnic roles. Environmentalism is a women’s issue because females (especially those of color) are the principal farm laborers around the world, as well as the majority of the world’s major consumers of agricultural products (Bizot 1992, 36). Environmentalism is also an important issue for people of color because we disproportionately bear the brunt of environmental degradation. For most of the world’s population, reclaiming the Earth is not an abstract state of affairs but rather is inextricably tied to the survival of our peoples. Womanism and ecology have a common theoretical approach in that both see all parts of a matrix as having equal value. Ecology asserts that without each element in the ecosystem, the biosphere as a whole cannot function properly. Meanwhile, womanism asserts the equality of races, genders, and sexual preferences, among other variables. There is no use in womanists advocating liberation politics if the planet cannot support people’s liberated

Chapter 4 Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too

93

lives, and it is equally useless to advocate saving the planet without addressing the social issues that determine the structure of human relations in the world. If the planet as a whole is to survive, we must all begin to see ourselves as interconnected with nonhuman nature and with one another.

At the foundation of dominant Western thought exists an intense ambivalence over humankind’s place in the biosphere, not only in relation to one another, but also in relation to nonhuman nature. The systematic denigration of men of color, women, and nonhuman nature is interconnected through a nature–culture dualism. This system of interconnectedness, which bell hooks labels “the politic of domination,” functions along interlocking axes of race, gender, species, and class oppression. The politic of domination “refers to the ideological ground that [the axes] share, which is a belief in domination, and a belief in the notions of superior and inferior, which are components of all those systems” (hooks 1989, 175). Although groups encounter different dimensions of this matrix based on such variables as species or sexual orientation, an overarching relationship nevertheless connects all of these socially constructed variables. In discussing the origins of Western dualism, Dona Richards articulates the influence of dominant Jewish and Christian thought on Western society’s conceptions about its relationship to nonhuman nature: Christian thought provides a view of man, nature, and the universe which supports not only the ascendancy of science, but of the technical order, individualism and relentless progress. Emphasis within this world view is placed on humanity’s dominance over all other beings, which become “objects” in an “objectified” universe. Humanity is separated from nature. (Richards 1980, 69)

With dualistic thinking, humans, nonhuman nature, and ideas are categorized in terms of their difference from one another. However, one part is not simply deemed different from its counterpart; it is also deemed intrinsically opposed to its “Other” (Collins 1990, 69). For instance, speciesists constantly point to human neocortical development and the ensuing civilization that this development constructs as proof of human superiority over nonhuman animals. Women’s position as other in Western patriarchies throughout the histories of both psychological theory and Christian thought has resulted in us being viewed as defective men.

1974 Animals, Men and Morals edited by Stanley Godlovitch, Rosalind Godlovitch, and John Harris published.

The politics of nature–culture dualism

94

Chapter 4 Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too

Women, the non-elite, and men of color are not only socially constructed as the “Others,” but the elite, white, male-controlled global political structure also has the power—through institutions such as the international media and politics—to extensively socialize us to view ourselves as others to be dominated. By doing so, the pattern of domination and subjugation is reinforced. Objectification is also central to the process of oppositional difference for all entities cast as other. Dona Richards claims that in dominant Western thought, intense objectification is a “prerequisite for the despiritualization of the universe and through it the Western cosmos was made ready for ever increasing materialization” (1980, 72). Since one component is deemed to be the other, it is simultaneously viewed as an object to be controlled and dominated, particularly through economic means. Because nature–culture dualism conceives of nature as an other that (male) human undertakings transcend and conquer, women, nonhuman nature, and men of color become symbolically linked in Eurocentric, masculinist ideology. In this framework, the objectification of the other also serves as an escape from the anxiety of some form of mortality. For instance, white supremacists fear that it will be the death of the white race if people of color, who comprise the majority of the world’s population, successfully resist the current global relations of power. Objectifying nonhuman nature by technology is predicated on an intense fear of the body, which reminds humans of death and our connection with the rest of nature. By making products that make tasks easier, one seeks to have more opportunities to live one’s life, with time and nature converted into commodities. World history can be seen as one in which human beings inextricably bind the material domination of nonhuman nature with the economic domination of other human beings. The Eurocentric, masculinist worldview that dominates Western thought tends to only value the parts of reality that can be exploited in the interest of profit, power, and control. Not only is that associated with nature deemed amenable to conquest, but it is also a conquest that requires no moral self-examination on the part of the prospective conqueror. For instance, there is very little moral examination by research laboratories that test cosmetics on animals, or by men who assault women. There was also very little moral examination on the part of slave owners on the issue of slavery or by European settlers on colonialism in “Third World” nations. By defining people of color as more natural and animalistic, a political economy of domination has been historically reinforced. An example of this phenomenon is the founding of the United States and the nation’s resultant slave trade. In order for the European colonialists to exploit the American land for their economic interests, they first needed to subjugate the Native

Chapter 4 Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too

95

American groups who were inhabiting the land. While this was being accomplished, the colonists dominated Blacks by utilizing Africans as slave labor (and simultaneously appropriating much of Mexico) in order to cultivate the land for profit and expand the new capitalist nation’s economy. Meanwhile, the buffalo almost became extinct in the process of this nation building “from sea to shining sea.” A salient example of the interconnectedness of environmental degradation and male supremacy is the way many societies attach little value to that which can be exploited without (economic) cost. Because nonhuman nature has historically been viewed by Westerners as a free asset to be possessed, little value has been accredited to it. Work traditionally associated with women via cultural socialization has similarly often been viewed as having little to no value. For instance, in calculating Gross Domestic Product, no monetary value is attached to women’s contributions to national economies through reproduction, housework, or care of children.

While serving as executive director of the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice in 1987, Reverend Benjamin Chavis, Jr., coined the term environmental racism to explain the dynamics of socioeconomic inequities in waste-management policies. Peggy Shephard, the director of West Harlem Environmental Action, defines United States environmental racism as “the policy of siting potentially hazardous facilities in low-income and minority communities” (Day and Knight 1991, 77). However, environmental racism, which is often intertwined with classism, doesn’t halt at the boundaries of poor areas of color. Blacks in Africa and the United States often have to contend with predominantly white environmental groups that ignore the connection between their own values and the struggles of people of color to preserve our future, which is a crucial connection in order to build and maintain alliances to reclaim the Earth. For instance, because the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is often seen as another institution that perceives elite white communities’ complaints as more deserving of attention than poor communities of color, many United States social activists are accusing the EPA of “environmental apartheid” (Riley 1991, 15). In “Granola Boys, Eco-Dudes and Me,” Elizabeth Larsen articulates how race, class, and gender politics are interconnected by describing the

1975 Animal Liberation by Peter Singer published.

The role of the environmental-isms in providing the foundation for an Afrocentric womanist agenda

96

Chapter 4 Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too

overwhelmingly white middle-class male leadership of mainstream United States environmental groups. In addition to being indifferent to the concerns of people of color and poor whites, the mainstream organizations often reinforce male supremacy by distributing organizational tasks along traditional gender roles (Larsen 1991, 96). The realization that only we can best represent our interests—an eco-identity politics, so to speak—lays the foundation for an Afrocentric ecowomanist agenda.5 Even though many Black women have been active in the environmental movement in the past, there appears not to be much published analysis on their part about the role of patriarchy in environmental degradation. The chief reason for this sentiment may stem from perceiving race as the “primary” oppression. However, there is an emergent group of culturally identified Black women in Africa and the United States who are critically analyzing the social roles of white supremacy, patriarchy, and classism in environmental degradation.

Emergent Afrocentric ecowomanism: On the necessity of survival There are several differences between ecofeminism and Afrocentric ecowomanism. While Afrocentric ecowomanism also articulates the links between male supremacy and environmental degradation, it lays far more stress on other distinctive features, such as race and class, that leave an impression markedly different from many ecofeminists’ theories.6 Many ecofeminists, when analyzing the links between human relations and ecological degradation, give primacy to gender and thus fail to thoroughly incorporate (as opposed to mere tokenism) the historical links between classism, white supremacy, and environmental degradation in their perspectives. For instance, they often don’t address the fact that in nations where such variables as ethnicity and class are a central organizing principle of society, many women are not only viewed in opposition to men under dualism, but also to other women. A salient example of this blind spot is Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, where she implores women to identify with nature against men and live our lives separately from men. However, such an essentialist approach is very problematic for certain groups of women, such as the disabled and Jews, who must ally themselves with men (while simultaneously challenging them on their sexism) in order to combat the isms in their lives. As writer Audre Lorde stated, in her critique of Daly’s exclusion

Chapter 4 Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too

97

of how Black women use Afrocentric spiritual practices as a source of power against the isms while connecting with nonhuman nature: to imply, however, that women suffer the same oppression simply because we are women, is to lose sight of the many varied tools of patriarchy. It is to ignore how these tools are used by women without awareness against each other. (Lorde 1983, 95)

Emergent United States Afrocentric ecowomanist activism Contrary to mainstream United States media claims, which imply that African Americans are not concerned about ecology, there has been increased environmental activism within Black communities since the early 1980s. Referred to as the environmental equity movement by Robert Bullard, predominantly Black grassroots environmental organizations tend to view environmentalism as an extension of the 1960s civil rights movement. In Yearning, bell hooks links environmentalism with social justice while discussing Black radicals and revolutionary politics: We are concerned about the fate of the planet, and some of us believe that living simply is part of revolutionary political practice. We have a sense of the sacred. The ground we stand on is shifting, fragile, and unstable. (Bullard 1990, 19)

On discussing how the links between environmental concerns and civil rights encouraged her involvement with environmentalism, arts writer and poet Esther Iverem states: Soon I began to link civil rights with environmental sanity . . . Because in 1970 Black folks were vocally fighting for their rightful share of the pie, the logical question for me became “What kind of shape will that pie be in?” (1991, 38)

1975 New Woman, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies & Human Liberation by Rosemary Radford Ruether published.

Unlike most white women, Black women are not limited to issues defined by our femaleness but are rather often limited to questions raised about our very humanity. Although they have somewhat different priorities because of their different environments, Afrocentric ecowomanists in the United States and Africa nevertheless have a common goal—to analyze the issues of social justice that underlie environmental conflict. Not only do Afrocentric ecowomanists seek to avoid detrimental environmental impacts, we also seek to overcome the socioeconomic inequalities that led to the injustices in the first place.

98

Chapter 4 Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too

Iverem’s question has been foremost in many African-American women’s minds as we continue to be instrumental in the Black communities’ struggle to ensure that the shape of the social justice pie on our planet will not be increasingly carcinogenic. When her neighborhood started to become dilapidated, Hattie Carthan founded the Magnolia Tree Earth Center of Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn in 1968, to help beautify the area. She planted more than 1,500 trees before her death in 1974. In 1986, the city council of Los Angeles decided that a 13-acre incinerator, which would have burned 2,000 tons of city waste daily, was to be built in a low-income Black and Latino neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. Upon hearing this decision, residents, mostly women, successfully organized in opposition by forming Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles. While planning direct actions to protest the incinerator, the grassroots organization didn’t have a formal leadership structure for close to two years. Be it a conscious or unconscious decision, Concerned Citizens accepted a relatively nonhierarchical, democratic process in their political activism by rotating the chair’s position at meetings, a form of decision-making characteristic of many ecofeminist groups.7 The Philadelphia Community Rehabilitation Corporation (PCRC), founded by Rachel E. Bagby, operates a village community to maintain a nonhierarchical relationship between human and nonhuman nature for its working-class-to-poor urban Black residents. About 5,000 reside in the community, and there is communalistic living, like that of many African villages. PCRC has a “repeopling” program that renovates and rents more than fifty previously vacant homes and also created a twelve-unit shared house. PCRC also takes vacant lots and recycles them into gardens to provide food, and oversees literacy and employment programs. Hazel and Cheryl Johnson founded People for Community Recovery (PCR), which is operated from a storefront at the Altgeld Gardens housing project, after they became aware that their community sits atop a landfill and has the greatest concentration of hazardous waste in the nation. In its fight against environmental racism, PCR has insisted that the Chicago Housing Authority remove all asbestos from the Altgeld homes and has helped lobby city government to declare a moratorium on new landfill permits. PCR also successfully prevented the establishment of another landfill in Altgeld Gardens. One Black women’s organization that addresses environmental issues is the National Black Women’s Health Project (NBWHP). The NBWHP expresses its Afrocentric ecowomanist sentiment primarily through its SisteReach program, which seeks to connect the NBWHP with various Black women’s organizations around the world. On urging African-American women to participate in the environmental movement and analyze the

Chapter 4 Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too

99

connections between male supremacy and environmental degradation, Dianne J. Forte, the SisteReach coordinator, makes the following statement:

For instance, women are increasingly being told that we should not have control over our own bodies, while the Earth is simultaneously deemed feminine by scientists who use sexual imagery to articulate their plans to take control over the Earth. Meanwhile, dominant groups often blame environmental degradation on overpopulation (and with their privileged status, usually point at poor women of color), when industrial capitalism and patriarchal control over women’s reproduction are among the most pronounced culprits. The most salient example of practical United States Afrocentric ecowomanism combating such claims is Luisah Teish, a voodoo priestess. In connecting social justice issues with spiritual practices rooted in West African heritage, Teish articulates the need for everyone to actively eliminate patriarchy, white supremacy, and classism, along with the domination of nonhuman nature. Members of Teish’s altar circle have planned urban gardening projects both to supply herbs for their holistic healing remedies and to assist the poor in feeding themselves. They have also engaged in grassroots organizing to stop gentrification in various communities.

Emergent Afrocentric ecowomanist activism in Africa On the African continent, women have been at the forefront of the movement to educate people about environmental problems and how they affect their lives. As with much of the African continent, environmental problems in Kenya particularly influence rural women’s lives, since they comprise 80 percent of that nation’s farmers and fuel gatherers (Maathai 1991, 74). Soil erosion directly affects the women, because they depend on subsistence agriculture for their families’ survival. The lack of firewood in many rural areas of Kenya because of deforestation disproportionately alters the lives of women, who must walk long distances to fetch firewood. The lack of water

1975 “The Oedible Complex: Feminism and Vegetarianism” by Carol J. Adams published in The Lesbian Reader.

At first glance and with all the major problems demanding our energy in our community we may be tempted to say, “this is not my problem.” If however, we look at the ominous connection being made between environmental degradation and population growth; if we look at the same time at trends which control women’s bodies and lives and control the world’s resources, we realize that the same arguments are used to justify both. (1992, 5)

100

Chapter 4 Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too

also makes a negative imprint on Kenyan women’s lives, because they have to walk long distances to fetch the water. However, many Kenyan women are striving to alter these current realities. The most prominent Afrocentric ecowomanist in Africa is Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan microbiologist and one of Africa’s leading activists on environmental issues. Maathai is the founder and director of the Green Belt Movement (GBM), a fifteen-year-old tree-planting project designed to help poor Kenyan communities stop soil erosion, protect their water systems, and overcome the lack of firewood and building materials. Launched under the auspices of the National Council of Women of Kenya, the majority of the GBM’s members are women. Since 1977, these women have grown 10 million trees, 80 percent of which have survived, to offset Kenya’s widespread deforestation.8 Although the GBM’s primary practical goal is to end desertification and deforestation, it is also committed to promoting public awareness of the relationship between environmental degradation and social problems that affect the Kenyan people—poverty, unemployment, and malnutrition. However, one of the most significant accomplishments of the GBM, Maathai asserts, is that its members are “now independent; had acquired knowledge, techniques; had become empowered” (1991, 74). Another Kenyan dedicated to environmental concerns is Wagaki Mwangi, the founder and coordinator of the International Youth Development and Environment Network. When she visited the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Mwangi discussed how Kenya suffers economic and environmental predicaments primarily because her homeland is trying to imitate Western cultures. “A culture has been superimposed on a culture,” Mwangi said, but there are not enough resources for everyone to live up to the new standards of the neocolonial culture (Schallert 1992, 3). She asserted that in attempts to be more Western, “what [Kenyans] valued as our food has been devalued, and what we are valuing is what they value in the West” (3). For instance, Kenyans used to survive by eating a variety of wild foods, but now many don’t consider such foods as staples because of Western influences. In the process, many areas of Kenya are deemed to be suffering from food shortages as the economy has been transformed to consumer capitalism with its attendant mechanization of agriculture. In Kourfa, Niger, women have been the primary force behind preventing the village from disappearing, a fate that many surrounding villages have suffered because of the Sahel region’s desertification. Reduced rainfall and the drying up of watering places and vegetation, combined with violent sandstorms, have virtually deprived Kourfa of harvests for the past five years. As a result, the overwhelming majority of Kourfa’s men have had to travel far away for long periods of time to find seasonal work.

Chapter 4 Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too

101

With the assistance of the Association of Women of Niger and an agricultural advisor, the women have laid out a small market garden around the only well in Kourfa. Despite the few resources at their disposal, the Kourfa women have succeeded in supporting themselves, their children, and the village elders. In response to the survival of the village since these actions, the Kourfa women are now calling for increased action to reverse the region’s environmental degradation so “the men won’t go away” from the village (Ouedraogo 1992, 38).

The environmental activism of some Black women brings up the question of whether community-oriented Black women who are addressing environmental issues are genuinely Afrocentric ecowomanists or possibly Afrocentric ecomotherists.9 According to Ann Snitow, motherists are women who, for various reasons, “identify themselves not as feminists but as militant mothers, fighting together for survival” (1989, 48). Snitow also maintains that motherism usually arises when men are absent or in times of crisis, when the private-sphere role assigned to women under patriarchy makes it impossible for the collective to survive. Since they are faced with the dictates of traditional work but face a lack of resources in which to fulfill their socially prescribed role, motherists become a political force. Since they took collective action to secure the survival of the village’s children and elders only after the necessary absence of Kourfa’s men, the activism of the Kourfa women may possibly be based on a motherist philosophy. One can only conjecture whether the Kourfa women criticized the social role of motherhood in Niger as they became a political force, or if womanist consciousness emerged after their political experiences. Because of their potential to transform into ecowomanists after they enter the political realm, Afrocentric ecomotherists shouldn’t be discounted in an analysis of Black women’s environmental activism. For instance, Charlotte Bullock contends that she “did not come to the fight against environmental problems as an intellectual but rather as a concerned mother” (Hamilton 1990, 216). However, she and other women in Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles began to notice the sexual politics that attempted to discount their political activism while they were protesting. “I noticed when we first started fighting the issue how the men would laugh at the women . . . they would say, ‘Don’t pay no attention to them, that’s only one or two women . . . they won’t make a difference.’ But now since we’ve been fighting for about a year the smiles have gone” (1990, 215). Robin Cannon, another member of Concerned Citizens,

1976 The Women and Spirituality Conference held in Boston, the earliest feminist conference to serve only vegetarian food.

Afrocentric ecomotherists: Ecowomanist potential?

102

Chapter 4 Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too

asserts that social relations in her home, specifically gender roles on caretaking, were transformed after she began participating in the group’s actions (220).

Moving beyond dualism: An Afrocentric approach In utilizing spiritual concepts to move beyond dualism, precolonial African cultures, with their both/and perspectives, are useful forms of knowledge for Afrocentric ecowomanists to envision patterns toward interdependence of human and nonhuman nature. Traditional West African cultures, in particular, which also happen to be the ancestral roots of the overwhelming majority of African Americans, share a belief in nature worship and view all things as being alive on varying levels of existence (Haskins 1978, 30). One example of such an approach in West African traditions is the Nyam concept. A root word in many West African languages, Nyam connotes an enduring power and energy possessed by all life (Collins 1990, 220). Thus, all forms of life are deemed to possess certain rights, which cannot be violated at will. In Jambalaya, Luisah Teish writes of the Da concept, which originates from the Fon people of Western Africa. Da is “the energy that carries creation, the force field in which creation takes place” (1985, 61). In the Fon view, all things are composed of energy provided by Da. For example, “the human is receptive to the energy emanating from the rock and the rock is responsive to human influence” (62). Because West Africans have traditionally viewed nonhuman nature as sacred and worthy of praise through such cultural media as song and dance, there is also a belief in Nommo. Nommo is “the physical-spiritual life force which awakens all ‘sleeping’ forces and gives physical and spiritual life” (Jahn 1961, 105). However, with respect for nonhuman nature comes a different understanding of Ache, the Yoruba term for human power. Ache doesn’t connote “power over” or domination, as it often does in mainstream Western thought, but rather power with other forms of creation. With Ache, Teish states that there is “a regulated kinship among human, animal, mineral, and vegetable life” (1985, 63). Humans recognize their Ache to eat and farm, “but it is also recognized that they must give back that which is given to them” (63). In doing so, we respect the overall balance and interdependence of human and nonhuman nature. These concepts can be useful for Afrocentric ecowomanists not only in educating our peoples about environmental issues, but also in reclaiming the cultural traditions of our ancestors. Rachel Bagby states the positivity of

humans connecting with nonhuman nature, a view that is interwoven in her organization’s work: If you can appreciate the Earth, you can appreciate the beauty of yourself. The same creator created both. And if I learned to take care of that I’ll also take care of myself and help take care of others. (Bagby 1990, 242)

Illustrating an outlook of planetary relations that is parallel to the traditional West African worldview, Bagby simultaneously reveals the continuous link between much of the African-American religious tradition and African spirituality. In light of the relations of power and privilege that exist in the world, the appropriation of indigenous cultures by some ecofeminists must be addressed. Many womanists, such as Andy Smith and Luisah Teish, have criticized cultural feminists for inventing Earth-based feminist spiritualities that are based on the exploitation of our ancestral traditions, while we’re struggling to reclaim and defend our cultures from white supremacy. In “For All Those Who Were Indian in Another Life,” Smith asserts that this appropriation of non-Western spiritual traditions functions as a way for many white women to avoid taking responsibility for being simultaneously oppressive as well as oppressed. White ecofeminists can reclaim their own pre-Christian European cultures, such as the Wiccan tradition, for similar concepts of interconnectedness, community, and immanence found in West African traditions.10 Adopting these concepts would transform humans’ relationship to nonhuman nature in a variety of ways. By seeing all components of the ecosystem affecting and being affected by one another, such a world perspective demonstrates a pattern of living in harmony with the rest of nature, instead of seeking to disconnect from it. By viewing ourselves as a part of nature, we would be able to move beyond the Western disdain for the body and therefore not ravage the Earth’s body as a result of this disdain and fear. We would realize that the Earth is not merely the source of our survival, but also has intrinsic value and must be treated with respect, as it is our elder. The notion of community would help us to appreciate the biological and cultural diversity that sustains life. Because every entity is viewed as embodying spirituality under immanence, culture wouldn’t be viewed as separate from, and superior to, nature, as it is seen in mainstream Western religions. Communalism would also aid us in reformulating the social constructions of race, gender, species, class (among other variables), which keep groups separate from one another. And finally, the environmental movement in particular would view politics as rooted in community and communally take actions to reclaim the Earth and move toward a life of interdependence for generations to come.

103

1976 First (and only) meeting of the Society of Feminist-Vegetarians at Shandygaffs, a vegetarian restaurant in the Castro District of San Francisco, convened by Chellis Glendinning and Carol Adams.

Chapter 4 Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too

104

Chapter 4 Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too

Acknowledgment I would like to acknowledge the help that Carol Adams has given me with this essay. Her reading suggested valuable changes in the structure of the paper as well as clearing up minor flaws in writing. She also suggested some references that would augment my claims.

Notes 1

2 3

4 5

Alice Walker’s definition of womanist is a feminist of color who is “committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female” (1983a, xi–xii). University of Ibadan (Nigeria) English senior lecturer Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi contends that “black womanism is a philosophy that celebrates black roots . . . It concerns itself as much with the black sexual power tussle as with the world power structure that subjugates blacks” (1985, 72). Since feminism often gives primacy to gender, and race consciousness often gives primacy to race, such limitations in terminology have caused many women of color to adopt the term womanist, which both Walker and Ogunyemi independently coined in the early 1980s. Although some of the women in this paper refer to themselves as feminists rather than womanists, or use both terms interchangeably, I am using the term womanist in an interpretative sense to signify a culturally identified woman of color who also critically analyzes the sexual politics within her respective ethnic group. For a discussion of how toxic waste has affected the environmental health of United States Black communities, see Day and Knight 1991. Robert Bullard (1990) contends that the mortality of wealth involves toxic-waste dumping to pursue profits at the expense of others, usually low-income people of color in the United States. Because this demographic group is less likely to have economic resources and political clout, it can’t fight back as easily as more affluent communities that possess white-skin privileges. I think this term is also applicable to the economic nature of toxic dumping in “Third World” countries, which are basically disempowered in the global political process. For an ecofeminist text that makes a similar claim, see King 1989. My definition of an Afrocentric ecowomanist is a communalisticoriented Black woman who understands and articulates the

interconnectedness of the degradation of people of color, women, and the environment. In addition to articulating this interconnectedness, an Afrocentric ecowomanist also strives to eradicate this degradation. For an extensive discussion of Afrocentrism, see Myers 1988. 6 An example of this distinction can be seen in Davies 1988. In her article, Davies only discusses the interconnections between gender and nature and completely avoids analyzing how such variables as ethnicity and class influence the experience of gender in one’s life. 7 For several descriptions of the political decision-making within feminist peace organizations, see the essays in Harris and King 1989. 8 It is noteworthy that the seedlings come from over 1,500 tree nurseries, 99 percent of which are operated by women. In addition, the women are given a small payment for the trees that survive. 9 In comparison to an Afrocentric ecowomanist, I define an Afrocentric ecomotherist as a communalistic-oriented Black woman who is involved in saving the environment and challenging white supremacy, but who does not challenge the fundamental dynamics of sexual politics in women’s lives. 10 For instance, Starhawk, a practitioner of the Wiccan tradition, has written about her spiritual beliefs (1990).

105

1976 The first “gay rodeo” is held. By 1983, Feminists for Animal Rights engaged in protests of the event as upholding “men’s most blatant attempt to celebrate the domination of nature.”

Chapter 4 Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too

106

Joy Deborah Slicer

5 1977 The feminist-vegetarian Bloodroot Collective is organized and creates their vegetarian restaurant in Bridgeport, CT.

W

e don’t eat those with whom we play, joke, laugh. This isn’t an empirical claim. In fact, some people do eat those with whom they play, joke and laugh. But many of us find it odd, even incomprehensible, a kind of category mistake, or worse. And when I say we don’t eat those “with whom” we laugh, I don’t mean laugh at (derisively) or laugh about (fondly), but laugh with, share something humorous.1 While I do think other animals have very significant moral claims, I don’t want to go there through the usual inclusivity and consistency arguments (inclusion of cognitively “sub-normal” humans in the moral universe requires we include cognitively similar non-human animals), however much I respect the huge inroads those approaches have made into academia and popular discussion of animals’ moral and legal standing. And I grant that these arguments have accomplished this because they are largely sound. For a long time I have been more attracted to the work of Cora Diamond and more recently to the novelist J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999). Diamond, because of her Wittgensteinian insistence that we take up ethical questions within the socially convoluted and epistemologically vexing forms of life that give rise to them, because of her insistence on literature and life as the best moral teachers, and because as early as 1978 she began working on the moral significance of other animals as “fellow creatures,” not just bearers of sentience or as subjects of a life, but as those with whom we share a certain “boat” and seek out as company, a theme that a number of other writers since have riffed without giving her due credit (Diamond 1991a, 329). And Coetzee, because his Elizabeth is so thoroughly the utter astonishment, bitter frustration, rage,

107

108

Chapter 5 Joy

alienation, loneliness, and despair that many of us who are long-time vegans and activists frequently feel among families like Costello’s, among students and colleagues like Costello’s, at dinner parties much like the one in honor of Costello, when we must shop for food and shoes and handbags, just like Costello. My concern for Elizabeth is that she seems humorless, and laughter is joy juice, an affirmation of life. This is one of those great “difficulties of reality,” to use Cora Diamond’s phrase, that joy along with profound, senseless suffering exist in equal measure as givens of our thrown condition, and, that whether taken separately or standing side-by-side, they are both equally freighted moral spaces. A certain kind of moral courage is required to be with that, particularly with their side-by-sideness, not just to intellectually acknowledge it, but to experience that tension in the deepest existential sense, and to keep one’s head attached and one’s moral bearings.

Story telling Certain writers say that philosophy must incorporate stories/narrative into a responsible representation of and response to moral life. Iris Murdoch (2001), Bernard Williams (1985), Cora Diamond (1991), Martha Nussbaum (1992), Stanley Cavell (2008), various feminists and ecofeminists, including Marti Kheel (2008), are among them, and their work is familiar by now. Like Aristotle, they show how literature is instructive because it represents something authentic in its difficulty and because it requires we participate— that we practice attention, emotional sensitivity and sensitivity to detail, deliberation, choice, and judgment along with the narrative’s characters. And of course those characters model all this for us. A bit more specifically, Nussbaum and Diamond, for example, note the way traditional philosophical treatments of moral life flatten and distort complex and emotionally charged moral situations into Kantian or utilitarian riddles that can be handily resolved by applying over-simple, abstract principles to them, by treating moral dilemmas as math problems with people. What is lost, among other things, is an understanding of the difficulty of choosing well, to paraphrase Nussbaum, within a context of various and competing particulars all vying for attention. And then there’s the difficulty of choosing and relinquishing competing, noncommensurable goods: erotic love or filial duty, or a truth that threatens friendship, for example. Robert Solomon (1976), Nussbaum (1992), and Diamond (1991, 2008), among others, also recognize a place for emotional intelligence in moral life. By “intelligence,” I mean that the

emotions have some legitimate sway over the will and that they have important cognitive functions. All this raises issues of what the philosopher should be doing. Should we be reading stories, become better literary critics? Should we teach stories alongside of or instead of “philosophy”? Should we write stories? Diamond and some ecofeminists, such as Marti Kheel (2008), Chris Cuomo and Lori Gruen (1998), and Greta Gaard (2007), stress the importance of stories because they help us see and feel that and how animals are subjects. As Kheel puts it: “Stories, such as Babe the pig’s and Emily the cow’s, help people recognize that the lives of other animals follow strong lines, representing a subjective identity. One way in which we can come to appreciate their subjectivity, therefore, is through telling their stories as best we can” (Kheel 2008, 249). Cuomo and Gruen advocate “transgressive moral orientations” that bring the background into the foreground, including non-human animals’ subjectivities into the foreground of our moral attention. Stories are transgressive because they contain “ins” that disrupt our usual ways of perceiving and feeling (or not feeling) and make possible empathy along with real friendships with animals—a point I’ll return to later (Cuomo and Gruen 1998, 133–4). The following stories inspired this piece. They also help me work some of the more difficult points I’m trying to make about the moral significance of playing and laughing, of creating joy with another. They don’t just illustrate the points. They do their own work and have their own depth, I like to think. And ultimately I hope they’re transgressive, “ins.”

Humor Asa, a 21-year-old, 16-hand, black quarter horse, is most in his element with groups of younger geldings who probably see him as the cool, middle-aged guy who shows them how to negotiate a variety of social situations—which crankier horses mean business and which bluff, how to move a guy off his hay pile without expending excessive energy or getting hurt, how to kick the ranch manager’s pastern-nipping Shepard while not crushing the little pest, how hard to run the pants off a new equine until or if he assumes the bottom of the pecking order, which two-legs are going to give you real grief if you don’t take orders and which, despite their predatory stature and bullying behavior, you can tell to take a flying fuck by simply playing deaf or, if you’ve really got some chutzpah, delivering a premonitory kick. He’s the older guy who, despite an arthritic lameness in his right front knee and left hock, is good for an impromptu, screaming rip around a field after wild turkeys or deer or a falling leaf or puff of wind or some seismic

109

1977 Dr. Daphne Sheldrick establishes the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya to protect and rehabilitate elephants.

Chapter 5 Joy

110

Chapter 5 Joy

shift—another herd running a field a mile distant. Asa and I have been together for nearly ten years. He’s one of the funniest guys I know. A word about horse humor. Play and humor are related expressions of élan vital, pure being, our “life force,” to use Henri Bergson’s (1974, 1998) and Susanne Langer’s (1965) expressions. Laughter, she says, is the “culmination of feeling—like the crest of a wave of felt vitality” (1965, 132). Horses have élan in spades. They have devious senses of humor, and they’re wicked practical jokers—butt biters, tail pullers, gate openers, bucket-, brush-, and hat-snatchers, stealthy farters, among other things. Early in our relationship I practiced Pat Parelli’s natural horsemanship, a series of what Parelli calls “games” that improve communication between horse and human, help establish the human as herd leader/teacher, and keep everybody safe. I’ve since had some misgivings about whether the natural horsemanship movement is as noncoercive, as egalitarian, attentive to the equine other, and as spontaneous as I want my friendships with horses to be. That said, these schools do stress understanding the horse’s mind, clear and consistent communication, and low-key mutual fun. This particular program was helpful to us during our first year together when Asa sized me up as a harmless novice and object of comic torture. So I spent many hours watching Parelli DVDs and reading Parelli handbooks, taking copious notes, condensing pages of notes into field instructions that I’d reference as I “played” with Asa, who, haltered, stood at the end of a 15-foot lead line, patiently, usually. One afternoon as I studied my notes, which I’d written on the back of an envelope, a pair of thick, black horse lips very gently took possession of the top edge of the paper. Horses have bilateral vision; they can see two different images spontaneously. But they can also converge their focus more directly on a single image in front of them, so long as they have a little distance from the object. Asa found a distance and adjusted his head down a bit to focus on this very funny joke. Many horses’ faces are exquisitely expressive, though I have often seen in horses the same gaze that John Berger describes in zoo animals—a “gaze that flickers and moves on . . . They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechanically” (cited in Coetzee 1999, 34). But Asa’s black eyes were soft, round, directed and energetic, an energy that, as hard as I try not to, I always associate with a jolly Santa, or, what’s more to my liking, with my grandfather, who had a similarly dry, teasing sense of humor. Ears up, chin loose as a wattle, his eyebrows twitched across his forehead like heat lightning. At first I protested for real, tugged the paper, and then tried backing him, knowing that in horse-land whoever moves the other’s feet is dominant. All for naught. The lips trembled the paper and held fast. My path to “love, language, and leadership,” the Parelli guarantee, was clinched between my

Chapter 5 Joy

111

horse’s front teeth. How absurd was that? And while tugging at my new social “contract” with my equine partner, I began to laugh. Many horses associate human laughter, that particular vocalization, with good things— petting, cookies and carrots, and just a general good feeling; it’s a vocal cue to cock a leg, yawn, lip-lick, let your mane down. Asa cued to all that, and I suspect he may have also heard my laughter as uptake, that I was getting the joke. At which point he began very slowly, and without breaking eye contact, lipping the entire page into his mouth. Once he’d had it all he chewed it leisurely, like an old man with his plug. Then casually spat the soggy wad into the dust. R. H. Smythe in a wonderful little book called The Mind of the Horse comments that “some horses possess a certain sense of humor and are prepared also ‘to act daft’ occasionally in order to pander to the whims of humanity” (Smythe 1965, 86). He doesn’t elaborate. I’ve found precious little else on other animals’ senses of humor, apart from some bits on laughter by Marc Bekoff, short pieces by dog trainers, and a little snippet titled “The Rat Who Laughed.”2 Theories of humor consistently highlight how things we find humorous subvert our expectations, whether physical or linguistic or social, without seriously painful or offensive consequences. We don’t laugh at something that we truly consider true, beautiful, or good, according to Robert W. Corrigan, though often comedy walks a dangerously fine line (Corrigan 1965, 6). A number of writers, including Bergson and Hazelit, stress incongruity and the subversion of expectations as potentially humorous—an umbrella the wind turns inside out or a clown’s or mime’s exaggerated, almost mechanized, limbs and facial expressions. Al Capp’s theory that we delight in “man’s inhumanity to man” reverberates with Langer’s and Freud’s claim that we find comedic delight in our sudden, unexpected superiority to some pathetic fop, brilliantly evoked by Charlie Chaplin, Capp argues. Susanne Langer’s discussion of the old folk character “Punch,” who carries out every repressed impulse by “force and speed of action—throws the baby out the window, beats the policeman, spears the devil with a pitchfork,” reminds me of Eric Bentley’s claim that farce is violence without fear of serious consequences (Langer 1965, 134). Aristotle, in his Poetics, considered comedy much inferior to tragedy and a species of the ugly, the ludicrous, which isn’t painful and causes no harm. Freud claims that “wit is an escape from authority, nonsense an escape from reason” (in which case witty Asa was full of nonsense).3 This is a very thin sampling of theories of comedy, and of humor, which is different, and a flimsy treatment of that sampling. What’s most relevant here is that almost invariably when other animals are mentioned theorists deny that they have senses of humor. Largely they follow Langer’s logic:

1978 “Lesbian’s for Animals’ Irreducible Rights” founded in Great Britain.

112

Chapter 5 Joy

other animals are not self-conscious, they simply pass through the natural succession of “individualized existence”; theirs is an instinctive struggle for survival, while the human animal “ponders its uniqueness, its brevity and limitations, the life impulses that make it, and the fact that in the end the organic unity will be broken, the self will disintegrate and be no more” (1965, 125). Very young children lack senses of humor too, even though they laugh, a much more elementary thing than humor, she says (132). Because children do not yet have a sense of a “self” that they must willfully negotiate through the social and natural worlds and that are battered by chance and fate, and because they have no conceptions of their own vulnerability and finitude, children have no “sense of life,” and thus cannot take pleasure in bizarre, absurd, improbable, stumbling, frivolous attempts to subvert and/or cope. One requires a “semantically enlarged horizon” for all that (124). But suppose Langer’s wrong. The facts. The arguments. Her sense of life. Suppose this time we give credence to anecdotal evidence. Trust the gut, love’s knowledge. Suppose Asa and I joke. Play. Suppose we seek them out as fellow creatures because we laugh together. Suppose our boat rocks with laughter. What kind of moral space have we entered?

Play Animals play. What exactly is “play”? Who plays? Why do animals play? When do they play? What functions, if any, does play serve? What are some of the communicative and cognitive aspects of play? And what are the social costs of not playing? Marc Bekoff and Colin Allen distinguish between functional and nonfunctional definitions of play. A functional characterization relates play to motor, social, and cognitive development. In 1998 Bekoff and Allen were leery of functional accounts because there were so few studies to support those theories (1998, 99). But in 2009 in Wild Justice, Bekoff and Jessica Pierce develop a functionalist-sounding theory of play as training for moral life, which they define as “a suite of other-regarding behaviors falling into three rough clusters of cooperation, empathy, and justice” (138). “Morality is a spectrum of behaviors that share a common feature of concern about the welfare of others” (138). Drawing on the cognitive literature they establish certain “threshold conditions” for at least mammals as moral animals: [A] certain level of complexity in social organization, including established norms of behavior to which attach strong emotional and cognitive cues

Chapter 5 Joy

113

Play is important to acquiring certain moral skills, such as developing basic social skills, bonding, learning social norms, reciprocity, respect for rules and others’ social space, recognition and assessment of others’ intentions, responsiveness to surprise and novelty. Playing fair, following the rules, is important; cheaters stop the game and are often chased out. Among other things, they’ve violated trust and may well be shunned. Trust, in particular, Bekoff and Pierce suggest is necessary for group cohesion and stability. In play we often neutralize inequalities and promote egalitarianism. Self-handicapping is a good example. Other animals, just like us, may do things they might not do outside of play—role reversal, for example— something that may even compromise their wellbeing in nonplay situations. And play involves justice, a natural sentiment, a feeling, the authors claim, and not necessarily an abstract set of principles. Nonfunctional characterizations define play as “all motor activity performed postnatally that appears [authors’ emphasis] to be purposeless, in which motor patterns from other contexts may often be used in modified forms and altered temporal sequencing. If the activity is directed toward another living being it is called social play. This definition centers on the structure of play sequences—what animals do when they play—and not on possible functions of play” (Bekoff and Allen 1998, 99). Nonfunctional definitions are problematic because they apply to nonplay behavior such as excessive grooming and repetitive pacing by caged animals. So Bekoff and Allen find a third way, a sort of behaviorist account: Our view is that the study of play ought to start with examples of behaviors which superficially appear to form a single category—those that would be initially agreed upon as a play—and look for similarities among these examples. If similarities are found, then we can ask whether they provide a basis for useful generalizations. We therefore propose to proceed on the basis of an intuitive understanding of play, guided to some extent by Bekoff and Byers’ attempt to define it, but without the view that this or any other currently available definition strictly includes or excludes any specifics behaviors from the category of play. (1998, 100)4

Horses play as often as dogs and, curiously, they play many of the same games as dogs, whose ancestors were once among horses’ natural enemies.

1978 Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her by Susan Griffin published.

about right and wrong; a certain level of neural complexity that serves as a foundation for moral emotions and for decision making based on perceptions about the past and the future; relatively advanced cognitive capacities (a good memory, for example); and a high degree of behavioral flexibility. (Bekoff and Aallen 1998, 13)

114

Chapter 5 Joy

Horses play chasing games, neck-biting games, tug-of-war, and take-away games, among others. Asa and I play games, though I don’t rough-house with my 1,200-pound friend. We do play take-away. Often the stolen object is my hat, sometimes a brush, sometimes a bucket. Sometimes we play tug-of-war with these items or with a lead rope. Occasionally we play a chasing game, which is simply a chase-me-if-you-want-to-halter-me sort of thing. We did this a few times when Asa wanted to establish dominance in our relationship, long ago, and then it wasn’t so funny. Now I know it’s a game because his body language is entirely different, and anymore he nearly always trots up to me at the gate, where I wait, resting on a boot toe, just another relaxed horse. Another game we play and that he’s recently started initiating is the transition game. Most riders, including myself, like very quiet transitions up from a halt to a walk, to a trot, and then to a canter, and then back down. Asa and I transition on the ground in his 10-acre bedroom. Walk, trot, halt, back up, trot, etc. We mix it up and try to keep an element of surprise going—a screeching halt or we jump obstacles like branches or small ditches. He handicaps himself so we can trot or canter side-by-side. The first time he initiated the game I was walking out in front toward a gate, when he trotted up beside me, nearly trotted in place so as not to out-distance me, and something in his facial expression, mostly in those effervescent eyes, said: “P-L-A-Y?” As I said, he handicaps himself, a lot. He’s kind and hangs with me. Rules: One guy doesn’t run off and leave the other, we don’t play this game when he’s haltered, we don’t ask each other to do things that are dangerous or impossible, like run through an acre of prairie dog holes or very close to a fence line or jump over gates, and if the other horses in the field join us, we stay focused. These aren’t just my rules. They’ve evolved between us, over time, and as we’ve paid attention to one another. My friend Jeff Hudson says that horses have to feel they’re on equal or near-equal terms with a person before they’ll horse around with you, joke or play. Barbara Smuts writes about equality—reciprocity, freedom, mutual dependence and respect—as the bases for friendship with another animal. Recognizing and allowing another to be a social subject and an idiosyncratic individual requires, among other things, we give up “control over them and [importantly] how they relate to us” (Smuts 2008, 118). I rarely hear anyone in the horse world, even those who practice natural horsemanship, talk about equality, though many talk about the importance of getting inside the horse’s mind, which is at least some acknowledgment of their subjectivity. Mostly we get inside the horse’s mind though in order to more effectively control them. I handily concede that one has to use more than usual caution when playing with a 1,200-pound animal whose flight response might be triggered by a waving branch or a garden hose or an odd-shaped rock along the trail

and who isn’t always cognizant of my personal space or their respective physical advantage. But for me this means that developing trust is more, not less, relevant than in my other relationships. Play and joking around with a very large animal can be dangerous. Nonetheless if I want this in my friendship with horses, I have to give up significant control and to trust, at minimum, our communication, that we’ll follow the rules, that we’ll take care of each other when one of us innovates, and, importantly, I think, when we play and joke we trust each other with a precious gift we’re sharing, our own joie de vivre, that vital force, which so marks our kinship with all other living individuals and with larger cycles and creative processes from evolution to poetry, the joy that other animals, from steers to rats, unconditionally give themselves over to in play. Everything I’ve just mentioned here has moral traction. Cognitively, to have a sense of humor it’s necessary to subvert and to recognize subverted social, physical, and communicative expectations and sometimes to make fine-grained distinctions between subversions that are very inappropriate because they’re harmful—painful or offensive—and subversions that are benign, sometimes silly, and give us joy. And play involves, among other social, cognitive, and emotive capacities, the recognition of rules, respect for rules, trust, an appreciation for novelty, and a sense of fairness. I think that other animals have these capacities, and that they have senses of humor and that they play. And most ethicists, short of perhaps the doctrinaire Kantian, will acknowledge that these things matter very much, morally. What most interests me in the following is what it means to mark our kinship, our status as fellow creatures, as Diamond might put it, by sharing joy as tricksters and playmates. Two points, briefly, before I close this section. First, I didn’t intend to convince skeptics that animals do in fact play. The literature on play is extensive and worth reading. Better yet, since gross contact is the soundest proof and the most successful moral “in,” go there first. Second, humor and play are cousins, but they aren’t the same. Play is fun, but it’s not always funny. Funny isn’t always a game.

Kip Within the last year I helped retrieve several horses who passed through the auction at the Missoula Livestock Exchange, all of them destined for slaughter. The first, an old friend, sold to a kill buyer by his human companion and former friend of mine, is Kip. Because Kip was in good weight and in good general health he was “fast tracked” to Canada from

115

1979 Green Paradise Lost by Elizabeth Dodson Gray published, one of the first books to theorize a relationship between heterosexism and the oppression of nature in patriarchal cultures.

Chapter 5 Joy

116

Chapter 5 Joy

Montana, which means he should have been “shot and hung,” as the industry puts it, within three days of sale. An hour after the sale he was loaded as hip number “138” onto a double-decker livestock trailer, which, even though such trailers are unsafe for horses, is a common means of transporting them to the slaughter plant in Alberta, a six-hour trip. Minutes prior to departure, a backcountry outfitter pulled him off that truck, trading two of his horses, “all broken down at the knees,” as he later told me. After that Kip was in limbo for five weeks until I found him in Ennis, Montana. This all happened in the back lot of the stockyard, and I had no idea that Kip was alive during the five weeks I searched for him, having been encouraged by two friends to keep looking and by a nagging sense of my own that I could and needed to find him. Whether that sense was my inability to get my mind around a “friend” being someone else’s “meat,” an insurmountable “difficulty of reality,” to borrow Cora Diamond’s idea, or some kind of energetic connection to him that’s as difficult to explain, I don’t know (Diamond 2008, 45). During that five-week search I talked with kill buyers, people at the Canadian slaughter plant, feed lot workers, brand inspectors, rescue workers, stockyard employees, and I now have a fair sense of how this system works, a system that’s both legal and clandestine, very poorly regulated, and that, for me, was accented by moments of disorienting kindness. During the six years I knew Kip prior to his sale he was a complete gentleman on the ground, personable, kind, and, mostly mustang, he had a mustang’s mind—exceptionally intelligent, agile, quick. People who knew horses were inevitably attracted to him. Kip also made it abundantly clear that he would not be ridden. At eleven years old he still refused to carry a rider, whether because of past abuse, because of his unusual conformation that sometimes caused him pain, because of ill-fitting saddles, nobody knows. When his person insisted on riding, Kip gave it an honest try, then decided his original fears were grounded. He bucked, hard; she got hurt. And what good is a horse you can’t ride? Or so it goes with many horsemen and horsewomen. It’s not an uncommon story. Kip is now my companion, and I have no expectations of him. A new trust has to begin there.

Being In “Eating Meat and Eating People,” Cora Diamond writes about the distinction we make between “pets” and animals people eat. Once we understand how the concept of “pet” functions, we understand that we don’t eat them. A pet “is given a name, is let into our houses [horses excepted] and

Chapter 5 Joy

117

may be spoken to in ways in which we do not normally speak to cows or squirrels” (Diamond 1991a, 378). Our concept of other animals entails their being fair game as food, clothing, research and testing subjects, and as entertainment. In the case of the not-pets, perhaps we stress the differences between “them” and “us,” while stressing the similarities between pets and ourselves. These concepts are social constructions and as such they are somewhat fluid. Cultivating the empathetic imagination, as ecofeminist and other writers, such as Diamond suggest, is key to recognizing similarities, especially cognitive and social ones, and insomuch as the heart is involved, these similarities, mostly these possibilities for deep social relations, can take on moral weight. The simple fact of being alive, of exercising a telos, as Paul Taylor argues in his Respect for Nature, as well as differences, differences that are mysterious, awesome, humbling, can take on moral significance too of course (Taylor 1986). But the cognitive and social similarities are easiest for us to notice because we are profoundly problem-solving and social creatures ourselves. Horses are exceptional; the conceptual boundaries are much looser with horses and other equines. Horses are both pets and meat. While it’s true that the majority of horses who end up at auctions and go to slaughter are there because they lost their economic or recreational value for a human being, those animals also have names (but become “hip numbers” on the auction floor), were socially educated/trained by human beings, were likely groomed regularly, have recognizable “horsonalities” (to use Parelli’s term), were praised and petted, and encouraged to trust, all the sorts of interactions typical of our relations to so-called pets. And the same individual who had these social interactions with the horse may very well send the horse to slaughter in a legal and social context that, even though the majority of Americans disapprove, enables the deaths of approximately 130,000 US horses each year. The conceptual distinctions we make between “them” and “us,” those who are at the table and those who are on the table, to paraphrase Diamond (1991a), are slipperier than usual in the horse’s case, and this conceptual instability is reflected, among other places, in our ambiguous relationships with their bodies, with their “fullness of being,” to use Coetzee’s character Elizabeth Costello’s term (1999, 33), which our many ingenious and largely successful mechanical “aids,” from curb bits to hobbles, are designed to lock up. I’ll return to this shortly. Both Diamond and Costello consider acts that are beyond the pale. Diamond, who comments on why it’s a kind of mistake to say it’s wrong to raise people for meat, to salvage the dead for their organs, supper, or the compost heap, points out that to say these things are wrong isn’t too weak, “but in the wrong dimension” (Diamond 1991a, 323). Costello’s many

1979 Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society by Elizabeth Fisher published.

118

Chapter 5 Joy

references to the Nazi extermination camps could be her attempt to make a similar point about something beyond the pale, and, for better or for worse (Coetzee lets us decide), she draws analogies with the mass slaughter of animals. Something beyond the pale, of another dimension, is related to its being a difficulty of reality, to use Diamond’s term again. My attempts to understand Kip’s fate and the equine slaughter industry resonate with this kind of difficulty. To be clearer, here’s Diamond. This difficulty “is experience of the mind’s not being able to encompass something which it encounters” (Diamond 2008, 44). Later she says these are “experiences in which we take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it, or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way, or perhaps awesome or astonishing in its inexplicability. We take things so. And the things we take so may simply not, to others, present the kind of difficulty, of being hard or impossible or agonizing, to get one’s mind around” (2008, 45–6). While some find enigmatic Costello’s comment that she’s a vegetarian in order to save her soul, I think it makes sense given her profound existential disorientation, feelings of isolation, and her frustrated attempts to explain herself to an unfriendly audience of highly educated, socially graceful, kindly-seeming people at Appleton College. She even says to her son: “It’s that I no longer know where I am” (Coetzee 1999, 69). I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money. . .Yet I’m not dreaming. I look into your eyes, into Norma’s, into the children’s, and I see only kindness, human-kindness. Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you! Why can’t you? (1999, 69)

And her son John, a mixed salad of repressed, raw emotions, who throughout the book mentally notes her old flesh, slumped shoulders, white hair, and old-womanish cold cream smell, whispers in her ear: “There, there. There, there. It will soon be over” (1999, 69). This exchange takes place in the car on the way to the airport after Elizabeth finishes at Appleton. As the novel’s closing line, it’s brilliantly ambiguous. Is he referring to Elizabeth’s departure from Appleton? Or to the end of his own ordeal as his mother’s host? Or is he trying to soothe her by promising some kind of (unlikely) pro-animal revolution? Is he referring to her death? Given that the comment immediately follows his mentally noting, yet again, her aged body, it’s most likely he’s referring to her dying. Much

like the way we ontologize other animals, her son frequently comments on Elizabeth’s body, equates her with her mortal corporality, and in that way (among others) diminishes, or outright rejects, her message, and ultimately her subjectivity. I wonder if a woman with more vital energy, which is not the same as youth, with what Elizabeth herself calls “fullness of being”—joy, for example—might be harder to “kill off,” to ontologize with death. Coetzee portrays Elizabeth as a victim, as an existentially “wounded animal,” to use her words, defending other victims. And while I agree with Costello’s points about the existential and mortal damages of our relationships with other animals—our victimization of them and our subsequent own selfdestructiveness—and I recognize this as the most prevalent type case against our treatment of other animals (and I’ve made the case myself in essays and as an activist), here I offer a different notion of subjectivity and relationship that, without taking a familiar “like-us” approach to animal relations, emphasizes our shared condition and our ability to respond to it through humor and play. Cora Diamond’s notion of animals as “fellow creatures” is relevant and in the preceding I’ve worked that idea by exploring our mutual capacity for joy. Costello grasps the idea too, but she only takes it so far. Excoriating Descartes, Costello says: To thinking, cogitation, I oppose fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being—not a consciousness of yourself as a kind of ghostly reasoning machine thinking thoughts, but on the contrary the sensation—a heavily affective sensation—of being a body with limbs that have extension in space, of being alive to the world. (Coetzee 1999, 33)

“Being alive to the world,” “a heavily affective sensation,” the sensation of being a body with limbs that have extension in space, to be full of being. And she says that “one name for the experience of fullness is joy” (1999, 33). Play, and especially the kind of physical, versus intellectual, play that young children and other animals so love, and much humor, laughter that crests the wave of “felt vitality,” to cite Langer again, are manifestations of this sensation. Costello says that when we are “full” we’re alive “to” the world, not simply alive “in” the world.5 So much hinges on that preposition. I want to hang with this phrase long enough to tease out some of its less obvious implications for joy. Even in our profane world, ours is a fallen state; we are creatures whose emotional and moral constitutions are as malleable and durable as tinfoil in a world so resistant to even our best efforts that it’s virtually impossible to avoid guilt, shame and estrangement, and grief, grief as inevitable as death. Or better yet, as Herman Melville’s Ishmael puts it, “there are certain queer times and occasions in the mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the

119

1980 Northern Animal Liberation League active in the north of England, with a motto of “Over the fence when they least expect it.”

Chapter 5 Joy

120

Chapter 5 Joy

wit thereof he dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own” (1999, 214). The universe certainly had the last laugh on the Pequod. Ishmael’s job was murder, as was Melville’s for three years in the South Pacific. And yet their voices are as “alive to” as any I’ve ever heard. Ishmael: Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly swept across four several cruising-grounds. . .It was while gliding through [the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery locality, southerly from St. Helena] that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude: on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea. . .[And] some days after, lo! at the same silent hour, it was again announced: again it was descried by all; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it disappeared as if it had never been. And so it served us night after night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at it. Mysteriously jetted into the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the case might be; disappearing again for one whole day, or two days, or three; and somehow seeming at every distinct repetition to be advancing still further and further in our van, this solitary jet seemed forever alluring us on. (Melville 1964, 219–20)

These “spirit spouts” inspire both awe and blood lust in the crew, solidarity with the universe and estrangement from it, a “quivering” pleasure and a terrible premonition. Costello doesn’t go here, but I say that when human being is alive to the world it is alive to all these things, that is to paradox, mystery. In any case, maybe because Costello, alive to the world, holds that paradox too long and is nearly mad, or because she’s constitutionally gloomy, or because she lacks a certain courage and emotional fortitude, she is joyless. And what I’ve been getting at is this: When we sail our little boat over the dark, open water, its “scrolls of silver,” “suffusing seethings,” and “soft silence,” take a butt-biter with you, play a flatulent game of chase. Because joy is part of the cosmic deal too.

Courage In a remarkable short essay by the British playwright Christopher Fry he says that most of his comedies began as tragedies, that if the characters were not

“qualified for tragedy there would be no comedy,” and to some extent, he says, “I have to cross the one before I can light on the other. . .A bridge has to be crossed, a thought has to be turned. Somehow the characters have to unmortify themselves: to affirm life and assimilate death and preserve joy” (Fry 1965, 17). I said earlier that I worry about Elizabeth Costello because she seems humorless and later I said she was joyless. On the one hand, Elizabeth is very much alive to the world, a world in which the holocaust on animals, as she’s describing it, exists alongside “kindness, human kindness,” and even joy, a difficulty of reality as stubbornly resistant as any. On the other hand, she has no fullness—she’s wounded, traumatized, suffering a “profound disturbance of the soul” (Diamond 2008, 56), precisely and understandably because she’s trying to hold this difficulty in her mind. I believe that even, especially even, had we not been unfathomably lucky last year, had Kip been “shot and hung” along with the 40 other horses from his sale, along with the unlucky two the outfitter traded for him, I believe I should be writing this same piece, a piece that acknowledges joy, affirms life. But I very much doubt I would be writing it. Like Costello I may well lack the emotional fortitude and a certain kind of courage that being alive to and that fullness requires. “I’m a poet and we tend to err on the side that life is more than it appears rather than less,” Jim Harrison says (2011, 454). I hear this as a moral imperative. One of my favorite characters in Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals is an earnest, blunt British professor, who nails it when he says to Costello at dinner: “Therefore all this discussion of consciousness and whether animals have it is just a smokescreen. At bottom we protect our own kind. Thumbs up to human babies, thumbs down to veal calves. Don’t you think so Mrs. Costello?” (Coetzee 1999, 45). Oh, yeah, I think so. I also think we’re quite capable of sharing, even creating, joy with other animals, an affirmation of good and hope, a fire-orange torch sweeping the darkness that buoys our little Pequod. And we do not eat those with whom we breathe into that fire.

Notes 1

Without having any particular culture in mind, I do acknowledge that for some people other animals might be ontologized as both food and playmates. I do not think it’s disrespectful to say that my worldview isn’t ontologized that way. I’m even enough of a metaphysical realist to say that some ontologies, or at least some aspects of them, better correspond to the way things really are, and I’ll even go so far as to say that I believe my worldview, and its moral fallout, is one of those.

121

1980 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals founded.

Chapter 5 Joy

122

Chapter 5 Joy

2

3 4

5

I don’t think that saying this is necessarily disrespectful, e.g, imperalizing or in some other way arrogant. Some disagreements among Christians or between Christians and secularists, for example, can be and often enough are like this. Exploring such differences and attempting to resolve them can be difficult, even crazy-making, as J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello shows us in The Lives of Animals, a novel I work with extensively in this paper. Reason is supposed to be the great equalizer and peacemaker of course. But Costello (and Coetzee in giving us his novels) shows us its flaws and limitations. Coetzee deliberately engages and at the same time argues that the imagination and the heart, along with reason, are moral operatives. And sometimes gross contact makes its own forceful case. When differences of ontology are worked over and sometimes resolved, I believe the “Leatherman” approach, a multi-tooled approach, does the job. See Bekoff and Pierce Wild Justice (2009), 94 and 120; “The Little Dog Laughed—The Function and Form of Dog Play,” by Cheryl S. Smith (2010); “Laughing Dogs,” Patricia Simonet (2007); and “The Rat That Laughed,” Jesse Bering (July 2012). The authors cited in the paragraph all appear in Corrigan (1965). Animals’ intentions (beliefs and desires) is another difficulty for play theorists. Play, especially social play, involves pretense, or pretend. And pretense requires us to “read” each others’ minds in order to distinguish play-fighting or play-fleeing, for example, from the real things. So we must be able to represent another’s representation of reality, a second-order intentionality, according to Daniel Dennett. Bekoff and Allen put it this way, paraphrasing A. Rosenberg: “for animal a truly to be playing with b, it must be that a does d (the playful act) with the intention of b’s recognizing that a is doing d not seriously but with other goals or aims” (1998, 101). For example, Asa knows that Deborah understands he’s play-fleeing, not running from a real predator, that he’s pretending. Dennett believes that some animals are capable of this. Critics argue they aren’t and suggest they cue into context instead, body language or even pheromones. My student Angela Hotaling pointed out this distinction in our seminar on animals and ethics in fall of 2011.

Eros and the Mechanisms of Eco-Defense pattrice jones

6 1980 The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution by Carolyn Merchant published.

D

esire drives everything. Arising in our animal bodies, eros impels us to stretch and strive for what we want. What we want, most of all, is connection. Rooted in patriarchal pastoralism, globalized via colonialism, serving the aims of capitalism, and furthered by slice-and-dicestyle science, the hegemonic economy of (re)production and consumption is the catastrophic antithesis of exuberant eros. It persists by damming and diverting eros along with rivers. Sparked by rioting street queens and enacted in explicit solidarity with the Black, Chicano, Native American, and women’s liberation movements of that era, the fabulous gay liberation movement of the 1970s has devolved into a fairly conservative movement that asks for only reactionary “rights” like marriage and military service. We need a theory and praxis of animal liberation that resuscitates the queer spirit of rebellious and generous connectedness. To be fully realized, the ecofeminist ethos of care (Kheel 1993) must be nourished and informed by eros. But “love don’t come easy,” as Diana Ross and the Supremes once sang. Eros can’t be hurried, ordered around, or expected to march in anything like a straight line. To resuscitate eros, we must understand its queer ways.

123

124

Chapter 6 Eros and the Mechanisms of Eco-Defense

Steps to an ecology of eros “The diversity of modes of singing amongst birds is so great that it defies explanation” —C. K. Catchpole and P. J. B. Slater, Birdsong (2008, 234) “We don’t only sing, but we dance just as good as we want.” —Archie Bell, introducing himself and the Drells on the 1968 recording of “Tighten Up”

The leaves of Bruce Bagemihl’s (1999) 750-page encyclopedic account of animal homosexuality teem with “wuzzling” dolphins, “necking” giraffes, and “cavorting” manatees, not to mention “aquatic spiraling,” “sonic foreplay,” and a form of sexual stimulation known as the “genital buzz”— and all of that just in the few pages devoted to an overview of the “dizzying array” of ways that nonhuman animals court and show affection to one another (1998, 13–18). In all, Bagemihl carefully reviews the documented accounts of same-sex courtship, affection, pair-bonding, parenting, and sex—did I mention “mounting, diddling, and bump-rumping”?—among the members of some 300 species of mammals and birds. Zoo visits, televised nature programmes, and storybooks featuring stereotypically gendered characters teach us to think about other-than-human animals as relentlessly heterosexual despite “the much more prevalent sex diversity among living matter” (Hird 2004, 86). It’s not just pop culture that gets it wrong. Bagemihl (1999) also documents the long, sorry history of scientific obliviousness, bewilderment, and heterosexist hubris in the face of same-sex sexuality among other-than-human animals. From the ethologist who decried the moral degeneracy of butterflies to the wildlife biologist who evicted a same-sex couple from the nest they had built together so that he could give it to a heterosexual pair, the litany of wrongs and wrong-headed writings is leavened only by the unintentional humor of the sometimes surreal extremes to which scientists have gone in order to avoid seeing (much less naming) the queer eros right in front of them. Before we ascribe the bemusement of those scientists entirely to the mutually reinforcing junction of ignorance and bigotry, consider this: The fungi known as Schizophyllum Commune swap genes by touching and have as many as 23,000 mating types (or, as we like to call them, sexes), thereby preventing “selfing” in a species in which any individual can both give and receive genetic material in order to produce progeny (Casselton 2002). Confused? That’s my point. Not only does non-reproductive sexuality flower in a variety of forms, but sexual reproduction itself occurs by means of a

Chapter 6 Eros and the Mechanisms of Eco-Defense

125

“remarkably diverse” (Fraser and Heitman 2004) array of strategies. But— wait!—there’s more: not only some plants but also some animals reproduce by various asexual means, including parthenogenesis. As Catriolina Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (2010) note in the introduction to their important anthology, Queer Ecologies, this “diversity of asexual modes of reproduction as well as several multi-gendered ones . . . appear to defy dominant, dimorphic accounts of sexual reproduction altogether” (2010, 12). Alaimo (2010) and others have commented on the inadequacy of our conceptual categories in the face of all of this. As biologist J. B. S. Haldane famously opined, “the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose.” So it’s not surprising that eighteenth-, nineteenth-, or even twentieth-century scientists unwittingly assimilated their observations of same-sex behavior into dualistic schemas they themselves couldn’t see (because they seemed like reality). Of course, just because mushrooms swap genes by brushing against each other is no reason to presume that we could or should do the same. Just because marsupials are also mammals does not—alas—mean that we can bound around with infants in our pouches. Nonetheless, this survey of the variety of (always embodied) animal eros offers us much more than an antidote to the still-too-common misconception that homosexuality is unnatural. First: Things we can’t imagine right now might still be possible. And: We too may be queerer than we suppose. People have courted, demonstrated affection, constructed households, and raised their children in a blooming profusion of different ways. And, while there’s some doubt that we deserve the sobriquet of sapiens, there’s no doubt at all about the homo. We not only sing to our same-sex sweethearts in almost as many languages and styles of music as there are varieties of birdsong, we also dance together in configurations that don’t fit within the boy-girl two-step of the Western square dance—and not just in urban discos. Since errors and erasures in this realm are almost as endemic as those concerning same-sex sexuality in nonhuman animals, a brief survey is in order. While gay or lesbian identity constructed in contradistinction to the relatively recently invented category of “heterosexual” is fairly new and geographically bounded (Katz 2007), same-sex erotic behavior has been “virtually universal in human societies” (Drucker 1996, 75), sometimes in defiance of cultural norms but often with cultural toleration or approval. From traditional marriages between African women (Morgan and Wierenga 2006) to casual sex “play” between Pakistani men (Khan 2001)—neither considered particularly queer by the participants—expressions of same-sex desire continue to thrive even in regions where they are repressed or reputed not to exist.

1980 The Political Palate: A Feminist Vegetarian Cookbook by The Bloodroot Collective published.

126

Chapter 6 Eros and the Mechanisms of Eco-Defense

None of this is news. Or, rather, none of this should be news, since the evidence—like that of animal homosexuality—has been hidden in plain view. For example, in Africa, where rock-solid scientific certainty of the absence of indigenous homosexuality delayed appropriate AIDS-prevention interventions for many years and where several states still justify anti-gay legislation with the idea that homosexuality is alien to the continent, indigenous same-sex sexuality “is substantially documented in scores of scholarly books, articles, and dissertations in a wide range of academic disciplines, in unpublished archival documents . . . in art, literature, and film and in oral history from all over the continent” (Epprecht 2008, 7). In the Americas, culturally condoned expressions of same-sex sexuality were so common among indigenous peoples that this was frequently cited by invading Europeans as justification for cultural genocide (Galeano 1992; Katz 1976; Smith 2005). In some North American native cultures, “two-spirit” people—those believed to have both male and female aspects due to their gender presentation and/or sexual orientation—were not only tolerated but esteemed (Roscoe 1988). Similarly, “there are striking examples of the recognition and acceptance of forms of same-sex desire in the history of important parts of Asia” (Sanders 2005, 32), including China, India, Japan, and Java. Local varieties of homoeroticism in Thailand and elsewhere in Asia-Pacific were and remain truly diverse, confounding not only heteronormativity but also easy explanations about what “homoeroticism” might mean (Jackson 2001; Wieringa, Blackwood and Bhaiya 2007). As Chou (2001) cautions about China, homosexualities of the past ought not be simplistically romanticized. Some traditional patterns of same-sex sexual behavior, in that region and elsewhere, occurred within and were patterned by social inequalities that today we would condemn as unjust. Some historical reports of same-sex eroticism record its repression. Nevertheless, whether they have been esteemed, approved, tolerated, used, abused, or repressed—and however they have thought of or denoted themselves—people who sometimes or exclusively have sex with members of their own sex have existed in virtually every human population. We’re just that kind of animal. Many—perhaps most—of the people who have sex with partners of the same sex do not think of themselves as homosexual or even bisexual. At the same time, terms denoting homosexual identity (or something like it) abound. While the globalization of gay pride has led to the importation of the terms gay and lesbian and variants thereof into numerous languages (Katyal 2002), local terms both old and new express local ways of enacting and thinking about same-sex sexuality. Again, it is necessary to resist idealization. While some contemporary same-sex practices challenge social

Chapter 6 Eros and the Mechanisms of Eco-Defense

127

inequalities or are integrated into egalitarian communities, others conform to—and perhaps reinforce—binary notions of gender and patriarchal conceptions of power (Blackwood and Wierenga 2007). Nonetheless we can revel in the linguistic and conceptual creativity deployed in the service of same-sex sexuality. In China, some activists have repurposed the term tongzhi—a Chinese translation of a Soviet-era term for comrade, constructed from tong (same) and zhi (spirit, goal, or orientation)— as a way of denoting themselves in a manner congruent with cultural values (Chou 2001). In Uganda, the previously derisive term kuchu is now claimed with pride (Tamale 2007). In the United States, many Native Americans have embraced the term two-spirit as “an expression of our sexual and gender identities as sovereign from those of white GLBT movements” (Driskill 2004). Diversity in self-identification also flowers within populations. Thailand’s national lesbian organization uses the term ying-rak-ying (women who love women) to describe its constituency; at the same time, many Thai women who do love women reject that term in favor of tom (short for tomboy) or dee (short for lady), because these better express their sense of themselves within the rigid gender system in which their sexualities operate (Blackwood and Wieringa 2007). Which brings us to gender. Recently, Czech archaeologists unearthed neolithic skeletal remains of a biological male who had been buried—4,500 to 5,000 years ago—in the manner in which females of that time and place usually were interred (Karpova 2011). Considerable diversity in ideas about gender has been documented in the human cultures that have arisen in different times and places since then, both in terms of whether gender is mutable (Nanda 2000; Ramet 1996) and how many genders there might be (Davies 2006; Roscoe 2000). Communities also have varied in the ways that they have coped with or explained persons who don’t quite fit into any of the categories created by their culture’s gender system (Epprecht 2008). The multiplicity of sexualities and exuberant diversity of gender expression among Homo sapiens suggests that some measure of flexibility—or, at least, a capacity for and tendency toward variability—is intrinsic to our species. The rigid enforcement of a two-gender system that goes hand in hand with rigid insistence on relentless heterosexuality is an artifact of a particular set of circumstances, seeming natural only because of its tendency to reproduce itself. Televised nature programs tend to portray evolution as an urgent quest in which every animal attempts to spawn as many offspring as possible. Some scientists, too, have implicitly defined evolutionary success as reproduction of the individual rather than the survival of the family, population, or species. Some “evolutionary psychologists” attribute virtually every characteristic and behavior to the reproductive imperative implicit in this presumed law of nature.

1981 Sally Gearhart gives a talk on interconnected oppressions at the rally on World Day for Laboratory Animals.

128

Chapter 6 Eros and the Mechanisms of Eco-Defense

But, if incessant reproduction is the law, we’ve got an awful lot of animal scofflaws. In some species, only a few individuals even attempt to reproduce. In many species, females—for whom reproduction is often a physically perilous affair—actively avoid pregnancy by means of a variety of strategies (Bagemihl 1999). Natural selection in the sense of helpful genetic mutations passed along to offspring who then disproportionately survive to reproduce certainly does occur and certainly does explain many evolutionary changes. But exclusive focus on the reproductive success of individuals ignores the interlocking material and social circumstances that also evolve. It’s not quite right to say that organisms adapt to their environments, since organisms are part of their ecosystems, which themselves constantly change as their participants evolve (Oyama 2000). Furthermore, natural selection acts upon not only physical traits but also behaviors, many of which are transmitted by social learning (Avital and Jablonka 2000). Moreover, cultural and physical traits often co-evolve. Natural selection acts upon groups as well as individuals. The overall fitness (or lack thereof) of the social group—family, flock, tribe, or troop— significantly influences likelihood of individual survival. Some circumstances—such as high rates of predation—do mandate that everyone at least attempt to reproduce for the population to survive, but in most instances the problem faced by populations is the opposite. The long-term survival of any group requires that its population be calibrated to the availability of resources. Same-sex sexual activities (and non-reproductive heterosexual erotic activities) allow for pleasure, bonding, and other benefits without risk of reproduction. Hence, queer eros enhances group fitness. Adults who don’t reproduce help groups in other ways. Homosexual pairs adopt orphaned offspring in many species. Adult animals who do not reproduce—including but not limited to exclusively homosexual animals— tend to contribute more to their social group than they take out. In all social circumstances where adults cooperate to provide protection and resources to juveniles, those who do not reproduce contribute without withdrawing. Those adults also have more energy to devote to activities that benefit the group, whether these be writing operas or looking out for predators. The simplistic view of natural selection and the European mindset in which it emerged both presume a struggle for scarce resources as the precondition of life. This way of thinking about the world makes sense in its own ecological context. Even after the decimation of the plagues and purges of the centuries just past—the traumatic impact of which must still have been reverberating in European psyches—the population of Europe remained too high to be satisfactorily supported by its deforested and depleted ecosystems.

Chapter 6 Eros and the Mechanisms of Eco-Defense

129

Within such simultaneously barren and crowded surrounds, the Hobbesian view of each against all must have seemed self-evidently true. But, in fact, plenitude rather than scarcity is the norm in nature. Most animals—like most people, prior to the successive waves of conquest and consequent population explosion that have globalized the environmental crises from which they arose—spend comparatively little time securing food and shelter, with plenty of time left to play. Virtually every human culture has produced music, visual art, and sport of some sort. All of these—along with non-reproductive sexuality—can be seen as exuberant uses of the abundant energy that shines down from the sun every day (Bagemihl 1999). Bagemihl contrasts his theory of biological exuberance with the notion that homosexuality serves as a natural check on population, but I see those ideas as complementary and mutually reinforcing. The exuberant upsurge of queer eros keeps populations in check, thereby setting the stage for even more exuberance. Suppression of queer eros thus injures populations, and their enveloping ecosystems, as well as individuals.

In zoos and vivisection labs, animals are assorted into boy-girl pairs and forced to mate if they do not do so willingly. Often, this involves breaking up same-sex pair bonds or preventing females from fleeing unwanted penetration. Likewise, in animal agriculture—whether on factory farms or family farms—everything depends on reproduction. From the electroejaculation of bulls to the confinement of fragile “broiler breeder” hens with heavyweight roosters made sex-mad by starvation, numerous cruel and unusual strategies ensure that no farmed animal opts out of compulsory heterosexuality. Even animal lovers join in the superintendency of animal sexuality. Dog lovers who decry puppy mills still feel free to decide whether, when, and with whom the canines under their control will partner. Animal advocates pursue the laudable goal of reducing animal homelessness and execution by demanding that all companion animals be deprived of reproductive freedom rather than by abolishing the for-profit traffic in dogs and cats. Animal sanctuaries, with similarly pragmatic rationales, routinely prevent their residents from choosing to reproduce. Meanwhile, homosexual or transgender behavior or identity remains a risky endeavor for people in many places. In some 35 countries, homosexual behavior remains a crime punishable by imprisonment. In South Africa—the

1982 Vandana Shiva founds the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology.

Reproduction and its discontents

130

Chapter 6 Eros and the Mechanisms of Eco-Defense

first country in the world to enshrine non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in its national constitution—lesbians still confront an everyday threat of “corrective rape.” Here in the United States, Mercy for Animals cofounder Nathan Runkle was gay-bashed nearly to death only a few years ago. The structural function of homophobia is the maintenance of the man-ontop binary gender system (Pharr 1988). That system dates back to the days when both daughters and dairy cows were the property of males who presumed the right to force females—whether they be called wives, slaves, or livestock— to bear more or different offspring than they would otherwise choose. Patriarchy and pastoralism both require fairly relentless preoccupation with and control of reproduction (and, hence, sexuality). The traditional pastoralism from which today’s factory farms evolved necessarily involved hands-on control of the reproduction of captive animals (Patterson 2002). Tools and tactics first used to gain and maintain total control over nonhuman animals were adapted for use with human slaves (Spiegel 1996). The process of conquest by which men who viewed women, land, animals, and people of other races as property created a globalized economy also carried homophobia around the world. In today’s topsy-turvy world in which Uganda’s Christian president condemns homosexuality as a foreign import despite the fact that Christianity comes from elsewhere while the indigenous Langi people allowed marriage between men and biologically male mudoko dako people (Tamale 2007), it may be important to repeat that queer eros flowered in a variety of flavors prior to the era of European colonialism and imperialism. While cultures varied in their attitudes towards homosexual behavior, toleration appears to have been the norm (Epprecht 2008), including in places where homophobia is now most marked (Galeano 1992). What happened? First, European Christians brought their atypical antipathy to homosexual behavior with them when they invaded the Americas, in some instances using native sex and gender norms as excuses for cultural genocide (Galeano 1992; Smith 2005). Obversely, Europeans were vested in the notion that Africans were like animals—and, hence, relentlessly heterosexual. “The prevailing prejudice was that Africans were uncivilized and close to nature . . . The emerging consensus on homosexuality thus required that Africans conform to the expectation of a supposedly natural heterosexuality” (Epprecht 2008, 40). The mechanisms by which African sexual diversity was denied or suppressed eerily echo those by which homosexuality among nonhuman animals was elided from the record for so long. Anthropologists failed to see, refused to record, hesitated to publish, or explained away instances of same-sex sexuality of which they were aware. These colonial cover-ups were in many instances compounded by postcolonial leaders eager to avoid any suggestion of the luridly “exotic”

Chapter 6 Eros and the Mechanisms of Eco-Defense

131

spectacles of African sexuality promulgated by National Geographic and the like (Epprecht 2008). Many of these leaders were men eager to enjoy the subordination of women facilitated by homophobia (Tamale 2007). Meanwhile, the post-colonial wave of trade globalization brought commodified conceptions of “gay,” “lesbian,” and “transgendered” identity to regions where indigenous cultures had other ways of conceptualizing same-sex activity (Katyal 2002). Rooted as they are in European ways of thinking about identity, these may or may not prove to be useful to queer people elsewhere—or to our shared struggle to bring ourselves into balance with the biosphere—but they certainly have provoked a fresh wave of homophobia-fueled violence in many places (Blackwood and Wieringa 2007). How did “gay” or “lesbian” get to be nouns instead of adjectives (or, even better, verbs) anyway? In short, the same Enlightenment ideas that brought us scientific racism engendered a way of thinking that led eventually to the categorization of people on the basis of what we now call sexual orientation. “The rise of evolutionary thought in Charles Darwin’s wake generally coincided with the rise of sexological thought in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s” (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010, 7). As we’ve seen, sexual selection is but one aspect of natural selection. Yet, perhaps because of the preoccupation with reproduction implicit in patriarchy/pastoralism, that element of evolution became the center of evolutionary theory. In consequence, “sex became a matter of fitness, and individual attributes could now be evaluated based on their apparent adaptiveness to an organism’s reproductive capacity” (2010, 8). That was bad news for eros. The medicalization of homosexuality arose at the same time, and from the same train of thought, as eugenics and scientific racism. Many of the medical assaults on people who were (or were perceived to be) either homosexual or non-gender-normative “occurred in the context of Race Hygiene and Race Betterment movements”; not only queers but also deaf, disabled, or dark-skinned people were considered “literally, biological enemies of the human species” (McWhorter 2010, 76). All of these efforts to improve the species presumed and sought to preserve the position of Homo sapiens at the top of an imagined hierarchy, the scientific rationalization of which continues to make speciesism feel logical even to those who now know that evolution is not an upwards affair. Along with delusions of grandeur and a perverse preoccupation with reproduction, the process of conquest that has led us to the present juncture exported an ethic of exploitation and a fantasy of infinity. That ethic, and the fantasy that enables it, have since been codified into the economic rules by which European powers still force the rest of the world to play.

1982 Feminists for Animal Rights founded in the United States.

132

Chapter 6 Eros and the Mechanisms of Eco-Defense

Capitalism demands and indeed requires incessant growth—new markets for new goods, which must come from somewhere—in order not to collapse. Unlike economies in which participants cooperate to trade fairly, capitalism is mathematically unbalanced by the removal of profits into private pockets and thus requires constant infusions of fresh resources. Thus, it requires not only incessant reproduction—whether of factory farmed chickens, assembly line automobiles, or worker-consumers to build those cars and eat those birds—but also the diversion of desire. Every natural impulse, whether for self-expression or social contact or—yes—sex, must be detoured toward the purchase of some product (for which, of course, one must earn the money to buy). And so now queer eros, where it is not still actively suppressed, faces the same dispiriting fate as heterosexual romance—the destination wedding! Having integrated virtually every place on earth into its economy of empty rapacity, late consumer capitalism has run out of places to go for fresh supplies of worker-consumers. Everything now depends on getting everybody to buy more—which is of course the opposite of what everything actually depends on. Seven billion people now stand on an overheated planet. “Humans have already changed the biosphere substantially, so much so that some argue for recognizing the time in which we live as a new geologic epoch, the Anthropocene” (Barnosky et al. 2012, 57). Climate change comes down to “patterns of human behavior, particularly over-population and overconsumption” (Oscamp 2000), both of which follow directly from the suppression and diversion of eros in all of its exuberant diversity. Preoccupation with reproduction characterizes most present-day human cultures. Reproduction remains an obligatory duty to family and community even as we confront the catastrophic environmental effects of overpopulation. Parenthood remains conflated with adulthood in many minds. This “repro-centric” (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010, 11) logic is both cause and consequence of suppression of queer eros. If reproduction is the paramount goal, then non-reproductive eros must be suppressed; if nonreproductive eros is suppressed, eros will seek satisfaction in socially sanctioned reproduction and consumption. Unless . . .

Consciousness of lost limbs In 2001, the mass trial of 52 Egyptian men arrested for dancing together at a floating nightclub rightly drew international attention to the ongoing

Chapter 6 Eros and the Mechanisms of Eco-Defense

133

persecution of homosexuals in that country (Hawley 2001). But let’s notice something else: these were men who knew they faced prosecution for homosexual activity. And they were dancing. To disco. On a boat. From “Fiddler on the Roof” to “Mississippi Masala” (not to mention “Romeo and Juliet” and all of its remixes), pop culture thrums with tales of young lovers defying parental prohibitions to follow their hearts. In the real world, eros often leads lovers of all ages to disobey even more powerful authorities. Here in the United States, in South Africa, and elsewhere, laws prohibiting miscegenation aimed to maintain oppressive racist regimes, but men and women of different races persisted in partnering, the threat of jail notwithstanding. All around the world to this day, same-sex couples come together despite real and menacing threats ranging from social ostracism to the death penalty. “Beneath the paving stones—the beach!” Like half-forgotten dreams, anarchist slogans like that Situationist gem from the 1968 student rebellion in Paris pop up on walls and burst from the mouths of black-clad teenagers smashing shop windows with baseball bats. Tattooed survivors of childhood sexual abuse tuck battered copies of the CrimethInc Ex-Workers Collective Manual Days of War, Nights of Love into backpacks, to read while sitting in endangered trees. Vegan punks bake cupcakes for each other, just to bring some sweetness to their struggles. Eros is right there—ready—to show us where we need to go and give us the energy to get there. Yet eros is also so easily deadened or misdirected. Eros can help us save ourselves and each other, and quit wrecking the planet along the way, but to do so it must be deliberately cultivated. It might seem counterintuitive to pursue the aim of checking human hubris by cultivating human eros. But true eros, unlike plastic pleasures purchased from profiteers, is both enlivening and relational. Eros is exuberant, sometimes jumping up when and where you least expect it. Eros begins in the body but always reaches outward, seeking connection. By “eros” I mean not only physical love and sexual desire but also what Black lesbian feminist poet and activist Audre Lorde (2012) called the “sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, [that] forms a bridge between the sharers” (2012, 56). Eduardo Galeano (1992) reports that among the Maya of Colombia, the ancestors of whom rose up against the sexual constraints imposed by the Conquistadors, the word for sex is “play.” Eros is playful. Queer eros is both cause and consequence of a happy state of affairs in which life is not a grim struggle to reproduce in the face of scarcity but, rather, joyous usage of the surplus energy that shines down from the sun every day. Because eros is inherently surplus and always oriented outward, genuine eros is always generous. We share smiles with sweethearts and give gifts and

1982 “Feminist Criticism and Cultural Imperialism (Where does one end and the other begin)” by Jane Meyerding published in Animals Agenda.

134

Chapter 6 Eros and the Mechanisms of Eco-Defense

Figure 6.1 At VINE Sanctuary, cross-species care-giving is common. Here, lamb ALFie offers a tender greeting to arriving calf Maddox. They have since become best friends. Photograph © by Kathy Gorish for VINE Sanctuary.

kisses to beloved others. It feels good to do this. Eros awakens feelings of all kinds—including the ones that ought to be telling us this is an emergency and giving us the energy to do something about it. As Lorde wrote in her classic essay on the uses of the erotic, “as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society” (2012, 58). Our feelings are fuel, and the good news is that they are renewable sources of energy. Eros arouses not only desire but also curiosity, creativity, and courage. It has abidingly proven to be more powerful than guns or governments in motivating human behavior. Inherently ecological, because it begins in our animal bodies, eros undammed and undiverted will flow in the direction of biospheric balance. Greta Gaard (1997) points out that “dominant Western culture’s devaluation of the erotic parallels its devaluations of women and of nature” and that “these devaluations are mutually reinforcing” (1997, 115). As with all of the intersections of oppression, the upside of seeing the junction is recognizing opportunities for intervention. And so, when we nurture wombats, women, or weeds genuinely and with generosity, we also are cultivating eros. But, if we hope to use eros to reanimate ourselves while animating our

Chapter 6 Eros and the Mechanisms of Eco-Defense

135

environmental efforts, we will have to come to better terms with our own animality.

The Eurocentric logic of mind-over-matter tells us that we should transcend our animal bodies by means of our very fine minds. That’s the same logic, however, that divides and conquers the world into male-over-female, whiteover-black, and straight-over-gay. My favorite flavor of ecofeminist theory extends the feminist understanding of intersectionality to include earth and animals, deepening our analyses of race, gender, and other social constructs along the way. Neither homophobia nor speciesism (nor any other ism) is a disembodied idea. They are practices (and accompanying rationalizations) that arose at particular times and places for particular purposes. Perhaps the most important purpose, for both of those and for sexism and racism too, is control of reproduction. Thinking about that intersection forces us to face not only our own animality but also our complicity in the ongoing subordination of other species by our own. That raises the question of how to go about animal liberation. Neither we nor the other animals we propose to liberate are abstract entities. Actual animal liberation is all about bodies—theirs and ours—and is therefore all about eros. Without eros, ethos risks slippage into the realm of disembodied abstraction. Suppression of eros is suppression of our animal selves and is thus antithetical to the project of animal liberation. Suppression of eros severs us not only from our desires but also from others, deadening our feelings and relationships in the process. It’s difficult to imagine how a liberatory ethos of care could be adequately enacted by beings who are cut off from themselves and others. What would an erotic ethos of care bring to the project of animal liberation? First, eros is always embodied and therefore always actual. Animals don’t care about our pretty ideas or pure intentions—what matters is what actually happens. An ethos of care rooted in eros would therefore mandate that care be actually enacted, that our ideas interact with that practice, and that both theory and praxis be constantly adjusted in response to what actually happens. Next, eros is all about desire. Different animals want different things. Salmon want streams that haven’t been dammed or diverted. Frogs want

1983 The Case for Animal Rights by Tom Regan published.

The animal problem

136

Chapter 6 Eros and the Mechanisms of Eco-Defense

unpolluted ponds. Chickens want out of those battery cages. Dogs want other dogs. All of these desires are located in bodies. Their frustration is felt physically. So, again, this brings us back to the actual. But also, the animal rights movement as it is currently constituted does not, in my view, make an adequate effort to wrestle with that diversity of desires, preferring to focus on rights that are most important to animals like us (e.g. legal liberty). An ethos of care rooted in eros would mandate a much more thorough reckoning of animal desires and a consequent (and continuing) adjustment of aims and tactics. Third, eros is all about relationships. An ethos of care rooted in eros would therefore mandate that such deliberations flow from, insofar as possible, real relationships with the animals in question. Which brings me to my expanded conception of the organic intellectual— let’s call it my theory of the veganic intellectual. As conceptualized by Gramsci (1971), the organic intellectual—a person who conceptualizes and articulates the ideas of a class of people in which she is enmeshed—is essentially a function of the social group, both growing out of and acting upon the group. Whether or not they have formal education, organic intellectuals both learn and teach in the context of active engagement with the struggles of their group, whether that group be an economic class or some other aggregation. Roosters have helped me not only to think through several important subjects but also to apply the resulting ideas in ways that help other roosters. When the first avian resident of what would become VINE Sanctuary turned out to be a rooster rather than a hen, he refused to allow my stereotyped ideas about roosters to define him or our relationship. This forced me to think deeply about where I got those ideas, which in turn led me to investigate the role of animals—real and imagined—in the social construction of gender. Similarly, a bonded pair of male foie gras factory refugees provoked me to commence a series of workshops at which participants considered the intersections between queer and animal liberation. Then, in flew a group of two dozen roosters who had been living together for years. They schooled both me and the young orphans from factory farms in the methods and morals of flock life. Their habit of sleeping in the trees rather than in buildings eventually led our sanctuary to be the first in which chickens rewilded themselves. That wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t decided to listen to the roosters themselves—who expressed themselves very clearly using their voices and bodies—on the question of how to balance freedom against safety from predation. Our sanctuary was the first to figure out how to rehabilitate former fighting cocks. I say “our sanctuary” deliberately because this was a

collective effort. The process involves not only soothing but also socializing these abused birds. I certainly could not have conceptualized that process without having first been taught about roosters by roosters, and the process cannot be implemented unless there are roosters willing and able to model the social behaviors that former fighters must learn in order to resolve conflicts without injury. The veganic intellectual, then, plays the same role as the organic intellectual, but for a group that includes nonhuman animals. The veganic intellectual does not claim to be “the voice of the voiceless,” but rather recognizes and listens to animal voices. The veganic intellectual—I think of Karen Davis (1995) with chickens and Lori Gruen (2009) with chimps— thinks in conjunction with nonhuman animals, exercising both empathy and careful observation, and then shares any arising ideas with people who don’t have the same opportunities for communion.

The return of the repressed Desire drives everything. It’s easy to maintain patriarchy once you’ve tricked little girls into dreaming of their wedding days, and it’s not so hard to control the working class if a preponderance of grown men are addicted to pornography and flat-screen TVs. Conversely, it can be difficult to engender progressive change while wild eros is dead-ended into such socially constructed cravings. According to a warning recently published in Nature by more than 20 researchers in biology and allied fields, we seem to be “approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere” (Barnosky et al. 2012, 52) wherein “the biological resources we take for granted at present may be subject to rapid and unpredictable transformations” (2012, 57). Reductions in both “world population growth and per-capita resource use” (57) will be necessary if we hope to avoid or even mitigate the coming cataclysmic changes. Scientists haven’t had much luck in using rational argumentation to persuade people to change our patterns of resource consumption (much less our mania for reproduction). Maybe we’ll get lucky (in both senses of that phrase) if we focus on feeling instead, cultivating queer eros in all of its manifestations, including not only love among animals but also topophilia and biophilia. That project will depend on our ability to put people in touch with their most heartfelt desires (which won’t tend to be wedding dresses or artisanal cheese), and that in turn will require us to embrace our own animality, including its queer eros.

137

1983 A Mobilization for Animals occurred with 15,000 people assembled at four major locations targeting the Primate Research Centers.

Chapter 6 Eros and the Mechanisms of Eco-Defense

138

Chapter 6 Eros and the Mechanisms of Eco-Defense

Acknowledgments While I wrote these words, many of the ideas arose as a function of processes of collective cognition. I both acknowledge and thank all of the participants in all of the “Queering Animal Liberation” workshops and discussions I facilitated between 2002 and 2010 as well as all of the students in my 2011 and 2012 “Cultural Politics of GLBT Sexuality” classes at Metropolitan State University. Thanks are also due to Carol Adams, Rebecca Barry, Greta Gaard, Lori Gruen, and Miriam Jones for useful comments on drafts of this chapter or portions thereof. Words cannot quite convey the ways that I am also indebted to the nonhuman animals in whose presence I have tried to imagine what real liberation might look like and how we might get from here to there together. This chapter goes out to all of the former egg factory inmates who have collectively taught me to remain ready to be surprised by what turns out to be possible.

