Animals and Women Feminist The

by Carol J Adams

  More likely, however, we do not have this power. If we nevertheless opt for protectionism, we are actually (ab)using the threat of death and extinction — in a situation where we have no power to stop it (and no power to protect the victims) — in the interest of “ allowing ” ourselves an attitude of protectionism (and consequent victimization of the oppressed) in the situation of our personal political activity, far from the scene of the crime we invoke. That is to say, we do not protect those actually being killed, we exploit their victimization to “ protect ” and patronize those surviving and within our reach. It means not only to abuse and instrumentalize those victimized, but to abandon the victims and what it means that there are victims in favor of a politics in the world of the living — ourselves and the actual survivors. It is a conceptual practice of “ divide and rule ” that relegates the dead to the scrapheap of history. A politics that is serious about challenging violence and oppression must defend the interests of victims as well as survivors, else we equate those killed with the nonexistent. Precisely because we do not have the power to protect all and everyone from the violence that threatens them, our political work of challenging oppression and victimization (including the oppression and victimization of animals) is all the more important — challenging it in every situation and context within our power. And with a conceptual framework that does not in practice dismiss or revictimize victims on the basis that they are “ past help. ”

  All the more important, in other words, is our theoretical understanding of the way in which animal oppression interconnects with all other forms of oppression, including victimism that “ extends the terrorism of the act of . . . violence ” (again in Barry ’ s words). 3 Compartmentalizing violence and oppressions according to their objects misleads us to focus on particular groups of the oppressed — (victim) identities that are created through that oppression. Instead, we need to look at the common factors of power that not only connect these different oppressions but which through their intersection point to an accumulation of power in the hands of those whose interests are being served by all forms of oppression: the principal beneficiaries of all power and exploitation, the elites and corporations of (principally) white, Western, capitalist, educated adult men. This is not to say that other people do not profit from the oppression of others — most of us do in different ways and to varying degrees. For example, whites in general — including women and even children, and including workers exploited by capitalism — benefit from the racism in their own countries, from Eurocentrism, and from the international imbalance of power — that is, the exploitation of the South by the North. Humans in general profit, however differentially, from the exploitation of animals; adults in general benefit from the lack of rights of children; the educated in general benefit from the lack of education of others; and so forth. It is precisely this possibility — the possibility that most oppressed groups have of sharing (however unequally) in the profits from the oppression of others — that is designed to break the solidarity between different oppressed groups and to corrupt our will to join in resistance against all oppression. Our focus should be less on the groups who are oppressed by or benefit from various singularized forms of oppression than on how the different oppressions operate, differentially coopting us, and how the multiple systems of oppression intersect to concentrate cumulative power in veritable centers of power, combining the benefit of every single form of oppression.

  We may feel, of course, that there is little support to be given to animals and animal survivors when millions of animals are being killed and tortured every day — that is, when many of them do indeed become victims and not survivors. This is a different question, however, and again not one limited to animals alone. It is the question whether in the face of immediate death or, as it usually presents itself, the immediate extinction of entire species, protection may not after all be justified. Yet to see ourselves faced with a choice between extinction or protection is to assume the viewpoint of the murderers. It is to overlook that we no more have the power to protect than we have the power to prevent the murderous aggression having led to this point of impending extinction in the first place. Or conversely, if we do have the power to move the aggressor to let us intervene with our protection, we have the power to stop the aggressor altogether. If we do have this power, however, and still bid for protection only, we are making a pact with the aggressors, guarding their interest in aggression and merely negotiating a respite for the victims.

  As feminists, we have challenged the Western ideological tradition — which constructs a diverse, yet interrelated, set of “ others, ” each on a different axis of a dualistic opposition and one at a time — as the construction of a hierarchy between the superior norm and the deviant “ other ” : man/woman, white/black, adult/child, First World/Third World, national/foreign, human/animal, (human) culture/nature, heterosexual/homosexual, Aryan/Jew, Christian/Jew, Christian/Muslim, healthy/sick, abled/disabled, civilized/primitive, and so forth. And we have been arguing for a form of resistance that resists these divisions while recognizing the different material realities they are creating. More than ever we need to understand that the struggle against oppression is more than the struggle of women against men, of blacks against whites, of the disabled against the able-bodied, of workers against capitalists, or of animals (or humans on behalf of animals) against humans and so forth — more, in other words, than a struggle over “ difference. ” We need to understand how masculinity, capitalism, white supremacy, speciesism, Western nationalisms and Western internationalism, science, professionalism, educationalism and culturalism, eugenics, reproductive technology and population control, etc. combine to build a formidable power pyramid, a megapower system of interlocking forms of oppression and exploitation, which requires our combined resistance if we really mean to dismantle it rather than just reshuffle a few positions for some on the oppression ladder. We must resist the embracing of single causes and challenge an identity politics that makes each struggle a single struggle and the responsibility of a particular “ lobby. ”

