The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Bloomsbury Revelations)

by Carol J Adams

  In fact, she has acquired a very specific function in Modern English: it is expressly used to refer to an animal regarded as a minor power. This accounts in particular for the “professional” use of she. Sportsmen, whalers, fishermen are in special relation to the animal. Whatever its size or strength, it is regarded as a potential prey, a power that has to be destroyed—for sport or food—, hence a dominated power. (See Figure 4.)

  “She” represents not only a “minor power,” but a vanquished power, a soon-to-be-killed powerless animal. Male animals become symbolically female, representing the violated victim of male violence. In fact, the bloody flesh of the animal recalls the sex who cyclically bleeds. In this case, the symbolic rendering of animals’ fate as female resonates with the literal facts about animals used for food. The sexual politics of meat is reinforced in the literal oppression of female animals.

  Figure 4 Adapted from: André Joly, “Toward a Theory of Gender in Modern English” in Studies in English Grammar, ed. André Joly and T. Fraser (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1975), figure 8, p. 273.

  We subsist by and large on female flesh. We eat female chickens because “males don’t lay eggs, and the flesh of these strains is of poor quality.”24 (The males are equally victimized although not consumed.) Chickens and cows produce eggs and dairy products for us during their lives before being slaughtered. In this we exploit their femaleness as well. Meat textbooks recognize the female state as requiring special attentiveness. They caution slaughterers: “Animals should not be slaughtered in the advanced stages of pregnancy. The physiological condition of the female is disturbed and the flesh is not normal.”25 Animal bodies can be condemned as unfit for human consumption because of

  Parturient Paresis.—This is a condition of paralysis and loss of consciousness occurring usually at the termination of parturition.

  Railroad Sickness.—This condition, which is similar to parturient paresis in many respects, affects cows which are usually in the advanced stages of pregnancy and occurs during or after a long continued transportation by rail.26

  The text of the body upon whom we write the fate of being meat is symbolically if not predominantly female.

  One animal-rights and feminist writer comments on the English tradition of hunting hares, traditionally female (as in Playboy bunnies): “So important was the hare’s femininity that breaking its [sic] back, with the foot was (and still is) called ‘dancing on the hare’, the usual erotic movement of courtship being transferred to death.”27 The language of the hunt implies that it is a variation of rape. For instance, the word venison (which originally included in its meaning the dead flesh of any beast or bird of the chase) comes from Latin venetus: to hunt; and is akin to the Sanskrit term meaning he desires, attacks, gains. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the word venery had two definitions (now both archaic): Indulgence in or the pursuit of sexual activity, (from venus, love) and also the act, art, or sport of hunting, the chase (from vener, to hunt). Paul Shepard suggests that “there is a danger in all carnivores [including humans] of confusing the two kinds of veneral aggression, loving and hunting.”28 Kate Millet demonstrated in Sexual Politics that the word “fuck” was synonymous with “kill, hurt, or destroy.”29

  The fused oppression of women and animals through the power of naming can be traced to the story of the Fall in Genesis in which women and an animal, the serpent, are blamed for the Fall; Adam is entitled to name both Eve (after the Fall) and the other animals (before the Fall).

  Since Adam’s initial naming of woman and animals, patriarchal culture has presumed to continue naming those it oppresses. Stereotyping through dualism occurs with both women and animals: they are either good or evil, emblems of divine perfection or diabolical incarnations, Mary or Eve, pet or beast, sweet beasts (bestes doulces) or stenchy beasts (bestes puantes).30 We learn of the parallel legal categories of femme covert and beste covert —married woman, domesticated animal—and ponder the relationship between these legal categories and husbands and husbandmen, battered women and battery chicks.

  Thinking literally

  “coffin:” the mould of paste for a pie; the crust of a pie. Obsolete. “Season your lamb with pepper, salt . . . So put it into your coffin.” (The 1750 Complete Housewife)

  —Definition and use of coffin, The Oxford English Dictionary

  The issue of false naming is hidden behind the dichotomy of thinking literally or symbolically. The statement “meat is fragments of dead, butchered animals,” or more baldly “meat is murder,” speaks the literal truth and calls one away from symbolic thinking. Part of the battle of being heard as a vegetarian is being heard about literal matters in a society that favors symbolic thinking. By laying claim to speaking literally both the message and the method of vegetarianism are at odds with the dominant viewpoint.