139

Figure 7.1 Self-Portrait With Chicken by Sunaura Taylor, 6” x 4”, 2012, pen, paper and color pencil. In this drawing an atypically bodied woman is shown in profile sitting naked with legs outstretched. Her back parallels the vertical right side of the paper while she faces towards the left, hairy legs stretched out in front of her. The figure is looking upwards. Perched on her leg is a plucked chicken who is also in profile. The chicken looks in the same direction as the human woman. Both of the figures are wrong. This particular chicken cannot do the thing we most want birds to do, the thing that inspires us, that stirs our envy—she cannot fly. Plucked and awkward, she is lacking feathers, too long in the legs, and her wings have been reduced to nubs. We wonder whether the bird escaped in the midst of being processed for meat or for feathers, and we wonder what wounds she has been left with. The woman is wrong too. She is unclothed, but not posing for our titillation. Her skinny, hairy legs align her with nature, and against culture. Like the chicken who doesn’t fly, this woman’s legs seem useless for walking. Her hands taper off into small nubs, perhaps limited in what they can grip and manipulate, but concave and cupped and ready to receive. They are wrong as individual specimens and doubly wrong as a pairing, but they are not alone and not ashamed. The chicken is a familiar, a consort to the woman, just as the woman is a familiar, a consort to the chicken. They are denuded, open, waiting for something from above. The nature of that something is unexplained and undepicted, but hangs over everything, a cloud cover. Maybe they should be afraid, but they are not. This is an image of contemplation and companionship; of bodily analogies; of vulnerabilities; of questions about whether similarities outweigh differences. 140

Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care Sunaura Taylor Being cared for

F

eminists have long recognized the importance of interdependence and caring. Whether critiquing the ways in which caring for “dependants” has historically been placed upon the backs of women (and especially women of color), or drawing attention to an ethic-of-care (the ways in which caring should play a vital role in conceptions of justice), feminists have a long tradition of theorizing a worldview that understands humans (and often nonhumans) as being interdependent beings who care and rely on each other. However, where feminist theory has done a lot to theorize what it means to care, there has been less said about what it means to be cared for. I have had a complex relationship to care. As a disabled person I both espouse a philosophy of interdependence (of which care is a vital component), while simultaneously resisting the narrative that care (especially in the form of goodwill, charity or the kindness of people’s hearts) will somehow allow me to live a more liberated life. Being “cared for” can be stifling, if not infantilizing and oppressive (as of course can being in the role of the carer). In her article “Building Bridges with Accessible Care: Disability Studies, Feminist Care Scholarship,

1983 Feminists for Animal Rights begins creating a slide show to illustrate visually the negative connection culture makes between women and animals entitled, “The Re-Presentation of Women and Animals.”

7

141

142

Chapter 7 Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care

and Beyond,” Christine Kelly writes: “theoretical work in disability studies implicitly and explicitly positions care as a layered form of oppression that includes abuse, coercion, a history of physical and metaphorical institutionalization, and a denial of agency” (Kelly 2013, 786). Historically, disability rights advocates have declared that we do not want to be cared for, we want rights, justice and an accessible society that does not limit or make impossible our involvement and contributions. However, over the years there has been an emergence of feminist disability studies scholars and others who have tried to bridge these complications and create a theory of care that recognizes the value, but also the oppressive histories, of being both cared for and a carer (Kittay 2002; Nussbaum 2006; Kelly 2013). An important contribution this work can offer is a consideration of what it is that those who historically have been viewed as being cared for, those who have been labeled as dependants or burdens, contribute to their relationships, society and the larger world. Theories of care and interdependence have also manifested themselves in a number of ways within conversations around animal ethics, particularly a feminist ethic-of-care toward animals. This work understands animals and humans as entangled in interdependent relationships, recognizing that animals are often vulnerable and dependent upon human care. In The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, Carol Adams and Josephine Donovan write that animal rights theory “presumes a society of equal autonomous agents,” however, as they argue, “Animals are not equal to humans; domestic animals, in particular, are for the most part dependent on humans for survival—a situation requiring an ethic that recognizes this inequality” (Donovan and Adams 2007, 6). Within a feminist ethic-of-care framework, the dependency and vulnerability of animals (particularly domesticated ones) adds to our responsibility toward them. Where many animal advocates have viewed animals simply as vulnerable victims who need protecting (often declaring themselves to be a “voice for the voiceless”), a feminist ethic-of-care offers a framework of justice that has the potential to complicate conceptions of dependency (perhaps in a similar vain to disability studies), to understand animals not as dependent beings with no agency, but rather as vital participants and contributors to the world. Echoing certain core philosophies in disability studies about who is given voice and subjecthood, Adams and Donovan write: “Some ethic-of-care theorists emphasize that our attention be directed as well to what the animals are telling us—rather than to what other humans are telling us about them” (Donovan and Adams 2007, 4). Although various questions exist as to how to listen to animals, an ethic-of-care nonetheless radically moves toward

asking how we can help and care for animals without paternalism and infantilization. In a similar vein, philosopher Lori Gruen’s work on entangled empathy challenges us to consider how our empathetic responses to others (specifically nonhuman animals) can help us not simply to sympathize with their suffering, but to consider what an individual animal wants, needs and is communicating. Gruen writes: “Being in ethical relation involves, in part, being able to understand and respond to another’s needs, interests, desires, vulnerabilities, hopes, perspectives, etc. not simply by positing, from one’s own point of view, what they might or should be but by working to try to grasp them from the perspective of the other” (Gruen 2013, 224). The sort of empathetic understanding and paying attention that Gruen and Adams and Donovan call for seems deeply relevant to conversations around disability as well, particularly to conversations around intellectual disability. I want to be clear here that I am not comparing animals and disabled humans; instead I am recognizing that to understand another being who does not communicate in ways able-bodied/able-minded humans have historically valued, we must pay attention to individuals—learning from them so that we can recognize their agency and preferences. This is a crucial step in moving conversations about animal and disability liberation away from limited narratives about suffering and dependence to more radical discussions about creating accessible, nondiscriminatory space in society in which individuals and their communities can thrive. Disability studies can add to the work being done by feminist animal ethics scholars by offering a critique of negative conceptions of dependency, and an understanding of interdependence that moves beyond mutual advantage, challenging us to consider what it is that animals are saying, wanting and contributing—while trying to consider what it is like for them to be cared for.

Disabled, domesticated, and dependent It is generally accepted that disabled people are dependent. We are dependent on carers for our physical wellbeing, and often dependent on the government for our economic wellbeing. It is also generally accepted that domesticated animals are dependent: they rely on human beings for feeding, shelter, health care, often even with birthing and aid with intercourse. Wild animals rely on us as well, albeit in a very different way—they are vulnerable to human decisions that involve their habitats, their food sources, whether they as

143

1983 Following in the tradition of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (started in 1981), The Porton Down Women for Peace and Animal Liberation occupied the area surrounding the Porton Down military testing site in England. In their public statements and their leaflets they protested the military industrial complex, vivisection, and provided a feminist analysis of the violence of the state.

Chapter 7 Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care

144

Chapter 7 Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care

individuals can be hunted or poached, and sometimes even whether their species will survive into the future. My libertarian grandmother once told me I should be grateful for everything I get as a disabled person, because I’d “die in the woods” if left to my own devices. What she meant is that if put in a “natural state” there would be no question of my complete and utter dependence—I would quickly starve unless someone kindly decided to share their berries with me, or (as my grandmother would have it) gave me some meat. These are fighting words for a grandma (she was quite a character), but her basic thesis is actually widely accepted. The notion that disabled people only survive out of the goodness of other people’s hearts has a long and widespread history. The point that my grandmother missed though, is that my able-bodied siblings would also eventually die in the woods if left all alone with no human support or tools. They might make it for longer than me, but odds are they’d go pretty quick. Domesticated animals are also confronted with this line of thought. They are understood as man-made, unnatural, and as utterly dependent and unfit for the wild. Various environmentalists, animal welfarists, and animal advocates have presented domesticated animals this way—as tragically, even grotesquely, dependent. Disabled people and domesticated animals are burdened with many people’s stereotypes about what it is to be unnatural and abnormal, as well as assumptions about the indignity of dependency. However, the truth is, all of us are dependent. We human beings begin life dependent on others and most of us will end life dependent on others. Yet dependence often becomes an excuse for exploitation and has extremely negative connotations—no one wants to be dependent. In American rhetoric there is a strong emphasis on independence and self-sufficiency. America is the country where everyone has the opportunity to become “independent.” Independence is perhaps prized beyond all else in this country and for disabled people this means that our lives are automatically seen as tragically dependent (Taylor 2004). But how true is this? Disability advocates argue that we are all dependent on each other. The difference between the way many disabled activists and scholars understand dependence and how the rest of society views it is that there is not so much emphasis on individual physical autonomy. In many ways independence is more about individuals being in control of their own services (be it education, plumbing, electrical, medical, dietary, or personal care), than it is about individuals being completely self-sufficient (Oliver 1990); this is true not only for the disabled population, but for the population in general. Very few (if any) of us in the world are actually independent.

Chapter 7 Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care

145

I want us to see disability as sometimes (though not always) resulting in a dependency that is but one variety of a dependency that we have all experienced at some point and to which we are all vulnerable. Similarly, the care of the disabled person who needs to be assisted is but a form of care that many persons give to dependents of all sorts. My reason for eliding the differences in favor of the commonalities is that I believe that we as a society have to end our fear and loathing of dependency. We need to see our dependency and our vulnerability to dependency as species-typical. (Kittay 2002, 248)

As human beings our dependence on each other is actually a miniscule amount of our overall dependence. We are massively dependent on other animals and of course on our environments in ways that are impossible for us to really even fathom. Other animals are dependent on their communities, habitats, and ecosystems. None of us are actually independent. The whole planet is interdependent. Despite this, disabled people become symbols of dependence. Where many able-bodied people can live in a delusion of independence (until of course they fall ill, hurt themselves, grow old, and so forth), disabled

1983 Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey published.

The negative consequences of dependency are largely made, whether through economic disenfranchisement, social marginalization, imprisonment, or societal, cultural and architectural barriers. In many ways the treatment of disabled people is merely a more pronounced form of the condition of other populations, as able-bodied individuals become dependent through socioeconomic frameworks as well. The point is not that able-bodied people and disabled people are equally dependent, but rather that the dichotomy between independence and dependence is a false one.1 Perhaps the distinction seems minor, but to many disabled people—a population persistently labeled as dependent and burdensome—a reminder that independence is far less clear-cut than is often presumed becomes vital. However, it is also true that not all disabled people are able to be in control of or make decisions about their lives. As Michael Bérubé writes, “autonomy and self-representation remain an alluring ideal even (or especially) for people with disabilities” (Bérubé 2010, 102). Bérubé points to the fact that there are individuals who rely on others for all aspects of their survival and who lack not only physical independence, but the ability to make choices about their lives. Dependency is real—but the point is that we all exist along its spectrum. The challenge is to understand dependency not simply as negative and certainly not as unnatural, but rather as an integral part of being alive. Eva Feder Kittay writes:

146

Chapter 7 Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care

people are often stigmatized as dependent and burdensome. Because of this our contributions to our families, communities, and cultures are often negated. Dependency has been used to justify the marginalization and exploitation of both human beings and nonhuman animals. In Animals Make Us Human Temple Grandin writes: I vividly remember the day after I had installed the first center-track conveyor restrainer in a plant in Nebraska, when I stood on an overhead catwalk, overlooking vast herds of cattle in the stockyard below me. All these animals were going to their death in a system that I had designed. I started to cry and then a flash of insight came into my mind. None of the cattle that were at this slaughter plant would have been born if people had not bred and raised them. They would never have lived at all. (Grandin and Johnson 2009, 297)

Dependency, it turns out, is a common argument for killing animals. The animals we consume are dependent on us for their very existence. By eating them we are doing them a favor. Slowfood USA’s “US Ark of Taste” program lists “over 200 delicious foods in danger of extinction,” the vast majority of which are animals— heritage breeds.2 As Josh Viertel of Slowfood USA told NPR, “You’ve got to eat them to save them!” Their tagline reads “Saving Cherished Foods, One Product at a Time.”3 In many ways the “eat them to save them” logic of Slowfood USA is the pinnacle of consumer activism. By eating heritage breeds, by literally consuming individual beings who are understood as products, one is said to not only help small farmers, support local agriculture and promote biodiversity, one can also save the animals themselves! But who exactly are we saving? Grandin and Slowfood USA use the extinction argument for different means, Grandin to justify animal slaughter in general (including from the largest producers), and Slowfood USA to support small farmers. But in both cases this paradigm presents certain animals (namely domesticated ones) as being dependent on their very own exploitation in order to live. Dependency is a reasoning that has been used to justify slavery, patriarchy, colonization, and disability oppression. The language of dependency is a brilliant rhetorical tool, as it is a way for those who use it to sound concerned, compassionate, and caring while continuing to exploit those who they are supposedly concerned about. Consider for example that farmer and author Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall argues that we must kill animals because they are domesticated and thus will be dependent on us during their lives. He writes:

Chapter 7 Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care

147

In a logic that is rooted in ableist notions of dependency as a negative and as burden, Fearnley-Whittingstall suggests that since we will still have a responsibility to these animals if we don’t slaughter them (because they are dependent on us), we should eat them, as their dependent lives will be less worthwhile than their wild and independent counterparts. Domesticated animals have in fact not only been presented as burdens who need to earn their keep, but in fact as “unnatural,” environmentally damaging beings created by man. They are also repeatedly presented as dimwitted in comparison to their “natural” and “wild” counterparts. Ecofeminist Marti Kheel points out in her book Nature Ethics that environmentalist John Muir “expressed a common disdain toward domesticated animals when he described the dignity of wild goats as ‘bold, elegant and glowing with life,’ in contrast to domesticated goats who are ‘only half alive”’ (Kheel 2008, 5). This statement has a stunning parallel to the common sentiment that disabled people are incomplete, or as Jerry Lewis famously described, to be disabled is to be “half a person.”4 In a similar vein, philosopher and environmentalist J. Baird Callicott wrote that domesticated animals “have been bred to docility, tractability, stupidity, and dependency. It is literally meaningless to suggest that they be liberated. It is, to speak in hyperbole, a logical impossibility” (Callicott 1989, 30). The dependency of domesticated animals has often been presented in tandem with their supposed “stupidity,” as if the fact that they cannot take care of themselves “in the wild” proves their dimwittedness. Of course numerous studies by animal behaviorists have shown that even when measured with human yardsticks, domesticated animals are hardly “stupid.” Their intelligence is actually all the more striking when one considers the brutality the majority of domesticated farmed animals have undergone— being kept in environments completely devoid of mental stimulation for generations. However, the idea that it would be “meaningless” to support a population’s liberation from exploitation, even if they were “dependent” and “stupid,” is chilling.

1984 Feminists for Animal Rights publish their first newsletter.

Of all the creatures whose lives we affect, none are more deeply dependent on us—for their success as a species and for their individual health and well-being—than animals we raise to kill for meat . . . This dependency would not be suspended if we all became vegetarians. If we ceased to kill the domesticated meat species for food, then these animals would not revert to the wild . . . The nature of our relationship would change but the relationship would not end. We would remain their custodians, with full moral responsibility for their welfare. (Fearnley-Whittingstall 2007, 16)

148

Chapter 7 Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care

Much of the hostility toward domesticated animals seems to come from the idea that they are unnatural; they have no natural state to be liberated to. Domesticated animals are often said to be destructive to the environment and at odds with natural habitats. I am not denying the horrendous impacts of animal agriculture on the environment and specifically global warming, rather an example of what I’m pointing to would be how many headlines blame these issues “on the cows,” versus on humans’ profound exploitation of them. Consider a more specific example, again from Callicott: “Domestic animals are creations of man. They are living artifacts, but artifacts nevertheless, and they constitute yet another mode of extension of the works of man into the ecosystem. From the perspective of the land ethic a herd of cattle, sheep, or pigs is as much or more a ruinous blight on the landscape as a fleet of four-wheel drive off-road vehicles” (Callicott 1989, 30). One wonders what Callicott would say of dependent disabled people going for a stroll or hike in our power wheelchairs? Alison Kafer has written about ableism within the environmental movement and nature writings, and has shown how narratives of nature are persistently presented as being open only to those who can have an unmediated experience of “the natural.” Kafer writes: “a very particular kind of embodied experience [is presented as] a prerequisite to environmental engagement . . . to know the desert requires walking through the desert, and to do so unmediated by technology. In such a construction, there is no way for the mobility-impaired body to engage in environmental practice; all modalities other than walking upright become insufficient, even suspect. Walking is both what makes us human and what makes us at one with nature” (Kafer 2013, 132). Domesticated animals have also been seen as suspect—understood as unnatural “creations of man” who do not have natural interactions with nature, but instead are themselves equated with technology that harms nature. However, as we saw with Grandin, Slowfood USA, and Hugh FearnleyWhittingstall, a more popular—in some ways contradictory—argument sees animal dependency not as unnatural or bad for the environment (in fact domesticated animals are sometimes said to be essential for sustainable farming), but rather as justification for the continued use of animals for food. For example, Stephan Budiansky, author of The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication, writes: “one may argue that domesticated animals are degenerates that through dependency and excess kindness from humans have become weak and ever more dependent on the crutch of human care. But calling them ‘degenerates’ does not somehow mean they are less worthy of our consideration. If anything, their degeneracy . . . argues for an even greater responsibility on our part” (Budiansky 1999, 123). Putting aside the almost laughable description of human “excess kindness” toward animals,

Chapter 7 Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care

149

and the prejudiced assumptions that disability, weakness, and dependency are inherently negative experiences, Budiansky gives us a picture of animal “degeneracy” that requires human “responsibility” versus contempt. However, this responsibility toward animals is expressed by raising, slaughtering, and eating them. Considering all this, it comes as no surprise that dependency becomes an even more blatant issue when the animals being discussed are actually disabled themselves. In instances of animal disability, speciesism and ableism work together to render dependency an even more justifiable and righteous reason for exploitation. When an animal becomes disabled their continued contributions to their environments and communities are understood as less important, unessential or nonexistent, and their only contribution is said to be in their flesh. For instance, a recent controversy broke out at Green Mountain College over the slaughter of the school’s two working oxen, Lou and Bill, who have tilled the school’s land for nearly a decade. Green Mountain, which is known for its environmental and sustainable mission, voted to slaughter the two oxen for food as they were becoming disabled, aging, and unable to work. The decision was made after Lou stepped into a woodchuck hole, aggravating an injury in his leg. Lou already had “medical” issues that were making him unable to work, which along with the fact that the two oxen were aging led the school to decide to put them to use another way. As the assistant manager of the farm told the New York Times, “His quality of life is rapidly deteriorating, and this is the logical time to use him for another purpose.” The focus on the two oxen’s work value and productivity is telling—when animals are no longer earning their keep through working, their bodies must be put to work and made useful in another way. The New York Times piece quotes the farm’s director: “ ‘It makes sense to consume the resources we have on campus,’ said Mr. Ackerman-Leist, who pointed out that the farm’s purpose is to produce food in a humane and sustainable way, not to shelter animals. ‘We have to think about the farm system as a whole.’ ”5 The ways in which romantic and conservative notions of self-sufficiency, productivity, and independence are entangled in contemporary discussions of animal welfare and sustainability is troubling. The work that Lou and Bill were able to perform as able-bodied animals justified (only for a time) their very right to live. As they became old and disabled the farm was adamant that they were not an “animal sanctuary.” The people at Green Mountain College believed that Lou and Bill had only one way of earning their keep as disabled animals—as edible flesh. The idea that some dependent individuals are less valuable and more justifiably exploitable because they are understood as burdens who offer

1984 The Second Seasonal Political Palate: A Feminist-Vegetarian Cookbook by The Bloodroot Collective published. In it they explain, “Our relationship to the earth and her creatures is the same relationship we must have with each other as sisters: when we hurt the earth we hurt each other; when we create with the earth we create with each other.”

150

Chapter 7 Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care

nothing of value back to their communities, of course, has a long and troubling history for disabled humans as well. The sort of thinking that led to the crisis of Lou and Bill reveals limited ways of understanding what it means to contribute. Western concepts of mutual support and aid have largely been framed by philosophical traditions such as the social contract, which has privileged concepts of mutual advantage over other, sometimes less clear-cut, forms of support. In her book Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, philosopher Martha Nussbaum shows how the tradition of the social contract has failed to provide substantial groundwork for justice for disabled people and nonhuman animals, as well as other vulnerable populations across the globe. The philosophical tradition of the social contract is a theoretical idea that emerged during the enlightenment, which tries to answer some of the questions of why individual, free, and rational people would choose to come together to govern themselves with laws in a society. The social contract argues that people who were roughly equal in strength and cognitive capacity chose to leave a “state of nature” and govern themselves for mutual advantage (Nussbaum 2006, 3). However, as Nussbaum writes, this influential theory “fails to address [disability, species membership, and nationality] as it assumes that in a ‘state of nature’ the parties to this contract really are roughly equal in mental and physical power” (Nussbaum 2009, 118). Of course, as Nussbaum points out, this assumption does not take into consideration physical and intellectual asymmetry between the disabled and able-bodied, and humans and nonhumans, as well as inequality between those who are born into wealthy nations and those who are not. Nussbaum similarly shows how the social contract tradition’s reliance on the idea of mutual advantage falls short when addressing disability and “species membership” as disabled individuals and animals don’t necessarily offer mutual advantage per se and, in fact, in some cases may offer a disadvantage. Thus Nussbaum argues that a more complete theory of justice must challenge this tradition and include other more complex reasons for cooperation besides advantage, such as love, compassion, and respect. An interesting parallel to Nussbaum’s critique of the social contract is available in another contract theory: a co-evolution theory that authors such as Michael Pollan, Stephen Budiansky and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall use to justify meat eating. This theory says that human beings and domesticated animals have entered into a contract with each other that, like the social contract theory, is largely based on the idea of mutual advantage. The theory says that we have entered into a co-evolutionary pact with these species that gives us the responsibility to care for them in exchange for their services and flesh. To be vegetarian or vegan would mean abandoning those animals who

Chapter 7 Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care

151

are most dependent on us. Leaving them to their own devices, they say, would be a fate far worse than the dinner table (Taylor 2011). The theory says that if we look at things in evolutionary terms, domesticated animals are doing remarkably well. Their populations are high and spread all around the globe, and they have another species—humans— providing them food and shelter. The theory argues that the relationship of domestication, and the killing that goes along with it, is just as beneficial for the animals as it is for the humans. Once again, the argument is that if we didn’t eat them, they wouldn’t exist. As Pollan writes, “From the animals’ point of view the bargain with humanity turned out to be a tremendous success, at least until our own time. Cows, pigs, dogs, cats, and chickens have thrived, while their wild ancestors have languished” (Pollan 2009, 120). Thus we have entered into a sort of social contract with these species, based on supposed mutual advantage; we provide and care for them and in return they feed our soil and give us their flesh. To stop eating animals would be to turn our back on this relationship and send these dependent domesticated creatures out into the wild only to die of starvation or be brutally killed by other animals. As I have argued elsewhere (Taylor 2011), there are numerous problems and contradictions in this theory (for example, the high population that supposedly heralds these species’ success is a consequence of intensive industrial animal farming, a practice these writers are all in opposition to). For our purposes, however, it is Nussbaum’s critique of the power asymmetries in a state of nature that is useful here, as to argue that animals were on a level playing field with human beings when this supposed contract was being formed ignores the obvious fact that humans and animals have extremely varied mental and physical capacities. This bargain was not made between beings “roughly equal in mental and physical power,” but between powerful human beings and more vulnerable animals. This contract was clearly written by the more powerful humans for their own interests: under this contract, humans benefit not only as a species but also as individuals, whereas animals “benefit” (if that word can be used at all) only as species, not as individuals. When we argue that animals are dependent on their own slaughter for their very survival, we need to remember that it is we human beings who are choosing each and every time to slaughter them. When we say that by killing them we are letting them live we are declaring that these animals have only one purpose: to be used by us. We see them only as commodities that will be discontinued if there is no market for them. In many ways the thinking behind the co-evolution theory is constructed around the idea of interdependence: domesticated animals and human beings have evolved together—animals help humans and we in turn help the

1984 Greenpeace posts a sexist antifur advertisement, “It takes up to 40 dumb animals to make a fur coat. But only one to wear it,” on 600 billboards across England.

152

Chapter 7 Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care

animals, or so the argument goes. However, this interpretation of interdependence is lacking in a disability studies perspective. The interdependence that is discussed within this framework may be one of mutual advantage and support in some ways, but it also simultaneously devalues and takes advantage of those who are deemed weaker and dependent. What disability studies and a feminist ethic-of-care brings to the conversation is a more nuanced understanding of how to define mutual advantage and a muchneeded analysis of what it means to be accountable to beings who are in many ways the most vulnerable. A disability studies perspective of interdependence is about recognizing that we are all vulnerable beings, who during our lives go in and out of dependency, who will be giving and receiving care (and more often than not, doing both), and that contribution cannot be understood as a simple calculation of mutual advantage. When we view animals through this lens we see that they contribute in countless calculable and incalculable ways, from fertilizing the soil to offering care and friendship. Lou and Bill, for example, clearly did contribute something very powerful to their community, which can be seen by the various people who offered them sanctuary and tried to save their lives. Disability asks us to question our assumptions about who counts as “a productive member of society” and what sort of activities are seen as productive. It asks us to question the things we take for granted—our rationality, the way we move, the way we perceive the world. Animal ethics also requires a critical engagement with our assumptions about who is valuable and who is exploitable and a reimagining of what it means to contribute to the world.

Disabled, domesticated, and valuable Surprisingly it is not only environmentalists and animal welfarists who argue that domesticated animals are unnatural, undignified, and dependent: animal advocates often argue this as well. Some animal advocates suggest that domestication has created beings who are so vulnerable to human exploitation that the only ethical solution is to stop breeding them until there are none. This includes farmed animals as well as cats and dogs. Domesticated animals are vulnerable as they are not only dependent on us, but have also been physically altered in unnatural ways that can be harmful to them—in other words, they are disabled. Domestication has led to unquantifiable violence towards animals. As Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka write in their 2011 book Zoopolis: A Political

Theory of Animal Rights, “for many animal advocates, [domestication] is irredeemably unjust; a world in which humans continue to maintain domesticated animals cannot be a just world” (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, 73). Many animal advocates believe that the best thing for animals is to have nothing to do with us, but because domesticated animals are dependent on us for their survival, and cannot be separated from human society, they are better off not existing at all (2011, 78). The reasoning behind an abolitionist argument for extinction is on one level very simple: if we stop bringing animals into existence, then they won’t exist for human beings to exploit and make suffer. Some animal activists see the suffering and exploitation of domesticated animals as enough of a justification for their extinction. In a way I understand why the prospect of these species (that we have bred to be extremely defenseless against us) becoming extinct seems like the most responsible conclusion to the question of domesticated animals—after all we have done, why should we be trusted as caregivers?6 Like Donaldson and Kymlicka I argue that the extinction argument is troubling, especially when one considers just how much of it is based upon assumptions about dependency, naturalness, and quality of life (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011; Taylor 2011). For example, consider this quote by animal advocate Gary Francione: Domesticated animals are dependent on us for everything that is important in their lives: when and whether they eat or drink, when and where they sleep or relieve themselves, whether they get any affection or exercise, etc. Although one could say the same thing about human children, the overwhelming number of human children mature to become autonomous, independent beings. Domestic animals are neither a real nor full part of our world or of the nonhuman world. They exist forever in a netherworld of vulnerability, dependent on us for everything and at risk of harm from an environment that they do not really understand. We have bred them to be compliant and servile, or to have characteristics that are actually harmful to them but are pleasing to us. We may make them happy in one sense, but the relationship can never be “natural” or “normal.” They do not belong stuck in our world irrespective of how well we treat them. (Francione, 2012)

Francione’s argument is strikingly similar to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s statement presented previously, but they are arguing for completely opposite ends. It seems clear that the dependency and vulnerability of domesticated animals makes people on all sides of the animal debate profoundly uneasy. The ableist assumption that it is inherently bad, even unnatural, and abnormal

153

1985 The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers and Vivisection in Edwardian England by Coral Lansbury published.

Chapter 7 Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care

154

Chapter 7 Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care

to be a vulnerable dependent human being is here played out across the species divide—pointing to just how much ableism informs our ideas of animal life. Wild animals in these narratives are romanticized—presented as the independent, natural subjects that Western philosophers have so long idealized. Domesticated animals on the other hand are seen as pitiable. In a parallel to the “better-off-dead” narrative of disability that views disability as worse than death, domesticated animals are viewed as “better-off-extinct.” However, if we consider the often-gross misjudgments on quality-of-life issues that people make about disability, it becomes clear why it’s so important to question assumptions about which lives are worth living. In fact it is impossible for me to consider the extinction view without conjuring up a history and legacy of eugenics. Animal breeding and eugenics have an entangled and troubling history. Early eugenicists were inspired by the way animal breeds could be manipulated to have “better” traits. In the early part of the twentieth century Charles B. Davenport, a leader in the American eugenics movement and member of the American Breeders Association, a group devoted to furthering knowledge about genetics, heredity and breeding, described eugenics as “the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding.” Author Charles Patterson writes that Davenport “stressed the importance of people’s genetic history and looked forward to the time when a woman would no more accept a man ‘without knowing his biologico-genealogical history’ than a stockbreeder would take a sire for his colts or calves who was without pedigree” (Patterson 2002, 83). Eugenics had as its goal the idea of perfecting the genetic makeup of a population by ridding the genetic pool of “undesirable” traits, which were invariably linked to disability, race, and class. What we have done to farmed animals over the past century has already been a form of eugenics— genetically perfecting them for our purposes. We have selectively bred these animals over centuries to make them into better products, better specimens. Where in human beings perfection meant getting rid of “unwanted” characteristics such as disabilities, in animals it has often actually meant enhancing certain characteristics to the point that they easily could be classified as disabilities and deformities.7 Now that these animals are here with us, do we really want to enact another coercive force over their individual lives and species by leading them to extinction based upon assumptions that their lives are less worth living than wild animal lives? I find the idea that the solution to the wrongs of domestication is to erase the very populations whom we have harmed, extremely unsettling. Instead I want to ask, how can we dismantle the

Chapter 7 Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care

155

exploitative systems that have created these injustices in the first place? Part of this involves critiquing the idea that one’s life is less valuable, worthy, or even enjoyable, if one is vulnerable and dependent. I am not suggesting that animal advocates are promoting eugenics, but I am suggesting that all of us who identify as animal advocates think deeply about what it means to purposefully want beings to become extinct. We need to take seriously the possibility that just because an animal is not “wild” and may in fact be dependent on human care, that she also may simultaneously value and enjoy her life and may in fact still have agency. We need to consider that perhaps it is better that she exist than not exist. Although I am in complete agreement that what we have done to these animals is beyond egregious, as a disability scholar I am extremely weary of claims that domesticated animals are better-off-extinct because they are vulnerable and dependent. Donaldson and Kymlicka write that “Dependency doesn’t intrinsically involve a loss of dignity, but the way in which we respond to dependency certainly does.” They offer the insightful example of a dog pawing at his bowl for dinner. “If we despise dependency as a kind of weakness, then when a dog paws his dinner bowl . . . we will see ingratiation or servility. However, if we don’t view dependency as intrinsically undignified, we will see the dog as a capable individual who knows what he wants and how to communicate in order to get it—as someone who has the potential for agency, preferences and choice” (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, 84). Does an animal’s dependence on human care have to be understood as inevitably negative, as simply characteristics that will invariably equal exploitation? Is it possible to have a relationship with domesticated animals in which humans recognize the value of these animals we have evolved with, beyond a simple calculation of mutual advantage? Could the dependence of domesticated animals be seen as an opportunity for humans and animals to coexist together, as farmers say, “symbiotically,” but without accepting exploitation? A large part of caring for animals ethically means listening to what animals are telling us about the care they are receiving and the care they would like to receive. As Gruen suggests, deciphering what animals need and want is a process that not only demands that we be actively involved in our own empathetic responses to animals, but also that we invest energy into learning about their species-typical behaviors as well as their individual characters. What could we learn from domesticated animals if we took Gruen’s suggestions to heart? If we tried harder to listen to them, would it challenge the often infantilized image animal advocates have of animals as “voiceless” beings who simply need our protection? Would our narratives of their futures (as individuals and as species) be altered? As Donovan writes,

1985 “The Liberation of Nature: A Circular Affair” by Marti Kheel published in Environmental Ethics.

156

Chapter 7 Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care

“It is not so much . . . a matter of caring for animals as mothers (human and nonhuman) care for their infants, but of listening to animals, paying emotional attention, taking seriously—caring about—what they are telling us” (Donovan 2006, 305). Where are we left, though, if both the argument for domesticated animal extinction and the argument for continued slaughter and animal exploitation are both inadequate? I have suggested that to view the dependence of domesticated animals through a disability studies and justice framework may give new answers to the questions surrounding animal exploitation and may also open up a third path in the question of our responsibility to domesticated animals. Instead of continuing to exploit animals because they are dependent on us, and instead of leading these animals to extinction as a potential vegan alternative, could we not realize our responsibilities to these animals whom we have helped create? Could we not recognize our mutual dependence on each other, our mutual vulnerability, and our mutual drive for life? As Donaldson and Kymlicka suggest, could we not recognize that we are all residents—citizens—of shared communities? The big questions that affect disability seem equally relevant to this debate: How can viewing these issues through a lens of interdependence help reframe the conversations? How can those who are seemingly most vulnerable also be recognized as useful, valuable, and necessary? How can we begin to start listening to those who need care about how they feel about their own lives and the care they are receiving? Feminist disability studies scholar Christine Kelly’s description of care seems particularly important here. Kelly explains care as being “an unstable tension among emotions, actions, and values, simultaneously pulled toward both empowerment and coercion.” She writes that “Care is a paradox” and that it is a tension among numerous definitions, “none to be disregarded” (Kelly 2013, 790). Kelly provides an analysis of care that insists on messiness and responsibility. Care and needing care are sites that rather than trying to avoid, we need to be radically attentive to. For better or for worse our co-evolution with domesticated species has created animals whom we are deeply entangled with, both ecologically and emotionally. These animals remind us that we ourselves are a part of “nature,” that we cannot just cut ourselves free from other animals. But they also remind us that we are capable of deep coercion and exploitation—that we have too often dominated those whom we deem dependent and vulnerable. Vulnerability and dependence can be unsettling as they are states that require intimacy, empathy, and self-reflection, but they also hold the potential for new ways of being, supporting, and communicating—new ways of creating meaning across differences in species and ability.

Chapter 7 Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care

157

This article is adapted from a chapter of my book Beasts of Burden (forthcoming from the Feminist Press, all rights reserved). I would like to thank the Feminist Press for allowing me to share this version here. This work builds on ideas I first elaborated in two previous articles; I am thus grateful to the Monthly Review and Qui Parle for allowing me to include some of the content from these pieces. I want to thank Lori Gruen and Carol Adams for their encouragement. And, as always, I am grateful to David Wallace for his love and support.

Notes 1

2

3 4 5

6

Someone who is quadriplegic, for example, is not physically autonomous in the same way an able-bodied person is, but this is not necessarily what makes this person dependent. If this person has little to no access to assistant services, to accessible housing, or to transportation, she will at worst spend her life locked away in a nursing home, or at best be at the whim of her family or other volunteer carers, with very little way of changing her situation. However, if this person has access to the social services she needs to live how she desires, to choose and hire who assists her, and an accessible environment in which to live and work, then her life becomes one more of interdependence than of dependence. Allison Aubrey, “Heritage Turkeys: To Save Them, We Must Eat Them,” www.npr.org, November 23, 2011 http://www.npr.org/blogs/ thesalt/2011/11/23/142703528/heritage-turkeys-to-save-them-we-musteat-them (accessed October 14, 2013). “Ark of Taste in the USA,” Slow Food USA, http://www.slowfoodusa. org/ark-of-taste-in-the-usa (accessed October 14, 2013). Jerry Lewis, “What if I had Muscular Dystrophy?,” Parade, September 2, 1990. Jess Bidgood, “Oxen’s Fate Is Embattled as the Abattoir Awaits,” (New York Times, 2012), http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/29/us/oxenspossible-slaughter-prompts-fight-in-vermont.html?_r=0 (accessed March 24, 2013). These animal advocates believe that we have a deep responsibility to the animals who exist currently to treat them with compassion and dignity while they are alive. We also have a responsibility to stop

1985 Anti-fur activists break away from Greenpeace and found “Lynx.” They engage in the first direct harassment of women wearing fur coats (Lynx painted them red).

Acknowledgments

158

Chapter 7 Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care

7

breeding billions of these animals every year—after all, there only are so many animals because humans breed them. However, at a certain point a decision will have to be made as to whether remaining domesticated animals are sterilized or kept from breeding to stop their species from reproducing. In regards to disability, I am not arguing that we need to make sure that animals who continue to grow so much muscle mass that their bones break under their weight, or animals whose udders produce so much milk that they are prone to broken bones, infection, and osteoporosis, must continue to exist. Before we can really begin to untangle the massive ethical issues that we have created through breeding, domestication, and exploitation, we have to unpack a lot of complex questions about our responsibilities to different breeds of animals and far more consideration has to go into what disability is in different species and how animals interact with disability. The point is that there needs to be a more thoughtful conversation about disability in regards to domestication and breeding, beyond simply using it as a justification for extinction.

159

Figure 8.1 Several Activists Hold Deceased Animals During NARD Memorial Ceremony. Photograph by Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Media.

160

Facing Death and Practicing Grief Lori Gruen

I

n March 2013, with very little attention, the African black rhino was declared extinct by the organization that is tasked with making such determinations—the International Union for Conservation of Nature. In March 2018, the last male northern white rhinoceros on earth died, leaving behind just two female northern white rhinos, his daughter Najin and his grand-daughter Fatu. In between these two deaths, in July 2015 in Zimbabwe, a white dentist from Minnesota, Walter Palmer, who has a history of illegal poaching, lured a lion named Cecil out of a protected sanctuary with the corpse of another animal and then shot Cecil with a crossbow. That did not kill the majestic creature, so Palmer and his two local hired hands tracked Cecil, shot and killed him, skinned him, and then beheaded him for a trophy. In the wake of Cecil’s killing, there was tremendous public outrage. (Capecchi and Rogers 2015). People protested daily outside of Palmer’s dental office, which had to be shut down for a while. Activists continue to monitor Palmer’s hunting activities and in 2020 reported that he had killed an endangered ram in Mongolia (Dalton 2020). Since so many animals are threatened with extinction and billions of animals are raised, killed, and eaten every year, this outcry over one man’s killing of a lion seems a disproportional response. I find it puzzling that some deaths generate such

1985 For the first time The Annual Conference on Women and the Law includes a workshop on animal rights.

8

161

162

Chapter 8 Facing Death and Practicing Grief

attention when others are barely noticed. I will suggest that part of the reason there is such disparity in our responses to death is that those of us who are committed to ending egregious lethal human practices have quite divergent views about what living and dying with other animals entails. These divergent views—coupled with an understandable reluctance to face death—have limited discussions of how we might grieve, particularly as the threats to existence on the planet continue to grow. In an attempt to open discussions about the construction of compassionate and nurturing practices of grieving as one way to honor the depth of our relationships, I will first analyze divergent views about what it means to live and die with others, and then discuss ways of mourning.

Ecofeminism, extinctionism, and exterminism Some have argued that we should end our relationships with other animals, particularly domesticated animals, and in that way we can avoid being responsible for their suffering and deaths. These “abolitionists” view our relationships as inherently ones of domination and believe we ought to end them by humanely caring for those animals who are dependent on us and making sure, through sterilization, that no more animals are brought into existence. This view has been called “extinctionism.”1 Many ecofeminists disagree with this view, arguing that attending to both the inevitability and specificity of our relationships with others, humans and nonhumans, and responding with compassion, care, or what I call entangled empathy, are important alternative practices that can lead to changing lives and relationships for the better.2 Our relationships with other animals (human and non) are a central part of what makes lives meaningful, and rather than ending our relationships we’d do better working to improve them. Ironically, ecofeminists find themselves in tension with some other feminists who mischaracterize ecofeminists as something like extinctionists and who fail to understand the complexities of entangled living and dying. These feminists erroneously see ecofeminists as engaged in some naive embrace of moral purity and suggest that ecofeminism advocates “exterminism.”3 That ecofeminism is targeted by extinctionists and criticized as exterminist I think reveals an aspect of our complicated relationships with other animals, namely an anxiety about death and loss that living with other animals inevitably entails. One of the central insights of ecofeminist theory, an insight that is shared with other theoretical interruptions of the status quo, is that the logic of

Chapter 8 Facing Death and Practicing Grief

163

domination crosses subordinated categories and builds strength from mutually reinforcing exercises of authority. The structures of patriarchy and heteronormativity and racism and colonialism and speciesism are not simply similar or metaphorically connected, but rather work together (not always or simultaneously) to solidify the power the dominant class gains through the construction of a subordinated “other.” Though some get confused by identity politics in debates about these intersecting oppressions, these are structures or systems of power; individuals, even individuals with power within the system, can’t create them or undo them on their own and the verdict is still out on what force collective action can have against such powerful systems.4 Ecofeminists who are concerned about other animals have been critical of “animal rights” discourse because it is based on a type of individualism that does not provide the theoretical tools for critically examining these systems of exploitation and the conceptual and material forces that help to maintain them. The legalistic reasoning of animal rights also tends to ignore the relationships that we are in and the particular concerns, interests, sympathies, and sensitivities of the individuals in those relationships. In addition, much of the animal rights literature focuses on aggregations and abstractions in two important and sometimes problematic ways. Particular individuals and their relationships are lumped together as mass terms—for example, farmed animals, companion animals, research chimpanzees, and suffering, pain, and death are generalized over. This focus on general suffering often excludes an exploration of the other features of one’s life that may involve great pleasure or satisfaction in the company of others. Even when most of one’s life is lived in conditions of dire exploitation, it is still possible that life isn’t all and only suffering, particularly if one has meaningful relationships. Pleasure can sometimes be found in awful places. Ecofeminists have also argued that standard approaches to animal rights truncate the description of the problems that emerge and fail to ask more critical questions about the conditions that allowed systems to create and perpetuate problems in the first place.5 While ecofeminists have focused on these systems and on the theoretical differences between approaches to changing the systems that cause suffering and exploitation, we, too, have not done a good enough job analyzing the particular relationships we have with other animals, particularly companion animals. There is an important concern that living with other animals is characterized by relations that always position humans in control and nonhumans in conditions of servitude or, at best, dependency. Humans are in a relationship of patronage with nonhumans—we can be kind and generous, but always with an air of superiority. When humans bring nonhuman animals into their homes, for example, the nonhuman animals are forced to conform

1985 City of Philadelphia bombs a townhouse, killing 11 people, involved with MOVE—a Black anti-oppression organization committed to Black liberation, sustainability, and animal rights.

164

Chapter 8 Facing Death and Practicing Grief

to the human rituals and practices that exist there. Cats and dogs are often denied full expression of their natural urges when their “owners” keep them indoors, in crates, or forbid dogs from digging, scavenging for food, or rolling in the most putrid-smelling stuff they can find. Of course, there are reasons we can give for imposing restrictions on companion animals, some of which have to do with the benefits that are gained by both the animals and their human companions. But even the most thoughtful, compassionate domesticated relationships can’t erase the fact that companion animals are forced to live by our cultural standards. Companion animals are, in a very real sense, our captives.6 Relationships with companion animals involve degrees of instrumentalization, as perhaps all relationships do, but when we turn to our relationships with farmed animals the power relationship becomes a clear relationship of use. The trouble with these sorts of relationships is most apparent with those animals who are being raised as named “quasi-pets” on so-called sustainable or pasture-based farms. The horrors that accompany the painfully short lives and violent deaths of the animals used for food (clearly on factory farms, but also on smaller farming operations) is what leads many of us to refuse to participate in a system that violently instrumentalizes individuals in deeply troubling ways, obliterates their personalities and interests, and turns them into both real and metaphorical fodder. Though most of us can readily eschew animal parts in our own diets, ecofeminists are mindful of the violence perpetuated in many gendered, racialized, and colonial contexts as well the realities of a changing climate and thus forego top-down, absolute universalizing judgments that everyone, everywhere should see “veganism as a moral baseline.” Instead, most ecofeminists argue for “contextual moral veganism” that recognizes both the moral centrality of a vegan diet and contextual exigencies that impede one’s ability to live without directly killing or using others (Curtin 1991). Some theorists have decided that this is not an acceptable response to instrumentalism and instead insist that, to avoid participating in exploitation, all of our relations with other (domesticated) animals should end. And the extinctionist view applies not just to farmed animals but also to companion animals. Prominent proponent of this position, Gary Francione, has argued against human relationships with companion animals: Domesticated animals such as dogs and cats are vulnerable and entirely dependent on us for all of their needs. They live very unnatural lives because they are not part of the human world and they are not part of the animal world. So however well we treat our nonhuman companions, the institution itself is morally problematic. (Unferth 2011)

Chapter 8 Facing Death and Practicing Grief

165

. . . ecofeminism retains the hierarchy of human over non-human: the nonhuman is treated differently from the human in that the latter is regarded as a “person” while the former is regarded as a “thing.” This is explicitly in contrast to rights theory, which eliminates the “thing” status of at least some animals. Ironically, ecofeminism systematically devalues animal interests because it regards the categorical rejection of institutionalized exploitation as itself a hierarchical position. (Francione 1996, 103)

In addition to being a mischaracterization of the ecofeminist position, this claim is too simple and dichotomous. In rejecting universal prohibitions, one needn’t accept the value dualism of humans over nonhumans, although navigating the complexities of context in nonhierarchical ways does require care and a good deal of attention. While extinctionists have argued that ecofeminists condone domination of other animals by refusing to accept universal abolitionism, some feminists have strangely criticized ecofeminists for proposing universal abolition— what they call exterminism. Donna Haraway, for example, attributes this

1985 Dian Fossey murdered in Rwanda, Zaire.

I find such views rather arrogant in that they fail to acknowledge the agency of other animals as well as ignoring human vulnerability and dependency. Further, such views suggest that vulnerability and dependency are problematic. Only from a place of privilege might one even formulate the illusion that dependency is something that can be completely overcome. Not only are we in a shared community that would be destroyed if some of us were to be forced out of existence, but others (human and non) co-constitute who we are and how we configure our own identities and agency, our thoughts and desires. We can’t make sense of living without others, and that includes other animals. We are entangled in complex relationships and, rather than trying to accomplish the impossible by pretending we can disentangle, we would do better to think about how to be more perceptive and more responsive to the deeply entangled relationships we are in. Since we are already, inevitably in relationships, rather than ending them we might try to figure out how to make them better, more meaningful, and more mutually satisfying. Recognizing that we are inevitably in relationships to other animals— replete with vulnerability, dependency, and even some instrumentalization—and working to understand and improve these relationships is not condoning exploitation. Acknowledging that we are in relationships doesn’t mean that all relationships are equally defensible or should stay as they are. Relationships of exploitation or complete instrumentalization are precisely the sorts of relationships that ecofeminists have argued should change. Extinctionists have argued otherwise, suggesting that ecofeminism assumes the legitimacy of institutionalized exploitation and accepts the very hierarchy we ostensibly reject:

166

Chapter 8 Facing Death and Practicing Grief

“vexing” view to ecofeminists. As she puts it, exterminism is a sort of killing, a “genocide of ways of living and dying together.” It’s not clear that Haraway wants every way of living and dying together to stand—stopping actual genocides (think Rwanda, Bosnia, Nazi Germany) denies a certain way of living and dying together but it would be perverse, or maybe ironic, to call ending a genocide a genocide as well. She does think there are ways of living and dying with other animals that it would be extreme or exterminist to prevent. She doesn’t clearly lay out what those ways are—it seems that eating a wild pig that a colleague hunted and killed at a department gathering in a part of the world where plant-based foods are readily available should not be condemned, as the activity of roasting a pig reveals our conflictual, cosmopolitical engagement (Haraway 2008, 298–300). Breeding and living with working dogs to prevent such relationships from becoming the stuff of stories is another practice she thinks should be maintained, or at least tolerated (2008, 105–6). Haraway would not make the same argument about cosmopolitical engagements of this sort if the “other” were human, and in this way Francione’s criticism of ecofeminism is more aptly directed toward her views. And her criticism of ecofeminists is more aptly directed at his version of vegan abolitionism. Yet ecofeminism becomes the target of both.7

Living and dying Though the charge of exterminism misses its mark when directed at ecofeminists, there is nonetheless something important to be teased out of Haraway’s overreach, a kernel of insight that also reveals another problem with extinctionist views. Haraway writes: In eating we are most inside the differential relationalities that make us who and what we are . . . There is no way to eat and not to kill, no way to eat and not to become with other mortal beings to whom we are accountable, no way to pretend innocence and transcendence or a final peace. Because eating and killing cannot be hygienically separated does not mean that just any way of eating and killing is fine, merely a matter of taste and culture. Multispecies human and nonhuman ways of living and dying are at stake in practices of eating. (2008, 295)

We can’t live and avoid killing; this is something I think has been underexplored in vegan literature. Of course, vegans kill less than those who

Chapter 8 Facing Death and Practicing Grief

167

aren’t attending to other animals or making excuses for their continuation of deathly practices, but the unavoidability of doing harm and causing death even while trying to prevent it demands further reflection.8 Living today, even for vegans, involves participating unwittingly in the death of sentient individuals. We can rail against the massive violence that is done to the huge number of living beings who did nothing to deserve their tragic fate, but our political commitments and moral outrage doesn’t clean our hands. We harm others (humans and nonhumans) in all aspects of food production. Many are displaced when land is converted for agricultural purposes, including highly endangered animals like orangutans who are coming closer to extinction as a result of the destructive practices used to produce palm oil, a ubiquitous ingredient found in a large number of prepared “vegan” food products. Animals, birds, and insects are killed when fields are tilled and plants are harvested. Though it is hard to calculate the harms to human and other animals from climate changes that result from greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector, it is impossible not to contribute to these harms and still eat. Vegan diets are less harmful than those that include animal products, to be sure, but the harms and deaths occur nonetheless. Vegans have attended to the tragedy that farmed animals experience, but have generally paid less attention to losses caused by our own practices. The system we live in, work in, play in, and benefit from (or at least make our way in) is built on the backs of other animals. And it is important to get perspective on our complicity in the pain and death of others and think about how we can address that loss. There is no glaring line between “them” and “us,” calculating exploiters and pure-of-heart vegans. If we think of these relations as complicated causal networks, we are certainly farther out on the web than those who consume animal bodies, who kill animals directly, and who directly profit from the death of other animals, but we are still in the web, not beyond reproach. In addition, there has been a growing public perception that vegans see themselves as better than non-vegans, morally superior, preachy, and even annoying. Whether or not that is in fact the case (and there is some evidence that it is probably not as bad as it sometimes looks),8 it would behoove vegans to reflect further before donning their T-shirts that read “Nobody is perfect, but vegans are close.” Considering ethical ways of living amid dying and of the possibility of recognizing inevitable instrumentalization is tricky if we are at the same time figuring out ways to engage in some form of moral repair (Walker 2006). Having a better perspective can only help us to actively and effectively minimize the suffering and death of other beings and make the deaths that do occur meaningful by mourning the lives of those who have died.

1986 The Pornography of Representation by Susanne Kappeler published, implicitly linking the status of women and the status of animals as objects whose role is to subjectify men.

168

Chapter 8 Facing Death and Practicing Grief

Living involves not only dying, but also —controversially—killing. We can’t live without killing others or, at best, letting them die. When we live with particular cats and dogs, for example, other animals will have to die. Most obviously to feed those animals.9 Even if they are vegan, dogs and cats will kill and eat other animals if they get a chance. And when we deny them that opportunity, it becomes more obvious how problematic our power over them is. If we are all vegan, growing plants to feed ourselves and other animals involves killing some other animals. Even if some vegans could carefully grow plants in such a way that they don’t displace the animals who live on the land they are using, they grow enough to share food with the “denizens” that may raid the fields, and they don’t destroy the animals who live in the earth they till, very few can afford to create food in this way. Not everyone can afford to care for other animals in need and it is simply impossible for those of us who can afford it to provide for all those other animals. In the U.S., 4 million dogs and cats are killed every year in shelters. That number is decreasing as more and more people realize that purchasing companion animals when there are already many cats and dogs who need homes is problematic. Nonetheless, approximately 10,000 cats and dogs die every day. No one can continuously adopt more animals and adequately care for those they already live with. As much as I wish I could bring more dogs into my life, Taz, Zinnia, and Eli, the dogs I am currently cohabitating with, are as much as I can handle. I can see there are reasons, perhaps good reasons, for me not to adopt more dogs, but the fact that I don’t means that someone will probably die and I didn’t save her. I can’t fall into a pit thinking everything is hopeless, but I do think further reflection on the deaths we are responsible for is necessary by members of the dominant species, even vegans. Some unwanted companion animals may end up homeless, some may be warehoused in no-kill shelters, provided with the bare minimum to exist, and those harms may be worse than death. Some no-kill shelters are like storage facilities and animals live in cages with no possibility of being themselves. If the choice is between existence without joy, without relationships, without exercise, without fresh air and sunshine, and nonexistence, I think the choice is painfully clear. And this is another reason to reflect on the deaths we are responsible for rather than avoiding this difficult topic. If companion animals do not have any reasonable hope that they will experience day-to-day pleasures then perhaps it is better, all things considered, for them not to live. When I think of my own death, I can only hope to die with dignity after a really good happy day with the beings I love. Far too often, people make that judgment for companion animals relatively quickly and too easily, and that is shameful. But in some cases it may be our responsibility to make that difficult final

Chapter 8 Facing Death and Practicing Grief

169

Those of us who value the lives of other animals live in a strange, parallel world to that of other people. Every day we are reminded of the fact that we care for the existence of beings whom other people manage to ignore, to unsee and unhear as if the only traces of the beings’ lives are the parts of their bodies rendered into food: flesh transformed into meat. To tear up, or to have trouble functioning, to feel that moment of utter suffocation of being in a hall of death [the meat isle in the grocery store] is something rendered completely socially unintelligible. Most people’s response is that we need therapy, or that we can’t be sincere. So most of us work hard not to mourn. We refuse mourning in order to function, to get by. But that means most of us, even those of us who are absolutely committed to fighting for animals, regularly have to engage in disavowal. (2012, 268)

That living with other animals and fighting for some other animals also means that other animals will inevitably die, suggests that it is important to come to terms with the death and dying, the grief and mourning that come with being vulnerable, embodied, fragile animals.

Practicing grief Urging that we come to terms with death and dying is not an endorsement of the way things are or a retreat to quietism that allows the status quo to

1986 “Am I Blue?” by Alice Walker published in Ms. Magazine.

decision and we are shirking our responsibility when we don’t and pass the buck to others (see Pierce 2012). When we do decide, it is often difficult to admit or find community; we make these decisions in “private” and there is very little wider deliberation about options and endings—this is another problem with not facing death. Even in our activism we inevitably end up focusing our attention in a way that saves some while countless others die. There are all sorts of animals who will live and die by the choices we individually and collectively make. Not eating animals doesn’t mean vegans aren’t involved in killing, although it does mean we are killing less. It’s a hard acknowledgment, but rather than avoiding it, perhaps it would be instructive to face it and grieve the lives of those lost while at the same time working to try to minimize causing additional harm and death. Of course, most vegans are particularly sensitive to the death of others, and turning attention to the source of so much sadness can be debilitating. But not acknowledging it is also painful. As James Stanescu has so poignantly written,

170

Chapter 8 Facing Death and Practicing Grief

continue. But it is an expression of humility and an acknowledgment of the limitations of good intentions. There are genuine moral dilemmas, perhaps fewer than some would think, but there are times in which whatever we do there is some moral “remainder,” something that is lost. Acknowledging loss helps us to recognize what Judith Butler has called the “precariousness of life”—a precariousness that is at the core of community. Because we can suffer and be killed, we can recognize relations and kinship. As she writes, “there is no life without the conditions of life that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not the discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interdependency of persons, involving reproducible and sustaining social relations, and relations to the environment and to non-human forms of life” (Butler 2009, 19). To recognize our precariousness, and our vulnerability, is to not only recognize our interdependence or entanglement, but also, as Stanescu has suggested, to honor our animality. Living with other animals requires paying more attention to grief, mourning, and maybe shame. This is doubly difficult today as acts of mourning human loss are increasingly sequestered. Sandra Gilbert recounts the ways that both death and grief have been relegated to social margins and illustrates how mourning has been pathologized: Given that every healthy mourner is potentially an unhealthy melancholic, it oughtn’t be surprising that those who are bereaved feel embarrassment, anxiety, even shame . . . That neither the mourner herself nor her comforters are able to draw upon any culturally agreed-upon procedures for grieving intensifies her embarrassment even while it may further shape her shame. (2006, 257)

Mourning is also feminized, considered a private activity that must be kept at home. Since keeping grief in the closet and not dwelling on death is an expectation in the human case, even acknowledging the death of animals, let alone mourning those deaths, leads us into the realm of questioning the sanity of those who grieve.10 But if we follow common norms of grieving and turn away from mourning, from the fact that we are in fatal interactions with other animals, we are not just making their lives unintelligible but are also foreclosing an appreciation of what it means to live with other animals, many of whom have life spans that are shorter than our own. It’s not easy to turn our attention to this underside of living with animals; it is painful and it requires courage in human supremacist societies, but doing so may allow us to develop new ways of finding meaning in our fleeting relationships. It can also help us in thinking through some of the dilemmas that we currently face in our nonideal, troubled relationships with animals (DeMello 2016). This is

Chapter 8 Facing Death and Practicing Grief

171

especially important for animal advocates who work on the front lines of animal care in sanctuaries and shelters.11 The practices that lead to the suffering and death of other animals are practices that, in addition to causing pain and ending life, also render those lives meaningless. Developing counterpractices of mourning can help make those lives and, importantly, our relationships to those who are now gone, intelligible. But since there are few recognizable practices for grieving humans in contemporary society, developing meaningful mourning practices for other-than-human animals is all the more challenging. Some animals appear to have developed what we might think of as mourning rituals and perhaps we can learn something from them. There have been many reports of dolphin, ape, and monkey mothers who carry around their dead children. Katie Cronin video recorded the reaction of Masya, an 18-year-old wild-born chimpanzee who had been living at Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust in Zambia for fifteen years, to the death of her infant daughter. Masya had reared two other daughters, one of whom, Mary, was in the social group at the time of the infant’s death. For two days Masya interacted in various ways with the corpse of her infant. The first day she held on to her and carried her around, a behavior that has been observed in captivity and the wild in many different species. The second day, Masya put the dead infant down, but then repeatedly would check on her (Cronin et al. 2011). Reports from other observers indicate that some mothers will carry their infants much longer. Cynthia Moss and others have described the mourning rituals of elephants. Elephants pay homage to those that die and often walk miles to return the site where a member of their family has passed. In some instances, members of other family groups come to pay their respects. And elephants will handle the bones of members of their family long after they have died. Echo, the remarkable matriarch that Moss observed for almost forty years at Amboseli, lost her daughter Erin, who died from an infection caused by a spear wound. Erin had a young son and, as she was dying, Echo took him away to get food and water and presumably so he would not witness his mother’s death. But the family later returned to touch and feel Erin’s bones. Researchers have noted that “African elephants are unusual in that they not only give dramatic reactions to the dead bodies of other elephants, but are also reported to systematically investigate elephant bones and tusks that they encounter” (McComb et al. 2006, 26). They will also pick up tusks and carry them around in their trunks. Deborah Bird Rose shares a multispecies experience of grief in which a pair of humans and a pair of albatross mourn the loss of the albatross’s egg. Male and female albatross take turns sitting on the egg, while the other is off

1987 First national gathering of the Green Movement includes the formation of an Animal Rights Caucus that began to prepare an Animal Rights platform for the Green Movement.

172

Chapter 8 Facing Death and Practicing Grief

feeding. After the male had been sitting on the egg for five weeks and the female did not return, he grew weak and had to eat. Louise and Rick, the human couple, were worried about what would happen to the egg and were relieved when both the male and female returned. But it was clear that things were not well. Here is how the humans describe what happened when they noticed that the egg was broken: . . . it was really sad. We did nothing but cry the whole day, pretty much. Because they, Makana and Kupa’a were out there mourning and crying . . . we were all crying. You could tell it was a different sound. They were doing the “sky moo,” but instead of their “oooh, oooh” it was “aah, aah.” It was sad. Awful. Just awful . . . she kept on trying to sit on it, and he would talk to her. He was starting to groom her. And she started to appear to realize that there was a problem with the egg, and they started to grieve. She really struggled to accept it – the loss of their chick. (Rose 2013, 7)

According to Rose’s report, Louise and Rick acknowledged that they could only explain what they were experiencing in anthropocentric terms and admitted that “even if their interpretation was wrong” there was an obvious change in behavior. Together Louise and Rick and Makana and Kupa’a experienced a loss that they all had to come to accept. It’s hard to know exactly whether Masya, or Echo, or Makana and Kupa’a, or the others were really grieving. Like Louise and Rick, we need to be cautious in our analyses of these different behaviors so as to avoid simply projecting our anthropocentric interpretations on their unique practices. And it is important to attend to the diversity of experiences of grief. Some chimpanzees, dogs, or hens appear to mourn the loss of a group member, while others seem not to care that much. Human grief practices are also quite different from those of other animals, but this doesn’t suggest that human practices are necessarily deeper or more significant. As Barbara King notes in her book How Animals Grieve: . . . they aren’t the story tellers we are, passing down elaborate narratives about our grandparents and parents to our children and grandchildren. Does that mean our grief is deeper than the grief of chimpanzees? Questions like this one miss the point. We each are what we are, animals bound together by our various ways of grieving. (2013, 148)

Whatever grieving behaviors might mean to those who mourn, we can learn from them in developing our own mourning practices. When my feline companion of twenty-three years, Recatsner, died, I had her body cremated and in the remains I discovered parts of bone and I had the small bone made into a pendant. It turns out there is a whole (apparently quite lucrative)

Chapter 8 Facing Death and Practicing Grief

173

cottage industry making “pet” cremation jewelry. While my desire to carry a part of Recatsner with me is satisfied, this is not a communal mourning practice. I am not connected to others who are grieving when I wear the pendant; indeed, unless I told someone, no one would see it as a memorial. Creating communal possibilities for mourning our companions who we have loved and lost as well as all of the other animals for whom we grieve can take grief out of the closet, out of the realm of the comic or crazy, and make the lives and deaths of other animals visible and meaningful. There are models of public grieving in protest, ACT UP and anti-war protests turn private losses into collective mourning. The campaign started by Israeli activists to have the number 269 permanently marked on bodies (through branding or tattoos) to stand in solidarity with a calf who has a tag with the number 269 through his ear, although not conceived as a campaign of community grieving, could be. Identifying with calf 269 and having 269 permanently marked on one’s body in protest of the lethal practices that destroy the lives of billions of animals may also be thought of as a form of mourning. It memorializes and makes explicit the individual whose life is lost and puts those who have marked themselves in solidarity into community with one another. Another form of public mourning involves bearing witness to animals being brought to slaughter or holding memorials for dead animals. The Animal Save Movement that started in Toronto in 2010 has been holding regular vigils to witness and grieve for pigs heading to slaughterhouses. These peaceful protests have taken hold across the globe, with over 900 groups holding regular vigils to bear witness to animal suffering, exploitation, and death. Extinction rebellion, a decentralized global network of activists using nonviolent protest to raise awareness about the climate emergency, has also staged public mourning rituals. They have held grief ceremonies in the streets followed by funeral processions; one memorial event in London brought out tens of thousands of people. They encourage supporters to bring puppets, flags, banners, and other things to commemorate loss due to extinction. Organizers told participants to “express yourself in accordance with the mourning rituals of your culture. Start in nature, end in nature. We unite in grief, rage, and love for life on Earth.” While so many suffer and die, and while their deaths pain us, it is vital that our relations to other animals and each other not be exclusively mournful. When there is a loss, there has to be a way to emotionally and physically absorb and process—to metabolize—the loss. In the case of animals who suffer and die in factory farms and laboratories, as well as those who are dying as ice caps melt and habitats are destroyed, we need to

1988 Rape of the Wild: Man’s Violence Against Animals and the Earth by Andrée Collard with Joyce Contrucci published.

174

Chapter 8 Facing Death and Practicing Grief

metabolize communally. Perhaps we might develop a ritual vegan feasting practice, to share in our grief, to memorialize and mourn those who have died. Collectively grieving provides a way to honor the precariousness and fragility of our entangled lives.

Acknowledgments I began thinking about these issues in response to a powerful presentation by James Stanescu at the Sex/Gender/Species conference that I co-hosted at Wesleyan in 2011 and I thank Scu for prompting my ongoing reflections on grief and mourning. The death of Marti Kheel and the support that ecofeminists provided each other during our grieving specifically pushed my thinking forward, thanks especially to Carol Adams for her nurturance when we were mourning our loss of Marti. I dedicated the first version of this chapter to Fuzzy—whose joy in life, boundless love, and heartbreaking death as the first edition went to press provided tremendous inspiration. I have since had to grieve for my beloved Maggie, which is an ongoing practice. I have learned a lot from the way that sanctuaries practice grief. I thank the humans and nonhumans at VINE Sanctuary and the chimpanzees and people at Chimp Haven for their powerful models of how to simultaneously mourn and continue caring deeply.

Notes 1

2

Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka (2011) describe the extinctionist view as one that “seeks the abolition of relationship between humans and domesticated animals, and since domesticated animals can rarely survive on their own, this is effect means the extinction of domesticated species . . . According to the abolitionist/extinctionist view, the horrendous history of injustice leads to an inescapable conclusion: we must remove ourselves from the equation—whether as owners, overlords, stewards, or ostensible co-contractors . . . we cannot have domestication without mistreatment, because mistreatment is intrinsic to the very concept of domestication” (2011, 77–8). Donaldson and Kymlicka reject this view. Not all ecofeminists agree here. Since the 1990s, there have been debates between “vegetarian ecofeminists,” sometimes called “animal ecofeminists,” and other ecofeminists about attention to the lives and deaths of other-than-human animals.

Chapter 8 Facing Death and Practicing Grief

175

Donna Haraway uses “exterminism” in two different senses in When Species Meet. She notes the sense that Derrida uses to describe the horror of “immense, systematized violence against animals,” but later she broadens the logic of sacrifice to recognize not just that “it is not killing that gets us into exterminism, but making beings killable” (2008, 80) and that “moral absolutes contribute to what I mean by exterminism” (106). For a robust critique of Haraway, see Weisberg 2009. 4 That is not to say that we shouldn’t collectively work to uncover and undermine these systems; it is simply to recognize the complex forces of such systems and the difficulties involved in dismantling them. 5 For more extensive criticisms of animal rights discourse, see Donovan and Adams 2007, Kheel 2008, Gruen and Weil 2012. 6 For a discussion of some of the issues of captivity of cats, dogs, and other animals, see Gruen 2014. 7 There is an important question about why ecofeminism has become the target and more work can be done on figuring out why ecofeminism continues to be mischaracterized in these ways. While I think anxiety about death, as I’ve suggested here, is one answer, there are probably others. 8 For example, Tania Lombrozo’s 13.7 NPR blog on November 26, 2012, notes: “Vegetarianism is a blossoming field of study, with research in psychology and other disciplines exploring the characteristics of vegetarians and omnivores, as well as people’s perceptions of vegetarians and omnivores.” http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2012/ 11/26/165736028/its-time-to-end-the-turkey-tofurky-thanksgivingfood-fight. Based on a Public Policy Poll, as reported by the Humane Research Council, “Among American voters, 49% view vegetarians favorably, and 22% unfavorably. In a pattern that holds for most crosstabulations, vegans are seen less favorably by about 10%, yielding 38% favorable versus 30% unfavorable. http://www.humanespot.org/ content/who-views-vegetarians-vegans-positively-new-poll-results. For a full discussion of some of these issues, see Gruen and Jones 2015. 9 There is still a great deal of controversy about the nutritional adequacy of vegan diets for dogs and especially for cats. 10 See essays in Gruen and Probyn-Rapsey 2018. 11 Perhaps more than anybody else, sanctuary care-givers have to deal with death and dying and loss and grieving often while at the same time providing care for others and so may not have time to

1988 “Farm Animals and the Feminine Connection” by Karen Davis published in Animals’ Agenda.

3

176

Chapter 8 Facing Death and Practicing Grief

acknowledge their grief. Fortunately, some sanctuaries have created memorial parks or areas where staff and visitors can mourn. Announcements in the form of obituaries and personal reflections are sometimes published. But grieving is still quite an individual activity and public practices of grieving, when they occur, seem to take the form of Facebook or other social media comments.

177

Mother by Suzy González.

178

part two Context Introduction This section, “Context,” contains chapters that explore the ways that our ethical, political, and epistemic commitments are challenged and altered when contexts change. Attention to context is an important part of ecofeminist theory and practice. Our ways of analyzing situations and our strategies for action must change as our understandings of social, historical, and cultural beliefs and values change. One current example of such important changes is the now accepted use of “they” in addition to “he” and “she” as a singular pronoun. Our understandings of sex and gender have changed considerably in the over thirty years that we have been working through an ecofeminist lens. Ecofeminism is not a static or dogmatic perspective, but one that is fundamentally attentive to changing contexts. As ecofeminist Marti Kheel argued, the universal standpoint that is commonly invoked within environmental and animal ethics truncates a larger narrative that questions how problems emerge in particular contexts. Awareness of context can be an important counter to the universalizing prescriptions that often characterize liberation struggles. The chapters grapple with questions of principle and particularity, universalism and contextualism, and the complexities created by ideologies of race, sex, gender, sexuality, and species. The methods used by the authors of the chapters in this section should not be confused with “applied ethics” or the like, as ecofeminism does not start with theory and move to specific, contextual concerns. Our organizing these chapters within a section called “Context” should not imply that these issues represent a practical application of abstract theory. We see ecofeminism as a type of praxis, in which theory and practice are always mutually informing.

179

180

Inter-animal Moral Conflict and Moral Repair: A Contextualized Ecofeminist Approach in Action Karen S. Emmerman

T

raditional approaches to conflicts of interest between human and nonhuman animals (inter-animal conflicts of interest, as I call them) generally fixate on offering dilemmas where a human interest is pitted against a nonhuman animal interest in a scenario where only one party can win. These dilemmas typically follow a predictable course where two very clearly defined options based on conventional ways of seeing matters are put forth and we are meant to pick between these two options. We are presented, for example, with an overcrowded lifeboat that for reasons surpassing understanding contains nameless, narrative-less, unknown dogs and humans. Our job is to use moral reasoning to determine which party is tossed overboard thus ensuring continued life for the other occupants.

1988 Woman of Power: A Magazine of Feminism, Spirituality, and Politics publishes a “Nature” issue. With Ingrid Newkirk on animal rights, Victoria Moran’s guidelines for raising children as vegetarians, a feminist critique of the notion of animal “rights” that argues that the best way to help animals is by adopting broad ecofeminist values.

9

181

182

Chapter 9 Inter-animal Moral Conflict and Moral Repair

Ecofeminist animal theorists have long expressed frustration with this, dominant, approach to moral deliberation.1 Emphasizing the need for context and narrative, these theorists have noted that inter-animal conflicts take place within social, economic, cultural, and political background conditions. To contemplate a dilemma stripped of the information these background conditions provide is, as Marti Kheel wrote, to engage in a “violence of abstraction” (1993, 255). Kheel, like many ecofeminists, suggests that we simply refuse to engage with such questions (259). I agree that talking about cases in these abstract, either/or, ways encourages an impoverished discussion by focusing only on two options and ignoring potentially salient details such as how we found ourselves in the particular dilemma in the first place. Moreover, discussions of inter-animal conflicts of interest tend to set a human interest against a nonhuman animal interest for the purpose of pumping our intuitions about the importance of the former over the latter. But this methodology rests on the dubious notion that approaching cases with such a degree of abstraction is morally unproblematic.2 An ecofeminist approach resists describing conflicts in these abstracted and unrealistic ways, requiring instead that we tend to all of the relevant features of a case.3 Insofar as this is a point about how discussion regarding inter-animal conflicts ought to be undertaken I am in complete agreement. Ecofeminist, contextualized accounts will simply refuse engagement with a question engendered by a false dichotomy and presented without any narrative. Still, I part ways with the tendency to want to focus questions primarily on how we got into the mess we are in, inasmuch as that tendency is unhelpful as practical guidance for moving forward in specific instances of conflict. We are embedded in systems that function largely beyond our immediate control when we are at discrete decision points. These systems are driven by large, often multinational companies, corporate greed, and governments more responsive to powerful lobbyists than a concerned citizenry.4 Certainly, under these conditions, it is crucial that we ask questions about how we landed in the mess we are in. For a particular parent making a quick decision between a pig heart valve and their daughter’s life, asking questions about why the pig’s valve is the only available option is part of the broader discussion about what options are available and why. Yet, at the moment of decision, the parent needs to know what to do and how to feel about it. Ecofeminist animal theory has been the driving force in shifting discussion away from traditional approaches to inter-animal conflicts focused on falsely dualistic dilemmas and truncated narratives. Subsequently, there has been a tendency in the ecofeminist literature to avoid engaging in specific cases. In this paper, I push past this tendency and show how an ecofeminist approach to inter-animal conflicts of interest functions when confronted with particular

Chapter 9 Inter-animal Moral Conflict and Moral Repair

183

instances of conflict. We should absolutely refuse engagement with truncated narratives and false lifeboat-style dilemmas. It is also crucial that we attend to what contextual details reveal about exploitation and marginalization and how they factor into creating the dilemmas we face. At the same time, because of the ubiquity of nonhuman animal use and abuse, cases of conflict are the norm rather than the exception. We do not need dramatic lifeboat cases to tell us what we already know, namely that even those of us firmly committed to ending animals’ unnecessary suffering are often in situations where all the choices available to us will do violence to animals’ interests in some way.5 An ecofeminist approach to inter-animal conflicts of interest must encourage us to attend to the worldview that created the dilemma. I would add, though, that an ecofeminist theory applied to actual cases helps us see what context can tell us about what to do, how to feel about our moral choices, and what other moral work might remain even if we have done our best in making a choice. This theoretical lens will be useful to activists as well insofar as it may help limit the tendency in the activist community to insist that there are perfectly clean ways out of inter-animal conflicts if only we are committed enough to pursuing them.6 Before examining the ecofeminist approach in action, I want to note the critical features of such an approach to inter-animal conflicts of interest. I do not have the room here to provide a robust defense of these features.7 For the moment, I will simply articulate what they are so that we can think about how such a theory works in practice. As with any theoretical approach, there is no singular set of features that defines an ecofeminist method for thinking about human/animal interactions. The view I offer here is not meant to represent all ecofeminist theories. Like many other ecofeminist animal theorists, the approach to interanimal conflicts of interest I endorse is nonhierarchical, pluralist about moral significance, and contextualized, moving between relevant features of the conflict to obtain as full a picture as possible of what is at stake for all parties (Emmerman 2012).8 This process includes, among other things, detailed descriptions of what is at stake for the humans and the nonhuman animals, situating those details in historical, political, and societal context, and asking hard questions about how we found ourselves in a situation of conflict to begin with. It also involves being aware of interlocking oppressions, how privilege is functioning in our deliberations, and the necessity of careful cross-cultural communication. This expresses what it means for the view to be contextualized. The approach is pluralist in that it recognizes that moral significance arises from a variety of sources (sentience, having a well-being of one’s own, relationships of love and care, etc.). While early animal theorists working within traditional moral theory (for example, Peter Singer

1988 Staying Alive by Vandana Shiva published.

184

Chapter 9 Inter-animal Moral Conflict and Moral Repair

and Tom Regan) relied solely on reason to account for animals’ moral considerability, the ecofeminist approach insists that emotions must have a significant role in determining what matters morally.9 Finally, the approach is nonhierarchical in that it does not give pride of place to any one kind of interest or creature. My view rejects preconceived moral hierarchies where types of sentient creatures or types of interests are ranked prior to the examination of a given conflict.10 This means that human lives are not prima facie more valuable than animal lives. Of course, in any given conflict, decisions must be made regarding the various interests and whose will prevail. Rather than endorsing a universally binding hierarchy of interests or life-forms, I prefer a methodology that recognizes differences without ranking them in a static, universally binding way. Differences between species and individuals help us understand need and capability but do not provide justification for ranking those species and individuals according to levels of moral significance.11 My ecofeminist approach to inter-animal conflicts also highlights the importance of recognizing moral remainders and attending to the work of moral repair when we cause harm.12 The cost of any human life is that our interests will sometimes conflict with those of someone else. We will often do harm to others’ interests. Whether or not we are ultimately justified in our choices, we cannot escape that these choices generate collateral damage for morally significant others. Recognizing that damage, seeing it for what it truly is, and confronting what we might do about it is a crucial part of navigating inter-animal conflicts. As a result of our choices and actions sometimes nonhuman animals will lose, sometimes humans we do not know will lose, and sometimes humans or nonhumans we love and cherish will lose. We have to accept that moral remainders are often a part of moral life even when we do our very best to mitigate all harms. This is as true in the inter-animal realm as it is in the inter-human realm.13 That we made the best choice of the options available to us most often will not mean that we can say “done, clean, finished” once we have chosen the best available alternative. Moral work will likely remain. As Margaret Urban Walker put it, But if moral life is seen as a tissue of moral understandings which configure, respond to, and reconfigure relations as they go, we should anticipate residues and carry-overs as the rule rather than the exception: one’s choice will often be a selection of one among various imperfect responses, a response to some among various claims which can’t all be fulfilled. So there will just as often be unfinished business and ongoing business, compensations and reparations, postponements and returns. (1995, 145)

Chapter 9 Inter-animal Moral Conflict and Moral Repair

185

A pluralist, nonhierarchical, and contextualized approach to inter-animal conflicts of interest helps us recognize the complexity and plurality of the interests at stake on all sides of a conflict and it forces us to take a more honest look at our dealings with others. Moral life is in large part about recognizing remainders as the norm, rather than the exception.14 Any approach to inter-animal conflicts of interest must take these realities seriously and address the issue of remainders head-on. A view that does not is out of touch with reality.15 As Virginia Held argues, theories must be tested against actual, lived experience (1995). Lived experience tells us that, in many cases, we do not simply maximize the good, respect rational agency, or show loving attention and move on worry-free even if moral theory tells us we could. We know moral remainders are a part of moral life because we experience them. An adequate theory will have something to say about this experience beyond thinking of it as mere squeamishness or sentimentality. With these features of an ecofeminist approach in mind, we can now turn to thinking about what such an approach might have to say about particular cases of conflict. There is a methodological tension here, to be sure. A central feature of an ecofeminist account is that it treats interests as situated in social, political, cultural, economic, and relational context. This means that too much discussion of hypothetical and inevitably truncated cases is antithetical to the approach. I have opted to cope with this delicate balance by focusing on an autobiographical example where I have as much understanding of the contextual complexities as possible. I do not need to operate with a truncated narrative. I will discuss the dilemma of feeding my newborn son. Here is the case: In 2006, I gave birth to my son prematurely at 33 weeks’ gestation with no previous warning signs. I had been hoping to breastfeed my child, but like some mothers of premature infants I was unable to do so.16 I was provided with a breast pump by the hospital and coached by lactation consultants but, after two weeks of pumping every three hours day and night with no results, the consultants suggested that I pursue other options. During those two weeks my son had been receiving formula. I am a vegan and was committed to raising a vegan child so I insisted that the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) provide my son with soy formula. In 2006 it was impossible to obtain vitamin D3 from nonanimal sources. No infant formula is made without including D3 in the mix. I was able to find a soy formula that sourced the D3 from sheep lanolin and opted for that as the best I could do. I am a person who strives as much as possible to live a life free from causing violence to other living beings. Sheep raised for wool receive terrible treatment and suffer a great deal over the course of their lives.17 The situation

1989 Humans and Other Animals: Beyond the Boundaries of Anthropology by Barbara Noske published.

186

Chapter 9 Inter-animal Moral Conflict and Moral Repair

caused me considerable distress. What does an ecofeminist approach have to say about this? Because the approach is nonhierarchical, I cannot reduce the conflict to my son having more moral significance than the sheep used to make his formula. My son is more significant to me than the sheep because he is my son and I am his mother and this clearly influences my choices. He is not more morally significant than the sheep, however, simply because he is human. So, it won’t do to say that in a conflict between feeding a human child and harming a sheep the child ought to prevail because he is morally more significant than the sheep. Still, I am certain it seems painfully obvious to everyone that opting not to feed him anything at all as a form of protest against the lanolin-derived D3, thus leaving my son to die of starvation, is not an option. This is because, like the sheep, he is also a living, breathing, sentient being in relationship with others (to the extent possible at birth). Also, he is my son which means I have the responsibility to see to his needs and ensure his survival wherever appropriate.18 The fact that he is my son also means that he is not a stranger with whom I have no connection. He is a beloved, much-anticipated member of my family. Ecofeminist animal theorists would want to ask a few questions here. We might ask, for example, why it took so long to develop a vegan source of D3 and was that because we take for granted that using sheep in these ways is morally unproblematic?19 Was there an environmental reason, caused by morally dubious behavior of another sort, for why I gave birth to a premature infant in the first place that should be addressed? These questions are reasonable and important. They also would not likely be brought to light in a traditional approach to inter-animal conflicts that focused entirely on simply categorizing the interests at stake or on defending a moral hierarchy of life-forms. These questions need to be explored and addressed, but their answers were not going to help me, given the pressing nature of the situation. At the time, I opted to give my son the soy formula with lanolin-sourced D3 while recognizing that in doing so I generated moral remainders with respect to the sheep. While that is what I did do, I have often wondered if that is what I should have done. A guiding principle of my approach is that we ought not to harm sentient life unless by doing so we seek to benefit them or defend ourselves.20 Therefore, using the lanolin-derived D3 formula is deeply problematic. Now, this approach is meant to strike a balance between principles and particulars so it also requires that I note the following things: (1) I could not breastfeed despite trying my best; (2) my son needed to eat something or he would die; (3) I am embedded in a context that for scientific, cultural, and speciesist reasons has not generated a completely vegan infant

formula; (4) I was exhausted from his birth and medically compromised myself, so not at the pinnacle of my moral powers; and (5) I was making these decisions in the context of an intensive care scenario which presented both structural and emotional complications. These are reasons I do not retrospectively cast tremendous blame on myself for the decision I made at the time. Still, this does not mean that I could justify going to any length to provide him with nutrition. If the doctors had suggested that the only way to keep him alive was to kill the baby in the next isolette, I could not have accepted that option. There are limits to what we can do for our loved ones, to be sure. But this points to the interesting way in which distance factored into my judgment at the time. Had the doctors hauled a sheep into the room and said, “Now, we’re going to cut off this sheep’s skin without anaesthesia in order to best obtain the lanolin from her wool so that we can feed your son,” I would have demanded alternative solutions. Respect for the sheep’s moral significance and empathy for the sheep’s desire not to suffer would have required that I had done so, just as respect and empathy for the stranger’s baby in the next isolette requires that I demand alternative solutions in that hypothetical case. The most obvious alternative would have been to rely on human breast milk donation. Unlike in the past, when wet nurses were often coerced or forced into providing milk for wealthier families (or slave owners in the case of antebellum “mammies”) at the expense of their own infants’ health, contemporary breast milk donation is entirely voluntary (Lubick 2020). Women with surplus milk donate to help those who need their milk, thus alleviating concerns about exploitation. The donated breast milk alternative is obvious now, but the contextualized nature of my approach reminds us to evaluate moral dilemmas in their historical context. In 2006, I was unaware of any discussion of breast milk donation either in the broader community where I live or in the hospital where my son was treated. Indeed, my son’s NICU did not start using human breast milk banking until October 2012.21 It is difficult to identify precisely what prevented the NICU from using human milk banking for their premature infants. It seems to have been a combination of concerns regarding cost, a lack of in-state milk banks, and that breastfeeding was not in itself something the hospital staff deemed particularly important.22 Had the hospital offered donated milk through a formal breast milk banking system I imagine I would have accepted their offer. The assurance that the donors had been screened and the milk pasteurized would have reassured me of its safety.23 Even so, my son’s relative healthiness for a premature infant would have disqualified him from receiving milk from a donor bank. Human milk from donor banks is

187

1989 Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science by Donna Haraway published.

Chapter 9 Inter-animal Moral Conflict and Moral Repair

188

Chapter 9 Inter-animal Moral Conflict and Moral Repair

expensive and offered to those babies most at risk for specific medical complications.24 What if someone had offered milk through an informal sharing system where women with surplus breast milk donate to mothers and infants in need? In 2020 this sort of casual sharing of breast milk is increasingly common. There are social networking pages where mothers in the community post that they have a surplus of milk and those needing milk can arrange to acquire it.25 In 2006, this kind of informal system for donating breast milk was not a part of the parenting culture where I live. Thus, it never occurred to me to even ask about breast milk donation at the time. The forces working against casual breast milk donation were not merely historical, however. There were also structural and emotional impediments. On a structural level, NICUs differ from one another in how they respond to families wanting to use unscreened, donated milk. I suspect that, in 2006, any such request would have been met with significant resistance from my son’s medical team.26 Still, in my case, there would have been limitations beyond these structural issues. Had the hospital permitted me to use milk obtained through casual donation, I cannot imagine that I would have taken advantage of the opportunity. Mothering an infant in the NICU puts a person in a very fearful place. Thoughts about death and the fragility of life are inescapable in that setting even if the prognosis for one’s child is good. Given that I already feared for my son’s life, I would not have accepted the potential risks involved in exposing his premature immune system to unscreened milk. The thought that I might make a choice that resulted in his death would have been too much for me to bear in that context. The contextualized nature of my approach reveals the ways my options were limited by the conditions in which I found myself. Situated as I was, in 2006, soy formula was truly the only reasonable alternative for feeding my son in a way that came as close to conforming to my vegan values as possible.27 We may be able to say that I truly made the best moral decision I could at the time. At the same time, this approach also sheds light on the moral remainders created by my decision and the necessity of looking to the work of moral repair.28 It makes clear that I must circle back to the questions raised earlier about why we live in a world that treats nonhuman animals as resources, why no vegan infant formulas are readily available, and what, if any, environmental factors contributed to my son’s premature birth in the first place. I must also return to thinking about the sheep. In this situation it is impossible to know which or how many sheep were affected. It is thus untenable to suggest that I make some sort of restitution to that (or those) sheep. Depending on my situation and resources, it may mean that I donate money to an organization working to improve the conditions of farmed sheep

Chapter 9 Inter-animal Moral Conflict and Moral Repair

189

or to a sanctuary working with rescued sheep. There are a variety of options for what would be appropriate depending on the particulars of the situation. Built into my thinking, however, must be the realization that I can never make restitution to the particular animals harmed in this situation and that should give me pause. This is not to suggest that I ought to be consumed with guilt and suffering as a result, but that I should approach the situation with some gravitas and recognition that my son’s life was maintained through the sacrifice of others’ well-being.29 This acknowledgment and appreciation will hopefully fuel the fire of my resolve to both change the mechanisms in place that forced me into such a dilemma in the first place and support those seeking to improve animals’ lives. The moral reparative work I have in mind is not a way to offset or balance our moral failings; it can neither make our hands clean nor provide compensatory restitution. Instead, moral repair in conflicts of the kind I discuss in this chapter is a way to acknowledge harm done and take actions to make that acknowledgment tangible. As this moral reparative work will often require challenging the systems of oppression that generate inter-species conflicts, undertaking it demonstrates a firm commitment to reducing nonhuman animals’ suffering. Expending effort to end systemic animal exploitation that both harms nonhuman animals and constrains our choices would improve life for all concerned. Moral repair is not an empty gesture meant to expiate our moral failings, but a genuine commitment to acknowledging harm done and repairing the world. Ecofeminist animal theories have historically insisted on the importance of context in part to make clear that moral conflicts do not arise in a vacuum. There are reasons vegan parents in much of the world who cannot breastfeed are in a position where they must choose between their commitment to living without causing violence to nonhuman animals and the ability to feed their children. These reasons can be explained by pointing to, among other things, the fact that we live in a society that systematically exploits nonhuman animals for human purposes. Therefore, for very good reasons, ecofeminist animal theorists have advocated against allowing false, dualistic dilemmas to drive our thinking about inter-animal moral conflicts. I hope to have shown here, though, that an ecofeminist approach to inter-animal moral conflicts can move beyond both conversations about how we got into these conflicts in the first place and the rejection of truncated narratives. Attending to context can reveal the underlying political, social, and cultural forces that limit our choices. It enables us to see that when we reach the limits of what is possible from the standpoint of individual morality, that is an indication we need to direct our energies toward the systems that uphold oppression and exploitation rather than rage at and blame ourselves for our

1989 The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery by Marjorie Spiegel published.

190

Chapter 9 Inter-animal Moral Conflict and Moral Repair

moral failures. Even now, fourteen years after my son’s NICU experience, I feel grief and shame about having had to feed him non-vegan infant formula. Ecofeminism’s reminder to turn our attention toward systems of oppression, rather than ourselves, when those systems limit our options is so very important. Finally, attention to context can help us identify moral remainders and undertake the work of moral repair. The inter-animal conflicts of interest we face may often not be resolvable in ways that are satisfying to our sense of justice or our feelings of compassion and care. My approach hopefully moves us a step forward in offering ways of thinking about these conflicts that captures this insight by highlighting the important role moral remainders and moral repair play in our moral lives.

Afterword 2020 As of this writing (September 2020), vegan D3 supplements are widely available for purchase.30 There is at least one company in the United States developing a vegan infant formula with the hopes of moving it through the lengthy process of approval with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).31 There are no vegan infant formulas widely available in the United States or the United Kingdom as all approved brands continue to rely upon lanolinsourced D3.32 Vegan infant formula produced in France is available in some areas through online boutique baby stores; but at approximately $2.30 per ounce, the cost is likely prohibitive for many families and the supply appears to be unreliable at times.33 Applying pressure on formula companies to shift to plant-based D3 would fit into my conception of the work of moral repair for those of us who have had babies whose lives were made possible by the exploitation of other creatures.

Notes 1

I use the language of “ecofeminist animal theory” because not all ecofeminist theory is inclusive of animals’ concerns. Greta Gaard uses “vegetarian ecofeminism” to clearly mark ecofeminist theory that takes the oppression of animals as integral to ecofeminist work (2002). Throughout this piece I refer to an “ecofeminist approach” as shorthand for an ecofeminist animal theorist approach, since the latter is cumbersome. It should be clear to readers that I am offering an ecofeminist analysis that is deeply inclusive of animals’ interests.

2

3

4

5 6

7

Lori Gruen discusses the problems with undertaking ethical inquiry through lifeboat cases (1991, 352). Cf. Francione 2004, 133; Mellon 1989, chapter 3. Cf. Carol Gilligan’s discussion of the Heinz case (1982, 25–31). Presented with a situation where Heinz either had to steal a drug he could not afford or watch his wife die without it, many women and girls wanted more information about why Heinz could not work in exchange for the drug, ask the pharmacist for a loan, and so forth. Presented with only two options (steal the drug or let one’s wife die), these respondents demanded more information. To some extent, this is what Rosalind Hursthouse is getting at when she argues that Peter Singer and Tom Regan’s claim that animal research is wrong is not action-guiding for most of us in certain circumstances (2006). Aside from actual vivisectors and lab technicians, it is unclear what it would mean for us to opt out of animal research. Of course, we can eschew products tested on animals and that sort of thing, but to the extent that the medical industrial complex is so much more powerful than we are and limits our choices in significant ways, opting out of certain aspects of animal research is sometimes impossible. For decades, a premature infant who was intubated in a hospital benefited from the fact that endotracheal intubation has been practiced on small animals, like ferrets, in pediatric training hospitals for years. That research is, thankfully, being changed to nonanimal models. But for parents in the neonatal intensive care unit it is difficult to know what to do with the general guidance that we should oppose animal research when in the actual moment of decision. Clearly, options for activism and awareness-raising abound, as Hursthouse points out, but the issue remains that we often cannot opt out of certain practices in the immediate situations we are in. Cf. Curtin 1991. Here I am reminded of the advice I received many years ago on a vegan listserv. I had asked if anyone knew of a vegan source of vitamin D3 and the response I got was that there were not any vegan supplements but I should go outside in the full sun without applying sunscreen. The person also suggested that people are far too serious about sunscreen application. This struck me as a willful denial of the reality that, in the absence of vegan D3 supplements, there may be a genuine moral dilemma at play. See Emmerman 2012 for a full discussion and defense of the features of the ecofeminist approach I mention here.