  Conservationism

  As war tears the Balkans apart, and nationalism and racism resurge all over Western and Eastern Europe, the connections and continuities in Western thinking about animals and about humans become apparent in new and startling form. When Western media began reporting the mass violence against women in the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, feminists in the West mobilized large-scale protest. Over two decades of feminist politics against sexual violence seemed to have predestined Western feminists to make a major intervention in the public international arena, challenging the specific ways in which women are victimized in war and how international politics deals with such violence. Yet, rather than seeing a feminist analysis challenging mainstream patriarchal ideology, what we saw was a feminist analysis that seemed to be slowly giving way to an analysis in conventional categories, succumbing to and integrating itself into the dominant understanding of “ rape in war. ”

  While feminist analysis defines rape as a crime against women, Western media and war propagandists in the Balkans agree in seeing rape in war as a crime against men and their nation . Consequently, the emphasis shifts from gender to nationality, from an analysis of sexual violence to an analysis of crimes against the nation — in which women function as the reproducers of the nation. While first reports had cited some 50,000 women raped, of whom 30,000 were also pregnant, subsequent reports put the number at 20,000 Bosnian Muslim women raped. In an article in Ms., Alexandra Stiglmayer and Laura Pitter explain the apparent discrepancy in these figures:

  A team of European Community (E.C.) investigators estimated in a January [1993] report that 20,000 Bosnian Muslim women have been raped by Serb soldiers; at the end of October [1992], the Bosnian Ministry for Interior Affairs put the number at 50,000, which also includes Croatian women who have been raped by Serbs. 4

  In other words, the total number of women who had been raped (by Serbian men) stays the sa
me, but the new figure quoted in subsequent reports was the figure of 20,000 Bosnian Muslim women raped. Proving a crime of genocide rather than rape in war required sorting out the Bosnian Muslim women from the total number of women who have been raped, and sorting out the Bosnian Muslim people from the entire population of Bosnia-Hercegovina — because only they qualify for a genocide in international terms. Because even if the Croatian and Serbian population of Bosnia-Hercegovina were massacred by a war that continued unabatedly, we apparently do not need to worry about the massacre of civilian populations — since there will continue to be Croats in Croatia and Serbs in Serbia. It is an argument about the preservation of endangered “ human species, ” whom we begin to protect only when they are threatened with extinction.

  Following the construction of new nation states in the Balkans on ethnicist principles — Slovenia and Croatia — and a nationalist war in the name of a “ Greater Serbia ” aiming to unite all “ Serbian ” people on a common Serbian territory, Western public argument actively joined in the nationalist logic, constructing a new “ ethnic nationality ” of Bosnian Muslims and separating the Bosnian community into its alleged component national species of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims 5 (there is rarely talk of the Jews, Rom, and other ethnicities living in Bosnian communities). Public protest was carefully mobilized, not to take a principled stand against war (and nationalism) — the cause of the suffering of civilians of all nationalities — but to favor the protection of a people threatened by extinction, if need be by means of further war. Publicizing rape thus became part of a campaign to ethnicize the war and to gain support for its management by international power. Women ’ s particular contribution consisted in supporting the reinterpretation of rape as a crime not against women themselves, but against “ their ” men and “ their ” national people — “ a message from man to man: your woman is now also my possession. ” 6

  To speak of “ mass rape, ” as the media have done, is to imply that mass rape is fundamentally different from single-incident rape, however high the total number. The very concept of “ mass ” is a signifier of speciesist thinking, which in the context of defining genocide becomes ethnicist or nationalist thinking, reflecting an internationalist concern regarding the protection of ethnic species: only once a people or ethnic community as a whole is seriously threatened in its numbers does it deserve our international protection — like a threatened animal species may incur our protection shortly before its extinction. This simultaneously implies that if the ethnic community is not so threatened in its numbers, everything is not so bad. “ Mass ” signifies less a very large number — like, say, the very large number of rapes in the United States, or the 30,000 rapes of Croatian women, or the high number of rapes of women of all nationalities in this and any other war — than a large number conceived as a percentage in relation to another total, the sum total of the ethnic population.