191

1990 The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory by Carol J. Adams published.

Chapter 9 Inter-animal Moral Conflict and Moral Repair

192

Chapter 9 Inter-animal Moral Conflict and Moral Repair

8

9

10 11

12 13

14

There are many examples of pluralist, contextualized, and nonhierarchical approaches to animal ethics. See Curtin 1991; Donovan and Adams 2007; Donovan 1990; Gaard 1993, 2001, 2002; Gruen 1993, 2004, 2011; Kheel 1985, 1993; Luke 1995, 2007; Slicer 1991, among others. See Singer 1990 and 1994 and Regan 1983 for their reason-only approaches to animal ethics. When I refer to traditional animal theory I reference these kinds of views. For excellent discussions of the importance of emotion to moral deliberation, see Donovan 1990; Gaard 2002; Gilligan 1982; Gruen 1991, 1993, 2004; Held 1995; Luke 1995, 2007; Kheel 1985, 1993; Slicer 1991; and Walker 1989, 1995. For two examples of theories that rely on such a hierarchy, see Varner 2012 and Warren 1997. In future work I will think more about what should be said about nonsentient living things. I am keenly aware of the dangers of replacing one form of hierarchy with another and would very much like to avoid doing so (these dangers are nicely articulated in Kheel 1985). Still, it is not yet clear to me exactly how to talk about nonsentient living things. I borrow the language of “moral repair” from Margaret Urban Walker (2006). Moral hierarchies that rank sentient creatures according to levels of moral significance are problematic in part because they have taught us not to see the remainders where our interactions with animals are concerned. If we think of a cat as less morally significant than a human, then we feel justified in allowing a human’s interest to override the cat’s interest. That feeling of being justified in turn discourages us from seeing that there may be more work to do with respect to the cat when her interests are thwarted in cases of conflict. I am not suggesting that there are always moral remainders. Certainly, if I make a promise to a friend and I keep that promise, then it is likely that I will not have generated any moral remainders in that process. In inter-animal conflicts, however, I suspect that moral remainders will more likely be the norm rather than the exception. We are embedded in exploitative systems over which we have very limited (or no) direct control. As a result, there may not be good ways to extricate ourselves from inter-animal conflicts without causing significant harms. Moreover, given that attending to animals’ interests in a robust way is still on the fringes of common morality, it will be difficult to attend to

16

17

18

19

20

193

animals without generating some problems in the inter-human realm, in particular with people we love or other community members (Emmerman 2019). One need only read blogs written by vegans about holiday celebrations to see that this is the case. Sharon Bishop has a thorough discussion of how principle-based theories handle (or fail to handle) feelings of remorse and guilt in Bishop 1987. I am trying to move away from the sort of view Bishop criticizes to one that can more easily recognize remorse and the appropriateness of acts of forgiveness or repair. My situation was complicated by physiological issues unrelated to my son’s prematurity. Many mothers of premature infants are able to breastfeed successfully with adequate support. Gene Baur says, “Even in the production of wool, cruelty is a feature. To reduce problems with flies that infest the folds in the skin of Merino sheep . . ., producers practice ‘mulesing.’ Strips of flesh are literally cut off the backs of the animals’ legs and hind region to create smooth skin without anesthesia or pain relievers. Sheep also commonly have their tails cut off to control fly problems” (2008, 79). This treatment is not limited to Merino sheep (see Farm Sanctuary 2021). There is also a connection between sheep used for wool and sheep used for consumption. When sheep “age out” of producing wool, they are slaughtered for human consumption and the lambs born of sheep in the wool industry are shipped and slaughtered for human consumption, sometimes being shipped alive for very long distances. Because of declines in demand for wool, sheep are being genetically modified for dual-purpose use so that they are both good wool producers and good sources of “meat” (Jones 2004). I say “wherever appropriate” because there may be cases, as if he is terminally ill, where ensuring his survival is either impossible or undesirable. To be fair, the sun is a vegan source of D3, but clearly sunshine is not an option for most infants and is certainly not an option for neonates living in isolettes in intensive care units. A vegan source of D3 was formulated around 2011. Josephine Donovan and Carol Adams have offered the following core principles for animal ethics: “It is wrong to harm sentient creatures unless overriding good will result for them. It is wrong to kill such animals unless in immediate self-defense or in defense of those for whom one is personally responsible. Moreover, humans have a moral obligation to care for those animals who, for whatever reason, are unable to adequately care for themselves, in accordance with their

1990 “Animal Rights and Feminist Theory” by Josephine Donovan published in Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

15

Chapter 9 Inter-animal Moral Conflict and Moral Repair

194

Chapter 9 Inter-animal Moral Conflict and Moral Repair

21 22

23

24

25

26

needs and wishes, as best as the caregivers can ascertain them and within the limits of the caregivers’ own capacities. Finally, people have a moral duty to oppose and expose those who are contributing to animal abuse” (2007, 4). The view I offer here is informed by Donovan and Adams, though I might alter the details of their principles somewhat. Ginna Wall, RN, MN, IBCLC, email to author, December 14, 2012. Apparently, it was not until the 2011 Surgeon General’s report on breastfeeding was released that there was an “official” recommendation to use donor milk (Wall, email to the author, December 20, 2012). Clearly, this was not an impediment for some hospitals, as the Mothers’ Milk Bank of California has been providing NICUs with donated milk since 1974 (https://mothersmilk.org/about/). Of course, whether a vegan should accept breast milk from a non-vegan donor is an open question. This issue has been debated on some vegan parenting sites (see http://www.mothering.com/ community/t/671974/vegan-infant-formula). This issue highlights how difficult it can be to fully extricate oneself from inter-animal conflicts. Human milk obtained through the milk banking system costs between $3.00 and $5.00 per ounce compared to $0.15 per ounce for formula. In 2012, donor milk was “used like an expensive medicine” (Wall, email to author, December 17, 2012). In 2020, though donor breast milk is still considered expensive medicine, the NICU where my son was treated has expanded the indications for its use and more babies receive donor breast milk than previously (Josephine Amory, MD, email to author, September 1, 2020). My son would not have qualified for donor milk even with the more expansive protocols. See, for example, Human Milk for Human Babies at www.facebook. com/hm4hb/ which has 80,000 followers and www.eatsonfeets.org. Both groups were started in 2010 and have grown considerably in the last decade. Some women also use neighborhood groups on Facebook and “buy nothing” groups to exchange milk. Most informal breast milk sharing does not involve the exchange of money. My thanks to Jennifer Mendelson and Joy MacTavish, IBCLC for bringing me up to date on current trends in casual breast milk donation. See Lubick 2020 for a discussion of anthropological studies of informal breast milk sharing. The current policy is to allow parents to feed their infants milk obtained through unscreened, casual donation after they have been informed of the risks by the medical team and have signed a waiver acknowledging the risks/benefits (Josephine Amory, MD, email to author, September 1, 2020). Even though casual donation is permitted,

28

29

30

195

some hospitals and physicians discourage parents from using unscreened human milk donations. I do not doubt that vegan mothers more informed about breast milk donation and less frightened of immunity concerns may have pursued other options. I do not mean to suggest here that no other option would have been reasonable, only that the one I pursued seems understandable under the circumstances. Though I cannot go more deeply into this here, the work of moral repair may amount to different things depending on the kinds of dilemmas we face. Some dilemmas come about because of deeply entrenched social and cultural structures, while others cannot be resolved by making changes in those structures. My analysis of my own situation is that it was a bit of both. There were structural limitations around the acceptability and availability of breast milk donation in an NICU setting as well as limitations created by the kind of fear and doubt many people suffer when in complex medical situations. This kind of recognition can be hard to articulate. Deane Curtin’s discussion of contextualized moral vegetarianism helps shed light on what I am getting at here. In discussing the fact that some cultures, due to extreme weather conditions, cannot follow a vegetarian lifestyle, he notes that many have rituals in place that involve paying respect to the animals harmed or killed. He says that “In some cultures, violence against nonhuman life is ritualized in such a way that one is present to the reality of one’s food” (Curtin 1991, 70). These rituals show mindfulness about the consequences for others of the choices we sometimes have to make. It is possible that, in some cases, the rituals express gratitude to the gods or the universe, but do not reflect the idea that anything wrong has happened. I have both senses of ritual in mind here: those that reflect a regretful attitude and those that express gratitude. Mindfulness or “being present to the reality” is an important part of having an appropriate mindset regarding moral remainders. The current practices of industrialized nations reflect neither respect nor gratitude toward the animals sacrificed in service of human ends. Early in their availability, there was some disagreement about whether all of these supplements are strictly vegan. See the discussion from 2012 on Jack Norris’s website regarding vegan D3 supplements: http:// jacknorrisrd.com/?p=2081. Norris is a vegan nutritionist and the founder of Vegan Outreach. That disagreement has diminished and there are several vegan vitamin D3 supplements available on the market in 2020.

1990 The first March on Washington for the Animals.

27

Chapter 9 Inter-animal Moral Conflict and Moral Repair

196

Chapter 9 Inter-animal Moral Conflict and Moral Repair

31 https://elsenutrition.com/pages/faq. They anticipate FDA approval is at least three years away. 32 My thanks to Lauren Ornelas of Food Empowerment Project for helping me with research on vegan infant formula when this paper was first published in 2014. It is unclear why companies making vegetarian infant formulas have not switched to plant-based D3 now that it is available. I suspect it has something to do with costs, the onerous nature of the approval process through federal agencies, and the widespread acceptance of animal exploitation. 33 The French vegan formula, Bébé Mandorle, sources their vitamin D3 from lichen (email to author, September 2, 2020).

Michael Vick, Race, and Animality Claire Jean Kim

I

t was April 25, 2007, when the Surry County Sheriff’s Department executed a search warrant at 1915 Moonlight Road near Smithfield, Virginia, a 15-acre property owned by NFL star Michael Vick.1 Investigators found more than 50 dogs, many of whom were scarred or wounded, and the standard paraphernalia of dogfighting including a breeding stand (“rape rack”), treadmill, breaksticks, and injectable steroids (Strouse 2009). Thus began Michael Vick’s spectacular fall from grace. Vick had gone from humble beginnings in a Virginia public housing project to NFL superstardom. He was the first African American quarterback to be selected first in the NFL draft (by the Atlanta Falcons in 2001) and was one of the most talented and promising players in the league. Just before his fall, he was flying high with a ten-year, 130 million dollar contract with the Falcons and endorsement contracts with Nike, Coca Cola, Reebok, and many others (Laucella 2010). Then one of Vick’s cousins was arrested for marijuana possession and gave 1915 Moonlight Road as his address, leading police right to Vick’s illegal dogfighting operation. Prosecutors charged Vick and three of his friends with several federal felony counts relating to the operation of an interstate dogfighting and gambling ring known as Bad Newz Kennels. For months, Vick lied to investigators, claiming that

1990 The National Women’s Studies Association Ecofeminist Task Force presents a “Resolution for Dietary Nonviolence at NWSA Conferences.”

10

197

198

Chapter 10 Michael Vick, Race, and Animality

his friends had engaged in dogfighting on his property without his knowledge. As the evidence against him mounted, he was suspended from the NFL, lost endorsement contracts, and filed for bankruptcy. Finally, after his three friends stated they were ready to give evidence against him, Vick pled guilty and was sentenced to 23 months in prison. But the rags to riches to rags story had one more twist. After Vick was released in 2009, after serving 18 months, he worked to redeem himself in the eyes of the NFL management, corporate sponsors, and the public. Working with several mentors and a team of more than seven public relations advisors, Vick resurrected his image (by acting as a spokesman against dogfighting for the Humane Society of the United States) and his career (he joined the Philadelphia Eagles in 2009 and once again signed a contract with Nike). Vick also won the Ed Block Award for courage and sportsmanship and the Associated Press NFL Comeback Player of the Year Award. The American Dream is the simple idea that if you work hard, you can make it, with making it defined quite specifically as the attainment of middleclass status or more and symbolized by ownership of a single family home. The adjective “American” here is a qualifier meant to express not humility— the recognition that people elsewhere might dream other dreams—but rather exceptionalism. This dream is only possible here, has been crafted to perfection here. Vick’s story of rags to riches to rags to redemption has been read by many observers and by Vick himself as a confirmation of the American Dream. For some time, professional sports has been touted as a site of successful racial integration in the US, a theater of black accomplishment and postraciality, and Vick’s story has been read through this lens. First he triumphed over the projects, then, humbled by his own inner demons, he fought his way back to NFL stardom and wealth. Only in America could Michael Vick have written his own story not once but twice. I would like to challenge this reading of the Michael Vick story and ask what it willfully, perversely forgets. The Michael Vick story, if we attend to it closely, is not one about self-realization in the context of freedom and opportunity but rather one about how taxonomies of power such as race, species, and gender constrain and indeed incarcerate the bodies they produce. The Michael Vick story does not validate the American Dream but rather exposes it as a fable. In the 1800s, the promise of America was used to manage the contradictions of racial and class inequality in nascent capitalism in order to produce quiescent workers and citizens. Now, in this neoliberal age, as these contradictions sharpen, the fable of the American Dream is more socially necessary and more empirically untrue than ever. Michael Vick’s arrest in 2007 ignited a firestorm of media commentary and public debate on television, on the radio, and in cyberspace. From the

Chapter 10 Michael Vick, Race, and Animality

199

start, Vick’s defenders argued that race was driving the prosecution. Animal advocates, many of whom are white, forcefully denied this, insisting that the case had “nothing to do with race” and that Vick was under fire only because of his cruel treatment of dogs. One caller on NPR’s Talk of the Nation said: “I don’t care if Michael Vick was black, white, green, purple. To me, this is not a story about color,” and PETA’s blog on the Vick case stated unequivocally: “This is not a race issue. We don’t care if he’s orange. This is not a race issue. White people who fight dogs need to fry. This is not a race issue.”2 Given the historical period we inhabit right now, it is not surprising that this became the central issue—was the Vick case about race or not? This period, which Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2009) calls the period of “colorblind racism” and Patricia Hill Collins (2005) has called the period of “new racism,” is marked by the contradiction of official race-neutrality and discourses of colorblind transcendence on the one hand, and ongoing racialization on the other. A period when race is everywhere and everywhere denied. A period when the nation’s first African American president is denounced as a cocaine dealer, an affirmative action baby, a foreign-born Muslim terrorist, the n-word, and a chimpanzee and at the same time held up as a symbol of our postraciality. In this period, racial justice advocates have become full-time sleuths, ferreting out and exposing racial discrimination as it disguises itself in ever subtler forms, while many whites object that this is not uncovering racism as much as it is “injecting race” into situations or “playing the race card.” Race is everywhere in the Vick story. We live in a society where racial meanings are ubiquitous and pervasive, saturating our thoughts, our speech, our actions. Animal advocates claimed that the Vick case had “nothing to do with race,” that they could bracket out race and assert a universalist narrative about cruelty without racial implications. But this is a claim to a kind of racial innocence that is impossible. There is no race free space. Vick’s critics said they didn’t care if he was green, purple, or orange, but no one in this country has ever been enslaved, auctioned off, or lynched for being green, purple, or orange. Race set the context for the Vick story, shaping poor urban neighborhoods like the one where Vick grew up, where the (mis)opportunity structure makes social mobility hard and the hostile criminal justice system makes going to prison easy—with sports an avenue of escape only for the lucky few. In Ruth Gilmore’s (2007) unforgettable words, race still means differential vulnerability to premature death. Driving while black, walking while black, breathing while black remains an offense that is sometimes punishable by death, and not only by the police but sometimes by overzealous (vigilante) citizens as well. We see race in the broader political backdrop, too, where there is an intensified effort to pass voter ID laws and otherwise

1990 Karen Davis founds United Poultry Concerns.

200

Chapter 10 Michael Vick, Race, and Animality

curtail voting rights (or as Justice Scalia calls them, “racial entitlements”) in the wake of Shelby County v. Holder (2013). I want to focus on the racial meanings which course through the Vick story, and specifically on the way in which racial meanings draw upon and are entangled with species meanings here. One reason the Vick case has been so explosive is that it raises questions about the human/animal boundary, about the intersection of the taxonomies of race and species, and specifically the relationship between Black maleness and animality. What did it mean that Vick’s critics often discussed his dogs in human terms—as having been executed, as experiencing redemption? What did it mean that some of Vick’s critics called for him to be neutered? What did it mean that satirists often reversed the positions of Vick and his dogs, suggesting that Vick was more of an animal than they were? Consider some of the key dualisms which underwrite Western culture: master/slave, male/female, human/animal, white/nonwhite, reason/nature, culture/nature, civilized/savage, mind/body, subject/object. Critical race theorists, ecofeminists, and many others have persuasively argued that these differences are not produced in isolation but are co-constituted or produced as effects of power in a profoundly interdependent way (McClintock 1995; Plumwood 1993). The Black man is made through synergistic taxonomies of power—not just as not white but as savage, nature, other, body, object, alien, slave, and animal. From the Middle Ages onward, Europeans viewed Black people as the lowest type of humans, ranked just above apes on the Great Chain of Being. The boundary between the two was a matter of great interest and fierce debate, and the Black man was variously characterized over the centuries as an ape, as ape-like, or as closest to the ape. Winthrop Jordan (1968) recounts that British explorers in the early 1500s first encountered Africans and apes at the same time and began describing Africans as apes who were tailless and walked upright. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1794), Thomas Jefferson wrote that Negro men preferred white women to the same measure that the “oran–ootans” (he was referring to chimpanzees) preferred Negro women, the males of each species reaching up the chain of being in their sexual desires. Decades later, as standard-bearers for the “American School” of anthropology, Josiah Nott and George Gliddon explicitly located Africans midway between Europeans and apes in Types of Mankind (1855). Along with Samuel George Morton, they used data from craniometric investigations to not only rank races (whites on top, Indians in the middle, Blacks on the bottom) but to argue that they were different species altogether. Scroll forward a century and a half to Barack Obama. Are we now in a postcivil rights postracial era where these ideas about black masculinity no longer pertain? I recently argued that we saw something new in the 2008

Chapter 10 Michael Vick, Race, and Animality

201

presidential campaign—blackness being recuperated into foreignness, as evidenced by the relentless constructions of Obama as a foreign-born Muslim terrorist (Kim 2011). But there has been plenty of good old-fashioned animalization of Obama as well. In 2012, federal judge Richard Cebull of the US District Court in Montana circulated an email entitled “A Mother’s Love,” wherein the little boy asks “Mommy, how come I’m black and you’re white?” and the mother responds, “Don’t even go there, Barack! From what I can remember about that party, you’re lucky you don’t bark!” During the 2008 campaign, T-shirts and toys featuring Obama as Curious George were on sale online, as were Obama sock puppet monkeys. In February 2009, referencing the fight over the president’s stimulus bill and the police shooting of a pet chimpanzee in Connecticut, a New York Post cartoon by Sean Delonas shows two police officers standing with a smoking gun over a dead chimp, saying “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” In April 2011, Orange County GOP Central Committee member Marilyn Davenport emailed to friends a picture of a “family” portrait of chimpanzees with Obama’s face photoshopped onto the baby chimpanzee’s body.3 In the US, sports, like politics, has been a high-voltage site for the production and circulation of racial meanings. The NBA, NFL, Nike, Gatorade and other corporate interests have sought to package and sell Michael Jordan, Michael Vick, and other superstars as exemplifying the American Dream and the transcendence of race through athletic achievement. But there is now a rich body of scholarship laying out how professional sports, and the NBA and NFL in particular, reinscribe patterns of white supremacy (Coakley 1998; Leonard and King 2011; Leonard 2010; Andrews 2001). Beyond stacking (the assigning of team positions based on race), the preponderance of white coaches, managers, and owners, and racism exhibited by fans at the games, the discourse we use to talk about and think of Black athletes bears the imprint of centuries of racial imaginings. As John Hoberman (1997) argues, we talk about natural Black athletic superiority even though this insinuates natural Black intellectual inferiority. We are more likely to refer to white ball players as smart, savvy, having good judgment or making good decisions. The same goes for honorary white players. In “The Great Yellow Hope,” I argue that Jeremy Lin (formerly with the New York Knicks, now with the Houston Rockets), who is Asian American, is heavily praised for his intelligence, diligence, organization, and preparation—all model minority traits.4 Black male athletes, on the other hand, are continually produced as either good Blacks or bad, either transcendent Michael Jordans or incorrigible Latrell Sprewells (Ferber 2007). Both can be depicted as beasts on the verge of being out of control. Consider the 2003 Nike television

1991 Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy publishes its Special Issue on Ecological Feminism with several essays focusing on ecofeminism and animals.

202

Chapter 10 Michael Vick, Race, and Animality

ad which juxtaposed gritty urban scenes of basketball faceoffs with a pitbull facing off against a Rottweiler in a fight. These imaginings of Black male athletes at once express collective anxieties about the threat of racial “progress” on various fronts and satisfy the neoliberal imperative of selling more stuff by showcasing the Black body as a site of both terror and desire. According to Thomas Oates (2007), we can look at the NFL draft itself— with its preliminary convention of having young prospects strip to their shorts, get weighed, and parade in front of scouts and media—as a disciplinary ritual which feminizes and animalizes these young men, rendering their blackness safe for white consumption. David Leonard writes: “Black bodies, even those living the ‘American Dream,’ functioning as million-dollar commodities, are contained and imagined as dangerous, menacing, abject, and criminal” (2010, 259). I would add, as animal. Many cartoonists approached the Michael Vick story through the theme of human/animal reversal. In one cartoon, Michael Vick is pictured next to a fighting dog and the caption reads: “Pop Quiz: Find the True Animal.” In another, a dog sitting curbside gives Vick the finger as he is driven away in a van labelled “Animal Control.” Another, referencing the fact that Vick electrocuted some of the dogs he found lacking, shows Vick sitting in what looks like an electric chair in a tub of water while a dog holding electrical wires approaches. What are we to make of this image? Is the artist ignorant of the impact of race upon every aspect of the US criminal justice system, from profiling to arrest to prosecution to conviction to sentencing to postsentencing consideration? Does s/he know nothing about the intense public debate raging about how the death penalty is enacted in a racially discriminatory way? What about journalist Tucker Carlson who said on Fox News that Vick should have been executed for being cruel to dogs? What are we to make of these statements about Vick? Many of Vick’s defenders voiced the opinion that whites feel a special glee in bringing down famous and wealthy Black men, especially athletes. Mike Tyson, OJ, Kobe Bryant, Barry Bonds, and now Michael Vick. Pointing to a tortured history of police violence against Black Americans and a discriminatory criminal justice system, they argued there was a rush to judgment and a harshness of condemnation in the Vick case. This is why some Black people talked about the need to close ranks around Vick. R. L. White, head of the Atlanta NAACP, expressed ongoing support for Vick, as did Southern Christian Leadership Conference president Charles Steele, who was quoted as saying: “We need to support him no matter what the evidence reveals.” Rev. Joseph Lowery, a veteran of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and other civil rights protests, said from the pulpit: “Michael Vick is my son. I’ve never met him. But he is my son.” Kwame Abernathy, Ralph Abernathy’s

son, called what happened to Vick an “electronic lynching” (Thompson n.d.). Polls showed that Black Americans were more likely than whites to think Vick’s punishment was too harsh and to support his reinstatement to the NFL after his release from prison, although the former were far from unanimous on these issues. We can only read Vick’s story as the American Dream if we willfully, perversely forget race. But race is not the only taxonomy of power that figures large in Vick’s story. There is also species—and here I mean the categorical line-drawing we do between humans and all other animals, as well as the way we characterize species natures and breed natures. Like race, species is a constructed system of power built upon the politicization of physical difference. Like race, it is a classificatory exercise with political ends. Species meanings have been an instrument for arrogating to ourselves as humans mind, reason, subjecthood, moral consideration, and rights—and denying these to all other sentient life. Virginia Anderson (2006) points out that seventeenth-century Algonquian-speaking Indian tribes in the Chesapeake area had no single word for “animal,” suggesting that they perceived a world of infinitely varied creatures. But the English colonists at Jamestown used the rubric term “animal” to refer to all those creatures whom they saw as less than human. Nonhuman animals do not figure at all in the American Dream, of course, except perhaps as pet commodities signifying middle-classness, along with the house and the picket fence (notably, the first thing Michael Vick wanted after his redemption was a family dog). The American Dream is anthropocentric in two senses: it attends only to the wellbeing, needs, and desires of humans; and it imagines the thriving of humans to be independent from the wellbeing of other species and nature— that is, it ignores the biological, ecological context in which human life and labor takes place. Many of Vick’s defenders resisted the animal question as distracting from the race question, as though it were a competitive, zero-sum situation—race or species, Black people or animals. Dogfighting is wrong, they intoned, but in the end, they’re only animals. Consider this NPR exchange between host Allison Keyes and scholar Michael Eric Dyson, both of whom are African American: Dyson: Lassie stayed on the air for 15 years, Nat King Cole couldn’t stay on his show for six months. Dogs and animals have been treated—relatively speaking—with greater respect and regard . . . than African American people. When you look at Hurricane Katrina, they have a famous picture of a bus full of dogs and animals being treated to first-class citizenship rights

203

1991 Trisha Lamb Feuerstein and Marti Kheel compile a Feminists for Animal Rights Bibliography.

Chapter 10 Michael Vick, Race, and Animality

204

Chapter 10 Michael Vick, Race, and Animality

in America while Black people were drowning . . . this is not to disrespect the needs of other sentient animals who would coexist with us on the human space called earth. Keyes: So what disturbs me is that an African American man who came from that legacy [of slavery] could do the same thing to dogs that white people did to us during the civil rights movement. Dyson: True. There’s no question about that. But you know what? We’re not dogs. We’re not animals. We are African American human beings . . . what he [Vick] did was reprehensible . . . but to put dogs and animals parallel to Black people is the extension of the legacy of slavery, not its contradiction.5

Keyes points out the ironic link between Vick’s experience of racism and his brutality toward dogs, but Dyson brushes aside her comments and returns to race as the important issue at hand. Appearing on the Late Show with David Letterman in September 2008, comedian Chris Rock made the same move, saying that Michael Vick must be looking at pictures of Sarah Palin holding a bloody moose and thinking, “Why am I in jail?” Of course, Rock is right that there is something arbitrary about licensing hunting and criminalizing dogfighting. But Rock isn’t animated by concern for animals here, he isn’t exhorting us to take a more critical look at moose hunting. Instead he’s foregrounding the issue of a racial double standard. In both of these examples, the focus on race subsumes, deflects, and ultimately denies the other set of moral claims being raised. Race, in other words, goes imperial in these instances, and the animal question is reduced to racism and silenced. Vick’s defenders embrace human supremacy in the name of fighting white supremacy. When Kwame Abernathy called what was happening to Michael Vick an “electronic lynching,” he of course echoed Clarence Thomas, who called the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings of 1991 a “high tech lynching,” a rhetorical move which trumped the issue of whether Thomas had sexually harassed Anita Hill and secured him a seat on the US Supreme Court. In the Vick case, is the lynching metaphor being used once again to deflect our attention from another form of injustice—not male domination this time but human domination? We have been at it for millennia, this project of animalizing animals or making them what we need them to be so that we can imagine ourselves the way we want to. According to Gary Steiner (2010), Plato and Aristotle’s enshrinement of “reason” as the faculty marking superior beings was a critical development in this process, as was the Stoics’ insistence that

Chapter 10 Michael Vick, Race, and Animality

205

animals existed entirely for the sake of humans. The Bible (Old and New Testaments) indicated that humans were superior to other animals because they possessed a soul and that this justified their dominion (originally mild; after the fall, harsher) over the latter. Then there was René Descartes, writing in the seventeenth century. For Descartes, humans were defined by soul, mind, thought, and language: cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). Animals, on the other hand, were machines, pure matter, bodies unencumbered by souls or minds, and when they cried out upon being dissected while fully conscious, Descartes insisted that they were not feeling or expressing pain but making mechanical noises like a clock might make if certain mechanisms within it were triggered. By the time eighteenth-century utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham pointed to animal sentience to argue for the moral considerability of animals—recall his famous quote, “The question is not, can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But, can they suffer?” (Bentham 1948)—he was swimming against the tide of Western theology and philosophy. Despite the official line on animal subordination over the centuries, there were murmurings of subversion. For one thing, humans have always been good at maintaining contradictory ideas about animals and everything else (Ritvo 1998). Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Keith Thomas (1983) argues, various developments—including the articulation of less anthropocentric taxonomic systems such as the Linnaean one in Systema Naturae (1735–68); the emergence of urban middle-class pet-keeping; urbanization and industrialization and the distancing from rural life; and the expansion of fields such as astronomy, geology, botany, and zoology—all worked together to foreground human/animal continuities and generate new ways of relating to, thinking about, and feeling for animals. Animal advocacy emerged in Britain in the early 1800s in the person of William Wilberforce, notably a leading abolitionist and founder of the RSPCA, and soon after in the US, where abolitionism and animal advocacy were also closely tied. The publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, of course, gave a scientific boost to the ongoing reconsideration of the human/animal divide. In the US, the last several decades have seen, simultaneously and contradictorily, an intensification in the commodification and instrumentalization of animals, driven by consumer demand and enabled by technological innovation, and a widening and deepening discussion over whether animals have the intrinsic right to be protected from exploitation. For animals, it is the worst of times and the best of times. “Animal capital,” to use Nicole Shukin’s (2009) term, is more salient than ever in the capitalist economy—from the unprecedented scale of factory farming to the manufacture of transgenic mice—but there is little doubt that our interest in the capacities and moral

1991 Cathleen McGuire and Colleen McGuire convene a reading, discussion, and activist group called “EVE” (Ecofeminist Visions Emerging) which met for three years in New York City.

206

Chapter 10 Michael Vick, Race, and Animality

standing of animals is growing as well. With the intensification of mastery has come the intensification of doubt. If we have always been anxious anthropocentrists, in Erica Fudge’s (2000) phrase, we have now become ambivalent ones as well—worrying not just about how to maintain domination over nonhuman animals, but also about whether we should. Genetic studies showing humans share 98.7 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees; ethological studies demonstrating the astonishing cognitive, emotional, and moral lives of animals; legal and philosophical arguments urging justice toward animals; investigative journalism exposing cruel farming and slaughtering practices; the emergence of the scholarly field of animal studies; the proliferation of animal law classes in leading US law schools; committed advocacy by animal welfare and rights groups; and yes, the extralegal practices of animal liberation groups—all of these developments together have initiated a cultural shift. The animal question has been raised. Dogfighting is embedded in this contradictory picture. Public sentiment has turned decisively against it; what was once the sport of kings in England is now a felony in all 50 states. The Vick case furthered the criminalization of dogfighting, helping to make it a felony in states where it had been a misdemeanor and stiffening penalties. At the same time, according to law enforcement officials, there are indications that dogfighting in the US is actually growing not only in its traditional strongholds, white southern rural areas, but especially in urban Black neighborhoods like Vick’s (Burke n.d.; Mann 2007). Fighting dogs are showing up in Nike ads for basketball shoes and in rap—on the cover of DMX’s Grand Champ, for example, and in music videos like Jay-Z’s. There are more than 100 websites selling dogfighting equipment and dozens of journals chronicling dogfights (with the disclaimer that all accounts are fictional). An estimated 40,000 adults and 100,000 kids and teenagers in the US fight dogs (Peters 2008). With bets ranging from pocket change to tens of thousands of dollars, it is a half-billion dollar industry where gambling, illegal drugs, weapons, and animal cruelty explosively converge. As Craig Forsyth and Rhonda Evans (1998) have shown, dogfighters deny charges of cruelty and insist that pitbulls choose to fight, that it’s their nature, that they love it. They compare themselves to coaches and their dogs to prize-fighters. But what does it mean to say that dogs choose to fight? How do we assess free will and choice on the part of the dog in this context? Consider that in the world of dogfighting, dogs are genetically bred to alter normal canine behavior, which would cause the dog to growl in warning before attacking and to stop fighting when injured or when the other dog shows signs of submission. Consider that female dogs who resist breeding are placed in “rape racks” which immobilize them so that the male dog can

penetrate them. Consider that from a tender age, dogs spend their entire lives outside, chained, just close enough to other dogs to keep them riled up but never close enough to have contact. Consider, too, that dogfighters continually taunt, starve, and drug dogs to heighten their aggression, that they use animals such as cats, small dogs, and rabbits (some of whom are stolen family pets) as “bait” to create an appetite for killing and for blood. Even after being bred and raised this way, some dogs still fail the viciousness test, showing little or no inclination to fight. These dogs are promptly killed. Placed in a dirt pit ranging from 8 to 16 square feet and surrounded by a three-foot high fence, dogs are set upon each other for a fight to the death. Fights often last for hours and end with the death of one dog or when one dog cannot or will not continue. Dogs who do not die in the fight will often die hours or days later from broken bones, puncture wounds, blood loss, shock, dehydration, or infection. Because the activity is underground, dogfighters do not take their dogs to the vet, but either ignore their wounds or stitch them up themselves. Veteran criminal investigators describe themselves as shocked by dogfighting operations. They find pits full of blood, corpses of dogs, dogs with dozens of open wounds and half of their jaws missing, dogs with most of their bodies covered in scar tissue. This account of a fight, taken from a dogfighting journal, gives you a sense of the violence involved: His face is a mass of deep cuts, as are his shoulders and neck. Both of his front legs have been broken, but Billy Bear isn’t ready to quit. At the referee’s signal, his master releases him and unable to support himself on his front legs, he slides on his chest across the blood and urine stained carpet, propelled by his good hind legs, toward to the opponent who rushes to meet him. Driven by instinct, intensive training and love for the owner who has brought him to this moment, Billy Bear drives himself painfully into the other dog’s charge . . . less than 20 minutes later, rendered useless by the other dog, Billy Bear lies spent beside his master, his stomach constricted with pain. He turns his head back toward the ring, his eyes glazed searching for a last look at the other dog as [sic] receives a bullet in his brain. (Gibson 2005, 7–8 quoting C. M. Brown, “Pit,” Atlanta Magazine, 1982, 66)

The most prized quality of a fighting dog is “gameness,” or a willingness to fight to the death, because this is seen as reflecting the masculine strength of the owner. Alan Dundes’s description of cockfighting as a “thinly disguised symbolic homoerotic masturbatory phallic duel, with the winner emasculating the loser through castration or feminization” (1994, 251) is a fine description of dogfighting, too. Rhonda Evans et al. write: “in the sport of dogfighting,

207

1991 PETA launches its “I’d Rather Go Naked than Wear Fur” Campaign; feminist critiques appear immediately.

Chapter 10 Michael Vick, Race, and Animality

208

Chapter 10 Michael Vick, Race, and Animality

the actual combatants serve as symbols of their respective owners, and therefore any character attributed to the dogs is also attributed to the men they represent” (1998, 832). The most despised dog is thus the so-called cur, the dog who turns away from the attacking opponent. Killing curs quickly and brutally helps to alleviate the owner’s humiliation and restore his injured masculinity. The dog is put out of sight, but he or she was never visible to begin with. Human supremacy as expressed in dogfighting psychically and corporeally obliterates the dog. Michael Vick saw his first dogfight at age eight but didn’t get seriously involved until he was on the cusp of celebrity. The same month he was drafted by the Atlanta Falcons, he decided to start a dogfighting operation with friends and purchased the remote 15-acre property near Smithfield, Virginia for this purpose. His friends lived on the property and ran the operation and Vick visited every Tuesday (his day off) to oversee things. Vick and his friends used these methods to kill dogs whom they deemed insufficiently vicious:6 ●

Hanging by a nylon cord thrown over a 2 × 4 nailed between two trees

●

Drowning by holding the dogs’ heads submerged in a 5-gallon bucket of water

●

Shooting in the head

●

Electrocuting by attaching jumper cables to their ears and throwing them in the swimming pool

●

Slamming repeatedly against the ground

The forensic report on the dogs whose bodies were found buried on Vick’s property showed facial fractures, broken necks from hanging, broken legs and vertebrae, and severe bone bruising. Most had skull fractures, possibly from a hammer (Gorant 2010). On ESPN’s First Take in March 2013, commentator Stephen A. Smith was fired up that some of Vick’s book tour appearances had been cancelled because of threats of violence. Vick was a “model citizen,” “a quintessential role model,” Smith remarked, as his colleagues called animal advocates “nuts” and “psycho” for their unwillingness to forgive. One quipped that Vick’s book should have been called Never Free instead of Finally Free. Animal advocates are easy to ridicule. The social construction of them as morally out of joint, overzealous, and fanatical runs very deep in American culture. Seen through the lens of anthropocentrism, animal advocacy is by definition loony. Why don’t these people pay attention to human issues? Homelessness? Child illiteracy? Juvenile diabetes? The presumption behind

Chapter 10 Michael Vick, Race, and Animality

209

these questions is that humans come first, that they are more important than animals, yet the grounds for this argument are less firm than we might think. The search for the single trait distinguishing all humans from all animals— what makes us uniquely human—has been as fruitless as it has been relentless over the past few millennia. Reason, language, self-consciousness, a sense of time and the future—all of these have been tried on and found lacking. Are humans more intelligent than other animals? Certainly, if we define intelligence as the particular types of cognitive skills which humans have and discount the intelligences of other species. But even here, as Peter Singer (2009) argues, the boundary fails once we grant that not every human has more of this kind of intelligence than every animal (a chimpanzee might do better than a mentally impaired human by some measures). When I first told my father, who is a first generation Korean American, that I was interested in animal issues, he asked why not work on the plight of North Korean refugees in China? For my father, the claim of blood, people, and nation takes priority over other claims. To me, his question was a reminder of the ultimate arbitrariness of choosing any cause to fight for. Who writes the rules governing love and commitment and where are they posted? For some animal advocates, the Vick case was a chance to change America’s mind about the pitbull. Pitbulls, in part because of their association with urban dogfighting, have gotten a bad rap. Indeed they have been racialized as urban/black/dangerous. As a result of this, pitbulls are dying. They are the dog of choice in US dogfights, and they are dying in dogfighting operations and in the fights themselves. They are dying because they are discarded in large numbers and end up in shelters where they are passed over for adoption and euthanized. Pitbulls now make up an estimated 30 to 60 percent of the dogs at shelters and are the most frequently euthanized type of dog in America (Muhammad 2012). Condemned as an entire breed, pitbulls are regulated and even banned by BDL, breed discriminatory legislation, in numerous localities across the nation. What dog rescuers want the public to know is that pitties are among the most loving family dogs, good with children, loyal, eager to please, and that while some are dangerous, through a combination of breeding and environment, most are not. The Vick case presented a rare chance for pitbulls to be seen as victims, to be seen as morally considerable and sympathetic and redeemable. Redemption was a central narrative in stories about the dogs taken from Vick’s property (Gorant 2010). The Best Friends animal sanctuary in Kanab, Utah took in 22 of Vick’s dogs—whom they have dubbed “the Vicktory dogs”—and invites the public to follow their progress as individuals struggling to overcome a difficult past. Some have gone to families with children and are thriving. Some will never leave the sanctuary because of their challenges.

1991 Nine-year-old vegan Nellie McKay sends a report to Feminists for Animal Rights about her activism on behalf of animals. In just a few years, songwriter, singer, performer McKay’s career as songwriter, singer, and performers takes off while continuing to speak on and advocate on behalf of feminism, civil rights, animal rights, and other deeply felt progressive ideals.

210

Chapter 10 Michael Vick, Race, and Animality

The taxonomy of power which renders the animal object, slave, body, and commodity provides the ultimate justification for dogfighting, a practice in which the dog’s own needs, desires, interests are ignored. Of course, one can be anthropocentric and still oppose dogfighting. This is a position I suspect many people hold—dogs are only dogs but dogfighting is still wrong. But the supremacist, taxonomic thinking which holds that dogs are lesser beings is closely sutured with the thinking that holds that Black people are lesser beings, that women are lesser beings, that gay people are lesser beings. Here I will go back and ask with Chris Rock—why is dogfighting wrong? What is the difference between dogfighting, on the one hand, and hunting, horseracing, Seaworld, the zoo, meat eating, and other institutionalized forms of animal usage? All of these involve commodifying other animals and reducing them to instruments of human ends, and all involve extreme measures of psychic and physical violence against them. This is what animal law professor Gary Francione (2009) meant when he intoned “We are all Michael Vick.” Maybe seeing Vick’s cruelty will open our eyes to our own cruelties. Maybe instead of making him into a monster, we will see ourselves in him or him in us. Maybe seeing the intimate entanglement of race and species, how race serves as a metric of animality, how the two taxonomies of power invigorate and reinforce one another, will push us to take another look at the daily practices which both systems of meanings authorize. Animal advocates need to go beyond claims of colorblindness and racial innocence to grapple honestly with the persistence of race and the racial implications of their own labor. At the same time, they should not disavow animals who are being seriously harmed, whether it is racialized minorities doing the harm or whites. Michael Vick deserves a vigorous defense from racist practices but not a license to harm animals. Subordination in one sphere does not translate into moral immunity in another sphere. If it did, if we took this “get out of jail free” logic to its conclusion, then only white affluent straight men would be subject to critique and the rest of us would not. It may be that forms of domination—white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, human supremacy, mastery over nature and more—are so intricately woven together, so dependent upon each other for sustenance, that they will stand or fall together. That as long as there are beasts, there will be Negro brutes. Can we imagine a world where white supremacy has been eradicated but human supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and the destruction of the planet motor on? Do we want to? Probably not, yet we remain, for the most part, in our separate silos, pursuing our separate struggles with hardly a sideways glance at each other. We embrace intersectionality as a theoretical insight, but do we accept what this might require of us politically? If Val Plumwood (1993, 2001) is

right that it is the general posture of mastery, exploitation, and instrumentalization which has brought us to the brink of ecological destruction, how do we step back from that brink? In closing, let me return to the American Dream. As a fable, the American Dream is stronger than ever, perhaps because under neoliberalism, the need for the fable grows as the real prospects for economic mobility shrink. But how is it that we have come to accept such a constricted and distorted definition of what it means to succeed as a human being? The American Dream is an individualist, materialist, consumerist, nationalist, exceptionalist fantasy with tremendous political potency. It seeks to create a citizenry that is so narrowly focused on personal enrichment that it doesn’t see larger issues of economic polarization, poverty and hunger, war, the exploitation of animals, the despoliation of nature, global warming, the claims of other nations, the claims of other generations. Perhaps it is time to dream a new dream. To imagine the world we want to create and think about how to get there. To engage in a transformational politics where we rethink our identities, avoid that recursive loop of zero-sum competition, and focus our collective energies on challenging the architecture of supremacist thought and practice which imprisons all of us. To reimagine our relationships with each other, animals, and the earth outside of dominance. Justice in a multiracial, multispecies world. Perhaps it is time to dream a new dream.

Notes 1

2

3

This paper is adapted from a keynote address by the same name delivered on April 4, 2013 at the conference “Re-imagining the American Dream,” sponsored by the Department of American Studies, University of Texas, Austin. “Race Played Factor in Vick Coverage, Critics Say,” Neal Conan’s Talk of the Nation, National Public Radio, August 28, 2007. http:// www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14000094. PETA Files. 2007. “Vick at the Office, Part 2.” http://blog.peta.org/archives/ 2007/10/vick_at_the_off.php “Richard Cebull, Montana Federal Judge, Admits Forwarding Racist Obama Email.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/01/richardcebull-judge-obama-racist-email_n_1312736.html. “Racist Obama Email: Marilyn Davenport Insists It Was Satire.” http://www. huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/20/racist-obama-email-marilyn-davenport_ n_851772.html

211

1992 A conference on Women and Animals: Empowerment in the 1990s, sponsored by Friends of Animals, Feminists for Animal Rights, and the feminist magazine, On the Issues held in Washington, D.C.

Chapter 10 Michael Vick, Race, and Animality

212

Chapter 10 Michael Vick, Race, and Animality

4 5 6

“The Great Yellow Hope.” http://www.wbez.org/blog/alisoncuddy/2012-03-08/jeremy-lin-great-yellow-hope-97098 “ ‘Supporting Our Own’: Blacks Split on Michael Vick.” National Public Radio, August 22, 2007. “Bad Newz Kennels, Smithfield Virginia” Report of Investigation, Special Agent-in-Charge for Investigations Brian Haaser. August 28, 2008. USDA Office of Inspector General-Investigations, Northeast Region, Beltsville, Maryland.

213

Figure 11.1 In what contexts is omnivory celebrated and in which is it to be forsaken? Photograph by Kenneth Allen of sculpture “The Rites of Dionsysus” by Tom Shaw (Eden Project, Cornwall UK) (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license).

214

Caring Cannibals and Human(e) Farming: Testing Contextual Edibility for Speciesism Ralph Acampora

I

magine the following scenario: by some stroke of historical, geographic, or extra-terrestrial displacement, you come into contact with a lost tribe of foragers whose living and eating customs betray an odd mix of the benign and the exploitive. These folk—who appear in most ways human, if not exactly humane—seem for the most part to be fairly decent members of the life community. And indeed their culture is rather advanced, replete with a wide spectrum of practices and achievements in narrative, technics, dance, music, and science. Likewise, they have become quite refined in their level of ethical discourse and moral development, and can often be found discussing various theories and controversies regarding the right manner of conduct and standards of good character. One thing horrifies you, however: this lost tribe occasionally preys upon other humans—not members of their own ethnic community, to be sure, but rather wandering loners and those from

1992 The FAR slideshow is now called Animal Liberation through an Ecofeminist Lens.

11

215

216

Chapter 11 Caring Cannibals and Human(e) Farming

tribes and nations whose territory lies adjacent to or somewhat overlaps the country inhabited by the lost tribalists. Hunts are conducted, killing consummated, and human flesh devoured. In a certain light, it is true, there can be no blaming the lost tribe—for long ago, nobody remembers when or why anymore, they came to reside in the remotest recess of land habitable by hominids; there vegetation is sparse and even other animal life is only rarely found, with the result that nutritional needs must be met by additional “supplements.” What’s more, it should be noted with some admiration that the lost tribe has evolved elaborate rituals, mythic lore, and even a kind of sympathetic spirituality that centers on their marvel and respect for the other people they eat. The tribe itself constitutes its identity through a braiding of totemistic allegiances with the more predaceous species to be found elsewhere around the continent of its residence. There are those who identify with the tigers or lions, with the bears or wolves, with the hawks or raptors, with the orcas or sharks—and these identifications are themselves subtly undergirded by attachment to the various kinds of elemental medium and ecological niche available to the heterotrophic organisms occupying this quadrant and epoch of the (or some alternate) biosphere. Now many of these totems’ actual referents are far removed in the present distribution of species—but there remain rich oral and literate traditions linking the clans of the lost tribe back to an imagined evolutionary consanguinity that they take to be “realissimo,” or the true reality of their common essence, before the migratory crosspaths of Diaspora flung animal kin far and wide. Consequently, by means of complex psychological mechanisms and religious liturgies, when the lost tribalists hunt other humans they enter into a trance-like state of virtual communion with their prey—re-enacting, in effect, the thrilling chases of yore between select totem species and ancestral hominids. Before setting out, they recite venatic scripture and chant songs of eulogy to the great Web of Life and Death. The successful hunter is taken to be the one who consummates the kill with no cruelty at heart and the least possible infliction of pain or suffering—she claims experiential singularity with her kill, and is granted a key role at the Rite of Ingestion (which is duly supervised by elders no longer of sufficient physical vigor to conduct their own hunts). The central moment of this ritual features a prayer of forgiveness to and appreciation for the sacrificed specimen. After this gesture of atonement, an entire clan may join the feast and at different stages of participation there are readings from their Great Book of Transfiguration, texts that testify to the wisdom encoded in their esoteric Doctrine of Metabolism. This body of dogma and the associated commentaries and teachings based upon it suggest that the cannibalized prey effectively offered itself for life-merging with the hunter qua totemized

Chapter 11 Caring Cannibals and Human(e) Farming

217

predator. Thus we find a profound paradox that runs through the conceptual and affective dimensions of the lost tribe’s shocking practice of “caring cannibalism”—namely, that they appear to think of this tradition as justified, on the one hand, whereas on the other they feel (perhaps subconsciously, and yet sufficiently) shameful to offer ritualistic apologies for the killing and eating of other humans. Still, in virtue of a mystical intuition that resists articulation, they somehow resolve this tension at a level of experience satisfactory for continuance of the custom.1 Indeed, so successful is this ineffable resolution of seeming incoherence that the proudest phase of passage for a juvenile member of the lost tribe (and a great pleasure to his family) is observed to be the sacrament of First Consumption. What are we to make of this hypothetical scenario? Are the “caring cannibals” above a lost tribe merely in the sense of spatial or temporal remoteness—or have they lost their moral bearings as well? Is the putative parable just a far-fetched puzzle that exercises certain (kinds of) philosophers who happen to be fond of so-called thought experiments? Perhaps. Yet maybe the story just sketched can serve as a heuristic analogy that could open up some fertile ground for reflection upon contextual moral vegetarianism (CMV). For our present purposes, let us consider it from the perspectives of some exemplary ecofeminists who theorize on the basis of, or at least in concert with, care ethics. Karen Warren, for example, concludes that “the bottom line for a [care-sensitive] contextual moral vegetarianism is that food practices regarding animals should not grow out of, reflect, or perpetuate oppressive conceptual frameworks and the behaviors such frameworks sanction” (Warren 2000, 143). Taking this assertion as a criterial proposition about im/moral edibility, whereby those practices that do uphold oppression are (to be deemed) unethical and those practices that do not are (to be deemed) ethically permissible, it would seem that the caring cannibals’ consumption of certain human animals meets the test and thus is an allowable food practice. That would be the result if we took the standard’s conjunction strictly—namely, that food practices should not depend on or promote both conceptual and behavioral oppression (whereas caring cannibalism is associated only with behavioral but not with conceptual oppression). More charitably, however, if we took the standard as a severable, two-part means of judgment, then we could say that the cannibals’ behavior is contemptible and yet their caring conception is laudable—because it can wear an egalitarian face that does not trade consciously on the “Up-Down hierarchical thinking” (2000, 139–40) excoriated by Warren (i.e. it needn’t be accompanied by a supremacist ideology). Thus, if we share the common intuition that human cannibalism is outrageously wrong, Warren’s CMV can be reduced to absurdity (totally on the first construal above, partially on the second).

1992 First AgGag Law passed in Missouri making it a crime to “Obtain access to an animal facility by false pretenses for the purpose of performing acts not authorized by the facility.”

218

Chapter 11 Caring Cannibals and Human(e) Farming

Another way to register this reduction is to view the hypothetical scenario through the lenses of Warren’s critique of “the logic of domination.”2 Succinctly put, her rendition of ecofeminism has it that any ecofeminist philosophy worth its salt will identify and reject all instances of this theoretical and practical matrix. The logic of domination, as she analyzes it, consists of four main gestures. First, it confronts otherness not by taking divergences of difference at face value, but instead by dualizing alterity into the polar opposite of some already familiar quality. Second, it configures these dipoles along a metaphorically vertical axis of hierarchy, such that one (self/same/familiar) is thought of as “above” the other (stranger or dualized difference), which is thus conceived to be “below.” Third, the logic of domination invests these positions with axiological significance rhetorically capable of legitimating exploitation: “up” entities are “better” than “down” ones, and that means the Downs may be justly used as means to ends of correlative Ups. Fourth, and finally, this rationalization motivates and reinforces the implementation of exploitative practices executed by Ups upon Downs (which can be called oppression correctly, if but only if the exploited is one capable of having choices or options and at least some of those choices or options are in fact squelched by the exploiter). Judging the moral turpitude of the lost tribe, as I have described it above, from the perspective of challenging domination’s logic, as Warren conceives of it, becomes a difficult exercise that decidedly does not yield ethical clarity. While it is undeniable that the caring cannibals are oppressive exploiters of their human prey, it is by no means clear to what extent they participate in the logic of domination. Most telling is that they may very well conceive of those people they eat as equals or peers, rather than subhuman underlings: the eaten are different, to be sure, in that they are made edible by the eaters— but this maneuver need not entail polarizing the difference, nor does it necessarily imply constituting that difference as inferiority. Here the caring cannibals can be likened to the Amazonian Guaja, who conduct symbolic cannibalism of monkeys with whom they identify: the practice is apparently underwritten by a cosmology that acknowledges “kinship between all living things” and believes that “like eats like”—such that “for the Guaja, it is the underlying and observable similarities between humans and monkeys which render monkey edible” (Hurn 2012, 94). Now, granted the extreme similarity (taxonomic identity) between the caring cannibals and their own prey, we may wonder whether a Guajan-type principle could sanction actual (rather than merely symbolic) cannibalism. Even if not, the lost tribe does feel justified in its cannibalistic exploitation, but in their view the practice’s justification comes from (perceived) necessity—not from a hierarchy of being or value that legitimates oppression. In this respect they believe themselves to

Chapter 11 Caring Cannibals and Human(e) Farming

219

be operating not unlike how certain naval laws of ours excuse cannibalism in cases of shipwrecked or marooned exigency. Thus it would seem that the caring cannibals’ morality need not rely, in any heavy sense, upon the logic of domination targeted by Warren’s brand of ecofeminism. Suppose now that we switch our viewpoint from Warren’s to that of Val Plumwood, who rejects global vegetarianism on the basis that not all use of animal flesh as food is necessarily disrespectful or uncaring. Her stance is informed by the rather intense and nearly unique experience of having survived an Australian crocodile’s death-rolls, which taught her what it means and feels like to be(come) prey for another being (1995).3 This experience results in her rejection of “ontological vegetarianism” that “demonizes human (and animal) predation and predation identities” (2000). In this context, Plumwood makes an analogy between heterotrophy and human sexuality thus: “saying that ontologising earth others as edible is responsible for their degraded treatment as ‘meat’ is much like saying that ontologising human others as sexual beings is responsible for rape or sexual abuse” (2000). The point here is that both claims are errant in that they confuse necessary for sufficient conditions in their respective cases. Of course, it is fair to point out a relevant disanalogy between almost all carnivory and benign sexuality—namely, that the latter typically involves mutual consent while the former does not. Against the rejoinder that consensuality simply does not apply to non-linguistic entities, it could be observed that prey animals refuse an interpretation of willingness by their very efforts of avoidance. Finally, the universalist vegetarian may distinguish between instinct-driven predation of and by nonhuman animals versus the responsibility for diet that attends the moral agency of mature human personhood. Another tack that might be taken on behalf of CMV à la Plumwood would be to claim that putative or actual instances or practices of flesh-eating can be counted as respectful/caring usage by meeting the test of Kant’s categorical imperative (in its teleological formula), because they would not amount to some moral agent (the eater) treating some moral patient (the eaten) merely as a means to the former’s end (of nutrition, e.g.).4 Hence such flesh-eating might avoid critique from deontological perspectives compatible with the rationale undergirding certain (e.g. Tom Regan’s) animal rights advocacy— because “what is prohibited is unconstrained or total use of others as means, reducing others [entirely] to means” (Plumwood 2002, 159, italics added) and not any use whatsoever (a prohibition which would be self-stultifying and arguably suicidal in ecological context). “We cannot give up using one another,” concludes Plumwood (2002, 159), “but we can give up use/respect dualism [mutual exclusion], which means working toward ethical, respectful and highly constrained forms of use.”

1992 Petra Kelly, German ecofeminist and Green Party politician, dies.

220

Chapter 11 Caring Cannibals and Human(e) Farming

Now the caring cannibals’ usage of humans as food can indeed be characterized as respectful (in light of their honorific prayers, valorizing rituals, etc.) and perhaps even as constrained (if it were to happen rarely and/or in low volume). Surely, however, it matters not to the individual being eaten whether the carnivorous practice to which s/he succumbs is limited in frequency or number—and any proponent of universal human rights would object that the prayers and liturgical gestures don’t actually benefit the one being killed and eaten; nor, we can observe, would they matter in the case of nonhuman animals—and so, on pain of speciesism, we should not judge any flesh-eating as respectful or morally permissible (at least not prima facie). This conclusion could be confirmed by pointing out that eating is literally a case of consumption, of using up some-body—such that there is no remainder whom one could any longer respect or care for/about. In cases of other animals at least, Plumwood (as per Warren 2000, 138) is ready to rejoin that respectful carnivory expresses or implies a promise that the eater will reciprocate in due course (i.e. offer her body, upon death, to the food web or energy circuit of the ambient ecosystem); and, knowing Plumwood’s feisty attitude and hardcore convictions, it is plausible that she would have been prepared to bite the bullet on this score regarding the caring cannibals (i.e. aver that their cannibalism is justifiable so long as they make a similar commitment of recompense). My point at this juncture is twofold: first, most of us would not be eager to follow suit; second, even if some of us were to join ranks with Plumwood here, there is an eco-ethical category mistake in the notion that a predatory eater’s later recycling through food chains or energy circuits—which are networks or systems—performs a reciprocation to the erstwhile prey as an individual (because the latter is a different sort of being from the former, and moreover it is one who would no longer exist on the very supposition at stake!). So far, then, we have not found a version of CMV that would (fully) solve the problem of speciesism posed by the story of the lost tribe. Yet there are two more renditions to consider, and they do fare better—not because they solve the issue head-on, but rather because one (Deane Curtin’s) dissolves it and the other (Marti Kheel’s) resolves it. If one reads the former’s position on CMV (Curtin 1992, esp. section 4), it at first appears that Curtin would fall into the trap set by my thought experiment: he approvingly cites Wendell Berry’s apology for carnivory when the flesh is “eat[en] with understanding and with gratitude”; he underscores that “to live is to commit violence”; and he allows that “some cultures, cultures that provide spiritual self-definition through food, have cultural rituals that mediate the moral burden of killing and inflicting pain for food” (1992, 130ff.). All this makes it seem that he would have to sanction the caring cannibals’ homicidal eating habit. However, Curtin also writes, “I do not mean to imply . . . that the choice to treat other

Chapter 11 Caring Cannibals and Human(e) Farming

221

animals as food is morally justifiable in exotic cultures, or in the ‘Third World’, or in extreme contexts” (132). How can he both uphold cultural pluralism (evident in the earlier references) and yet retreat from approbation of meat-eating in the contexts just cited (as well as, presumably, in my thought experiment)? It is not all that clear—but reading between his lines, I believe the key to grasping what Curtin calls “authentic presence to food” is that heterotrophic living’s inevitable “violence needs to be understood within a particular cultural narrative” (132); he could then say that my story is a truncated narrative which would prove impossible if we tried to fill in more details (e.g. how the hominid prey in this remote region putatively subsist themselves) and that such carnivorous narratives as do exist in exotic cultures and extreme contexts may explain yet do not justify their subject matter (or, to put a Wittgensteinian spin on it, that these cultures and contexts present forms of life or exigencies of survival in which the language game of moral justification/condemnation is not played because it simply does not fit). Thus the problem under discussion evaporates—because neither eating other animals nor human cannibalism is deemed moral. Although this putative dissolution works well enough on its own terms, it can leave one dissatisfied in that it dodges the issue at stake instead of confronting it. We want to know how and to what extent multicultural tolerance for dietary diversity can coexist with animal advocacy’s call for ethical vegetarianism. Here Curtin himself provides clues that lead us to consideration, finally, of Marti Kheel’s work. While he admits that “authentic presence to food may express itself differently in different [cultural/narrative] ‘worlds’,” nonetheless he finds inauthenticity “in western, industrialized countries [where] flesh foods are almost exclusively encountered in contexts that express alienation from and dominance over other beings” (1992, 132). Thus, for those of us inhabiting such socio-historical locations, Curtin endorses CMV as “a bodily commitment to direct one’s defining relations toward nonviolence whenever possible . . . [which] should be understood not as a moral state [of purity], therefore, but as a [meliorist] moral direction” (131). This idea of veg(etari)anism as an aspirational vector is taken up by Marti Kheel in her delicately balanced discourse on the topic. Her version of CMV is animated by a certain sort of universalizing impulse. She was keen to eschew, it is true, the kind of moralism that trades in ethnocentric judgmentalism. Nonetheless, she also held onto the notion of indefinitely widespread veganism as a regulative ideal for anybody and everybody interested in what she called “nature ethics” (Kheel 2008, 235–6). Following Kheel along this tightrope, I wonder, could a nature ethicist disapprove of the caring cannibals’ food practice and maintain her CMV without the stain of speciesism? It seems to me that a key move here would

1992 Animal Enterprise Protection Act is passed in the United States, heightening the criminal consequences of animal activism.

222

Chapter 11 Caring Cannibals and Human(e) Farming

be to heed the rhetorical mode in which veg(etari)anism is invoked. For Kheel, it is clear that moral philosophy should not be in the business of issuing injunctions that seek to compel conduct or impose belief; rather, her brand of nature ethics pursues an edifying discourse of encouragement where invitation and inspiration are the watchwords (2008, 14 and 266 n.154). “There is nothing inherently oppressive in encouraging vegetarianism or veganism as ideals,” she pleads, “while recognizing that there may be environmental and climatic factors that make them difficult in some cultures” (236). It would appear, then, that nature ethics à la Kheel could consistently advocate herbivory to my hypothetical lost tribe (as well as to actual peoples who may practice subsistence hunting of other animals) and yet maintain its contextual bona fides—because, while the ideal of veganism is universalizable in spirit or principle, the manner of address through which it is pursued practically is sensitive to ecological/geographic and sociohistorical conditions.5 This means that such advocacy is probably best (most respectfully and most effectively) offered to, and then conducted by, critically minded or dissenting members of the relevant groups themselves; and conversely, “[s]ince the vast majority of animal abuse occurs on factory farms that are owned and operated in the Western, developed world, it is most appropriate for vegetarian advocates living in the West to direct their central criticisms to this form of abuse” (267 n.161). This last point of Kheel’s raises the issue of agricultural ethics, and it will be helpful now for us to consider such at greater length. For we may well wonder whether a CMV-inflected proscription against factory farming actually invites or at least makes allowance for so-called humane farming practices. Although I am not aware of any self-identified CMV advocate who explicitly endorses animal agriculture of the small-scale, free-range, organic, or otherwise welfarist variety,6 one can certainly conceive how CMV might be pressed into its service: the farmed animals are taken care of properly (with veterinary attention for their well-being, not just for the sake of consumers’ health or safety), their species/breed-typical interests are addressed (with decent living conditions assured), environmental and labor concerns are met (through sustainable rearing methods, fair wages, and slaughter techniques duly approved by Temple Grandin)—taken together, all these scruples prima facie compose a context in which vegetarianism is optional rather than obligatory, in which omnivory may be indulged without qualm. All things considered, however, most CMV proponents would likely borrow from Warren’s critique of the logic of domination: the moral problem with humane farming, it could be argued, is that it relies upon a system of animal husbandry that remains despotic and prone to oppressive backsliding as it perpetuates speciesist hierarchy in a crypto-sexist vein.

Chapter 11 Caring Cannibals and Human(e) Farming

223

Is it possible for humane agriculture to resist the charge of domineering speciesism? One gambit would be for its advocates to bite the bullet on the hypothesis of human farming—as, for example, was done in Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (1729). After rehearsing the difficulties of poverty and famine confronting an overpopulated Ireland, Swift observed “that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled” and suggested that a sustainable harvest of human flesh might be instituted by setting aside some Irish children “reserved for breed” while most could “be offered in sale” for consumption and by-products (since it is possible to “flea the carcass; the skin of which, artificially dressed, will make admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen”). Of course the proposal at stake is notoriously satirical (a wicked parody of what could be called flat-footed or callous consequentialism), and it is not hard to discern in its author’s persona another kind of pernicious hierarchy at work— namely, an ethnocentrist rationalization of Celto-Gaelic exploitation at the hands and mouths of Anglo-Saxon overlords (thus Swift’s references to reducing the population of papist Catholics in order to protect “good Protestant” upkeep of the United Kingdom). So this stab at Malthusian meateating (as it were) seems to fail as a genuine legitimation of humane farming, at least if the terms of such are to be cast in the concepts and criteria of CMV. What would seem needed for a CMV stamp of approval might be a system wherein people harvested their own peers—something like the society depicted in Logan’s Run (Anderson 1976; Noland and Johnson 1967), with the twist that those culled would also be consumed. Recall that, in this piece of science fiction, conditions of scarcity in the future give rise to a policy of exterminating those above a certain age of maturity (twentyone in the novel, thirty in the film). Execution is most often accepted fatally—in both senses of that word—by those who reach their allotted limit, perhaps because it is carried out painlessly and valorized by rites of sacrifice. Yet some rebellious spirits do reject the practice and seek “sanctuary” to elude their early demise, which raises the issue of ageism as a form of illegitimate discrimination and gives the narrative a distinctively dystopian atmosphere. One could imagine, of course, that the lethal enforcement of a disproportionately youthful society would be defended by pointing out that there weren’t enough resources for a full-spectrum population and that those who reach some age duly calculated for demographic equilibrium have enjoyed whatever period of time is sustainable, whereas those younger than them require and deserve the same opportunity. Still, in both the cinematic and literary versions, the “runners” who attempt to escape their appointed fate take on a heroic aura that threatens to subvert acquiescence to a

1993 Ecofeminism, Women, Animals, Nature edited by Greta Gaard published.

224

Chapter 11 Caring Cannibals and Human(e) Farming

thanatology of social sustainability. Hence, to the extent that fleeing becomes preferable to dying on time, the maintenance dynamic of a Logan-like society would approximate hunting more than farming—and thus our discussion would revert to the considerations examined above (i.e. those pertaining to the thought experiment about caring cannibals). Yet there is another work of science fiction that more approximates a model of human(e) farming, namely the film Soylent Green (Fleischer 1973).7 Set at the turn of the millennium (original book), or shortly thereafter (movie), we are again faced with conditions of overpopulation and resource scarcity. Under these circumstances, American food producers apparently try first to manufacture and mass-distribute a vegetarian loaf of concentrated soya and lentils, then move into the market for plankton pies, and end up scraping the bottom of agriculture’s barrel by converting human corpses into cakes that resemble and are advertised as nonhuman foodstuffs. Though the details are kept murky, it would seem that the harvesting process occupies a twilight zone between farming and foraging: it is hinted that the supply of human bodies is sourced from natural deaths and from a brisk business of voluntary euthanasia or assisted suicide (some folks find the future bleak and dismal enough to opt out ahead of time). Inasmuch as this industrialized form of cannibalism goes beyond the happenstance of pure scavenging and actually facilitates death upon demand, it can be seen as a kind of agriculture—and one that certain utilitarians might have to accept, if pressed hard enough. But would proponents of CMV have to follow suit? No, at least not on Curtin’s version—because it is anchored in the notion of “authentic presence to food” and the marketing of “soylent green” is a real whopper (pun intended, without apology to Burger King)! Likewise, by assiduously investigating inauthenticity in operations billed as “cruelty-free,”8 an advocate of CMV can also avoid endorsing so-called humane farming of nonhumans. Taking stock of our reflections to this point, it would seem that at least certain versions of CMV can avoid speciesism—albeit with sometimes fancy theoretical footwork—even in the face of thought-experimental challenges centering on cannibalism of one variety or another. So . . . has our discussion amounted to much ado about, if not nothing, then very little? In reply, I remind the reader that there is always value in testing and thereby fortifying a viewpoint. Still, I am somewhat anxiously aware that I may have been testing not only CMV but also my audience’s patience with what might have seemed a series of far-fetched fantasies whose critical bite traded on abusing a peculiarly profound taboo. After all, it does remain a conceivable option to avoid speciesism not by enforcing limits on edibility but rather by eroding such boundaries: break the spell of the taboo at stake and accept

Chapter 11 Caring Cannibals and Human(e) Farming

225

[t]here is an honesty in accepting a cannibal identity, and cannibal consumption is certainly more productive and noble than the way we currently consume animals . . . as commodified pieces of factory-farmed meat in a global capitalist marketplace, [for] cannibal consumption seeks to incorporate rather than alienate . . . [and so] may come to represent a union between two bodies rather than expressing domination of one over the other.

In a final flourish that waxes almost Swiftian, and consistent with the argument just given, our intrepid author advocates eating the companion animal in one’s midst as “my delicious pet,” because “[c]onsumed kin . . . are made more kinlike as they are fluidly incorporated into literal [metabolic] and metaphoric acts of cannibalism.” Sensationally suggesting that “we move into the uneasy realm of the cannibal as a way to seriously explore the way kinship intersects with and conjoins consumption,” Villagra concludes with a dare: “Rather than giving in to the gut [!] sense of disgust that the suggestion of cannibalism may invoke, we can embrace the cannibal, a figure who resolves many of the tensions created by seeing animals as subjects, as kin, and as food.” Because it confronts the taboo against cannibalism head-on, in what seems a fearless fashion, Villagra’s essay is rhetorically entrancing and it can

1993 Feminism and the Mastery of Nature by Val Plumwood published.

cannibalism under certain conditions of care or respect—thence argue on behalf of subsistence hunting and humane farming. But does anybody actually take up such a position? As it turns out, there is indeed a theorist in animal studies who has recently given the appearance of doing something very much like this . . . In an essay entitled “Cannibalism, Consumption, and Kinship in Animal Studies” (2011), Analia Villagra notes that certain indigenous conceptions of edibility attribute to eating “. . . the transformational power to make another [the eaten] sacred’ ” (2011, 47), and declares that she “would like to argue for a more challenging vision of kinship that would allow for the consumption of fellow animals not in the absence of or in spite of bonds of kinship, but rather because of them” (50). In a bold theoretic gambit, Villagra argues the case for “becoming cannibal” (52ff.). First, “[t]he reinsertion of human sociality into the wider natural world requires the employment of more animal terms of relation.” Thus “we must confront the idea that as the kin of other animals, when we consume them we may become the cannibals we have so feared.” Yet “ ‘[t]aking cannibalism seriously’ entails releasing ourselves from the cultural mythology of the ruthless, inhuman killer (the Hannibal Lecter mythos) and acknowledging the profoundly transformative aspect of cannibalism.”9 Indeed,

226

Chapter 11 Caring Cannibals and Human(e) Farming

have the effect of stifling objections that might appear too small-minded or timid. Nonetheless, it is important to underscore what the essay does not do—namely, it never commends intra-specific cannibalism of humans by humans. No, Villagra stays clear of that practice and remains content to laud cannibalism only when it figures symbolically or else preys upon extended kin in the non-human fold. Could it be that the taboo at stake is not just a silly, ethnocentric superstition policing “typical North American bonds of kinship” (as Villagra [2011, 53] might have it)? Could it be that refraining from cannibalism marks, rather, a nearly universal omission that partially constitutes the very idea of kinship—so that advocating the ingestion of “our kind” (whatever boundaries that phrase may encompass) is itself akin to rounding a socionormative square? If one answers these questions affirmatively (as I am inclined to), Villagra’s essay appears in the final analysis to want the concept of cannibal-cake without eating the actual practice too—in other words, in reducing to anthropocentrism without anthropophagy, it loses the critical nerve of its own challenge and ends up sounding like yet another (albeit anthropologically sophisticated) rationalization of homo-exclusive carnivory. Hence I am prepared to conclude here that, possibly outside of certain mortuary practices,10 an anti-speciesist CMV need not tolerate cannibalism—and nor should it embrace the subsistence hunting or humane farming scenarios that usually crop up in the literature on dietary morality. Disgust, then, should be seen from this perspective as a species of wonder, one that is productive at the root of ethics. (italics added) Avramescu 2010

Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Carol Adams and Lori Gruen for accommodating his odd tastes in theory, cultivating intellectual companionship, and making allowances for compositional latitude.

Notes 1

Which is not to say that the tension is totally dissolved: see Russell Weiner’s stab at a credo of carnivory, “When eaten . . . they [who are eaten] may occasion a transcendent experience akin to the experience of the beautiful, an experience I will call the Delicious. Through such an experience the [prey] transcends its abject particularity and becomes

Chapter 11 Caring Cannibals and Human(e) Farming

227

a vehicle for the universal” (2012); cf. Perry Farrell’s lyrical confession/conundrum of being caught in food chains, “One must eat the other who runs free before him / Put them right into his mouth / While fantasizing the beauty of his movements / A sensation not unlike slapping yourself in the face” (1990). 2 See especially Warren 2000, Chapter 3. 3 It is worth noting that this episode qualifies her to speak on bio-ecological embeddedness from a more even-handed background of experience, in contrast to those “holy hunters” (criticized by Marti Kheel for faux sanctity) who are wont to extol the eco-immersive virtues of adopting predaceous practices without ever balancing their outlook by enduring the risks or assuming the vulnerabilities constitutive of the prey position or role. 4 Plumwood herself nods in this direction when she mounts a critique of what she refers to as the “Use Exclusion Assumption” of hardcore animal rights theory (2002, 156ff.). 5 E.g. 267 (n.161): “When, where, and how individuals express their ideals are important considerations for a contextual ethical approach.” 6 In other words, I do not know that any of the theorists discussed above (all of whom are aligned with ecofeminism and/or ethics of care) come out in its defense. It should be noted, however, that at least one prominent animal ethicist often appears tolerant of or even sanguine about non-industrial animal husbandry—but, though Bernard Rollin might be counted correctly a contextual moral vegetarian, his discourse of animal teleology (rooted in Aristotelian biology) and its flirtations with perhaps patriarchal nostalgia for pastoral practices of yore places him outside the fold of ecofeminist/care-ethical thought that is the prime focus of the present paper. 7 It was loosely based on an earlier novel (Harrison, 1966). 8 For an expose of welfarist farms, see http://www.chooseveg.com/freerange.asp 9 As I wrote this chapter, a former officer of the NYPD was on trial for conspiracy to cannibalize women. The defense argued that the alleged perpetrator was involved only in fantasy role-playing; to my knowledge, they have not mounted a campaign to exonerate based on religious or otherwise spiritual exemption. The jury returned a conviction, which is being appealed without substantial change in defensive rationale. 10 Actual cannibalism (of the human variety) is hard to investigate and verify—aside from rare anecdotes of psychotic episodes in Western

1993 An Unnatural Order: Why We Are Destroying the Planet and Each Other by Jim Mason published.

228

Chapter 11 Caring Cannibals and Human(e) Farming

civilization, many stories of indigenous cultures harboring the practice turn out to be apocryphal; the cases with the highest level of corroboration appear to feature the ritual consumption of recently deceased kin (whose death was not the result of cannibalistic intent)—and, depending on the details involved in any given instance, one could mount a defense of such by appeal to Curtin’s notion of “authentic presence” to food.

Ecofeminism and Veganism: Revisiting the Question of Universalism Richard Twine

12 1993 Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva published.

T

his chapter examines the complex question of universalism in the context of ecofeminist animal advocacy. This set of debates has broad importance for the “animal advocacy movement”1 and is often exploited as a means by which to critique vegetarianism or veganism.2 Given that ecofeminism already has a history of considering these debates, this chapter argues that intersectional ecofeminist thinking on this question has much of value to offer the broader animal advocacy movement which can add rigor to its liberatory roadmap.3 The subject of universalism and associated accusations of ethnocentrism could arise in a number of areas associated within either animal advocacy or ecofeminism, but it is the question of a universal vegetarianism or veganism4 that has most often been the target of these discourses. The charge of universalism is sometimes assumed, by those making it, to instigate a wholesale denigration of vegan practice and to call into question the value of anyone being vegan. The charge could be seen partly as a defensive response to what is a threat to the very established social norm of animal consumption. However, at the same time

229

230

Chapter 12 Ecofeminism and Veganism

that I do not wish to suggest we can reduce all discourse critical of veganism to this, there are issues that need to be responded to. In the case of ecofeminism this has been part of the process of internal self-critique which accompanied the necessary, though drawn-out and sometimes paralysing, debates on essentialism which were a feature of 1990s ecofeminism (Gaard 2011). Since ecofeminism has been such a threat to mainstream feminism (for example, contesting the feminist reliance upon humanist concepts of violence) it has, perhaps peculiarly and uniquely, developed in a highly selfreflexive way constantly questioning itself in relation to critical themes of, especially, essentialism and universalism. Dividing this chapter into four main sections I begin by suggesting that more than ever the question of food practices and universalism is a pressing issue. I then review the various ways in which intersections between animals, nation, and racialization have occurred before moving onto specific discussions by ecofeminists writing on the relationship between animal advocacy and universalism. I finish the chapter by noting differences between ecofeminists in their use of “contextual,” different degrees of emphasis resulting in varying political visions. I suggest that intersectional approaches such as ecofeminism, which acknowledge the co-shaping of, for example, genders and species, and the dangerous tendency of analyses to reinscribe exclusions, have provided valuable tools and arguments for thinking through the complex terrain of food and universalism which is in stark contrast to the unfolding laissez-faire globalization of norms of high animal consumption.

Why universalism now? This is, I suggest, a good time to revisit the question of veganism and universalism for several reasons. First, some popular proponents within the animal advocacy movement appear to assume that a universal veganism is a goal without first opening up that question to scrutiny. For example, Gary Francione’s “The World is Vegan – if you want it” online campaign5 is an attempt to inspire social change by reminding individuals that they have the choice to become vegan which is presented as a practice of nonviolence. His website contains many translations of the campaign slogan so that activists from many countries can spread the word. While certainly laudable, Francione’s campaign is open to criticism on several grounds. There is much diversity within veganism, and it should not be assumed simply that it is always a choice for nonviolence. Human workers are also typically absent

Chapter 12 Ecofeminism and Veganism

231

referents in the fetishization of food commodities and therefore, seen through an intersectional lens, vegan choices can certainly still be bound up in various forms of exploitation. In this way, politically, veganism is a beginning not an end because food and clothing choices are part of a broader economic system that exploits humans and animals alike. Choices are also socially constrained in all sorts of ways, be that through material means, access to knowledge, proficiency at skills, and adherence to social norms. Therefore, before we even begin to address the ethics of a vegan universalism, we are already faced with the need to be reflexive over what sort of change individual choices can bring and the recognition of sociological complexity in the realm of food practices. Secondly, this is also a good time to revisit the universalism issue because in the age of social media, campaigns against animal exploitation typically extend across national borders and so bring questions of culture and difference to the fore. There is now an unprecedented opportunity to know about, to opine, and to act against practices taking place in areas of the world that are geographically distant. Significantly, contemporary communication technologies and new forms of mobility also further undermine the view of culture as a distinct bounded entity. Hegemonic and counter-hegemonic values are increasingly transcultural—for example, cultural forms, practices, and identities inspire new socialities (such as the international animal advocacy, feminist, or Black Lives Matter movement) which transcend conventional state boundaries. Thirdly, I argue, critical scrutiny toward a goal of universal veganism, though vitally important, takes on a tragicomic aura when one considers current trends around food practices and universalizing tendencies. It is thus important to remember (for vegans and those critiquing aspirations toward vegan universalism alike) to set debates around vegan universalism6 within the larger context of the present-day universalization of Western food practices which include, of course, increasing global trajectories of meat and dairy consumption in, for example, Asia and Latin America. Although this does not detract from the importance of ecofeminist debates on contextual moral veganism and universalism, it is clear that such debates partly serve the purpose of teasing out an intersectional political vision rather than reflecting an impending empirical reality. So, specific discussions pertaining to a theoretical vegan universalism take place alongside the contemporary universalization of diets high in meat and dairy consumption, a trend also in need of urgent attention from an intersectional ecofeminist analysis. In terms of scale contemporary accusations of food colonialism and imposition must then also be directed at the unsustainable Westernization of high rates of meat and dairy consumption in new

1993 Perennial Political Palate: The Third Feminist-Vegetarian Cookbook by The Bloodroot Collective published.

232

Chapter 12 Ecofeminism and Veganism

parts of the world. However, it is important to add that not all facets of the universalism debate are theoretical. It is very much the case, as we shall see, that issues of racism and cultural difference can surface within veganism and animal advocacy and do reflect contemporary lived experience. These must continue to be addressed as part of the intersectionality vision of ecofeminism (see, e.g., Gaard 2001; Harper 2010a; Kim 2007). Drawing on previous ecofeminist and intersectional scholarship that probes the universalism issue, including that of Claire Jean Kim, Greta Gaard, and Marti Kheel, this chapter also intends to focus on some of the key questions that are important to this vision. An initial distinction can be made in the debates over ecofeminism and vegetarianism/veganism. The 1990s discourse that took place on listservs,7 books, and journals (e.g., Adams 1990, 1993, 1994, 1995; Bailey 2007; Donovan 1995; Gaard and Gruen 1995; George 1994, 1995, 2000; Lucas 2005) often centred on either defining ecofeminism (Must ecofeminists be vegetarians?) or upon challenging feminism (Should feminists be vegetarians?). On this latter emphasis they were partly about the ecofeminist challenge to mainstream feminism over its human-centeredness or anthropocentrism. They could then be set in the context of previous critiques of (academic) feminism for centralizing gender and assuming a “woman” who was invariably white, middle class, heterosexual, and omnivorous. Thus, the ecofeminist challenge to feminism could itself be read as a challenge to the universalism of feminism (specifically a universal way of being human) and its failure to be intersectional enough, to name various relations (beyond gender), notably human/animal relations, as either exploitative, political, or worthy of attention. These debates pertain to the way in which liberatory struggles often can end up reproducing new relations of power as they develop. It is notable then as the question broadens (from one of the vegetarianism/veganism of ecofeminists or feminists to that of arguing for vegetarianism/veganism across a society and across cultures) that the charge of universalism potentially amplifies. Could ecofeminists, or animal advocates generally, be seen as coming close to this in advancing a vegan universalism? As the example of Francione earlier illustrated, some animal advocates have argued for a universal cross-cultural veganism, though even here it is unlikely that vegan outreach in every geographical location on the planet is actually being pursued or suggested. Ecofeminists have been more explicitly cautious than the rhetoric of Francione’s campaign, tending to introduce some sense of contextuality into their vegan ethics. Yet the implication has been from some (even in the culturally limited example of academic conference catering) that to advocate for vegan eating is ethnocentric, exclusionary, or even racist.

Chapter 12 Ecofeminism and Veganism

233

Before tackling that question, it is useful first to outline the various ways in which issues of animal exploitation or advocacy have been noted to intersect with questions of culture, nationalism, racism, and racialization. In the case of national symbols and cuisines animals are often drawn upon to construct a mythology of essential national character, perhaps emphasizing strength and masculinity as in the case of the “British bulldog” or the use of lions in British iconography. In the cultural political economy of property and exchange, animals as naturalized commodities become tied to nation or region—for example, in the evocation of ‘British beef’ for projects of economic growth. As Deckha points out, the deployment of meat for the performance of masculinities is inseparable from its intersection with nationalist and patriotic iconography (2012, 139–40). Ecofeminists (e.g., Adams 1994; Twine 2001) have consistently argued that an important intersection between the exploitation of animals and racism is found in the way in which animals and notions of animality have been brought into the process of racialization (i.e., the marking out of “race”). The animalization (to represent as, to compare with, other animals) of some people in the process of racialization and dehumanization is a long-standing trope that simultaneously constructed the racially unmarked category of “white” as “human” and “civilized.” This has been drawn upon in various moments of colonialism, slavery, and genocide with obvious examples including the enforced slavery of Africans, the British oppression of the Irish, and the Nazi construction of Jewish people. It remains part of the everyday repertoire of racist discourse today. As many have made clear, this use of human/animal dualism, as with its gendering, relies upon the anthropocentric assumption of animal inferiority, and so its comprehension is an important part of the wider intersectional understanding of power favored by ecofeminists. I have already made reference to the ongoing universalization of a Western diet high in meat and dairy. The escalation of animal exploitation, the associated carbon footprint, locally imposed changes in land use, and the public health impact of this trend position it as a form of food colonialism, an unsustainable part of the global food system that is also wasteful of scarce resources such as water. It prolongs food insecurity, worsens the climate and biodiversity crises, and benefits Western transnational food corporations. There is no oversight to this change; it is typically naturalized, conceived as an inevitable part of “development” and the “free” market. Moreover, it is

1993 “Ecofeminism: Toward Global Justice and Planetary Health” by Greta Gaard and Lori Gruen published in Society and Nature.

Intersections of animals, nation, and racialization

234

Chapter 12 Ecofeminism and Veganism

even essentialized to the “human” expressed in the view that (e.g., I have read this repeatedly in UN policy documents under the notion of the “nutrition transition”) when people have more disposable income it is assumed they want to eat meat—thus reinforcing a particular, historically white Western model of the “human.” This underlines the way in which an interrogation of universalism is also closely tied to a politics around notions of human natures. For food corporations the relatively low(er) levels of animal consumption in many “developing” countries is understood as a deficit, and a growth and investment opportunity. These two examples of intersections are quite well known and clearly chime well with a politics of advocacy working against both animal exploitation and racism. They seem to unambiguously cast two social movements together as having shared aims and interests. Of more concern to this chapter are those examples where animal advocacy might be seen to conflict with anti-racism. A particularly striking example of this is found in campaigning by far-right groups against halal and kosher slaughter. Better characterized as a disingenuous animal welfarism, groups such as the British National Party (BNP)8 currently organize protests against ritual slaughter under the guise of concern for animals. In this way they attempt to tap into the discursive history of white civility constructed via a foil of racialized barbarity. Specifically, for the BNP in this case the premise is that Muslims are not “truly British.” In the UK context animal advocacy groups have seen through this, arguing against all forms of slaughter. However, the opportunity for an intersectional political alliance between pro-animal and anti-fascist groups is as yet unrealized. This example is similar to that outlined by Claire Jean Kim in her (2007) case study of “immigrant” animal practices in California. Instead of far-right groups exploiting animal welfare as a conduit for racialization, she outlines how the framings and targets of genuine animal advocates can become bound up in racist politics. Indeed, in a racist society, it is possible that pro-animal campaigns can garner broader support than they would otherwise when focused on the practices of minorities. Thus, there could be cause for concern when advocates disproportionately target either immigrant practices or those in other countries. Kim, however, is particularly interested in how discourses of multiculturalism can narrow opportunities for critically opening up a discussion of animal ethics and I will return to her analysis later. Potential intersections between animal advocacy and racism or colonialism also recall prior analyses of the Makah Whale Hunt (Gaard 2001; Hawkins 2001). In a more recent account, Kim (2020, 76) highlights the role of right-wing Republican politicians in joining with environmentalists against Makah whaling. Furthermore, Dinesh Wadiwel (2012) has examined the high-profile case of Australian opposition to the treatment of “Australian”

Chapter 12 Ecofeminism and Veganism

235

Ecofeminists discussing animal advocacy and universalism In the remainder of this chapter, I explore in more depth these questions in reference to the key literature from those arguing from an ecofeminist or intersectional perspective. I already mentioned that ecofeminists have historically been cautious toward universalism. This prudence was shaped by the ecofeminist critique of both utilitarian and rights-based theories of animal ethics (see, e.g., Donovan and Adams 1996). That traditional ethical theory had a tendency to be pronounced universalistically has been part of a broader critique that was further suspicious of ethics divorced from everyday life and of the disavowal of emotionality. For example, Marti Kheel specifically associated universalism with her understanding of masculinity (2008, 3). Thus, universalism became perceived as something to avoid in favor of sensitivity to the lived context of differently positioned people. An early contribution to the ecofeminist literature on ethics of care and contextual moral vegetarianism9 by Deane Curtin argued against an absolute moral rule prohibiting meat eating under all circumstances (1991, 69). For Curtin, personal contextual relations (essentially unlikely emergency

1993 Cesar Chavez, co-founder of United Farm Workers and civil and animal rights promoter, died.

live-exported cattle within Indonesian slaughterhouses. Wadiwel, rather than wanting to critique veganism per se, aims to make clearer the “racialized context within which veganism is practiced” (1). Thus, veganism and animal advocacy may be liable to become part of a process of constructing white civility when set within the context of a racialized geopolitics. A perverse proprietorial nationalism can be set in motion which intensifies an apparent concern for animals, here coded as “Australian” cattle under threat from racialized others. As Wadiwel argues, “the underlying message is that we kill our animals in a civilized way and they don’t” (2), which is the similar rationale of the BNP example discussed above, and arguably that of the welfarist and Western discourse of ‘humane” killing generally. In common with writers such as Harper (e.g. 2010a, 2010b) and Guthman (2008), Wadiwel wants alternative food discourse, animal advocacy, and vegan practice to be critically open to how it can act as a site for the reinscription of white privilege. Although veganism is certainly an attempt to reconceptualize the human away from habitual anthropocentrism it is not itself immune from becoming entangled with exclusionary notions of the human, be they along lines of race or class. Such possibilities must then be part of the intersectional reflexivity that shapes analysis of the contexts of moral veganism.

236

Chapter 12 Ecofeminism and Veganism

situations) and geographical contexts may also be relevant where a choice to subsist without killing animals could be seen as constrained by ecology and climate. In spite of these contexts Curtin’s vegetarianism is, I would argue, not far from universalistic—in other words under most circumstances his ecofeminist ethic of care argues against the consumption of animals. During the 1990s and early twenty-first century the debate over contextual moral vegetarianism would be taken up by people such as Karen Warren, Val Plumwood, Greta Gaard, and Carol Adams. Before noting some of these arguments I wish to first focus on the more recent work of Claire Jean Kim around the intersection of race and species. In her case study of some “immigrant”10 animal practices in California, she focuses on controversies involving the practices of both horse tripping in Mexican charreadas (rodeos) and the practices of live-animal-market workers in San Francisco’s Chinatown. While very aware that such practices can be exploited to enhance the representation of the otherness of immigrant communities, Kim is nevertheless critical of what she sees as a simplistic condemnation of animal advocacy opposition to them as racist. She is also sceptical of defenses of these practices in terms of them being traditions that are an integral part of communities. More specifically her critique is centered on the way in which multiculturalism is an anthropocentric frame and, for her, is deployed in these debates in an imperialistic manner. Through a close reading of the legal challenges to these practices she argues that Defenders of immigrant animal practices have reacted by evoking a multiculturalist interpretive framework that situates these interventions about animals in a long history of White aggression against powerless immigrants of color. In this view, the majority is guilty of judging immigrant minority cultures to be deficient and wrong (ethnocentrism), seeking to impose dominant cultural values on marginalized cultures (cultural imperialism), and enunciating an impassable racial difference between the “self” and the “other” in order to bolster ongoing efforts to exclude the latter from meaningful membership in this nation (racism and nativism). Animal advocates, it is said, operate with a “double standard,” targeting foreign-born minorities while ignoring the majority’s own cruel animal practices. (Kim 2007, 2)

While some advocates may indeed operate such a double standard, Kim accuses the defensive position as working to close off critical ethical questions around the treatment of other animals. In one respect her critique goes to the heart of both the anthropocentrism of multiculturalism and a problem with the argument of “cultural difference” as a defense of animal exploitation. Those arguing from an intersectional or ecofeminist perspective

Chapter 12 Ecofeminism and Veganism

237

cannot simply take the concept of “culture” as read. The ethical tradition of ecofeminism has been to question the production of a discourse of culture as exclusively human. Thus, we must note that the “multi” of multiculturalism is insufficiently multiple and the terrain of “cultural difference” must be broader than the human. While “culture” will continue to be “too much” of a term for many to apply to other animals,11 even without this designation what we share with other animals both socially and corporeally ought to be enough to transgress the human/animal dualism of moral considerability. Two further points by Kim (2007, 7) are relevant to enriching the debate on universalism and cultural difference. The deployment of a multiculturalist framework to defend exploitative practices against other animals not only essentializes cultures as purely human but both majority and minority cultures are represented as coherent unitary wholes (a similar point is made by Gaard 2001). Appeals to respect other cultures risk conflating a given practice with the entirety of a culture and of reifying that culture as static. Secondly, it “elides ideological, rhetorical and strategic differences among animal advocates, the mainstream media, politicians and others, by lumping these distinct entities together as ‘the dominant groups’ ” (7). This is an important point since animal advocacy cannot be said to represent a dominant part of any Western culture. Even in its non-vegan welfarist form it is not so. Moreover, vegetarianism is clearly in significant respects also a non-Western practice (Kheel 2004, 335; Spencer 2000), even though we must acknowledge the cultural diversity of reasons for vegetarianism or veganism. Animal advocacy as a social movement constitutes an oppositional politics, arguing for a radical revision of dominant Western cultural practices and institutions. While this does not preclude the possibility that an alternative and minority (pro-animal) politics could act oppressively toward, for example, immigrant groups or other cultures, it renders problematic attempts to situate them within a history of dominant Western cultural imperialism. Recognizing this arguably aids the possibility of intersectional coalition since both animal advocates and discriminated communities have a shared interest in opposing a capitalism that instrumentalizes according to constructions of race, class, and species via intertwined legacies of animalization and racialization. Kim also gives a clear and specific stance on the question of universalism. She reminds us that “claims about the culture-boundedness of all assertions are nonsensical in that they themselves assume universal form” (2007, 12). Marti Kheel makes a similar point stating that “the view that all advocacy of vegetarianism as an ideal is inherently imperialist is an unjustified universal claim of its own” (2008, 267 n.159), even if this could also be said to contradict her conflation of universalism with masculinity. Perhaps then we need to be more nuanced about assertions that all instances of universalism

1993 First Open Rescue by Animal Liberation Victoria, Australia.

238

Chapter 12 Ecofeminism and Veganism

are, for example, ethnocentric, imperialist, or masculinist. Kim takes the view that the recognition of a small number of universal values is morally necessary12 (2010, 59), proposing that the prohibition of cruelty (against both humans and animals) ought to be one such universal value (2007, 12). Again human/animal dualism shapes moral considerability when using a discourse of “cruelty” or “violence” which entails that, in some sense, the exploitation of other animals is typically taken less seriously. This is not to say that human/animal dualism exists in exactly the same form in all human cultures. However, anthropocentrism (like patriarchy) does seem to be significantly cross-cultural;13 even if its history, trajectory, and experience exhibit cultural specificity. Kim’s thoughts resonate with the earlier important work of ecofeminist Greta Gaard. Both advocate for forms of dialogue as inescapable strategies for addressing such cross-cultural controversies, a point I return to later. Gaard’s (2001) focus was on the Makah Whale Hunt, a controversy that came to prominence in the late twentieth century over the right or not of the Makah in Northwest Washington State to resume whale hunting. In common with Kim’s case studies, the situation of the Makah also reflected a marginalized group long subject to racism. However, a relevant difference here in the practice was that the Makah had not hunted whales since 1913 and therefore were seeking to resume a practice. Furthermore, that the resumption was not predicated on reasons of subsistence meant that it did not satisfy the International Whaling Commission’s (IWC) criteria for “aboriginal whaling” (Gaard 2001, 5–6). Nevertheless, the U.S. government managed to gain permission from the IWC for the Makah to kill whales between 1998 and 2002, with the first animal killed in May 1999. The pro-hunting claims of (in fact, a segment of) the Makah also came up against the problem that broader cultural sensitivity, the regulatory environment, and scientific knowledge of animals such as whales have shifted considerably during the past hundred years. Both Kim and Gaard are sensitive to the specific historical context of communities attempting to survive in the face of racism and economic marginalization. At the same time both want to open an ethical space for the considerability of other animals in the face of the simplistic denouncement of animal advocacy as neocolonialist. Moreover, both analyses are critical of tendencies to homogenize such communities. As Gaard points out in the case of the Makah, there was significant opposition to the whaling among the community with some evidence of a traditional gendering of opinion vis-à-vis the advocacy of whaling as a method for Makah cultural renewal. She argues that “In the case of the Makah, the whale hunting practices of a certain elite group of men have been conflated with the practices, and substituted for the identity, of an entire culture” (2001, 17). There is certainly a

Chapter 12 Ecofeminism and Veganism

239

responsibility for ecofeminists not to discount an analysis of gender or other divisions within a culture or community in order to better grasp the context of why certain practices are pursued. Approaching communities as undifferentiated, as homogeneous only reinforces their objectification (see Plumwood 1993). Moreover, this also constitutes an impoverished sociology and emphasizes the need for intersectional approaches such as ecofeminism to conduct grounded empirical research to properly grasp the complexity of a controversy. Although ecofeminist ethics began by distancing themselves from abstraction, analyses such as Gaard’s and Kim’s suggests that ecofeminism is enriched by sociological and historical analysis. Intersectionality is not something one can hope to understand only as a disengaged philosopher. Similar arguments have been made within feminist bioethics where many have also critiqued philosophical over abstraction in ethical analysis (see Twine 2010a). As mentioned earlier, Kim (2020) herself has recently also written on the Makah issue producing a lengthy nuanced analysis arguing that it is more than possible to make anti-colonial and anti-whaling positions work together; and that there are positions worth pursuing in the refusal to conflate either anti-whaling with eco-colonialism, or being pro-Makah with pro-whaling. In spite of the similarities of approach between Gaard and Kim, Gaard has been slightly more reticent. For example, she does not explicitly advocate for a limited sense of universalism and states in relation to the Makah controversy that “In this specific intersection of historical, political, and cultural contexts, it is not the place of non-native feminists and ecofeminists to challenge even what we perceive to be oppressive features of marginalized cultures; rather only members of a specific culture are positioned to lead an inquiry into traditional cultural practices” (2001, 18). Such a principle raises difficult questions since it may be the case that there are no members of a community that want to lead an inquiry especially if it could be read as a form of betrayal. Here we can read “lead” literally and assume that Gaard does not mean that one has to be a member of a specific culture in order to voice criticism. She advocates for a postcolonial ecofeminist perspective where the responsibility is on ecofeminists to learn about the particular culture and context related to the practices in question. This further highlights the need for embedded and proximal methodologies: Gaard argues that people who can act as “border crossers” between different perspectives and spaces are vital for setting up mutually respective dialogue (19–22). Perhaps then this is not so far from Kim’s take on such conflicts. Although Gaard does not argue for a limited universalism she does state, for example, that ecofeminism pursues “certain minimum conditions for ethical behaviour” and wants to support certain “basic principles” (2001, 3; see also Kao 2010,

1993 Delora Wisemoon begins in Austin, Texas a program for sheltering the companion animals of battered women.

240

Chapter 12 Ecofeminism and Veganism

626). Kim also supports a similar mutually sensitive dialogue in which both sides open themselves to scrutiny. In the cases noted in this chapter such as in the UK, California, Washington State, or Australia, and elsewhere, majority animal practices also have to be open to critique. Their scale and effects are after all typically more systemic. Kim concludes by saying that “Immigrants need protection from cultural imperialism and nativism, but receiving and giving moral criticism and engaging others on issues of moral concern is an important part of membership in a moral community. The risks of being seen as outside of this community may well be higher than the risks of being included” (2007, 14). Both Gaard and Kim wish to construct a way forward that is accountable to the intersections of different relations of power, but also push intersectionality as a concept beyond its traditional anthropocentric usage (see Twine 2010b). Ecofeminism, as I have argued, can realize such analyses as long as it strives for methodologies and politics that account for the complexity of social, cultural, and historical context, so that we might better understand how certain practices begin to take hold.

Contesting “contextual” To end this chapter, I want to examine the uses of contextual by ecofeminists a little more closely. Contextual has been used in two main ways: first to stress the importance of understanding the contexts of practices, and secondly to actually highlight specific contexts within which animal use could be deemed unavoidable. In particular we can note this in differences of perspective over the second sense between Val Plumwood and her critique of some ecofeminists, notably Carol J. Adams and Marti Kheel. I focus mostly on Kheel, given her specific position on the question of universalism. Although a committed vegan, Kheel took care to avoid advocating for vegan universalism. As previously noted, in tension with Kim, Kheel viewed universalism as masculinist. Shaped by this and her grounding in ecofeminism she was wary of abstract norms and universal rules. Instead Kheel argued for what she referred to as an “invitational approach” (2004, 328) to vegetarianism.14 Kheel wanted ecofeminism to focus on deconstructing normalized practices of animal consumption, to place the onus of justification there, in order to “clear a space in which to plant the seeds that invite the vegetarian ideal” (329). Yet it is important to grasp the complexity of Kheel’s position. It is inaccurate to portray her simply as a contextual ecofeminist countering universalism. In fact, she was clearly critical of some contextual ecofeminists (334).

As we saw earlier, Curtin’s approach was to account for contexts of emergency and geography as potential examples of unavoidable animal use. However, others such as Val Plumwood argued for a broader understanding of “contextual” and espoused an anti-vegan stance (see Plumwood 2000, 2003, 2004). Plumwood’s position instead was “semi-vegetarian” and was against factory farming rather than killing animals per se (2004, 53). She correctly wanted the “human” to be resituated in ecological terms but incorrectly framed veganism as precluding that possibility (see Plumwood 2003, 2). Just because vegans do not eat animal products does not mean that everything else they do eat does not somehow embed the (vegan) human in the rest of nature. Nor do vegans, as she claims, insist that neither humans nor animals should never be conceived as edible (2003, 2). A radical reorganization of human death and burial would be one way, for example, to promote the ecological benefits of human edibility. Human predation itself (preying upon, or being live prey) is hardly a prerequisite for ecological flourishing. In a straw man critique of the work of writers such as Carol Adams and Marti Kheel, Plumwood portrayed vegan ecofeminists as being universalist and of being anti-predation generally. Although Plumwood made useful points over choice: Western urban vegans should not assume that their choice of foods is reflected in other parts of the world (2004, 306), her latter work unhelpfully and unnecessarily reemphasized a divide between environmentalists and animal advocates. While vegans such as Kheel and Adams were keen to underline that predation had been overemphasized and used to naturalize meat consumption in humans, Plumwood conflated this with a view that denied predation generally in other animals. Furthermore, there was a paucity of evidence to suggest the sort of accusation of universalism that Plumwood was making had validity.15 Kheel deflected such charges by distinguishing her invitational approach from one that would seek to impose practices on other cultures. Here veganism is an ideal presented as a positive mode of living more caring and empathic lives (2008, 246) that can be offered to people alongside a critical incitement: to reflect upon the arbitrariness and damage done by norms and expectations of animal consumption. In arguing against some versions of contextual vegetarianism she argued Typically, the contextual approach focuses on the importance of understanding and respecting meat eating within the overall context of particular cultures, without examining the sub-cultural contexts that exist within the larger culture. While it is important to try to understand, and where appropriate, respect the practices of other cultures, this should not preclude a deeper analysis of the cultural associations that may underlie

241

1994 Neither Man nor Beast by Carol J. Adams published.

Chapter 12 Ecofeminism and Veganism

242

Chapter 12 Ecofeminism and Veganism

those practices, and in particular the cultural associations between masculine self-identity and meat eating. (2004, 335)

This concurs with the view of both Gaard and Kim, that it is a poor analysis which fails to try and understand social differentiation within a particular culture or community. In her book Nature Ethics, Kheel proposed that advocating for veganism is fully consistent with an ecofeminist contextual approach (2008, 235). She explicitly did not construct a rational argument for veganism arguing that it is also the case that people do not typically evoke such arguments for why they do not kill other humans (235). This highlighted her interest in social norms. There is little public discourse on rationally justifying not killing other humans because it is a taken-for-granted social norm, a keystone of the social order. Animal consumption and anthropocentrism operate similarly; that humans eat and kill other animals is as normal as the understanding that we do not kill other humans. Acutely aware that veganism is anything but a social norm, Kheel purposively avoids dictating veganism as a universal injunction because she wants her primary focus to be on radically troubling the norm of animal consumption which operates, for Kheel, to guarantee society’s access to animals’ bodies (236). Although some may read this move as a retreat from the “dangerous territory” of universalism, Kheel’s tactic here is consistent, I suggest, with what I earlier referred to as the tragicomic character of the debate around vegan universalism.16 Social norms are not static but there is no impending probability of vegan universalism. Since ethnocentric patterns and trends of high animal consumption associated with specific developments within twentieth-century Western culture are currently universalizing to other parts of the world, it does seem fair that it is these practices, and those interests that support them, that must be foremostly called to account. Furthermore, any realistic examination of food practices being culturally imposed must engage with the mass prescription of animal consumption as a norm in the majority of human cultures and attend to the historical, social, and economic reasons for that. On the one hand, high rates of meat/dairy consumption are an increasingly globalized practice, and yet specific historical configurations of organizing this practice (see Shove and Pantzar 2005, 57–8) are important for considering both its longevity as well as prospects for alternative practices to take hold. It is briefly worth stating that the universalism of animal consumption does not only operate spatially, but also temporally, or generationally. Generational universalism secures the reproduction of social norms and is only recently starting to be contested by discursive practices of vegan parenting (Phillips 2019), critical animal pedagogy (Dinker and Pedersen

Chapter 12 Ecofeminism and Veganism

243

2016) and a focus on childhood in critical animal studies (Ankomah 2018; Bray et al. 2016; Stewart and Cole 2014). In this chapter I have set the question of (ecofeminist) vegan universalism in a broader context.17 The emergence of ecofeminist vegan ethics can be situated within the wider relationship between ecofeminism and other types of animal ethics and its challenge to the anthropocentrism of mainstream feminist thought. Any attempt to advocate for large-scale changes in eating practices cannot subsist alone upon ethics and must acquaint itself with the sociological, historical, and cultural dimensions of eating and human/animal relations. While the shaping of ecofeminist thought has attuned itself to thinking about tensions with universalism, debates on vegan universalism are significantly overshadowed (though not trivialized) by the economic and cultural globalization of high rates of animal consumption. What if more critical discourse was directed at this significant cross-cultural change as being enmeshed within ethnocentrism and colonialism? To be clear I have not used this point to diminish the importance of also directing attention at the ways in which pro-animal politics can become bound up in new or old exclusions, new constructions of whiteness, and how they can become enrolled by racists partaking in “opportunistic animal advocacy.” This is the task of posthumanist forms of intersectionality to be reflexive to precisely such developments. Although beyond the scope of this chapter I have suggested that there is a need to more carefully consider research methodologies that can appropriately be positioned to understand the various contexts that shape the emergence and durability of human/ animal relations. In effect a more coherent approach of how to practice intersectionality. Broadly four positions emerge from the ecofeminist or intersectional literature on the specific question of animal advocacy and universalism. First, Val Plumwood has argued for a semi-vegetarianism which is more an opposition to factory farming rather than to animal consumption per se. I argued that her critique of veganism fell short in several ways and that her perception of an uncritical universalism in writers such as Carol Adams and Marti Kheel was misplaced. Secondly, Deane Curtin, and arguably most ecofeminists, have favored a form of contextual moral veganism which I have characterized as a “near universalism”; it certainly implies that in most contexts humans can and should be vegan. Thirdly, I read Claire Jean Kim’s position as similar but with a limited model of universal values based especially around opposition to cruelty. Fourthly, Marti Kheel’s somewhat different approach was to construct an “invitational approach” to veganism and to focus on the compulsory nature of norms of animal consumption as

1994 Cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter authors “No Humans Involved – An Open Letter to My Colleagues” providing an analysis of connection between race and species.

244

Chapter 12 Ecofeminism and Veganism

universals in need to critique. Such positions will continue to offer the wider animal advocacy movement important reflective tools for a liberatory roadmap. I have also suggested that ecofeminists have an interest in not accepting simple defenses of particular human/animal relations based on (human) cultural differences precisely because they have had a stake in not assuming an anthropocentric and atemporal conception of “culture.” For example, to make the argument from “culture” for a practice such as bullfighting is to use a speciesist term and frame in order to perpetuate a speciesist relationship. The political crux of ecofeminism and kindred accounts of intersectionality is to not only create cultures in which other animals matter and are included, but to move “culture,” precisely, away from norms of animal exploitation.

Notes 1 2

3

4

I do not wish to present this as either homogeneous or tied to any particular geography. I do not use the term “animal rights movement” since I prefer to stick to a theoretically correct description. Given the diversity of political and ethical thought, one does not, strictly speaking, have to commit to a rights view to advocate for other animals. From an ecofeminist perspective it is also worth stating that there can be no such thing as an isolated “animal advocacy movement” since the “question of the animal” intersects with intrahuman relations of power. Consequently, veganism can only ever be one, albeit important, part of an integrated ecofeminist political practice. I see this chapter as related to my work on domestication in the journal Configurations entitled “Is Biotechnology deconstructing animal domestication? Movements toward ‘liberation’ ” (Twine 2013). Their relatedness consists in an attempt to think critically about animal liberation, and to probe what the “liberation” of other animals can actually mean. The Configurations piece specifically considers what liberation can mean in the context of domesticated animals. Together with the issue of universalism I see these as some of the most challenging questions for the rigor of the animal advocacy movement. During the 1990s there were intensive debates within ecofeminism on the question of whether ecofeminists should be vegetarians, as well as around notions of contextual vegetarianism. Notably the term “vegetarianism” was mostly used instead of “veganism.” I would contend three reasons for this. First, I expect some North American writers used

7

8 9 10 11

12 13

14 15

16

245

vegetarianism but meant veganism. Secondly, since the 1990s I would argue that vegetarianism has lost a lot of credibility as a consistent ethical position within the animal advocacy movement but at that time it was still deemed credible. Thirdly, and relatedly during the first decade of the twenty-first century, notably in Western countries, there has been an ethical shift toward, and cultural normalization of, veganism as the preferred and more consistent practice of animal advocates. So much so that an ecofeminist arguing today for ovo-lacto vegetarianism would suffer from a credibility problem. See http://www.abolitionistapproach.com. Be they critiques of veganism that assume that a universalism is being proffered, or the important ecofeminist debates on universalism. I certainly remember participating in a heated debate in the mid-1990s on the “ecofem” listserv based on the University of Colorado server on the subject of whether ecofeminists should be vegetarian. It now seems quaintly naive in retrospect (see n.4 above). See http://www.bnp.org.uk/news/regional/ halal-protest-sunderland-25th-aug-2012. See n.4 above. This is not intended as a racist conflation of the term “immigrant” with anyone not classified as “white.” The complexity of this question is beyond the scope of this chapter. Needless to say that many arguments have been made for animal culture, and that human and animal cultures are hardly distinct from each other, which calls into question the assumption of culture as purely human. Kim’s thinking on universalism is influenced by the theorist of multiculturalism, Bhiku Parekh. I accept that the term “cross-cultural” could be deemed problematic for the way in which it could be read as assuming that a singular culture is a clearly demarcated entity. Kheel is an example of a writer that used the term “vegetarian” to in fact mean “vegan.” See her explanation (2004, 338 n.1). For a well-argued response to Val Plumwood’s critique of Adams and Kheel, see Eaton 2002. For a recent, considered, and critical engagement with Plumwood’s work around the value of veganism, see Montford and Taylor 2020a. Kheel is very clear on her direct thoughts on universalism so I do not think she can be accused of being evasive. Her stance is not so different to that of Deane Curtin. For example, she stated that “There is nothing inherently oppressive in encouraging vegetarianism or

1994 Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing by Rosemary Radford Ruether published.

5 6

Chapter 12 Ecofeminism and Veganism

246

Chapter 12 Ecofeminism and Veganism

veganism as ideals, while recognizing that there may be environmental and climatic factors that make them difficult in some cultures. Advocating ideals is not the same as seeking to impose one’s beliefs on other people and other cultures” (2008, 236). 17 My focus has largely been on animals exploited for food. For a broader philosophical discussion of animal ethics and context, see Palmer 2010.

247

Figure 13.1 “Ursula Hamdress” from Playboar. This image appeared in The Beast: The Magazine that Bites Back, 10 (Summer 1981), 18–19. It was photographed by animal advocate Jim Mason at the Iowa State Fair where it appeared as a “pinup.” (More recent issues of Playboar have renamed “Ursula” “Taffy Lovely”).

248

Why a Pig?

S

13

everal recent books of critical theory have included investigations of the traditional Western depiction of women’s beauty or women’s sexual availability especially as it has been captured in the “reclining nude” pose. Yet, as critical theory traces these depictions forward into the late twentieth century, it has failed to recognize specifically how this tradition has leapt the human body. In this essay, I return to an image that has been vexing me for 30 years, and illuminate it as an example of the reclining nude as it was imposed on an other-than-human body. I argue that cultural theory must include consideration about species hierarchies and attitudes when examining racial and sexual representations. Otherwise it is impoverished. Attitudes about sex and race that continue to be imposed on an other-thanhuman body are permitted to be retrograde and oppressive, escaping the kind of scrutiny that would be brought to bear if the representation were imposed on a human body. I seek to change this.1 In specific, I am concerned about the image of “Ursula Hamdress” (see figure 12:1). I first encountered this image in the

1994 Feminism, Animals and Science: The Naming of the Shrew by Lynda Birke published; the first book on the construction of the animal in biological science from a feminist perspective.

A Reclining Nude Reveals the Intersections of Race, Sex, Slavery, and Species Carol J. Adams

249

250

Chapter 13 Why a Pig?

early 1980s. Jim Mason had been in the Midwest and decided to go to the March 1981 National Pork Producers’ conference in Kansas City, Missouri. He wandered through the trade show, flush with 480 exhibitors and 15,000 visitors. The implements of contemporary hog raising are there: farrowing stalls (which imprison a sow who has just given birth), cages, pens, slatted floors, feeders, etc. “Here Hess & Clark, Pfizer, Dow Chemical, Elanco, American Cyanamid, etc. are exhibiting the myriad varieties of antiobiotics, disinfectants, growth promotants, pre-mixes and other factory drugs and supplies.” Jim, who by that point had many visits to factory farms under his belt, notices the absence of dust, manure smell, dank, acrid air, and “no shrieks of crowded pigs.” He heard a buzz and saw lots of people gathered around something; they were all staring at and talking about the picture of Ursula Hamdress: “a photograph of a pig in panties sprawled in a chair. I overhear one of the men explain how a veterinarian sedated the pig so that she would hold still for the picture” (Mason 1997, 68). “Ursula” was named for actress Ursula Andress, a “sex symbol” (in the terminology of the 1960s) as a result of her role in an early James Bond film. In 1965, she posed for Playboy. “Ursula Hamdress” with her painted trotter nails and red Victoria’s Secret-like panties, was posed as a centerfold for the magazine Playboar—the Pig Farmer’s Playboy. In the early 1980s, I recognized that two “genealogies” had combined in Ursula Hamdress—the pornographic and the domesticated farm animal. In terms of the pornographic, “Ursula Hamdress” was posed as though she were the centerfold for a pornographic magazine. The accoutrements in the photograph were staged in such a way as to evoke a nineteenth-century brothel, but the being was distinctly different than the kind of being usually found in that setting or as a centerfold: a pig. The other genealogy—that of the lives of farmed animals, from which “Ursula” had been elevated into a human-inspired environment—had its own setting and accoutrements. Since the publication of the 1980 book Jim Mason’s and Peter Singer’s Animal Factories, with its photographs and text, an animal activist who encountered the photograph of “Ursula Hamdress” would recognize something distinctly different about her, too: she showed none of the signs of having lived the kind of life the majority of her sister sows endured. She was unblemished. No other sow had chewed on her, forced into a cannibalism through the stress of crowded conditions. By the time the 1990s rolled around, Ursula Andress’s iconic sex symbol status had faded. The “joke”—Ursula Andress in Playboy becomes “Ursula Hamdress” in Playboar—had lost its referent for most consumers. However the visual referent remained. Playboar circumvented this dated association

Chapter 13 Why a Pig?

251

by making just one change: they changed the name of the pig. “Ursula Hamdress” became “Taffy Lovely.” The sole updating they did for this magazine of barnyard/school/fraternity humor—the humor derived from dominance—was to change the name of the sedated pig. Otherwise, that issue of the magazine has stayed exactly the same. All of the other visual and verbal jokes and double entendres were left untouched and it seamlessly moved into the twenty-first century with the iconography of the twentieth. To the editors of Playboar, there was a sense of an unchanging set of consumers from the 1960s to the twenty-first century, and they weren’t just pig farmers.

Another genealogy exists into which “Ursula Hamdress” fits—a genealogy identified recently by several important cultural critics, but a genealogy that in their discussion does not include “Ursula.” I will argue that it should. The three works I will consider are David Harvey’s The Conditions of Postmodernity (1997) which describes the movement from modernity with its emphasis on rights and a teleology of progress to postmodernism with its flowering of fluidity, multiplicity, plurality; Michael Harris’s Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation (2003) which examines Black artists’ response to racist imagery; and Nell Painter, who makes the invisible and the universal perspective associated with whiteness in Western culture visible and specific by providing A History of White People (2010). Each author devotes visual space to the evolution of the pose called “the reclining nude.” Scholars concerned with race-making, representation, and the transition from modernity to postmodernity all gravitate to images that are the precursors of and motivators for the posing of a (possibly dead) pig. Placing this (possibly dead) pig within the larger cultural tradition they analyze is important.

David Harvey’s The Conditions of Postmodernity (1997) In Chapter 3 of The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey takes a big risk. He chooses five images that feature naked women without alluding to that specific fact. He begins by introducing a chart by Hassan that identifies

1994 Feminists for Animal Rights published two responses to PETA’s “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” campaign.

The genealogy of the reclining nude

252

Chapter 13 Why a Pig?

the “Schematic differences between modernism and postmodernism” (43). It is as though postmodern binaries do and don’t exist; binaries are a remnant of the modern project; but these schematic differences can’t be freighted with meanings of essentialism or universalism. Here is a sample of the binaries he and Hassan identify: Modernism Form Design Hierarchy Distance Centering Semantics Signified Metaphysics

postmodernism antiform (disjunctive, open) chance anarchy participation dispersal rhetoric signifier irony

Race, sex, and species are not “schematic differences” for Hassan. After 12 pages of discussion of these binaries among other things—12 pages in which gender is neither theorized nor examined—one turns the page and finds David Salle’s Tight as Houses (1980). Salle’s is the only image that is allowed to take up the space of an entire page. It is difficult to “read” in its detail—there is a sketch (written upon the negative of a photograph?) that is imposed over a photograph of a woman’s well-rounded naked body. It seems to illustrate Harvey’s statement that “the deconstructionist impulse is to look inside one text for another, dissolve one text into another, or build one text into another.” In Harvey’s words, “the collision and superimposition of different ontological worlds is a major characteristic of postmodern art” (50). The image is the site of collisions, of building a text upon another text. That this text is a woman’s body is both obvious and untheorized. Four pages later, naked women begin to appear more frequently. Titian’s Venus d’Urbino greets us with her unabashed stare and her hand coyly covering her pubic area. This Venus, “one of the first reclining nudes in Western art” and originally called by its owner “la donna nuda—the naked woman” (Harris, 128), has generated many successors, including, as Harvey notes (twice!), Manet’s Olympia. Turning the page, there she is, assured, brash even, her eyes meeting ours, her hand laying on top of her right leg and thus, also, obscuring her pubic area. Across from Olympia, Rauschenberg’s Persimmon stares at her viewers through a mirror. Harvey remarks that “Rauschenberg’s pioneering postmodernist work Persimmon (1964), collages many themes including direct reproduction of Rubens’s Venus at her toilet.” Juxtaposed with Olympia, Persimmon appears to rework Manet and Titian as well—what faces out now

faces in, but the mirror restores the gaze. According to Robert Hughes’s The Shock of the New, Rauschenberg “was fond of embedding an ironic lechery in his images” (1980, 335). In his choice of images, Harvey appears to have had some fun evoking an ironic lechery. At the end of the chapter, a naked young woman stares at us from an advertisement for Citizen Watches. She recalls Persimmon, with her backside facing frontward in the advertisement, naked except for a watch. As I noted in my use of images in The Pornography of Meat, watches are a primary vehicle for inscribing dominant attitudes (Adams 2020, 202–03). In postmodern times, advertisement strategies influence art and art influences advertisements—superimposing images and creating referentiality across their once discrete fields. Harvey’s decision to use paintings that represented women’s bodies to illustrate the evolution of art into postmodernity seemed to backfire on him. After the first edition of his book was published, Harvey’s genealogy of images quickly came under critique. Tellingly, feminists found both acts of commission and omission. One of the commentators was D. Massey, who wrote in “Flexible Sexism” a stunning critique of the implicit sexism in his analysis that ignores any insights from feminist theory and the explicit sexism in the illustrations in Chapter 3. She writes: His commentaries ponder the superimposition of ontologically different worlds, or the difference between Manet and Rauschenberg, but they are oblivious to what is being represented, how it is being represented and from whose point of view, and the political effects of such representations. David Salle’s “Tight as houses” is the most evident case of this where Harvey gives no indication that he has grasped the simple pun of the title and its clearly sexist content. Whose gaze is this painting painted from and for? Who could get the “joke”? The painting is treated with dead seriousness by Harvey, who cites Taylor (1987) on how it is a collage bringing together “incompatible source materials as an alternative to choosing between them” (Harvey, page 49). My own response, as someone who was potentially in that picture, and who saw it with completely different eyes, was: “here we go, another pretentious male artist who still thinks naked women are naughty.” . . . The painting assumes a complicit male viewer. (Massey 1991, 44–5)

In a note to the paperback edition, at the end of that chapter, Harvey responds to critiques such as Massey’s. He seems stung by the criticism. He writes: The illustrations used in this chapter have been criticized by some feminists of a postmodern persuasion. They were deliberately chosen because they

253

1995 Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations and Beyond Animal Rights: Toward a Caring Ethic for Animals, both edited by Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan, published.

Chapter 13 Why a Pig?

254

Chapter 13 Why a Pig?

allowed comparison across the supposed pre-modern, modern, and postmodern divides. The classical Titian nude is actively reworked in Manet’s modernist Olympia . . . All of the illustrations make use of a woman’s body to inscribe their particular message. The additional point I sought to make is that the subordination of women, one of many “troublesome contradictions” in bourgeois Enlightenment practices, can expect no particular relief by appeal to postmodernism. (Harvey 1997, 65)

Harvey failed to recognize that using images that objectify women and empower the privileged position of the presumed male spectator require explicit response. He also chose to represent only the work of white men (though the creators of Citizen Watches are anonymous). Resistance required either comment or intentional juxtaposition with more liberatory images.

Michael Harris’s Colored Pictures: Race and Representation Michael Harris’s Colored Pictures: Race and Representation makes up for Harvey’s silence. He is alert to racial and sexual representation as he updates the genealogy of reclining nudes for the twentieth century. He also explicitly examines race as it is inflected in the genealogy. Harris observes that “even in black communities, black was a negative signifier.” He points out that “blackness, unlike Jewishness or Irishness, is primarily visual.” He elaborates on this visual and negating nature of blackness: “Racial discourses, although they are discourses of power, ultimately rely on the visual in the sense that the visible body must be used by those in power to represent nonvisual realities that differentiate insiders from outsiders” (Harris 2003, 2). Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark brilliantly illustrates Harris’s insight about blackness as a negative signifier. She describes how, in conceptualizing ideas like freedom, nineteenth-century American whites needed the “unfree” Black person to represent the “not-me.” She writes: “It was not simply that this slave population had a distinctive color; it was that this color ‘meant’ something” (Morrison 2008, 49). This leads Morrison to a discussion of the ending of Huckleberry Finn, in which Jim is not freed. She observes the “parasitical nature of white freedom.” Does Manet’s Olympia betray this parasitical nature? A prostitute replaces Titian’s Venus. In place of a white servant in Titian, Manet places an African woman behind the white woman, helping her. The white woman looks out of the painting toward the viewer; the African woman looks at the white woman.

Chapter 13 Why a Pig?

255

Because of the way Manet brings race into his painting, Harris’s commentary fills in the gap that Harvey’s “no comment” methodology left unsaid. Harris carefully interprets the genealogy Harvey visually presented. What Harvey trusted his readers to do, Harris does not leave to chance—or interpretation. Moreover, he explicitly identifies the racial hegemony being inscribed. His chapter, “Jezebel, Olympia, and the Sexualized Woman,” describes how “During the nineteenth century, the black female body in art had become a signifier of sexuality, among other things, as myths of black lasciviousness became entwined with other sexual ideas.” The Black servant is not just a signifier of sexuality, but also for disease, an association that had been “part of the essentialist stereotyping of nonwhite women” (Harris 2003, 126). Further, “In the nineteenth century, women of color were associated with nature, uncontrolled passion, and promiscuity.” Let’s note that not just in the nineteenth century have women of color been associated with nature, uncontrolled passion, and promiscuity, often by presenting them as wild, rather than domesticated animals. Annette Gordon-Reed reminds us that “The portrayal of black female sexuality as inherently degraded is a product of slavery and white supremacy, and it lives on as one of slavery’s chief legacies and as one of white supremacy’s continuing projects” (2009, 319). In Olympia, Harris argues, “within the privileged space of the white male gaze is a layered black subject who is at once socially inferior to a naked prostitute, for whom she is a servant, and yet a sexual signifier and cipher; her mere presence is the equivalence of Olympia’s nakedness” (2003, 126). She is the “not-me” of the painting; her imputed degraded sexuality suggesting a different kind of “not-free” status. In his discussion of the female nude, Harris moves backward in time from Manet’s Olympia to Titian’s Venus. He finds three recurring aspects in this popular classical subject in Western art: evidence of patriarchal structures; the assumption of the universality of the white male perspective; the appropriation of female bodies (2003, 126). Harris finds these three characteristics of Western art functioning in Titian’s painting, and then, moving forward, exposes it in various artworks of the nineteenth century. He identifies compositional strategies that emphasize the visual availability of the woman being depicted, specifically a vertical line that thrusts downward to the vaginal area. Harris points out that this vertical line highlights the genital area of the nude woman. In fact, the composition of Titian’s and Manet’s paintings also includes a horizontal line made by the arm of the woman. That line, too, moves toward the pubic area of the white woman. Here is the place where the vertical and the horizontal intersect. (It is reproduced with “Ursula Hamdress,” too.)

1995 Dead Meat by Sue Coe, with an essay by Alexander Cockburn, captures the costs of meat eating on animals and slaughterhouse workers.

256

Chapter 13 Why a Pig?

As for the way Titian and Manet portray their subject’s eyes, “The fact that each woman meets the viewer’s gaze suggests that both women are complicit and compliant in the sexual arrangements” (2003, 129). Harris then turns to the ways colonialism/imperialism inflected the image of the sexually consumable woman. He considers Jean Ingres’s Odalisque with a Slave, and how it depicts “primitive sexuality” to be found outside Europe. Harris says: “All the painted harem nudes are available for visual consumption by the viewer—who is implicitly a European male” (2003, 130). Linda Nochlin notes how paintings such as Ingres’s “body forth two ideological assumptions about power: one about men’s power over women; the other about white men’s superiority to, hence justifiable control over, inferior, darker races” (Chadwick, 199). Regarding the odalisques, what you see is what you get: both visual and literal sexual consumption in the service of and confirming the imperialist practices of the West. Harris writes: “All the nudes as paintings were available as artifacts for ownership and private consumption by male patrons, a fact that rehearsed or reiterated colonial and imperial adventure and its appropriation of land, resources, and people” (2003, 130). Harris’s genealogy then claims a place for Paul Gauguin’s Spirit of the Dead Watching. Harris sees this as an inverted Olympia: “the black attendant and the reclining woman [now on her stomach] have become one” (2003, 131). The reclining woman is a pubescent girl. She is younger, more demure, less frank in her gaze, and fully submissive. The white bedclothes echo Titian’s painting. Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is the next painting in Harris’s genealogy. White prostitutes are depicted with African-themed masks, and though the white women are holding various poses, most of them standing, their poses suggest reclining nudes. By placing African mask-like faces on several prostitutes, Picasso merged “the primitivized white female and the imagined libidinous black woman into one body.” Picasso’s painting creates a Black invisibility: “The mask forms insinuated a black presence yet subordinated it to the white females whose sexual consumption was linked to the colonial physical consumption of Africa” (2003, 131). Harris’s genealogy of the reclining nude ends with a photograph, “A South Sea Siesta in a Midwinter Concession,” that was displayed at the California Midwinter International Exposition in 1894.2 The non-Anglo woman is shown reclining on a mat—her breasts are uncovered, though her genital area is covered. “The photo shows the woman in a pose from a maledominated discourse, but she gives no evidence of a willing compliance” (2003, 132). That was her power as a photographed subject: to refuse. The subjects of the paintings and the Citizen Watches ad, if they exercised such control in their gaze, could not control the representation of their gaze.

Chapter 13 Why a Pig?

257

But, what if a photographed subject has no power to refuse? What if the photographed subject is an other-than-human animal either sedated or dead? Her eyes will be closed, yet there is no resistance in this act. Harris helps us place the genealogy of the reclining nude within the context of oppressive attitudes regarding sex and race, and how these intersected. From Harris we can see how juxtaposition and superimposition function not only as artistic strategies, but as ways that complicate and confirm oppressive situations.

Intersectionality is always happening. It is happening with whiteness, too. It’s just that whiteness, having been under-theorized for so long, often needs something else to put a spotlight on it. I will argue that when Playboar positioned a pink pig in the classic reclining nude pose, this became the “something else” that can turn a spotlight toward how whiteness is (and is not) functioning. Nell Painter, in her History of White People, explores the ways in which whiteness came to signify power, prestige, and beauty. Though its staying power is remarkable (Roediger), whiteness was never monolithic in its granting of power and prestige. Whiteness, Painter reveals, also had a component of the “not-me” and the “not-free.” She discerns two kinds of slavery in the anthropological work of eighteenth-century “science of race” scholars. Enslaved peoples whose bodies were forced to perform brute labor, including Africans and Tartars, were represented as ugly. But, luxury slaves also existed: they were “valued for sex and gendered as female” and became representations of human beauty. Painter describes how the term odalisque (and accompanying terms) carry with them “the aura of physical attractiveness, submission and sexual availability—in a word, femininity. She cannot be free, for her captive status and harem location lie at the core of her identity.” Painter examines the migration of the idea of “Causasian” beauty, and how it spread across the English Channel into Britain; the uncontested fact was that beauty resided in the enslaved. Georgian, Circassian, and Caucasian were all interchangeable names, so that in 1864 when P. T. Barnum asked his European agent “to find ‘a beautiful Circassian girl’ or girls” to exhibit in his New York Museum, Painter says, “In the American context, a notion of racial purity had clearly gotten mixed up with physical beauty.” But when they arrived, Barnum’s “Circassian slave girls” had the appearance of

1995 Feminist-vegan responses to Kathryn Paxton George’s article on feminism and veganism in Signs appear.

Nell Painter’s History of White People

258

Chapter 13 Why a Pig?

light-skinned Negroes as they all had “white skin and very frizzy hair.” These white-skinned, frizzy-haired women offered a way to reconcile “conflicting American notions of beauty (that is, whiteness) and slavery (that is, Negro)” (Painter 2010, 51). The science of race and the evolution of white slavery as a beauty ideal migrated into an attractive subject for male artists. As Painter describes, “By the nineteenth century, ‘odalisques,’ or white slave women, often appear young, naked, beautiful, and sexually available throughout European and American art” (2010, 43). One cannot ignore Ingres if discussing odalisques, so like Harris, Painter turns to his paintings. Ingres’s work “was a sort of soft pornography, a naked young woman fair game for fine art voyeurs.” Painter notes that while the “odalisque still plays her role as the nude in art history,” her part “in the scientific history of white race has largely been forgotten” (2010, 43). Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Slave Market also comes under review. In this painting, a young naked girl is being exhibited for sale. Her stance recalls (or prefigures) that of Picasso’s prostitutes. Her pelvis tilts or rolls (suggesting submission as well as availability [see Adams 2004, 106]). Painter notes the existence of slavery today, an issue that Nicolas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn tackle in the first chapter (“Emancipating Twenty-First Century Slaves”) of their book, Half the Sky. Their conservative estimate is that there are three million women and girls (and a small number of boys) who are enslaved in the sex trade (2010, 10). Like Harvey and Harris, Painter finds a genealogy of images that carry forward into modernism. Two recent books, Edward Said’s Orientalism and Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather, used white slave iconography on their book covers, though neither book dwelt on white slavery. Regarding this, Painter concludes, “Late twentieth-century American scholars seemed unable to escape Gérôme or confront slavery that was not quintessentially black” (2010, 56). What else is a negative signifier beside blackness? Animality. Who else in contemporary society is enslaved besides women, girls, and an unknown number of boys? Other animals; the largest number being farmed animals. And so, whether we follow Harris, Harvey, or Painter, we arrive at “Ursula” and confront a slavery that is neither black nor human. I created a chart to track the genealogy of the “Reclining Nude.”

Chapter 13 Why a Pig?

259

Genealogy of the “Reclining Nude” and cultural commentary on gender, race, species

Harvey

Harris

Painter

Adams

Salle’s Tight as Houses

✗

Titian’s Venus

✗

✗

✗

Manet’s Olympia

✗

✗

✗

Ingres’s Odalisque

✗ with a slave (1840)

✗ Grand (1819) ✗ Le Bain Turc (1862)

Powers’s The Greek Slave

✗ (sculpture)

Gérôme’s Slave Market

✗

Gauguin’s Spirit of the Dead

✗

Picasso’s Les Demoiselles

✗

South Sea Siesta

✗ (photo)

Matisse’s Odalisque

✗

✗

✗

Citizen Watch

✗ (photo) ✗ (photo)

All of Harvey’s examples are of white women. Harris demonstrates the presentation of the reclining nude and what happens when one watches for the way racial and gender attitudes are inscribed together, so that African women represented animality. Painter considers a specific kind of presentation: that of white beauty as it was related to the enslavement of white women. I am looking for the way gender and race leap over the species line and become represented in a “reclining nude” that has a pig posed in a way similar to Titian’s Venus d’Urbino and her successors. Harris notes “a fluidity between popular culture and fine art that gains momentum in the mid-nineteeth century and is taken for granted at the beginning of the twenty-first century” (Painter 2010, 11). Playboar fits the bill.

1995 First showing of The Sexual Politics of Meat Slide Show at CalTech.

✗

Rauschenberg’s Persimmon

Ursula/Taffy

✗

260

Chapter 13 Why a Pig?

Harvey’s, Harris’s, and Painter’s critiques are important, but the mistake of their critiques (though whether Harvey’s “no comment” is a critique or not is open to debate) is to believe that there is any sort of (human-based) closure to this genealogy. Critical theory that investigates traditional Western depictions of women’s beauty, specifically “the reclining nude,” and follows these depictions into the late twentieth century has failed to recognize specifically how this tradition has leapt/fled/transcended human-centered notions to reinscribe retrograde and oppressive attitudes toward women and domesticated animals. My argument is that any of these critical theorists who think that tracing this genealogy can succeed when it is looking only at depictions of homo sapiens, especially female homo sapiens, has missed an interesting and important aspect of the genealogy. This aspect reveals how delving past the species line in representation of female “beauty,” or sexualized female bodies, exposes the structuring of consumption of not just women, but domesticated animals. It is normalizing and naturalizing this consumption because it has fled the human without discarding representational aspects of race, sex, and class. Nonanthropocentric cultural theory will acknowledge how the sexualizing and feminizing of bodies intensifies oppressions on all sides of the species boundary.

The function of animalizing and racializing: That’s why a pig The way in which “Ursula” a pig is substituted for the woman reveals how overlapping absent referents that animalize, sexualize, racialize, and figure “youthfulness” interact. In both Titian’s and Manet’s paintings we can find an animalizing function that exists parallel to the white woman at the center of the canvas: a little dog at Venus’s feet in Titian, the African woman servant and a black cat in Manet. When Playboar intervenes into this genealogy and places a female pig smack dab in the center of its staged photograph, the animalizing function has moved from margin to center. The animalizing and sexualizing functions which are separate in Titian’s and Manet’s paintings are united in one being. With Harris and Painter providing foundational insights, we notice what we might not have noticed at first when we consider “Ursula”: “Ursula” is marked as white. The white slave, the odalisque, available for sexual consumption has become the “white” enslaved female, available for literal consumption.

Chapter 13 Why a Pig?

261

Once we notice how the pig’s pink skin recalls white slavery, we realize why the pig’s “racial” characteristics matter. Her whiteness is an anthropocentric anchor. As I discuss in The Pornography of Meat, if it were a “colored” pig (and after all, pigs can be many different colors), the non-dominant associations (gender, species, and race) would have been so great, there would be no anthropocentric hook. Because of the race hierarchy that still is inscribed so strongly in Western culture, a white pig was needed, so that the degradation being represented could be as strongly conveyed as possible (i.e., the whiteness associated with the pig, which normally would have provided a racial elevation, is contained/overwhelmed by the female, animal, and enslavement associations). In addition, a “colored” pig would not have evoked the tradition of the odalisque and its figuration of whiteness. When we consider “Ursula Hamdress”—this popular culture manifestation of misogyny and objectification—we cannot ignore the racist figuring of white beauty that it is also drawing on while perverting it. The key here is that white beauty has a history tied to enslavement as well. Harris’s genealogy culminates in a photograph, as does mine: his, the “siesta-taker”; mine, “Ursula.” Harris writes that the photograph suggests “a willingness by the photographer to contribute to the existing tradition of artistic nudes. Though this tradition was largely absent from American art, the nudity of a primitive nonwhite woman was more acceptable than that of a white woman” (Harris 2003, 132). Why? Why was it more acceptable to photograph a primitive nonwhite woman? Harris suggests it is because it “offers a stage to play out white moral superiority.” Visual consumption also provided distance from—yet enjoyment of—this dangerous, erotic-laden woman. So, too, with a pig. The moral superiority is that of the human male; the visual consumption is of whiteness and (a farcical) “beauty”; the photograph offers the same distance and yet enjoyment of this very familiar, but now erotic-laden pig. And so the tradition moves whiteness to the nonhuman. With “Ursula,” the photographer and all those who contributed to the creation and execution of the photograph express cynicism, while achieving detachment and enjoyment. “Ursula Hamdress” is probably one of the founding images of anthropornography. Anthropornography is a neologism coined by Amie Hamlin and introduced in The Pornography of Meat to identify the specific sexualizing and feminizing of animals, especially domesticated animals consumed as food. Animals in bondage, particularly farmed animals, are shown “free,” free in the way that “beautiful” women have been depicted as “free”—posed as sexually available as though their only desire is for the viewer to want their bodies. (Especially when such freedom was a lie.) They become the

1996 Greta Gaard’s film Ecofeminism Now! premiers.

262

Chapter 13 Why a Pig?

“not-free free.” Playboar puts a face on meat eating that encapsulates a heinous, deeply offensive history of enslavement, misogyny, and racism. Anthropornography opens another avenue for these freighted meanings and images to be disseminated in and through popular culture. Harris concludes his examination of the reclining nude as presented by artists representing the dominant culture with a discussion of voyeurism. He draws on the work of David Lubin who argues that “gazing at women voyeuristically is a means by which men may experience, reexperience or experience in fantasy their virility and all the potency and social worth that implies. Voyeurism by any definition, suggests detachment, estrangement, viewing from a distance” (2003, 134). Harris extends Lubin’s insight: “Voyeuristic engagement with the black/ primitive woman safely separates the viewer from her dangers and reinforces his position within acceptable boundaries. He is white and gazes at the spectacle and danger of nonwhiteness, and he has the option of making real but disaffected forays into this realm as an exercise of his male prerogatives and power. Using the nonwhite female body as a spectacle . . . offers a stage to play out white moral superiority because the exotic woman is a sign of the wanton sexual danger that white society has mastered” (2003, 134). Which brings us back to the National Pork Producers’ meeting in Des Moines and the excited buzz around looking at “Ursula.” What was to be gained by the voyeuristic experience of encountering “Ursula”? Several things: The cues that the largely male attendees were encountering were of a pornographed pig, so that in public they could do what, generally, with pornography, one did in private. They would recognize that this pig had not endured life in one of their factory farms. So, for them the depiction of “Ursula” feeds on humor of the dominant culture about the one who “escapes.” They would have possessed the cynical knowledge about how few pigs actually would have such unbruised skin as she did. With “Ursula,” there is the voyeurism not of the nonwhite (human) female body, but of the (ostensibly) white (nonhuman) female body. “Ursula” would have been the real “pork producer”—her reproductive labor the necessary slavery for future piglets. The human male exceptionalism that benefits from the positioning of Ursula/Taffy was further reinforced because Playboar was for sale at a public event (the National Pork Producers Council), and the participants could take the publication home and introduce it to their private space. The privileged male consumer knew that he was never going to be the enslaved consumed.

Chapter 13 Why a Pig?

263

Harvey suggests that women’s objectification is not resolved by postmodernism. The past 40 years have also been a time in which meat eating has been regressively associated with masculinity. The postmodern representation might or might not resist complicity with the three points of Harris’s recognized oppressive framework (patriarchal attitudes, white male as normative viewer, appropriation of female body), though Harvey clearly indicates that he did not believe it did resist this, nor was the postmodern intervention going to provide any particular relief. However, anthropornography does not resist it; it is not only complicit in this oppressive approach towards representing women, it simultaneously hides and celebrates its complicity, simultaneously makes fun of itself and never truly resists the figuration—consumption, it seems to say, is consumption and the “carnivorous virility” (Derrida) that constitutes the Western subject is okay by them. This is the status quo not just reinscribed, but extended, compelled to sink, compelled to register the lowering that “carnivorous virility” is causing, this doubled interactive lowering, and “carnivorousness” is at the heart of it. The message made explicit: “This being is consumable.” Just who this being is is fudged slightly, fudged to delight the virile carnivorous viewer. Perhaps no area of representation intersects race, sex, and species as much as barbecue images. In Making Whiteness, Grace Elizabeth Hale argues that the “New South” of the early twentieth century constructed whiteness (and its enforcer Jim Crow laws) as an identity in response to the success of the Black middle class. Her work, like that of Harris and Painter, is concerned with racial making. Barbecues that use images of full-bodied white female sexual beings are a strange legacy of this constructed whiteness. With the images that advertise barbecues, what you see is what you get—visual and literal consumption of the full-bodied female body. They are “Ursula’s” sisters and they share her fate. Massey—who tackled Harvey’s lack of critical consciousness—observes: “It is now a well-established argument from feminists but not only from feminists, that modernism both privileged vision over the other senses and established a way of seeing from the point of view of an authoritative, privileged, and male, position” (1991, 45). Massey continues: “The privileging of vision impoverishes us through deprivation of other forms of sensory perception.” She then quotes Irigaray: “In our culture, the predominance of the look over smell, taste, touch, hearing, has brought about an impoverishment of bodily relations . . . the moment the look dominates, the body loses its materiality” (46). Massey suggests something more is going on: “more important from the point of view of the argument here, the reasons for the privileging of vision is precisely its supposed detachment.”

1997 Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action by Noel Sturgeon published.

264

Chapter 13 Why a Pig?

This is what the posing and photographing of Ursula finally achieves— detachment from a body for whom materiality was everything but emptied of all meaning, a body whose role was to grow bodies for consumption and then be consumed itself. Harris too, recognizes the implications of his genealogy for the voyeurism of the viewer: the act of looking becomes “the equivalence of sexual action; he is able to give the nude woman an ocular caress” (2003, 129). After those pork producers looked at and laughed about “Ursula,” after the ocular caress, they went home and returned to pigs whom they could touch, artificially impregnate, kill, and consume.

Acknowledgments This essay was first given as a keynote address in 2010 at the Animals and Animality Graduate Student Conference at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. I thank the students at Queen’s who invited me, and the participants with whom fascinating conversations occurred. I also thank Jim Mason for conversations with me in February 2012 in which we retraced our encounters with the image of Ursula Hamdress.

Notes 1 2

This essay continues my reflection on race and critical animal theory. Earlier essays can be found in Adams 1994, 2004, 2007, and 2012. Harris believes the photograph was shown; I wonder if the woman wasn’t on display there. As this event was an echo of and re-presentation of some of the exhibits of the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, it would seem that they would have arranged to have people from non-dominant cultures on display, as they did in Chicago. Thus, it could be a photograph of a woman in the exhibit who was at the California Exposition.

Toward New EcoMasculinities, EcoGenders, and EcoSexualities Greta Gaard

14 re there masculinities that could be consistent with ecofeminist praxis? From years of organizing through the “chain of radical equivalences” among social movement actors, advocated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) as crucial to the formation of a radically democratic social movement, eco-justice activists and scholars have learned the value of deconstructing the role of the Dominant Master Self, and providing a location for even those constructed as dominant (whether via race, gender, class, sexuality, or nationality) to embrace a radically ecological vision and stand with—rather than on top of—the earth’s oppressed majorities. For any egalitarian socioeconomic and eco-political transformation, such as that advocated by ecofeminism to be possible, both individuals and institutions need to shift away from overvaluing exclusively white, male, and masculinized attributes and behaviors, jobs, environments, economic practices, laws and political practices, in order to recognize and enact eco-political sustainability and ecological genders. Yet, while ecofeminist theory and praxis continues to be articulated by scholar-activists of diverse biological identities, genders, and sexualities, these scholars have not theorized the intersections between their embodiments and their ecofeminist praxis. In thinking about futures that don’t

1997 Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature edited by Karen Warren published.

A

265

266

Chapter 14 Toward New EcoMasculinities, EcoGenders, and EcoSexualities

center heteromasculinity and creating a more inclusive and descriptive ecofeminism—one that provides strategies and locations for co-creatively revisioning, educating, and mobilizing those who reject anti-ecological gender constructions—it is useful to start thinking about eco-masculinity. Hegemonic masculinity requires an ecofeminist rethinking because humans (from industrial capitalists to ecofeminists and environmentalists) are gendered, sexual beings, and gender is crucial to many peoples’ erotic expressions. As a scholar and activist, I am invested in the exploration of eco-masculinities because my own queer animal femme eco-sexuality prompts me to do so. In my own ecofeminism, gender and eroticism are entangled with my love of this earth. I want words for the butch resonance of rhyolite under my fingers when I am rock-climbing. I want language for the erotic attraction arising between my homecoming presence and feline greetings that approach and recede to rub against doorways and chair legs, eyeing me all the while. I want theory for the desire I inhale from a long-limbed lover who smells like trees. And I know I’m not alone in this eco-erotic bricolage of gender, species, nature. From Virginia Woolf’s transgendered protagonist in Orlando (Woolf 1928) to Jeanette Winterson’s unnamed and ungendered narrator in Written on the Body (Winterson 1992), queer feminist writers are envisioning eco-masculinities unbounded by sexual biologies, encompassing diverse sexualities and enacting diverse sexual practices.1 As Annie Sprinkle writes in Bi Any Other Name, “I started out as a regular heterosexual woman. Then I became bisexual. Now I am beyond bisexual— meaning I am sexual with more than just human beings. I literally make love with things like waterfalls, winds, rivers, trees, plants, mud, buildings, sidewalks, invisible things, spirits . . .” (Sprinkle 1991, 103).2 From Sprinkle’s position as a former sex worker and porn star, and now self-described “eco-sexual,” to Terry Tempest Williams’s public position as Mormon heterosexual wife, the expression of eco-erotics and eco-genders suggests a wealth of information for considering eco-masculinities. In literature, Terry Tempest Williams’s Desert Quartet (1995) describes eco-erotic encounters between a human hiker and the four elements. In the slot canyons of Utah’s Cedar Mesa, the narrator’s palms “search for a pulse in the rocks,” while her body finds “places my hips can barely fit through” until “the silence that lives in these sacred hallways presses against me. I relax. I surrender. I close my eyes. The arousal of my breath rises in me like music, like love, as the possessive muscles between my legs tighten and release. I come to the rock in a moment of stillness, giving and receiving, where there is no partition between my body and the body of earth” (Tempest Williams 1995, 8–10). Hiking along a creek in the Grand Canyon, “only an hour or so past dawn,” the narrator decides to take off her “skin of clothes” and leave them on the

Chapter 14 Toward New EcoMasculinities, EcoGenders, and EcoSexualities

267

bank, lying down on her back and floating in water: “Only my face is exposed like an apparition over ripples. Playing with water. Do I dare? My legs open. The rushing water turns my body and touches me with a fast finger that does not tire. I receive without apology. Time. Nothing to rush, only to feel. I feel time in me. It is endless pleasure in the current” (1995, 23–4). Are the rock and the water gendered in these eco-erotic encounters? Or does the eco-erotic include and transcend gender? Perhaps it is (past) time to envision alternative genders—and particularly eco-masculinities—from an ecofeminist perspective. What would it mean to redefine, or reconceive, an ecological masculinity?

Many ecofeminist philosophers, men’s movement writers, animal studies and cultural studies scholars offer diverse yet mutually reinforcing critiques of Euro-Western cultural constructions of masculinity as predicated on themes of maturity-as-separation, with male self-identity and self-esteem based on dominance, conquest, workplace achievement, economic accumulation, elite consumption patterns and behaviors, physical strength, sexual prowess, animal “meat” hunting and/or eating, and competitiveness. These constructions developed in opposition to a complementary and distorted role for women: white hetero-human-femininity (Adams 1990; Buerkle 2009; Cuomo 1992; Davion 1994; Plumwood 1993; Schwalbe 2012). Recent studies of hegemonic masculinity as portrayed in men’s lifestyle magazines confirm its pervasive representation via discourses of appearances (strength and size), affects (work ethic and emotional strength), sexualities (homosexual vs. heterosexual), behaviors (violent and assertive), occupations (valuing career over family and housework) and dominations (subordination of women and children) (Ricciardelli, Clow, and White 2010, 64–5). These representations varied far less than researchers expected among straight and gay-oriented men’s magazines, and reaffirm the continuing force of hegemonic masculinity across sexualities and nationalities. A term that was named “word of the year” in 2003 (Danford 2004), metrosexuality was articulated via the mass media television show, “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” and The Metrosexual Guide to Style by Michael Flocker (Flocker 2003); both productions promoted “gay” advice for heterosexual men, emphasizing “self-presentation, appearance, and grooming” (Ricciardelli, Clow, and White 2010, 65). Beneath metrosexuality’s “softened” masculinity, scholars found the same hegemonic masculinity,

1997 Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx, and the Postmodern by Ariel Salleh published.

Toward an ecological masculinity

268

Chapter 14 Toward New EcoMasculinities, EcoGenders, and EcoSexualities

influenced and intensified by consumerism, youth-obsession, and an emphasis on appearance, mandates usually enforced for femininity, and by association (Pharr 1988), for gay males as well: “whenever hegemonic masculinity is challenged, a new hegemonic form emerges,” and thus “hegemonic masculinity actually becomes more powerful because of its ability to adapt and to resist change” (Ricciardelli, Clow, and White 2010, 65). From bikini waxing to collagen injections and shopping (Frick 2004), metrosexuals were soon called back to hegemonic hetero-masculinity through beef consumption. Discussing Burger King’s commercial “Manthem” as a textual narrative of gender, C. Wesley Buerkle (2009) reaffirms arguments made by Carol Adams (1990) that the very act of eating is associated with masculinity, and meat eating is an act of masculine selfaffirmation.3 Through advertising images and commercials, fast-food franchises such as Burger King and Hardee’s portray hamburger consumption as enacting men’s symbolic return to their supposed essence: personal and relational independence, nonfemininity, and virile heterosexuality. Continuing research reaffirms and uncovers further evidence to support Marti Kheel’s critique of hegemonic masculinity’s anti-ecological foundations, articulated in the ways it “idealizes transcending the [female-imaged] biological realm, as represented by other-than-human animals and affiliative ties” and “subordinate[s] empathy and care for individual beings to a larger cognitive perspective or ‘whole’ ” (Kheel 2008, 3). The unstated fact that the morethan-likely “spent” dairy cows and other juvenile cattle slaughtered for fast-food beef hamburgers served at Burger King and Hardee’s contribute exponentially to the accelerated rate of global warming (FAO 2006) underscores the anti-ecological impact of beef-eating hegemonic masculinity. But masculinity has not always been defined in opposition to ecology. Although Lynn White’s (1967) critique of Christianity’s anthropocentric dominion over nature is probably the first and best-known, feminist and ecofeminist theologians such as Rosemary Radford Ruether (1983, 1992), Carol Christ (1997, 1979), Charlene Spretnak (1982), and Elizabeth Dodson Gray (1979) advanced beyond White’s, offering significant critiques of monotheistic, patriarchal religions that worship a sky god and remove spirituality and the sacred from the earth, placing Hell beneath our feet and Heaven in the sky, deifying men, and valuing men’s associated attributes over the values, attributes, and bodies of women, children, non-human animals, and the rest of nature. But prior to patriarchal, monotheistic religions, history and archeology show a different value was placed on women, nature, fertility, and the cycles of the earth. Following feminist theologians, men’s movement scholars interested in mythology and archetypes make an important distinction between “sky god archetypes [who are]

Chapter 14 Toward New EcoMasculinities, EcoGenders, and EcoSexualities

269

often warlike, either youthful invincible heroes, or older dominant males who rule in the name of an all-powerful [and often wrathful] sky god” and who serve to define masculinity as “a journey of ascension,” and contrast them with earth gods: “archetypal images that relate masculinity to the earth” and offer “a different journey, one of descent, a ‘going down’ into, initially for many men, grief” (Finn 1998). In Arizona and New Mexico, the earth god is Kokopelli, the hump-backed flute player, a 3,000-year-old Hopi symbol of fertility, replenishment, music, dance, and mischief. In Europe, it is the Green Man, pictured as a male head disgorging vegetation from his mouth, ears, eyes; often associated with serpents or dragons, the Great Goddess, and the sacred tree, the Green Man dates back to Celtic art before Roman conquest, and to the work of Roman sculptors in the first century CE, and includes manifestations in figures such as Osiris, Dionysus, Cernunnos, and Okeanus (Anderson 1990). But as many feminist spirituality groups have discovered, most people can’t jump backwards in history, and attempts to re-enter and revive ancient traditions can seem not only ill-fitting, but also fail to provide maps and solutions for contemporary eco-social problems. Their value, however, lies in the fact that their presence proves there have been ecological, life-giving, and nurturing attributes associated with masculinity; thus, alternatives to hegemonic, anti-ecological masculinism may again be possible. Reconstructing ecological masculinities in 2021 and beyond, however, will require influence and insight from the last century of eco-justice movements, philosophies, and activisms. Certainly, there have been significant silences that need to be addressed. As Mark Allister explains in Eco-Man, “gender studies in ecocriticism have been dominated by attention to feminism, [and] men’s studies has been blind in seeing nature,” citing the most important anthology in the field, Michael Kimmel and Michael Messner’s Men’s Lives, for supporting evidence (Allister 2004, 8–9). But despite its provocative subtitle, and its expressed intention “to serve as a companion to ecofeminism,” Eco-Man: New Perspectives on Masculinity and Nature offers “no consistent underpinning” for its contents, and “no general deconstruction . . . of masculinity” (2004, 8). Similarly, in the premier volume on Queer Ecologies (MortimerSandilands and Erickson 2010), while ample focus is given to human queer identities and other species’ queer sexual practices, no attention is paid to the practices and organizations inspired by vegan lesbians, the presence and meaning of numerous websites and listservs for queer vegetarians, or the argument that vegan sexuality challenges heteronormative masculinity (Potts and Parry 2010); moreover, discussions of gender are relegated to a footnote summarizing Judith Butler’s (1997) description of masculinity and femininity

1998 “Violent Love: Hunting, Heterosexuality, and the Erotics of Men’s Predation” by Brian Luke published in Feminist Studies.

270

Chapter 14 Toward New EcoMasculinities, EcoGenders, and EcoSexualities

as “precarious achievements that are socially and psychically produced, in the context of a prohibition against homosexuality, through the compulsory loss of homosexual attachments,” a loss that is “essentially melancholy in character” (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010, 356 n.10). In sum, neither ecocriticism, nor men’s studies, nor queer ecologies, nor (to date) ecofeminism has offered a theoretically sophisticated foray into the potentials for eco-masculinities. Perhaps this omission is rooted in second-wave feminism’s rejection of gender roles as universally oppressive. Radical texts of second-wave feminism such as June Singer’s Androgyny (1977), which explores diverse religious and philosophical traditions from Plato’s Symposium to the Book of Genesis, and from Jewish mysticism in the Kabbalah to Hindu practices of Tantra, concludes that both masculine and feminine traits are part of a whole and healthy psyche (meaning both soul and mind), and our job as selfactualizing humans involves “transcending” gender and “simply flowing between the opposites” (Singer 1977, 332). Yet such thousand-year-old constructions of gendered identity perpetuate the notion of dualized and polarized gender characteristics, advancing an essentialism that ecofeminists later rejected as limiting to theory-building and inclusivity (Davion 1994; Cuomo 1992). Instead of perpetuating the heterosexually distorted binary gender roles of masculine and feminine through an ideal of androgyny, or pretending that gender can be erased by eschewing all gendered cultural practices (from shaving and make-up to competition and weight-lifting), feminist eco-masculinity theorists need to reconceive gender—because we can’t dismiss it. As a primary portal to the erotic, gender is more engaging when multiply expressed and freely crafted into diverse expressions. Moreover, exploring gender quickly leads to exploring sexualities, and opening the possibilities for not just eco-masculinities but eco-genders, eco-sexualities, and the eco-erotic. As Jack Halberstam’s groundbreaking volume on Female Masculinity (2018) describes, there is a long history of cisgender women with variously expressed masculine gender identities, from nineteenth-century tribades and female husbands to twentieth-century inverts and butches, transgender butches and drag kings. But the conjunction of ecological feminist politics and practices with these female masculinities has not been fully theorized, and the conjunctions range widely: while some articulations of female masculinity—most notably, some drag kings and transmen—have perpetuated oppressive manifestations of masculinity via sexism, exercising male privilege, and objectifying women, other articulations of transgender (and feminist) masculinities, exemplified in the annual Cascadia Trans and Womyn’s Action Camp, engage in everything from “ecosexual hikes” to

Chapter 14 Toward New EcoMasculinities, EcoGenders, and EcoSexualities

271

“climb line rigging,” “coalitions against coal,” “nonviolent action training,” “racism through an intersectional framework,” and “self-care for cyclists” (Trans and Womyn’s Action Camp 2012). Halberstam’s research addresses the embodiment of female masculinities as performance and identity, providing groundwork for further attention to intellectual forms of female masculinities (i.e. theory-building, interrupting/contesting the corporate media), to the eco-political relation between butch identities and veganism, for example, or to climate justice and the material realities of economically marginalized women, people of color, queers, and non-human animals. As even Halberstam writes in his concluding chapter, “I do not believe that we are moving steadily toward a genderless society or even that this is a utopia to be desired” (2012, 272). Instead, theorizing the ecological articulations of a diversity of genders and sexualities may be a more strategic way to explore material dimensions of animal and ecological health. Although lesbian femme and hetero-feminine genders also have ecological intersections, I am drawn to exploring eco-masculinity because masculine gender identity has been constructed as so very anti-ecological, and thus its interrogation and transformation seem especially crucial. Moreover, the tools for this exploration are close at hand. From ecofeminist theory, “boundary conditions” for eco-masculinities can be adapted to offer preliminary groundwork. For example, Karen Warren’s eight boundary conditions of a feminist ethic (Warren 1990), as applied to eco-masculinity, might read: (1) not promoting any of the “isms” of social domination; (2) locating ethics contextually; (3) centralizing the diversity of women’s voices; and (4) reconceiving ethical theory as theory-in-process which changes over time. Like a feminist ethic which is contextualist, structurally pluralistic, and in-process, an eco-masculinity would also strive to be (5) responsive to the experiences and perspectives of oppressed persons of all genders, races, nations, and sexualities; (6) it would not attempt to provide an objective viewpoint, knowing that centralizing the oppressed provides a better bias. As with feminist ethics, an eco-masculinity would (7) provide a central place for values typically misrepresented in traditional ethics (care, love, friendship, appropriate trust), and most significantly, (8) reconceive what it means to be human, “since it rejects as either meaningless or currently untenable any gender-free or gender-neutral description of humans, ethics, and ethical decision making” (1990, 141, italics mine). By rejecting abstract individualism, feminist eco-masculinities would recognize that all human identities and moral conduct are best understood “in terms of networks or webs of historical and concrete relationships” (141). Building on Warren’s theory, an ecological masculinity would have to be explored through cross-cultural and multicultural perspectives to protect against

1998 “Ecofeminism: A Practical Environmental Philosophy for the 21st Century” Conference held in Missoula, Montana.

272

Chapter 14 Toward New EcoMasculinities, EcoGenders, and EcoSexualities

privileging any specific race, region, or ethnicity. Patriarchy has shaped most contemporary industrial capitalist cultures, so eco-masculinities would need to recognize and resist the identity-shaping economic structures of industrial capitalism, its inherent rewards based on hierarchies of race/class/gender/ age/species/sex/sexuality, and its implicit demands for ceaseless work, production, competition, and achievement. With ecofeminist values at heart, eco-masculinities would develop beyond merely rejecting the bifurcation of heterogendered traits, values, and behaviors: eco-masculinity/ies would enact a diversity of ecological behaviors that celebrate and sustain biodiversity and ecological justice, interspecies community, eco-eroticisms, ecological economics, playfulness, and direct action resistance to corporate capitalist eco-devastations. Already, developments are underway. To date, Paul Pulé (2007, 2009) has been foremost in developing an “ecological masculinism” that replaces an “ethic of daring” (based on dominant male values such as rationality, reductionism, power and control, confidence, conceit, selfishness, competitiveness, virility) with an “ethic of caring” for self, society, and environment (with associated values of love, friendship, trust, compassion, consideration, reciprocity, and cooperation with human and more-than-human life). Optimistically, Pulé identifies eight key conceptual frameworks across the political spectrum, along with seven “liberatory ideals in sympathy with Leftist politics” that he believes support “a shift away from hegemonic masculinities and towards a long-term ecological sustainability”; he proposes an eco-masculinism that “may crucially contribute to this shift” (Pulé 2007).4 While Pulé’s work offers a foray into this discussion, he omits Plumwood (1993), Warren (1994, 1997, 2000), Salleh (1984, 1997), and many other ecofeminist critiques of several of his listed key conceptual frameworks and liberatory ideals—critiques that prove many of these conceptual frameworks to be inherently unsuited to even a feminist revisioning of ecologically oriented gender. Moreover, apart from a footnote, Pulé does not consider the strong influences of race, class, sexuality, and culture in constructing masculinities. In advancing a truly ecological and feminist masculinity, the heterosexism implicit in hegemonic constructions of masculinity would need to be resisted, drawing on insights and questions from the new queer ecologies (Gaard 1997; Hessler 2021; Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010). What would an eco-trans-masculinity look like? Are all Lesbian Rangers eco-butches, or are there eco-femmes flashing lesbian masculinities in the Parks Service as well?5 Could we imagine eco-fags, radical faeries who dance and flirt and organize for eco-sexual justice? Indeed we can. In the 1960s and 1970s, gay liberation activists seeking ways to articulate the intersections of gay sexuality, spirituality, eco-anarchist

Chapter 14 Toward New EcoMasculinities, EcoGenders, and EcoSexualities

273

politics, and genderfuck created the Radical Faeries. Describing themselves as “a network of faggot farmers, workers, artists, drag queens, political activists, witches, magickians, rural and urban dwellers who see gays and lesbians as a distinct and separate people, with our own culture, ways of being/becoming, and spirituality,” Radical Faeries believe in “the sacredness of nature and the earth [and] honor the interconnectedness of spirit, sex, politics and culture” (Cain and Rose). They include legendary queer visionaries such as Harry Hay, Will Roscoe, and Mitch Walker, with their history and vision articulated through Arthur Evans’ Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture (Evans 1978). Within their regionally placed communities and annual gatherings, Radical Faeries celebrated an earth-based spirituality that honored sexuality and began the applied work of articulating contemporary, non-hegemonic eco-masculinities. Describing themselves as “not-men,” “sissies,” and “faeries,” the Radical Faeries’ “manifesto” offered only a short statement about feminism: “As faeries we are very interested in what our sisters have to say. The feminist movement is a beautiful expansion of consciousness. As faeries we enjoy participating in its growth” (Cain and Rose). Unfortunately, the faeries continue to describe the earth as female, a gendering that ecofeminists have shown tends to perpetuate Eurocentric gender stereotypes (i.e. earth as nurturing mother who will clean up men’s toxic wastes, as a bad and unruly broad who brings hurricanes and other “bad” weather, or a virgin to be ravished/colonized, etc.) and does not improve real material conditions for women or nature (Gaard 1993). Nonetheless, the Radical Faerie movement launched interrogations of queer eco-masculinities that have been advanced over the past four decades. In “Wigstock” (1995), a documentary covering the annual drag festival in New York City, emcee Lady Bunny says, “I think Mother Nature must be a Drag Queen,” articulating the nexus of eco-masculinity and genderfuck that drag queens are well positioned to provide. Consider the “radioactive” drag queen Nuclia Waste (Krupar 2012), whose flamboyant performances draw attention to the clean-up efforts at former plutonium production facility Rocky Flats, Colorado, that have converted this location into a wildlife refuge. As a triple-breasted and sparkly-bearded drag queen with glowing green hair, Nuclia Waste makes visible “the porosity of body and environment and the ways humans and nonhumans have been irrevocably altered by nuclear projects”(2012, 315). Her digital performances reintegrate toxic waste, mutant sexualities, and popular culture, “queering the nuclear family” and encouraging viewers to consider “the entire US as a nuclear landscape” and the pervasive “presence of nuclear waste in everyday life” (316). Mixing stereotypically male and female signifiers, Nuclia’s drag performs an irreverent critique of nature/culture and waste/human binarisms, insisting on the

1999/2000 The Gay-Straight Animal Rights Alliance (GSARA) forms in Salt Lake City with the motto “Human Rights, Animal Rights. . . The Only Difference is Ignorance!”

274

Chapter 14 Toward New EcoMasculinities, EcoGenders, and EcoSexualities

impossibility of purity and queering humans as “boundary-creatures, neither fully natural nor fully civilized” (317). Yet her work could do more to address the real material conditions for “wildlife”—i.e. the more-than-human animals reintroduced to clean up appearances at this nuclear waste site. In sum, Nuclia’s performances offer an embodied ecological politics that is crucial to an ecofeminist reconsideration of eco-genders and eco-sexualities—and interspecies ecologies need to be central in such reconsiderations. Introducing the term “ecogender,” Banerjee and Bell (2007) argue that “women and men have been interacting with the environment for ages, qua women and men, without consciously attempting to do so” (Banerjee and Bell 2007, 3). Although their research accepts sexual and gender dualisms, they offer an environmental social science critique of ecofeminism that is helpful to this project of constructing eco-masculinities: “Merchant’s [1980] view of precapitalist society passes easily over the brutality of feudal hierarchies,” they observe, and “Plumwood [1993] does not identify the logic of domination outside of the West” even though patterns of dominating women, non-dominant men, children, more-than-human animals and nature can readily be found in non-Western societies. Moreover, “Mellor’s [1992, 1997] vision of women as environmental mediators homogenizes women’s experience and unnecessarily excludes men as potential mediators,” and “Salleh [1984, 1997] does not confront the question of the commodification of men and male labor” (Banerjee and Bell 2007, 37–8). Far from articulating the anti-feminist complaint that “men are oppressed too!”, Banerjee and Bell remind us that the elevation of a few elite men has been advanced at the expense of other less-dominant men, women, children, animals, and the environment. As Warren’s boundary conditions suggest, liberatory theories that exclude or overlook the oppression of any subordinated group cannot hope to provide a holistic description of the logic and functioning of oppressive systems, or propose effective strategies for their transformation. Based on the understanding that “gender itself is a relational construction, and that therefore women’s and men’s embodied environmental experience cannot be understood in isolation” but must be historically and culturally situated, Banerjee and Bell propose an eco-gender study to explore “the dialogic character of the relationality of gender, society, and environment” which will uncover “the patterns of oppression that constrain these interactions” (2007, 14). Although their study omits consideration of sexualities and species relations, their articulation of eco-gender as an encompassing approach to bringing ecofeminist theory into the environmental social sciences directly addresses Kheel’s critique of hegemonic masculinity. Putting these diverse approaches together raises questions about the ecological implications of gender and sexuality alike. Approaching

Chapter 14 Toward New EcoMasculinities, EcoGenders, and EcoSexualities

275

eco-gender from the perspective of bisexuality, Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio argues that our “current erotophobic cultural climate” can be disrupted by bisexual practices that function “as a portal to a world without the homohetero divide,” unleashing an erotophilia whose “transformative force” can power more loving and ecologically effective responses to climate instability and a variety of human health crises (Anderlini-D’Onofrio 2011, 179, 186, et passim). To move beyond the bedroom into the sociopolitical, or from the erotic to the eco-erotic, this erotophilia needs to be linked with an eco-anarchafeminist political approach.6 Clearly, the humanist (or as Kheel would argue, the anthropocentric and more specifically androcentric) orientation of most culturally constructed masculinities must be interrogated. Disentangling biological sex, gender expression, gender role, sexual orientation, and sexual practices, as queer studies scholars like Anderlini-D’Onofrio and others suggest, can we describe (not define) diverse eco-sexualities that play fast and loose with gender while actively working for environmental, interspecies, and climate justice? How might a queer, interspecies consideration of gender guide our revisioning of human eco-masculinities and eco-sexualities?

For examples of eco-masculinities and the eco-erotic, we can look to the music and lyrics of “Nature Boy” eden ahbez, ecocritic Jim Tarter, and Sami-American artist Kurt Seaberg.7 In 1947, eden ahbez (who always spelled his name in lower case) approached Nat King Cole’s manager in Los Angeles, and handed him the music and lyrics for “Nature Boy,” a song that quickly became famous. A disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda’s silent meditation practices, ahbez lived a life of economic and ecological simplicity, wearing burlap pants and sandals, sleeping outdoors underneath the Hollywood sign, and eating a vegetarian diet. He later lived in community with other like-minded yogis in Laurel Canyon, and collaborated with jazz musician Herb Jeffries on his “Nature Boy Suite.” Predating the hippie movement of the 1960s, ahbez performed bongo, flute, and poetry gigs at beat coffeehouses in the Los Angeles area. In 1960—the year I was born— ahbez recorded his only solo LP, Eden’s Island, for Del-Fi Records. Growing up in a Los Angeles suburb in the 1960s, I listened to eden ahbez’s album “Eden’s Island” and played over and over again the songs “Full Moon” and “La Mar” for their ecological economics and eco-spirituality, expressed in

2000 Eastern Shore Sanctuary (now VINE) founded.

Eco-masculinities, ecosexualities, and their contemporary expressions

276

Chapter 14 Toward New EcoMasculinities, EcoGenders, and EcoSexualities

lyrics reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s poetry.8 It wasn’t until adulthood that I researched ahbez and found he had been living two miles from my childhood home, where his ecological, spiritual, and political-economic ethics preceded and made space for my own vision of ecofeminist ethics. Another vibrant example of feminist eco-masculinity can be seen in the life of ecocritic Jim Tarter. Writing in The Environmental Justice Reader, Tarter (2002) describes his battle with Hodgkin’s Disease, a cancer of the lymphatic system, and his sister’s battle with ovarian cancer. Quitting his career-track job, Tarter moved in with his sister Karen and became her primary, live-in caretaker for the last six months of her life. Together, they read Sandra Steingraber’s Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment (1997), and pieced together their family’s battle with cancer in conjunction with the toxic environment of their early childhood years along the Saginaw River in Michigan, with General Motors and Dow Chemical and cement factories nearby. Through his caregiving of Karen, and their readings of Steingraber, Tarter realized that cancer is a feminist environmental justice issue for the ways it affects women’s bodies, with the most dangerous carcinogens stored in body fats, and the cancers attacking women’s reproductive organs (breast, uterus, ovaries). After Karen’s death, Tarter continued his teaching and ecocritical scholarship in Idaho with this new focus, committing his teaching to educating indigenous students and bringing feminist perspectives into his work. Lithographer, carpenter, gardener, playful actor and eco-activist writer, Kurt Seaberg makes his home by the Mississippi River, in a duplex he shares with African American poet Louis Alemayhu. Seaberg has replaced his entire back yard and driveway with a sustainable garden, where he grows much of his own food, and has planted native grasses around the front and sides of the home. Songbirds, hummingbirds, and wasps receive equal welcome in his garden with nests and feeders tucked among lattices and eaves, while mice find forage in his compost bins. As a visionary response to climate change, Seaberg uses his bicycle for transportation, and participates in local activist groups such as Friends of the Mississippi River, Occupy Minneapolis, Tar Sands Action, and supports the Indigenous Environmental Network. A former men’s group participant and Green Party supporter, Seaberg brings a vision of social and ecological justice into his work, his creative and performing artistry, and his strong community ties. His artist’s statement describes this work: One of the tasks of the artist, I feel, is to remind us where our strength and power lies—in beauty, community and a sense of place. Nature has always been a theme and source of inspiration in my work, in particular the

Chapter 14 Toward New EcoMasculinities, EcoGenders, and EcoSexualities

277

Based on these diverse examples from ecofeminist and queer ecological theories, literature, and lived experiences, what values, traits, and behaviors might articulate the radical possibilities of eco-masculinities, eco-gender, and/or eco-sexualities? As Schwalbe (2012) reminds us, reconstructing hegemonic masculinity requires crucial actions linking the individual and the institutional: as examples, he suggests nurturing new minds in children, minds not oriented to seeking satisfaction in status, power, and the domination of others, nor in submission or blind obedience; and working to “end the exploitative economic and political arrangements that are sustained by a continuing supply of expendable men” (Schwalbe 2012, 42). Without the need to dominate and control others—and with the creation and ongoing presence of cooperative economic and democratic enterprises—there will be “little need for the kind of manhood that has evolved under capitalism” (2012, 44). Writing in Eco-Man, Patrick D. Murphy suggests another key feature of eco-masculinity: noting that “men are credited with creating but are not expected to nurture what they create,” he laments that “nurturing remains a concept rarely applied to men and an area of male practice inadequately studied, discussed, and promoted” (Murphy 2004, 196–7). Murphy’s essay explores some of the ways that fathers can nurture children while learning “to relinquish the illusion of control” and engaging with the fathers’ own emotions, in dialogue with their children (2004, 208). Nurturing ecological sustainability, nurturing human and more-than-human companions, nurturing an ecophilic eco-erotic, and nurturing interspecies, ecological justice: these are some of the projects of a feminist eco-masculinity.

Inviting explorations: Eco-erotophilicanarcha-feminist masculinities Ecofeminist scholarship, and the research of scholars and activists across the disciplines, suggests that capitalist heteromasculinity is fundamentally antiecological. Of major significance in Kheel’s Nature Ethics is her insight that all environmental ethics are constructed through the lens of gender. If environmental ethicists and activists want to make more conscious choices

2000 Clifton Flynn’s “Woman’s Best Friend: Pet Abuse and the Role of Companion Animals in the Lives of Battered Women” published in Violence Against Women.

spiritual qualities that I find there. My hope is that my art will evoke the same feelings that arise in me when I contemplate the mystery of being alive in a living world: humility, gratitude and a sense of wonder before what I believe is truly sacred. (Seaberg 2010)

278

Chapter 14 Toward New EcoMasculinities, EcoGenders, and EcoSexualities

about that lens, we’ll need to envision diverse expressions of eco-genders— not just eco-masculinities but also eco-femme and eco-trans identities—as well as eco-sexualities. As with our cultures, our physical, erotic animal bodies are a location of knowledge to be explored.

Acknowledgments Special thanks to Lori Gruen and Chris Cuomo for suggesting I consider female (eco) masculinity.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5

For an ecofeminist ecocritical discussion of such gender-bending literatures, see Justyna Kostkowska, Ecocriticism and Women Writers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). I excerpted this portion of Sprinkle’s sentence because she completes her list by including “beings from other planets, the earth, and yes, even animals,” raising the significant question of consent, and how one would determine consent from another species. Consent is a non-negotiable premise for all radical sexualities and sexual behaviors. See Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover (Minnesota UP, 2021). The commercial is now publicly available on YouTube, at http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=R3YHrf9fGrw Pulé’s eight conceptual frameworks range from Progressive Left to Conservative Right, and include Socialist, Gay/Queer, Profeminist, Black (African), Mythopoetic, Men’s Rights, Morally Conservative, and Evangelical; his seven liberatory ideals include Feminist Sociobiology, Deep Ecology, Social Ecology, Ecopsychology, Gaia Theory, Inclusionality Theory, and General Systems Theory. Bruce Erickson (2010) introduces the Lesbian Rangers: “Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan founded the Lesbian National Parks and Services in 1997 as a way of inserting a lesbian presence into the natural landscape. In full uniform, the performance artists interact with the public, and point out potential hazards to the flourishing of lesbian flora and fauna in natural settings, including sexism and the naturalization of heterosexuality in human and nonhuman contexts” (Erickson 2010, 328 n.3). Described as a group of “eager beavers,”

Chapter 14 Toward New EcoMasculinities, EcoGenders, and EcoSexualities

7 8

the Lesbian Rangers maintain a website with rich resources at http:// fingerinthedyke.ca/index.html (accessed October 16, 2012). Chaia Heller (1999) describes five dimensions of the socio-erotic, humans’ desire for sensuality, association, differentiation, development, and political opposition as part of an eco-anarcha-feminist eroto-politics. Robert Bly’s masculinist and anti-feminist work is purposely omitted as it does not advance ecofeminist politics. For a full listing of ahbez’s lyrics, it is well worth the time to look at http://plus1plus1plus.org/Resources/eden-ahbez-lyrics.

2000 Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters by Karen Warren published.

6

279

Growth by Suzy González.

280

part three Climate Introduction “Climate”—new to this edition—explores both our climate crisis and the climate of reception for ecofeminist ideas and actions. Chapters explore inclusions and exclusions of feminist insights within animal studies and Black feminist thought from environmentalism; the global reach of intensive animal agriculture and its impact on animals, humans, and the environment; and how changing conceptions of gender and sexuality open up creative possibility for social and environmental action. As we face climate catastrophe, it is more important than ever that we explore what it means to listen to animals, and to think about inequitable relationships that exist, and the way that harms are disproportionately distributed. From bringing animal agriculture into ecofeminist thought in a very clear way to an exploration of the disappearance from the story of animal theory of women writers on issues having to do with animals, to a reflection on ecofeminist praxis, we highlight the range of climates in which we live. The climate of ecofeminism is always self-reflective. What’s hidden? What have we missed? Who or what is excluded? Who’s available to be seen? Who is speaking? Who speaks for whom? What work needs to get done to see things anew? Who is listening? How do we pay attention to some but not exclude others? These kinds of questions are always part of our ecofeminist process; they are regularly asked as we think about our commitments. Ecofeminism, in many ways, can be seen as always working to unpack the “us vs. them” dualism, who is in the “us” category, and how does the thinking and action of those in that category impact “them.” The essays in this section help us to see the dangers of this dualism and provide insights into how we might dismantle it.

281

282

Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals: Tracking Gender in Animal Studies Susan Fraiman I

n 1967 Jane Goodall published her first account of bonding with wild chimps, launching a career that would not only popularize primatology but also contribute to its reinvention. Following Goodall, the number of women doing fieldwork on primates would increase, as would attention to the role of females in primate societies (including, under the banner of women’s liberation, our own).1 In 1975, Peter Singer galvanized the modern animal rights movement with Animal Liberation, a work that would be heralded as one of its founding texts. That same year, The Lesbian Reader included an article by Carol Adams entitled “The Sexual Politics of Meat,” inspiration for a book eventually published in 1990. Her scholarship contributed to a growing body of ecofeminist work, emergent in the early 1980s, on women, animals, and the environment. Adams alone would go on to write or edit more than half a dozen volumes theorizing the relation between feminist and vegetarian issues.

2001 More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality by Karen Davis published, showing how both wild and domestic turkeys are subject to human sexual violence.

15

283

284

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

Three more books bear mention in this quick sketch of innovative, formative work on animals appearing across the disciplines well before the new millennium: Adam’s Task (1986), by animal trainer and philosopher Vicki Hearne; The Animal Estate (1989), by historian Harriet Ritvo; and Primate Visions (1989), by feminist historian of science Donna Haraway.2 And then there’s Jacques Derrida, his very name being shorthand for theoretical sophistication even now, with the initial heyday of American poststructuralism well behind us. Though briefly indicating an interest in animality both in a 1989 work on Martin Heidegger and in a 1991 interview, Derrida’s only sustained commentary on this topic came late in his career. “L’Animal que donc je suis (à suivre)” was the first in a series of talks given at Cérisy-la-Salle in 1997. In 2002 it was published in Critical Inquiry as “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” and an English translation of the entire series came out in 2008.3 The sincerity, gravity, and acuity of his remarks on the subjection of animals are not in question. Nevertheless, given the relative slightness of these remarks—relative, that is, both to his own corpus and to the immense body of in-depth animal scholarship— Derrida’s inclusion in this narrative might seem, at first glance, unwarranted. Why pause over a one-off talk by a thinker notably more concerned with words than flesh? I do so because of his nomination, early in the twenty-first century, as forefather of a dramatically renovated version of animal studies, extending across the disciplines and linked to the theoretical project of “posthumanism.” Once an obscure and idiosyncratic subfield, by 2009 animal studies had been remade as a newly legitimate, high-profile area of humanities research, its status evinced by burgeoning numbers of special issues, conferences, and publications at top presses. As I am not the first to note, this rapid increase in cultural capital appears closely correlated to the fact that several of those most publicly identified with the “new” animal studies look for authorization to Derrida.4 Chief among these is Cary Wolfe, whose oft-cited overview for the 2009 animal issue of PMLA gives some indication of his stature in the field. Taking its cue from PMLA, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran its own animal cluster not long after, including an introductory piece serving to confirm four things: the official arrival of animal studies; Wolfe’s prominence in the new formation; the tagging of Derrida as originary figure; and the interrelation among these. Introducing Wolfe as “one of the leading theorists in animal studies,” Jennifer Howard went on to quote his claim in PMLA that “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” is “arguably the single most important event in the brief history of animal studies.” Derrida’s primacy was reiterated by Matthew Calarco, author of Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (2008), who explained to Howard that

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

285

Derrida “has almost single-handedly made the question [of animals] interesting for people in lots of disciplines.”5 In other contexts, Wolfe and Calarco allude, at least in passing, to important work in animal studies dating back to the eighties. Yet, as we see here, both emphatically single out Derrida as animal studies’ preeminent source and sponsor, and Calarco frankly credits the philosopher with attracting interest to an area of research just now emerging from the shadows. As I have suggested, the sexy subset of what might fairly be called Derridean animal studies is only part of a larger, longer-standing, interdisciplinary whole. Increasingly, however, especially in the humanities, it is the subset called upon to speak for animal studies and accorded prestige by the profession.6 If Derridean animal studies seems poised to corner the contemporary market, I am troubled in part by its revisionary history—the way an origin story beginning in 2002 serves to eclipse the body of animal scholarship loosely referenced above, dozens of books going back some forty years, long before Derrida’s essay was brought to the attention of English speakers. Much of this pioneering work was by women and feminists—a significant portion under the rubric of ecofeminism—and all of it arose in dialogue with late-century liberation movements, including the secondwave women’s movement. No surprise, then, that Singer would introduce the term speciesism and that animal studies would frequently be likened to intellectual formations spearheaded by opponents of racism and sexism. As the Chronicle piece rightly notes, however, animal scholars today are divided in their willingness to affiliate openly with the animal rights movement. Those mobilizing Derrida typically distinguish their project not only from animal advocacy but also from gender studies and other areas animated by specific political commitments. As we will see, Wolfe does this primarily by locating his animal work under the broader, theoretical rubric of posthumanism. But his comments to the Chronicle and elsewhere suggest institutional as well as theoretical concerns. Matter-of-factly invoking the gendered logic of academic reception, Wolfe anticipates the case I will be making below. Howard quotes him as worried that the women’s studies model would lead to “ghettoization,” and Calarco admits that he, too, is anxious lest animal studies become “another one of these minority studies” (“CC”). Though animal studies is, of course, defined by its attention to species, this essay will explore its further saturation by notions about masculinity, femininity, and feminism—even (or especially) when not explicitly engaged with these categories. In the pages to come, I aim to unpack the troubling gender politics of two related tendencies: the installation of Derrida as founding father; and the framing of animal studies in opposition to emotionally and politically engaged work on gender, race, and sexuality. I begin by

2002 Eastern Shore Sanctuary featured on episode of PBS series “In the Life,” seizing the opportunity to outline the links between queer and animal liberation.