  The language of international law, of the conventions on war crimes and the prevention of genocide, is the language of power and dominance. Be the aim the protection of endangered peoples or the protection of endangered species, the fundamental presupposition remains that a moderate, “ lawful ” amount of killing may take place. Thus there may be a temporary international moratorium on the killing of whales, not because there is a fundamental objection to the murdering of whales, but so as to give endangered species a chance to reproduce and regenerate themselves. The aim is not to put an end to the slaughtering, the aim is moderate slaughtering, slaughtering “ within limits ” : permitted murder of individuals within a prohibition to exterminate the entire species. The species shall survive, not through its individual members remaining alive, but through the species ’ reproduction. Survive it shall for our benefit — for some of us, so that there may continue to be whales to slaughter; for others, because the whales ’ extinction would constitute a loss to us, an impoverishment of the multitude of life forms on this planet for those of us continuing to live on it. Self-interest is the motive in both cases, for the slaughterers as well as the protectors, an interest that the survival of the species guarantees and to which the interests of individuals are being sacrificed.

  In the same way, any measures for the protection of civilian populations during war — the so-called “ rules of humanitarian warfare ” 7 — remain within the framework of an axiomatic right to war. Their aim is self-imposed restraint in the manner of war conduct — in other words, murder and destruction “ within limits, ” murder that keeps to agreed rules and limitations. It is what military experts — including now women experts — consider “ clean ” warfare, as for instance Ruth Seifert, who speaks of “ dirty ” wars that do not keep to “ the common ‘ rules of war. ’ ” 8 And we all know what a clinically clean, surgical war looks like since the Allies ’ war against Iraq.

  Zoology and the “ Human Sciences ”

  As Lynda Birke writes elsewhere in this volume, “ there is a reciprocal relationship between the two knowledges, of humans and of animals: each structures the other. ” That is, any similarity depends less on a postulated similarity between the objects — humans and animals, or women and animals/nature — than on the common structure of thought and knowledge — be it science or politics — that is making them its objects. Thus Birke emphasizes, quoting Donna Haraway, that “ primatology is ‘ politics by other means. ’ ” As we could equally well say, politics is primatology by other means, or more generally, zoology by other means. Politics heavily relies on so-called scientific knowledge, while the construction of scientific knowledge is heavily political.

  Western theories of racism attained proper “ scientific ” status in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the guise of medicine, psychiatry, eugenics, anthropology, demography, and so forth. They stand in direct continuity with the theories that categorize nonhuman animals into species, and living beings into humans, animals, and plants — categories modeled on the paradigms of the natural sciences. These included attempts to establish classifications of “ kinds ” of people based on “ typical ” data — be it measurements of bodies and body parts, genetic data, or behavioral features. Nor have they been overcome in the present: modern dictionaries continue to explain the term “ race ” as signifying a “ set ” or “ kind ” of people, animals, or plants of common descent or origin, “ a limited group of persons descended from a common ancestor; a house, a family, kindred . . . a tribe, nation or people regarded as common stock . . . a group of tribes or peoples, forming a distinct ethnical stock . . . a breed or stock of animals; a particular variety of a species, ” and so on. 9

  In particular, the idea of a diachronic history of evolution was translated into the synchronic hierarchy of species. Just as the animal world was said to reflect an historical evolution in the simultaneity of the different species, so the multitude of “ peoples ” (today we would say “ cultures ” ) is said to reflect the history of humankind, from its “ primitive ” beginnings to its “ most advanced development, ” a “ natural ” hierarchy of “ indigenous ” or “ aboriginal ” peoples through to the “ highly developed ” peoples of the West. That is, the notion of a natural evolution translates into a conception of the political history of humanity as a steady progression toward increased “ civilization ” or “ higher development. ” Thus history or histories, the social and political conditions of life, are turned into quasi-biological features, said to be manifest in the different “ species ” or “ races. ”

  Since the Holocaust and the reign of German Fascism, which made the breeding of a “ pure race ” of humans or “ the most highly developed Aryans ” its explicit goal, ending in the murder of millions of European Jews as well as of other people designated as inferior, we have become cautious, at least superficially, about using a (traditional) racist vocabulary in relation to humans. Yet no such caution seems to apply when it comes to animals, or indeed to our self-differentiation from the animals: we still do talk of the human race. The German word for a pedigreed animal
(i.e., a dog, horse, cat, etc. of “ pure ” race or breeding) also is “ race ” ( Rasse ), and the same word is used to denote the different breeds. The practice of breeding seems uncontested when those bred to standard or discarded as substandard are animals (or plants). That is to say, we are on our guard against race ideology and its practices only on the basis of the object groups to whom they might be applied (humans); we do not seem to object to the ideological structures and functions of racism and breeding themselves. Thus we continue the tradition of race ideology, which simply redraws the lines from time to time between “ us, ” we who do, and the “ others, ” the races or kinds to whom it is permissible to do — between the “ master race ” and the “ sub-human, ” between humans and nonhumans.