286

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

contrasting two animal anecdotes—one taken from Derrida, the other from primatologist Barbara Smuts. Instead of citing him as a hedge against minoritization, here I call on Derrida to help schematize the effects of gender. He and Smuts provide me with “primal scenes,” which I offer as allegories for “masculine” and “feminine” modes of encountering another species. The middle section of my essay considers Wolfe’s animal scholarship as a leading example of the Derridean turn. Together these readings elaborate a critique directed not only at Wolfe but also at academic protocols tending to devalue scholarship marked as feminine. I close with two more anecdotes that once again humorously mark divergent approaches to animals and animal studies. Juxtaposing texts by Adams and Haraway, this final section also models an alternative to Wolfe’s posthumanist idiom; despite their many disagreements, Adams and Haraway both exemplify an animal scholarship informed by feminism, open to emotion, and frankly invested in social change.

Why this shame? On the trail of gender in animal studies, let us now turn to Derrida’s memorable anecdote in “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Derrida doesn’t, of course, proceed in linear fashion from beginning to end but prefers to tease us with multiple versions embedded in thickets of puns, repetitions, speculations, and asides. We are warned from the outset that there will be nudity. The gist of the anecdote, we learn soon enough, involves a cat who has occasion to look at our philosopher—indeed, to study him coolly as he stands there naked. Gazed upon so directly by this unabashed creature, Derrida’s reaction is embarrassment, compounded by shame at feeling so: “And why this shame that blushes for being ashamed? Especially, I should make clear, if the cat observes me frontally naked, face to face, and if I am naked faced with the cat’s eyes looking at me as it were from head to toe, just to see, not hesitating to concentrate its vision—in order to see, with a view to seeing—in the direction of my sex” (“A,” p. 373). The cat in question, he will soon stipulate, “is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t the figure of a cat” (“A,” p. 374). The “sex” in this scene, we can only assume, is likewise “real” as well as densely symbolic—and it is, moreover, specifically male. It flinches just a little before the animal’s fixed gaze; while the cat looks without touching or biting, Derrida informs us “that threat remains on its lips or on the tip of the tongue” (“A,” p. 373). The cat’s look and man’s blush will recur as a kind of refrain for the essay as a whole—its burden, as it were. A subsequent account elaborates on what

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

287

Derrida describes as a daily ritual: “The cat follows me when I wake up, into the bathroom, asking for her breakfast, but she demands to be let out of that very room as soon as it (or she) sees me naked” (“A,” p. 382). This passage leads directly to Derrida’s stinging taxonomy, classing together those philosophers unable to acknowledge an animal’s gaze. Later he will tie this refusal by post-Cartesian philosophers to be seen and addressed by animals to the Holocaust-like violence against them in the modern era (see “A,” pp. 394–5). Citing René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, and Emanuel Lévinas as examples of those belonging to this category, Derrida inserts a striking proviso: “(all those males but not all those females, and that difference is not insignificant here)” (“A,” pp. 382–3). It is Derrida himself, then, who cues my efforts to articulate the “not insignificant” difference of gender as it functions in discussions of animality.7 As the essay winds down, Derrida’s concern with gender becomes more explicit; his final pages shift away from “Man” meaning “human” to “(s)he,” “man or woman,” “he or she,” “him- or herself” (“A,” pp. 416–17). In his closing paragraphs, he takes the further step of imagining an unashamed “I” capable of presenting himself “in his totally naked truth. And in the naked truth, if there is such a thing, of his or her sexual difference, of all their sexual differences” (“A,” p. 418). Maneuvering beyond binarized to pluralized sexual differences, the conclusion of “Animal” thus echoes the well-known reverie at the end of “Choreographies: “I would like to believe in the multiplicity of sexually marked voices,” Derrida says there. “I would like to believe in the masses, this indeterminable number of blended voices, this mobile of non-identified sexual marks.”8 I would like to believe in this, too— and yet, despite a number of such de-binarizing moves in “Animal,” I am riveted by the image of a self-consciously masculinized human, in his bathroom without a stitch, shamed by the gaze of a cat whose femaleness as well as realness is specified early on (see “A,” p. 375). Like the cat, I cannot help looking (“in order to see, with a view to seeing”) in the direction of the narrator’s “sex.” To aid in this examination, let us juxtapose Derrida’s story with a kindred account by Smuts. Like Derrida, Smuts tells of an encounter between human and nonhuman animals in terms that are both highly personal and incipiently paradigmatic. One day, while living with and studying baboons in Kenya, Smuts finds herself fingertip to fingertip with a juvenile member of the troop. Her hand resting on a rock, she is surprised by a gentle touch before turning to recognize “a slight fellow named Damien.” As Smuts goes on to explain, “he looked intently into my eyes, as if to make sure that I was not disturbed by his touch, and then he proceeded to use his index finger to examine, in great detail, each one of my fingernails in turn . . . After touching each nail,

2002 Chef and food justice activist Bryant Terry founds b-healthy! (Build Healthy Eating and Lifestyles to Help Youth).

288

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

and without removing his finger, Damien glanced up at me for a few seconds. Each time our gaze met, I wondered if he, like I, was contemplating the implications of the realization that our fingers and fingernails were so alike.”9 As I need hardly observe, in Smuts’s story, proper names serve to denominate the narrating human female and the encountered animal male. It thus inverts what I have depicted as the relatively stable, normative gendering of Derrida’s couple—a gendering that means to bare and implicate the speaker’s masculinity along with his humanity but that also has the further effect of staging a seemingly primal confrontation between masculinized human and feminized animal.10 The two stories differ, moreover, in depicting and ranking the senses. True that Derrida’s cat is accorded the power of the gaze: the singular, discerning “point of view” traditionally tied to cognition and reserved for humans. Yet the bathroom transaction overall—explicitly visual (and visually explicit) but definitely not tactile—leaves intact the old rationalist hierarchy valuing vision/mind/cognition over touch/body/emotion. Illustrating a tendency common to animal rights advocacy, though also routinely criticized, Derrida’s cat is granted provisional subject status in implicitly humanist terms—ones that continue to reflect the premium placed by our own upright species on the “higher” faculties. Smuts’s account, on the other hand, effectively challenges this hierarchy—not only by prioritizing the meeting of fingertips but also by undoing the opposition between touch and vision, showing instead how these senses overlap and collaborate to bridge the distance between baboon and biologist. As Smuts carefully notes, Damien’s gaze adds another level of contact but doesn’t supersede his touch. He raises his eyes to check in visually without breaking the tactile bond. The intimacy thus sustained brings me, finally, to the most striking divergence between these two animal tales: their presiding affects. As we have seen, Derrida’s encounter is suffused with anxiety and, as he tells us repeatedly, a double dose of shame. This is certainly a reasonable response to our history of defining animals as killable, and Derrida’s selfironizing essay is superb in its wish to hold us accountable. The difference in the emotional and ethical emphasis of Smuts’s story is nevertheless telling. The real-time pacing of her narrative, detailing each moment of tactile and visual contact, seems to replicate and reciprocate in formal terms the tentativeness, attentiveness, and tenderness of Damien’s gestures toward her. The interaction it models is based on mutual care, in the sense of heightened awareness as well as solicitude. The emotional stance it describes is relaxed, wondering, receptive to animal overtures and meanings—this in contrast to Derrida’s account of his nervous, sheepish impulse to cover himself. Indeed, as Haraway has pointed out, Derrida’s worries about being exposed are such that the cat herself is soon all but forgotten (see W, p. 20).11

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

289

This dynamic, whereby interest flips into incuriosity, would not surprise Silvan Tomkins, for whom retreat from another’s gaze is the very definition of shameful response. As Tomkins explains, the shame response is marked by a lowering of the eyes that “calls a halt to looking.” “Such a barrier,” Tomkins continues, “might be because one is suddenly looked at by one who is strange, or because one wishes to look at or commune with another person but suddenly cannot because he is strange.” Tomkins argues, moreover, that lowering one’s eyes and bowing one’s head in shame entails a loss of human dignity, since “man above all other animals insists on walking erect.” All of this would seem to be applicable in Derrida’s case, including Tomkins’s observation that shame is frequently experienced as shameful, compounding the original effect.12 As far as human–animal relations are concerned, Derrida’s shame thus appears to cut both ways. It is triggered by the philosopher’s wish to commune with a four-legged creature; moreover, by undermining his sense of human superiority, it would seem to put them both, as animals, on a par. At the same time, in registering animal “strangeness,” shame abruptly calls a halt to their encounter. What then are we to make of the apparent shamelessness of Smuts’s visual and tactile communion with a baboon? Given women’s historically embattled relation to full human dignity and entitlement, is it possible she finds Damien less strange than Derrida finds his little cat? And might she not, for the same reason, be less susceptible to shame at being ashamed, the second-order humiliation brought about by compromised erectness?13 Derrida’s French title plays on “je suis” in its double sense of “I am” and “I follow”: “L’Animal que done je suis (à suivre).” So saying, he names himself an animal while also questioning the putative precedence of human animals before all others. Smuts, meantime, spent years scrambling to keep up with a very mobile troop of baboons. Before leaving these two figures, I want briefly to differentiate their shared dedication to following animals. Derrida’s riffs on following animals include tracking animals in the philosophical record; acknowledging our historically predatory relations to animals; and challenging our temporal/ontological priority as humans. Citing the fact that Adam names “animals created before him” (“A,” p. 384), Derrida identifies our own animality as belated and derivative. Theoretically compelling, all this remains nonetheless at odds with the image of a cat following him into the bathroom, petitioning for breakfast, only to be left behind as he flies off in pursuit of more abstract game. The result is to keep Derrida, however unwillingly, in the position of alpha animal—putting the philosopher before the feline, the call of the mind before that of the body, and all at the expense of genuine mutuality. Smuts has, of course, the perhaps too-easy advantage of immersion in fieldwork with actual animals. Notably, however, her work with baboons

2003 The SAAV Program (“Sheltering Animals of Abuse Victims”) providing foster care for companion animals of battering victims is begun in Wisconsin.

290

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

involves far more than literally tracking them across the savannah. As Smuts explains, she learned to keep physical pace with the baboons only by trusting them emotionally and deferring to them cognitively: “Abandoning myself to their far superior knowledge, I moved as a humble disciple, learning from masters about being an African anthropoid” (“R,” p. 109). Following the lead of animals on these multiple levels would come to characterize Smuts’s research method overall. Disregarding the protocol of maintaining a “neutral” distance from her subjects, she put herself in baboon hands, yielded to their expertise, and took her cues from them about baboon sociality as well as survival (“R,” p. 109). Back at the ranch, influenced by her work with primates, Smuts’s relationship with her dog, Safi, is similarly guided by principles of negotiation and mutual accommodation rather than ordinary human dominance. “Because I spent years following baboons around,” Smuts says, “I realized that nonhumans tend to have a superior grasp of wild places” (“R,” p. 119). It is therefore sometimes Safi who takes them for a walk, sniffing out their route while her person happily brings up the rear (see “R,” p. 119). In short, while “following” for Derrida quickly comes to mean chasing down the abjection of animals by Western philosophers, for Smuts it has meant letting go the lead, drawing closer, apprenticing herself to animal ways of being and knowing.

Real men don’t like animals Clearly some of the variation in these animal stories by Derrida and Smuts may be chalked up to disciplinary training and disposition—no surprise, we might say, that a philosopher would be less in touch with real animals than an ethologist. Disciplinary paradigms also explain Smuts’s assumption (in her scholarship on baboons) that animal behaviors are naturally tied to reproductive expediency. For a feminist in the humanities like myself, Smuts’s evolutionary reasoning, fraught with sociobiological associations, has very little appeal; I get far more leverage from the constructionist views of gender (and identities in general) that Derrida’s work has helped to formulate. Disciplinary factors aside, however, what I find interesting are the differences I would parse in terms of gender. Needless to say, I am not suggesting that Derrida’s relation to animals is somehow inherently, inflexibly male— or, for that matter, seamlessly “masculine” in tenor. Nor, as I have said, do I see it as uniformly less feminist than Smuts’s. I offer the examples of Derrida’s anxious man and Smuts’s interactive woman merely as tropes for differences between “masculine” and “feminine” approaches to animals and

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

291

animal studies that are often but not always aligned with male and female morphology. I will also, before we are done, cite examples of divergences within these categories. If they are not biological, how might we account for the frequent differences, referenced and in some ways illustrated by Derrida, between male and female narratives about humans in relation to other animals? We need not look very far (though many choose not to) for a sizeable body of scholarship responding to this question in highly theorized, historicized detail. As I began by mentioning, a cohort of ecofeminists—including Adams, Josephine Donovan, Brian Luke, Connie Salamone, Marti Kheel, Andrée Collard, Deane Curtin, Alice Walker, Deborah Slicer, Greta Gaard, Lori Gruen, Lynda Birke, and Karen Warren, among others—embarked several decades ago on the project of challenging deeply embedded humanist assumptions concerning gender and animality.14 Broadly speaking, these include the notions that women and animals are linked together as avatars of nature; that they are similarly debased by their shared association with body over mind, feeling over reason, object rather than subject status; that men are rational subjects, who therefore naturally dominate women and animals alike; that masculinity is produced in contradistinction to the feminine, animal, bodily, emotional, and acted upon; that degree of manliness is correlated to a degree of distance from these and other related categories—physicality, literalness, sentimentality, vulnerability, domesticity, and so on. None of this is news to seasoned feminists or poststructuralists bent on troubling all such binary oppositions. It is therefore surprising that even someone like Derrida, known for his strategic identification with the feminized, animalized margins, should still in “Animal” flinch at the “threat” connoted by his little cat. Or perhaps it is not surprising, given Derrida’s own emphasis on our inability completely to escape this dualistic logic. As a result, men working in the area of contemporary animal studies—men siding with animals—may indeed feel threatened by “castration.” Proximity to this feminized realm may even induce a degree of gender/species anxiety I am tempted to call (with a nod to Eve Sedgwick) pussy panic. A likely though not inevitable response to such panic is emphatic disavowal of all further, feminizing associations—emotionality in particular— along with the principled affirmation of masculinizing ones. In her incisive 1990 essay, “Animal Rights and Feminist Theory,” Donovan identified this gender dynamic at work in two books foundational to the contemporary movement for animal rights as well as to animal studies: Singer’s aforementioned Animal Liberation and Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights (1983). Donovan begins by citing passages in which each writer explicitly sets off his own carefully reasoned, academically credible defense of animals

2004 Wangari Maathai awarded Nobel Peace Prize, the first environmentalist and the first African woman to be honored in this way.

292

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

from the emotionally motivated, easily dismissed concerns of “animal lovers.” Speaking for himself and his wife, Singer insists they have never been “inordinately fond of dogs, cats, or horses.” “We didn’t ‘love’ animals,” he repeats, noting that the presumed sentimentality of animal rights views has led to their exclusion from “serious political and moral discussion.” Regan is similarly anxious to counter “the tired charge of being ‘irrational,’ ‘sentimental,’ ‘emotional,’ or worse.” He doesn’t specify what could possibly be “worse,” though I have tried to suggest where his fears are likely to lie. Regan thus advises scholars defending animal rights to make “a concerted effort not to indulge our emotions or parade our sentiments. And that requires making a sustained commitment to rational inquiry.”15 As Donovan demonstrates, both men make a point of distancing themselves from inordinate feelings clearly coded as feminine, while allying themselves instead with a mode of “serious . . . discussion” and “rational inquiry” no less clearly marked as masculine. It is not that women are inherently kinder to animals, Donovan explains—many are not; nevertheless, those who take up the cause of animals are often more willing to acknowledge the emotional aspect of their advocacy. Indeed, as designated outsiders to the realm of rationality, women (with less to lose) have often led the way in challenging rationalist frameworks altogether and recuperating their assemblage of subordinated terms—the feminine and affective along with the animal.16 Regan and Singer, by contrast, are driven by gender norms to make a show of demonizing feeling, thereby basing their defense of animals on the very rationalist schema that spurns animality in the first place. As Donovan concludes, “unfortunately, contemporary animal rights theorists, in their reliance on theory that derives from the mechanistic premises of Enlightenment epistemology (natural rights in the case of Regan and utilitarian calculation in the case of Singer) and in their suppression/denial of emotional knowledge, continue to employ Cartesian, or objectivist, modes even while they condemn the scientific practices enabled by them.”17 What I take from Donovan’s analysis is the following maxim: the more a male-identified scholar is devoted to animal liberation, the more pressure he is under to assert his nonlove for animals. Moving on to Wolfe, I want to explore what I see as traces of this logic—even in work that sets itself off from Singer and Regan and that sometimes invokes gender as an explicit category of analysis. In addition to the PMLA overview, “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities,” Wolfe’s important contributions to animal studies include the edited volume Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (2003) and Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (2003).18 His central project in these texts is to indicate the anthropocentrism on which Western thinking continues to

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

293

depend, even in poststructuralist work theoretically committed to debunking humanism and even in “cultural studies” work politically committed to eliminating bias. Wolfe would have us grapple seriously with nonhuman subjects, adding that a discourse of species permitting cruelty to animals serves equally well to justify violence against animalized groups of humans (see AR, p. 7, and “H,” p. 567). It is ostensibly for this latter reason (our own, human stake in opposing speciesism) that Wolfe adduces his version of the familiar disclaimer. Italicized for emphasis in Animal Rites, reiterated in PMLA, and commonly pulled out for quotation in discussions of these texts, its wording is unconditional: “The ethical and philosophical urgency of confronting the institution of speciesism and crafting a posthumanist theory of the subject has nothing to do with whether you like animals” (AR, p. 7). Earlier in “Human, All Too Human,” Wolfe differentiates animal studies from scholarship reducing animals to “metaphor, analogy, representation, or sociological datum (in which, say, relations of class, or race, or gender get played out and negotiated through the symbolic currency of animality and species difference)” (“H,” p. 567). It is work of this latter kind, focused solely on the animalization of humans, that may proceed quite apart from caring about animals per se. By contrast, the work Wolfe champions would seem to be distinguished precisely by its two-part motive: social justice for humans but also, crucially, attention to the specificity of animals, an investment in animal welfare, and a sense of affiliation with animals for which liking is as good a word as any. To repeat then, in Wolfe the declaration of nonlove is formulated as the insistence that liking animals (“strictly speaking,” the PMLA iteration adds) has nothing to do with the imperative to challenge speciesism. Recalling Singer and Regan, this move to rule out “liking” feels both overstated and disingenuous. Indeed, though offered as a narrowly drawn conclusion, it is logically extraneous to Wolfe’s pitch for animal studies, even a bit puzzling— unless we understand it in relation to the traditional gender dynamic described above. As we have seen, however superfluous in logical terms, not-needing-to-like-animals has obvious advantages in strategic terms, as long as one assumes the bundling of nonemotionality and nonfemininity with intellectual credibility. That this assumption continues to hold sway is suggested by several other strategies fending off not only affection for animals but also association with two intellectual formations marked as feminine: ecofeminism and contemporary gender studies. While most ecofeminists receive no mention at all, Adams and Collard are listed in the PMLA piece, and Adams is credited exactly twice in Animal Rites for her point that women and animals frequently code one another within semiotic systems rendering both consumable. In each case, however,

2005 Animal Abuse and Family Violence: Researching the Interrelationships of Abusive Power by Amy Fitzgerald published.

294

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

Wolfe acknowledges Adams’s argument but then proceeds to undercut or supplant her contribution. Thus, in their compelling chapter on Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, Wolfe and co-author Jonathan Elmer take Adams to stand for ecological feminism only to set it aside as inadequate: “We want to specify our differences with a critical discourse that at first seems promising for an analysis of Demme’s film.” Granting the gist of Adams’s argument, they insist the film calls “for a more nuanced and complex analysis” (AR, pp. 104, 105). The other mention of Adams occurs in Wolfe’s introduction, which offers an appreciative synopsis of The Sexual Politics of Meat, before ending with a flourish of deference to Derrida. Adams’s view, Wolfe concludes, is “all compressed in what Derrida’s recent work calls ‘carnophallogocentrism’“ (AR, p. 8). With this closing swerve to poststructuralism, Wolfe permits a speculative coinage lifted from a single interview (“Eating Well”) to “compress” and effectively trump what for Adams is the central concern of books and articles extending, as I have stressed, back to the mid-1970s. The substitution of Derrida for Adams, poststructuralism for ecofeminism is a move shaping Animal Rites as a whole and that, in general, subtends Wolfe’s posthumanist approach to animal studies.19 In fact, notwithstanding his wish to downplay liking, much of the work Wolfe does under a Derridean rubric revisits arguments previously made by ecofeminists: their interrogation of dualistic thinking; their quarrel with arguments for animal “rights” that remain steeped in liberal humanism, especially those by Singer and Regan; their claim that women and animals are categories liable to trope one another in producing the dominant category of white, human masculinity.20 Yet despite this continuity with Adams, Donovan, and others, Animal Rites effectively authorizes its critique of speciesism and model for contemporary animal studies by means of a revamped genealogy—one skewed to privilege Derrida and disregard the groundwork laid by ecofeminism. Rather than engaging with feminist precursors, Wolfe builds his case, following Derrida, by contending with philosophical fathers from Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein to Jean-François Lyotard and Lévinas. In addition to distancing itself from ecofeminism, Animal Rites opens by distinguishing its project from what is sweepingly disparaged as “cultural studies.” Its very first sentence singles out “what we call cultural studies” to illustrate “a fundamental repression that underlies most ethical and political discourse.” In other words, Wolfe continues, “well-intentioned critics of racism, (hetero)sexism, classism, and all other -isms that are the stock-intrade of cultural studies almost always remain locked within an unexamined framework of speciesism” (AR, p. 1). There is no reason given here for launching a critique of widespread, deeply rooted speciesism over against

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

295

this particular intellectual/political formation (especially since most of the book will focus elsewhere), though Wolfe would not be the first to relish finding an -ism guilty of an -ism of its own. But the wish to avoid contamination by “identity politics,” referenced somewhat euphemistically as “cultural studies,” comes through clearly enough. It is a wish that Wolfe reiterates and elaborates six years later in “Human, All Too Human,” at which point he devotes several pages to repudiating “the cultural studies template” (“H,” p. 568). The crux of his complaint is that, even when adding animals and speciesism to the list of objects studied, “cultural studies” remains essentially “humanist” in its premises and procedures. Equating cultural studies with a facile pluralism and investment in “rights,” Wolfe cites the standard poststructuralist critique of the “liberal humanist” tradition, stressing the human bias built into its presumption of unified, individual subjects. Without giving a single example, relying entirely on other scholars for a blanket indictment of cultural studies as incoherent and vague, Wolfe blames these qualities for helping to obscure what remains a normative conception of subjectivity, despite the rhetorical inclusion of animals (see “H,” p. 568). “In this light,” he says ominously, “animal studies, if taken seriously, would not so much extend or refine a certain mode of cultural studies as bring it to an end” (“H,” p. 568; emphasis added). Wolfe closes his case against cultural studies by shifting abruptly from a catch-all, “liberal” notion of cultural studies to a specific, Marxist one. Underwritten by Antonio Gramsci’s notion of “critical consciousness,” cultural studies is said to privilege the distinctly human attributes of “critical introspection and self-reflection” (“H,” p. 570). It “thus reinstates the human/ animal divide in a less visible but more fundamental way, while ostensibly gesturing beyond it” (“H,” p. 570). The PMLA piece concludes by touting an alternative template for animal studies, one that “intersects with the larger problematic of posthumanism” (“H,” pp. 571–2). For as Wolfe explains, his ultimate goal is a posthumanism reaching beyond a thematic and ethical focus on animals to interrogate humanist ways of knowing: “Just because a historian or literary critic devotes attention to the topic or theme of nonhuman animals doesn’t mean that a familiar form of humanism isn’t being maintained through internal disciplinary practices that rely on a specific schema of the knowing subject and of the kind of knowledge he or she can have” (“H,” p. 572). In What Is Posthumanism? (2010), Wolfe will go on to argue still more forcefully for subordinating a critique of speciesism to the “larger” theoretical question posed by his title, reiterating that “the nature of thought itself must change if it is to be posthumanist.”21 My responses to these several claims can be summed up as follows. To begin with, the targeting of Gramsci among countless purveyors of

2005 After national attention beginning with a Wall Street Journal front page article, VINE becomes widely recognized for being the first to rehabilitate fighting roosters, an endeavor they explicitly characterized as an ecofeminist project.

296

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

intellectualism seems arbitrary at best—and besides, does recognizing animal subjectivity necessarily mean demonizing our own capacity for critical introspection? Beyond this, I take serious issue with Wolfe’s dismissive and inaccurate characterization of “cultural studies.”22 Indeed, the vagueness and incoherence Wolfe attributes to “the cultural studies template” is arguably a function of his own overly broad and flexible use of it to reference everything from specific Marxist paradigms to any and all scholarship on gender, sexuality, or race produced since the 1970s. For example, in a passage echoing the “stock-in-trade” comment as well as mainstream attacks on Left scholarship, Wolfe sets “animal studies” apart from an “endless” list of like subfields beginning with “gender studies”: “If taken seriously, animal studies ought not be viewed as simply the latest flavor of the month of what James Chandler calls the ‘subdisciplinary field,’ one of ‘a whole array of academic fields and practices’ that since the 1970s ‘have come to be called studies: gender studies, race studies, and cultural studies, of course, but also film studies, media studies, jazz studies . . .’—the list is virtually endless” (“H,” p. 569). Following Chandler, Wolfe casually conflates half a dozen, highly developed, discrete areas of scholarship (areas encompassing such theoretically diverse figures as Rita Felski, Sedgwick, Gayatri Spivak, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stuart Hall, Lauren Berlant, and Mary Ann Doane, among hundreds of others) in order to disparage them all as no more than faddish “flavors of the month.” As for Wolfe’s assimilation of “cultural studies” to “liberal humanism,” I need hardly point out that scholars working on gender, sexuality, and race have themselves been in the forefront of efforts to unseat the normative “liberal humanist” subject—poststructuralist feminists, for example, along with feminist legal theorists, postcolonial theorists, critical race theorists, not to mention anti-identitarian queer theorists.23 Even more to the point, we will recall that it was actually ecofeminists like Donovan, Adams, and Luke who first interrogated rights approaches to animal advocacy precisely on the basis of their complicity with Enlightenment ways of knowing. In short, the view of animal studies according to the “cultural studies template” as theoretically naive—devoted only to the thematic inclusion of previously excluded identities and wholly unself-conscious with regard to its internal, disciplinary assumptions and procedures—is little more than a caricature. Yet there is, I would argue, a genuinely substantial difference between Wolfe’s preferred “posthumanist” template and those he disparages under the heading of “cultural studies”—a difference that is not epistemological so much as political. Both approaches protest the exclusion of animals and also, typically, deconstruct the tenets of humanist thinking. But while Wolfe does so to ends that are ostensibly theoretical, ecofeminists and

their like do so to ends that are avowedly political. It is, indeed, because Wolfe regards the oppositional politics built into the gender studies model as inextricable from liberal notions of human rights that he accuses non-Derridean animal studies of being residually humanist. As feminists point out, however, claims to be apolitical in a “carnophallogocentric” world are themselves highly political. Wolfe’s very effort to be theoretically pure, beyond all taint of humanism, is undoubtedly well-intentioned but inescapably gendered nonetheless in both its tacit assumptions and institutional effects. To recap briefly, what dismays me most is Wolfe’s emphatic framing of animal studies as discontinuous with and even antithetical to scholarship on women, African Americans, queers, and other marginalized groups. I attribute this framing, at least in part, to a fear of contamination by the flakey flavorof-the-month crowd. As we know, Wolfe says as much in the Chronicle of Higher Education interview, repeating his hope that animal studies will not be viewed as “just another flavor of the month” (“CC”). The assertion that, “if taken seriously,” animal studies should not be likened to gender studies might therefore be more accurately worded as: if animal studies wishes to be taken seriously, it must run as fast as it can away from anything resembling gender studies. In his introduction to Rites, W. J. T. Mitchell notes the “combination of resistance and anxiety” raised by the topic of animal rights.24 The strategies illustrated by Wolfe may address the gendered aspects of this anxiety, but they do so at a price: slighting ecofeminist precedents, reinforcing caricatures of Left academic work, overlooking complicity with gendered institutional dynamics, hampering our ability to braid “species” with other aspects of identity—all this in addition to trivializing our emotional attachments to animals.

Feminists that therefore we follow Hoping to find some less anxious approaches to theorizing our relations and obligations to nonhuman creatures, I turn first to Adams. I will briefly recap her major arguments before coming to the oft-told story of how she came to conjoin her feminist and antiracist commitments with animal advocacy. In contrast to Wolfe, Adams shares with most ecofeminists an appreciation for emotional knowledge and a willingness to claim caring as the basis for her interest in animal issues. Along with Donovan, she edited a collection of essays, Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals (1996), elaborating the care paradigm as an alternative to Singer’s and Regan’s. Like others in this volume, Adams’s essay counters rationalist

297

2006 “The Salience of Species Difference for Feminist Theory” by Maneesha Deckha published in Hastings Women’s Law Journal.

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

298

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

arguments for animal “rights,” explaining that her own work on gender and species evolved “precisely because I cared about animals.” Rather than simply celebrate care, however, Adams aims to challenge the conventional dichotomization of feeling and reason. “Emotions and theory are related,” she insists. “One does not have to eviscerate theory of emotional content and reflection to present legitimate theory. Nor does the presence of emotional content and reflection eradicate or militate against thinking theoretically.” Adams is further concerned to denaturalize the tie between women and caring; if women’s nurturing role is a function of their historical subordination, so men’s self-sufficiency is actually a fiction, maintained by women’s emotional work. Once again, rather than simply recuperating care, Adams undoes the opposition between naturally caring women and men eligible for rights by virtue of their innate autonomy and rationality. Her advocacy of care— “because it is good, not because it constitutes women’s ‘difference”’—is thus emphatically constructionist, tied to her rejection of rights logic as extended to animals and couched within a broad critique of dualistic thinking.25 In fact, The Sexual Politics of Meat (which preceded Adams’s involvement in the rights–care debate among feminist philosophers) neither theorizes care nor stages her own communion with animals. Instead, Adams’s best-known book is a bold critique of the discursive basis for our violence against animals (especially those killed for food), and in this it would seem to anticipate Derrida or Wolfe more than it does Smuts. As we know, she also breaks new ground in showing that gender codes are used to denigrate animals, species codes to denigrate women, and that normative masculinity rests on an instrumental relation to both. Adams further examines how racialized groups are animalized and, conversely, how meat-eating—as the nutritional prerogative and status marker of “civilized” peoples—is raced as well as gendered.26 Elaborating in Neither Man nor Beast (1994) on the need for intersectional thinking, Adams explains: “Just as identity is not additive but interlocking, so I am not interested as much in analogies between the status of oppressed humans and the status of animals as I am interested in intersections . . . When white racism uses an animalizing discourse against Black people, it demonstrates the way supremacist ideology inscribes intersecting forms of otherness (race and species).”27 Adams’s understanding of intersecting oppressions does not mean that a given text necessarily reinforces or resists all of these evenly. Indeed, one of her primary goals is to chide feminist analyses of women depicted as meat that fail to recognize the violence against animals intrinsic to this category. Moreover, “just as feminist theory needs to be informed by vegetarian insights,” Adams insists that “animal rights theory requires an incorporation of feminist principles.”28 In The Pornography of Meat (2003), she debunks

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

299

ad campaigns sponsored by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), which—for reasons that should be clear by now—make their case for animals using images of women calculated to shout heteronormativity.29 As her criticism of PETA and Singer/Regan suggests, Adams shares my own concern not only with the gender politics of species discourse but also with animal activists and scholars prone to pussy panic. In a 2009 interview, Adams noted to the Minnesota Review her dismay at “the masculinization of the animal rights movement.” She speculated, too, about a similar bias within academia suggested by the emphasis on feral animals: “I often feel that when people glom onto animal issues, the one area they don’t want to glom onto is the domesticated, farmed animals, because they’re too ordinary, too low in status, because they’re female or equated with the female.”30 Adams herself was drawn to feminist vegetarianism through her love and grief for a particular domestic animal. The story she recounts about coming to consciousness through the shooting of Jimmy the horse is threaded through her corpus, appearing with slight variations in at least three different contexts.31 Like Derrida’s watchful cat anecdote, it functions as a kind of origin story, emotional touchstone, and paradigm for her work on animals. As Adams tells it, the year 1973 found her already a feminist, alert to the politics of personal life, but still a consumer of meat.32 She had just returned to her small hometown after a year at Yale Divinity School when, in the midst of unpacking, she is interrupted by loud knocking—a frantic neighbor has come to report that Adams’s beloved pony has been shot. Running to the back pasture, Adams finds Jimmy on the ground, blood trickling from his mouth. “Those barefoot steps through the thorns and manure of an old apple orchard took me face to face with death,” she recalls. “That evening, still distraught about my pony’s death, I bit into a hamburger and stopped in midbite. I was thinking about one dead animal yet eating another dead animal. What was the difference between this dead cow and the dead pony whom I would be burying the next day?”33 From that moment on, her view of meat was fundamentally altered. I have several observations to make about Adams’s story as a figure for her overall project. Both confirming and troubling my earlier, gendered generalizations about Derrida versus Smuts, it also sets the stage for some closing thoughts about a rather different tale of feminist eating. Adams’s epiphany comes, first of all, as both disruption and continuation of her theological training. Hers is a feminist theology, but as the blood, thorns, and martyred animal of this story imply, Adams rejects the patriarchal aspects of Christianity while retaining its iconography of suffering along with its ethic of neighborliness and care for the meek. Caught in spiritual transit, still unpacking the baggage of her year at Yale, she is brought home by this act of violence to her

2006 Film-maker Tami Wilson’s Flesh premieres, examining the connections between women and meat in a society obsessed with flesh.

300

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

calling as an independent activist-scholar—one for whom the rites of academia will always be less compelling than the justice issues raised in her own backyard. Hailed in what we might be tempted to think of as an Althusserian manner, Adams is abruptly called into subjectivity not by a police officer but by a sympathetic neighbor, who effects her interpellation as a dissenting rather than obedient citizen. In contrast to Smuts, fingertip to fingertip with Damien, Adams’s paradigmatic animal encounter brings her “face to face with death.” And this is true across Adams’s corpus; more often than not, the animals we encounter there are neither canny companions nor prurient pets but the decaying corpses we euphemistically call meat. Made suddenly aware, the night her horse is shot, that she is feasting on dead cow, her first response is similar to Derrida’s; shrinking back in shame at the “strangeness” of animals, she dramatizes the nonrecognition allowing them to be killed for human use. Like Derrida, her subsequent work proceeds in a critical mode; instead of celebrating intimacy with animals, she, too, is more interested in tracing the discursive patterns authorizing human violence against them. In contrast to Derrida, however, Adams does not respond to her shame by blushing to be ashamed. Instead, her shame yields quickly to a second impulse: “I also recognized my ability to change myself: realizing what flesh actually is, I also realized I need not be a corpse eater. Through a relational epistemology I underwent a metaphysical shift.”34 Exposed in her shame, she is moved not to cover but rather to examine and reimagine herself. It would be another year before Adams would actually convert to vegetarianism, some seventeen years before her feminist-vegetarian critical theory would be (as it were) fully cooked. But the basis for these have been laid in the “metaphysical shift” described here—a shift over to the side of animals, disavowing the identity of meat eater in order to identify, instead, with the eaten. It is, I would note, a shift inextricable from its occurrence in the early 1970s, underwritten by the civil rights, antiwar, and women’s liberation movements. Thanks to her formation as a radical feminist, Adams is primed to recognize the emotions of shame, grief, and sympathy as sources of knowledge; to imagine herself in relational rather than autonomous terms; and to bring a sophisticated analysis of patriarchal structures to bear upon human–animal relations. For Adams, then, there is no preexisting, mystical alliance with animals on the basis of her womanhood. Instead, at a moment of crisis in 1973, she makes the conscious choice to be schooled by them and to reposition herself on their side, in keeping with an ecofeminist epistemology. As she will later put it: “I do not value animals because women are somehow ‘closer’ to them, but because we experience interdependent oppressions.”35 Smuts, by contrast, does not invoke feminist frameworks, and her emphasis on animal agency

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

301

and interspecies mutuality might seem to be the inverse of Adams’s focus on animal victimization and human grief at animal suffering. There are, however, resemblances as well as differences between the two women. Both affirm our “sentimental” ties to nonhuman animals; both claim our liking of and likeness to other animals (in some, though certainly not all, respects). For Smuts, the similarity of Damien’s hand and hers reveals our shared ability to navigate our environments and foster friendship through touch. For Adams, the similarity of Jimmy’s objectification and her own points to the way animals and women share the position of other within a specific discursive and political context. Like Adams, Haraway makes good on the ecofeminist and deconstructionist critique of dualistic thinking through work that combines upfront feelings with forceful analysis, political commitments with scholarly ones, care for animals and animal lovers with theoretical contributions to animal studies. Though gender is not foregrounded in her most recent writing on animals—The Companion Species Manifesto (2003) and When Species Meet (2008)—Haraway takes every opportunity to mention her own long-standing feminism and the pioneering, ongoing importance of feminist scholarship in thinking about species.36 As she observes in a 2009 interview (appearing alongside Adams’s in Minnesota Review), “people like Lynda Birke and Carol Adams and others have been for thirty years or more doing feminist theory in the mode of animal studies that gets at the levels of violence and destruction visited on working animals” (“SS,” p. 159). And despite her reputation as a high-flying postmodernist, Haraway is another theorist who takes a hands-on approach, a thinker very much in touch with the material world. In the middle section of When Species Meet, we follow her and her canine partner Cayenne into the world of dog agility training, a sport in which most of the humans are women over forty, and “contact zone” refers not only to a technical aspect of the course but also, for Haraway, to agility training as a site of intense bodily and cultural exchange, mutual though not symmetrical, between people and dogs (see W, pp. 208–16). Her visceral and intellectual involvement with the female subcultures of dog trainers and breeders is, I would say, comparable to Adams’s with the subcultures of advocates for battered women and fair housing. For both feminist theorists, these women-centered, extra-academic communities with little cultural capital are identified as sources of inspiration and knowledge. That said, Haraway and Adams have widely divergent views on two of the most vexed animal issues: meat eating and animal experimentation. Haraway is highly critical of factory farming, but she looks instead to humane husbandry rather than vegetarianism. More risky and uncomfortable still, as she herself acknowledges, Haraway makes a conditional case for the use and

2006 The “SHAC 7” are convicted under the Animal Enterprise Protection Act. The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act is passed, to expand the definition of terrorism to include any actions to “deter” animal enterprises, not just property destruction.

302

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

even killing of animals for scientific research (see W, pp. 68–93). Beyond their disagreements on these specific issues, Haraway and Adams are further discrepant in the general emphasis and affect of their animal texts. Broadly speaking, the emphasis for Adams is on animals as victims—disappeared as subjects, feminized and fragmented as objects, so that meat-eating humans are enabled to ignore the violence of their table. As we have seen, in keeping with this view, the emotional tenor of her writing is a mix of sorrow, anger, and compassion. Haraway’s emphasis, on the other hand, is on animals as workers and collaborators, creatures with imagination, agency, and influence, even in the context of unequal relations to humans. Like Smuts, her interaction with them is unashamed and fearlessly tactile. Full of wonder, scientific curiosity, and affection, her animal writing tends toward the celebratory, even ecstatic. “Ms Cayenne Pepper continues to colonize all my cells” (W, p. 15), she declares in the opening pages of When Species Meet. For Haraway, moreover, other “companion species” belie the boundaries of our humanness at a cellular as well as conceptual level. As she explains, “I love the fact that human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such” (W, p. 3). Haraway argues, too, that our humanist sense of mastery and autonomy is usefully undermined by technology as well as by animality— by our prosthetic as well as intra-organic ways of being. Challenging the tendency of most ecofeminists, including Adams, to indict science for crimes against nature, Haraway distinguishes creative from destructive uses of science and places us in a companionate relation to the cyborg as well as to nonhuman animals (“SS,” p. 155).37 And now for our final animal story, this one recounted by Haraway as a “parting bite” at the end of When Species Meet (W, p. 293). It is not a Smutsian tale of intimacy with a dog or baboon in a wild zone remote from other humans, but a story of sitting down to dinner with colleagues. The year is 1980, and Haraway has just given a job talk, clinching her appointment as a feminist theorist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As she tells it, two women arrive at the restaurant fresh from a birth celebration held in the “feminist, anarchist, pagan cyberwitch mountains” (W, p. 293). Led by a midwife, it had culminated in a feast, prepared by the husband, consisting of onions and . . . placenta. This second group of diners is soon entirely caught up by an intense but inconclusive debate about “who could, should, must, or must not eat the placenta” (W, p. 293). Conflicting anthropological, Marxistfeminist, historical, nutritional, philosophical, and vegetarian arguments are animatedly canvassed, and after many hours the only thing clear to Haraway is that she has “found [her] nourishing community at last” (W, p. 294).

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

303

How does Haraway’s story of feminist eating, ostensibly without reference to species other than our own, contribute to theorizing animal–human ties as well as to specifying the sexual politics of this project? There is, first of all, the placenta as a figure for what Haraway regards as a fundamental aspect of our creaturely lives: our dependence for nurturance, both before and after birth, on bodies other than our own; our need as animals to feed not only with but on one another; our interpenetration by organisms that tumble inside us regardless of whether we are pregnant or carnivorous; the phenomenon, in short, of overlapping ingestions, gestations, and embodiments. All of which is to say that, while for Adams, no one should be considered meat, one lesson to be drawn from Haraway’s story is that we are all somebody’s meat—even before we are food for worms. Our two scenes of feminist eating may be contrasted in another way as well. Whereas for Adams eating a burger answers all questions, for Haraway eating a placenta does nothing but multiply uncertainties—chief among them, for my purposes, the conundrum of how gender figures in this story. What do we make of the husband, standing (as I picture him) with spatula and grill—so like and unlike your average suburban dad? By ritualistically birthing/eating like a nonhuman animal, do we render ourselves more or less animalistic? Digesting placenta, we are made to consider our resemblance to other mammals—only, perhaps, to be reminded of our peculiarity as humans, hemmed in by culinary, familial, academic, and narrative protocols. In short, if the placenta as an organ confuses self and other, inside and outside, eating the placenta adds further confusion regarding the “biological” and “cultural,” along with our human relation to these categories. Haraway remarks that “kin relations blurred” (W, p. 293), and for me even the definitively “female” act of giving birth is defamiliarized and denaturalized by this narrative, transmuted into something less reliably gendered; if everyone was once inside a placenta, now every guest, male and female, has placenta inside them. Despite their differences, and by no coincidence, both Adams and Haraway tell stories tracing their work on animals back to feminist conversations originating in the 1970s. One goal of this essay has been simply historiographical—to challenge Wolfe’s account of animal studies as Derridean in origin, describe a gendered pattern of reception, explore the sources of discomfort with ecofeminism, and acknowledge an intellectual debt to this body of work. Beyond this, I have wanted to question Wolfe’s strict definition of his posthumanist project, walling it off from the studies— women’s studies past and present, along with the many approaches lumped together as cultural studies. Having parsed what I see as the gender logic of this move, I want to close with a few further thoughts about what we stand to lose thereby.

2006 Maine becomes the first state to pass a law that allows companion animals to be included in orders of protection.

304

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

Wolfe’s theoretical paradigm—in animal terms, a rather territorial one— categorically rules out what scholars working on such issues as gender, race, and sexuality have to offer a posthumanist discussion of species. Yet these scholars, as I see it, have made indispensable contributions in two particularly relevant areas. The first is thinking about identity, whether as the rhetorical basis for demanding “rights,” as a discursive category that is necessarily both intersectional and situational, or as a regime to be demystified and disavowed. Surely this work bears closely on inquiries into animal subjectivity, animality and its imbrication with other dominant discourses, as well as the deconstruction of humanist assumptions about identity. The second key contribution is to thinking about emotion. Studies of women, the subaltern, the disabled, and so on—originating, like animal studies, in movements for social justice—have led the way in owning the role of political and personal feeling in academic inquiry. As we know, feminists have been especially forceful in claiming their own passions, contesting the gendered split between feeling and reason, and launching a full-blown critique of scientific “objectivity.” The wealth of recent scholarship on the nature and role of affect should make it even harder to ignore the affective register of scholarship itself. Wolfe nevertheless in his essay “The Very Idea” once again invokes Derrida to decry cultural studies’ commitment to “humane advocacy” as irredeemably tainted by humanism. Mentioning his off-campus animal activism, Wolfe admits the uses of such language in that specific context. At the same time, recalling his earlier concern with academic street cred, he warns that university audiences would likely mock overtly political appeals as a sign of theoretical naiveté.38 Wolfe thus continues to police the border between “rigorous” theorizing and passionate activism, relegating them to separate spheres (which may explain why his posthumanist discourse eschews the kind of personal animal story included by all four of my other figures).39 As Haraway and company might argue, however, bringing these spheres into dialogue can make for more effective animal activism as well as more honest animal scholarship— and, I would add, for human animals less anxiously dichotomized by gender. As a current example of work in this vein, refusing to bracket sentiment as a condition of academic legitimacy, I recommend Kathy Rudy’s Loving Animals: Toward a New Animal Advocacy (2011).40 Rudy’s exhortation to claim our everyday love for animals is both ethical and strategic: by tapping into people’s extravagant love for their pets, she hopes to broaden our awareness of how enmeshed we are with all animals. Keeping in mind Rudy’s vision, I suggest we work up to creaturely love by starting with something more modest—the admission that theorizing seriously about animals might have something to do with liking them.

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

305

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Jeff Smith, Rita Felski, and Kathy Rudy for their invaluable advice and encouragement.

1

2

3

On Goodall’s various cultural and political meanings, see Donna J. Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York, 1989), pp. 133–85; Marianne DeKoven, “Women, Animals, and Jane Goodall: Reason for Hope,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 25 (Spring 2006): 141–51; and Susan McHugh, “Sweet Jane,” Minnesota Review 73–4 (Fall 2009–Spring 2010): 189–203. On the role of Goodall and other female scientists in the development of primatology, see Primate Encounters: Models of Science, Gender, and Society, eds. Shirley C. Strum and Linda Marie Fedigan (Chicago, 2000). See also Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York, 1975); another key text is Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley, 1983). Other references are to Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat (New York, 2000), hereafter abbreviated SPM; Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York, 1986); Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA, 1989); and Haraway, Primate Visions. For simplicity’s sake, I will generally be using animal to mean “nonhuman animal.” I will also use animal studies in its broadest, contemporary sense to mean the sprawling, multidisciplinary field known by some as animality studies or human-animal studies and not to be confused with the scientific usage meaning lab studies involving animals. My particular focus will be on animal studies within the purview of the humanities. Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 369–418, hereafter abbreviated “A”; the collected lectures appeared as The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. Wills, ed. Marie Louise Mallet (New York, 2008). Derrida’s remarks on Lacan’s handling of animals are included in Derrida, “And Say the Animal Responded?” trans. Wills, in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis, 2003), pp. 121–46. For Derrida’s early comments on

2006 Connect the Dots founded to promote and build capacity to address the connections between human, animal, and environmental well-being.

Notes

306

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

4

animals, see Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago, 1989) and “‘Eating Well’; or, the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” interview by Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell, in Who Comes after the Subject? eds. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York, 1991), pp. 96–119. For a list not of theoretical interventions but of the critters cropping up in Derrida’s writing over the years, see the “zoo-auto-bio-bibliography” toward the end of “A,” pp. 402–6. For further thoughts on where and how the question of animality has long informed his work, see Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow. . .: A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA, 2004), pp. 62–76. Matthew Calarco, in Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York, 2008), pp. 103–6, concedes the oddness of Derrida’s claim in “A” to have always regarded the question of the animal as paramount, but goes on to offer a helpful overview of Derridean texts bearing, at least implicitly, on this question. See Haraway, “Science Stories: An Interview with Donna J. Haraway,” interview by Jeffrey J. Williams, Minnesota Review 73–4 (Fall 2009– Spring 2010): 133–63; hereafter abbreviated “SS”: “Derrida did some wonderful stuff, but he doesn’t start animal studies. There’s no question that the big name theorists lend a certain cachet to a certain aspect of animal studies these days, which isn’t necessarily the fault of Jacques Derrida or Gilles Deleuze” (“SS,” p. 157). She continues with a warm defense of Cary Wolfe’s work, describing him as “a very committed, on-the-ground animal person . . . In graduate school he was taking the lab dogs out for walks” (“SS,” p. 157). Elaborating on Haraway’s point about “cachet,” I will be offering a more critical view of Wolfe’s reliance on Derrida. Needless to say, my own discussion does not concern Wolfe as a person. Leaving aside his real-life relation to animals, I am interested in Wolfe’s theoretical project (including its formulation as, precisely, set apart from the dog-walking everyday). My topic is also the reception of his work—an aspect, as Haraway notes, exceeding the author’s control and responsibility. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Massumi et al. (Minneapolis, 1987) has played a cachet-bestowing role not unlike Derrida’s “A.” For Haraway’s scathing view of its section on “becoming-animal,” see pp. 27–30 of When Species Meet (Minneapolis, 2008); hereafter abbreviated W. For another such view, see Xavier Vitamvor, “Unbecoming Animal Studies,” Minnesota Review 73–4 (Fall 2009–Spring 2010): 183–7.

6

7

8

9

307

Jennifer Howard, “Creature Consciousness,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 18 Oct. 2009, chronicle.com/article/CreatureConsciousness/48804/; hereafter abbreviated “CC.” See Wolfe, “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities,” PMLA 124 (Mar. 2009): 564–75; hereafter abbreviated “H.” In addition to Wolfe and Calarco, see David Wood, Thinking after Heidegger (Malden, MA, 2002), and Leonard Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida (New York, 2007). Also relevant here is Derridanimals, ed. Neil Badmington, special issue of Oxford Literary Review 29 (2007). For additional animal works in dialogue with Derrida, see also various titles in the Posthumanities Series edited by Wolfe for the University of Minnesota Press. I use gender to indicate a logic organizing “A” above and beyond Derrida’s characteristic play with the markers of sexual difference. For a full-blown discussion of Derrida’s failure in “A” to sustain a critique of sexual as well as species difference, see Lisa Guenther, “Who Follows Whom? Derrida, Animals, and Women,” Derrida Today 2 (Nov. 2009): 151–65. For examples of diverse feminist views on sexual difference in Derrida, see Leslie Wahl Rabine, “The Unhappy Hymen Between Feminism and Deconstruction,” in The Other Perspective in Gender and Culture: Rewriting Women and the Symbolic, ed. Juliet Flower MacCannell (New York, 1990), pp. 20–38; Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman, eds. Ellen K. Feder, Mary C. Rawlinson, and Emily Zakin (New York, 1997); Feminist Interpretations of Jacques Derrida, ed. Nancy J. Holland (University Park, PA, 1997); and Anne-Emmanuelle Berger, “Sexing Differences,” differences 16 (Fall 2005): 52–67. As these works demonstrate, a critique of particular texts does not preclude an appreciation for what Derridean concepts may have to offer feminist theorists. Derrida, “Choreographies: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” interview by Christie V. McDonald, trans. MacDonald, Diacritics 12 (Summer 1982): 76. Barbara Smuts, “Reflections,” in J. M. Coetzee et al., The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ, 1999), p. 113; hereafter abbreviated “R.” Smuts’s is one of four “reflections” on Coetzee’s fictional staging of a debate about animal rights. Observing that “none of the characters ever mentions a personal encounter with an animal,” she proceeds to speak from her own experiences as scientist and pet owner (“R,” p. 107).

2006 Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen by Anna Lappé and Bryant Terry published.

5

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

308

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

10 Derrida knows his anecdote has the ring of a primal scene but insists he doesn’t intend it as such; see “A,” p. 380. A further effect of Derrida’s masculine first person is slippage between “man” in the precise sense and “Man” as a false generic meaning “human.” Uncertainty as to whether such slippage has occurred is a recurrent feature of “A” itself up until its last three pages, due in part to the discursive tradition Derrida engages; for an extended analysis of this equivocation, see Guenther, “Who Follows Whom?” The problem is worse in the layers of commentary and metacommentary on Derrida’s animal discourse, in which Man as representative human is all too easily renaturalized. See Fordham Univeristy Press’s overview of The Animal That Therefore I Am, touting Derrida’s critique of the distinction “between man as thinking animal and every other living species.” Lawlor’s This Is Not Sufficient is frequently ambiguous in its usage; at still one more remove, David Wood’s blurb on the back dustjacket cover of Lawlor’s book is not; Wood praises the author for tracing Derrida’s “indictment of man’s violence to (other) animals.” (By contrast, Calarco and Wolfe make a point of avoiding man as a false generic.) 11 Haraway adds that Derrida’s apt criticism of Western philosophers fails to look for possible counterexamples in areas outside the humanities (see W, p. 21), and she precedes me in looking to Smuts for an antidote. Citing Smuts, Sex and Friendship in Baboons (Cambridge, MA, 1999), Haraway contrasts Derrida’s limited curiosity about his cat to Smuts’s innovative research method of socializing with baboons on their own terms; see W, pp. 23–6. Despite Haraway’s renown as a feminist theorist, W is not ostensibly concerned with gender. It is, however, loaded with references affirming her identification with feminist politics and theory. 12 Silvan Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, eds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham, NC, 1995), pp. 134, 135, 136. 13 Derrida himself makes some suggestive remarks along these lines later in “A,” when he contrasts the shame of mythical Greek hero Bellerophon with the shamelessness of women; see “A,” pp. 413–14. 14 For a comprehensive overview of ecofeminism—its roots in 1980s activism, its broad range of scholars and diversity of approaches including materialist ones, its internal debates and development over the last thirty years—see Greta Gaard, “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism,” Feminist Formations 23 (Summer 2011): 26–53. Gaard shares my chagrin at the discrediting of ecofeminist scholarship,

16

17

18

19

309

even as its contributions are appropriated and esteemed under other rubrics. Whereas my focus is the neglect of ecofeminism by Derridean animal studies, Gaard addresses its similar mischaracterization and dismissal as “essentialist” by the feminist academic establishment. Quoted in Josephine Donovan, “Animal Rights and Feminist Theory,” in Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals, eds. Donovan and Adams (New York, 1996), pp. 34–5. See ibid., pp. 35–6. For a recent example, see Rosi Braidotti, “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others,” PMLA 124 (Mar, 2009): 526–32. As Braidotti explains, “Becoming animal, minoritarian . . . speaks to my feminist self, partly because my sex, historically speaking, never made it into full humanity, so my allegiance to that category is at best negotiable” (p. 531). See also Marianne DeKoven, “Guest Column: Why Animals Now?” PMLA 124 (Mar. 2009): 361–9. Like Braidotti, DeKoven is a feminist theorist who links her work on animals to her positioning by gender; noting that “women and animals go together,” she derives her attraction to animal studies “in part from that pervasive cultural linkage” (p. 366). Donovan, “Animal Rights and Feminist Theory,” p. 45. Though Singer’s reliance on Jeremy Bentham (whose criterion for animal rights is not reason but suffering) might seem to exempt him, Donovan argues that utilitarianism remains a pervasively rationalist framework. See also pp. 291–2 of Brian Luke, “Taming Ourselves or Going Feral? Toward a Nonpatriarchal Metaethic of Animal Liberation,” in Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, eds. Adams and Donovan (Durham, NC, 1995), pp. 290–319. See Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago, 2003); hereafter abbreviated AR. In What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis, 2010), Wolfe brings Derridean animal studies together with his long-standing interest in systems theory. See also Wolfe’s contributions to two multiauthored volumes: Wolfe, “Exposures,” in Stanley Cavell et al., Philosophy and Animal Life (New York, 2008), pp. 1–41, and “Humanist and Posthumanist Antispecism,” Paola Cavalieri et al., The Death of the Animal: A Dialogue with Commentaries (New York, 2009), pp. 45–58. The failure to reference ecofeminist precedents is already, as Haraway suggests in a footnote, present in Derrida: “Unfortunately, philosophers like Derrida are unlikely to read, cite, or recognize as philosophy the large feminist literatures indicated in my notes above . . . The feminist work was often both first and also less entrammeled in the traps of

2007 Food Empowerment Project, which encourages healthy, compassionate food choices, founded. It spotlights the abuse of animals on farms, the depletion of natural resources, unfair working conditions for produce workers, and the unavailability of healthy foods in low-income areas.

15

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

310

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

20

21 22

23

24 25

26 27 28

misrecognizing animals as singular, even if we have been just as caught in the nets of humanism” (W, p. 334). In Wolfe’s astute reading of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, for example, the problem of Jake’s injured masculinity is displaced from the realm of gender onto the realm of species; he can then repair his “manhood” by proving his mastery over animals (and superiority to mere carnality); see AR, pp. 138–9. Echoing but never citing Adams, this chapter once again invokes Derrida as shorthand for ecofeminist arguments: Jake’s initial feminization and animalization are unsurprising, Wolfe explains, “when we remember the strictly homologous positions of the feminine and the animal in the cultural regime of ‘carnophallogocentrism”’ (AR, p. 132). Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? p. xvi. For essays rebutting simplistic views of cultural studies, especially as supposedly inattentive to formal and theoretical concerns, see The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies, ed. Michael Bérubé (Malden, MA, 2005). To name only a few among scores of possible examples, see Frances Olsen, “Statutory Rape: A Feminist Critique of Rights Analysis,” Texas Law Review 63 (Nov. 1984): 387–432; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990); Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43 (July 1991): 1241–99; and Wendy Brown, “Suffering Rights as Paradoxes,” Constellations 7 (June 2000): 230–41. For a recent account of animal studies juxtaposing rather than opposing feminist and postmodern theories, see Kari Weil, “A Report on the Animal Turn,” differences 21, no. 2 (2010): 1–23. W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Rights of Things,” foreword to AR, p. ix. Adams, “Caring about Suffering: A Feminist Exploration,” in Beyond Animal Rights, pp. 171, 173. Two decades after its original publication, an updated version of Beyond Animal Rights was published as The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader (New York, 2007). Care is also an ethical imperative in Haraway’s recent animal writing, though she understands it very differently—to include, for example, a caring though instrumental relation to lab animals; see W, pp. 82–4. See Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, pp. 40–2. Adams, Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals (New York, 1994), pp. 79–80. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, p. 26.

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

311

29 See Adams, The Pornography of Meat (New York, 2003), pp. 166–9. As a spokesman for PETA boasted, “just because we are softhearted doesn’t mean we can’t be soft-core” (quoted in Adams, The Pornography of Meat, p. 166). 30 Adams, “Vegan Feminist: An Interview with Carol J. Adams,” by Heather Steffen, Minnesota Review 73–4 (Fall 2009–Spring 2010): 130, 124. For more on the gendered disdain for domestic animals by animal studies scholars, see W, p. 30; on gender codes at work in actual agricultural practices, see Erika Cudworth, “‘Most Farmers Prefer Blondes’: The Dynamics of Anthroparchy in Animals’ Becoming Meat,” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 6, no. 1 (2008): 32–45. 31 See Adams, Neither Man nor Beast, pp. 162–3; a brief mention in “Caring about Suffering,” p. 171; and the preface to The Sexual Politics of Meat, pp. 11–12. 32 See Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, p. 11. 33 Ibid., p. 12. 34 Adams, Neither Man nor Beast, p. 163. 35 Adams, “Caring about Suffering,” p. 173. 36 See Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago, 2003). 37 As author of the influential “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65–108, Haraway is often identified as a “posthumanist”; indeed, Wolfe includes her along with only a handful of figures representing thorough “posthumanist posthumanism” (Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? p. 125). But Haraway herself insists, “I am not a posthumanist” (W, p. 19); likewise, though interested in Derrida, she describes herself as “not a Derridean” (“SS,” p. 157). 38 See Wolfe, “The Very Idea,” in Species Matters: Humane Advocacy and Cultural Theory, eds. Marianne DeKoven and Michael Lundblad (New York, 2012), pp. 27–8. 39 See ibid. Here and elsewhere, Wolfe rationalizes this split by citing Niklas Luhmann on differentiated social systems, vocabularies, and so on. My point has been, however, that scrupulous theoretical consistency may actually be inconsistent with anti-Cartesian aims insofar as it stems from and reproduces the subordination of “feminine” emotion. As an unexpected counterexample, I think of Derrida’s interview with Elizabeth Roudinesco, in which he repudiates Cartesian rights discourse on philosophical grounds while also declaring his “sympathy” for activists seeking legal redress for

2007 Wake Up Weekend begins in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as an annual grass-roots celebration of animal-friendly advocacy, art, food, education, music, philosophy, and religion with a commitment to ending global hunger, diseases of affluence, the exploitation of women, racial injustice, and environmental degradation.

312

Chapter 15 Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals

nonhuman animals (Derrida, For What Tomorrow . . ., p. 67). Rather than setting aside his sympathy, Derrida reiterates the claims of both positions, theoretical and political/emotional (and does so all the more poignantly in the face of Roudinesco’s evident lack of sympathy for animal advocacy). In addition to Wolfe, Species Matters includes pieces by Adams, Haraway, and others with the goal, not unlike my own, of mediating between animal and cultural studies. While agreeing with Wolfe on the risk of humanism implicit in humane, DeKoven and Lundblad hope nevertheless to bring these two projects together under the rubric of “humane advocacy”; see Lundblad and DeKoven, “Animality and Advocacy,” introduction to Species Matters, pp. 5–6. 40 See Kathy Rudy, Loving Animals: Toward a New Animal Advocacy (Minneapolis, 2011).

Black Feminist Ecological Thought: A Manifesto Chelsea Mikael Frazier

16

here is an erroneous notion in mainstream films, books, and political discourse that Black women and their communities do not care about the natural environment, sustainability, or their own health. To add insult to stereotype-informed injury, Black feminist voices have often been seemingly absent from mainstream environmentalism and the intellectual movements that sprang forth from it in the early 1990s. But Black Feminist Ecological Thought (though emergent in name) has been present and continues to evolve alongside environmental thinking and action that often fails to recognize its existence and its intellectual and creative authority. Take, for example, ecocriticism, the study of the relationship between literature, art, and the environment. It is an intellectual movement that began to formally cohere in the early 1990s. Its aims included drawing attention to: 1) everything being connected—especially nature and culture; 2) our definitions of humanity being rooted in our cultural norms and languages; and 3) a commitment to the health, well-being, and sustainability of our natural environments. From its inception, ecocriticism, its parallel discourse ecofeminism, and environmentalism more

2008 Val Plumwood dies.

T

313

314

Chapter 16 Black Feminist Ecological Thought

broadly, announced themselves as being universally relevant to and concerned about “all” people, but suffered from a very obvious lack of gender, ethnic, economic, and/or racial diversity. Part of the reason why ecocriticism suffered from a lack of diversity is because of its tendency to primarily highlight texts produced by intellectuals that were white (and often male) who had access to leisure time, land ownership, and financial capital. And while ecofeminism advanced a compelling critique of masculinist themes and principles in environmental discourse, those critiques were often rooted in white, Western feminist intellectual traditions. As a result, both fields implicitly privileged white, Western values over all others and have been very slow to perceive the existence and/ or necessity of alternative strands of ecological thought—such as Black Feminist Ecological Thought. As a Black feminist scholar, when I picked up the mantle of ecological criticism, I couldn’t help but immediately notice the characteristics of these intellectual and political movements myself. Ecocriticism and ecofeminism’s alarming lack of diversity made it difficult for fields like Black Feminist Thought to find a collaborative rhythm, despite having many aligned priorities. Black feminism is an umbrella term that describes a range of social and political practices and theories that are historically rooted in and extrapolated from the experiences of Black women. Because of this, it is a field that has always been interested in breaking the structural imbalances that lead to an unfair distribution of material resources. Additionally, Black, Africandescended women across the Diaspora are routinely the first to confront and lead the fight against some of the most intense harmful effects of environmental degradation. Initially, as a Black feminist scholar, bathed in the knowledge that: 1) African-descended women across the African Diaspora routinely confront some of the more intense harmful effects of environmental degradation; 2) there were several examples of Black women environmental justice advocates and organizers leading the fight against those effects; and 3) artists and thinkers of various mediums had been doing the work of creatively documenting the first two ideas, I was generally bothered by what I initially perceived to be an exclusion from ecocriticism and ecofeminism. But I was also emboldened in my writing and activism—or writing as activism—to draw attention to the ways that these intellectual movements, Black Feminist Thought, ecocriticism, and ecofeminism, could and should benefit each other. Especially because all these movements claimed to be committed to demystifying the structural imbalances that lead to an unfair distribution of material resources. The origins of, and my initial commitment to, developing Black Feminist Ecological Thought came as a result of

Chapter 16 Black Feminist Ecological Thought

315

recognizing the ways that our dismissive and stereotypical beliefs about Black, African-descended women were also limiting the transformative potential of our environmental movements across many fields. I realized that I would have to make clear that these movements were missing out on the foundational knowledge that Black, African-descended women were not environmental justice leaders by coincidence and it wasn’t just a result of their suffering at the hands of ecological violence. The consistency of the messages in Black women’s art suggested something deeper: that Black women’s ecological inclinations were rooted in an ecological world-sense completely alternative to what readily comes to mind when we think about the environment from a Eurocentric center. Moving beyond a Eurocentric center implores us to rely on and revere an ecological world-sense that unearths the nefarious roots of our ecological imbalance. This shift frees us to recognize and address more of the interrelated roots of our problems rather than continuing to focus too much of our efforts and resources on Western notions of “diversifying” and “reform.” Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy provides a representative example of this alternative world-sense and the roots of ecological imbalance it retains the potential to unearth. A Mercy zooms in on America’s infancy and locates that infancy in the interwoven narratives of an American family in the 1690s. We meet Florens, a 16-year-old enslaved African girl laboring and living on a farm in rural New York; Jacob Vaark, the Dutch slave owner who purchases Florens and owns the farm where she works; his London-born, English wife Rebekka Vaark; and an enslaved Native American woman named Lina who also lives and works on the Vaark farm. Throughout the novel, the farm itself—with its structures, people, flora, and fauna—also functions as a character, sometimes victim of the whims of its characters, other times the impartial container of the characters, but also the central environment that frames the happenings that shape their lives. In the narrative, Toni Morrison juxtaposes the demise of the character Florens—a young enslaved Black girl—with the impending dysfunction of her environments, i.e., the farm. In doing this, we can read Morrison’s A Mercy as a parable that makes clear the ways that misogynoir and antiIndigeneity are more than simply a breach in morality on a societal level that can be neatly remedied. More urgently, the novel dramatizes the notion that the convergences of misogynoir and anti-Indigeneity are widespread social, economic, and ecological liabilities. This interpretation is the kind made possible by Black Feminist Ecological Thought. Black Feminist Ecological Thought emphasizes the importance of recognizing this kind of novel as being both Ecological Art and Black Feminist Art simultaneously. Black Feminist Ecological Thought also

2009 Bryant Terry, advocate of Afro-diasporic vegan tradition, publishes his first book, Vegan Soul Kitchen: Fresh, Healthy, and Creative African-American Cuisine, drawing on native foods.

316

Chapter 16 Black Feminist Ecological Thought

illuminates the reasons why it is important for us to interweave these perspectives in order to discern the transformative potential of the text. In this case, the transformative potential is that the ecological harms of misogynoir and anti-Indigeneity affect Black women extremely intensely, and those effects also guarantee a despairing destruction for all directly responsible and/or indirectly complicit. For another example of Black Feminist Ecological Thought at work, we can turn to MacArthur Genius grant-winning artist Latoya Ruby Frazier’s 2016 photo project, “Flint is Family.” Popular images of Black mother-led families that permeate the pop cultural landscape often paint those families and the Black mothers that lead them as dysfunctional. By contrast, Latoya Ruby Frazier presents poet, entrepreneur Shea Cobb, a single mother, and her family as a functional, whole, organized, and complete unit. Additionally, Frazier’s images—with a touch of hopeful melancholia—highlight the motivation behind Shea Cobb’s ecological ethics: a tender focus on protecting her young daughter from the poisonous effects of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Frazier’s images invite viewers to reflect on the fact that the stress the Cobb family is experiencing is located in state-sanctioned ecological violence, rather than that all-too-common grammar of American life: a “shameful” Black mother. Black Feminist Ecological Thought keeps our appetites hungry for images, words, and stories like Latoya Ruby Frazier’s that meditate on the relationship between environmental harm and the everyday stresses of Black mothering. Black Feminist Ecological Thought also reminds us that Black women are not, and have never been, passive victims of environmental degradation—nor are they and never have they been the blame for a supposed breakdown of “the Black family.” Instead, in “Flint is Family” we have a representation of a Black family, not the Black family, led and composed mostly of Black women and girls conceptualized as whole, functional, and complete yet straining intensely against the great chasm of environmental injustice that is the Flint water crisis. Black Feminist Ecological Thought is neither static nor universally relevant to all things and all times. Black Feminist Ecological Thought is also not the result of “adding” Black feminist principles to environmental theory, ecofeminism, or ecocriticism, but rather transforming them. As an interpretive and creative world-sense, it is committed to understanding the intersections of gender, race, and class and brings those commitments into a larger discussion of ecocritical approaches to literature, art, and culture. Black Feminist Ecological Thought can help us critically interpret and create not only art and literature, but can also help us to criticize (when necessary), reimagine, and create other elements of culture including our

legislation, our economic sensibilities, or engagement with material resources like water, flora, fauna, and land. It is about perceiving what new ideas and worlds are made possible when the commitments of Black Feminist Ecological Thought become centered and the homogeneity within ecofeminist, ecocritical, and environmental discourse becomes destabilized. Practitioners must be careful, however, not to limit Black Feminist Ecological Thought to the reactionary work of uncovering and unpacking ecofeminism’s, ecocriticism’s, and/or mainstream environmentalism’s lack of diversity and/or inattention to the ecological perspectives of Black women. Black Feminist Ecological Thought is not a reactionary response to the Eurocentric failings of environmentalism and its attendant intellectual and political progeny. Black Feminist Ecological Thought illuminates and documents the ways that: 1) Black women thinkers have always developed their own alternative understandings of the interconnectedness of all things; and 2) these ecological understandings have centered the health, well-being, and sustainability of Black, African-descended women across the Diaspora since time immemorial. Black Feminist Ecological Thought asks all of us to keep our eyes peeled for the very subtle ways that environmental harm and discourses around environmental harm tend to blame, neglect, or obscure Black women’s complex relationships to themselves, their families, and their environments. But Black Feminist Ecological Thought has always been whispering to us— urging us to understand the interconnected points of our unwell society as a first step toward restoring our environments. The aim of Black Feminist Ecological Thought is to open more portals for us to thoughtfully confront all the melancholy and promise of ecological healing, or as Zora Hurston Neale might say, to confront all the “dawn and doom” in the branches.

317

2009 Nekeisha Alexis presents “Racism, Sexism, Speciesism: The Intertwining Oppressions” at Wake Up Weekend.

Chapter 16 Black Feminist Ecological Thought

Figure 17.1 An Eastern grey kangaroo and her joey who survived the forest fires in Mallacoota. Mallacoota Area, undefined, 2020. Photograph by Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Media.

318

The Animals Call it: Listening to the Climate Crisis Fiona Probyn-Rapsey T

he magpie in the video looks to be young, not quite yet the shiny black and gray-white of a grown-up. She is perched on the gate of someone’s home singing, seemingly unbothered by a man close to her, filming with his mobile phone. Behind him is another, taking the footage I’m looking at, along with hundreds of thousands of others who listened and watched this bird singing a song that went viral, a “swansong” for Australia”s “black summer” bushfires. Her song was an emergency vehicle siren, a rendition winding down and up as if the vehicle (a fire truck or an ambulance) is heard in the distance, moving through country that is on fire, that is about to be on fire, that has fire everywhere. She must have heard this siren over and over, and she really listened to it. Living in close proximity to the Australian bush, on Gundungurra country (1.5 hours southwest of Sydney), we built our house to withstand what’s called “flamezone”, a building standard named to indicate a tolerance of proximity to flame. Embers cannot be trapped in its steel and concrete externalities, windows with their steel mesh are supposed to resist firestorms

2010 Sistah Vegan: Food, Identity, Health, and Society: Black Female Vegans Speak edited by A. Breeze Harper published.

17

319

320

Chapter 17 The Animals Call it

that can ignite a wooden house from a distance, with explosive efficiency. That summer, as much of the state was on fire, both cars were packed with suitcases ready for a quick departure and our evacuation destination, a friend’s house twenty minutes away. We’d already stowed suitcases with Christmas presents there, and some boxes full of things chosen to set up another house if needed; kid’s artworks, artifacts, hard drives. Though we had fire training through the local volunteer and community fire units and had the firefighting equipment (the bright blue uniforms, yellow helmets and boots, our own diesel-powered water pump and fire hoses), I had already decided that I would not “fight” these fires that come at us now, firestorms that incinerate forests, melt houses, and create their own weather systems. Twice we said goodbye to our house. Each time, wind changes redirected the distant line of fire away from our valley, and we came back. The blue/gray greasiness of endless days of smoke, with burnt leaves and less recognizable bits of burnt life floating through it, weaned us from attachments to the house. When they were finally out in January (after torrential rains that brought floods, of course), the fires had burnt through approximately 12 million hectares (roughly the size of the island of Ireland), killing an estimated 3 billion nonhuman animals including remnant populations of koalas, macropods, birds, lizards, insects, and fish effected by ash runoff into depleted river systems. The death count does not include nonevacuated livestock animals, such as chickens, sheep, and cattle whose deaths are much less visible, and often hidden in figures signaling only financial “losses” to agricultural businesses, with billions of individuals “you don’t hear”: You don’t hear the four shots fired out – echoing along the Ridge. Or the heavy thuds of three horses collapsing, one taking that second bullet to fall down: “An act of kindness,” she’ll tell you later, try to explain to anyone who’ll listen. “I couldn’t let them burn.” (Bishop 2019, 194)

They would burn as would hundreds of thousands of the unnamed and unmemorialized, and all would become part of the gray and oily smoke-slick that we hosed from our house when the rains came. I thought to take a picture of the dark matter of other lives washed from our house, but didn’t. My partner, a photographer, decided not to post certain photographs of the fire clouds: the words “smoke plume” do not quite capture their continental size. The fire clouds were cremations. Weeks and weeks of cremations building up infrastructure of smoke, heat, and mass, whole other countries floating above us, puffed up and expansive with the dead. A bird who sings an emergency siren clearly has something to say. The question is, can we listen?

Chapter 17 The Animals Call it

321

Listening is qualitatively distinct from the act of hearing. It is very hard not to hear Australian birds, and visitors from overseas have often remarked on the noisiness (rather than peace and quiet) of “time in the country.” According to Tim Low, Australian songbirds (including magpies, lyrebirds, and butcherbirds) are the biggest and loudest on the planet, and they have evolved to such size and decibel because of the flowering trees rich in sugars which encourage large-scale territoriality and display (Low 2017). Australian birds may have an audible voice, but less so a “political voice” which Lauren Corman usefully describes as “the ability to define and assert one’s subjectivity, or the power to have one subjectivity recognised by those who refuse it” (Corman 2016, 486). In the case of a magpie’s territorial alarms and songs, we might hear it easily but less frequently recognize its social and political significance: “this is mine! I am here! intruders!” Lauren Corman’s work on listening in feminist animal studies is exemplary for its exploration of how listening changes the nature of our engagements with other animals. Citing the rhetorical attachment to “having a voice” in social movements, including feminism and antiracism, she counts over twenty advocacy organizations that claim to represent animals as their “voice” because animals are understood as “voiceless.” Corman’s critique centers on the political expediency but overuse of the word “voiceless” to describe animals: “voice functions paradoxically because it both attempts to highlight subjectivity at the same moment that it inadvertently erases it (through the proclamation that animals are voiceless and advocates alone are their voices)” (2016, 487). By emphasizing the role of listening, instead of speaking up, Corman suggests that advocates do better to acknowledge the voices that animals do have, including their acts of resistance and their participation in the advocacy work that is done with them (as much as for them): “To develop meaningful communication and the possibility of non-hierarchical relationships with other species requires careful listening to their voices . . . Listening to animals’ voices is the first step towards replacing saviour narratives with solidarity” (viii ). Attending to the politics of listening shifts the focus from those encouraged to “speak up” to those with a responsibility to listen (Dreher 2010, 85), shifting the political framing of inclusion from those expected to comply, to those with the power to define inclusion in the first place. And so, for Corman, when it comes to the question of animals and voice, “perhaps the question is not, ‘do they have a voice?’ but instead, ‘are their voices heard?’ or, more precisely, ‘are their voices heard by those in power?”’ (Corman

2010 VINE expands to begin to take in dairy industry survivors (including both former dairy cows and their cast-off sons), which they view as an explicitly feminist project.

The politics of listening

322

Chapter 17 The Animals Call it

2016, 487). Val Plumwood emphasized the importance of “communicative models of relationships with nature and animals” (2001, 190) because she believed that they “offer us a better chance of survival in the difficult times ahead” (190). A proponent of a dialogical method, Plumwood argued that animals should be seen as intentional agents and “always encountered as a potentially communicative other” (190). Josephine Donovan’s analysis of the importance of listening to animal voices (regarding the question of whether they have a voice as a moot point; 2006, 322) also situates listening as a core element of dialogical feminist animal care ethics; requiring conversations, communication, and ethical relations that are formed contextually. Donovan writes: “knowledge of one’s immediate animal entourage, as well as one’s own experience of suffering, provides a point of reference to which the reactions of remote others may be compared and analogized on the principle of homology” (310). Donovan’s archive shows how sympathy and compassion has been a feature of feminist care ethics for a long time, elaborated further in the work of Lori Gruen where empathy becomes strategic and meaningful when acted upon (2014, 2018). The political voice of the advocate for animals is, as Donovan and Corman both highlight, fundamentally relational (between subjects) because it is linked to listening: it exists between speaker and listener and in terms of attentive recognition. Listening is a political and ethical act, an effort of attention and recognition of those who do not so much “lack voice” as use other-than-human speech to communicate; the bellowing call of a cow separated from her calf, the growl of disapproval, the yelp at a closed door, the nuzzle and call to be fed, the murmurings for attention, the subtle and nuanced throaty rhythms of dogs signaling affection and play are all communicative strategies insufficiently captured by the human words we have for these embodied expressions of individuality and agency: “Reading embodied action is part of all our lives, and is the common language of all embodied beings” (Plumwood 2001, 192). And yet, so many humans fail to do this in relationship to the other animals. When it comes to listening, birdsong exemplifies the inseparability of biological (how we hear) and cultural (what we hear), the audible (sound) and the intelligible (meaning). Tim Low claims that “all the sounds that resemble music come from songbirds” (2017, 76) and cites numerous composers (Beethoven, Haydn, and Messiaen) who composed directly from birdsong. Australian composer and musicologist Hollis Taylor offers a contemporary example: her compositions with pied butcherbirds situate them as “Neither laboratory equipment nor informants, they instead became my musical teachers and colleagues” (2017). Rachel Mundy’s exploration of musicality and animal voices also shows that, while animal studies has

Chapter 17 The Animals Call it

323

traditionally devoted itself to questions about how humans “see” animals, there is less work on how we listen to them even though “it is in voice and sound that we have been trained to hear both selfhood and alterity” (2018). Mundy starts to listen to how humans listen to animals, and finds that sensory awareness of listening highlights the cultural values we attach (or not) to the animal’s voice:

Mundy differentiates between hearing and listening when she writes that she “learned to hear.” Learning to listen to animals is thus an activity of careful attention and an openness to thinking through the significance of animals communicating with each other, in and through their habitats, territories, kin. Learning to listen to animals warning each other of the threat that we pose to them, as “something they considered dangerous,” is also an important opening for critical reflection. Ultimately it suggests limits on human entitlement, to act without considering their expressions of need and interests. It is important to listen to the voices of animals when it comes to doing animal studies work, which Lynda Birke (2014) observes is frequently constructed without actual animals in mind or involved in the research. She highlights how important it is to know about the lives of actual animals that we write about, species-specific behaviors, capabilities, traits. The problem is much of this knowledge comes from experiments and studies that have exploited and harmed animals, such that what is “known” about them is hard to disentangle from that power imbalance. Birke calls on animal researchers (including animal studies scholars) to listen to animals and to consider how their participation in the production of knowledge can be enhanced for their benefit, from experimental design, to questioning sources and including animals’ voices as active agents in research. Along with Birke, ecofeminist theorists like Plumwood, Donovan, and Gruen disrupt that power dynamic and the hierarchy of human knower and known animal other. There is also a question of how animals and humans are entangled in the production of scientific knowledge, and how that entanglement might be improved not by attempts to “subtract” the unruliness of the human–animal relation for the sake of some idea of objectivity, but to factor that messiness in and develop better accounts of how “our” experiments reveal as much

2010 Our Hen House, an online resource and multi-media magazine, founded.

like many other ethnographers and naturalists, I learned to hear sentience, selfhood, and meaning in sound too. Before seeing them, I could hear a deer stamp his foot in the scrub; I’d hear the local hawk’s chicks begging for food; and I’d hear the alarm calls of thrushes warning me that something they considered dangerous, probably another pedestrian, was on the path ahead.

324

Chapter 17 The Animals Call it

about humans as they do about the animals they are designed to measure, a point made by many ecofeminist writers (see, e.g., Gruen 1996) and feminist critiques of science (Haraway 1986, 1988, 1989; Harding 1986). More recently, like many ecofeminist writers before her, Vinciane Despret criticizes what she calls “de-passioned knowledge” about humans and animals: “a world of minds without bodies, of bodies without minds, bodies without hearts, expectations, interests, a world of enthusiastic automata observing strange and mute creatures; in other words, a poorly articulated (and poorly articulating) world” (Despret 2004, 131). Despret and Birke write against the tradition of seeing animals as mute, as having nothing to say, and this signals an opening for the kinds of ethical listening that shifts animals from object to subject, from “dumb animal” (Descartes 2007, 60) to those who articulate worlds that might be shared. Despret’s work does not doubt that animals have something to say, but instead locates the problem with the humans who frame the conversation. As the title of her book announces, What Would Animals Say if We Asked the Right Questions? (2016). In “K for Killable,” Despret argues that to speak of livestock animals consumed for meat in terms of tonnage (“Two billion, three hundred and eighty-nine million pounds of farm animals died in 2009,” [2004, 81]), is to de-subjectify the animal in line with “practises of forgetting” (84), because “data eventually has a role similar to that of the logic of the sarcophagus: to prevent thinking, to forget” (85). Despret cautions animal studies scholars against repeating this data; quantifying these lives by number or weight is to render their individual life invisible again, contributing to rather than exposing the ways that abattoirs make animals disappear, compartmentalizing killing, exiling death (Vialles 1994; also Arcari et al. 2020) to the outskirts of towns where they are supposed to be not seen nor heard, and abstracting animal life through semantic and rhetorical means (Adams 2015). These are all strategies of the “sarcophagus,” to use Despret’s image. Despret’s response to this de-subjectification of the animal is to look for human practices of honoring the animal in death. Despret sees farmers who thank “their animals” (2004, 87), rather than seek their forgiveness for killing them, as a positive practice of de-subjectification, individualizing the animal through gratitude. But we might ask, paraphrasing Despret’s own project, What would animals say if we asked the right questions about killing? (2016). Is gratitude the right response to the animal who faces their killer? Is it possible that they would question why they need to be sacrificed or for whom they are being sacrificed? Would it not be better to “listen” to the resistance, fear, and struggle of the animal prior to slaughter, as they are taken? Would that kind of listening also constitute a space for a different question about whether or not the animal accepts gratitude as a fair

Chapter 17 The Animals Call it

325

exchange? In Despret’s work, the political voice of the animal, though recognized as an agent in research, is heard only conditionally; anthropocentrism ultimately refuses that voice. Here anthropocentrism operates not only as a species standpoint (the “human” perspective) but as a political/philosophical approach marked by arrogant self-reference (Probyn-Rapsey 2018), akin to Plumwood’s description of human superiority creating “simplifying blinkers” (2001, 189) around what we are prepared to know and act upon. A different approach is taken by Donovan, where dialogic ethics means that the wishes of the animal are acknowledged, listened to, and then also acted upon: “If one reads and pays attention to the body language of the deer who is fleeing from the hunter, taking seriously the communication from the deer that she does not want to be killed or injured, one would have to conclude that the hunter should lay down his gun” (Donovan 2006, 316). The implications of “taking seriously” communication with animals occurs with stunning effect in an ecofeminist-themed novel by Laura Jean McKay, The Animals in That Country (2020). The novel interrupts a fantasy of mutual (and positive) “attunement” between humans and other animals and instead forces our attention on the differences between what humans think animals might say/want, and what humans can tolerate hearing. In the novel a “zooflu” sweeps the country and one of its symptoms is the ability to hear, feel, and think with animals, a symptom that is at first very attractive to two of the novel’s protagonists, Jean (a caretaker at the wildlife park) and her granddaughter Kim. Their desire to be afflicted with the disease of animal communication is based on the presumption that they can already talk with the animals and that their friendship and love are mutual and reciprocated across species boundaries. This falsehood is soon exposed when they can actually hear what the animals have to communicate to them. When Ange contracts the disease she is suddenly able to understand birds. Panic-stricken, she is told by Jean: “Tell them you’re their friend.” But Ange informs her that the birds have already made it very clear that “I’m not their friend. I’m their predator. I’m their prey. They’re hunting me back” (McKay 2020, 87). One of the first to contract the disease, Lee, says: “I thought it’d be great, but they’re all institutionalized. Messed up in the head” (2020, 66). When she contracts “zooflu” Jean is able to hear the lab mice, bred then gassed to be food for the wildlife park’s reptiles: “They scream bloody murder, the death of everyone, death in the cages and death in the walls. All the little kids in the whole world die . . . Disease eats my face” (2020, 75–6). When the conditions under which animals are kept are factored into multispecies relations, and when it is made clear that it is humans who manage those relations through various forms of dominance and control (fences, drugs, poisons, food), then the dream of mutual care based on friendly

2011 “Sex/Gender/Species” conference held at Wesleyan University.

326

Chapter 17 The Animals Call it

encounters is turned on its head. The animals express horror and fear in the hands of human torturers: “He can taste me. I’m like deadly salt. I’m poison. He says . . . he . . .” She gets back to staring” (73). Throughout the novel human speech is depicted as incapable of representing human cruelty in words palatable or fit for our ears, as if “we” cannot hear or see the cruelty we have inflicted. Infected with new powers of listening, the human characters are forced to hear that they are predators, not “friends” with “happy” animals under their “protection.” As Ange comments with a sense of foreboding on contracting “zooflu,” “everything we knew about animals is going to change” (51). This is what listening to animals can do: change what we know and then, hopefully, how we might act.

Into the wreckage The man who posted the video of the magpie singing the song of the emergency siren during the bushfire crisis described the footage as “one of the coolest things ever” (Lim 2020), a reaction that initially seems to reflect astonishment at the bird’s mimicry. The video was originally posted by Gregory Andrews on a Facebook page devoted to Australian native birds. It was shared multiple times and also uploaded to YouTube. Gregory Andrews used to work as the Federal Government-appointed Threatened Species Commissioner (2014–16), during which time Australia’s extinction rates increased and he was criticized for relentlessly “sugar coating” and “brightsiding” (Borschmann 2017) extinctions from a compromised position working too closely with government. During his time as commissioner, he maintained a prolific social media presence. With this background he might have known the effect that his video, a singular portent of extinction, would have. Within days the video went viral, it had made international news and provided an opening riff, an accompaniment to picturing the scale of bushfire devastation. The social media landscape provided this magpie with a platform like no other, a megaphone for a song that was heard very differently across the spectrum that social media affords. Comments attest to mixed feelings among the thousands of viewers, ranging from astonishment at the magpie’s mimicry, a sense of national pride in Australia’s songbirds, as well as varying degrees of sadness at a shared experience: “Even a magpie can recognise the emergency.” Here recognition of magpie cognition is tempered by the word “even”; a reminder that human cognition (such as that which political leaders should show) is expected to always surpass that of an

Chapter 17 The Animals Call it

327

animal: “This bird is way better at warning people than the prime minister” (Andrews 2020). At the height of the bushfire crisis, novelist Richard Flanagan wrote in the New York Times that Australian political leadership was “suicidal” when it comes to dealing with climate change: coal exports continue, lack of investment in renewables, and, during the bushfires, a noticeable absence of leadership around the crisis. Our prime minister was on holiday in Hawaii, which seemed to suit the broader narrative of his government’s refusal to see the bushfires and their spectacular ferocity as part of the climate crisis. According to Flanagan, the leaders of both major parties were resolute in reassuring coal companies, and thereby willing to “open the gates of hell and lead a nation to commit climate suicide” (2020). This statement resonates with Wendy Brown’s account of Trumpism in/as the “ruins of neoliberalism,” a state she diagnoses as a willingness to sacrifice everyone along the way to maintain privilege: if I can’t have it then no one can, “the never-gosoftly-into-the-night character of male superordination” (Brown 2019, 7). Brown’s neoliberal nation “is figured as privately owned and familial and the president is the paterfamilias” (2019, 116–17), the White House becomes a white gated community where the wealthy reject the collective to save only themselves. For Flanagan, Australian political leaders are at hell’s gate, stoking the fire with coal commitments. These two images, Brown’s in the U.S. and Flanagan’s in Australia, are both territorial images of privileged communities clinging on to that privilege in self-made ruins of political disaster; refusing to listen, refusing to act on climate change with incomprehensible disregard for a collective future (defying the assumption that temporality and future thinking is a uniquely human trait). Brown’s reading of the “wreckage” pays attention to the gendered and racialized nature of the nihilism, coming from “the dominant as they feel their dominance waning” (175), the “anger of the dethroned” (177), who have “brought the species to unprecedented misery and the planet to the brink of destruction” (181), where “end-times eschataology is the religion of the age” (182). The dethroned refuse to go quietly, as Val Plumwood also implies in her earlier analysis of the master narratives and the “Empire of Men” that subordinate ecological beings, women, the colonized, to the extractive rationality of mastery and possession (1993). Plumwood’s and Brown’s diagnosis adds a missing dimension to Flanagan’s sense that the nation is being led to suicide. It is not so much that Australia is pushed to a collective suicide, it is more like a murder-suicide, where the murderer kills himself only after having denied the others their right to live without him at the helm: I am in charge of your life, as mine. Moreover, it is a death spiral that includes animals, environments, fauna, sea life: an “omnicide” (Celermajer 2020).

2011 A vegan-feminist Hunt Sab group formed to challenge traditional patriarchal rules of the countryside and related misogynist attitudes.

328

Chapter 17 The Animals Call it

Attention A siren goes off to warn us; a siren is sung by a magpie to warn us of a human-made disaster; a mechanical howl is shifted into nature’s urgent repertoire. In the case of Australian songbirds, their capabilities to reproduce both natural and mechanical beings are “world-renowned” (Low 2017, 74). This is especially so in the case of lyrebirds: As well as copying bird songs, they have broadcast with an uncanny accuracy the wingbeats of pigeons, the howling of dogs, the nocturnal hunks of wandering swans, the pleading of young magpies, the coughing of a smoker, the siren of an ambulance, koalas grunting, trees creaking, parrot feathers rustling, kookaburra bills snapping, cockatoos tearing wood. Albert lyrebirds chased up a tree by dogs barked for three weeks afterwards. Pet lyrebirds have imitated rattling chains, violins, pianos, saws, the creaking of a horse and dray, a child crying, and the screaming of slaughtered pigs. (2017, 74)

The choice of sounds and calls that the lyrebirds take on here warrants attention, indeed their choices suggest an attention to attention itself. Attention, as ecofeminist theorists of care ethics reiterate, requires asking of another, “What are you going through?” and hearing the answer. The birds learn calls that are pleas for attention, a desire to be heard, “the screaming of slaughtered pigs,” “a child crying,” “pleading,” a “siren.” Such calls are claims on the listener to help, to stop, to solve, offer comfort, to stand aside, to let pass, to let go, to have the will of the other recognized and respected. This birdsong that focuses our attention on alarms and calls for help seems to hone in the broader question of listening; the importance of listening, the question of what is heard and wants desperately to be heard, and the alarm’s/howl’s/cry’s capacity to travel distances across space, time, and species, a reproduction that is suited to the scale of disaster around us. So rather than being the “coolest thing ever,” as our ex-Threatened Species Commissioner describes it, the magpie’s siren call is decidedly chilling. But what canon might suit it? When it comes to incorporating birdsong into music for human ears, composers tend not to choose the birdsong that is the “screaming of slaughtered pigs” or a “child crying” or emergency sirens, saws. Those sounds say too much about us, and about things we pretend not to hear.

Chapter 17 The Animals Call it

329

Australia is a settler colonial state, a fact known by acknowledging all of the devastation that settler colonialism imposes on land and people. Patrick Wolfe observes the logic of “erase and replace” settler colonialism. Bruce Pascoe points out how pastoralism in Australia functioned in this way: “croplands were mown down by sheep and cattle and people were prevented from protecting and utilizing their crops. No better device, short of murder, could ensure the weakening of the enemy” (2014, 18). Settler colonialism brings the cats, foxes, sheep, cattle, and pastoralism that rapidly alter habitats through the annexation of Aboriginal land and its ecologies. A study by Australian conservation biologists Woinarski, Burbidge, and Harrison (2015) examined the anomaly of Australian extinction rates, finding them to be remarkable because they are so high, largely concentrated in smaller mammals, occur mostly in the last 225 years, and in areas that might be described as remote wilderness. The team suggest that the causes of Australia’s high “mammal losses” are “unresolved, baffling and contested” (Woinarski et al. 2015, 4534). But on the other hand, they point the finger at cats, foxes, and the loss of Aboriginal fire-based land management as the three “major factors” that are “driving the decline.” These three (cats, foxes, and fire management) all come with what they refer to as the “rapid continent scale replacement of a purposeful and long-established Indigenous land management regime by a substantially more exploitative and transformative set of land management practices.” While Australia is a world leader in bird extinctions, large songbirds and parrots have managed to thrive in the context of urbanization, because they have been less affected by the depletion of grasslands that other birds have relied on. What people don’t understand, suggests Low, is that while “the world’s loudest, smartest and most colourful birds are thriving” and are the “winners that people see” (Low 2017, 318)— the “coolest thing ever”—they miss the fact that the smaller less vocal ones have lost their habitat due to pastoralism, an industry responsible for deforestation, habitat loss, and climate change emissions, as well as being well versed in practices of avoiding listening to animals. Pastoralism is now the dominant land use across much of Australia. This system has brought with it land clearing, habitat destruction, the end of firestick farming, persecution of animals such as macropods and koalas—as well as effects on waterways (water extraction, pollution, river modification, drought)—which leaves animals like the platypus in “significant decline” (Woinarski et al. 2015, 4536). All of this helps to explain the loss of smaller mammals like bandicoots, potoroos, bilbies and marsupial rats and mice,

2011 Marti Kheel dies.

Settler colonialism

330

Chapter 17 The Animals Call it

smaller birds; all endemic to Australia and all evolving here without cats, until colonization. They surmise that in excess of a hundred species of small mammals are facing extinction. Solutions include “marooning” threatened animals on islands or in areas where predators are excluded by fencing; sustained baiting for foxes; establishment of Indigenous protected area systems that restore fire regimes to benefit biodiversity; removal of herbivores and livestock; expansion of private land through the Australian Wildlife Conservancy; and in relation to cats they propose the “development of such a broad-scale control mechanism” as something “likely to provide the greatest conservation benefit to the Australian mammal fauna” (2015, 4538). Two months after the publication of this article, the Federal Government’s Threatened Species Commissioner Gregory Andrews and Environment Minister Greg Hunt declared a “war” on cats, an announcement that made international news, perhaps because it looked so silly (and featured a fluffy white domestic cat in the case of the Washington Post with its headline: “Australia actually declares ‘war’ on cats, plans to kill 2 million by 2020,” Tharoor 2015). Cats are extinction scapegoats in Australia; settler colonialism constitutively unable to declare itself a “pest” and self-eradicate. The conservation team of Woirnarski et al. express concern that the Australian public seems unmoved by species extinctions, noting the “complacency” of Australians toward the “extinction calamity” (2015, 4533). Australian naturalist Hedley Finlayson “foresaw this catastrophic outcome” decades earlier, writing in 1945: It is not so much, however, that species are exterminated by the introduction of stock, though this has happened often enough, but the complex equilibrium which governs long established floras and faunas is drastically disturbed or even demolished altogether. Some forms are favoured at the expense of others; habits are altered; distribution is modified, and much evidence of the past history of life of the country slips suddenly into obscurity. (Woinarski et al. 2015, 4533)

It is significant that this quotation from 1945 is evoked as evidence that naturalists foresaw the current calamity. But what Finlayson’s description also draws attention to is one of the main obstacles to its comprehension: animal agriculture is both centered and decentered when it comes to settler colonialism and animal extinctions.1 As Finlayson writes, the introduction of livestock is a foundational disturbance and demolition of a “complex equilibrium,” after which the cats and foxes become symptoms of an overall systemic disruption. Finlayson points out that animal agriculture cannot be understood as a direct form of extermination because it is not as if the cattle and sheep (as herbivores) are directly preying upon small mammals and

Chapter 17 The Animals Call it

331

birds. The problem is rather distributed along effects that cannot be located in one individual act, notwithstanding the point that heavy hoofs effect the soil, eating effects biodiversity of grasslands where small birds and mammals live, methane emissions contribute to climate change and pollution, fences affect habitat and territory, predator and prey relationships, and the exclusion of Indigenous people from managing the land would also bring about the rapid-scale changes that they describe. Given all this, who, exactly, is responsible here remains an important question. Is it the farmer who raises the cattle, the consumers who support the industry, the government which subsidizes, the cultural mechanisms (including literature and film, see Boyde 2013a, 2013b) that reproduce pastoral myths/edible animal myths helping to make them invulnerable to critique, or agile enough to admit to just a little of the violence in order to exaggerate the peace, as Tiffin and Huggan have described the pastoral literary form (2016, 101)? And so, rather like the puzzle of industrial-scale killing of animals in “meat processing” factories, where the act of killing is itself willfully concealed by a complex and distributed politics of sight (see Pachirat 2011), that must also include a distributed politics of listening, it is possible to conclude that, just as in the abattoir so, too, in agricultural land it is as if there is no “actual killing” (Vialles 1994). So, too, with extinctions brought about by something so vast and concealed “in plain sight” (and “plain sound” to a magpie), like animal agriculture, the act of killing animals seems not to happen at all. If we do not pause upon the significance of mass deaths of livestock, stranded in firezones, or sent to abattoirs, then it’s hardly surprising that “collateral” deaths of animals in deforested land are unheard, framed out, muted. This is part of the cultivation of indifference to violence against animals; the encouragement to not listen.2 Settler colonies (like Australia and the United States) are particularly prone to denial, given that the violence of appropriation is something known, but not acted on—the strategy of erase and replace functioning at the memory and knowledge level as well, as writers like Stanley Cohen explain. Stanley Cohen’s work on silence and denial distinguishes between what we know and what we deny. We “know” about the climate crisis, but whether we care to know in the sense of acting on it is another question, a question of denial. Cohen says, denial is not about “not knowing,” it is more a case of not “caring to know,” not acting on what we know. Australia is the only Commonwealth country not to have a treaty with Indigenous peoples. In 2017, Indigenous people from all over the country met in Uluru and devised Voice, Treaty, Truth, the “Uluru Statement from the Heart,” designed to enshrine a First Nations voice to Parliament, to make listening to Indigenous people a constitutional imperative. The Federal

2011 Ethics and Animals: An Introduction by Lori Gruen is published.

332

Chapter 17 The Animals Call it

Government refused to take it to referendum, refused the invitation to listen. These failures of listening and refusals to listen are part of the broader cultivation of indifference and forgetting; an elimination and incorporation that is part of the logic of colonialism (Plumwood 1993, 192; see also Wolfe 2006). This refusal signals an ongoing failure to recognize the significance of political dialogue, to yarn with Indigenous people, which Tyson Yunkaporta describes as “a structured cultural activity . . . rigorous methodology for knowledge production . . . [that] . . . references places and relationships and is highly contextualised in the local worldviews of those yarning” (2019, 130–1). Yunkaporta’s work draws attention to how yarning between settlers and Indigenous people changes the nature of knowledge itself (including how we know what we know) which he frames in terms of political reckoning and also ecological survival. A similar point has been made by Indigenous writers and philosophers including Bruce Pascoe (2014) and Tony Birch who put it this way: “we must listen to those who have lived with country for thousands of years without killing it” (2018).

“Really listen hard” Waanyi writer Alexis Wright depicts the inseparability of climate collapse, denial, and colonization in her novel, The Swan Book (2013). The narrator tells us that Australia was built on not saying things about genocide: “genocide, or mass murder, which were crimes thought to be so morally un-Australian, it was officially denied that anything like it ever happened” (Wright 2013, 309). As a consequence of this denial, the only words of English that remain in the post-apocalyptic Australian continent depicted in the novel is heard in the song of the birds, the ones who create a “new internationally dimensional language about global warming” (2013, 329). The birds choose to include remnants of English once common across the continent: “just short words, like Not true” (330). These words are “the most commonly used words you would have heard to try to defeat lies in this part of the world” (330). With “not true” the birds of the future remember what the English language was made to work hard at in Australia: denial. Denial about genocide, extinctions, mass, organized killings, all made “not true.” In the epilogue the narrator instructs us to: “Really listen hard to what they [the birds] were saying” (329). There is the lyrebird who recalls the screaming of slaughtered pigs; she is in close proximity to the violence as it happens, and she calls it. There are also the birds in Tasmania who recall the songs of birds who do not live there

anymore, who may be extinct in the places where their sounds live on through others. There are magpies whose lively songs fill the ears of human listeners, obscuring the silence of birds now gone, that needed grasslands free of sheep and cattle to survive. The cultural transmission of this lively ecology is a remembering that is also a remastering of soundscapes. An ethical listening would mean to “really listen hard,” listen for gaps in understanding, our failure to capture their meaning, listening for those we cannot hear through the blockages of cultivated indifference; listening out for their assessment of us (intruder, danger, predator), listening to them as they herald a threshold between life and death, as they invite humans to their death but warn against the killing of others. The bird sirens have called it, now we need to “really listen hard” and act.

Notes 1

2

Livestock are “one of the major drivers of habitat change (deforestation, destruction of riparian forests, drainage of wetlands), be it for livestock production itself or for feed production” (Steinfeld et al. 2006, 186–7). Val Plumwood writes: “the fact that there are many perfectly good ways of finding out about animal experience also reveals how much of our ignorance is calculated and cultivated; we do not know what non-humans experience because we do not want to know, since doing so would oblige us to challenge accepted and profitable practices that inflict immense deprivation on commodified animals” (2001, 192).

333

2012 A radical queer liberation group—Bash Back—responds to the problem of captive Orcas by recognizing solidarity between queer liberation struggles and the resistance of other animals and that their own liberation is directly tied to that of those suffering in our marine parks, zoos, and beyond.

Chapter 17 The Animals Call it

334

Global Atmospheres of Violence: Shifting Terrains of Othering in Ecofeminist Multispecies Witnessing Kathryn Gillespie and Yamini Narayanan

I

(Katie) made my way across the muddy parking lot at an auction yard in Enumclaw, Washington. As I neared the front entrance, I heard the moans of a flock of chickens, a sad chorus of stress and fear. There was a rusty cage on the ground, almost blocking one of the auction doors, packed tightly with Rhode Island Red hens from the “poultry” sale earlier that day. Their heads poked out between the dirty wire mesh as they strained to free themselves, eyes wide. A group of men who stood next to

2012 Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy publishes a special issue on “Animal Others.”

18

335

336

Chapter 18 Global Atmospheres of Violence

the cage joked and laughed, oblivious. The cage with the birds looked like an eight-headed creature—a tangle of wire and feathers. Looking closer, the hens’ bodies and wings were sparsely covered in feathers, with large bald patches and bony joints jutting out in different directions. I heard the announcement from inside the building that the auction was beginning soon. I glanced once more at them, trying to memorize their faces—trying to remember them as individuals against the abstracting effects of their confinement en masse. And then I stepped around the cage and hurried into the building to attend the dairy sale, quickly shifting my focus to the cows whose bellows I could already hear. When I left the auction later, the chickens were gone. *

*

*

The piercing cries seemed to cut through my bones as I (Yamini) tried to concentrate on the agitated conversation, rapidly alternating between Hindi and Rajasthani, between the animal welfare officer accompanying me, and a floor manager of a municipal slaughterhouse in Jaipur. Against the glaring light of the desert sun, and the steady arrival, movement, and noise of trucks carrying goats, sheep, and lambs, everything seemed to blur and tilt. These screams however, rose above all else, penetrating singularly into my consciousness. I walked unsteadily to a nearby enclosure full of goats, sheep, and lambs, trying to locate the individual who was in such distress. It was impossible. Even as I tried to focus amid the bleating and cries of the animals, and the shouting workers, screams—almost human-like—continued to rise, simultaneously and insistently, from different enclosures. Two young goats pushed against the fencing. One of them, a beautiful white-brown goat with clear gray eyes, and small curling horns tried to thrust his head out and reach for the latch outside the gate that had him and his family bolted in. He tried to angle his horns, and fruitlessly headbutted the lock for several seconds. He then paused and looked directly at me. I could scarcely look back at him. Inches away, I could have easily turned the lock and helped him. And then where would he go? What could I do? I backed slowly to my friend, who was chain-smoking by then in stress. He was being intimidated against conducting an inspection of the buffalo-slaughtering facilities; he suspected cows were being butchered there as well, a criminal offense in Rajasthan state. As we left not long after, I paused at the enclosure again. The goat had curled up in a huddle with some lambs, all awaiting slaughter the next day. I looked at the small mound of rounded backs, a sickening heartache starting that has not stopped, all these years.

Chapter 18 Global Atmospheres of Violence

337

In our work on cows and buffaloes commodified for dairy in India and the United States—distinct geographies but both global leaders in dairy production—we have shared with each other and in our writing many stories of the individual animals we encountered in our research. Throughout our fieldwork, amid the stream of countless cows and buffaloes whose paths we crossed, both of us had tried to center the individual animals. However, because of the abstracting nature of these large numbers and the monotonous and mundane qualities of dairy production spaces, and indeed, commodification itself, it was often difficult to focus in on the individual in a sea of so much suffering (Gillespie 2018). As such, observing the embodied and emotional experiences of the individuals exploited for milk necessitated a laser focus that at times meant obscuring the broader multispecies context within which our research and their lives were unfolding. Our attention in the field involved a kind of triage. Most emergent were the cows and buffaloes we were intentionally there to witness. Then, our attention was drawn by the overtly desperate other animals—those who were loud and insistent, whose bodies were clearly injured or wrecked, and whose relational severings/ losses were more obvious to us. Our uneven attention was determined in large part by our perceptions of their voices, bodies, and relationships, as well as by our capacity to be emotionally present in that particular moment of encounter. Dairy production spaces, while primarily inhabited by bovine animals and humans, also intersect with other sites and industries of animal exploitation and suffering—networks of animal use that we refer to as atmospheres of violence. Attention to atmospheres is an attention to the geographies of animal exploitation—the spaces where this exploitation occurs, the bodies who inflict and have violence inflicted on them, and the relational nature of these spaces in their shifting and evolving characteristics. Attention to geography is an attention to context, and context is a classically ecofeminist concern, in part because “[w]renching an ethical problem [like a particular form of animal exploitation] out of its embedded context severs the problem from its roots” (Kheel 1993, 255; Gruen 1993). And so, in order to make sense of, trace, and uproot the problem, we need to understand its embedded context, or put differently, we need to understand its atmospheres. In dairy production, other species are sometimes present in these atmospheres, like the caged hens at the auction yard and the goats and sheep at the slaughterhouse. Over the years, we have worried together about these “other” animals we encountered in our research—those who were not the subject of our study

2012 Conference celebrating Marti Kheel’s vision for an inclusive ecofeminist theory and practice held at Wesleyan University.

Introduction

338

Chapter 18 Global Atmospheres of Violence

or did not fit into the frame of our analysis, and who came out of the periphery and demanded to be witnessed, even in the most fleeting of encounters. In fact, we understand now that as researchers we were engaged in a kind of othering of these “other” animals. Othering is both sustained by dualisms and reinforces dualistic ordering (Plumwood 1993), and “value dualisms give rise to value hierarchies” (Gaard and Gruen 1993, 237), wherein life is hierarchically ordered with the white, able-bodied, cis, economically advantaged man at the top and the animal as the “abject opposite of the human, of whiteness” at the bottom (Ko 2017, 45; Deckha 2010; Kim 2015). Othering along these dualisms and hierarchies often has the effect of hierarchizing care, specifically who is seen as deserving or undeserving of care (Adams 2007, 22–3). It also has the effect of abstracting from individual lived and embodied experiences through the objectification of the one being othered (Donovan 1993, 177). But othering and the logics that underwrite it are not abstract or disembodied; instead, “[t]hey are practices (and accompanying rationalizations) that arose at particular times and places for particular purposes” (jones Ch. 6 this volume, 135). The process of abstraction conceals these particularities, obscuring the way they are practices reproduced again and again through the maintenance of animal exploitation as the status quo. An ecofeminist approach, by contrast, in its focus on emotion, embodiment, and subjectivity, calls for different practices—ones that actively reject the violent logic of abstraction, and thus “[move] out of the realm of abstraction and [get] closer to the effects of our everyday actions” (Gruen 1993, 79). Ecofeminist fieldwork, then, especially in spaces of production and commodification, is an embodied research practice dedicated to attending to and resisting the violence of the spaces, norms, and relationships that would objectify, disembody, and generalize animals’ experiences. A lone rooster pecked gingerly at the ground in between the crowded hooves of cows waiting in pens at an Everson, Washington auction yard; a rui fish thrashed around in a shallow bucket of water behind counters of beef in a Calcutta meat market; a rat scurried behind the bleachers at a state fair in Puyallup, Washington; a broken, emaciated lion rehabilitated from a Vishakapatnam circus who shared a vet from the animal husbandry department with the cows and buffaloes. These animals’ lives intersected, however fleetingly, with our lives and the bovines’. In hindsight, it became clear that we needed to conceptualize and engage in an ecofeminist praxis of a kind of retroactive multispecies witnessing that brought these other animals into focus for the fullest understandings of these structures of power, harm, and vulnerability. In this effort, we hope to recognize and honor the individuals who escaped our focused attention in the field, those we noticed in passing glimpses out of the corner of our eyes. We bring together our

Chapter 18 Global Atmospheres of Violence

339

respective affective and political labor employed in bearing witness to the bovines, and shift our vigil to these other animals enmeshed in the global climate of animal exploitation and violence. Across the many stories of individual animals we each have to share from our dairy fieldwork, we have developed a patchwork of moments of suffering, vulnerability, and connection that illuminates a collective fabric of experiences of living and dying for dairy production. These fleeting encounters with other animals cause us to reflect on the relationship between individual, embodied experience and global logics that drive animal exploitation. However, this kind of dual focus is difficult to achieve. Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner ask, “Is it possible to theorize global processes while remaining attentive to the pleasures and travails of individual embodiment? How might we find ways to hold on to emotion, attachment, the personal, and the body when we move into a more expansive engagement with the world?” (Pratt and Rosner 2012, 11). It’s a question of ecofeminist praxis and is one of our aims in this chapter—to draw together the global with the intimate (Pratt and Rosner 2012) in order to reflect on individual animals’ positioning within these broader atmospheres of violence. One of the key commitments in ecofeminist theory is to avoid generalized abstractions in thinking about, talking about, and caring for and about other animals (Adams and Gruen 2014, 3–4). Following that tradition, we are mindful of not universalizing practices of animal exploitation and violence against animals, and so aim to focus on the particularities of both the individuals we encountered and the atmospheres or contexts surrounding them (Gruen 2015, 26, 28). Their experiences, however, do travel across and between places and scales to say something about the atmospheres of violence that constitute animal exploitation, and which both intersect with and depart from dairy. In the case of a global and globalized industry like dairy, to focus too closely on the specific practices of a particular production site risks obscuring the way that harm manifests in kaleidoscopic diffusion across geographic contexts. To focus too closely on a single animal risks ignoring the web of relations among countless individuals entrapped in these webs of harm. We wonder, then, is it an incomplete, even an inaccurate picture of dairy capitalism itself, to try to filter out the terrified squawks of a chicken in a market mostly selling bovines for dairy, or to try to forget the peacocks being secretly and illegally reared for slaughter in a dairy farm, or to ignore the shrill cries of puppies being kicked by the children of poor dairy workers living in the slums adjoining dairy farms? Perhaps, too, focused ecofeminist work on dairying—while laudable as sound research practice—might contribute to a homogenization or obscuration of the multiple animal industries that intricately and continuously intersect with each other. Othering is an organizational logic,

2013 Defiant Daughters: 21 Women on Art, Activism, and The Sexual Politics of Meat edited by Kara Davis and Wendy Lee published.

340

Chapter 18 Global Atmospheres of Violence

manifesting quite starkly in sites of violent animal commodification such as farms, markets, and slaughterhouses. Fences, barbed wire, cages, and, indeed, even dominant concepts of who animals are, act as boundary-making devices, making it possible, even in feminist research, to bear witness (somewhat) selectively. Furthermore, attempting to witness “neatly,” in so far as is even possible as we continuously discovered, is also a desperate logic of survival and coping itself, while seeing so much (and such extreme) suffering. In the case of critical animal work, and even vegan ecofeminist scholarship, what we understand to be an unintentional process of othering has continued to play a troubling role in animal ethnography thus far, including in our own work. In Pluriversal Politics, Arturo Escobar (2020, 10) calls for “the explicit creation of interepistemic spaces in which the primacy of academic understandings is subverted in favor of a determined stance for the ‘knowledges otherwise’ of subaltern groups.” As we set out to understand the lived realities of cows and buffaloes entrapped in dairying, what could—and should—we have made of the voices and movements of these others we also heard—the bleats, grunts, moans, cries, hisses, and squawks, among others? How do these bring to light the totalizing nature of global animal exploitation—and the possibilities for pluriversal multispecies flourishing beyond? What sort of political work might attention to these other animals perform in critical animal or ecofeminist research? Our aim in this chapter is, first, to theorize dairy field sites as atmospheres of violence that coalesce to sustain the othering of animals that is so core to their exploitation. Our research was intended to counter this othering and personalize the experiences of animals through close attention to the animals themselves. But even as we focused on individual animals in our dairy research, we now realize the problem of othering that can result from focused attention. Thus, second, we think through the ways that othering can occur in ecofeminist research praxis as a result of sustained focus on one species. Finally, we think through how this problem of othering might be addressed in ecofeminist research, acknowledging the shifting terrain of who becomes other and to what ends, and imagining what an ecofeminist praxis of multispecies witnessing in this context might offer.

Atmospheres of violence: Creating animal others I (Katie) sat in the audience at a multispecies auction in Enumclaw, Washington, waiting patiently for the cows and calves to enter the auction

ring. This auction, in contrast to dairy-specific auctions, sold a range of species—goats, sheep, pigs, and cows. From behind the door that admitted animals into the auction ring there was the sound of scuffling and squealing. The door opened and a litter of five pink piglets, splattered with mud and feces, dashed into the ring, squealing and crashing into one another as they tried to escape the thwack of the paddle that was meant to keep them moving. Each piglet had a number sloppily drawn on their back hip, signaling that they would be sold separately as individuals (rather than as a group). As the auctioneer loudly solicited bids, the ring quickly turned into a chaotic scramble of human and pig bodies. Another worker had entered the ring to help wrangle the piglets. The bidding ended, the piglets’ individual destinies determined, and they scattered frantically, as if already being torn in the disparate directions of their futures. One of the workers managed to force four of the piglets out the exit, but the remaining piglet darted erratically around the ring. The other worker chased her and used his body to slam her against the wall; her small body was pinned, her cries intensifying, and she was shaking visibly as he leaned down and grabbed her roughly, tossing her, finally, out the exit door. She limped badly as she dropped to the floor and rushed out the door. *

*

*

I (Yamini) heard the high-pitched brays of the donkey before I could see her, seeming all at once excited, anxious, and complaining. As I followed the cow vigilante into a gaushala in Ahmedabad, a cow shelter that also served as a temple to worship the chained cows, a dirty-white, thin donkey came running toward us as rapidly as her broken front hoof would allow. The donkey repeatedly nuzzled and rubbed her face against my companion, demonstrating such unrestrained joy and relief as greeting that I had only previously seen in dogs. The cow vigilante team had seized a truck full of “spent dairy cows” being illegally transported to slaughter. On their way to the gaushala, they saw a donkey on the road, so disabled, bloodied, and emaciated that she was incapable of taking a single step. She presumably had been previously used by one of the brick kilns surrounding the city; overloaded to an inch of her life, and abandoned when she fell, grievously injuring herself. The gaushala had grudgingly taken in the donkey, a concession to the political connections of the cow vigilantes. Otherwise, an animal regarded as universally contemptible was an affront in their “high-caste” spaces. However, as the donkey continued her excitable braying—“why did it take you so long to come?” she seemed to be asking her beloved rescuer—the vigilante tried frantically to shush her. “Shhh, shhh, it’s okay, be quiet,” she

341

2013 First exhibit of the Museum of the History of Cattle in Helsinski introduces the shared history of cattle and humans as seen by the cattle, created by feminist Terike Haapoja and writer Laura Gustafsson.

Chapter 18 Global Atmospheres of Violence

342

Chapter 18 Global Atmospheres of Violence

whispered. The donkey had no friends in the gaushala; she had none of her own and wasn’t allowed to mix with the cows. The manager hated her presence, and mockingly called her “Lata” after one of India’s most famous classical singers, a ridicule of her braying. While the donkey, still so sickly from her time in the kilns, could be kept out of his sight, it was imperative to also keep her quiet, her tenure at the gaushala so precarious. *

*

*

Dairy industry spaces can be characterized by atmospheres of violence—a term we use to understand the global colonial-capitalist climate of intersecting animal exploitation industries. These industries have their roots in fundamental notions of animals as capital and as colonial subjects—logics that make them from the moment of their birth into subjects of violence (Belcourt 2015; Collard 2020; Shukin 2009). Attending to atmospheres can help to explain the overlapping industries that collide with dairy—the egg industry in which the eight hens were trapped, the milk and meat industries that would slaughter the lambs and goats on the following day, the global pork industry in which the piglets circulate as capital, and the brick kiln industries throughout South Asia, so profoundly violating of human and animals’ rights that activists consider their products “blood bricks.” Atmospheres of violence that coalesce around animals in sites of exploitation come into being through the pooling of the layers and intensities of bodily and emotional harm that animals endure. The manifestation of violent worlds in and through the atmospheric unfoldings in these spaces define and move fluidly beyond these particular atmospheres to shape broader ideas and practices that normalize violence against animals. “[T]he term atmosphere presents itself to us as a response to a question; how to attend to collective affects that are not reducible to the individual bodies that they emerge from?” (Anderson 2009, 80). While we are attentive here and in our fieldwork to individual animals and their experiences, the “collective affects” of atmospheres offer further windows into understanding how these forms of violence are performed and sustained. Ecofeminists have paid close attention to the way othering operates to exclude, oppress, and violate those deemed other. In the context of witnessing animals in industries intersecting with dairy, othering operates at multiple registers to contribute to these atmospheres of violence. Animals themselves are conceptualized as the abject other to humans—an already-contested category hierarchized along lines of race, gender, (dis)ability, ethnicity, or caste (Jackson 2020; Kim Ch. 10 this volume, 2015; Ko and Ko 2017; Narayanan 2018; Taylor Ch. 7 this volume, 2017). Othering underwrites

Chapter 18 Global Atmospheres of Violence

343

conceptions of animals’ embodied, emotional, and relational lives—the alterity of their being renders them inferior and exploitable. Their otherness leaves them vulnerable and in a perpetual state of precarity (Butler 2009). While all life is precarious (Butler 2009), the lives of human and nonhuman others and the environment are, increasingly and intensively under capitalism, structured and legitimized around othering, manifesting in a multitude of suffering in the form of displacement and deportation, commodification, genetic restructuring of life itself, and life lived in degraded, even poisonous sites. The economic logics of the market are intricately interlocked with insidious and equally violent forms of sociopolitical othering. Colonialism and capitalism are predicated on consuming, often quite literally, “otherness” (Monguilod 2001, 189). We know that humans experience othering and exclusion in visceral ways—from stress to despair and depression to insomnia to even an inability to digest food (Devadoss 2020). Animals, too, feel keenly the effects of being rendered other; they, too, experience physical and psychological traumas and miseries when regarded as exceptional to, or unworthy of, our moral consideration and care. In our field sites, we were both struck, for instance, by the ways sound became its own atmosphere of violence, othering, expression, and resistance. Animals’ sounds and voices, the embodied conditions and experience of animals, and their relationships that were unfolding and severed in these spaces, collided with the shouts, cursing, everyday chatter, and laughter of humans. Sound is political, emphasizes Devadoss (2020), and animals’ roars, bellows, screeches, quacks, neighs, barks, and brays travel across these physical and metaphorical boundaries and borderlands. The sound of some animals is so deeply rooted in human imaginations as contemptible or offensive that they become disruptions to ideas of who may be audible and “who does and who does not have a voice” (Taylor 2017, 61). In the case of humans, aural othering, or sound expressed through language and accent, is one of the most critical and frequently ignored aspects of racial microaggressions (Devadoss 2020). As English is frequently used as a colonizing and neocolonizing tool to privilege, homogenize, and assimilate cultures (Devadoss 2020), so, too, human forms of language itself—including expressions of terror, misery, sickness, resistance—become ways of fully de-legitimizing the voice and speech of nonhuman others—to the extent that even many animal protection organizations claim to advocate for the “voiceless”’ (see Voiceless 2020; Dave 2014). In critiquing discourses of animals’ voicelessness in animal advocacy, Sunaura Taylor (2017, 62) quotes Arundhati Roy (2004), explaining that, “[t]there’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”

2014 First Vegan Soulfest held, an annual celebration of culture and the vegan lifestyle in Baltimore City.

344

Chapter 18 Global Atmospheres of Violence

The donkey in the gaushala, in her delighted braying at seeing her rescuer again, had to be “deliberately silenced” so as not to offend the gaushala workers and lose her already-precarious place at the shelter. The piglets’ distressed squeals were painful to listen to as an observer attuned to the piglets themselves, but the auctioneer simply raised the volume of the hum of his voice to drown out their cries—they became “preferably unheard.” The cries of the goats and sheep in the slaughterhouse, and the moans of the caged hens, too, were “preferably unheard”—seeming to dissolve into the background din of the slaughterhouse and the auction yard. For us, outsiders in these spaces, the cries of the piglets, goats, sheep, and hens rendered their suffering real and urgent; the excited brays of the donkey expressed joy even in such an abject space. These animals’ voices simultaneously communicated their experiences of stress, fear, pain, delight, and connection and they rendered them other in contexts that do not acknowledge their subjectivity. Attention to the embodied conditions of animals exploited in these spaces highlights how “the body itself can be interpreted as a vehicle of otherness” (Iovino 2013, 193). Othering “[reduces animals] to their perceived biological species identity or reproductive capacity [and], especially when domesticated/enslaved by humans are brought or born into relations with us, [animals] live lives mediated by our ideas about them and their embodiment” (Deckha 2012, 534). Animals’ embodied otherness becomes justification for all sorts of bodily incursions, appropriations, violence, and killing. Atmospheres of violence are founded upon othering animals’ bodies in such a way that the animals become “absent referents” wherein their subjectivity and experience is eclipsed entirely by the dominant understanding of their bodies as consumable (Adams 2000). In the auction yard, the piglet’s body, already framed as future meat, becomes a management and movement problem as she frantically darts around the ring, her liveliness an inconvenience met with violent handling. In the gaushala, the donkey’s broken body, destroyed by hard labor, is an inconvenience in her need for care. Conceptualizations of these individuals as meat and labor rely on their bodies being viewed as other; pigs and donkeys are particularly abject in both global and geographically specific contexts—as filthy, despicable, or “low-caste” (Narayanan 2021). Othering operates in these atmospheres of violence in a wholesale denial of animals’ social and emotional relationships. Moments of connection and tenderness, then, become all the more poignant in these contexts. After the auction, the piglets waited in a small muddy pen in the cold winter damp, crowding around the injured piglet and nuzzling her gently. These were their last moments together before their different buyers would come to retrieve them, and they huddled together for warmth and reassurance. A tiny calf,

covered thickly with mud and diarrhea, reached his head through the fencing in an adjacent pen and licked one of the piglets, seeming to surprise them both, and then turned to groom one of the other calves in his pen—an act of care and comfort for them both in an atmosphere spatially designed for separation and alienation. At the slaughterhouse, the young goat almost seemed forced to grow up too soon as he tried to use his little horns to unlock the gate. Two other goats stood behind and watched him without once dropping their gaze; they seemed to know what he was trying so desperately to achieve. As the goat finally gave up and walked away from the gate, he huddled with the woolly lambs for comfort, a visceral bodily need for safety and reassurance, even in the desert heat of Jaipur. Atmospheres of violence are flooded with the frustration, loneliness, and heartbreak of the animals who inhabit them. Alienation from others is its own kind of othering, and animals continually actively resist it by stealing back moments of caring attention and connection with others. Although these moments may be few in intensified sites of exploitation, we are also mindful that, as Lori Gruen and Kari Weil warn, in “focusing on the suffering that a specific individual experiences, we tend to overlook other aspects of her life that may involve pleasure in community with others. Even when one’s life is extremely impoverished, it may not be a life of all and only suffering” (Gruen and Weil 2012, 479). These moments of tenderness between the piglets and calf, and between the donkey and the cow vigilante, become all the more important in the face of the suffering and isolation they do experience. The embodied, emotional, and experiential qualities of these atmospheres can both intensify in the characteristics of violence to which animals are subjected and be potentially transformed—even if only momentarily—by encounters of witnessing and care, and resistance to the exploitative logics that render animals subjects of violence in the first place. We witnessed many fleeting moments of care between animals, and occasionally between humans and animals, in our field sites. Sometimes we were those humans, and other times not. It is to our fraught role in both resisting and participating in the creation of the other in these atmospheres of violence that we now turn.

Othering animals in feminist research At a cull market auction in Everson, Washington, where “spent” cows were being sold for slaughter, a lone gray horse was confined outside in a small pen off to the side, away from the larger pens that held the herds of cows. The

345

2014 Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with other Animals and the Earth edited by Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen published.

Chapter 18 Global Atmospheres of Violence

346

Chapter 18 Global Atmospheres of Violence

horse stood quietly, looking at me (Katie) from beneath long eyelashes as I approached. I walked up to stand in front of her. I didn’t try to touch her; I was mindful of not entitling myself to her body in a space where humans impose themselves routinely on animals’ bodies. Even a gentle touch might have felt like an affront in this context. We stood there, silently, facing each other. I could see the breath passing from her nostrils in the chilly air. She raised her head to look me more squarely in the eye. She appeared to be in good physical condition—a beautiful gray coat, speckled with white, and a light-colored mane and tail. I wondered why she was being sold at auction, where she had come from, where she was going, and what relationships had been severed leading up to her presence here at the auction. As these questions flashed through my mind, the bellowing of distressed cows echoed across the auction yard, reminding me why I was there. I turned away from the horse and moved on to observe the cows and watch the sale. I quickly forgot about her, recalling her only in passing when I later wrote up my field notes in detail. *

*

*

The last of the heavy, unbaked bricks were emptied out of each makeshift saddle sack that the thirty donkeys had on their backs, and the sacks themselves were flung on the ground. Almost noon, the donkeys had been laboring since 3 a.m., to maximize the coolest hours of the day. The donkey owner appeared to take the donkeys to graze on the highway, immediately adjoining this particular brick kiln. Mounds of plastic waste and rotting food lay alongside the highway—and what each desperate donkey could manage to forage in the next few hours would be her meal that day. I (Yamini) was there to intentionally witness the donkeys, a species with whom I was entirely unfamiliar. So deeply immersed in working with bovines for the last five years, and accustomed to taking care to avoid the front end of the bovines where their beautiful but potentially dangerous horns posed a risk, I had leapt in surprise when, during a visit to the Donkey Sanctuary earlier that morning, a donkey bucked his rear to kick his mate. I was now focused on trying to witness each individual as intently as possible, my heart twisting in pain at each encounter. I looked around at the highway landscape and suddenly froze. Further down the stretch, about twelve Holstein cows and eight buffaloes were tied to stakes. There was an illegal dairy farm right on the edge of highway. Oh my god, I thought. I had assiduously followed every cow, buffalo, bull, and calf, as much as I possibly could, in the years of dairy research; certainly I had never intentionally walked away from witnessing them. I paused a moment longer, rooted in place, and then turned my back.

Chapter 18 Global Atmospheres of Violence

347

A thin, young donkey was nosing through the rubbish nearby, finding nothing. I put out my hand and softly touched her coat, rough and grainy with what seemed like kilograms of dust and sand. I’m so sorry! I cried in my heart, filled with grief and confusion. One day, would I other her too? *

*

Ecofeminists have called for focused attention to the individual, the embodied, the particular, the singular animal and their lived experiences as a way to counter practices of othering that come from abstraction occurring in these atmospheres of violence. These forms of attention necessitate an ethic of care and understandings of other animals as embedded in multispecies caring relations (Donovan and Adams 2007). Indeed, Lori Gruen (2015, 35) explains that “‘attention’ is one of the central features of care ethics; attention directed to individual animals of course, but also to the difference between animals, and to the larger structural forces that separate and maintain distance between us and them.” It is through such attentiveness to the specific individual, and in the here and now, that a more universal praxis of extending sympathy to other animal beings more broadly can even be imagined (Donovan 2007). Sympathy to the “other” can dissolve otherness altogether, and critically, argues Donovan (2007, 179), such understanding is neither “anthropomorphic nor need it deny the separate and different reality of the other organism.” Thus, the donkey’s high-pitched braying of excitement and fear, the piglets’ squeals of terror, or the bellows of buffaloes and cows in a dairy farm, are, in fact, far from species-specific expressions—and therefore ostensibly indecipherable to humans. Using Max Scheler’s (1970, 48) notion of “a universal grammar . . . for all languages of expression,” Donovan (2007) rather argues that humans need to be able to decipher such articulations by employing our sympathy to a particular individual of another species as also a legitimate form of knowing. We have both taken this care-ethics approach in our work. In the field, we worked hard to focus on each individual, persistently making an effort to resist the powerful abstracting conditions of these spaces. We have documented in detail many of the individual animals whose paths we crossed in order to share what we could gather of their stories from our brief encounters. To the greatest extent possible, we have tried to be attentive to these individuals’ voices, their embodied conditions, and the presence or absence of their relationships with others. And yet, as we look back, it becomes clear that focus on one thing renders other things out of focus. Focused attention on the individuals of a single

2014 The Oxen at the Intersection: A Collision by pattrice jones published.

*

348

Chapter 18 Global Atmospheres of Violence

species—cows or buffaloes or donkeys—means focused attention is denied to other individuals and other species inhabiting the same spaces of exploitation. Focused attention on any individual can also make it challenging to hold in focus the broader structures in which that individual is entangled. On one level, it’s possible to explain away this problem by saying that this is simply the nature of focused attention; it’s impossible to focus on everything at once. And we agree—it is. Still, we must make an attempt to address this problem both for the integrity of our research, and for our accountability to both the animals we encountered in our fieldwork and those we didn’t and won’t encounter at all. While we may have gathered a fairly clear picture of certain aspects of the exploitation of bovine animals in our respective geographic field sites, what we’ve realized in shifting our attention now to these other animals is that not only have we likely missed important features of bovine industries, but we have also missed a fuller understanding of the intricately shared violent atmospheres that characterize animal exploitation within and beyond dairy. Without being simultaneously reflective about the donkeys and the cows, for instance, it might be difficult to see any substantive global interconnections between a brick kiln and a dairy farm. Yet these insidious forces of extractive capitalism are acutely interdependent. Bricks constitute the cellular material of humans’ built civilization; bricks build dairy farms, and, indeed, also gaushalas, animal sanctuaries, and veterinary hospitals. The Indian brick kiln and dairy farm are both unauthorized, even illegal constructions, as part of a global informal economy that underpins global capitalism itself (Narayanan 2019). At a local level, the brick-kiln workers use the dairy farm for milk, as the farm buys its bricks from the kilns. Cows and donkeys compete with each other for the toxic waste. One bears a long history of being exploited for dairy while new innovations for using the donkey now include farming their milk for cosmetics and novelty cheese. What then of the multitude of individual animals, albeit of different species, at the heart of these fraught forces of capitalism? Orienting ourselves within our past field sites and engaging in a practice of retroactive witnessing to recall those other animals who were present and ignored might make a kind of amends to those animals we missed and help us to fill out a more comprehensive accounting of global animal exploitation. We realize that we could spend our lifetimes researching the plight of individual animals in spaces of exploitation and still only scratch the surface of truly understanding the depth and breadth of animals’ abjection in human societies. Our hope, though, in engaging in this kind of retroactive witnessing is that it will help us to develop a more holistic practice of multispecies witnessing in future research to gather a more comprehensive understanding

Chapter 18 Global Atmospheres of Violence

349

of animals’ plights in colonial-capitalist systems. As we’ve reflected on the othering of the animals we encountered—first the non-bovines, and then, to the shock of Yamini, the bovines themselves, we realized in digging back through the archives of our fieldwork memories that there were, in fact, others even to these others. The gray horse at the auction yard was one of these individuals. In the cacophony of cows bellowing and humans shouting, she went almost entirely unnoticed in her silence and stillness. She wasn’t audibly crying out for lost loved ones as many of the cows were bellowing for their calves, or as the piglets were squealing and the chickens moaning. These surface-level observations made it possible to make a mental note about her and then to keep moving without a second thought in the moment. Thinking back to this horse, though, it was precisely these qualities that made her noteworthy (even extraordinary) in that atmosphere—her silent stillness was an anomaly in an auction yard defined by movement and noise. At the cull market auction, where all of the cows were in varying degrees of debility and wornoutness, her good physical appearance stood out in stark contrast. It’s tempting to say that she was less severely subjected to the violence of animal capital—but it would be a mistake to accept her silence, her seemingly good physical condition, and her apparent acceptance of her isolation as evidence of her well-being. Of course, different species—and even more so, different individuals—express themselves differently, their emotions manifesting in audible and inaudible ways. Her true health and physical wellbeing could not have been determined by a researcher of cows stopping to look at her for a few seconds. Thinking for just a few more moments about her in relation in that encounter would have led to an acknowledgment that horses are highly social herd animals who thrive in companionship with others. This horse, by contrast, was alone in a strange place. Perhaps her silence and stillness were, in part, a manifestation of her uneasiness or fear in that space. Horses, for instance, sometimes bolt in fear, but alternatively they may freeze, unable to move, or grind their teeth. The assumptions it was possible to make in observing her in that moment worked to render her other. In retrospect it’s possible only to wonder about her—an opportunity missed both for fully acknowledging and being present for her plight in the moment and for learning something more about the atmospheres of violence at the auction yard. On the side of the road near the brick kiln and the adjacent dairy farm, a mother donkey stood still as a statue near the piles of rubbish on the highway, a small, thin, brown animal, suckling her foal who was almost as big as she was. Some of the other donkeys nearby foraged with obvious agitation, clearly starving after more than ten hours of hard labor. This mother would

2015 Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals by Lori Gruen published.

350

Chapter 18 Global Atmospheres of Violence

additionally be experiencing raging metabolic hunger from lactation; nonetheless, it was clear that she would not budge until her infant, also unfed during this time, had suckled. In a cloud of grief for this mother and infant, I (Yamini) found myself walking to the highway dairy, despite myself. Once there, I knew by then to cast my eyes swiftly around the geographies of an Indian dairy; sure enough, at the far end of rows of tied cows, lay a tiny pile of three calves, all males, being starved to death. It would likely take another four or five days for them to die, even as their heartbroken mothers with heavy udders stood chained, bellowing, not even ten feet away. Lactational trauma is not normally associated with animals in a brick kiln; even animal activists remain primarily concerned, understandably so, with their terrible injuries and suffering as overloaded laborers. And yet, while the cows and buffaloes remained within our central focus as enduring anguish due to the disruption of their lactational bonds with their calves, the donkey and her foal—and indeed, the lone horse whose story we will never know and the terrified piglets separated from their mother—routinely face similar terrors. It was, in fact, these years of dairy research that enabled this fuller witnessing of the trauma of reproductive violence and relational severing for those animals not overtly commodified for their reproductive capacities. The traumas of dairy production itself already remain obscured in the main; this obscuration becomes magnified in the case of the reproductive violence against non-dairy animals. The suffering on which we tend to focus our care and advocacy can often remain intertwined with the use to which the animal is put under capitalism in the first place. And if we were to rely solely on our direct witnessing gaze to understand their distress, we may miss a fuller account of the multiple and intricately intertwined facets of suffering that animals experience as commodified labor.

Conclusion: Toward multispecies witnessing on shifting terrain As we ruminate on our past, current, and future research and practices of accountability in witnessing, it becomes vital to ask—what of us, as ecofeminist researchers in these spaces, where it is we who decide the parameters of ‘othering’ and ‘sameness’? How can we best attend to the complexities and interconnections of multispecies witnessing while simultaneously drawing attention to the specificities of exploitation in a particular industry? In focusing on the bovines, how could we nonetheless attend justly and thoughtfully to those who are not bovines? As our research unfolds into new

Chapter 18 Global Atmospheres of Violence

351

pathways, requiring a sustained focus on individuals of species other than bovines, often, indeed, directly as a result of witnessing these very others from the corner of our eyes—how can we continue to remain accountable to the bovines? How can we provide a fuller account of the chains of capitalism that impoverish and extract from these innocent individuals, well into their afterlives, to serve the untrammelled greed and profit of a few? At moments of profound moral indecision around what inevitably seems to be or becomes intentional othering, such as being frozen between the brick kiln and the dairy farm, we have asked ourselves if it might not be better to devote our care and commitment to just one species. Certainly, the celebration of rationality that pervades much of the more masculinist approaches to animal ethics might emphasize the practical benefits to studying one species over a long period of time, such is the wealth of species-specific knowledge that it is possible to develop. We also both feel a profound sense of accountability to the cows and buffaloes, which has meant that we have felt that turning our focus to a different species would involve turning away from them. However, it was almost immediately apparent that this would be unfeasible in the sustained othering that would be required to focus entirely and into the future on this one species. As Cathryn Bailey (2007, 357) points out, what is seen as reasonable can become an effective way of “silencing” other animals, following the long, oppressive trajectory of invoking rationality to nullify the voices of women, persons of colour, and the differently abled. Rationality legitimizes the binary-making that underpins anthropocentrism and patriarchy. “Reason,” warns Bailey (347), “promises to take the messy disturbing reality and carve it into a manageable, debatable issue.” A praxis of witnessing that is rational in the sites of continuous sensory overload, though tempting even in the interests of the emotional self-preservation of the researcher, might be, in fact, to enter into a contract of complicity in silencing, oppression, and erasure of multiple others. Furthermore, even relying on species as an organizing logic for the focus of our research could be understood as what Val Plumwood (1993, 42) calls a “dualistic trap,” in which we inadvertently have sustained a kind of dualistic boundary-making that perpetuates the work of othering. For instance, reflecting on the subjects of our research as bovine or non-bovine created a dualism that made it possible to create sidelined others (the not-bovines) in our fieldwork. The commitment in ecofeminist research to dissolving dualistic boundaries, like species, can help us to avoid these problems of othering, and it can also more clearly reveal the connections between what are often framed as distinct or separate industries of animal exploitation. In essence, a practice of multispecies witnessing with an attention to atmospheres is more deeply ecofeminist.

2015 Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age Book by Claire Jean Kim published.

352

Chapter 18 Global Atmospheres of Violence

We cannot deny what we repeatedly experienced: the brief moment of comfort between the calf and the pigs; the anxiety of a mother, whether a donkey or a cow; the loneliness of a horse in the swirling busyness and violence of a dairy auction. It does not need to be, then, a turning away from the bovines in order to focus on other species; we can instead engage in a multispecies witnessing that allows for a shifting and evolving focus, keeping individuals of these multiple species in the frame of our attention. This shifting terrain is, in fact, a characteristic of atmospheres. As Anderson (2009, 79) writes, “Atmospheres are perpetually forming and deforming, appearing and disappearing, as bodies enter into relation with one another. They are never finished, static or at rest.” We now know that there is a fine line between accidental othering and intentional othering. Despite our maximally attentive witnessing, in the high-octane emotional and ethical quicksand of the field, the decisions we make are often more likely to be viscerally embodied than carefully planned. It is in fact in our instinctive, often involuntary reactions that we become mindful that the human/animal othering dissolves in fundamental ways too. We are not other to the animal, we are animal. And in dissolving the binaries and othering we encountered while following cows and buffaloes in the ruins of the dairy industry, we have come to deeply appreciate the fullest perspective that the peripheral vision can provide. The peripheral gaze is not a “lesser” practice of witnessing. It is also not the kind of focused attention we understood as we entered the field to study the bovines. We worried about shifting terrain that animal bodyscapes, and sites of exploitation occupied, as the other, or from being the focus, to the other; we now value the kaleidoscopic prism that the shifting gaze allows, through which we can better understand the enablements and complicity of what seems like diverse or even unrelated strands of extractive capitalism. The shifting gaze is its own kind of attention—not any less focused, but differently focused. It is only by bearing witness to the fringe or outermost borderlands of animal lives and bodies that we can have the greatest sense of the here and now. And indeed, by directing a tunnel vision on the cows for instance, we might even risk learning less about the cows than we might through the emotionally risky labor of being willing to shift our gaze. Nonetheless, as we reflect back, and look forward, and as we continue to engage in our retrospective witnessing and reflections, we also remind ourselves to be mindful against the inadvertent misstep of “assimilating” the “other” into our work. Assimilation refers to the universalizing and homogenizing processes of absorbing diversity—racial, cultural, religious—or indeed, species—such that the essential and distinctive qualities of the subaltern “other” become gradually blurred and lost. The “other,” in other

words, can exist only as not-other, through assimilation. “Othering” and “assimilation” have therefore been in consistent tension in racial politics (Tanyas 2016). Gruen and Weil (2012, 481) write, “as singular identities dissolve into the fluid and changing interdependencies they effect in others, and as animal otherness is increasingly situated within and between all species, the specific plight and needs of particular nonhuman animals, indeed their difference(s), risk being lost again.” We now know and deeply appreciate that the peripheral gaze is crucial for us to more clearly seek alternatives; indeed, denying what seems tangential may constitute an unwillingness to breach the borderlands that scaffold capitalism. In seeking alternatives of many worlds to the violence of capitalism, Escobar (2020, 2) reassures us that “another possible is possible.” Envisaging a pluriversal way of coexistence, Escobar emphasizes that we must “sentipensar (feel-think)” our way into manifesting courageous and caring new alternatives “about what is real and thus what is possible” (2). In other words, the real—and therefore, the possible—are hardly given. The dairy industry, so thoroughly objectively homogenized in its violent structures of commodification, and the kind of animals it breeds to produce a persistently homogenizable product in the form of milk, perhaps unravels and crumbles if we dare to “feel-think” our ideas of it. And perhaps our ecofeminist witnessing of the violent worlds of what is multispecies animal production requires us to see through many eyes, hear through many ears, feel through different skins, scales, and feathers. Perhaps pathways forward for new relational ontologies that must underpin ecofeminist research, being vigilant, and holding vigil and space for what are, always already, multispecies worlds and climates of witnessing.

353

2015 Lori Gruen gives the first Marti Kheel Memorial Lecture at Minding Animals, New Dehli, India.

Chapter 18 Global Atmospheres of Violence

354

Maximum Plunder: The Global Context and Multiple Threats of Animal Agriculture Mia MacDonald

F

or more than three decades, ecofeminists have provided analyses of animal agriculture (e.g., Adams, Gaard, and Gruen). They have considered intensive animal farming and its impact on the environment, workers, and animals, offering insight into the way the value dualisms of human/animal, culture/nature, and capital/raw material validate and consolidate oppressive relations. During this time, large-scale animal agriculture—Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), more commonly called factory farms, and the conversion of large tracts of land to grow soy, corn, and other grains to feed those animals—has moved beyond its beginnings in industrialized countries in the global North and increasingly embedded itself at the center of food systems within the vast

2015 Art of the Animal: Fourteen Women Artists Explore The Sexual Politics of Meat edited by Kathryn Eddy, L. A. Watson, and Janell O’Rourke published.

19

355

356

Chapter 19 Maximum Plunder

geographical and political area known as the global South. The expansion of CAFOs presents an enormous challenge to human societies and the nonhuman world on a warming planet where biodiversity is under threat, injustices and inequalities are rife, and facts are under assault. The forces driving this expansion include a reductive, economic model that commodifies all aspects of production; consolidated and vertically integrated multinational corporate behemoths that wield massive political power; and compliant governments who have bought into a notion that it is better to ship one’s water, topsoil, and grain overseas in the form of animals (or to feed them) and then use the money to import food than to reduce hunger at home. One result is that feedstock and meat and dairy products are shipped around the world, often in a quilt of in and out that defies common logic: from the U.S. and European Union to China; from Brazil to the European Union, China, and the U.S.; to the U.S. from Brazil, China, and much of Latin America. Another result is active or passive disdain for the rights and well-being of animals and workers across the value chain, backed by vast marketing and branding muscle. Despite large-scale animal agriculture’s current expansion around the world, the grim calculus of the costs are finally emerging from the shadows, and activists’ and scholars’ work to document and raise the alarm about factory farming has migrated from the margins toward (albeit not in) mainstream discourse in Europe, the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand and in a growing number of countries in the global South. Climate change, animal rights, and food justice activists and veg*ns are raising awareness and leveraging strong critiques of the industrial “model” of animal agriculture in Brazil, China, India, Paraguay, Thailand, South Africa, to name just a few. The ecofeminist analyses of the past decades presaged this kind of engagement. Now, in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the links between future pandemics and animal agriculture and diets and food systems centered on meat, dairy products, and feedcrops are being made with greater clarity and urgency (United Nations Environment Program 2020). As more information emerges about the consequences for humans, the other animals, and the planet of the ongoing commitment to and expansion of animal agriculture, ecofeminist analyses must incorporate these new developments. The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the continuing extreme weather events brought on by the climate crisis brought into sharp relief the vulnerabilities, inefficiencies, and grotesqueries of a food system that places profit before everything. The pandemic brought about a renewed focus on who and what are considered “essential” as well as stark new evidence of racial inequities and injustices. The convergence of zoonotic disease and a warming climate amplifies profoundly inequitable relationships.

Chapter 19 Maximum Plunder

357

For more than a decade my organization, Brighter Green, has worked with other civil society groups around the world at the intersection of the climate crisis, the globalization of animal agriculture, and food security. This chapter highlights some examples of the work that is grounded in addressing inequities in our relationships with each other and the nonhuman world. I use specific stories and regions because vast, interconnected contexts can be overwhelming to think about for those wanting a genuinely sustainable future. At the end of this chapter, I suggest ways to envision these relationships anew in both policies and practice based on reciprocity and justice across human communities and with other species and biota. I provide evidence and a rationale, alongside some speculative but informed blue-sky thinking, about a post-COVID world. There, instead of denying power imbalances and inequities, we acknowledge and examine them, in an ecofeminist vein, and work to create something new.

A few days before the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday in 2019, a cargo ship, the Queen Hind, capsized in the Mediterranean on its way from Romania to Saudi Arabia. On board was a crew, all rescued quickly, and nearly 15,000 sheep. Most of these “live exports,” a relatively small number in a booming global trade, were quickly engulfed in the sea. As rescuers from the military, police, firefighters, the Romanian coastguard, and animal welfare groups worked to try and prevent the sheep from drowning, it became clear the losses would be extensive (BBC News 2019). The awful images of animals packed together, frantically trying to escape, captured the world’s shocked attention. Anger and remorse came from unusual sources and employed language rarely applied to nonhuman animals. A statement by ACEBOP, an association of Romanian livestock companies, lamented the loss of “thousands of innocent souls” who had died “for no clear reason” (Yeung 2019). As the desperate rescue efforts continued, photojournalist Jo-Anne McArthur and I put together a photo essay that would center the reader’s/ viewer’s eye on the animals themselves, asking them to see the thousands of sheep struggling or succumbing to the depths as individuals, not merely industry “stock” that would, unfortunately, not reach consumers as intended (MacDonald 2019). If people could, they’d then learn more about the context for the suffering amid the cruel, unrelenting calculus of the globalized food chain, where trade volume, not “souls,” has priority. We hoped there might

2015 Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror by Laura Wright published.

A sinking ship

358

Chapter 19 Maximum Plunder

Figure 19.1 Sheep being loaded onto trucks from the sale yards. Australia, 2013. Courtesy Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Media

be recognition that the math that had allowed all those sheep to die was obscuring what needed to come into being. Transporting animals alive or dead, sick or healthy, in trucks, trains, and boats across vast distances is what passes for efficient food delivery in this system. Millions of cattle, sheep, and goats are packed in huge containers (Osborne 2020). Some travel thousands of miles over many days; some ships contain as many as 85,000 animals (Compassion in World Farming). These sheep, cows, and very young calves, among others, are transported live so they can be fattened for slaughter, or freshly killed once they arrive so as to satisfy religious slaughter practices, or so their meat can be frozen and sent on to still other ports or centers. Like these sheep, many die en route (Evershed 2018). Ultimately, rescuers managed to save 254 sheep from the Queen Hind disaster, although 70 died shortly afterward of injury or exhaustion. In all, about 1 percent of those sheep loaded onto the ship survived (McGrath 2020). These lucky sheep had the benefit of being seen as individuals, not commodities: Four Paws and its partner Arca in Romania gained custody of them from the shipping company and made plans for them to be adopted by vegan-run farm animal sanctuaries, principally in Romania, so they wouldn’t have to embark on another long journey (BBC News 2020).

Chapter 19 Maximum Plunder

359

The results of an investigation into what doomed the sheep and the vessel carrying them hadn’t been made public a year after the accident, although some point to overloading the aging ship. A subsequent investigation by the Guardian concluded that ships carrying farmed animals experience grounding or sinking at twice the rate of other cargo ships, and tend to be older too. Investigators also found secret decks inside the Queen Hind on which even more sheep could be transported, without alerting officials to the true number (Kevany 2020). “Our association is shocked by the disaster,” the head of the ACEPOB, Mary Pana, said at the time of the disaster. “If we cannot protect livestock during long-distance transports, we should outright ban them,” she added (BBC News 2019). But the system of “live exports” shows little sign of slowing down. Romania has become a popular embarkation site for sheep destined for slaughter in the Middle East, and the value of European Union live exports of farmed animals has more than tripled since 2000 (van der Zee 2019). In the year after the Queen Hind and those thousands of sheep “souls” were “lost,” the Guardian reports that more than 2 million live animals left Romania bound for North Africa or countries in the Middle East (McGrath 2020). Much of this story’s resonance, and the reaction to it, depends on our finally seeing the animals and acknowledging the atrocity. Yet billions of animals continue to go to their deaths because their boat didn’t run aground, their train didn’t run off the rails, their truck didn’t overturn on the highway, or one or more of them didn’t escape from the corral or the slaughter line. In fact, the live export industry is expanding, with a value of $22 billion and an estimated 5 million animals in 2020 being transported each day, with pigs by far the most numerous (Nair 2021). COVID-19 has actually intensified the trade, at least on airplanes, as carriers sought profitable nonhuman cargo as human passenger numbers plummeted. “One of the few bright spots for a global airline industry ravaged by COVID-19 has been an increase in live animal cargo flights,” the Wall Street Journal reported in late 2020. “Cargo planes this year have taken thousands of pigs, goats, alpacas, cats and dogs on international flights . . .” (Craymer 2020). But the lines of invisibility are now beginning to weaken as the appalling realization of the actual experiences of animals comes to the fore. For, as this old story of continued animal exploitation was unfolding, a new narrative is coming into being, containing inescapable, intertwined facts, if only we could or would confront them. The same day as the graphic images of the sheep drowning or suffocating arrived on our screens, the United Nations released another report describing how far our governments and industries were from meeting the Paris climate accord’s goals of keeping temperature

2016 Race and Animals Institute held, bringing international scholars and activists to Wesleyan University to explore the theoretical issues raised when considering how power is used to constitute racialized and animalized subjects.

360

Chapter 19 Maximum Plunder

rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100 (Sengupta 2019). (Current estimates are a rise of 3.6°C by that date.) Pound for pound, lambs, who are sheep younger than a year old, used for meat are the greatest emitters of greenhouse gases (GHGs), and those emissions are 50 percent higher than those for beef (Hamerschlag 2011); animal agriculture as a whole is a significant contributor to GHGs globally (at least 14.5 percent). It’s also a major factor in massive biodiversity loss due to land-use change, such as clearing forests and other vegetation to make way for pasture, or the feed crops required. As Jo-Anne and I wrote: “The lessons of the Queen Hind for ‘spaceship’ Earth couldn’t be clearer: We need to turn this ship around!” (MacDonald 2019). A week after news broke of the Queen Hind’s sinking, government delegations gathered in Madrid, Spain, for the annual United Nations climate summit (COP25). Their remit was, as it has been for years, to assess progress and bottlenecks to addressing the global climate crisis. At this climate summit, as we have for many years at previous international forums, Brighter Green urged governments to acknowledge the climate impacts of food systems and especially animal agriculture and meat and dairy consumption, and craft policies and regulations commensurate with what the scientific evidence said was the vast scale of the problem. In a policy brief prepared for the summit, we wrote: Warming of the Earth’s atmosphere cannot be kept to 1.5 degrees Celsius, massive biodiversity decline cannot be stopped, and we cannot feed the 9 or 10 billion people who will be alive later this century if we do not change the food system. According to the 100 scientists who contributed to the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] Land report, food security around the world is at risk and agriculture has caused significant damage to Earth’s forests and soils. Among the report’s specific recommendations are to cut the shocking one-third of food that’s wasted and to shift diets away from meat and dairy products and toward plantbased foods . . . Ongoing expansion of animal agriculture and the need to drastically reduce GHGs contradict one another. (Brighter Green 2019)

At around the time that COP25 in Madrid was wrapping up to general consternation that delegates had failed, again, to agree on actions commensurate with the scale of the climate crisis (Vaughan 2019), I heard from my colleague in Beijing about a strange pneumonia he’d learned was circulating in parts of China, including in the metropolis of Wuhan. We would all soon learn about the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in China, possibly transmitted by a wild animal on sale to become “meat” in a large fresh-food market.

Chapter 19 Maximum Plunder

361

In 2019, the Amazon rainforest in Brazil was in flames, the fires set mainly to clear land for cattle ranching (Mufson 2019). To be sure, other forms of agriculture, along with timber, mining, and infrastructure development also fueled the fires, but cattle for beef was and is the main ignition point for the assault on the Amazon and soybeans often replace cattle in the Amazon as soils are degraded and ranchers move into still-forested areas. Forest loss displaces human communities, particularly indigenous populations. It deprives wild animals of their homes and, in the case of the Amazon, known as the “world’s lungs,” releases enormous amounts of climate-warming carbon dioxide that is held in the forests’ soils. Indeed, according to researcher Thomas Lovejoy, the Amazon forests likely contain 90 billion tons of carbon, and continued clearing could turn thick rainforest into grasslands (Mufson 2019). The destruction of the rainforest is a calamity. However, the destruction of land in Brazil’s Cerrado, which stretches nearly 800,000 square miles across several of the country’s states and is the most biologically diverse savannah ecosystem on the planet, is no less tragic, partly because it is not as well known. The Cerrado provides habitats for jaguars, maned wolves, and the blue-eyed ground dove (Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund). Almost 80 percent of Brazil’s rivers have their origin in the Cerrado, the reason the region is called “the birth of all waters.” As with the Amazon, the Cerrado (pronounced Se-HARD-o) is being transformed at a rapid rate. A key driver of the expansion of the agricultural frontier into the Cerrado’s grasslands, wetlands, plateaus, and ravines is the push for more production of soybeans to feed some of the billions of farmed animals raised and slaughtered each year around the world (Brighter Green 2011). China, the world’s largest producer and consumer of animal-based foods, buys the majority of Brazil’s soy harvest, and annual purchases are steadily increasing (Donley 2020). As higher elevation lands are fenced off and cultivated, agribusiness interests invade the ravines where small villages of Indigenous peoples, campesinos, and Quilombolas (Afro-Brazilians) live. These actions have led to an intensification of threats to these communities’ communal land rights, livelihoods, and sustainable use of natural resources, like water. Much of the land for industrial agricultural expansion has been secured through non-transparent processes—“land grabbing”—that often involves violence and intimidation, the use of shadowy private security forces, and violations of communities’ human and environmental rights (Sax 2020).

2017 The #MeToo movement identifies serial sexual exploiters in the animal rights movement.

The tragedy in Brazil

362

Chapter 19 Maximum Plunder

Even though the Cerrado is not heavily forested, clearing the land still has considerable climate impacts. Trees and other savannah vegetation have deep and extensive root systems, resulting in large quantities of plant matter and a rich variety of microorganisms under the soil. As the Cerrado burns, carbon dioxide stored in underground root systems is released. This fact has led some scientists who study the Cerrado to suggest that greenhouse gas emissions from destruction here could rival those from deforestation in the Amazon region (Woodyatt 2019). In 2020, attacks on Indigenous peoples and the land they inhabit increased due to the rhetoric and policies of Brazil’s right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro, who was elected in 2018 and has opined that the environment is important only to “vegans, who only eat vegetables” (Garcia 2019) instituted policies that removed protections for Indigenous lands and forests, gutted enforcement of environmental laws, and bolstered his allies in the “Ruralista” lobby, which is comprised of, and beholden to, agribusiness interests, including beef and soybeans (Sullivan 2019). Bolsonaro has encouraged incursions into the Cerrado and the Amazon, and intensified economic development, with little concern for the consequences. The atmosphere of insecurity, fear, and uncertainty has grown. Bolsonaro also mocked those concerned about COVID-19 when it arrived in Brazil. In March 2020, he called it a “little flu” and bragged that if he was infected, he’d recover quickly and unscathed, a not uncommon boast made by autocratic leaders around the world (Paz 2020). Bolsonaro also battled public health experts with a message that the economy had to come first, and peddled quack COVID treatments. In Brazil, COVID infections and deaths have disproportionately affected Indigenous and Black communities. By early 2021, more than 200,000 Brazilians had died (VOA News 2021). Indeed, it was in Manaus, a major city in Brazil’s Amazon region, where by late January 2021, a new more virulent COVID variant was ravaging the city’s population and its health system. Doctors reported dire conditions: a lack of oxygen, patients being turned away from hospitals already filled beyond capacity, and “a funeral procession [that] rumbled toward the cemetery” every half-hour (McCoy 2021). During the pandemic, meat-processing plants in Brazil became a locus of infection and community spread, as they did in the U.S. (more below), and in numerous other countries. The world’s largest meatpacking corporation, Brazil’s JBS, stated publicly that worker health was its “principal priority.” Yet thousands of workers contracted COVID in more than twenty JBS plants in seven Brazilian states, according to a study published in September 2020. And, as in the U.S., JBS in Brazil ratcheted up production amid the pandemic,

adding 15,000 new workers and amassing nearly twice the quarterly profits analysts had anticipated. Growing exports was a “principal” reason—while JBS’s lack of protections and testing for workers led to a spate of lawsuits against the corporation by Brazilian prosecutors and unions (Mano 2021). According to the Reuters news organization, the food workers’ union Contac-CUT concluded that up to 25 percent of the half a million people who work in Brazil’s slaughterhouses had been infected by COVID, drawing from surveys of its local chapters. Not surprisingly, the Brazilian Association of Animal Protein (ABPA) decried this figure as a form of fake news, “disinformation” that wasn’t legitimate because it relied on estimates (Mano 2020). It was not inevitable that Brazil should in 2020 become a leader in both deforestation and COVID-19 infections, and yet the toxic mix of misinformation, indifference to the fate of one’s most marginalized and vulnerable citizens, and a craven wish to convert all natural capital into animal products or commodities to ship elsewhere made infection much more likely. Unexpected, unwise, and unequal proximities and high levels of deforestation on Indigenous lands in 2020 in Brazil led to “some level of—peaceful or violent—social interaction. Rising deforestation “puts pressure on Indigenous people to displace to regions where the virus may already be present and worsens respiratory health risks, including COVID-19 cases.” Humberto Laudares produced a chilling data point: that each kilometer of deforested land led to a 9.5-percent increase in COVID-19 infections among Indigenous people in Brazil within the subsequent two weeks (Laudares 2020).

Viral resistance In the spring of 2020, New York City, where I live, was hit hard by COVID-19. Infection rates rose rapidly and hospital beds, and soon morgues, filled up. Within a month of the first death in the state on March 15, 11,500 had died; thirty days later, that number had doubled (Elflein 2021). Given the stay-at-home orders and injunctions, we didn’t see the evidence of the pandemic so much as hear it in the wail of the ambulance sirens. But we knew and saw those deemed “essential workers” still showing up to their jobs in the city and across the country and the world, unless they experienced symptoms or received a positive test result (if testing was accessible). In April, Brighter Green co-organized a letter with the U.S.-based Center for Biological Diversity, signed by fifty-four labor, environmental, animal

363

2017 Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation by Sunaura Taylor published.

Chapter 19 Maximum Plunder

364

Chapter 19 Maximum Plunder

protection, climate, and food justice organizations to Congressional leaders demanding that any future COVID economic support funds not prop up factory farms or subsidize the operations of “big meat” or “big dairy” or “big feed.” Our letter laid out an agenda of what we wanted proscribed (e.g., bailouts for industrial animal agriculture and the waiver of clean water and air regulations mandated by law) and what we wanted policymakers to accelerate. This included adequate workplace COVID protections for frontline food workers, and fiscal and legislative actions to support more cultivation of climate-compatible plant-based foods and the endeavors of small- and medium-scale farmers, especially those who are Black, Latinx, of color, and Indigenous (Center for Biological Diversity 2020). Although we didn’t know then how long the COVID crisis might last, the pandemic only underscored how the food system needed to shift to avoid further exacerbating the climate and biodiversity loss crises, and the ongoing exploitation of billions of farmed animals and millions of agricultural and food-chain workers in the U.S. (our focus for this effort) and around the world, including in the global South (the focus of Brighter Green’s work). Later in April, I began to hear and read news about the ways COVID was affecting the food system and the food supply. “Might the meat compartment be bare?” the U.S. media repeatedly and lazily asked, ratcheting up fears of how the pandemic had upended so much of what we took for granted for too long, including brisket and bacon and “cold cuts” processed from the bodies of cows, lambs, and pigs. On April 26, a Sunday, Tyson Foods published an open letter in leading U.S. newspapers addressed to the White House that painted a dire picture of a food system on the verge of breakdown—meat-processing plants closing, shortages at the supermarket—and in need of immediate government action (Gibson 2020). The language was stark, inflammatory, and in some sections, belied comprehension. The intent, visible and not, was to get action that would help the industry. It was money well spent by Tyson. Within a matter of hours, the Trump administration had declared meatprocessing plants essential to the economy and that, as a result, workers would have to report for their shifts. I was later told by someone whom I have many reasons to trust that the letter was merely the public plea, a performance of urgency. Just two weeks earlier, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) had pledged $16 billion in support to farmers and ranchers (USDA 2020a) with few restrictions on how it would be spent. Privately, Tyson had been in touch with White House officials to lobby for its and other “big meat” processing plants to be deemed essential. More than the dire consequences of meat shortages, the motivation for Tyson and other big processors like JBS, Smithfield, and Cargill was both much simpler and

Chapter 19 Maximum Plunder

365

more instrumental: the prices of their shares in the stock market were dropping. They had to restore confidence to restore profits. The skewed logic prevailed. No meat shortages! Workers back in the plants. COVID? We’ll see what we can do to protect these women and men on the slaughter lines. But continuing production is paramount. It was also around this time that Leah Douglas, a thoughtful and diligent food and agriculture writer, began compiling data and then a map of all the COVID infections and deaths among food-chain workers in the U.S. on farms, in meat processing, and in other kinds of food-processing plants. She posted this map and a set of charts and graphics on the website of the Food Environment Reporting Network and updated it each week. The map began making the rounds among many of us who’d been involved in the COVID bailout letter and others working on food justice and farmed animal issues. What was not wholly surprising was the outbreak bubbles Douglas created were expanding most in the plants of the meat giants, including JBS, Smithfield, Cargill and no more so than in those operated by Tyson Foods (Douglas 2020). Stories emerged of workers unable to practice social distancing—line speeds for slaughter remained as fast as in non-COVID times, and in some plants, astonishingly given the pandemic, speeds were increased by up to 25 percent as part of the Trump administration’s torching of health and safety regulations across industries. In poultry plants, this meant 175 birds being killed each minute, or nearly three every second. Workers also reported ongoing shortfalls in effective personal protective equipment (PPE), still being spaced much closer than the recommended six feet apart on slaughter lines and crowding into common areas for meal breaks. Local and state officials came under growing pressure to close the plants to protect the workers and “stop the spread.” But Tyson, JBS, and the others pushed back, claiming they had protocols in place for testing and infection prevention. But they really didn’t do much, especially in the spring. And so the round bubbles representing COVID infections and deaths on Leah Douglas’s map kept expanding. The children of some of these workers, many recent immigrants, almost all Black or Brown, spoke out, describing parents in the plants without proper PPE and even being asked to pay for masks, limited soap and hand sanitizer, and few real efforts to ensure social distancing. Many described parents continuing to work when they felt ill due to a cruel point system that penalized them for missing a shift. They pointed to the corporations’ responsibilities to protect workers as still largely unfulfilled, if not actively ignored (Duffy 2020). As with much of the federal regulatory structure under the Trump regime, safety guidance for essential workers, including those in the meat-processing plants, was left to the best efforts of employers.

2017 Making Milk: The Past, Present and Future of Our Primary Food edited by Mathilde Cohen and Yoriko Otomo published.

366

Chapter 19 Maximum Plunder

By late June almost 30,000 workers—mostly Black, Latinx, and immigrant—in U.S. meat-processing plants had contracted COVID. More than 100 had died (Douglas 2020).1 By the end of January 2021, Douglas had documented more than 56,000 COVID infections in meat-processing-plant workers and 277 deaths, by far the most in any part of the food chain. She also documented thousands of infections among workers on farms and in non-meat food processing operations and, by the end of January 2021, nearly 100 deaths (Douglas 2020). “Trump’s decision to use the Defense Production Act to force meatpacking plants to open was a death sentence for many vulnerable workers of color,” wrote author/activists Astra Taylor and Sunaura Taylor (Taylor 2020). The rates of infection and death among the workers, along with the glaring racial injustices amid a reckoning on the value of Black lives in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer, outraged many of us who had participated in the “no COVID bailouts for factory farms” project. So did the corporations’ seeming impunity and the near-total disregard of federal occupational safety regulators in the Trump administration to fulfill their mandate and act. Our collective outrage and disbelief led Brighter Green to help amass a coalition of more than 100 organizations, spanning labor, animal protection, food justice, environment, and farming in centering workers’ rights and safety by calling on Tyson Foods and other meatpackers to immediately provide all workers with potentially life-saving PPE. We also demanded that employees receive paid sick leave, on-site COVID testing, physical distancing to reduce infection, and slower slaughter-line speeds, along with the right to organize. Tyson had more workers in more plants than any other meatpacker contracting COVID, so we decided to focus our week-long advocacy on them, but didn’t let the other big meatpackers “off the hook” either (Friends of the Earth 2020). At the same time, a civil rights lawsuit was filed with the USDA against Tyson and JBS charging both corporations with putting Black, Latinx, and Asian workers in processing plants at higher risk of COVID infection than white employees, who usually populate management ranks not the slaughter lines. Almost unbelievably, some of the workers were offered free steaks as part of a small suite of inducements to keep coming to work (Khanna 2020). Though many slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants remained open, slaughtering capacity was cut by 25 percent to 40 percent in the U.S. due to COVID-19, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union. In practical terms, this meant that the industry’s slaughter model could no longer “process” millions of animals because they’d grown beyond their slaughter-weight. Because of corporate consolidation, producers had nowhere

Chapter 19 Maximum Plunder

367

to kill the millions of animals this entailed. As a result, a parallel crisis unfolded resulting in millions of pigs and piglets, chickens and chicks, and cows and calves being euphemistically “depopulated” by gunshot, suffocation, blunt-force trauma, or shutting off ventilation systems inside factory farms (Kevany 2020a). Getting firm numbers on how many animals were killed was not easy and the industry wasn’t required to make the data available for public inspection. But we can glean a sense of the scale. The National Pork Producers’ Council estimated that by September 2020 more than 10 million pigs would have to be “euthanized” (National Pork Producers Council 2020). In this case, “euthanized” meant disposed of in landfills, through incineration, burning on open pyres, or composting with little public transparency or official oversight. Disposal methods and sites for such events aren’t publicly mapped despite the potential for contamination of soil and groundwater, pollution of habitats for wildlife, and human respiratory disease. An Environmental Protection Agency COVID-19 guidance note on depopulation admitted, “Improper carcass management could lead to the need for environmental cleanups, as well as public concerns and the potential for future legal liability” (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 2020). This was a toxic combination: meat companies—already known for their unbridled desire to protect shareholder profits and produce as much meat as possible, no matter the circumstances—greeted the spreading of a highly transmissible disease with indifference to worker health. This response was not unique to Brazil. Indeed, Brazil’s own JBS benefited mightily in the U.S., too. One JBS facility in Green Bay, Wisconsin, was fined a total of $13,494 for flouting the “general duty clause” of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OHSA) to protect against hazards (Demetrakakes 2020). Even though the penalties were insultingly small, JBS as well as Smithfield Foods announced plans to fight them, arguing that the violations they were charged with existed before OSHA issued COVID-specific safety guidance (Scheiber 2020). Reporting later documented that exports in April 2020 of pork by Smithfield and Tyson to China reached some of their highest levels ever— just as the meat industry was warning Americans of refrigerator cases emptied of bacon and steak and COVID was surging among processing-plant workers and they were being forced to choose between wages and the risks of infection (Corkery 2020). Throughout 2020, “big meat” corporations continued to operate with virtually no oversight from U.S. regulators. That only changed in late January 2021 when the new administration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris issued more responsible guidance on COVID worker protections (Scheiber 2021).

2017 Sanctuary: Reflecting on Refuge, a conference about care and purpose at farmed animal sanctuaries hosted at Wesleyan, organized by VINE Sanctuary and Wesleyan Animal Studies.

368

Chapter 19 Maximum Plunder

Rigid, flawed, and vulnerable The unprecedented decisions of the Trump administration to protect the profits of Big Ag and meat producers by making them an “essential” industry shows the power of these corporations to sway governments. But it also demonstrates their extraordinary weakness in the face of the kinds of shocks that COVID-19 presented, shocks that will become more regular as the climate crisis deepens. In a catastrophe at least partly caused by a heedless attitude toward animals’ capacity to be vectors of zoonotic diseases in a confined or unnatural environment, industrialized animal agriculture showed itself, again, to be rigid, flawed, and profoundly vulnerable—not least because it demands that humans and animals conform to a mechanized, just-in-time, production-line model that neither serves the welfare of workers nor animals, nor (in a time of emergency) the needs of people for food. The absurdity is compounded by the fact that in spite of Big Ag’s fabled promise to “feed the world,” small farmers still make up the majority of food producers, while using and controlling much less land (GRAIN 2014). Many of the world’s food producers are also on the frontlines of an accelerating climate emergency. However, they rarely receive equitable portions of government subsidies, concessional loans, or bailout packages (Cohen 2020), continue to struggle to find markets, and contend with slender profit margins or no profit at all (Michigan State University 2020). According to the United Nations, 820 million people around the world suffer from hunger (UN News 2019); by the end of 2020, the United Nations World Food Programme estimated those experiencing acute food insecurity because of the pandemic’s effects would have doubled, from 135 million to 270 million (United Nations 2020). Most of these people will be from the global South; most will be Black or Brown; many millions will be children. The commitment to Big Ag intensifies food insecurity and curtails individuals’ right to food. In 2018, the world produced almost 350 million tons of soybeans (Soybean Meal Info Center 2018); in the 2020/21 growing season, a record harvest of 1.16 billion tons of corn (maize) is anticipated (Reuters 2020). And yet people go hungry. Why? One reason is that at least 40 percent of crop calories, including from soybeans and corn, go to feed animals or are used to produce biofuels. Demands for feed crops are rising, despite research showing that growing food for people to eat directly, not through animals’ bodies, could expand the world’s available food calories by 70 percent and feed another 4 billion human beings (Cassidy 2013).

Industrial animal agriculture only serves to make a set of bad problems worse: by being a substantial contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, driving biodiversity loss and land-use change, wasting potable water, and despoiling surrounding environments with water and air pollution. This, in turn, degrades the health and intrudes on the rights of the people who live near such intensive farms who are often lower-income or communities of color. It is precisely these communities who are also disproportionately affected by the effects of the climate crisis, in both the global South and the global North (Germanwatch 2021). It is ironic that the COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent lockdowns revealed to many the possibility of a world with cleaner skies, more birdsong, the return of wild animals, and a greater awareness of our local environments overall. However, the slight downturn in CO2 emissions due to the economic contraction caused by COVID around the world was not enough to stop 2020 seeing record CO2 levels, nor to disrupt rising global temperatures and intensifying weather events (Freeman 2020). Nor will it alter the long-term challenges of crop (The Conversation 2019) and farmed animal losses due to heat stress (Bernabucci 2019) or variable rainfall patterns. It also won’t halt the warming and acidification of the planet’s oceans, and the threats to global security and humanitarian disasters as millions of climate refugees flee to cities or across their nations’ borders. “Humanity will undergo many more tests as our species encounters new diseases, novel climates, and erratic political whims,” writes Columbia University professor Ruth DeFries in her book What Would Nature Do?, published during the COVID pandemic. “We are in uncharted territory. We are not prepared” (DeFries 2021).

A new vision Could we become more prepared? Could this time of crisis be when we begin to create better relationships? Can facts, ethics, and solidarity counter the myriad forces that would stop radical change, even though billions of lives on Earth are at risk from the “normal” we inhabited pre-COVID 19? “In various ways, our disregard for other species led to and worsened this pandemic,” Astra Taylor and Sunaura Taylor write. “To mount an adequate response—and to prevent future disasters—we need to start taking animals into consideration . . . To respond to the [COVID-19] pandemic we need to broaden our political imaginations. Our conception of solidarity must cross the species barrier” (Taylor 2020).

369

2017 Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters by Aph and Syl Ko published.

Chapter 19 Maximum Plunder

370

Chapter 19 Maximum Plunder

Such a different vision for ourselves and the nonhuman world is not only desirable but necessary. Such a vision requires, on a basis of urgency, forging a new relationship with the nonhuman world that is based on mutuality and not exploitation to avoid catastrophic climate change and biodiversity loss, and terrible consequences for human societies and the billions of species with whom human beings inhabit Earth. This new future prioritizes the needs of communities for a livable environment, provides easy and affordable access to fresh food and healthy living arrangements, and compensates all its citizens commensurate with their value. That society will not only be more equitable and habitable, but it will be more likely to survive the social, political, and economic upheavals that await us over the next two to three decades. In late 2020, nearly 200 animal protection and environmental organizations from across the world joined together to publish the Animals’ Manifesto, arguing that the origins and impacts of COVID-19—and prevention of the next pandemic—required a new commitment to the nonhuman world, and to each other, as well as a new agenda for concerted action encompassing wild and domesticated animals. “We recognize the real risk that business as usual will pick up and continued unabated,” we wrote. “We also assert that such an approach holds dire consequences for human communities, animals, and Earth’s support systems. This is a moment of opportunity to meet the enormous challenges COVID-19 has illuminated and together change our trajectory to ensure the wellbeing of all. Time is of the essence.” As the examples I have detailed in this chapter make clear, industrial animal agriculture depends on externalizing costs—whether to natural habitat, water and topsoil, human and animal life, and to public health and food security. Just as gas, oil, and other polluting industries should be made to pay for fouling the environment and making people sick, so Big Ag needs to stop handing its costs to society over to governments. So, the first policy would be an end to the bailouts, subsidies, and incentives that enable the mass production of commodity feedstock and animals. As the COVID crisis has shown, an industry so set on a disassembly-line model of mass production is extremely vulnerable to economic, environmental, and other disruptions. What is needed is the opposite: a disaggregated, flexible, and resilient model of food production. Therefore, a second policy would be to reorient agriculture to smaller-scale, bioregional production of low-carbon intensive fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes, and grains. That would include urban environments, where rooftop and community gardening, vertical farming, and local farms would diversify food sheds and encourage green space.

As the COVID crisis in slaughterhouses and around the world has made abundantly clear, public health and resilience depend on making sure that “essential” workers are treated as such and not as expendable units in a factory. A third policy, therefore, would mandate decent opportunities for co-ownership and livable wages for all workers in the food chain to foster dignity and literal and social investment. Concomitantly, we have seen that industrial animal agriculture and COVID have affected communities of color—whether they are forced to work in slaughterhouses or live next door to factory farms, or they are unable to find healthy food, or practice social distancing, or they do not have access to healthcare. A fourth policy would prioritize women-led, minority, and indigenous initiatives as central to a reimagined farm-to-table economy that’s accessible to all and restores a measure of equity and justice to those forced from their lands over several centuries. Such a step would nurture economic and social resilience, and increase access to affordable, healthy, sustainable, and just food. Cattle culture—whether in America’s Old West or in the wild frontiers of Brazil—has gone hand in hand with a racialized, neocolonialist, and lawless mentality. It is both a symptom and a consequence of that destruction of indigeneity and the forests of the planet that humankind now finds itself confronting zoonotic diseases (SARS, MERS, COVID, Bird Flu, Ebola, etc.) that result from replacing the wild with human settlements, or bringing the wild to human settlements. A fifth policy would, therefore, restore public lands now given over to grazing cattle and sheep and feed crops via rewilding, conservation, and community management. Such a commitment would allow for reafforestation, carbon sequestration, watershed protection, increased biodiversity (and thereby greater biotic resilience as the planet warms), and new or reclaimed habitat for thousands of species, or more. It would both reflect and deepen our recalibration of how we assign value to land and the natural world. The confluence of catastrophes revealed in 2020 highlights the ways our current practices are endangering our democracies, imperiling public health, and destroying the life systems upon which any economic or political model depends.2 By shifting from extraction to restoration, monocultures to polycultures, commodification to bioregionalism, concentrated power to participatory democracy, hyper-individualized and divisive social structures to a social and political ecosystem that honors community, diversity, and the public good, we—all species—stand more chance of collective survival.

371

2018 Animaladies: Gender, Animals, and Madness edited by Lori Gruen and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey published.

Chapter 19 Maximum Plunder

372

Chapter 19 Maximum Plunder

Acknowledgments Thank you to Martin Rowe, Isis Alvarez, Jessica Bridgers, Janice Cox, Stephanie Feldstein, Kathrin Herrmann, Jo-Anne McArthur, and Jennifer Molidor for fruitful discussions, ideas, and venues for thinking and action. Some of the text in this chapter about the Queen Hind ship sinking is adapted from a photo essay Jo-Anne McArthur and I published in Medium in 2019, and some other text is based on a statement Brighter Green published for World Environment Day in 2020.

Notes 1

2

By the end of January 2021, Douglas had documented more than 56,000 COVID infections in meat-processing-plant workers and 277 deaths, by far the most in any part of the food chain. She also documented thousands of infections among workers on farms and in non-meat food-processing operations and, by the end of January 2021, nearly 100 deaths (Douglas 2020). “Can we say that we controlled or steered the narrative about what we do, long-term, about this pandemic or the next one?” asked writer and activist Alex Lockwood in early 2021. “What I know is this: we tried. But we need more resources, more strength in depth, more communications infrastructure to lead the narrative and steer it towards our goals . . . The thing is, the next pandemic is already on its way” (Lockwood 2021).

Upsetting Boundaries: Trans Queer Interspecies Ecofeminisms

20

There are no unchanging “essential” characteristics of sex, gender, or nature. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature Trans bodies are magical. They are the parts of nature we are never told about. Luz Cruz1

I

n 2017, the premiere episode of BBC’s documentary series Blue Planet II opens with the sexual transformation of an Asian sheepshead wrasse (Semicossyphus reticulatus), colloquially known as the kobudai in Japan.2 David Attenborough narrates an underwater scene filmed off the coast of Sado Island in the Sea of Japan in which two kobudai swim together against an oceanic backdrop saturated in watery hues of blue, green, and red. One fish is svelte with iridescent green scales, and the other is pale blue and comparatively larger with bulbous facial features. The edited footage, roughly five minutes in length, begins with a playful tone but takes a sharp eerie turn as Attenborough describes how “diminutive” kobudai 10 years old

2018 Carol Adams gives the Second Marti Kheel Memorial Lecture at Minding Animals in Mexico City.

Leah Kirts

373

374

Chapter 20 Upsetting Boundaries

and older stop mating with kobudai of different sexes, and upon reaching a “critical body size,” they undergo a “dramatic transformation” of hormonal and enzymatic change.3 What follows in the episode is evocative of a sci-fi horror film. The smaller kobudai disappears inside of a rocky habitat where the light dims, the colors fade, ominous music swells, and brief flashes of light illuminate the shadowy depths as a montage reveals close-up shots of the fish’s spiky blue fins, growing jawline, and roving eyes. The camera hugs the kobudai’s newly protruding facial curves, and Attenborough’s voice-over becomes sensationalized. Each pause in commentary is punctuated with a monstrous musical score. “Over just a few months, particular enzymes in her body cease to work, and male hormones start to circulate,” Attenborough explains, framing the sex change as more of an enzymatic dysfunction than a developmental milestone. “As time passes, her head expands and her chin gets longer,” he narrates, as the lone fish emerges from within the cavernous gorge, visibly transformed in color and size. “A she has changed into a he,” Attenborough declares. The segment concludes “inside the body of every kobudai female, there is a new male in waiting.” The scene is frustrating to watch. The filmmakers highlight a biological process that is standard in kobudai communities yet rarely seen on mainstream television, but rather than portray sex mutability as fascinating and commonplace, this episode falls into a pejorative cisgender trope, depicting the kobudai’s ability to change sex as terrifying. Sex diversity is typical in kobudai, and hardly an exception in fish broadly. At least 2 percent of all fish have fluid sexes which represents 500 known species (Avise and Mank 2009). Some fish, along with certain species of lizards, snakes, sharks, and turkeys, are parthenogenetic, which means that regardless of whether they are pairbonded or unpartnered, they can asexually impregnate themselves and raise healthy (albeit cloned) offspring without using a partner’s gametes.4 Among the combative Paradise fish (Macropodus opercularis), who are all born as what is considered to be female, social status is the determining factor of sex differentiation which occurs prior to maturation “as a direct result of social interactions” with other individuals in their community (Helfman 2009, 155). That there is no room for these species in heteronormative binary sex (and corresponding gender) categories is not a new problem. As pattrice jones discusses in Ch. 6 this volume and the authors in Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire highlight, although queerness is indicted for being “against nature,” it consistently shows up in nature. Stacy Alaimo details the range of partnerships, family formations, communities, nonreproductive pleasure, and interdependent caretaking that exists among nonhumans, such as in gay bighorn sheep (who represent the majority of their peers), lesbian seagulls, intersex pigs, and thousands of different sexes of fungi and bacteria

Chapter 20 Upsetting Boundaries

375

(Alaimo 2010, 66). Alaimo and jones draw upon queer science writing that contains centuries of research about queer species (Bagemihl 1999; Roughgarden 2013; Hird 2004), situating queer natures as boundary transgressors. Rather than expand theories to include the natural world, scientists have wielded institutional power to uphold the status quo. Authoritative scientific texts have not adequately represented the biodiversity in the world, but have attempted to conform nature to reductive theories of sex, gender, and race that mirror the contemporary worldview of white heterosexual cis-gender men. They have effectively cited each other over centuries, propelling theories about the world that pit nature against women, queers, gender nonconforming and racialized people, which has legitimized economic projects of enslavement, reproductive control, colonial extraction, and dispossession (Herzig 2015; Repo 2018; Schuller 2018; Sears 2015). After the kobudai episode aired, British tabloids and news outlets labeled the kobudai a “transgender fish,” to which transphobic commenters unleashed mocking disdain. We do not know how fish feel about gender, if they are troubled by terminology that conflates their underwater materialities with human transgender self-determination. Of course, they have bigger problems from human overfishing and ocean acidification, but we can nonetheless examine the nomenclature of sex diversity about nonhumans and humans alike through a queer lens.

Gender is not an expression of an essential biological fact, as queer, feminist, and ecofeminist theorists have long argued. In their canonical work, Gender Trouble, Judith Butler unravels gender as a politically situated cultural apparatus: It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category . . . gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or a “natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. (1990, 7)5

The historical context of gender classifications matters a great deal when we consider the ontology of sex differentiation in biomedicine, biopolitics, and societal norms, wherein Nature™ is upheld as a moral ideal to legitimize

2018 Cow with Ear Tag #1389 by Katie Gillespie published.

Scaffolding gender

376

Chapter 20 Upsetting Boundaries

some characteristics as acceptable, unchanging, familiar, and true, while rendering others fraudulently illegible and disordered. The dualism of oppositional negation and hierarchical dominance, such as mind/body, reason/emotion, civilized/primitive, and so on, is defined by Val Plumwood as the master model (1993) that upholds the mutualistic devaluation of women, racialized people, queers, animals, and nature, reinforcing what Butler calls the heterosexual matrix, a “grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders and desires are naturalized” (1990, 151). As Butler argues, gender does not act on a politically neutral stage but plays a role in the consolidation of power across Western philosophical, religious, and scientific traditions. In Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science, Londa Scheibinger, a historian of science and gender, traces cishetero norms in science writing about plants and animals back to the late 1600s when European naturalists first recognized sexuality in plants and set out to rename and reclassify plant reproductive systems, modeling them after heterosexual matrimony (believed to be for the purpose of reproduction, not pleasure) and human reproductive anatomy (Scheibinger 1993, 19). Only men were describing nature (women naturalists were rare). In The Death of Nature, Carolyn Merchant provides a historical ecofeminist analysis of the feminization of nature, and subsequent mechanization of nature for profit (1980). As early capitalism began to transform preindustrial European civilizations that were transitioning from subsistence to capitalist modes of production, the association of nature and women became rife with contradictions: once depicted as a fertile, serene, passive mother with infinite resources for human enjoyment, the language shifted to couch nature as a disorderly force that needed to be dominated by man “for the good of the entire human race” (1980, 169). The projects of draining marshlands, mining metals, and clearing forests produced a new image of nature “as a female to be controlled and dissected through experiment legitimated the exploitation of natural resources” (189). Capitalist extraction of resources from the natural world had very real gendered consequences for women who had shared equally in the labors of subsistence alongside men, Angela Davis explains in Women, Race & Class (1981). Women’s social standing in the commons as weavers, soap makers, carpenters, brewers (you name it) was replaced by privately-owned factories where low wages and harsh workplace conditions degraded the value of their expertise. Industrial capitalism propelled the ideology of inferior femininity that cemented women’s roles as housewives and mothers now that they were no longer visible as industrious workers in the public economy. But this symbol of femininity was only materially available to white middle-class women who did not have to operate factory machines or labor under the coercive

Chapter 20 Upsetting Boundaries

377

conditions of slavery. The ideal housewife was popularized in women’s magazines and romance novels, but as Davis writes, “among Black female slaves, this vocabulary was nowhere to be found. The economic arrangements of slavery contradicted the hierarchical sexual roles in the new ideology” (1981, 12). Outside of the West, gender is not, as it was once thought to be, a universal category for organizing society or explaining inherent power dynamics. Nigerian gender scholar Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyèwùmí writes that among precolonial Yorùbá society in southwest Nigeria, people of all genders held leadership positions (1997). It was age, not gender, that was the defining characteristic of their culture prior to colonization. Society was stratified along the lines of elders and youth, and the category of biologically determined “woman” did not arrive until the mid-nineteenth century when European colonization imposed gendered policies and practices. White colonists recoiled at the presence of people they saw as women occupying public space and serving in roles of governance. This threatened their own gendered rules of dominance back home. Gender binarism was forced upon the Yorùbá, which altered every way of life and demoted people other than men to second-class citizenship, barring their access to social services and rendering them “ineligible for leadership roles,” explains Oyèwùmí, stating that “The emergence of women as an identifiable category, defined by their anatomy and subordinated to men in all situations, resulted, in part, from the imposition of a patriarchal colonial state. For females, colonization was a twofold process of racial inferiorization and gender subordination” (1997, 124). Rigid gender norms imposed upon the Yorùbá served as organizational tools for the consolidation of white patriarchal power in Nigeria. In parts of the world where the gender binary was not yet categorized, there was more fluidity in terms of love, desire, and the gendered division of public and private spheres. In late-seventeenth-century Qajar Iran, depictions of beauty and amorous couplings were “undifferentiated by gender,” writes Afsameh Najmabadi in Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (2005, 11). Masculinity and femininity did not sync with gender differentiation in Iran in the way that it had in Western culture. Marriage, relegated to sexual reproduction not love or romance, allowed people a degree of freedom to pursue queer desires. Persian poetry and paintings portrayed beautiful androgynous figures as objects of older men’s desire. Likewise, women could take a vow of sisterhood that contextualized their intimate relationships in terms of homosocial bonds, behind the screen of heterosexuality, which, according to Najmabadi, provided “a shelter, a masqueraded home, for homosexuality. We can continue to hold each other’s hand in public because we have declared it

2018 Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question by Bénédicte Boisseron published.

378

Chapter 20 Upsetting Boundaries

to be a sign of homosociality that is void of sexuality,” she explains (2005, 38). Europeans who visited Iran for business travel and leisure imposed shame upon Iranians’ homosocial bonds. Europeans lacked cultural context for homosociality, which Iranians resented but were ultimately influenced by. Thus, “concepts of masculine and feminine became centrally structuring categories for notions of beauty, desire and love only when gender differentiation became pertinent to these categories” (59). The export of legible genders and predictable sexualities from the West functioned as a cohesive device for universalizing hierarchies. Visible differences between binaried genders became an integral component of the co-constitution of gender and myths of racial purity. Kyla Schuller writes in The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century that visual differences between white men and white women were held up by scientists as evolutionary goalposts for human civilization, and used to advance white supremacy on the grounds that racialized people were sex indistinguishable which made them primitive and closer to animals (2018, 102). Hair was a key component in developing taxonomies of racialized-gendered difference. Beards had long been a European symbol of wisdom and masculinity (a holdover from Humoral theory), which Linnaeus hailed as a marker of God-given masculinity for men “to distinguish them from women,” whereas women with beards were considered outcasts and pathologized (125). In her 2015 book, Plucked: A History of Hair Removal, Rebecca M. Herzig documents the history of the modern hair removal industry that grew out of late-sixteenth-century settler-colonial mythologies about American Indians (used to justify land removal and genocide) that became solidified as clinical hair pathologies of racist eugenics projects in the early twentieth century, and represent U.S. imperialism as modes of counterterrorist torture techniques in the twenty-first century. By the twentieth century, hair (its absence on assigned-male bodies, its presence on assigned-female bodies) was deeply pathologized, having long been used to classify queer, trans, and racialized people as primitive, wicked, wild, and mentally disturbed. They were measured and dissected, stripped and shaved, pathologized, sterilized, and institutionalized. Hair was used to portray racialized people as dangerous, underdeveloped humans or animalhuman hybrids who threatened racial-gender purity, threatening to topple humanity into decay and extinction. Theories of sexual inversion conflated body hair with sexual deviance; one 1938 research paper, that included a gender nonconforming person (possibly a trans woman) who plucked their eyebrows, painted their fingernails, and presented as a woman, hypothesized that uncommon hair removal among men and facial hair growth among women meant that they “might be queer” (Herzig 2015, 110).

Chapter 20 Upsetting Boundaries

379

From the scores of sheep and pigs slaughtered to produce a single drop of gland extract to the thousands of electronics factory workers recruited to assemble home laser devices, from waterways filled with the effluvia of chemical depilatories to air polluted with the belching smoke of petroleum refineries, this book shows how the evolving habits of self-management among the privileged rely on and foment new ways of consuming and discarding the lives of others. (2015, 189–90)

Degendering the body the lines of where we draw a body are cultural & particular, not fixed and universal. Alok Vaid-Menon6

2019 Veganism, Sex, and Politics by C. Lou Hamilton published.

Attention to body hair and sex hormones opened up old debates about the fixity of sex. Hormone variability was shown to be an important factor in sexual development, and for a brief moment, this could have debunked the gender binary. A textbook from 1939 stated that there was a “slippery continuum” between sexes and declared, “There is no such biological entity as sex” (2015, 104). Instead of being accepted as fact, sex fluidity was reinterpreted as an unwieldy force to be controlled with the binary, not to be released from it. The violent history of forced hair removal haunts standard grooming practices today: shaving, plucking, waxing, threading, and other techniques to remove hair from the body are normalized through social pressure. In an updated edition of her book, The Pornography of Meat (2020), Carol J. Adams observes how hairlessness functions as a symbol of ideological conformity. “Shaved heads in the military, like shaving pubic hair, eliminates a sign of individuality. What about shaving legs?” (2020, 277). Bushy underarms, legs, and groins are more commonplace among queer and radical feminists, but there is nothing inherently radical about the unshaven or unplucked form, and there are opportunities for individual expression in the removal of hair. For many trans women, genderqueer and nonbinary people, hair removal can function as a crucial technology to manage dysphoria, and to cultivate their own aesthetic without the outward assumption of transness, which can impede their freedom from harassment and violence, especially for Black trans women who are disproportionately at risk of violent harm. Throughout her writing, Herzig shows how compulsory hair removal functions within these synergistic taxonomies that racialize, pathologize and involuntary queer individuals while causing unfathomable harm to nonhuman animals and the earth. Herzig argues that:

380

Chapter 20 Upsetting Boundaries

In her compact manifesto, Glitch Feminism, Legacy Russell writes that the very “idea of ‘body’ carries this weapon: gender circumscribes the body, ‘protects’ it from becoming limitless, from claiming the infinite vast, from realizing its true potential” (2020, 8). The vast majority of individuals in the world (queer, trans, female, Black, brown, working-class, nonhuman) are limited by the self-serving ideals of a minority (white, straight, cis-male, elite) in service of profit-driven capitalism. Russell’s manifesto proposes a new tool for radical liberation from binarism: a glitch, an error in the system. Each chapter explores new modes of failure, new digital-material strategies of refusal with slippery genders and immeasurable cosmic selves that are useless to binaries and purposefully fail to comply with the constraints of capital. Removing gender binarism does not erase individual identity, it expands individual and collective potential to determine who we are without the burden of assignation. Highlighting the power of digital rebellion, Russell reframes the state of being online and being away from keyboard (AFK) not as an oppositional line but as a loop where queer corporealities have space to explore new liberatory frameworks, while understanding that “all technology reflects the society that produces it, including its power structures and prejudices” (2020, 23). Simply put, the cloud is not more radical than the street. It is with similar force that marginalized groups struggle for space to be free from censorship from the algorithms online and state-sponsored violence outside their doors. Alok Vaid-Menon, nonbinary author of Beyond the Gender Binary and mixed-media performance artist, is someone who activates their own corporeality as a site of gender deconstruction on digital platforms in a way that is helpful for us to understand Russell’s manifesto more clearly and apply it to the broader conversation at work in this chapter. Alok’s digital presence interweaves poetry that details their experiences of street harassment, racism, colonialism, and familial trauma with striking images of themself adorned in bright colors, patterns, glittering accessories, painted lips, and thick body hair sculpted into ornate swirls covering their arms, legs, and torso. Alok’s self-portraits take on layers of meaning through social media interactions like the threatening vitriol of anonymous strangers who hurl corrective insults meant illicit shame. Instead of being hidden or quickly deleted, the comments are put on display: “Animal.” “Transkenstein.” “Gawd . . . we need the flood again.”7 Written as public comments or sent in private messages, the themes that emerge harken back to pseudoscientific beliefs fomenting in previous centuries, inherited ideas about gendered body hair and its connection to one’s primitiveness, lack of humanity, and mental illness.5 What was meant to be kept in the dark is made an example of in the Internet’s ceaseless day. And rather than internalize the vomit emojis, racist

screeds, animalization, and transphobia, Alok transforms them into a public spectacle. I liken this to a reversal of the childhood rhyme that says only sticks and stones can break us, not verbal abuse. The digital realm provides distance from literal bruises, but in so many ways it is another frontier for taxonomic violence and the linguistic erasure of bodies. History, queer theory, and fashion each play a prominent role in Alok’s transgression of digital space, and they use fashion as a technology to talk about the violence directed at trans people, particularly trans women and nonbinary people of color, for making autonomous choices in their pursuit of rebirth. In a video interview for the Myron E. Ullman, Jr. School of Design at the University of Cincinnati, Alok historicizes fashion within the context of the racial-gender binary, situating their work to de-gender fashion as a political act.8 The absurdity of gendered clothing is made plain in Alok’s sharp assessment. “Clothing can’t think and declare itself a gender,” they explain, noting that inanimate objects like clothing are neutral before gender is imposed on them. Because our cultural norms demand congruity, when people see someone they categorize as having a masculine form wearing what they associate with feminine attire, “they see that as incongruity and therefore they respond with violence,” Alok continues. Their efforts to de-gender fashion are first and foremost an anti-violence mechanism. In a culture where anyone can wear a skirt or apply makeup, that sense of dissonance is removed, which would decrease gender-based violence, Alok argues. Another element of de-gendering fashion is to provoke culture and remind us that fashion (much like hair) should invoke creative expression, not categorization. Citing the scholarship of Ann Hollander, author of Sex and Suits (1994), Alok describes how the suit became a bourgeois symbol to emphasize men’s legs, to reinforce the image of men as mobile workers, whereas gowns and skirts created the sense of mystery around womanhood, keeping women confined not only in the home, but where men imagined they should be. Alok brings historical depth to their cultural critique, adding new layers to Merchant’s and Davis’s writing. What we now call feminine—things like wigs, makeup, heels, leggings, plumes, lace—was actually worn by men for hundreds of years in Europe . . . and the reason that lace and heels became associated with femininity is after the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, you see this introduction of separate spheres for men and women. Men are supposed to be productive workers, [middle-class white] women are supposed to stay at home and take care of domesticity.

Not only was it unfashionable and scandalous for women to wear functional clothing that was associated with men, it was made to be criminal. Clare

381

2019 Climate activist Greta Thunberg named “Person of the Year” by Time Magazine.

Chapter 20 Upsetting Boundaries

382

Chapter 20 Upsetting Boundaries

Sears writes in Arresting Dress: Cross-dressing, Law and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (2015) that the rise of local municipalities’ public indecency laws during the mid-nineteenth century, which spanned thirty-four cities in twenty-one states, made it illegal for trans women, “fairies,” gender non-conforming people, and feminist dress reformers to access public spaces by outlawing clothes that did not fit their assignedsex (2015, 3). Initially meant to restrict visibility of transness and gender nonconformity, the attention garnered from dress code arrests shed more light on cross-dressing, making it an object of public fascination from the local newspaper’s front page to the vaudeville stage. In some cases, the same people who parodied queer and trans people on stage accosted them in the streets. The San Francisco chief of police, Jesse Brown Cook, “was a fan of theatrical drag” yet he “led a police force that persistently harassed and arrested people for cross-dressing on the city streets” (2015, 99). Much like the riots at Stonewall in the mid-twentieth century, queers in the nineteenth century actively resisted arrest and fought back against harassment. After her arrest, Ferdinand Haisch continued wearing women’s clothing at home where she “hosted numerous visitors and fought back when groups of young men harassed her, throwing water, bricks, and wood at those who gathered beneath her window” (142). In 1890, Dick Ruble wore pants and a shirt to their court hearing, swaggering up to the witness stand declaring their right to wear the clothes as someone “who ‘was as much as man as a woman,”’ and two decades prior, Jeanne Bonnet, who was arrested over twenty times in the 1870s, told the police court judge, “You may send me to jail as often as you please, but you can never make me wear women’s clothes again” (142). Eventually, local laws enforcement intersected with growing federal immigration control that targeted San Francisco’s ports, and by the late 1800s, circa the Chinese Exclusion Act, vice laws that were imbued with the rhetoric of transmisogyny fed the flames of Sinophobia and the feminization of Chinese men. If someone was even suspected of cross-dressing, police officers could legally arrest them, strip search them, and perform forced medical examinations upon them. This form of policing was used to racially profile Asian immigrants and other people of color, especially those who were queer (143). Dualisms that pit feminine/weak/excessive/stylized tropes against masculine/strong/agile/rational standards fail to understand that these are attributes that everyone is capable of possessing simultaneously. To paraphrase Walt Whitman: we are large, we contain multitudes.9 In their lecture, Alok offers a brief meditation on the pervasive rhetoric of freedom in the USA amid compulsory conformity, which confuses self-expression.

Chapter 20 Upsetting Boundaries

383

We live in a template culture that requires people to fit into certain categories and boxes, and they only know who they are in relation to those predetermined categories and boxes. And when you actually ask people, what do you feel? They don’t know how to describe that because they’ve been dispossessed of that kind of creative vocabulary.

Embodying futures The earth and nonhuman animals do not misgender us. Tuck Woodstock11

In Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late Capitalist Struggle, scholar Tammy Kovich writes “There is nothing about gender transgression that is in and of itself revolutionary,” as any liberation of gender cannot happen without broad “collective struggle,” and any serious consideration of gender needs to be grounded in material and social relations

2019 Novel coronavirus identified in Wuhan, China.

Recognizing and accepting our generic differences and meaningful distinctions, instead reproducing compulsory categories of sameness, is fundamental to liberation. We can liken Alok’s expression of self-determination in the digital sphere as their own mode of parthenogenesis. In a poem, “Anatomy is not destiny,” they write, “Transition was giving birth to myself was forging my own anatomy. This is why we are so persecuted. In a world that is death dealing, we are life giving.”10 Here, borrowing from Russell’s idea of the glitched self (Russell 2020, 47), we can explore the reproduction of oneself by merging the worlds away from the keyboard with the worlds in the cloud where one can easily slip in and out of multiple forms and occupy many spaces at a single time. The impulse to force gender nonconforming people into the closet and out of the public arena points to a bigger question of who can exist in the commons? Who gets to be a political subject? Though online harassment is real and produces trauma, there is a greater degree of distance from imminent danger than when one is walking down the street where strangers throw trash from their cars and hurl threats—an all-toocommon experience for many trans people. What’s crucial to understand is that, while it is an individual act of bravery every time a gender nonconforming person of color enters into the commons or posts their images online, rebirthing oneself in this context is not in service of vanity or hollow neoliberal individualism. Upending the gender binary is liberatory for all people.

384

Chapter 20 Upsetting Boundaries

(2016, 181). We can queer Davis’s housewife model—where the dominant ideal is only materially available to some, but the societal expectations are compulsory for all—and see how queer-friendly rainbow capitalisms reproduce existing hierarchies even as they become trans-inclusive. This happens when trans aesthetics are co-opted into fashion and media without compensation or credit, while trans people are still routinely attacked, incarcerated, and murdered at disproportionate rates (Stanley 2015; Kirts 2020). As such, trans queer visions of freedom do not settle for aesthetics or commodified sentiments of pride, but are grounded in anti-capitalist, anti-hierarchical liberatory politics. Trans scholar and activist Dan Irving contemplates the always-becomingness of trans in the Latin prefix that literally means “to move across,” as opposed to the unmoving meaning of cis, “on the side of” (2016, 423). Irving positions transness as dynamic “trans-motions toward understanding how gender-based governance interconnects with capitalism, nationalism, and colonialism,” with guerrillastyle shifts that have the potential to “create possibilities for solidarity among oppressed people and across political groups” linking trans struggles against oppression “to queer, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist social justice organizing” (426). Framing transness within a politically interdependent struggle toward social justice is embodied by a small collective of trans nonbinary Latinx friends who call themselves the Cuir Kitchen Brigade, forming in 2017 during a communal meal in Brooklyn, New York as news of Hurricane Maria’s widespread destruction of Puerto Rico reached the mainland. The founding members of the brigade are Puerto Rican and identify as Boricuir, a play on words that unites queerness with Boriqua, the Taíno word for Puerto Rican. As the extent of the hurricane’s damage unfolded, brigade members Luz Cruz, Ollie Montes de Oca, and Pao Lebron mobilized a seed bank and sourced fresh produce donated by nearby farms to send food relief to hard-hit areas on the ground. The beating heart of the collective is solidarity with communities of color on the front lines of climate collapse and political oppression, within and beyond Puerto Rico, which made the crisis as much personal as it was political. With 85 percent of Puerto Rico’s fresh produce, meat, and grain supplies imported, food access that is already strained quickly becomes threatened when natural disasters strike. After the initial shipping container of food was delayed, the collective began hosting weekly canning brigades in Brooklyn community centers like Mayday Space to process the massive quantities of donated vegetables into hundreds of mason jars. Raw vegetables and fruit were transformed into fermented pickles, marmalade, aji amarillos, and tomato sauce that would not spoil, no matter how long it took for them to arrive in the hands of

Chapter 20 Upsetting Boundaries

385

farmers and at Centros de Apoya Mutua, beyond the island’s decimated shoreline. Once known for its rich port, the island is now more famous for being one of the world’s oldest colonies, meaning that its people “have not been allowed to fully govern themselves since the time that the Renaissance was happening in Europe. For half a millennium, the land has been exploited by successive rulers,” writes Alicia Kennedy in an expansive four-part series, “Isla del Encanto,” in which she details Puerto Rico’s historical lack of food sovereignty and its recent strides toward self-determination through acroecology.12 Kennedy was one of the first food writers to publish articles about the canning brigades, as the members traveled to Puerto Rico following their shipping container of fermented foods, with seed packets and canned pickles stuffed into their suitcases, ready to help rebuild what had been lost and sow seeds brought with them across borders carrying hope for “future becomings” (Irving 2016, 430). In December of 2018, Cruz and Montes de Oca prepared for another transnational brigade to the U.S.–Mexico border. In order to fund the trip, they sold hot sauce and cooked vegan dinners. They created a fermentation zine, “You Can Too! Un Cuir Canning Guide” with Montes de Oca’s handdrawn illustrations of mason jars, bell peppers, and long wavy carrots. They performed hardcore punk shows to raise gas money and collected food supplies to sustain what would be a harrowing eight-day journey across the country to Enclave Caracol at the border in Tijuana, a hub for migrant caravanners awaiting admission to the U.S. There, the brigade breathed fresh energy into the kitchen space and began cooking meals in ten-hour shifts, feeding more than a hundred people each day for five consecutive days alongside comrades from the local Food Not Bombs chapter—an international anarchist collective that serves free vegan meals in public spaces to protest the U.S. military industrial complex. Both vegetarians, Cruz and Montes de Oca created spontaneous menus using the fermented vegetables they brought in their van and whatever rejected produce they could find at a local market. “We would ask for merma, ugly vegetables, the stuff that can’t be sold but can still be eaten,” writes Montes de Oca. “It was pretty incredible to see all this produce that we would accumulate and how it fed so many people when it otherwise would have just rotted.”13 The meals were shared with migrants and asylum-seekers awaiting legal and medical aid, many of whom were fellow queers and formed close bonds with the brigade members. “In terms of queer and trans liberation, when you are forced to live in a society where you are judged by how you should act and feel, and because we are killed so often, it is an imperative for us as marginalized bodies to feed each other. Otherwise, how will we be able to fight if we are not able to feed ourselves?” says Cruz, explaining why food

2020 Karen Warren dies.

386

Chapter 20 Upsetting Boundaries

access is fuel for radical change.14 The movements for decolonization and trans liberation share many of the same struggles, Cruz points out, specifically in the fight for self-determination where food sovereignty is a crucial common denominator. In the ensuing years, the Cuir Kitchen Brigade has continued to organize support for trans and queer-led agroecological projects in Puerto Rico and elsewhere, bringing their farming brigades, canning brigades, and cooking brigades to places where they are needed. They host workshops on decolonized foodways, create illustrated seed-saving zines, and, most recently, they have worked to distribute free groceries, diapers, and urban gardening supplies (including compost and vegetable seedlings) for underserved communities of color affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.15 The pandemic has altered life away from keyboard but has opened up online possibilities to produce new queer becomings that rupture the binaried paradigm. For example, Tuck Woodstock’s Gender Reveal, “a podcast about what the heck gender is” is a collection of trans oral histories in which more questions are asked than answered, as each episode revolves around an ongoing investigation into gender’s multidimensions and what its future holds.16 Launched in 2018, the show is vulnerable, curious, and intrusive—a digital space of personal and political transformation where each conversation exists as an archive of trans people living their lives as artists, organizers, linguists, scientists, journalists, actors, filmmakers, and more. Cisheteronormative culture hinges on the idea that an assigned identity is more legitimate than what someone chooses for themself, whereas transness is about “getting to live the future that we want to see, and everyone being able to have as much agency as possible in what they do and how they express themselves, with limited intervention from other people, unless it is about immediate physical safety,” says Woodstock. A long-time vegan, they recognize that bodily autonomy includes nonhumans, who “should be able to express their personalities, pursue their own interests and develop their own hobbies.” Woodstock lives in a trans vegan household with an intersex nonbinary cat named Seven. Despite (or perhaps due to) the ambiguity of Seven’s name and their visible markers of gender hidden by fur, the cat is frequently misgendered by guests. While being misgendered is not bothersome to Seven, because “cats don’t speak English,” Woodstock reassures, it is useful for us to consider the act of misgendering.17 Woodstock routinely conducts professional workshops about gender with cis people and encourages them to practice using they/them pronouns with their animal companions. The exercise has less to do with gendering animals—because they do not have the same concept of gender, whether they are cats or kobudai—and serves to gauge a base level of respect for individual agency, which affects nonhumans too. Nonhumans are frequently objectified as it/its

Chapter 20 Upsetting Boundaries

387

even though they/them is just as readily available. Singular they/them blurs gender distinctions but maintains personhood, whereas it/its objectifies nonhumans (although some argue otherwise) and has been used to intentionally demean marginalized humans by simultaneously animalizing and objectifying them. In their 2020 essay, “Beyond Binaries: An Interspecies Case for They/Them Pronouns,” Patti Nyman asserts that humans and nonhumans benefit from the normalization of they/them pronouns: The “it-ness” of falling outside of “she” or “he” is perhaps most striking in the common question asked of pregnant people, “Is it a boy or a girl?” It is as though one must enter consciousness through “he” or “she” to be recognizable as human at all . . .

In this case, the practice of they-ing is less about nonhumans or fetuses (neither of which understand or care about pronouns) and more to do with rejecting the impulse to equate living beings within binarism. In “She Unnames Them,” from 1985, Ursula K. LeGuin questions whether androcentric taxonomies expand our understanding of fellow creatures, or if the presumed authoritative definitiveness of classifications actually flatten meaningful distinctions (and similarities) between other creatures, as well as between us and them. “Most of them accepted namelessness with perfect indifference,” the short story begins, as LeGuin narrates various negotiations between groups of animals about whether they will cling to or give up their assigned identities—many of which were inconsequential to begin with (1985, 166). After yielding their names, They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to smell one another’s smells, feel or rub or caress one another’s scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one another’s blood or flesh, keep one another warm—that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food.

LeGuin’s vision of interspecies relationships ultimately lacks nuance and blurs all generic differences, erasing particular struggles and histories while carving out a nameless intimacy that ignores political subjectivity. Can you have solidarity with someone and eat them too? What, then, are our trans queer interspecies ecofeminist futures? Ariel Salleh reminds us that it is not enough to tack on “common ground” between

2020 Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson published.

We need to avoid the default of going through the binary to get to personhood, to avoid requiring gender categorization at all in order to be morally recognizable. (2020, 226)

388

Chapter 20 Upsetting Boundaries

movements, but, keeping in the way of ecofeminism, to pursue connections between (inter) and across (trans) “dominations, while yet developing an integrative subaltern standpoint” (1997, 192). We might think, too, of pattrice jones’s vision to transform our current reckless course of resource consumption by “cultivating queer eros in all of its manifestations, including not only love among animals but also topophilia and biophilia” (jones Ch. 6 this volume, 137), and meditate on Sunaura Taylor’s call to a mutual dependent vulnerability that attends to sites of radical care giving and receiving (Taylor Ch. 7 this volume, 142, 156), that is both inter-human and trans-species. We can, as Greta Gaard prompts us, “envision diverse expressions of eco-genders” (Gaard Ch. 14 this volume, 278) as we embody the biodiverse futures we dream of, in our refusal to conform or disappear, in our political struggle for a good life that invites interdependence and fights for total liberation, in the rewilding of our world and our imaginations so that we may collectively heal.

Acknowledgments I want to thank Lori Gruen and Carol J. Adams for the opportunity to write this chapter, and for the gift of their guidance, encouragement, and wisdom. I am grateful to the friends who helped me parse my thoughts and pushed me to ask bigger questions, especially Troy Vettese. Thank you to Luz Cruz and the Cuir Kitchen Brigade for their radical embodiment of trans ecofeminism, to Tuck Woodstock for their oral archive of trans legacies as our resident gender detective, and to Alok Vaid-Menon for their glorious example of abundant anatomical joy.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5

Cruz, Luz, @harley_punxx. March 31, 2021. https://www.instagram. com/p/CNFp-hxjL3Q/. “Blue Planet II – Episode 1: One Ocean.” 2017. BBC Media Centre. https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2017/44/blue-planet-2. “Blue Planet II: One Ocean.” 2017. BBC One, https://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/p04thmv7. Hogenboom, Melissa. “Spectacularly real virgin births.” BBC Earth, December 22, 2014. http://www.bbc.com/earth/ story/20141219-spectacular-real-virgin-births Emphasis theirs.

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Vaid-Menon, Alok. July 4, 2019. “Anatomy is not Destiny.” https:// www.alokvmenon.com/blog/2019/7/5/anatomy-is-not-destiny Vaid-Menon, Alok, @alokvmenon. January 10, 2020. https://www. instagram.com/p/B7J576KhoOV/. Vaid-Menon, Alok, @alokvmenon. March 4, 2021. https://www. instagram.com/p/CMAYz6vBo4n/. Whitman, W. 1904. Song of Myself . . . . East Aurora, New York: Roycrofters. 69. See n. 6 above, “Anatomy is not Destiny.” All Tuck Woodstock quotations from personal communication (phone interview). December 16, 2020. Used with permission. Kennedy, Alicia. April 16, 2019. “Isla del Encanto.” How We Get to Next. https://howwegettonext.com/isla-del-encanto-ab1c1420a6c5. Ollie Montes de Oca, Personal Communication (email interview). August 29, 2019. Used with permission. Luz Cruz, Personal Communication (phone interview). July 29, 2019. Used with permission. Cuir Kitchen Brigade, @cuirkitchenbrigade. Instagram. https://www. instagram.com/cuirkitchenbrigade/. Gender Reveal. 2021. https://www.genderpodcast.com/. Gender Reveal addresses this issue in episode 13, which is devoted to trans linguistics with nonbinary linguistics scholar Kirby Conrod, who studies synchronic and diachronic variation in third-person pronouns, and explains why some people struggle with singular they/them pronouns more than others.

389

2021 Animals as Legal Beings Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders by Maneesha Deckha published.

Chapter 20 Upsetting Boundaries

390

References Acampora, Ralph. 1995. “The Problematic Situation of Post-Humanism and the Task of Recreating a Symphysical Ethos.” Between the Species 11 (1–2): 25–32. Acampora, Ralph. 2006. Corporal Compassion: Animal Ethics and Philosophy of Body. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Adams, Carol J. 1975. “The Oedible Complex: Feminism and Vegetarianism.” In The Lesbian Reader, Gina Covina and Laurel Galana (eds.). Oakland, CA: Amazon Press. Adams, Carol J. 1976. “Vegetarianism: The Inedible Complex.” Second Wave 4. Adams, Carol J. 1990. The Sexual Politics of Meat. New York: Continuum. 2010. 20th anniversary edn. London: Bloomsbury. Adams, Carol J. 2015. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Bloomsbury. Adams, Carol J. 1991. “Ecofeminism and the Eating of Animals.” Hypatia: Special Issue on Ecological Feminism 6 (1): 125–45. Adams, Carol J. 1993. “The Feminist Traffic in Animals.” In Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, Greta Gaard (ed.). Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 195–218. Adams, Carol J. 1994a. Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals. New York: Continuum. Adams, Carol J. 1994b. “Bringing Peace Home: A Feminist Philosophical Perspective on the Abuse of Women, Children, and Pet Animals.” Hypatia 9 (2): 63–84. Adams, Carol J. 1994c. “On Beastliness and a Politics of Solidarity.” In Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals. New York: Continuum, 71–84. Adams, Carol J. 1995a. “Woman-Battering and Harm to Animals.” In Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan (eds.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 55–84. Adams, Carol J. 1995b. “Comment on George’s ‘Should Feminists be Vegetarians?’ ” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 21 (1): 221–5. Adams, Carol J. 1996. “Caring about Suffering: A Feminist Exploration.” In Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals, Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams (eds.), 170–96. Adams, Carol J. 1997. “ ‘Mad Cow’ Disease and the Animal Industrial Complex: An Eco-feminist Analysis.” Organization and Environment 10 (1): 26–51. Adams, Carol J. 2007. “The War on Compassion.” In The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams (eds.). New York: Columbia University Press, 21–36. 391

392

References

Adams, Carol J. 2011. “After MacKinnon: Sexual Inequality in the Animal Movement.” In Critical Theory and Animal Liberation , John Sanbonmatsu (ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 257–76. Adams, Carol J. 2012. “What Came Before The Sexual Politics of Meat: The Activist Roots of a Critical Theory.” In Species Matters: Humane Advocacy and Cultural Theory, Marianne DeKoven and Michael Lundblad (eds.). New York: Columbia University Press, 103–38. Adams, Carol J. 2020. The Pornography of Meat: New and Updated. New York: Bloomsbury. Adams, Carol J., and Josephine Donovan (eds.). 1995. Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Adams, Carol J., and Lori Gruen. 2014. “Groundwork.” In Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Animals and the Earth, Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen (eds.). New York: Bloomsbury, 7–36. Adams, Carol J., and Lori Gruen. 2014. “Introduction.” In Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Animals and the Earth, Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen (eds.). New York: Bloomsbury, 1–5. Adams, Carol J., and Lori Gruen. 2014. Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth. New York: Bloomsbury. Adler, Jonathan E. 1987. “Moral Development and the Personal Point of View.” In Women and Moral Theory, Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers (eds.). Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 205–34. Adler, Julius, and Wung-Wai Tso. 1974. “ ‘Decision’-Making in Bacteria: Chemotactic Response of Escherichia coli to Conflicting Stimuli,” Science, n.s., 184 (4143) (June 21): 1292–4. ahbez, eden. 1960. Eden’s Island: The Music of an Enchanted Isle. Hollywood, CA: Del-Fi Records LP. Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. “Eluding Capture: The Science, Culture, and Pleasure of ‘Queer’ Animals.” In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (eds.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 51–72. Allister, Mark (ed.). 2004. Eco-Man: New Perspectives on Masculinity and Nature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Anderlini-D’Onofrio, Serena. 2011. “Bisexuality, Gaia, Eros: Portals to the Arts of Loving.” Journal of Bisexuality 11: 176–94. Anderson, Ben. 2009. “Affective Atmospheres.” Emotion, Space and Society 2 (2): 77–81. Anderson, Michael, dir. 1976. Logan’s Run. Metro Goldwyn Mayer/United Artists. Anderson, Virginia. 2006. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anderson, William. 1990. Green Man: The Archetype of our Oneness with the Earth. London: HarperCollins. Andrews, David (ed.). 2001. Michael Jordan, Inc.: Corporate Sport, Media Culture, and Late Modern America. Albany: State University of New York Press. Andrews, Gregory. 2020. “Australian Magpie Mimics Emergency Siren during NSW Bushfires.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHzs-mlDXMY. Ankomah, W. S. 2018. “Animal Studies: Let’s Talk About Animal Welfare and Liberation Issues in Childhood.” Society and Animals 28 (3): 311–26.

References

Arcari, Paula, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, and Hayley Singer. 2020. “Where Species don’t meet: Invisibilized animals, urban nature and city limits.” Environment and Planning E 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848620939870 Austin, J. L. (1946) 1979. “Other Minds.” In Philosophical Papers, 3rd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 76–116. Avise, J. C., and J. E. Mank. 2009. “Evolutionary perspectives on hermaphroditism in fishes. Sexual development: genetics, molecular biology, evolution, endocrinology, embryology, and pathology of sex determination and differentiation,” Sexual Development 3 (2–3): 152–63. https://doi.org/10.1159/ 000223079 Avital, Eytan, and Eva Jablonka. 2000. Animal Traditions: Behavioural Inheritance in Evolution. New York: Cambridge University Press. Avramescu, Catalin. 2010. Interviewed by Justin E. H. Smith, in “The Raw and the Cooked.” Cabinet Magazine. Excerpted as “An Examination of Cannibalism Is Bound to Induce a Species of Metaphysical Unease,” in Berfrois: Intellectual Jousting in the Republic of Letters. http://www.berfrois.com/2010/11/ examination-of-cannibalism. Bad Newz Kennels, Smithfield Virginia. August 28, 2008. Report of Investigation, Special Agent-in-Charge for Investigations Brian Haaser. USDA Office of Inspector General-Investigations, Northeast Region, Beltsville, MD. Bagby, Rachel. 1990. “Daughters of Growing Things.” In Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, Irene Diamond and G. F. Orenstein (eds.). San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Bagemihl, Bruce. 1999. Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Bailey, Cathryn. 2007a. “We Are What We Eat: Feminist Vegetarianism and the Reproduction of Racial Identity.” Hypatia 22 (1): 39–59. Bailey, Cathryn. 2007b. “On the Backs of Animals: The Valorization of Reason in Contemporary Animal Ethics.” In The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, J. Donovan and Carol J. Adams (eds.). New York: Columbia University Press, 344–59. Baker, Steve. 2000. The Postmodern Animal. London: Reaktion Books. Baker, Steve. 2001. Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation. Champaign and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Baker, Steve. 2013. ARTIST|ANIMAL. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Banerjee, Damayanti, and Michael Mayerfeld Bell. 2007. “Ecogender: Locating Gender in Environmental Social Science.” Society & Natural Resources 20: 3–19. Barnosky, Anthony D., Elizabeth A. Hadly, Jordi Bascompte, Eric L. Berlow, James H. Brown, Mikael Fortelius, Wayne M. Getz, et al. 2012. “Approaching a State Shift in Earth’s Biosphere.” Nature 486 (7401): 52–8. Bate, Jonathan. 1998. “Poetry and Biodiversity.” In Writing the Environment, Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells (eds.). London: Zed Books, 53–70. Bateson, Gregory, and Mary Catherine Bateson. 1987. Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. New York: Bantam. Baur, Gene. 2008. Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds about Animals and Food. New York: Touchstone. BBC News. 2019. “Queen Hind: Rescuers race to save 14,000 sheep on capsized cargo ship.” November 25. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50538592

393

394

References

BBC News. 2020. “Queen Hind: 180 rescued sheep arrive at new home in Romania.” January 13. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51088953 Beirne, Piers. 1997. “Rethinking Bestiality: Towards a Concept of Interspecies Sexual Assault.” Theoretical Criminology 1 (3): 317–40. Beirne, Piers. 1998. “For a Nonspeciesist Criminology: Animal Abuse as an Object of Study.” Criminology 37 (1): 117–48. Beirne, Piers. 2004. “From Animal Abuse to Interhuman Violence? A Critical Review of the Progression Thesis.” Society and Animals 12 (1): 39–65. Bekoff, Marc, and Colin Allen. 1998. “Intentional Communication and Social Play: How and Why Animals Negotiate and Agree to Play.” In Animal Play, Marc Bekoff and John A. Byers (eds.). New York: Cambridge University Press, 97–114. Bekoff, Marc, and Jessica Pierce. 2009. Wild Justice. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Belcourt, Billy-Ray. 2015. “Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects: (Re)Locating Animality in Decolonial Thought.” Societies 5 (1): 1–11. Benhabib, Seyla. 1987. “The Generalized and the Concrete Other: The KohlbergGilligan Controversy and Moral Theory.” In Women and Moral Theory, Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers (eds.). Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 154–76. Bennett, Joshua. 2020. Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Benney, Norma. 1983. “All of One Flesh: The Rights of Animals.” In Reclaim the Earth: Women Speak out for Life on Earth, Leonie Caldecott and Stephanie Leland (eds.). London: The Women’s Press, 141–50. Bentham, Jeremy. (1789) 1939. “An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.” In The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill, Edwin A. Burtt (ed). New York: Modern Library, 791–852. Benton, Ted. 1988. “Humanism=Speciesism. Marx on Humans and Animals.” Radical Philosophy 50: 4–18. Benton, Ted. 1993. Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights, and Social Justice. London and New York: Verso. Berger, John. (1972) 2008. Ways of Seeing. New York and London: Penguin. Berger, John. (1980) 1991. About Looking. New York: Vintage/Random House. Bergson, Henri. 1974. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Mabelle Andison. New York: Citadel. Bergson, Henri. 1998. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Dover. Bering, Jesse. 2012. “The Rat That Laughed.” Scientific American 306 (7): 74–7. Bérubé, Michael. 2010. “Equality, Freedom, and/or Justice for All: A Response to Martha Nussbaum.” In Cognitive Disability and its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, Eva Feder Kittay (ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Bernabucci, Umberto. 2019. “Climate change: impact on livestock and how can we adapt.” Animal Frontiers 9 (1): 3–5. https://doi.org/10.1093/af/vfy039 Birch, Tony. 2018. “Friday Essay: Recovering a Narrative of Place-stories in the Time of Climate Change,” The Conversation, April 27. Birke, Lynda. 1994. Feminism, Animals and Science: The Naming of the Shrew. Buckingham and Bristol, PA: Open University Press.

References

Birke, Lynda. 2014. “Listening to Voices: On the Pleasures and Problems of Studying Human-Animal Relationships.” In The Rise of Critical Animal Studies, Nik Taylor and Richard Twine (eds.). London: Routledge, 71–87. Bishop, Alice. 2019. A Constant Hum. Melbourne: Text Publishing. Bishop, Sharon. 1987. “Connections and Guilt.” Hypatia 2 (1): 7–23. Blackwood, Evelyn, and Saskia E. Wieringa. 2007. “Globalization, Sexuality, and Silences: Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in an Asian Context.” In Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia, Saskia E. Wieringa, Evelyn Blackwood, and Abha Bhaiya (eds.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–21. Bizot, Judithe. 1992. “Raising Our Voices: An Interview with Bella Abzug.” UNESCO Courier 45 (March): 36–7. Blattner, Charlotte, Sue Donaldson, and Ryan Wilcox. 2020. “Animal Agency in Community: A Political Multispecis Ethnography of VINE Sanctuary.” Politics and Animals 6: 1–22. Boisseron, Bénédicte. 2018. Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question. New York: Columbia University Press. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2009. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. 3rd edn. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Borschmann, Gregg. 2017. “Leasing rare animals flagged as a way to fund wildlife conservation programs.” Australian Broadcasting Corporation. https://www.abc.net.au/ news/2017-10-06/leasing-endangered-animals-could-help-biodiversity-crisis/9022554 Boyde, Melissa. 2013a. “Mining Animal Death for All It’s Worth.” In Animal Death, J. Johnston and F. Probyn-Rapsey (eds.). Sydney: Sydney University Press, 119–36. Boyde, Melissa. 2013b. “Mrs Boss! We gotta get those fat cheeky bullocks into that big bloody metal ship!”: “Live export as romantic backdrop in Baz Luhrmann”s Australia.” In Captured: The Animal Within Culture, M. J. Boyde (ed). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 60–74. Bray, H., S. C. Zambrano, A. Chur-Hansen, and R. A. Ankeny. 2016. “Not appropriate dinner table conversation? Talking to children about meat production.” Appetite 100: 1–9. Brighter Green. 2019. “Climate Policy Must Support Sustainable, Equitable, and Climate-Compatible Food and Agriculture: Policy Recommendations for COP25, Madrid. https://brightergreen.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/COP-25Single-Flyer.pdf Brophy, Brigid. (1965) 1968. “The Rights of Animals.” In Don’t Never Forget: Collected Views and Reviews. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 15–21. Brown, Wendy. 2019. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic politics in the West. New York: Columbia University Press. Browne, Kathe, Jason Lim, and Gavin Brown (eds.). 2007. Geographies of Sexualities: Theory, Practices and Politics. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Brueck, Julia Feliz. 2017. Veganism in an Oppressive World. A Vegans-of- Color Community Project. Sanctuary Publishers. Brueck, Julia Feliz, and Z. McNeil. 2020. Queer and Trans Liberation: Achieving Liberation Through Consistent Anti-Oppression. Sanctuary Publishers.

395

396

References

Budiansky, Stephen. 1999. The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication. New Haven: Yale University Press. Buerkle, C. Wesley. 2009. “Metrosexuality Can Stuff It: Beef Consumption as (Heteromasculine) Fortification.” Text and Performance Quarterly 29 (1): 77–93. Bullard, Robert. 1990. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Burke, Bill. n.d. “Once limited to the rural South, dogfighting sees a cultural shift.” http://hamptonroads.com/print/283641 Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life. New York: Verso. Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War. New York: Verso. Cain, Joey, and Bradley Rose. “Who are the radical faeries?” http://eniac.yak.net/ shaggy/faerieinf.html Callicott, J. Baird. (1980) 1992. “Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair.” In The Animal Rights/Environmental Ethics Debate: The Environmental Perspective, Eugene C. Hargrove (ed). Albany: State University of New York Press, 37–69. Callicott, J. Baird. 1987. “The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic.” In Companion to “A Sand County Almanac”: Interpretive and Critical Essays. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 186–207. Callicott, J. Baird. 1989. In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy Albany: State University of New York Press. Calvo, Luz, and Rueda Esquibel. 2015. Decolonize Your Diet: Plant-Based MexicanAmerican Recipes for Health and Healing. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Capecchi, Christina, and Katie Rogers. 2015. “Killer of Cecil the Lion Finds Out That He Is a Target Now, of Internet Vigilantism.” The New York Times, July 29. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/30/us/cecil-the-lion-walter-palmer.html Carastathis, Anna. 2013. “Basements and Intersections.” Hypatia 28: 698–715. Casselton, Lorna A. 2002. “Mate Recognition in Fungi.” Heredity 88 (2): 142–7. doi:10.1038/sj.hdy.6800035 Cassidy, Emily S., et al. 2013. “Redefining Agricultural Yields: From Tonnes to People Nourished per Hectare.” Environmental Research Letters, August 1. Cavell, Stanley. 1998. “Companionable Thinking.” Philosophy and Animal Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Césaire, Aimé. 2000. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Celermajer, Danielle. 2020. “Omnicide: who is responsible for the gravest of all crimes?” ABC Religion and Ethics. https://www.abc.net.au/religion/ danielle-celermajer-omnicide-gravest-of-all-crimes/11838534 Center for Biological Diversity. 2020. “54 Groups Urge Congress: Don’t Use COVID-19 Funds to Prop Up Factory Farms.” April 15. https:// biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/ press-releases/54-groups-urge-congress-dont-use-covid-19-funds-to-prop-upfactory-farms-2020-04-15/ Chadwick, Whitney. (1990) 1996. Women, Art, and Society. London: Thames & Hudson.

References

Chapple, Christopher. 1986. “Noninjury to Animals: Jaina and Buddhist Perspectives.” In Animal Sacrifices: Religious Perspectives on the Use of Animals in Science, Tom Regan (ed.). Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 213–35. Chou, Wah-Shan. 2001. “Homosexuality and the Cultural Politics of Tongzhi in Chinese Societies.” Journal of Homosexuality 40 (3–4): 27–46. doi:10.1300/ J082v40n03_03 Christ, Carol P. 1997. Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality. New York: Routledge. Christ, Carol P., and Judith Plaskow (eds.). 1979. Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion. New York: HarperCollins. Clement, Grace. 2003. “The Ethic of Care and the Problem of Wild Animals.” Between the Species 3: 1–9. http://cla.calpoly.edu/̃jlynch/clement.htm Coakley, Jay. 1998. Sport In Society. 6th edn. New York: McGraw-Hill. Coetzee, J. M., et al. 1999. The Lives of Animals, edited and with an introduction by Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cohen, Rachel. 2020. “Small Farms, Already Stressed and Underfunded, Struggle for Federal Coronavirus Relief.” The Intercept, April 29. https://theintercept. com/2020/04/29/small-farms-coronavirus-aid/ Cole, Eve Browning, and Susan Coultrap-McQuin (eds.). 1992. Explorations in Feminist Ethics: Theory and Practice. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Collard, Rosemary-Claire. 2020. Animal Traffic: Lively Capital in the Global Exotic Pet Trade. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2005. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge. Compassion in World Farming. “Our Campaigns: The Global Live Animal Transport Trade.” https://www.ciwf.org.uk/our-campaigns/live-animal-transport/ global-live-animal-transport-trade/ The Conversation. 2019. “Climate Change is Affecting Crop Yields and Reducing Global Food Supplies.” July 9. https://theconversation.com/climate-changeis-affecting-crop-yields-and-reducing-global-food-supplies-118897 Corkery, Michael, and David Yaffe-Bellany. 2020. “As Meat Plants Stayed Open to Feed Americans, Exports to China Surged.” The New York Times, June 16. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/business/meat-industry-china-pork.html Corman, Lauren. 2016. “The Ventriloquist”s Burden: Animal Advocacy and the Problem of Speaking for Others.” In Animal Subjects 2.0., J. Castricano and L. Corman (eds.). Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 243–512. Corrigan, Robert W. 1965. Comedy, Meaning and Form. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing. Craymer, Lucy. 2020. “When Pigs Fly, They Want Drinks, Legroom.” The Wall Street Journal, November 10. https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-pigs-flythey-want-drinks-leg-room-11605022688 Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. 1989. “Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum: 139–67.

397

398

References

Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. 1992. “Whose Story Is It Anyway? Feminist and Antiracist Appropriations of Anita Hill.” In Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, Toni Morrison (ed.). New York: Pantheon Books. Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund. “Cerrado-Species.” https://www.cepf.net/ our-work/biodiversity-hotspots/cerrado/species Cronin, Katie, Edwin van Leeuwen, Innocent Chitalu Mulenga, and Mark Bodamer. 2001. “Behavioral response of a chimpanzee mother toward her dead infant.” American Journal of Primatology 73 (5): 415–21. Cuomo, Chris. 1992. “Unravelling the Problems in Ecofeminism.” Environmental Ethics 15 (4): 351–63. Cuomo, Chris. 2017. “The Anthropocene: Foregone or Premature Conclusion?” Earth Magazine (October): 10–11. Cuomo, Chris, and Lori Gruen. 1998. “On Puppies and Pussies.” In Daring to Be Good, Ami Bar On and Ann Ferguson (eds.). New York: Routledge, 129–44. Curtin, Deane. 1992. “Recipe for Values.” In Cooking, Eating, Thinking, D. Curtin and L. Heldke (eds.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 123–44. Curtin, Deane. (1991) 1996. “Toward an Ecological Ethic of Care.” In Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals, Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams (eds.), 60–76. Dalton, Jane. 2020. “Dentist who slaughtered Cecil the lion ‘hunts and kills protected wild ram’ just four years later.” The Independent, July 12. https:// www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/walter-palmer-cecil-lion-hunt-ramsheep-mongolia-a9613856.html Damasio, Antonio R. 2010. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. 1st edn. New York: Pantheon Books. Danford, Natalie. 2004. “DaCapo Embraces Metrosexuality.” Publisher’s Weekly (January 29): 107. Dave, Naisargi N. 2014. “WITNESS: Humans, Animals, and the Politics of Becoming.” Cultural Anthropology 29 (3): 433–56. Davies, Katherine. 1988. “What is Ecofeminism?” Women and Environments 10 (3): 4–6. Davies, Sharyn Graham. 2006. Challenging Gender Norms: Five Genders Among Bugs in Indonesia. Independence, KY: Wadsworth Publishing. Davion, Victoria. 1994. “Is Ecofeminism Feminist?” In Ecological Feminism, Karen J. Warren (ed.). New York: Routledge, 8–28. Davis, Angela Y. 1981. Women, Race & Class. New York: Random House. Davis, David Brion. 1996. “At the Heart of Slavery.” New York Review of Books 43 (16): 51–4. Davis, Karen. 1988. “Farm Animals and the Feminine Connection.” Animals’ Agenda 8 (January/February): 38–9. Davis, Karen. 1995. “Thinking Like a Chicken: Farm Animals and the Feminine Connection.” In Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan (eds.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 192–212. Davis, Karen. 2001. More than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality. New York: Lantern Books.

References

Davis, Susan, and Margo Demello. 2003. Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature. New York: Lantern Books. Day, Barbara, and Kimberly Knight. 1991. “The Rain Forest in Our Back Yard.” Essence 21 (January): 75–7. Deckha, Maneesha. 2006. “The Salience of Species Difference for Feminist Theory.” Hastings Women’s Law Journal 17 (1): 1–38. Deckha, Maneesha. 2008. “Intersectionality and Post-human Visions of Equality. Wisconsin Journal of Law 23. Deckha, Maneesha. 2010. “The subhuman as a cultural agent of violence.” Journal of Critical Animal Studies 8 (3): 28–51. Deckha, Maneesha. 2012. “Toward a Postcolonial, Posthumanist Feminist Theory: Centralizing Race and Culture in Feminist Work on Nonhuman Animals.” Hypatia 27 (3): 527–45. Deckha, Maneesha. 2018. “Postcolonial.” In Critical Terms for Animal Studies, Lori Gruen (ed). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. DeFries, Ruth. 2021. What Would Nature Do? A Guide for Our Uncertain Times. New York: Columbia University Press. DeGrazia, David. 1999. “Animal Ethics around the Turn of the Twenty-First Century.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 11 (2): 111–29. de la Pena, Nonny, and Susan Davis. 1990. “The Greens are White: And Minorities Want In.” Newsweek 116 (October 15), 34. DeMello, Margo (ed.) 2016. Mourning Animals: Rituals and Practices Surrounding Animal Death. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press. Dembroff, Robin. Forthcoming. Real Men on Top: the Relations of Patriarchy. New York and London: Oxford University Press. Demetrakakes, Pan. 2020. “Conagra, JBS Hit with COVID Fines.” Food Processing, October 30. https://www.foodprocessing.com/industrynews/2020/ conagra-jbs-hit-with-covid-fines/ Derrida, Jacques. 1991. “ ‘Eating Well’, or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” In Who Comes After the Subject?, Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (eds.). New York and London: Routledge, 96–119. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter): 369–418. Descartes, René. 2007. “From the Letters of 1646 and 1649.” In The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings, L. Kalof and A. Fitzgerald (eds.). Oxford: Berg, 59–62. Despret, Vinciane. 2004. “The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis.” Body & Society 10: 111–34. Despret, Vinciane. 2016. What would animals say if we asked the right questions? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Devadoss, Christabel. 2020. “Sounding ‘Brown’: Everyday Aural Discrimination and Othering.” Political Geography 79: 1–10. Devall, Bill, and George Sessions. 1984. Deep Ecology: Living as if the Planet Mattered. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books. Diamond, Anna. 2017. “The Deadly 1991 Hamlet Fire Exposed the High Cost of ‘Cheap.’ ” The Smithsonian. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ deadly-1991-hamlet-fire-exposed-high-cost-cheap-180964816/

399

400

References

Diamond, Cora. 1991. The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Diamond, Cora. 1991a. “Eating Meat and Eating People.” In The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 319–34. Diamond, Cora. 1991b. “Anything But Argument.” In The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 335–51. Diamond, Cora. 2008. “The Difficulty of Reality.” In Philosophy and Animal Life by Stanley Cavell et al. (eds.). New York: Columbia University Press, 43–89. Dinker, K. G., & Pedersen, H. 2016. “Critical Animal Pedagogies: Re-learning Our Relations with Animal Others.” In The Palgrave International Handbook of Alternative Education HE, Helen E. Lees and Nel Noddings (eds.). London: Palgrave MacMillan. Donald, Diana. 2020. Women Against Cruelty: Protection of Animals in NineteenthCentury Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Donaldson, Sue, and Will Kymlicka. 2011. Zoopolis. New York: Oxford University Press. Donley, Arvin. 2020. “China Imports of Brazilian Soy Up Year-on-Year.” WorldGrain.com, October 28. https://www.world-grain.com/ articles/14409-china-imports-of-brazilian-soy-up-year-on-year Donovan, Josephine. 1990. “Animal Rights and Feminist Theory.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15 (2): 350–75. Donovan, Josephine. 1991. “Reply to Noddings.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16 (2): 423–5. Donovan, Josephine. 1995. “Comment on George’s ‘Should Feminists be Vegetarians?’ ” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 21 (1): 226–9. Donovan, Josephine. 1996. “Attention to Suffering: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals.” Journal of Social Philosophy 27 (1): 81–102. Donovan, Josephine. 2004. “ ‘Miracles of Creation’: Animals in J. M. Coetzee’s Work.” Michigan Quarterly Review 43 (1): 78–93. Donovan, Josephine. 2013. “The Voice of Animals: A Response to Recent French Care Theory in Animal Ethics.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 11 (1): 8–23. Donovan, Josephine. 2016. The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Donovan, Josephine, and Carol J. Adams (eds.). 1996. Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals. New York: Continuum. Donovan, Josephine, and Carol J. Adams (eds.). 2007a. The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics. New York: Columbia University Press. Donovan, Josephine, and Carol J. Adams. 2007b. “Introduction.” In The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams (eds.). New York: Columbia University Press, 1–20. Douglas, Leah. 2020. “Mapping Covid-19 outbreaks in the food system.” Food & Environment Reporting Network, April 22. https://thefern.org/2020/04/ mapping-covid-19-in-meat-and-food-processing-plants/ Dreher, Tanja. 2010. “Speaking up or Being Heard? Community Media Interventions and the Politics of Listening.” Media, Culture & Society 32 (1): 85–103. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443709350099

References

Driskill, Qwo-Li. 2004. “Stolen From Our Bodies: First Nations Two-Spirits/Queers and the Journey to a Sovereign Erotic.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 16 (2): 50–64. doi:10.1353/ail.2004.0020 Drucker, Peter. 1996. “ ‘In the Tropics There Is No Sin’: Sexuality and Gay–Lesbian Movements in the Third World.” New Left Review 1 (218): 75–101. Duffy, Erin, and Natalie Saenz. 2020. “ ‘I’m scared to return’: Nebraska meatpacking workers and their families speak out.” Omaha World-Herald, May 10. https://omaha.com/state-and-regional/im-scared-to-return-nebraska-meatpackingworkers-and-their-families-speak-out/article_d9d8c573-a1f9-5f23-b480c20bb0ba3ab0.html Dunayer, Joan. 2001. Animal Equality: Language and Liberation. Derwood, MD: Ryce. Dundes, Alan. 1994. “Gallus As Phallus: A Psychoanalytic Cross-Cultural Consideration of the Cockfight As Fowl Play.” In The Cockfight: A Casebook, Alan Dundes (ed.). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 241–82. Eaton, David. 2002. “Incorporating the Other: Val Plumwood’s Integration of Ethical Frameworks.” Ethics and the Environment 7 (2): 153–80. Eisen, Jessica. 2019. “Milked: Nature, Necessity, and American Law.” Berkeley Journal of Gender Law & Justice 34: 71–116. Elflein, John. 2021. “New York State COVID-19 cumulative deaths from Mar. 15, 2020 to Jan. 17, 2021, by day.” Statista, January 18. https://www.statista.com/ statistics/1109713/new-york-state-covid-cumulative-deaths-us/ Emmerman, Karen. 2012. “Beyond the Basic/Nonbasic Interests Distinction: A Feminist Approach to Inter-species Moral Conflict and Moral Repair.” PhD Dissertation, University of Washington. Emmerman, Karen S. 2019. “What’s love got to do with it? An Ecofeminist approach to inter-animal and intra-cultural conflicts of interest.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (1): 77–91. Engels, Friedrich, and Lewis Henry Morgan. 1972. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. New York: Pathfinder Press. Epprecht, Marc. 2008. Heterosexual Africa?: The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Erasmus K. H. J. zu Ermgassen, et al. 2020. “The Origin, Supply Chain, and Deforestation Risk of Brazil’s Beef Exports.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. December 15, 117 (50): 31770–31779. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/50/31770 Erickson, Bruce. 2010. “ ‘fucking close to water’: Queering the Production of the Nation.” In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, Catriona MortimerSandilands and Bruce Erickson (eds.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 309–30. Escobar, Arturo. 2020. Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Extinction Rebellion. “We Demand” (authored and representing XR US). http:// extinctionrebellion.us/demands-principles Evans, Arthur. 1978. Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture. Boston, MA: Fag Rag Books. Evans, Rhonda, DeAnn Gauthier, and Craig Forsyth. 1998. “Dogfighting: Symbolic Expression and Validation of Masculinity.” Sex Roles 39 (11/12): 825–38.

401

402

References

Eversley, Melanie. 2016. “Dakota Access pipeline protests draw contrasts to Bundy.” USA Today, October 26. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/10/28/ dakota-access-pipeline-protests-continue-questions-fairness-emerge/92913148/ Evershed, Nick, and Calla Wahlquist. 2018. “Live Exports: Mass Animal Deaths Going Unpunished as Holes in System Revealed.” The Guardian, April 9. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/10/ live-exports-mass-deaths-going-unpunished-as-holes-in-system-revealed Fanon, Franz. 1966. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press. Farm Sanctuary. 2021. “Suffering for Their Meat, Milk, and Wool.” https://www. farmsanctuary.org/sheep/#multi_column_block_1 Farrell, Perry. 1990. “Of Course.” On Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual de lo Habitual. Warner Brothers. Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh. 2007. The River Cottage Meat Book. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press. Feldstein, Stephanie, and Mia MacDonald. 2020. “COVID-19 Should Push Congress to Fix Our Flawed Food System.” The Hill, April 30. https://thehill. com/opinion/energy-environment/495427-covid-19-should-push-congressto-fix-our-flawed-food-system Flanagan, Richard. 2020. “Australia is committing Climate Suicide.” The New York Times January 3. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/opinion/australia-firesclimate-change.html Ferber, Abby. 2007. “The Construction of Black Masculinity: White Supremacy Now and Then.” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 31 (1): 11–24. Finn, John. 1998. “Masculinity and Earth Gods.” Certified Male: A Journal of Men’s Issues (Australia) 9. http://www.certifiedmale.com.au/issue9/earthgod.htm Fisher, Elizabeth. 1979. Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday. Fitzgerald, Amy. 2005. Animal Abuse and Family Violence: Researching the Interrelationships of Abusive Power. Mellen Studies in Sociology, vol. 48. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Fleischer, Richard, dir. 1973. Soylent Green. Metro Goldwyn Meyer. Flocker, Michael. 2003. The Metrosexual Guide to Style: A Handbook for the Modern Man. Cambridge, MA: DaCapo Press. Flynn, Clifton P. 1999. “Exploring the Link between Corporal Punishment and Children’s Cruelty to Animals.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 61: 971–81. Flynn, Clifton P. 2000a. “Why Family Professionals Can No Longer Ignore Violence Toward Animals.” Family Relations 49 (1): 87–95. Flynn, Clifton P. 2000b. “Woman’s Best Friend: Pet Abuse and the Role of Companion Animals in the Lives of Battered Women.” Violence Against Women 6 (2): 162–77. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. 2006. Livestock’s Long Shadow. Rome: Livestock, Environment and Development Initiative. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. 2013. “Tackling Climate Change through Livestock: A global assessment of emissions and mitigation opportunities.” http://www.fao.org/3/i3437e/i3437e.pdf Forsyth, Craig, and Rhonda Evans. 1998. “Dogmen: The Rationalization of Deviance.” Society & Animals 6 (3): 203–18.

References

Forte, Dianne J. 1992. “SisteReach. . . Because 500 Years is Enough,” Vital Signs: News from the National Black Women’s Health Project 1 (Spring): 5. Fraiman, Susan. 2012. “Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals: Tracking Gender in Animal Studies.” Critical Inquiry 39 (1): 89. Francione, Gary. 1996. “Ecofeminism and Animal Rights: A Review of Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals.” Women’s Rights Law Reporter 18: 95–106. Francione, Gary. 2000. Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Francione, Gary. 2004. “Animals—Property or Persons?” In Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, Cass R. Sunstein and Martha Nussbaum (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 108–42. Francione, Gary. 2009. “We’re all Michael Vick.” Philly Online, August 14. http:// www.abolitionistapproach.com/media/links/p2026/michael-vick.pdf Francione, Gary. 2012. “ ‘Pets’: The inherent problems of domestication.” Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach, July 31. https://www.abolitionistapproach. com/pets-the-inherent-problems-of-domestication/ Fraser, James A., and Joseph Heitman. 2004. “Evolution of Fungal Sex Chromosomes.” Molecular Microbiology 51 (2): 299–306. doi:10.1046/ j.1365-2958.2003.03874.x Frazier, Chelsea M. 2016. “Troubling Ecology: Wangechi Mutu, Octavia Butler, and Black Feminist Interventions in Environmentalism.” Critical Ethnic Studies 2 (1): 40–72. Frazier, Chelsea M. 2020. “Black Feminist Ecological Thought: A Manifesto,” Atmos. https://atmos.earth/black-feminist-ecological-thought-essay/ Freedman, Andrew, and Chris Mooney. 2020. “Earth’s Carbon Dioxide Levels Hit Record High, Despite Coronavirus-related Emissions Drop.” The Washington Post, June 4. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/06/04/ carbon-dioxide-record-2020/ Freeman, Andrea. 2013. “The Unbearable Whiteness of Milk: Food Oppression and the USDA.” UC Irvine Law Review 3: 1251–70. French, Marilyn. 1985. Beyond Power: On Men, Women and Morals. New York: Summit. Frick, Robert. 2004. “The Manly Man’s Guide to Makeup and Metrosexuality.” Kiplinger’s Report (June), 38. Friends of the Earth et al. 2020. “120+ Organizations Target Meatpacking Giant Tyson Foods for Failing to Protect Workers from Covid-19,” July 6. https://foe.org/ news/120-organizations-target-meatpacking-giant-tyson-foods-for-failing-toprotect-workers-from-covid-19/ Fritsch, Kelly, Clare O’Connor, and A. K. Thompson. 2016. Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle. Chico, CA: AK Press. Fry, Christopher. 1965. “Comedy.” In Comedy, Meaning and Form, Robert W. Corrigan (ed.). San Francisco: Chandler Publishing, 15–16. Fudge, Erica. 2000. Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture. Champaign and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Gaard, Greta. 1993. “Ecofeminism and Native American Cultures: Pushing the Limits of Cultural Imperialism?” In Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, Greta Gaard (ed.). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

403

404

References

Gaard, Greta (ed.). 1993. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Gaard, Greta. 1994. “Milking Mother Nature: An Ecofeminist Critique of rBGH.” The Ecologist 24: 6. 1–2. Gaard, Greta. 1997. “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism.” Hypatia 12 (1): 114–37. Gaard, Greta. 2001. “Tools for a Cross-Cultural Feminist Ethics: Exploring Ethical Contexts and Contents in the Makah Whale Hunt.” Hypatia 16 (1): 1–26. Gaard, Greta. 2002. “Vegetarian Ecofeminism: A Review Essay.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 23 (2): 117–46. Gaard, Greta. 2007. Nature of Home: Taking Root in a Place. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Gaard, Greta. 2011. “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism.” Feminist Formations 23 (2): 26–53. Gaard, Greta, and Lori Gruen. 1993. “Ecofeminism: Toward Global Justice and Planetary Health. Society and Nature 2 (1): 1–35. Gaard, Greta, and Lori Gruen. 1995. “Comment on George’s ‘Should Feminists be Vegetarians?’ ” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 21 (1): 230–41. Gaarder, Emily. 2011. Women and the Animal Rights Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Galeano, Eduardo. 1992. We Say No. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2009. Staring: How We Look. New York and London: Oxford University Press. Garbarino, James. 1999. “Protecting Children and Animals from Abuse: A Transspecies Concept of Caring.” In Child Abuse, Domestic Violence, and Animal Abuse: Linking the Circles of Compassion for Prevention and Intervention, Frank R. Ascione and Phil Arkow (eds.). West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 9–15. Garcia, Diego. 2019. “Questão ambiental é para veganos que só comem vegetais, diz Bolsonaro.” Folha de S. Paulo, July 27. https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ cotidiano/2019/07/questao-ambiental-e-para-veganos-que-so-comem-vegetaisdiz-bolsonaro.shtml Garner, Robert. 2003. “Political Ideologies and the Moral Status of Animals.” Journal of Political Ideologies 8 (2): 233–46. George, Kathryn P. 1994. “Should Feminists be Vegetarians?” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19 (2): 405–34. George, Kathryn P. 1995. “Reply to Adams, Donovan, and Gaard and Gruen.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 21 (1): 242–60. George, Kathryn P. 2000. Animal, Vegetable, or Woman? A Feminist Critique of Ethical Vegetarianism. Albany: State University of New York Press. Germanwatch. 2021. Global Climate Risk Index 2021: Who Suffers Most from Extreme Weather Events? Weather-related Loss Events in 2019 and 2000 to 2019. https://germanwatch.org/en/19777 Gibson, Hanna. 2005. “Dog Fighting Detailed Discussion.” Animal Legal and Historical Center, Michigan State University College of Law. http://www. animallaw.info/articles/ddusdogfighting.htm Gibson, Kate. 2020. “ ‘Food Supply Chain in Breaking’, Tyson Foods Chairman Warns Amid Meat Plant Shutdowns.” CBS News, April 27. https://www.

References

cbsnews.com/news/tyson-foods-chairman-food-supply-chain-breaking-meatplant-shutdowns-coronavirus-pandemic/ Gilbert, Sandra. 2006. Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Gillespie, Kathryn. 2018. The Cow with Ear Tag #1389. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gilman, Sander L. 1985. “Black Bodies; White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature.” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn): 205–43. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gorant, Jim. 2010. The Lost Dogs: Michael Vick’s Dogs and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption. New York: Gotham Books. Gordon-Reed, Annette. 2009. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. GRAIN. 2014. “Hungry for land: small farmers feed the world with less than a quarter of all farmland.” May 28. https://www.grain.org/article/ entries/4929-hungry-for-land-small-farmers-feed-the-world-with-less-than-aquarter-of-all-farmland†footnote6sym Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers Co. Grandin, Temple, and Catherine Johnson. 2009. Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Gray, Elizabeth Dodson. 1979. Green Paradise Lost. Wellesley, MA: Roundtable Press. Gruen, Lori. 1991. “Animals.” In A Companion to Ethics, Peter Singer (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Gruen, Lori. 1993. “Dismantling Oppression: An Analysis of the Connection between Women and Animals.” In Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, Greta Gaard (ed.). Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 60–90. Gruen, Lori. 1994. “Toward an Ecofeminist Moral Epistemology.” In Ecological Feminism, Karen Warren (ed.). New York: Routledge. Gruen, Lori. 1996. “On The Oppression of Women and Animals.” Environmental Ethics 18 (4): 441–4. Gruen, Lori. 2001. “Beyond Exclusion: The Importance of Context in Ecofeminist Theory.” In Land, Value, Community, J. Hall and W. Ouderkirk (eds.). Albany: State University of New York Press. Gruen, Lori. 2002. “Conflicting Values in a Conflicted World.” Women & Environments International (52–3): 16–18. Gruen, Lori. 2004. “Empathy and Vegetarian Commitments.” In Food for Thought: The Debate over Eating Meat, Steve F. Sapontzis (ed.). Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Gruen, Lori. 2009. “Attending to Nature: Empathetic Engagement with the More Than Human World.” Ethics & the Environment 14 (2): 23–38. Gruen, Lori. 2011. Ethics and Animals: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

405

406

References

Gruen, Lori. 2012. “Navigating Difference (Again): Animal Ethics and Entangled Empathy.” In Strangers to Nature: Animal Lives and Human Ethics, G. Zucker (ed.). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 213–34. Gruen, Lori. 2013. “Entangled Empathy: An Alternate Approach to Animal Ethics.” In The Politics of Species: Reshaping our relationships with other animals, Raymond Corbey and Annette Lanjouw (eds.). New York: Cambridge University Press, 223–31. Gruen, Lori (ed.). 2014. The Ethics of Captivity. New York: Oxford University Press. Gruen, Lori (ed.). 2015. Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals. New York: Lantern Books. Gruen, Lori. 2018. “Empathy.” In Critical Terms for Animal Studies, L. Gruen (ed.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 141–53. Gruen, Lori, and Fiona Probyn Rapsey. 2018. Animaladies: Gender, Animals, and Madness. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Gruen, Lori, and Kari Weil. 2012. “Animal Others—Editors’ Introduction.” Hypatia 27 (3): 477–87. Gruen, Lori, and Robert C. Jones. 2015. “Veganism as an Aspiration.” In The Moral Complexity of Eating Meat, Ben Bramble and Bob Fischer (eds.). New York: Oxford University Press, 153–71. Guthman, J. 2008. “ ‘If They Only Knew’: Color Blindness and Universalism in California Alternative Food Institutions.” The Professional Geographer 60 (3): 387–97. Halberstam, Jack. 2018. Female Masculinity. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press. Hale, Grace Elizabeth. 1998. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South: 1890–1940. New York: Vintage. Hamerschlag, Kari. 2011. Meat Eater’s Guide to Climate Change and Health. Washington, DC: Environmental Working Group, 5. https://www.ewg.org/ meateatersguide/ Hamilton, C. Lou. 2020. “Vegan Reads: Peter Singer’s Why Vegan? (2020).” February 28. Veganism, Sex, and Politics. https://veganismsexandpolitics.com/ vegan-reads-peter-singers-why-vegan-2020/ Hamilton, Cynthia. 1990. “Women, Home and Community: The Struggle in an Urban Environment.” In Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein (eds.). San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Haraway, Donna. 1988. Primate Visions. New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harper, A. Breeze. 2010a. “Race as a ‘Feeble Matter’ in Veganism: Interrogating whiteness, geopolitical privilege, and consumption philosophy of ‘cruelty-free’ products.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 8 (3): 5–27. Harper, A. Breeze. 2010b. Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society. New York: Lantern Books. Harper, A. Breeze. 2014. “On Ferguson, Thug Kitchen, and Trayvon Martin: Intersections of [Post]Race-Consciousness, Food Justice, and Hip Hop Vegan

References

Ethics.” http://sistahvegan.com/2014/10/09/on-ferguson-thug-kitchen-andtrayvon-martin-intersections-of-postrace-consciousness-food-justice-and-hiphop-vegan-ethics/ Harding, Sandra. 1986. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harris, Michael. 2003. Colored Pictures: Race and Representation. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Harris, Adrienne, and Ynestra King (eds.). 1989. Rocking the Ship of State: Toward a Feminist Peace Politics. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Harrison, Harry. 1966. Make Room! Make Room! New York: Doubleday. Hartsock, Nancy C. M. 1983. “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism.” In Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (eds.). Dordrecht: Reidel, 283–310. Hartsock, Nancy C. M. 1998. The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays. Boulder, CO: Westview. Harvey, David. 1997. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Hassan, Ihab. 1985. “The Culture of Postmodernism.” Theory, Culture, and Society 2 (3): 119–32. Haskins, James. 1978. Voodoo & Hoodoo: Their Tradition and Craft as Revealed by Actual Practitioners. New York: Stein and Day. Hawkins, R. 2001. “Cultural whaling, commodification, and culture change.” Environmental Ethics 23 (3): 287–306. Held, Virginia. 1987. “Feminism and Moral Theory.” In Women and Moral Theory, Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers (eds.). Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 111–28. Held, Virginia. 1995. “Feminist Moral Inquiry and the Feminist Future.” In Justice and Care: Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics, Virginia Held (ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Helfman, Gene S., Bruce B. Collette, Douglas E. Facey, and Brian W. Bowen. 2009. The Diversity of Fishes. 2nd edn. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Hersher, Rebecca. 2021. “Drawing A Line in The Mud: Scientists Debate When ‘Age Of Humans’ Began.” National Public Radio, March 7. https://www.npr. org/2021/03/17/974774461/ drawing-a-line-in-the-mud-scientists-debate-when-age-of-humans-began Heller, Chaia. 1999. Ecology of Everyday Life: Rethinking the Desire for Nature. Montreal: Black Rose Books. Herzig, Rebecca M. 2015. Plucked: A History of Hair Removal. New York: New York University Press. Hessler, Stefanie (ed.). 2021. Sex Ecologies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hird, Myra J. 2004. “Naturally Queer.” Feminist Theory 5: 85–9. Hoberman, John. 1997. Darwin’s Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Hollander, Anne. 1994. Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress. New York: Bloomsbury. hooks, bell. 1989. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston, MA: South End Press.

407

408

References

hooks, bell. 1990. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston, MA: South End Press. hooks, bell, and Cornel West. 1991. Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life. Boston, MA: South End Press. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. 2016. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Hughes, Robert. 1980. The Shock of the New: Modern Art, Its Rise, Its Dazzling Achievement, Its Fall. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Hurn, Samantha. 2012. Humans and Other Animals: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Interactions. London: Pluto Press. Hursthouse, Rosalind. 2006. “Applying Virtue Ethics to Our Treatment of Other Animals.” In The Practice of Virtue, Jennifer Welchman (ed.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Iovino, Serenella. 2013. “Loving the Alien. Ecofeminism, Animals, and Anna Maria Ortese’s Poetics of Otherness.” Feminismo/s 22: 177–203. IPCC. 2014. “Summary for Policymakers.” In Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, O. Edenhofer, R. Pichs-Madruga, Y. Sakona, et al. (eds.). Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1–32. IPCC. 2018. “Global Warming of 1.5°C.” In An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty, V. Masson-Delmotte, P. Zhai, H.-O. Pörtner, et al. (eds.). https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ Ivermen, Esther. 1991. “By Earth Obsessed.” Essence. 22 (September): 37–8. Irving, Dan. 2016. “Trans* /- .” In Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle, Kelly Fritsch, Clare O’Connor, and A. K. Thompson (eds.). Chico, CA: AK Press, 423–30. Jackson, Peter A. 2001. “Pre-Gay, Post-Queer: Thai Perspectives on Proliferating Gender/Sex Diversity in Asia.” Journal of Homosexuality, 40 (3/4): 1–25. Jefferson, Thomas. 1794. Notes on the State of Virginia. Philadelphia: Printed for Mathew Carey, no. 118, Market-Street, November 12. Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. 2020. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: New York University Press. Jaggar, Alison M. 1995. “Caring as a Feminist Practice of Moral Reason.” In Justice and Care: Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics, Virginia Held (ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 179–202. Jahn, Janheinz. 1961. Muntu: The New African Culture. New York: Grove Press. Jaina Suˆtras. (1884) 1973. Trans. Hermann Jacobi. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Jewett, Sarah Orne. 1881. “River Driftwood.” In Country By-Ways, 1–33. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Jones, Keithly G. 2004. “Trends in the U.S. Sheep Industry.” Electronic Report from the Economic Research Service. United States Department of Agriculture, Agriculture Information Bulletin 787 (January). https://downloads.usda.library. cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/kw52j804p/08612r694/gm80hz92n/aib787.pdf

References

Jones, Maggie. 2008. “The Barnyard Strategist.” The New York Times Magazine, October 24. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/magazine/26animal-t.html Jordan, Winthrop. 1968. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Joyce, Christopher. 1989. The Social Face of Buddhism. Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications. Kaba, Mariame. 2021. We Do this ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. Chicago: HayMarket Books. Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1957. “Theory of Ethics.” In Selections, Theodore Meyer Green (ed.). New York: Scribner’s, 268–374. Kao, G. Y. 2010. “The Universal versus the Particular in Ecofeminist Ethics.” Journal of Religious Ethics 38 (4): 616–37. Kappeler, Susanne. 1986. The Pornography of Representation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kappeler, Susanne. 1995. “Speciesism, Racism, Nationalism. . . or the Power of Scientific Subjectivity.” In Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan (eds.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Karpova, Lisa (trans.). 2011. “Third Sex Prehistoric Skeleton Found.” Pravda, July 4. http://english.pravda.ru/science/tech/07-04-2011/117498-Third_ Sex_prehistoric_skeleton_found-0/ Katyal, Sonia. 2002. “Exporting Identity.” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 14 (1). http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID330061_code021111140.pdf Katz, Jonathan. 1976. Gay American History. New York: Avon. Katz, Jonathan. 2007. The Invention of Heterosexuality. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Kean, Hilda. 1995. “The ‘Smooth Cool Men of Science’: The Feminist and Socialist Response to Vivisection.” History Workshop Journal 40 (1): 16–38. Kelch, Thomas G. 1999. “The Role of the Rational and the Emotive in a Theory of Animal Rights.” Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review 27 (1): 1–41. Keller, Evelyn Fox. 1983. A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman. Kelly, Christine. 2013. “Building Bridges with Accessible Care: Disability Studies, Feminist Care, Scholarship, and Beyond.” Hypatia 28 (4): 784–800. Kemmerer, Lisa. 2011. Sister Species: Women, Animals, and Social Justice. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press. Kessler, Suzanne J. 1998. Lessons from the Intersexed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kevany, Sophie. 2020. “Exclusive: livestock ships twice as likely to be lost as cargo vessels.” The Guardian, October 28. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ 2020/oct/28/exclusive-livestock-ships-twice-as-likely-to-be-lost-as-cargo-vessels Kevany, Sophie. 2020a. “Millions of US farm animals to be culled by suffocation, drowning and shooting.” The Guardian, May 19. https://www.theguardian.com/ environment/2020/may/19/millions-of-us-farm-animals-to-be-culled-by-suffocationdrowning-and-shooting-coronavirus Khan, S. 2001. “Culture, Sexualities, and Identities: Men Who Have Sex with Men in India.” Journal of Homosexuality 40 (3–4): 99–115. doi:10.1300/J082v40n03_06

409

410

References

Khanna, Navina, and Axel Fuentes. 2020. “It’s Time for U.S. Meatpackers to Stop Spreading COVID-19 and Racial Injustice.” I Heart Climate Voices in Medium, August 3. https://medium.com/i-heart-climate-voices/ its-time-for-u-s-meatpackers-to-stop-spreading-covid-19-and-racial-injustice6c349ac458e1 Kheel, Marti. 1984. “A Feminist View of Mobilization.” Feminists for Animal Rights Newsletter [first newsletter, no volume or issue number]: 2. Kheel, Marti. (1985) 1996. “The Liberation of Nature: A Circular Affair.” In The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams (eds.). New York: Columbia University Press, 17–33. Kheel, Marti. 1989. “From Healing Herbs to Deadly Drugs: Western Medicine’s War on the Natural World.” In Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism, Judith Plant (ed.). Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 96–111. Kheel, Marti. 1990. “Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology: Reflections on Identity and Difference.” In Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein (eds.). San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Kheel, Marti. 1993. “From Heroic to Holistic Ethics: The Ecofeminist Challenge.” In Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, Greta Gaard (ed.). Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 243–71. Kheel, Marti. 1995. “License to Kill: An Ecofeminist Critique of Hunters’ Discourse.” In Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan (eds.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 85–125. Kheel, Marti. 2004. “Vegetarianism and Ecofeminism: Toppling Patriarchy with a Fork.” In Food for Thought: The Debate Over Eating Meat, S. Sapontzis (ed.). Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Kheel, Marti. 2008. Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist Perspective. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Kim, Claire Jean. 2007. “Multiculturalism goes Imperial—Immigrants, Animals, and the Suppression of Moral Dialogue.” Du Bois Review 4 (1): 233–49. Kim, Claire Jean. 2010. “Slaying the Beast: Reflections on Race, Culture, and Species.” Kalfou 1 (1): 57–74. Kim, Claire Jean. 2011. “President Obama and the Polymorphous ‘Other’ in U.S. Racial Discourse.” Asian American Law Journal 18: 165–75. Kim, Claire Jean. 2012. “The Great Yellow Hope.” WBEZ Chicago, March 8. https://www.wbez.org/stories/ jeremy-lin-the-great-yellow-hope/92bf5268-79af-440a-afb9-8a39ef5a57e8 Kim, Claire Jean. 2015. Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kim, Claire Jean. 2020. “Makah Whaling and the (non)ecological Indian.” In Colonialism and Animality: Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies, K. S. Montford and C. Taylor (eds.). London: Routledge, 50–103. Kindy, Kimberley, Ted Mellnik, and Arelis R. Hernandez. 2021. “The Trump administration approved faster line speeds at chicken plants. Those facilities are more likely to have covid-19 cases.” The Washington Post, January 3. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-chicken-covid-coronavirusbiden/2021/01/03/ea8902b0-3a39-11eb-98c4-25dc9f4987e8_story.html King, Barbara. 2013. How Animals Grieve. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

References

King, Ynestra. 1983. “Toward an Ecological Feminism and a Feminist Ecology.” In Machina Ex Dea, Joan Rothschild (ed.). New York: Pergamon, 118–29. King, Ynestra. 1989. “Healing the Wounds: Feminism, Ecology, and the Nature/ Culture Dualism.” In Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, Allison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo (eds.). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 115–41. Kirts, Leah. 2020. “Toward an Anti-Carceral Queer Veganism.” In Queer and Trans Voices: Achieving Liberation Through Consistent Anti-Oppression, J. Feliz Brueck and Z. McNeil (eds.). Sanctuary Publishers, 185–223. Kittay, Eva Feder. 2002. “Love’s Labor Revisited.” Hypatia 17 (3): 237–50. Kittay, Eva Feder, and Diana T. Meyers (eds.). 1987. Women and Moral Theory. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. Kristof, Nicholas, and Sheryl WuDunn. 2010. Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity Worldwide. New York: Vintage. Ko, Syl. 2017. “Addressing Racism Requires Addressing the Situation of Animals.” In Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters, A. Ko and S. Ko (eds.). Brooklyn, NY: Lantern Books, 44–9. Ko, Aph, and Ko, Syl. 2017. Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters. Brooklyn, NY: Lantern Books. Kostkowska, Justyna. 2013. Ecocriticism and Women Writers. Palgrave Macmillan. Kovich, Tammy. 2016. “Gender.” In Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle, Kelly Fritsch, Clare O’Connor, and A. K. Thompson (eds.). Chico, CA: AK Press, 175–82. Krupar, Shiloh R. 2012. “Transnatural Ethics: Revisiting the Nuclear Cleanup of Rocky Flats, CO, Through the Queer Ecology of Nuclia Waste.” Cultural Geographies 19 (3): 303–27. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Lama, Dalai. 2011. Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Lama, Dalai. n.d. “Compassion and the Individual.” http://www.dalailama.com/ messages/compassion Langer, Susanne. 1965. “The Comic Rhythm.” In Comedy, Meaning and Form, Robert W. Corrigan (ed.). San Francisco: Chandler Publishing. Lansbury, Coral. 1985. The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers and Vivisection in Edwardian England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Lappé, Frances Moore. 1972. Diet for a Small Planet. New York: Ballantine Books. Larabee, Mary Jeanne (ed.) 1993. An Ethic of Care: Feminist and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Larsen, Elizabeth. 1991. “Granola Boys, Eco-Dudes, and Me.” Ms. 2 (July/August): 96–7. Laucella, Pamela. 2010. “Michael Vick: An Analysis of Press Coverage on Federal Dogfighting Charges. Journal of Sports Media 5 (2): 35–76. Laudares, Humberto. 2020. “Deforestation in Brazil is spreading COVID-19 to the Indigenous peoples.” VoxEU.org, November 3. https://voxeu.org/article/ deforestation-spreading-covid-19-brazils-indigenous-peoples Leonard, David. 2010. “Jumping the Gun: Sporting Cultures and the Criminalization of Black Masculinity.” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 34 (2): 252–62.

411

412

References

Leonard, David, and C. Richard King (eds.). 2011. Commodified and Criminalized: New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Lim, Michelle. 2020. “Australian Magpie mimics emergency sirens as deadly fires rage.” CNN Edition. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/02/asia/australia-magpiemimics-siren-intl-hnk-scli/index.html Lloyd, Genevieve. 1979. “The Man of Reason” Metaphilosophy 10 (1): 18–37. Lockwood, Alex. 2021. “Beyond COVID-19: Get Ready to End Animal Exploitation.” Surge, January 28. https://www.surgeactivism.org/articles/ beyond-covid-19-get-ready-to-end-animal-exploitation Lorde, Audre, 1983. “An Open Letter to Mary Daly.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (eds.). New York: Kitchen Table Press, 90–3. Lorde, Audre, 2012. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: Random House. Low, Tim. 2017. Where song again: Australia’s birds and how they change the world. Melbourne: Penguin. Lubick, Naomi. 2020. “What Milk-Sharing Communities Reveal.” Sapiens, August 6. https://www.sapiens.org/culture/milk-sharing/ Lucas, S. 2005. “A Defense of the Feminist-Vegetarian Connection.” Hypatia 20 (1): 150–77. Lugones, María. 2010. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25 (4): 742–59. Lukács, Georg. (1923) 1971. History and Class Consciousness. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Luke, Brian. (1992) 2007. “Justice, Caring, and Animal Liberation.” In The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams (eds.). New York: Columbia University Press, 77–102. Luke, Brian. 1995. “Taming Ourselves or Going Feral? Toward a Nonpatriarchal Metaethic for Animal Liberation.” In Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan (eds.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 290–319. Luke, Brian. 1996. “The Erotics of Predation: An Ecofeminist Look at Sports Illustrated.” Feminists for Animal Rights Newsletter X (1–2): 6–7. Luke, Brian. 1997. “A Critical Analysis of Hunters’ Ethics.” Environmental Ethics 19 (Spring): 25–44. Luke, Brian. 1998. “Violent Love: Hunting, Heterosexuality, and the Erotics of Men’s Predation.” Feminist Studies 24 (Fall): 627–55. Maathai, Wangari. 1991. “Foresters without Diplomas.” Ms. 1 (Mar/April): 74–5. MacDonald, Mia, and Jo-Anne McArthur. 2019. “The Sinking Ship: The Romanian Sheep Transport Disaster and the Climate Crisis.” Medium, November 29. https://medium.com/brighter-green/the-sinking-ship-the-romanian-sheep-transportdisaster-and-the-climate-crisis-1faeba37560e MacDonald, Mia, and Justine Simon. 2011. “Cattle, Soynization, and Climate Change: Brazil’s Agricultural Revolution.” New York: Brighter Green, 10–11. https://www.brightergreen.org/files/brazil_bg_pp_2011.pdf MacKinnon, Catharine A. 1987. Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

References

MacKinnon, Catharine A. 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. MacKinnon, Catharine A. (1990) 1995. “Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: ‘Pleasure under Patriarchy.’ ” In Feminism and Philosophy: Essential Readings in Theory, Reinterpretation, and Application, Nancy Tuana and Rosemarie Tong (eds.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 134–61. MacKinnon, Catharine A. 2004. “Of Mice and Men: A Feminist Fragment on Animal Rights.” In The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams (eds.). New York: Columbia University Press, 316–32. McAllister, Pam. 1982. “Introduction to article by Connie Salamone.” In Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence, Pam McAllister (ed.). Philadelphia: New Society Publishers. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge. McComb, Karen, Lucy Baker, and Cynthia Moss. 2006. “African elephants show high levels of interest in the skulls and ivory of their own species.” Biology Letters 2 (1): 26–8. McCoy, Terrence, and Heloísa Traiano. 2021. “The Amazonian city that hatched the Brazil variant has been crushed by it.” The Washington Post, January 27. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/01/27/coronavirus-brazil-variant-manaus/ McGrath, Stephen. 2020. “Romania accused of ‘silence’ over ship that capsized killing 14,000 sheep.” The Guardian, November 27. https://www.theguardian. com/environment/2020/nov/27/ romania-accused-of-silence-over-ship-that-capsized-killing-14000-sheep McJetters, Christopher-Sebastian. 2014. “Thug Love: Ferguson and the Politics of Race in Veganism.” https://www.all-creatures.org/articles/ar-thug-love.html McKay, Laura Jean. 2020. The Animals in That Town. Brunswick: Scribe Publications. McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McWhorter, Ladelle. 2010. “Enemy of the Species.” In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (eds.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 73–101. Malatino, Hilary. 2019. Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Mano, Ana. 2020. “Special Report: How COVID-19 swept the Brazilian slaughterhouses of JBS, world’s top meatpacker.” Reuters, September 8. https:// www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-jbs-specialreport/ special-report-how-covid-19-swept-the-brazilian-slaughterhouses-of-jbs-worldstop-meatpacker-idUKKBN25Z1I4 Mason, Jim. 1981. “Fear and Loathing on the Hog Farmer Trail: Jim Mason takes a poke at the 1981 American Pork Congress.” Vegetarian Times 47 (June): 66–8. Mason, Jim. 1997. An Unnatural Order: Why We Are Destroying the Planet and Each Other. New York: Continuum. Mason, Jim, and Peter Singer. 1980. Animal Factories: The Mass Production of Animals for Food and How It Affects The Lives of Consumers, Farmers, and the Animals Themselves. New York: Crown.

413

414

References

Massey, D. 1991. “Flexible Sexism.” Environment and Planning 9: 31–57. Mellon, Joseph. 1989. Nature Ethics without Theory. PhD Dissertation, University of Oregon. Mellor, Mary. 1992. Breaking the Boundaries: Towards a Feminist Green Socialism. London: Virago Press. Mellor, Mary. 1997. Feminism & Ecology. Washington Square, NY: New York University Press. Melville, Herman. 1964. Moby Dick. New York: Bantam. Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper & Row. Metzinger, Thomas. 2009. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books. Meyer, Eugene L. 1992. “Environmental Racism: Why Is It Always Dumped in Our Backyard? Minority Groups Take a Stand.” Audubon 94 (January/February): 30–2. Meyerding, Jane. 1982. “Feminist Criticism and Cultural Imperialism (Where does one end and the other begin).” Animals Agenda 14–15 (November/December): 22–3. “The Michael Vick Case: Is ‘Supporting Our Own’ OK?” 2007. Tell Me More, August 22. National Public Radio. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story. php?storyId=13859969 Michigan State University. 2020. “Small Farmers Sink or Swim in Globalization’s Tsunami.” Science Daily, February 25. https://www.sciencedaily.com/ releases/2020/02/200225154344.htm Midgley, Mary. 1983. Animals and Why They Matter. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Monguilod, Cristina Pallí. 2001. “Ordering Others and Othering Orders: The Consumption and Disposal of Otherness.” The Sociological Review 49 (2): 198–204. Montford, K. S., & C. Taylor. 2020a. “Beyond edibility: towards a nonspeciesist, decolonial food ontology.” In Colonialism and Animality: Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies, K. S. Montford and C. Taylor (eds.). London: Routledge, 129–56. Montford, K. S., & C. Taylor (eds.). 2020b. Colonialism and Animality: Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies. London: Routledge. Morgan, Ruth, and Saskia Wierenga. 2006. Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men, and Ancestral Wives: Female Same-Sex Practices in Africa. Johannesburg: Jacana Media. Morrison, Toni. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage. Morrison, Toni. 2008. A Mercy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, and Bruce Erickson. 2010. “A Genealogy of Queer Ecologies.” In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (eds.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1–47. Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, and Bruce Erickson (eds.). 2010. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Mufson, Steven, and Andrew Freedman. 2019. “What You Need to Know about the Amazon Rainforest Fires.” The Washington Post, August 27. https://www.

References

washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-amazonrainforest-fires/2019/08/27/ac82b21e-c815-11e9-a4f3-c081a126de70_story.html Muhammad, Latifah. 2012. “Police Raid Rapper Young Calicoe’s Home Over Suspected Dog-Fighting.” July 11. http://hiphopwired.com/2012/07/11/. police-raid-rapper-young-calicoes-home-over-suspected-dog-fighting-video/ Mundy, Rachel. 2018. “Why Listen to Animals.” Society for Literature, Science and the Arts. https://www.litsciarts.org/2018/10/12/why-listen-to-animals/ Murdoch, Iris. 2001. The Sovereignty of Good. 2nd edn. New York: Routledge. Murphy, Patrick D. 1991. “Prolegomenon for an Ecofeminist Dialogics.” In Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic, Dale M. Bauer and Susan Jaret McKinstry, (eds.). Albany: State University of New York Press, 39–56. Murphy, Patrick D. 1995. Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques. Albany: State University of New York Press. Murphy, Patrick D. 2004. “Nature Nurturing Fathers in a World Beyond Our Control.” In Eco-Man: New Perspectives on Masculinity and Nature, Mark Allister (ed.). Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 196–210. Myers, Linda James. 1988. Understanding an Afrocentric Worldview: Introduction to an Optimal Psychology. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt. Nair, Devatha. 2021. “This $22-Billion Industry Suffers from a Serious Lack of Oversight.” Sentient Media, January 11. https://sentientmedia.org/ this-22-billion-industry-suffers-from-serious-lack-of-oversight/ Najmabadi, Afsaneh. 2005. Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. Berkley: University of California Press. Nanda, Serena. 2000. Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Narayanan, Yamini. 2018. “Cow Protection as ‘Casteised Speciesism’: Sacralisation, Commercialisation and Politicisation.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 41 (2): 331–51. Narayanan, Yamini. 2019. “Jugaad and Informality as Drivers of India’s Cow Slaughter Economy.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 51 (7): 1516–35. Narayanan, Yamini. 2021. “Animating caste: Visceral geographies of pigs, caste and violent nationalisms in Chennai city.” Urban Geography. doi: 10.1080/02723638.2021.1890954 Nash, Roderick Frazier. 1989. The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. National COSH. 2020. “Safety Advocates Say Last-Minute Push by USDA to Speed Up Poultry Plants Will Endanger Workers.” National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, November 11. https://www.coshnetwork. org/2020-11-11_Poultry_Plant_Speed_Up_Endangers_Workers National Pork Producers Council. 2020. “The Tragic Impact of COVID-19 on U.S Hog Farmers: The Need to Euthanize.” May 8. https://nppc.org/wp-content/ uploads/2020/05/euthanasia-fact-sheet-FINAL-5-8-20.pdf Noddings, Nel. 1984. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press. Noddings, Nel. 1991. “Comment on Donovan’s ‘Animal Rights and Feminist Theory.’ ” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16 (2): 418–22.

415

416

References

Noland, William F., and George Clayton Johnson. 1967. Logan’s Run. New York: Dial Press. Norris, Michele. 2012. “How Black Beauty Changed How We See Horses.” All Things Considered, November 2. https://www.npr.org/2012/11/02/163971063/ how-black-beauty-changed-the-way-we-see-horses Noske, Barbara. 1989. Humans and Other Animals: Beyond the Boundaries of Anthropology. London: Pluto Press. Nott, Josiah, and George R. Gliddon. 1855. Types of Mankind: Or, Ethnological Researches: Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and Upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical History, Illustrated by Selections from the Inedited Papers of Samuel George Morton and by Additional Contributions from L. Agassiz, W. Usher, and H. S. Patterson. London: Trübner & Co. Nussbaum, Martha C. 1992. Love’s Knowledge: Essays in Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2000. Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, The John Robert Seeley lectures. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2004. “Beyond ‘Compassion and Humanity?’: Justice for Nonhuman Animals.” In Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, Cass Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum (eds.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 299–320. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2006. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2009. “Justice.” In Examined Life: Excursions with Contemporary Thinkers, Astra Taylor (ed.). New York: New Press. Oates, Thomas Patrick. 2007. “The Erotic Gaze in the NFL Draft.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4 (1): 74–90. Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo. 1985. “Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Novel in English.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 11 (Autumn): 63–80. Oliver, Michael. 1990. The Politics of Disablement: A Sociological Approach. New York: St Martin’s Press. Osborne, Hilary, and Bibi van der Zee. 2020. “Live Export: Animals at Risk in Giant Global Industry.” The Guardian, January 20. https://www.theguardian. com/environment/2020/jan/20/ live-export-animals-at-risk-as-giant-global-industry-goes-unchecked Oscamp, S. 2000. “A sustainable future for humanity? How can psychology help?” American Psychologist 55 (5): 496–508. Ouedraogo, D. 1992. “Demographic variables, inevitable passage. Irrigated areas and health of populations.” Pop Sahel : bulletin d’information sur la population et le developpement 17: 6–11. Oyama, Susan. 2000. The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ. 1997. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

References

Pachirat, Timothy. 2011. Every Twelve Seconds. New Haven: Yale University Press. Painter, Nell Irvin. 2010. The History of White People. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Palmer, C. 2010. Animal Ethics in Context. New York: Columbia University Press. Patterson, Charles. 2002. Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust. New York: Lantern Books. Pascoe, Bruce. 2014. Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident. Perth: Magabala Books. Paz, Christian. 2020. “What Bolsonaro’s COVID-19 Case Tells Us About Trump’s.” The Atlantic, October 3. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/ archive/2020/10/donald-trump-jair-bolsonaro-coronavirus/616602/ PETA Files. 2007. “Vick at the Office, Part 2.” http://blog.peta.org/ archives/2007/10/vick_at_the_off.php Peters, Sharon. 2008. “A Fight to Save Urban Youth from Dogfighting.” USA TODAY, September 29. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-0929-dogfighting_N.htm Pharr, Suzanne. 1988. Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism. Little Rock, AR: Women’s Project Press. Phillips, R. J. 2019. “Frames as Boundaries: Rhetorical Framing Analysis and the Confines of Public Discourse in Online News Coverage of Vegan Parenting.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 43 (2): 152–70. Phys.org. 2020. “Record Fires Ravage Brazil’s Amazon and Pantanal Regions.” November 2. https://phys.org/news/2020-11-ravage-brazil-amazon-pantanalregions.html Pierce, Jessica. 2012. The Last Walk: Reflections on our Pets at the End of their Lives. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Pluhar, Evelyn. 1995. Beyond Prejudice: The Moral Significance of Human and Nonhuman Animals. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pluhar, Evelyn. 2006. “Legal and Moral Rights of Sentient Beings and the Full Personhood View.” Organization and Environment 19 (2): 275–8. Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London and New York: Routledge. Plumwood, Val. 1995. “Human Vulnerability and the Experience of Being Prey.” Quadrant (March): 29–34. Plumwood, Val. 2000. “Integrating Ethical Frameworks for Humans, Animals, and Nature: A Critical Feminist Eco-Socialist Perspective.” Ethics and the Environment 5 (2): 285–322. Plumwood, Val. 2001. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge. Plumwood, Val. 2003. “Animals and Ecology: Towards a Better Integration.” Working/Technical Paper, Australian National University Digital Collection. https://digitalcollections.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/41767 Plumwood, Val. 2004. “Gender, Eco-Feminism and the Environment.” In Controversies in Environmental Sociology, R. White (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 43–60. Pollan, Michael. 2009. Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin. Potts, Annie, and Jovian Parry. 2010. “Vegan Sexuality: Challenging Heteronormative Masculinity through Meat-free Sex.” Feminism & Psychology 20 (1): 53–72.

417

418

References

Pratt, Geraldine and Victoria Rosner. 2012. The Global and the Intimate. New York: Columbia University Press. Probyn-Rapsey, F. 2018. “Anthropocentrism.” In Critical Terms for Animal Studies, L. Gruen (ed). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 47–63. Pulé, Paul M. 2007. “Ecology and Environmental Studies.” In Routledge International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities, Michael Flood, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Bob Pease, and Keith Pringle (eds.). New York: Routledge, 158–62. Pulé, Paul M. 2009. “Caring for Society and Environment: Towards Ecological Masculinism.” Paper Presented at the Villanova University Sustainability Conference, April 2009. http://www.paulpule.com.au/Ecological_Masculinism.pdf “Race Played Factor in Vick Coverage, Critics Say.” 2007. Neal Conan’s Talk of the Nation, National Public Radio, August 28. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/ story.php?storyId=14000094 “Racist Obama Email: Marilyn Davenport Insists It Was Satire.” 2011. Huffington Post, April 20. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/20/racist-obama-emailmarilyn-davenport_n_851772.html Ramet, Sabrina Petra (ed.). 1996. Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropologial and Historical Perspectives. London: Routledge. Readfern, Graham, and Adam Morton. 2020. “Almost 3 billion animals affected by Australian bushfires, report shows.” The Guardian, July 28. https://www. theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/28/ almost-3-billion-animals-affected-by-australian-megafires-report-shows-aoe Regan, Tom. 1983. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press. Regan, Tom. 1991. The Thee Generation: Reflections on the Coming Revolution. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Regan, Tom, and Peter Singer. 1989. Animal Rights and Human Obligations. 2nd edn. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Repo, Jemima. 2018. The Biopolitics of Gender. New York: Oxford University Press. Reuters. 2020. “Update 1-IGC Cuts Forecast for 2020/21 Global Corn Crop.” Successful Farming, September 24. https://www.agriculture.com/markets/ newswire/update-1-igc-cuts-forecast-for-202021-global-corn-crop Ricciardelli, Rosemary, Kimberley A. Clow, and Philip White. 2010. “Investigating Hegemonic Masculinity: Portrayals of Masculinity in Men’s Lifestyle Magazines.” Sex Roles 63: 64–78. Richards, Dona. 1980. “European Mythology: The Ideology of ‘Progress.’ ” In Contemporary Black Thought, Molefi Kete Asante and Abdulai Sa Vandi (eds.). Beverly Hills: Sage. “Richard Cebull, Montana Federal Judge, Admits Forwarding Racist Obama Email.” 2012. Huffington Post, March 1. http://www.huffingtonpost. com/2012/03/01/richard-cebull-judge-obama-racist-email_n_1312736.html Riley, Shay. 1991. “Eco-Racists Use Fatal Tactics.” Daily Illini 121 (September 4), 15. Riley, Shamara Shantu. 2003. “Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too: The Politics of Emergent Afrocentric Ecowomanism.” In This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment, edited by Roger S. Gottlieb, 368–81. Abingdon: Routledge. Ristau, Carolyn A. 2013. “Cognitive Ethology.” WIREs Cognitive Science 4 (September–October): 493–509.

References

Ritvo, Harriet. 1998. The Platypus and the Mermaid: And Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Robinson, Margaret. 2014. “Indigenous Veganism: Feminist Natives Do Eat Tofu.” Earthling Liberation Kollective, December 22. https:// humanrightsareanimalrights.com/2014/12/22/ margaret-robinson- indigenous-veganism-feminist-natives-do-eat-tofu/ Robinson, Margaret. 2018. “The Roots of My Indigenous Veganism.” In Critical Animal Studies, Atsuko Matsuoka and John Sorenson (eds.). London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 319–32. Roediger, David R. 2008. How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon. London and New York: Verso. Roller, Zoë. 2020. “Water Justice Crises and Resistance Struggles.” In From Environmental Loss to Resistance: Infrastructure and the Struggle for Justice in North America, Michael Loadenthal and Lea Rekow (eds.). Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 107–30. Roscoe, Will (ed.). 1988. Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Roscoe, Will. 2000. Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rose, Deborah Bird. 2013. “In the Shadow of All This Death.” In Animal Death, Jay Johnston and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey (eds.). Sydney: Sydney University Press. Roughgarden, Joan. 2013. Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People. Oakland: University of California Press. Roy, Arundhati. 2004. The 2004 Sydney Peace Prize Lecture. Seymour Theatre Centre, University of Sydney, November 4. Rubin, David A. 2017. Intersex Matters: Biomedical Embodiment, Gender Regulation, and Transnational Activism. Albany: State University of New York Press. Rubin, James H. 1994. Manet’s Silence and the Poetics of Bouquets. London: Reaktion Books. Ruddick, Sara. 1989. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. 1975. New Woman/New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation. New York: Seabury. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. 1983. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. 1992. Gaia & God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing. San Francisco: HarperCollins. Russell, Legacy. 2020. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. New York: Verso. Russo. Ann. 2019. Feminist Accountability: Disrupting Violence and Transforming Power. New York: New York University Press. Salamone, Connie. 1973. “Feminist as Rapist in the Modern Male Hunter Culture.” Majority Report (October). Salamone, Connie. 1982. “The Prevalence of the Natural Law within Women: Women and Animal Rights.” In Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence, Pam McAllister (ed.). Philadelphia: New Society Publishers. Salleh, Ariel. 1984. “Deeper Than Deep Ecology: The Eco-Feminist Connection.” Environmental Ethics 6: 339–45.

419

420

References

Salleh, Ariel. 1997. Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx, and the Postmodern. London: Zed Books. Sanbonmatsu, John. 2005. “Listen, Ecological Marxist! (Yes, I said Animals!).” Capitalism Nature Socialism 16 (2): 107–14. Sanders, Douglas. 2005. “Flying the Rainbow Flag in Asia.” Conference paper. http://digitalcollections.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/8691 Sandilands, Catriona. 1994. “Lavender’s Green? Some Thoughts on Queer(y)ing Environmental Politics.” Undercurrents: Critical Environmental Studies (May): 20–4. Śāntideva, Kate Crosby, and Andrew Skilton. 2008. The Bodhicaryāvatāra (Oxford World’s Classics). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Sapontzis, Steve (ed.). 2004. Food for Thought: The Debate Over Eating Meat. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Sax, Sarah, and Mauricio Angelo. 2020. “Communities in Brazilian Cerrado besieged by global demand for soy.” Mongabay, January 13. https://news. mongabay.com/2020/01/ communities-in-brazilian-cerrado-besieged-by-global-demand-for-soy/ Schallert, K. L. 1992. “Speaker Examines Impact of the West on Africa” (Wagaki Mwangi), Daily Illini 121 (April 3), 3. Scheiber, Noam. 2021. “Biden Orders OSHA to Issue New Guidelines to Protect Workers from Coronavirus.” The New York Times, January 22. https://www. nytimes.com/2021/01/21/business/economy/biden-osha-coronavirus.html Scheiber, Noam. 2020. “OSHA Criticized for Lax Regulation of Meatpacking in Pandemic.” The New York Times, October 22. https://www.nytimes. com/2020/10/22/business/economy/osha-coronavirus-meat.html Scheler, Max. (1923) 1970. The Nature of Sympathy. Trans. Peter Heath. Hamden, CT: Archon. Schiebinger, Londa. 1993. Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Schuller, Kyla. 2018. The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Schwalbe, Michael. 2012. “The Hazards of Manhood.” Yes! 63 (Fall): 42–4. Scully, J. L., L. Baldwin-Ragaven, and P. Fitzpatrick (eds.). 2010. Feminist Bioethics: At the Center, on the Margins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Seaberg, Kurt. 2010. “Artist’s Statement.” https://www.kurtseaberg.com/ artist-statement/ Sears, Clare. 2015. Arresting Dress: Cross-dressing, Law and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Serrato, Claudia. 2010. “Ecological Indigenous Foodways and the Healing of All Our Relations.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 8 (3): 52–60. Sengupta, Somini, 2019. “ ‘Bleak’ U.N. Report on a Planet in Peril Looms Over New Climate Talks.” The New York Times, November 26. https://www.nytimes. com/2019/11/26/climate/greenhouse-gas-emissions-carbon.html Shapiro, Kenneth. 1989. “Understanding Dogs through Kinesthetic Empathy, Social Construction, and History.” Anthrozoös 3 (3): 184–95. Shepherd, Jean. (1965) 1966. “Duel in the Snow, or Red Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid.” Reprinted in In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. New York: Doubleday Books, 21–48.

References

Shiva, Vandana. 1994. Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health and Development Worldwide. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers. Shiva, Vandana, and Maria Mies. 1993. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books. Shove, E., and M. Pantzar. 2005. “Consumers, Producers and Practices— Understanding the invention and reinvention of Nordic Walking.” Journal of Consumer Culture 5 (1): 43–64. Shukin, Nicole. 2009. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Simon, Bryant. 2017. The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives. New York: New Press. Simonet, Patricia. 2007. “Laughing Dogs.” The Bark 44: 2–3. Singer, June. 1977. Androgyny: Toward a New Theory of Sexuality. New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday. Singer, Peter. 1975. Animal Liberation. New York: New York Review Books. Singer, Peter. 1982. “The Oxford Vegetarians – A personal account.” International Journal for the Study of Animal Problems 3 (1): 6–9. Singer, Peter. 1990. Animal Liberation. Rev. edn. New York: Avon Books. Singer, Peter. 1994. “Feminism and Vegetarianism: A Response.” Philosophy in the Contemporary World 1 (2): 36–9. Singer, Peter. 2009. Animal Liberation: The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement. Reissue edn. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. Singer, Peter. 2020. Why Vegan? Eating Ethically. New York: Liveright. Singer, Peter, and Karen Dawn. 2004. “When Slaughter Makes Sense.” New York Newsday, February 8, A30. Slicer, Deborah. 1991. “Your Daughter or Your Dog: A Feminist Assessment of the Animal Research Issue.” Hypatia 6 (1): 108–24. Slicer, Deborah. 1998. “Toward an Ecofeminist Standpoint Theory: Bodies as Grounds.” In Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy (eds.). Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 49–73. Smith, Andy. 1993. “For All Those Who Were Indian in a Former Life.” In Ecofeminism and the Sacred, Carol J. Adams (ed.). New York: Continuum. Smith, Andy. 2005. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Smith, Bonnie. 2000. The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smith, Cheryl. 2010. “The Little Dog Laughed—The Function and Form of Dog Play.” IAABC Dog Blog, December 6. Smith, David Livingstone. 2011. Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Smith, David Livingstone. 2020. On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, David Livingstone. 2021. Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smuts, Barbara. 2008. “Reflections.” In The Lives of Animals by J. M. Coetzee et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 107–20. Smythe, R. H. 1965. The Mind of the Horse. Brattleboro, VT: The Stephen Greene Press.

421

422

References

Snitow, Ann. 1989. “A Gender Diary.” In Rocking the Ship of State: Towards a Feminist Peace Politics, Adrienne Harris and Ynestra King (eds.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Solomon, Robert. 1976. Passions. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday. Sorabji, Richard. 1993. Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Soybean Meal Info Center, 2018. “World Soybean Production.” March, “News.” https://www.soymeal.org/soy-meal-articles/world-soybean-production/ Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Specter, Michael. 2005. “Nature’s Bioterrorist.” New Yorker, February 28, 50–61. Spencer, Colin. 2000. Vegetarianism: A History. London: Grub Street. Spiegel, Marjorie. (1988) 1996. The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery. London: Mirror Books. de Spinoza, Benedictus, and Michael L. Morgan. 2006. The Essential Spinoza: Ethics and Related Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Spretnak, Charlene (ed.). 1982. The Politics of Women’s Spirituality. New York: Anchor Books. Sprinkle, Annie. 1991. “Beyond Bisexual.” In Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out, Loraine Hutching and Lani Kaahumanu (eds.). New York: Alyson Publications, 103–7. Sprinkle, Annie, and Beth Stephens. 2021. Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. “Standing Rock Sioux Tribe v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Memorandum in Support of Motion for Preliminary Injunction Expedited Hearing Requested” (PDF) (1:16-cv-1534-JEB). United States District Court for the District of Columbia. August 4, 2016. Archived from the original (PDF) on August 7, 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20160807104201/http://standingrock.org/data/upfiles/ media/Memo%20ISO%20Mtn%20for%20Preliminary%20Injunction_3.pdf Stanescu, James. 2012. “Species Trouble: Judith Butler, Mourning, and the Precarious Lives of Animals.” Hypatia 27 (3): 567–82. Stanley, Eric A., and Nat Smith. 2015. Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex. Chico, CA: AK Press. Starhawk. 1990. “Power, Authority, and Mystery: Ecofeminism and Earth-Based Spirituality.” In Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein (eds.). San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Steeves, H. Peter (ed.). 1999. Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life. Albany: State University of New York Press. Steiner, Gary. 2010. Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Steinfeld, H., P. Gerber, T. Wassenaar, V. Castel, M. Rosales, and C. De Haan. 2006. Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Steingraber, Sandra. 1997. Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Stewart, K., & Cole, M. 2014. Our Children and Other Animals: The Cultural Construction of Human-Animal Relations in Childhood. Farnham: Ashgate.

References

Stoll, Steven. 2007. U.S. Environmentalism since 1945: A Brief History with Documents. Boston, MA: Bedford’s/St. Martin’s. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. (1852) 1981. Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life among the Lowly. New York: Penguin. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. 1869. “Rights of Dumb Animals.” Hearth and Home 1 (2): 24. Strouse, Kathy, with Dog Angel. 2009. Bad Newz: The Untold Story of the Michael Vick Dogfighting Case. Dogfighting Investigation Publications. Sturgeon, Noel. 1997. Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action. New York: Routledge. Sullivan, Zoe. 2019. “The Real Reason the Amazon Is on Fire.” Time, August 26. https://time.com/5661162/why-the-amazon-is-on-fire/ Swift, Jonathan. 1729. “A Modest Proposal.” In Encyclopedia of the Self, Mark Zimmerman (ed.). http://emotionalliteracyeducation.com/classic_books_online/ mdprp10.htm Tamale, Sylvia. 2007. “Out of the Closet: Unveiling Sexuality Discourses in Uganda.” In Africa after Gender?, Catherine M. Cole, Takyiwaa Manuh, and Stephan F. Miescher (eds.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 17–29. Tanyas, Bahar. 2016. “Experiences of Otherness and Practices of Othering: Young Turkish Migrants in the UK.” Young 24 (2): 157–73. Tarter, Jim. 2002. “Some Live More Downstream than Others: Cancer, Gender, and Environmental Justice.” In The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy, Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein (eds.). Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 213–28. Taylor, Astra, and Sunaura Taylor. 2020. “Solidarity Across Species.” Dissent, Summer 2020. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/solidarity-across-species Taylor, Hollis. 2017. “Birdsong has inspired humans for centuries: is it music?” https://theconversation.com/ birdsong-has-inspired-humans-for-centuries-is-it-music-79000 Taylor, Keenaga-Yamahtta (ed.). 2017. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Taylor, Paul. 1986. Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Taylor, Sunaura. 2004. “Right Not to Work: Power and Disability.” Monthly Review 55 (10). Taylor, Sunaura. 2011. “Beasts of Burden: Disability Studies and Animal Rights.” Qui Parle 19 (2): 191–222. Taylor, Sunaura. 2017. Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation. New York: New Press. Teish, Luisah. 1985. Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Terry, Bryant. 2014a. Afro-Vegan: Farm-Fresh African, Caribbean, and Southern Flavors Remixed. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press. Terry, Bryant. 2014b. “The problem with ‘thug’ cuisine.” https://www.cnn. com/2014/10/10/living/thug-kitchen-controversy-eatocracy/index.html Tharoor, Ishaan. 2015. “Australia actually declares ‘war’ on cats, plans to kill 2 million by 2020.” The Washington Post, July 17. https://www.washingtonpost. com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/07/16/australia-actually-declares-war-on-catsplans-to-kill-2-million-by-2020/

423

424

References

Thomas, Keith. 1983. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800. London: Allen Lane. Thompson, Wright. n.d. “A History of Mistrust.” ESPN.com. http://sports.espn. go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=vicksatlanta. Tong, Rosemarie. 1993. Feminine and Feminist Ethics. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Trans and Womyn’s Action Camp. 2012. http://twac.wordpress.com/ Tronto, Joan C. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge. Turner, James. 1980. Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain and Humanity in the Victorian Mind. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Twine, R. 2001. “Ma(r)king Essence—Ecofeminism and Embodiment.” Ethics & the Environment 6 (2): 31–58. Twine, R. 2010a. “Broadening the Feminism in Feminist Bioethics.” In Feminist Bioethics: At the Center, on the Margins, J. L. Scully, L. Baldwin-Ragaven and P. Fitzpatrick (eds.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 45–59. Twine, R. 2010b. “Intersectional Disgust? Animals and (eco) feminism.” Feminism & Psychology 20 (3): 397–406. Twine, R. 2013. “Is Biotechnology Deconstructing Animal Domestication? Movements toward ‘Liberation’.” Configurations 21 (2): 135–58. Twine, R. 2021. “Emissions from Animal Agriculture: Not 18%, Not 14.5%, Not 16.5%, Not 15.6% but presently incalculable.” Centre for Human Animal Studies. https://sites.edgehill.ac.uk/cfhas/blog-post-july-2021/ Unferth, Deb Olin. 2011. “Interview with Gary Francione.” Believer Magazine, February. United Nations. 2020. “Amid Threat of Catastrophic Global Famine, COVID-19 Response Must Prioritize Food Security, Humanitarian Needs, Experts Tell General Assembly.” UN General Assembly, December 4. https://www.un.org/ press/en/2020/ga12294.doc.htm United Nations Environment Programme and the International Livestock Research Institute. 2020. Preventing the Next Pandemic: Zoonotic diseases and how to break the chain of transmission. Nairobi: UNEP and ILRI. https://www. unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/press-release/ unite-human-animal-and-environmental-health-prevent-next-pandemic-un UN News. 2019. “Over 820 million people suffering from hunger; new UN report reveals stubborn realities of ‘immense’ global challenge.” July 15. https://news. un.org/en/story/2019/07/1042411 UN Report. 2019. “Nature’s Dangerous Decline Unprecedented.” https://www. un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedentedreport/ United Soybean Board. 2020. “What are Soybeans Used For?” Updated June 20. https://www.unitedsoybean.org/article/what-are-soybeans-used-for U.S. Department of Agriculture. 2020. “Acreage.” National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), Agricultural Statistics Board, released June 30. U.S. Department of Agriculture. 2020a. “USDA Announces Coronavirus Food Assistance Program.” April 17. https://www.usda.gov/media/pressreleases/2020/04/17/usda-announces-coronavirus-food-assistance-program U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 2020. Carcass Management of Non-Diseased Animals in Response to the Coronavirus Outbreak (COVID-19).

References

https://www.epa.gov/agriculture/carcass-management-non-diseased-animalsresponse-coronavirus-outbreak-covid-19 Van der Zee, Bibi. 2019. “Campaigners call for sheep saved from capsized ship to be put out to pasture.” The Guardian, November 28. https://www.theguardian. com/environment/2019/nov/28/campaigners-call-for-sheep-saved-from-capsizedship-to-be-put-out-to-pasture Varner, Gary. 2012. Personhood, ethics, and animal cognition: Situating animals in Hare’s two-level utilitarianism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vaughan, Adam. 2019. “COP25 climate summit ends in ‘staggering failure of leadership.’ ” New Scientist, December 16. https://www.newscientist.com/ article/2227541-cop25-climate-summit-ends-in-staggering-failure-of-leadership/ Vialles, Noellie. 1994. Animal to Edible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Villagra, Analia. 2011. “Cannibalism, Consumption, and Kinship in Animal Studies.” In Making Animal Meaning, L. Kalof et al. (eds.). East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press. VOA News. 2021. “Brazil Launches COVID-19 Vaccine Program for Hard Hit Indigenous People.” January 20. https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/ brazil-launches-covid-19-vaccine-program-hard-hit-indigenous-people Voiceless. 2020. Voiceless: The Animal Protection Institute. https://voiceless.org.au/ Wadiwel, Dinesh 2012. “Thinking through Race and its Connection to Critical Animal Studies.” Presented at the ICAS roundtable at Minding Animals 2 Conference, July 4, Utrecht, The Netherlands. Wadiwel, Dinesh. 2015. The War Against Animals. Leiden: Brill. Walker, Alice. 1983. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Walker, Margaret Urban. 1989. “What Does the Different Voice Say?: Gilligan’s Women and Moral Philosophy.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 23: 123–34. Walker, Margaret Urban. 1995. “Moral Understandings: Alternative ‘Epistemology’ for a Feminist Ethics.” In Justice and Care: Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics, Virginia Held (ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Walker, Margaret Urban. 2006. Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ward, Edith. 1892. “Review of Henry Salt, Animal Rights.” Shafts 1, no. 3 (November 19). Warren, Karen J. 1987. “Feminism and Ecology: Making Connections.” Environmental Ethics 9 (1): 3–20. Warren, Karen J. 1990. “The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism.” Environmental Ethics 12 (2): 125–46. Warren, Karen J. (ed.). 1994. Ecological Feminism. New York: Routledge. Warren, Karen J. (ed.). 1997. Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Warren, Karen J. 2000. Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Warren, Mary Anne. 1997. Moral Status: Obligations to Persons and Other Living Things. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weil, Kari. 2010. “Shameless Freedom.” jac 30 (3–4): 713–26. Weiner, Russell. 2012. “Flesh.” Unpublished manuscript.

425

426

References

Weisberg, Zipporah. 2009. “The Broken Promises of Monsters: Haraway, Animals and the Humanist Legacy.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 7 (2): 22–62. West, Robin. 1988. “Jurisprudence and Gender.” University of Chicago Law Review 55 (1): 1–71. West, Robin. 1997. Caring for Justice. New York: New York University Press. White, Lynn, Jr. 1967. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Science 155 (3767): 1203–7. White, R. (ed.). 2004. Controversies in Environmental Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wieringa, Saskia E., Evelyn Blackwood, and Abha Bhaiya (eds.). 2007. Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wiley, Andrea S. 2004. “ ‘Drink Milk for Fitness’: The Cultural Politics of Human Biological Variation and Milk Consumption in the United States.” American Anthropologist 106 (3): 506–17. Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Williams, Delores. 1993. “Sin, Nature, and Black Women’s Bodies.” In Ecofeminism and the Sacred, Carol J. Adams (ed.). New York: Continuum. Williams, Terry Tempest. 1995. Desert Quartet: An Erotic Landscape. New York: Pantheon Books. Winterson, Jeanette. 1992. Written on the Body. New York: Vintage. “Women Working for Animals.” 1985. Feminists for Animal Rights Newsletter 1 (4): 2. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1963. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. Woinarski, John, C. Z. A. Burbidge, and P. L. Harrison. 2015. “Ongoing Unraveling of a continental fauna: Decline and Extinction of Australian Mammals since European Settlement.” PNAS 112 (15): 4531–40. Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409. Woodyatt, Amy. 2019. “The Amazon burns. But another part of Brazil is being destroyed faster.” CNN, September 22. https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/22/ americas/brazil-cerrado-soy-intl/index.html Woolf, Virginia. (1928) 1956. Orlando. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. World Animal Net et al. 2020. The Animals’ Manifesto: Preventing COVID-X, 5. https://pub.lucidpress.com/1c6e4a02-2bae-4656-a238-333d956dc2a0/#_0 Worldwatch. 1987. “On the Brink of Extinction.” Quoted in World Development Forum 5 (November), 3. Wright, Alexis. 2013. The Swan Book. Sydney: Giramondo Publishing Company. Wu, Peichen. 2007. “Performing Gender Along the Lesbian Continuum: The Politics of Sexual Identity in the Seitô Society.” In Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia, Saskia E. Wieringa, Evelyn Blackwood, and Abha Bhaiya (eds.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 77–100. Wynter, Sylvia. 1994, “ ‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues.” Forum N.H.I: Knowledge for the 21st Century 1 (1): 1–17. Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (3), 257–337. doi:10.1353/ncr.2004.0015

References

Yeung, Jessie. 2019. “Thousands of sheep feared drowned after a cargo ship capsized in the Black Sea.” CNN, November 25. https://www.cnn. com/2019/11/25/europe/romania-sheep-ship-overturned-intl-trnd-hnk-scli/index. html Yunkaporta, Tyson. 2019. Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. Melbourne: Text Publishing. Yusoff, Kathryn. 2019. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

427

428

Index Page references in italic denote figures/illustrations ableism 148 abolitionism 165, 166, 205 abstraction 338 abuse 55, 81 accidental othering 352 Ache 102 ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) 59 activism 16–22, 30–1, 32, 33–9 see also animal rights movements Adams, Carol J. 16, 259, 283–4, 293–4, 297–303 “Caring about Suffering” 63 Neither Man Nor Beast 298 Pornography of Meat, The 253, 261, 298–9, 379 “Sexual Politics of Meat, The” 283 Sexual Politics of Meat, The 23, 283, 294, 298 vegetarianism 299–300 Adams, Carol J. and Donovan, Josephine Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethics for the Treatment of Animals 53, 63, 297–8 Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, The 40, 142 Adam’s Task (Hearne, Vicki) 284 advocacy 205, 208–9, 210, see also animal rights movements universalism 229, 233–5, 235–44 affect theory 45 Africa 90, 95, 102–3, 161 Afrocentric ecowomanist activism 99–101 colonialism 130–1 gender 377 homosexuality 126, 127, 130–1 Afrocentric ecomotherism 101–2 Afrocentric ecowomanism 96, 102 African activism 99–101 necessity of survival 96–7 US activism 97–9

Afrocentric womanism 95–6 Afrocentrism 102–3 agriculture 29, 55, 59, 129, 130, 164, 167, 355 see also dairy industry and factory farming animal feed 361, 368 auctions 335–6, 340–1, 345–6, 354, 358 Australia 330–1 COVID-19 pandemic 362–71 environment, the 29, 330–1, 356, 359–60, 369, 370 ethics 222–3 Finlayson, Hedley 330–1 GHGs 360 government policies 364–8, 370–1 human 223, 224 industries 342 meat-processing plants 336, 362–3, 364–8 shipping 356 see also Queen Hind capsize slaughterhouses 336, 362–3 small farmers 368 trade shows 250, 262 ahbez, eden 275–6 Eden’s Island 275 “Nature Boy” 275 ahbez, eden and Jeffries, Herb “Nature Boy Suite” 275 albatross 171–2 “All of One Flesh” (Benney, Norma) 21 Allen, Colin and Bekoff, Marc 112, 113 Allister, Mark Eco-Man: New Perspectives on Masculinity and Nature 269 Amazon rainforests 361 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 59 American Dream, the 198, 203, 211 429

430

Index Amory, Cleveland 15 “Anatomy is not destiny” (Vaid-Menon, Alok) 383 Anderlini-D’Onofrio, Serena 275 Andrews, Gregory 326, 330 Androgyny (Singer, June) 270 anger 78 animal care theory 57 Animal Equality (Dunayer, Joan) 64 Animal Estate, The (Ritvo, Harriet) 284 Animal Factories (Mason, Jim and Singer, Peter) 250 Animal Liberation (Singer, Peter) 10–11, 14, 15, 36, 283, 291–2 Animal Machines (Harrison, Ruth) 15 “L’Animal que donc de suis (à suivre)” (Derrida, Jacques) 284, 289 Animal Rights (Salt, Henry) 12 “Animal Rights and Feminist Theory” (Donovan, Josephine) 55, 291–2 animal rights movements 18–20, 33–9 see also activism and advocacy Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Wolfe, Cary) 32, 292, 293, 294–5, 297 Animal Save Movement 173 animal studies 31–2, 206, 285 Birke, Lynda 323 Derrida, Jacques 284–8 gender 290–1 Wolfe, Cary 284–5, 292–7, 306 n.4 “Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow), The” (Derrida, Jacques) 284, 286–7, 291 animaladies 7 animality 38, 200–2, 203–5, 210, 233, 258 race 25–6, 38, 91 animalizing 260 animals 6–7, 205–6 see also birds and species abuse 55, 222 see also dogfighting advocacy. See advocacy agriculture. See agriculture anti-cruelty associations 7, 9 anti-vivisection 12, 13–14, 18 in art. See “Ursula Hamdress” bushfire deaths 320 capital 205 care 40–1, 44, 156 see also feminist animal care theory colonialism 38

commodification 205, 210 communication with 325 companion 116–17, 163–4 consumption of. See meat, consumption de-subjectification 324 deaths 166–74, 320, 324–5, 331 see also extinction degeneracy 148–9 dependency 142, 143–56, 163, 164–5 desires 135–6 disability 149 domesticated 144, 146–9, 151, 152–6, 168 eros 135–6 ethics 11, 142, 193 n.20 eugenics 154–5 extinction. See extinction following 289–90 friendships with 116–20 grieving 171–2 homosexuality 124 humor 109–12 immigrant practices 236, 240 industries affecting 342 see also dairy industry intelligence 147 interdependence 151–2 killing 29, 324–5, 331, 367 language of 61–2 liberation 135 love for 304 mirror neurons 73–4 mourning rituals 171 nationalism 233, 235 oppression 32 othering. See othering patriarchal culture 20–1 pets 116–17, 163–4, 168, 304 play 112–15 pronouns 386–7 protection 13–14 reading 62–3 relationships among 374–5 relationships with 136, 162, 163–5, 169–74 representations 245, 249–50 reproduction 124–5, 127–8, 129, 154, 157 n.6 research using 52–3, 58, 129, 191 n.4 rights 163 rights movements. See animal rights movements sanctuaries 40–1

Index sentience 205 sexuality 124, 129 slavery 258 standpoint theory 60–1 subordination 205, 208, 210 taxonomies 205, 387 as totems 216 veganism 168 vivisection 52–3, 58, 129, 191 n.4 voice 321, 322, 324 wild 57–8, 143–4 women’s connections with 12–14 Animals in That Country, The (McKay, Laura Jean) 325–6 Animals Make Us Human (Grandin, Temple and Johnson, Catherine) 146 Animals Manifesto 370 Animals, Men, and Morals: An Enquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans (Godlovitch, Roslind, Godlovitch, Stanley and Harris, John) 15 Anthropocene, the 27–31, 132 anthropocentrism 172, 203, 208–9, 233, 238, 325 animal consumption 242 “Ursula Hamdress” 261 anthropornography 261–2, 263 anti-cruelty animal associations 7, 9 anti-vivisection 12, 13–14, 18 Aristotle Poetics 111 Arresting Dress: Cross-dressing, Law and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Sears, Clare) 282 Asia 126, 127 Asian sheepshead wrasse 373 assimilation 352–3 atmospheres 352 atmospheres of violence 337, 342, 344–5 attention 328, 347–8, 352 aural othering 343 Australia 329–32 bushfires 319–20, 326–7 climate change 327 denial 331, 332 extinction 326, 329–30 indigenous people 331–2 songbirds 319, 321, 326, 328, 329, 332–3 Babe the pig 109 baboons 287–8, 289–90 see also primatology Bagby, Rachel 102–3 Bagemihl, Bruce 124, 129

Bailey, Cathryn 351 Bain Turc, Le (Ingres, Jean) 259 Banerjee, Damayanti and Bell, Michael Mayfield 274 barbecues 263 Barnum, P. T. 257–8 Bartmann, Sarah 92 Bateson, Gregory and Bateson, Mary Catherine 64 Bateson, Mary Catherine and Bateson, Gregory 64 Bauman, Batya 20 beards 378 bearing reins 9 beauty 257–8, 259, 260, 261 being, friendships with animals 116–20 Bekoff, Marc and Allen, Colin 112, 113 Bekoff, Marc and Pierce, Jessica Wild Justice 112–13 Bell, Michael Mayfield and Banerjee, Damayanti 274 Benney, Norma “All of One Flesh” 21 Bérubé, Michael 145 Best Friends animal sanctuary 209 Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethics for the Treatment of Animals (Donovan, Josephine and Adams, Carol J.) 53, 63, 297–8 “Beyond Binaries: An Interspecies Case for They/Them Pronouns” (Nyman, Patti) 387 Beyond Power (French, Marilyn) 20 Beyond Religion (Dalai Lama) 70 Beyond the Gender (Vaid-Menon, Alok) 380 Bi Any Other Name (Sprinkle, Annie) 266 bio-ethnocentrism 37 Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century, The (Schuller, Kyla) 378 birds 319 Australian songbirds 319, 321, 326, 328, 329, 332–3 extinction 329 as mimics 319, 326, 328 music 322, 328 Birke, Lynda 323, 324 bisexuality 275 Black Beauty (Sewell, Anna) 9 Black Feminist Ecological Thought 313–17 Black masculinity 200 Black womanism 89–93 see also Afrocentric ecowomanism

431

432

Index Blue Planet II television series 373–4, 375 BNP (British National Party) 234 bodies 135, 136 differences in 140 gender 379–83 Bolsonaro, Jair 362 bovines 337, 344–5, 348, 350, 371 see also dairy industry Brazil 361–3, 367 breast milk donation 187–8 brick kilns 342, 348, 349–50 Brighter Green 357, 360, 363–4, 366 British National Party (BNP) 234 British Women’s’ Ecology Group 20 Brophy, Brigid 8 “Rights of Animals, The” 6–7, 15 Brown, Wendy 327 Buddhism 77–8, 82 Budiansky, Stephan 150 Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Choose Domestication, The 148–9 buffaloes 337 “Building Bridges with Accessible Care: Disability Studies, Feminist Care Scholarship, and Beyond” (Kelly, Christine) 141–2 Bullock, Charlotte 101 Burbidge C. Z. A., Woinarski, John, and Harrison, P. L. 329, 330 Burger King “Manthem” 268 bushfires 319–20, 326–7 Butler, Judith 170 Gender Trouble 375–6 CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) 355 see also factory farming Calarco, Matthew 284–5 Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida 284 Callicott, J. Baird 147, 148 cancer 276 cannibalism 215–17, 218–19, 220–1, 223, 224–6, 241 “Cannibalism, Consumption, and Kinship in Animal Studies” (Villagra, Analia) 225–6 canning 384, 385 capitalism 132, 272, 342, 343 animal capital 205 brick kilns 348 COVID-19 pandemic 364–5

Escobar, Arturo 353 factory farming 356 women 376–7 Capp, Al 111 care 45–6, 141 Adams, Carol J. 297–8 cross-species 134 disability studies 142 eros 135–6 Kelly, Christine 156 masculinity 277 political analysis 64 care ethics 22, 39–42, 61–5, 142–3, 156 see also compassion attention 347–8 care theory 22, 47–8 see also care ethics and feminist animal care theory criticisms 49–50 standpoint theory 60–1 “Caring about Suffering” (Adams, Carol J.) 63 caring cannibalism 217, 218–19, 220–1, 225–6 Carthan, Hattie 98 Case for Animal Rights, The (Regan, Tom) 291–2 categorical imperative, the 50, 52, 219 cats 329, 33 cattle culture 371 Caucasian beauty 257–8 Cerrado, the 361–2 Césaire, Aimé Discourse on Colonialism 38 Chante tin’sa kinanzi Po 28 chasing game, the 114 chickens 25, 136–7, 140, 335–6, 344 chimpanzees 171, 283 see also primatology China 126, 127 Christianity 93, 299 Christmas Story, A (Clark, Bob) 8 Citizen watch advertisement 253, 256, 259 civil rights 97–8 class 24–5, 95–6 Clement, Grace “Ethic of Care and the Problem of Wild Animals, The” 57, 58 climate 281 climate change 22, 28, 90, 132, 281, 359–60 agriculture 29, 330–1, 356, 359–60 Australia 327 Brazil 361–2 denial 331, 332

Index United Nations 359, 360 USA 327 Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health and Development Worldwide (Shiva, Vandana) 23 clothing 381–2 CMV (contextual moral vegetarianism) 217–24, 226, 235–6 co-evolution theory 150–2 Cobb, Shea 316 Cobbe, Frances Power 12 Coetzee, J. M. Lives of Animals, The 107–8, 117–19, 120, 121 Cohen, Stanley 331 colonialism 38–9, 94–5, 342, 343 diet 37 environment, the 90 food 233–4 homophobia 130–1 nudes 256 Puerto Rico 385 race 26–7, 29, 38, 130–1 settler 329–32 women 377 Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation (Harris, Michael) 251, 254–7, 259–60, 261, 262, 264 Combahee River Collective (CRC) 24 communal mourning 173–4 community 103 Companion Species Manifesto, The (Haraway, Donna) 301 compassion 7, 53–4, 70–1 arguments against 72, 83–4 defining 76–82 food 84–6 morality 72–4 vs. rights 69–71 Stoic objection to 83–4 turning empathy into 74–6 wisdom 77–8 Compassion (González, Suzy) 44 Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) 355 see also factory farming Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles 98, 101–2 Conditions of Postmodernity, The (Harvey, David) 251–4, 255, 259–60, 263 consent 59–60 context 179, 189, 337 contextual 240–3

contextual moral vegetarianism/veganism (CMV) 164, 217–24, 226, 235–6 COP25 summit 360 Corman, Lauren 321 Corrigan, Robert W. 111 Costello, Elizabeth (character) 117–19, 120, 121 courage 120–1 Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Choose Domestication, The (Budiansky, Stephan) 148–9 COVID-19 pandemic 356, 359, 360, 362, 385 Animals Manifesto 370 environment, the 369–71 factory farms 364 food-chain workers 364–7 hunger 368 meat-processing plants 336, 362–3, 364–8 USA 363–8 cows. See bovines Combahee River Collective 24 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 23–4 Cronin, Katie 171 cross-dressing 381 Cruz, Luz 384, 385–6 Cruz, Lux and Montes de Oca, Ollie “You Can Too! Un Cuir Canning Guide” 385 Cuir Kitchen Brigade 384–5, 386 cultural appropriation 35–9 cultural studies 294–5, 296–7 culture 129, 231, 237–9, 244 meat-eating 25, 241–2 multiculturalism 236–7 universalism 236–7 Cuomo, Chris and Gruen, Lori 109 Curtin, Deane 195 n.29, 220–1, 235–6, 243 Da concept 102 dairy industry 37, 337, 339, 340–2, 346, 353 brick kilns 342, 348, 349–50 lactational trauma 350 Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) 28–9 Dalai Lama 77, 78, 80–1, 85, 86 Beyond Religion 70 Daly, Mary Gyn/Ecology 96–7 Damasio, Antonio 74, 75, 84 DAPL (Dakota Access Pipeline) 28–9 Darwin, Charles On the Origin of Species 205 Davenport, Charles B. 154

433

434

Index Davis, Angela Women, Race & Class 376, 377 Davis, David Brion 55–6 Dawn, Karen and Singer, Peter “When Slaughter Makes Sense” 54 Days of War, Nights of Love (CrimethInc) 133 death 161–2, 166–74, 241, 300, 331 see also extinction bushfires 320 Despret, Vinciane 324–5 killing 29, 324–5, 331, 367 Death of Nature, The (Merchant, Carolyn) 17, 376 “Decolonizing Relationships with Nature” (Plumwood, Val) 38–9 deforestation 361, 362, 363 DeGrazia, David 51 Demme, Jonathan Silence of the Lambs, The 294 Demoiselles d’Avignon, Les (Picasso, Pablo) 256, 259 denial 331, 332 denied dependency 3 dependency 142, 143–56, 163, 164–5 depopulation 367 Derrida, Jacques 284–90, 294, 311 n.39 “L’Animal que donc de suis (à suivre)” 284, 289 “Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow), The” 284, 286–7, 291 Descartes, René 205 Desert Quartet (Tempest Williams, Terry) 266–7 desire. See eros and eroticism Despret, Vinciane 324 What Would Animals Say if We Asked the Right Questions? 324–5 Diamond, Cora 107, 108, 117–18, 119 “Eating Meat and Eating People” 116–17 diet 37–8, 233–4 see also food and meat, consumption and veganism and vegetarianism Diet for a Small Planet (Lappé, Francis Moore) 17 Dion, Mark Scala Naturae 5 disability studies 142–3 dependency 142, 143–52 domesticated animals 149, 152–6 social contract, the 150 Discourse on Colonialism (Césaire, Aimé) 38

diversity 24, 29, 94, 254, 314 animal rights movements 15, 19, 32, 33, 35–9 environmental groups 95–6 dogs ability training 301 dogfighting 197–8, 206–8, 209, 210 domination 1–2, 17, 22, 163, 210, 265 see also white supremacy challenging 6 farming 222 ideology of 91 logic of 218–19 othering 94 politic of 93 of vision 263–4 Warren, Karen 218–19 Donald, Diana 13 Women Against Cruelty: Protection of Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain 7, 8 Donaldson, Sue and Kymlicka, Will 156 Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights 152–3, 155 donkeys 341–2, 344, 346, 347, 348, 349–50 Donovan, Josephine 155–6 “Animal Rights and Feminist Theory” 55, 291–2 listening 322, 325 sympathy 347 Donovan, Josephine and Adams, Carol J. Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethics for the Treatment of Animals 53, 63, 297–8 Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, The 40, 142 Douglas, Leah 365, 366 drag queens 273–4 dualisms 3–4, 7, 11, 17, 46, 200, 376, 382 see also hierarchies civilized/savage 200 domination/subordination 3 human/animal 6, 12, 38, 233, 237, 238 see also animality master/slave 3, 200 man/woman 3–4, 8, 31 mind/body 3, 8, 46, 200, 376 nature/culture 93–5 othering 337, 351 Plumwood, Val 8–9 public/private 8–9, 17, 19, 33–4 reason/emotion 10, 11

Index research 351 subject/object 200 white/nonwhite 200 Dunayer, Joan Animal Equality 64 Dyson, Michael Eric 203–4 earth gods 269 Eastern grey kangaroo and her joey who survived the forest fires in Mallacoota, An (McArthur, Jo-Anne) 318 “Eating Meat and Eating People” Diamond, Cora 116–17 eco-gender 274–5, 277, 278 Eco-Man (Murphy, Patrick D.) 277 Eco-Man: New Perspectives on Masculinity and Nature (Allister, Mark) 269 eco-masculinity 266, 267–75 contemporary expressions 275–7 eco-sexuality 266–7, 278 contemporary expressions 275–7 ecocriticism 313–14 “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism” (Gaard, Greta) 31 Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature (Gaard, Greta) 23 ecofeminist animal theory 182–3 Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action (Sturgeon, Noel) 23 ecofeminist philosophy/theory 3–6, 31–2, 265–6 see also ecowomanism appropriation 103 domination 163, 218 ecofeminist animal theory 182–3 feminism, challenge to 232 multispecies 350–3 othering animals 345–51 ecology 92 see also environment, the Black Feminist Ecological Thought 313–17 world-sense 315 “Ecology is a Sistah’s Issue Too: The Politics of Emergent Afrocentric Ecowomanism” (Riley, Shamara Shantu) 25–6 ecomotherism 101 economic value 95 ecowomanism 25 see also Afrocentric ecowomanism

Eden’s Island (ahbez, eden) 275 elephants 171 Elmer, Jonathan 294 emotion 11–12, 72, 76, 82, 304 see also sentimentality Adams, Carol J. 298, 300 Damasio, Antionio 75 Derrida, Jacques 288 feelings 75–7, 82 gender 292 Nussbaum, Martha 76–7 shame 288–9, 300 Smuts, Barbara 288 emotional intelligence 108–9 empathy 45, 55–6, 63–4, 70, 83 see also entangled empathy compassion, disconnection from 80–1 compassion, turning into 74–6 empathetic inaccuracy 82 evolution 72–3 legal rights 53 entangled empathy 41, 79–80, 82, 143, 162 Entangled Empathy (Gruen, Lori) 11 environment, the see also Afrocentric ecowomanism and climate change Africa 90 Afrocentric ecomotherism 101–2 Afrocentric ecowomanist activism 97–101 Afrocentric womanism 95–6 Afrocentrism 102–3 agriculture 29, 330–1, 356, 359–60, 369, 370 Australia 320–1, 326–7, 329–31 Black Feminist Ecological Thought 313–17 Black womanism 89–93 Brazil 361–3 Brighter Green 357 bushfires 319–20, 326–7 carcass management 367 COVID-19 pandemic 369–71 deforestation 361, 362, 363 destruction of the 28–9, 89–90, 137 drag queens 273–4 ecology 92, 315 environmental ethics 21–2 environmental racism 26, 90, 95 food 233 gender 277–8 health 276 ideology of domination 91 livestock effect 333 n.1 new vision for 369–71

435

436

Index toxic waste 90, 273–4 USA 90, 95–6, 316, 327 water contamination 316 equality 11–14 Erickson, Bruce and Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriolina Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire 125, 269 eros 123, 133–4, 137 see also eroticism and sexuality animals 135–6 capitalism 132 care 135–6 prohibition 133 suppression 135 eroticism 266–7 erotophilia 275 Escobar, Arturo 353 Pluriversal Politics 340 essentialist 4, 31, 96, 230, 234, 252, 255, 270, 308–9 n14 essentialism 230, 252, 270 “Ethic of Care and the Problem of Wild Animals, The” (Clement, Grace) 57, 58 ethics 72 see also care ethics and morality agriculture 222–3 animal 11, 142, 193 n.20 CMV 217–24, 226, 235–6 eugenics 131, 154–5 euthanasia 367 Evans, Arthur Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture 273 Evans, Rhonda and Forsyth, Craig 206 evolution 72–3, 75, 84, 127, 131 co-evolution theory 150–2 exterminism 162, 165–6 extinction 22, 30, 89, 90, 153, 154–5, 161 see also extinctionism Australia 326, 329–31 foods 146 palm oil 167 Extinction rebellion 173 extinctionism 162–6 factory farming 29, 222, 250, 355–6, 369 COVID-19 pandemic 362–5 FAR (Feminists for Animal Rights) 19, 20, 21 farmed animals 250 fashion 381 Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh 146–7, 150 feelings 75–7, 82 see also emotion Female Masculinity (Halberstam, Jack) 270–1

femininity 9, 290–2, 293, 376–7 see also gender Iran 377–8 Vaid-Menon, Alok 381 feminism see also womanism activism 16–22 animal rights groups 19–20 animals, connection with 12–14, 15–16 ecofeminism, challenge from 232 intersectionality 23–6, 134, 232 universalism of 232 Vegetarian-Feminists 16 Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (Plumwood, Val) 23 Feminism Unmodified (MacKinnon, Catharine) 59 feminist animal care theory 48–9 criticisms 49–53 ethics 61–5 refinements 53–60 standpoint theory 60–1 Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, The (Donovan, Josephine and Adams, Carol J.) 40, 142 “Feminist Criticism and Cultural Imperialism” (Meyerding, Jane) 21 feminist eating 302–3 feminist standpoint theory 60, 61 Feminists for Animal Rights (FAR) 19, 20, 21 fieldwork 338 fight or flight mechanism 75 Finally Free (Vick, Michael) 208 Finlayson, Hedley 330 fish 373–4, 375 Fisher, Elizabeth Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society 20 fishing industry 29 Flanagan, Richard 327 “Flexible Sexism” (Massey, D.) 253, 263 “Flint is Family” (Frazier, Latoya Ruby) 316 Flocker, Michael Metrosexual Guide to Style, The 267 Floyd, George 37 food 85–6, 100, 167–8 see also diet and meat, consumption barbecues 263 canning 384, 385 colonialism 233–4 hunger 368 nationalism 233, 235 supply 364–5, 384–6 universalization of 231, 233–4

Index food-chain workers 364–7, 371 Food Not Bombs chapter 385 “For All Those Who Were Indian in Another Life” (Smith, Andy) 103 Ford, Isabella “Women and Socialism” 14 formula milk 185–7, 190, 191 n.6 Forsyth, Craig and Evans, Rhonda 206 Forte, Dianne J. 99 Fraiman, Susan 31, 32 “Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals: Tracking Gender in Animal Studies” 31 Francione, Gary 153, 164 “World is Vegan – if you want it, The” campaign 230, 232 Frazier, Latoya Ruby “Flint is Family” 316 free speech 59 freedom 261–2 French, Marilyn Beyond Power 20 friendships with animals 116–20 Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Nussbaum, Martha) 150 Fry, Christopher 120–1 Gaard, Greta 32, 238–40 “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism” 31 Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature 23 Gaarder, Emily Women and the Animal Rights Movement 32 Garbarino, James “Protecting Children and Animals from Abuse: A Trans-species Concept of Caring” 55 Gardiner, Linda 8 Garner, Robert 49–50, 52 Gauguin, Paul Spirit of the Dead Watching 256, 259 Gay Vegetarians 18 GBM (Green Belt Movement) 100 Gearhart, Sally 18–19 Wanderground, The 18 gender 127, 266, 269–71, 273, 286–8, 290–3, 375–83 see also femininity and masculinity

Adams, Carol J. 299 binaries 4 Derrida, Jacques 286, 287, 288, 290 eco-gender 274–5, 277, 278 environment, the 277–8 Haraway, Donna 304 Irving, Dan 384 liberation from 383–4 Wolfe, Cary 297, 310 n.20 Woodstock, Tuck 386 Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice, The (Smith, Bonnie) 9 Gender Reveal podcast (Woodstock, Tuck) 386 Gender Trouble (Butler, Judith) 375–6 Gérme, Jean-Léon Slave Market 258, 259 GHGs (greenhouse gases) 360 Gilbert, Sandra 170 Gliddon, George and Nott, Josiah Types of Mankind 200 Glitch Feminism (Russell, Legacy) 380 global considerations 339 violence 229 goats 336, 344, 345 Godlovitch, Roslind 14–15 Godlovitch, Roslind, Godlovitch, Stanley, and Harris, John Animals, Men, and Morals: An Enquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans 15 Godlovitch, Stanley, Godlovitch, Roslind, and Harris, John, Animals, Men, and Morals: An Enquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans 15 González, Suzy Compassion 44 Growth 280 Mother 178 Goodall, Jane 283 Grande Odalisque, La (Ingres, Jean) 259 Grandin, Temple and Johnson, Catherine Animals Make Us Human 146 “Granola Boys, Eco-Dudes and Me” (Larsen, Elizabeth) 95–6 Great Chain of Being 4 “Great Yellow Hope, The” (Kim, Claire Jean) 201 Greek Slave, The (Powers, Hiram) 259 Green Belt Movement (GBM) 100 Green Man 269 Green Mountain College 149

437

438

Index greenhouse gases (GHGs) 360 grief 162, 169–74 Growth (González, Suzy) 280 Gruen, Lori 41, 143, 156 compassion 79–80, 81, 82 Entangled Empathy 11 Gruen, Lori and Cuomo, Chris 109 Gruen, Lori and Probyn Rapsey, Fiona 7 Guaja, the 218 Gyn/Ecology (Daly, Mary) 96–7 hair 378–9 hair removal 378–9 Halberstam, Jack Female Masculinity 270–1 Hale, Grace Elizabeth Making Whiteness 263 Half the Sky (Kristof, Nicolas and WuDunn, Sheryl) 258 Hamlet fire 23–5 Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives, The (Simon, Bryant) 24, 25 Hamlin, Amie 261 Haraway, Donna 165–6, 301–3 Companion Species Manifesto, The 301 meat, consumption 301–3 Primate Visions 284 When Species Meet 301, 302 Harris, John, Godlovitch, Roslind, and Godlovitch, Stanley Animals, Men, and Morals: An Enquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans 15 Harris, Michael Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation 251, 254–7, 259–60, 261, 262, 264 Harrison, P. L., Burbidge C. Z. A., and Woinarski, John 329, 330 Harrison, Ruth Animal Machines 15 Harvey, David Conditions of Postmodernity, The 251–4, 255, 259–60, 263 Hassan, Ihab “Schematic differences between modernism and postmodernism” chart 252 hate/love 75 health 54–5, 59, 81, 276 see also COVID-19 pandemic racism 90, 131

Hearne, Vicki Adam’s Task 284 Herzig, Rebecca M. Plucked: A History of Hair Removal 378, 379 hierarchies 3, 4–6, 131, 134, 165, 204–5, 209 see also domination animal rights movements 19, 33 capitalism 272 inter-animal conflicts of interest 184 Ko, Syl 26 Meyerding, Jane 21 moral 192 n.13 nature-culture dualism 93 othering 338 patriarchal 6–9 reason 10, 11 Up-Down hierarchical thinking 217–18 vision 263–4, 288 history 9 History and Class Consciousness (Lukács, Georg) 61 History of White People, A (Painter, Nell) 251, 257–60 Hollander, Ann Sex and Suits 381 homeostasis 74 homophobia 130–1, 132–3 homosexuality 124–7, 128, 129–31, 272–3 homosociality 377–9 hooks, bell 91–2 Yearning 97 horses 9, 109–11, 113–16, 117, 292, 345–6, 349 Hottentot Venus, the. See Bartmann, Sarah How Animals Grieve (King, Barbara) 172 Huckleberry Finn (Twain, Mark) 254 Hughes, Robert Shock of the New, The 253 “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities” (Wolfe, Cary) 292, 293, 295 human farming 223, 224 humane farming 222, 223, 224, 225, 226 humanity 73–4, 209 humanness 302 human supremacy 204, 208, 210 humor 109–112, 115 hunger 368 Hunt, Greg 330 hunting 57–8, 216, 234, 238 Hurricane Maria 384–5 Hursthouse, Rosalind 191 n.4

Index identity 216, 304, 386 immigrant animal practices 236, 240 Imperial Foods Processing Plant fire 23–5 Imperial Leather (McClintock, Anne) 258 inclusivity 19, 32 independence 144–5 indigenous cultures 103, 126, 127, 131, 227 n.10 Australia 331–2 Brazil 361, 362 Nigeria 377 yarning 332 Ingres, Jean 258 Bain Turc, Le 259 Grande Odalisque, La 259 Odalisque with a Slave 256, 259 intentional othering 352 inter-animal conflicts of interest 181–90 interdependence 141, 142, 143, 151–2 see also dependency intersectional analysis 23–6, 134, 210–11, 232, 236, 239, 243, 257, 298, 304 animals and race 233, 234 coalitions 237 Combahee River Collective 24 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 23 ecofeminism 22-26, 135, 229, 230, 232 race and gender 25 veganism 231, 232, 235, women against animal cruelty 7–9, 16–22 Irving, Dan 384 “Isla del Encanto” (Kennedy, Alice) 385 Iverem, Esther 97–8 Jambalaya (Teish, Luisah) 102 Jefferson, Thomas Notes on the State of Virginia 200 Jeffries, Herb and ahbez, eden “Nature Boy Suite” 275 Jewett, Sarah Orne 62 Johnson, Catherine and Grandin, Temple Animals Make Us Human 146 joy 107–8, 119, 120, 133 justice 39, 46 disabilities 150 race 202–3 Kafer, Alison 148 kangaroos 318 Kant, Immanuel 50, 72, 219 Kean, Hilda “Smooth Cool Men of Science” 12

Kelch, Thomas G. “Role of the Rational and Emotive in a Theory of Animal Rights, The” 53–4 Kelly, Christine 156 “Building Bridges with Accessible Care: Disability Studies, Feminist Care Scholarship, and Beyond” 141–2 Kennedy, Alice “Isla del Encanto” 385 Kenya 99–100 Keyes, Allison 203–4 Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late Capitalist Struggle (Kovich, Tammy) 383 Kheel, Marti 19, 109, 182, 241–2 CMV 221–2 “Liberation of Nature: A Circular Affair, The” 21–2 masculinity 268 Nature Ethics 147, 242, 277 universalism 237–8, 240, 243–4 killing 242 Kim, Claire Jean 6, 234, 236–40, 243 Kimmel, Michael and Messner, Michael Men’s Lives 269 kin altruism 51 kinship 225–6 King, Barbara How Animals Grieve 172 King, Ynestra 2 dualism 3 Kip the horse 115–16 Kittay, Eva Feder 145 Ko, Aph 36, 38 Ko, Syl 26, 38 kobudai 373–4, 375 Kokopelli 269 Kourfa, Niger 100–1 Kovich, Tammy Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late Capitalist Struggle 383 Kristof, Nicolas and WuDunn, Sheryl Half the Sky 258 Kymlicka, Will and Donaldson, Sue 156 Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights 152–3, 155 lactational trauma 350 LAIR (League/Lesbians for Animals’ Irreducible Rights) 18 Langer, Susanne 111–12

439

440

Index language 61–2, 127, 332, 343, 347 pronouns 386–7 Lansbury, Coral Old Brown Dog, The 14 Lappé, Francis Moore Diet for a Small Planet 17 Larsen, Elizabeth “Granola Boys, Eco-Dudes and Me” 95–6 laughter 110, 111 League for Animals’ Irreducible Rights (LAIR) 18 LeGuin, Ursula K. “She Unnames Them” 387 Lesbians for Animals’ Irreducible Rights (LAIR) 18 Lesbian Rangers 278 n.5 liberal humanism 294, 295, 296 liberal rights theory 59 liberalism 69–70, 71 see also neoliberalism “Liberation of Nature: A Circular Affair, The” (Kheel, Marti) 21–2 life 77, 166–9 precariousness of 170 Linnaeus, Carl Systema Naturae 205 lions 161 listening 328, 333 see also sound indigenous people 331–2 politics of 321–6, 331 refusal 332 literature 108 live exports 359 see also shipping Lives of Animals, The (Coetzee, J. M.) 107–8, 117–19, 120, 121 livestock 330 see also shipping Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment (Steingraber, Sandra) 276 Lloyd, Genevieve 10 Logan’s Run (Anderson, Michael; Nolan, William F. and Johnson, George Clayton) 223–4 Lorde, Audre 96–7 love/hate 75 Loving Animals: Toward a New Animal Advocacy (Rudy, Kathy) 304 Lubin, David 262 Luke, Brian “Taming Ourselves or Going Feral?” 63–4 Lukács, Georg 61 History and Class Consciousness 61

lynching metaphor 203, 204 lyrebirds 328 Maathai, Wangari 100 McArthur, Jo-Anne 357 Eastern grey kangaroo and her joey who survived the forest fires in Mallacoota, An 318 Sheep being loaded onto trucks from the sale yards 354, 358 McClintock, Anne Imperial Leather 258 McKay, Laura Jean Animals in That Country, The 325–6 MacKinnon, Catharine 55 Feminism Unmodified 59 “Of Mice and Men” 59 Towards a Feminist Theory of the State 59 mad cow disease 59 Magnolia Tree Earth Center of Bed-Stuy 98 Makah Whale Hunt 234, 238, 239 Making Whiteness (Hale, Grace Elizabeth) 263 male supremacy 17, 22–3, 95, 96 Manet, Édouard Olympia 252, 254–6, 259, 260 “Manthem” (Burger King) 268 Martin, Trayvon 36 Marxism 61 masculinity 7, 9, 265–6, 267–75, 290–2 see also eco-masculinity and gender dogfighting 207–8 female 270–1 Iran 377–8 meat-eating 233, 242, 263, 268 nationalism 233 nurturing 277 reason 10 voyeurism 262 Wolfe, Cary 310 n.20 Mason, Jim 250 “Ursula Hamdress” 245, 249–51, 255, 257, 259, 260–4 Mason, Jim and Singer, Peter Animal Factories 250 Massey, D. “Flexible Sexism” 253, 263 Matisse, Henri Odalisque 259 meat, consumption 25, 29, 164, 231–2, 233–4, 242–4 see also CMV and food cannibalism 225–6 co-evolution theory 150–2 culture 25, 241–2

Index dependency 146–9 Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh 147 feminism 17 masculinity 233, 242, 263, 268 placentas 302–3 race 263 meat-processing plants 336, 362–3, 364–8 medicine 182 see also health assaults 131 Merchant, Carolyn Death of Nature, The 17, 376 Mercy, A (Morrison, Toni) 315 Melville, Herman 119–20 Men’s Lives (Kimmel, Michael and Messner, Michael) 269 Messner, Michael and Kimmel, Michael Men’s Lives 269 #MeToo 33–5 Metrosexual Guide to Style, The (Flocker, Michael) 267 metrosexuality 267–8 Mexico 385 Meyerding, Jane “Feminist Criticism and Cultural Imperialism” 21 Midgley, Mary 51 Mies, Maria and Shiva, Vandana 2 Mind of the Horse, The (Smythe, R. H.) 111 mirror neurons 73–4 miscegenation 133 modernism 252 “Modest Proposal, A” (Swift, Jonathan) 223 monkeys 218 see also primatology Montes de Oca, Ollie 384, 385 Montes de Oca, Ollie and Cruz, Luz “You Can Too! Un Cuir Canning Guide” 385 morality 83, 84, 112–13, 184 see also CMV development 74–5 inter-animal conflicts of interest 181–90 moral hierarchies 192 n.13 moral patients 11 moral remainders 184–5, 190 moral repair 184, 188–9, 190 moral theory 51 Morrison, Toni Mercy, A 315 Playing in the Dark 254 mortality 77, 94 Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriolina and Erickson, Bruce Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire 125, 269, 374

Moss, Cynthia 171 Mother (González, Suzy) 178 motherhood 185–7, 350 motherism 101 mourning rituals 171 multiculturalism 236–7 Mundy, Rachel 322–3 music 322–3, 328 Murphy, Patrick D. 61 Eco-Man 277 Mwangi, Wagaki 100 Najmabadi, Afsameh Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity 377 NARD Memorial Ceremony 160 National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) 14 National Black Women’s Health Project (NBWHP) 98–9 nationalism 233, 235 natural selection 128, 131 see also evolution nature 10, 57 see also animals and environment, the and species ableism 148 Afrocentrism 102 Black womanism 91–3 decolonizing 38–9 feminization of 376 human relationship with 103 language of 61–2 wild animals 57–8 “Nature Boy” (ahbez, eden) 275 “Nature Boy Suite” (ahbez, eden and Jeffries, Herb) 275 nature-culture dualism 93–5 Nature Ethics (Kheel, Marti) 147, 242, 277 Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Scheibinger, Londa) 376 NAWSA (National American Woman Suffrage Association) 14 NBWHP (National Black Women’s Health Project) 98–9 Neither Man Nor Beast (Adams, Carol J.) 298 Neoliberalism 327 New Women, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation (Ruether, Rosemary Radford) 17, 19 Nigeria 377 “No Humans Involved – An Open Letter to My Colleagues” (Wynter, Sylvia) 26

441

442

Index Nommo 102 Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson, Thomas) 200 Nott, Josiah and Gliddon, George Types of Mankind 200 Nuclia Waste 273–4 nudes, discussion of 245, 249–50, 251 Harris, Michael 251, 254–7, 259–60, 261, 262, 264 Harvey, David 251–4, 255, 259–60, 263 Painter, Nell 251, 257–60 nurturing 277 see also care Nussbaum, Martha 76–7, 78–9, 108 Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership 150 Nyam concept 102 Nyman, Patti “Beyond Binaries: An Interspecies Case for They/Them Pronouns” 387 Obama, Barack 200–1 objectification 91–2, 94, 385–6 see also nudes Odalisque (Matisse, Henri) 259 Odalisque with a Slave (Ingres, Jean) 256, 259 odalisques 256, 257, 258 “Of Mice and Men” (MacKinnon, Catharine) 59 Old Brown Dog, The (Lansbury, Coral) 14 Olympia (Manet, Édouard) 252, 254–6, 259, 260 On the Origin of Species (Darwin, Charles) 205 “Only Justice Can Stop a Curse” (Walker, Alice) 91 oppression See ableism; domination; dualisms; homophobia; male supremacy; meat, consumption of; race/racism; patriarchal culture; white supremacy organic intellectuals 136 Orientalism (Said, Edward) 258 Orlando (Woolf, Virginia) 266 O’Sullivan, Siobhan, Probyn-Rapsey, Fiona, and Watt, Yvette 32 othering 93–4, 338–40, 342–3, 345–51 accidental 352 assimilation 352–3 aural 343 embodied 344 intentional 352 social and emotional relationships 344–5 sympathy 347 Oyèwùmí, Oyèrónk 377

Pacelle, Wayne 15 Painter, Nell History of White People, A 251, 257–60 Palmer, Walter 161 Paradise fish 374 Parelli, Pat 110 pastoralism 130, 329–31 patriarchal culture domination 22–3 reproduction 130 sexual exploitation 33–5 Western art 255 patriarchal spaces sentiment in 6–9 Patterson, Charles 154 PCR (People for Community Recovery) 98 PCRC (Philadelphia Community Rehabilitation Corporation) 98 People for Community Recovery (PCR) 98 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) 299 peripheral gaze 352, 353 Persimmon (Rauschenberg, Robert) 252–3, 259 PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) 299 pets 116–17, 163–4, 168, 304, 386 Philadelphia Community Rehabilitation Corporation (PCRC) 98 Picasso, Pablo Demoiselles d’Avignon, Les 256, 259 Pierce, Jessica and Bekoff, Marc Wild Justice 112–13 pigs 341, 343 see also “Ursula Hamdress” pitbulls 209 pity 83 placentas 302–3 Plato Symposium 270 play 112–15, 119, 133 Playboar magazine 248, 249–50, 257, 260, 262 Playing in the Dark (Morrison, Toni) 254 Plucked: A History of Hair Removal (Herzig, Rebecca M.) 378, 379 Plumwood, Val 3, 8–9, 219, 220, 237 communication 322 contextual 241 “Decolonizing Relationships with Nature” 38–9 Feminism and the Mastery of Nature 23 reason 10 universalism 243

Index Pluriversal Politics (Escobar, Arturo) 340 poaching 161 Poetics (Aristotle) 111 Pollan, Michael 150, 151 pornography 250, 258 see also anthropornography and nudes Pornography of Meat, The (Adams, Carol J.) 253, 261, 298–9, 379 posthumanism 295, 296–7, 304 postmodernism 252, 263 poultry 25, 136–7, 140, 335–6, 344 power 33–5, 102 see also diversity structures/systems of 163 care ethics 39–40, 64 taxonomy of 210 dualisms 3–4 patriarchal 18, 20 Powers, Hiram Greek Slave, The 259 predation 128, 219, 241 “Prevalence of the Natural Law Within Women: Women and Animal Rights, The” (Salamone, Connie) 20 Primate Visions (Haraway, Donna) 284 primatology 283 baboons 287–8, 289–90 chimpanzees 171, 283 monkeys 218 Probyn-Rapsey, Fiona and Gruen, Lori 7 Probyn-Rapsey, Fiona, O’Sullivan, Siobhan, and Watt, Yvette 32 pronouns 386–7 “Protecting Children and Animals from Abuse: A Trans-species Concept of Caring” (Garbarino, James) 55 public mourning 173 public/private sphere 8–9 Puerto Rico 384–5 Pulé , Paul 272 “Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals: Tracking Gender in Animal Studies” (Fraiman, Susan) 31 Qajar Iran 377–8 Queen Hind capsize 357–60 Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriolina and Erickson, Bruce) 125, 269, 374 “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” television show 267 queerness 123–5, 128, 130, 133, 137, 374–5, 387–8

race/racism 6, 23–6, 199–200, 203–4 see also Afrocentric ecowomanism Afrocentric ecowomanism 96–101 animal advocacy 234 animality race 25–6, 38, 91, 200–2, 203–4, 233 apes 200 barbecues 263 beauty 257–8, 259, 261 Black Feminist Ecological Thought 313–17 Black womanism 89–93 civil rights 97–8 colonialism 26–7, 29, 38, 130–1 COVID-19 pandemic 365–6 DAPL 28–9 environmental 26, 90, 95 food-chain workers 365–6 gender 378 government policies 371 hair 378 immigrant animal practices 236, 240 justice system 202–3 Makah, the 238 miscegenation 133 moral immunity 210 nutritional 37–8 objectification 91–2 othering 93–4 pigs 260–1 racialization 233, 236 representations 249 scientific racism 131 sexuality 130–1, 255–6 slavery 55–6, 92, 94–5, 204, 254, 255, 257–8 sport 198, 201–2 veganism 235 Vick, Michael 197–200, 210 voyeurism 262 white supremacy 35–9, 201, 210 whiteness 257–61, 263 racialization 233 Radical Faeries 273 rainforests 361 rationality/reason 10–12, 72, 204, 351 see also wisdom Adams, Carol J. 298 emotion 11–12 gender 292 Rauschenberg, Robert Persimmon 252–3, 259

443

444

Index reclining nudes 251 genealogy 259 Harris, Michael 251, 254–7, 259–60, 261, 262, 264 Harvey, David 251–4, 255, 259–60, 263 Painter, Nell 251, 257–60 Regan, Tom 53 Case for Animal Rights, The 291–2 Thee Generation, The 51 Regarding the Pain of Others (Sontag, Susan) 63 relationships 42, 136, 162, 163–5, 169–74 queerness 374–5 religion 93, 268–9 Buddhism 77–8, 82 Christianity 93, 299 reproduction 124–5, 127–8, 129–32, 374 control of 135 eugenics 154 population 137 responsibility 157 n.6 Respect for Nature (Taylor, Paul) 117 Reuther, Rosemary Radford 1–2, 22 New Women, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation 17, 19 rhinoceros 30, 161 Richards, Dona 93, 94 “Rights of Animals, The” (Brophy, Brigid) 6–7, 15 “Rights of Dumb Animals” (Stowe, Harriet Beecher) 56 rights theory 57 Riley, Shamara Shantu “Ecology is a Sistah’s Issue Too: The Politics of Emergent Afrocentric Ecowomanism” 25–6 “Rites of Dionysus, The” photograph (Shaw, Tom) 214 ritual 216–17, 220 Ritvo, Harriet Animal Estate, The 284 Rock, Chris 204 “Role of the Rational and Emotive in a Theory of Animal Rights, The” (Kelch, Thomas G.) 53–4 Roller, Zoë “Water Justice Crises and Resistance Strategies” 29 roosters 136–7 Rose, Deborah Bird 171–2 Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) 7, 9

RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals 7, 9 Rubens, Peter Paul Venus at her toilet 252 Rudy, Kathy Loving Animals: Toward a New Animal Advocacy 304 Ruether, Rosemary New Women, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation 17 Russell, Legacy Glitch Feminism 380 Said, Edward Orientalism 258 Salamone, Connie 16, 19 “Prevalence of the Natural Law Within Women: Women and Animal Rights, The” 20 Salle, David Tight as Houses 252, 253, 259 Salleh, Ariel 2 Salt, Henry Animal Rights 12 Sanctuary Prints (Wylie, Cheryl) xxiv Śāntideva 78, 86 Scala Naturae (Dion, Mark) 5 Scheibinger, Londa Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science 376 “Schematic differences between modernism and postmodernism” chart (Hassan, Ihab) 252 Schizophyllum Commune 124 Schuller, Kyla Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century, The 378 Schwalbe, Michael 277 science, 302, 324 Scottish Enlightenment 55–6 Seaberg, Kurt 276–7 Sears, Clare Arresting Dress: Cross-dressing, Law and Fascination in NineteenthCentury San Francisco 282 Self-Portrait With Chicken (Taylor, Sunaura) 140 sentimentality 7, 8, 292, 293, 301 see also emotion reason 11 settler colonialism 329–32 Sewell, Anna Black Beauty 9

Index Sex and Suits (Hollander, Ann) 381 sex fluidity 374, 379 sexism 253 sexual exploitation 33–5 “Sexual Politics of Meat, The” (Adams, Carol J.) 283 Sexual Politics of Meat, The (Adams, Carol J.) 23, 283, 294, 298 sexual representations. See nudes sexual reproduction 124–5, 127–8, 129–32, 135 sexuality 124–7, 128, 129–31 bisexuality 275 eco-sexuality 266–7, 275–7, 278 hair 378–9 homosexuality 124–7, 128, 129–31, 272–3 see also homophobia Iran 377–8 metrosexuality 267–8 race 130–1, 255–6 Radical Faeries 273 Shafts 12 shame 288–9, 300 Shaw, Tom “Rites of Dionysus, The” photograph 214 “She Unnames Them” (LeGuin, Ursula K.) 387 sheep 185–6, 187, 188–9, 336, 344, 354, 358 see also Queen Hind capsize Sheep being loaded onto trucks from the sale yards (McArthur, Jo-Anne) 354, 358 Shepherd, Jean 8 shifting gaze 352 shipping 356 see also Queen Hind capsize Shiva, Vandana Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health and Development Worldwide 23 Shiva, Vandana and Mies, Maria 2 Shock of the New, The (Hughes, Robert) 253 Silence of the Lambs, The (Demme, Jonathan) 294 Simon, Bryant Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives, The 24, 25 “Sin, Nature, and Black Women’s Bodies” (Williams, Delores) 25 Singer, June Androgyny 270 Singer, Peter 14–15, 53 Animal Liberation 10–11, 14, 15, 36, 283, 291–2

Singer, Peter and Dawn, Karen “When Slaughter Makes Sense” 54 Singer, Peter and Mason, Jim Animal Factories 250 Sioux Tribe 28–9 SisteReach program 98–9 slaughterhouses 336, 362–3 see also meatprocessing plants Slave Market (Gérme, Jean-Léon) 258, 259 slavery 55–6, 92, 94–5, 204, 254, 255, 257–8 Slicer, Deborah “Your Daughter or Your Dog” 52 Slowfood USA 146 “US Ark of Taste” program 146 Smith, Andy “For All Those Who Were Indian in Another Life” 103 Smith, Bonnie Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice, The 9 Smith, Stephen A. 208 “Smooth Cool Men of Science” (Kean, Hilda) 12 Smuts, Barbara 114, 287–90, 300–1 Smythe, R. H. Mind of the Horse, The 111 Snitow, Ann 101 social class. See class social contract, the 150, 151 social play 113 songbirds 319, 321, 326, 328, 332–3 Sontag, Susan Regarding the Pain of Others 63 sound 343–4, 347, 349 “South Sea Siesta in a Midwinter Concession, A” 256, 259, 261 soybeans 361, 368 Soylent Green (Fleischer, Richard) 224 species 25, 26, 203 beauty 260 cannibalism. See cannibalism cross-species care 134 empathy 84 extinction. See extinction multispecies research 350–3 representations 249 speciesism 285, 293, 294–5 Spirit of the Dead Watching (Gauguin, Paul) 256, 259 spirituality 273 see also religion sport 198, 201–2

445

446

Index Sprinkle, Annie Bi Any Other Name 266 Standing Rock Sioux Tribe 28–9 standpoint theory 60–1 Stanescu, James 169 Steingraber, Sandra Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment 276 stereotypes 7–8 Stoicism 72 story telling 108–9 Stowe, Harriet Beecher “Rights of Dumb Animals” 56 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 56 Sturgeon, Noel Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action 23 suffering 54, 55–7, 163, 345 Buddhism 77, 82 ideology 63–4 reading 62–3 suffragettes 13–14 survival 74, 128–9 see also dependency Swan Book, The (Wright, Alexis) 332 Swift, Jonathan “Modest Proposal, A” 223 sympathy 63–4, 347 sympathy theory 50, 56, 57 Symposium (Plato) 270 Systema Naturae (Linnaeus, Carl) 205

Tight as Houses (Salle, David) 252, 253, 259 Titian Venus d’Urbino 252, 254, 255–6, 259, 260 Tomkins, Silvan 289 Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (MacKinnon, Catharine) 59 toxic waste 90 transition game, the 114 transgender 384, 386, 388 trauma 350 Tronto, Joan 64 trust 113, 115 Twain, Mark Huckleberry Finn 254 Types of Mankind (Nott, Josiah and Gliddon, George) 200 Tyson Foods 364–5, 366

“Taffy Lovely” (Mason, Jim) 245, 251, 259 “Taming Ourselves or Going Feral?” (Luke, Brian) 63–4 Tarter, Jim 276 Tarter, Karen 276 taxonomies 205, 387 of power 210 Taylor, Paul Respect for Nature 117 Taylor, Sunaura Self-Portrait With Chicken 140 technology 302, 380 Teish, Luisah 99 Jambalaya 102 Tempest Williams, Terry 266 Desert Quartet 266–7 Terry, Bryant 37 Thailand 127 Thee Generation, The (Regan, Tom) 51 Thug Kitchen blog/book 36–7 Tibet 81

Vaid-Menon, Alok 380–1, 382–3 “Anatomy is not destiny” 383 Beyond the Gender 380 value dualisms 3–4 veganic intellectuals 136, 137 veganism 36–8, 52, 164, 166–9 see also vegetarianism breast milk donation 187 formula milk 185–7, 190, 191 n.6 Kheel, Marti 221–2, 240, 241–2 Plumwood, Val 241 racialization 235 universalism 229–32, 240, 242–4 vegetarianism 8, 16–18, 52, 118, 175 n.8 see also veganism Adams, Carol J. 299–300 CMV 217–24, 226, 235–6 Kheel, Marti 241–2 moral 195 n.29 Plumwood, Val 219, 241 universalism 229–30, 236, 240

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe, Harriet Beecher) 56 United Nations 359, 360 universalism 229–35, 243–4 animal advocacy and 235–40 contextual 240–3 universalizability 50–2 Up-Down hierarchical thinking 217–18 “Ursula Hamdress” (Mason, Jim) 245, 249–51, 255, 257, 259, 260–4 “US Ark of Taste” program (Slowfood USA) 146 utilitarianism 54

Index Venus at her toilet (Rubens, Peter Paul) 252 Venus d’Urbino (Titian) 252, 254, 255–6, 259, 260 “Very Idea, The” (Wolfe, Cary) 304 Vick, Michael 197–9, 206, 208, 210 animality 200, 202 cartoons 202 Finally Free 208 support for 202–4, 208 Villagra, Analia “Cannibalism, Consumption, and Kinship in Animal Studies” 225–6 VINE sanctuary, Vermont 40, 41, 134, 136–7 violence 229, 337, 342, 344–5 see also trauma vision 289 dominance of 263–4, 288 peripheral gaze 352, 353 shifting gaze 352 vivisection 52–3, 58, 129, 191 n.4, Haraway, Donna 301–2 voice 321, 322, 324 , 347 Voice, Treaty, Truth Uluru statement331–2 voicelessness 343–4, 349 voyeurism 262, 264 Wadiwel, Dinesh 234–5 Walker, Alice “Only Justice Can Stop a Curse” 91 Walker, Margaret Urban 50, 184 Wanderground, The (Gearhart, Sally) 18 Ward, Edith 12 Warren, Karen 2, 23, 217–19 masculinity 271 value dualisms 3, 4 Waste, Nuclia 273–4 watches 253, 256, 259 “Water Justice Crises and Resistance Strategies” (Roller, Zoë) 29 Watt, Yvette , O’Sullivan, Siobhan, and Probyn-Rapsey, Fiona 32 Western art 255–6, 258 What is Posthumanism? (Wolfe, Cary) 295 What Would Animals Say if We Asked the Right Questions? (Despret, Vinciane) 324–5 “When Slaughter Makes Sense” (Singer, Peter and Dawn, Karen) 54 When Species Meet (Haraway, Donna) 301, 302 White, Lynn 268 white supremacy 35–9, 201, 210 whiteness 257–61, 263

“Wigstock” (Shils, Barry) 273 wild animals 57–8 Wild Justice (Bekoff, Marc and Pierce, Jessica) 112–13 Williams, Delores “Sin, Nature, and Black Women’s Bodies” 25 Winterson, Jeanette Written on the Body 266 wisdom 77–8 Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture (Evans, Arthur) 273 witnessing 342, 348–9, 350–2 Woinarski, John, Burbidge C. Z. A., and Harrison, P. L. 329, 330 Wolfe, Cary 284–5, 292–7, 303–4, 306 n.4 Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory 32, 292, 293, 294–5, 297 “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities” 292, 293, 295 masculinity 310 n.20 “Very Idea, The” 304 What is Posthumanism? 295 Zoontologies” The Question of the Animal 292 womanism 89, 90, 92 Afrocentric womanism 95–6 Black womanism 89–93 see also Afrocentric ecowomanism Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society (Fisher, Elizabeth) 20 women 291, 300–1 Afrocentric ecomotherism 101–2 Afrocentric ecowomanism 96–101 beauty 260 Black 23–4, 254–5, 262 Black Feminist Ecological Thought 313–17 Black womanism 89–93 cancer 276 capitalism 376–7 care 298 colonialism 377 of color 23–4, 254–5, 262 consumption of 256, 260, 261, 263 domination 1–2, 17, 22, 93–4 as inferior 376–7 motherism 101

447

448

Index nature 376 nudes. See nudes objectification 91–2 odalisques 256, 257, 258 oppression 16, 17, 20, 377 othering 93 placenta eating 303–4 race 23–4, 254–5, 262 shame 289 slavery 257 voyeurism 262, 264 work, inferiorization 14–16 Yorùbá society 377 Women Against Cruelty: Protection of Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Donald, Diana) 7, 8 “Women and Socialism” (Ford, Isabell) 14 Women and Spirituality Conference, Boston 17 Women and the Animal Rights Movement (Gaarder, Emily) 32 Women for Animal Liberation 18 Women, Race & Class (Davis, Angela) 376, 377 Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Najmabadi, Afsameh) 377 Woodstock, Tuck Gender Reveal podcast 386 Woolf, Virginia Orlando 266 workers 14

“World is Vegan – if you want it, The” campaign (Francione, Gary) 230 Wright, Alexis Swan Book, The 332 Written on the Body (Winterson, Jeanette) 266 WuDunn, Sheryl and Kristof, Nicolas Half the Sky 258 Wylie, Cheryl Sanctuary Prints xxiv Wynter, Sylvia “No Humans Involved – An Open Letter to My Colleagues” 26 Yarbrough, Anastasia 35–6 yarning 332 Yearning (hooks, bell) 97 Yorùbá society 377 “You Can Too! Un Cuir Canning Guide” (Cruz, Lux and Montes de Oca, Ollie) 385 “Your Daughter or Your Dog” (Slicer, Deborah) 52 Yunkaporta, Tyson 332 Yusoff, Kathryn 27, 28 Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (Calarco, Matthew) 284 Zoontologies” The Question of the Animal (Wolfe, Cary) 292 Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Donaldson, Sue and Kymlicka, Will) 152–3, 155