  An example from popular culture may help in discerning the way we fail to focus on the literal fate of animals. In The Birds, the shock of the violent attacks on people by the birds is acutely felt because there is no explanation as to why these birds have suddenly turned on humans. Yet at least two literal representations of the oppression of birds are offered in the movie. In the first, we find Alfred Hitchcock’s signature—his appearance in the film—when he enters a pet shop full of caged birds. In the second, the local ornithologist, Mrs. Bundy, argues against the notion that birds would ever turn against humankind. This opinion is voiced in a restaurant as orders for “Three southern fried chicken” sound in the background. We are reminded of the fate of the birds (they are dead and fried), that they are victims of multiple violations (three chickens rather than one are ordered, each was first incarcerated and then murdered), though language obscures this fact, since the word chicken implies the singular. The literal chickenmeat about to be eaten appears to challenge Mrs. Bundy’s opinion that birds have no reason for attacking humans. She acknowledges in general that human beings are a violent species, but her concern does not encompass the activities within that restaurant. The restaurant setting and the food consumed confirm her claim that humans are violent—that is, if one takes the setting and its activities literally. Both shoppers in a bird store and eaters of fried chickenmeat enact the acceptance of the structure of the absent referent, a structure that the birds through their massed presence appear insistently to avenge.

  In examining the reactions of children to the literal truth about meat eating, we can see how our language is a distancing device from these literal facts. Children, fresh observers of the dominant culture, raise issues about meat eating using a literal viewpoint. One part of the socialization process to the dominant culture is the encouragement of children to view the death of animals for food as acceptable; to do so they must think symbolically rather than literally. “Vladimir Estragon” (the Village Voice’s Geoffrey Stokes) sardonically observes, “Remind a kid that chicken was alive and there’s a nasty scene, but let him think they make it in factories and everything is fine.”31

  Children often try to restore the absent referent. Dr. Alan Long reports of his becoming a vegetarian at eight: “I began to ask about the fate of the animals, and I began to inquire about the sources of my food, and I discovered to my horror that the lamb, the mutton on my plate, was obtained from the lambs I had seen in the fields. I said, in effect, that 1 liked lambs and I didn’t like lamb, and that was the start of it all.”32 Harvard philosophy professor Robert Nozick credits his two-year-old daughter with bringing about his vegetarianism. During a Thanksgiving dinner, she queried: “That turkey wanted to live. Why was it [sic] killed?”33 One three-year-old vegetarian demanded that he and his mother confront the local marketpersons with the literal truth that they were selling “poor dead mommie and baby animals.”34

  Most children, however, are inculcated into a basic aspect of patriarchal language by experiencing simultaneously the masks of language and the relativizing of the death of animals. The failure to consider meat literally becalms vegetarianism as an issue.

&nbs
p; Muted voices

  Difficulty arises when one group holds a monopoly on naming and is able to enforce its own particular bias on everyone, including those who do not share its view of the world. . . . The dominant reality remains the reference point even for those of us who seek to transform it.

  —Dale Spender, Man Made Language35

  Vegetarians face the problem of making their meanings understood within a dominant culture that accepts the legitimacy of meat eating. As the feminist detective in Lynn Meyer’s Paperback Thriller remarks early in the novel, “I could tell you now that I’m a vegetarian, but let’s just leave it at that. I won’t go into the reasons. If you don’t understand them, there’s not much I can say; and if you do, there’s no need for me to say anything.” But she does go on to explain, and traces her vegetarianism to learning the literal truth about meat eating as a child: “It all goes back to a duckling I had when I was a kid. It grew up to be a duck, and then we killed it and cooked it. And I wouldn’t eat it. Couldn’t. From that, it was all obvious and logical.”36

  The difficulty of introducing meaning for which there is no conceptual space has been theorized by anthropologist Edwin Ardener as a problem of dominance and mutedness. The theory of dominance-mutedness explains why vegetarians are not heard by the dominant culture. The term “muted” connotes issues of language and power. As Elaine Showalter explains it, “muted groups must mediate their beliefs through the allowable forms of dominant structures.”37 Vegetarians are frustrated in their attempts to unmask violence by the muting of their voices.

  When vegetarians protest meat eating, they are silenced in a patriarchal world because the dominant viewpoint holds that thinking about animals “ain’t no everyday thought.” These are the words of Janie, the hero of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, to her husband after he purchases an old and overworked mule to protect her from further abuse. Janie had been outraged by the mistreatment of this tired and misused mule. Though “a little war of defense for helpless things was going on inside her,” she speaks only to herself about the disgraceful activities. Her husband, upon overhearing her, acts in the mule’s defense. Janie places his action within the historic tradition of liberators: “Freein’ dat mule makes uh mighty big man outa you. Something like George Washington and Lincoln.” Here she creates her own mythopoesis, enlarging the meaning of an individual’s actions so that it carries political importance; actions that are usually muted within a dominant culture that decides what is appropriately political. Janie concludes, “You have tuh have power tuh free things.”38

  Mary Helen Washington sees Hurston’s novel as representing “women’s exclusion from power, particularly the power of oral speech.”39 The mule episode reflects this issue: Janie mutes her voice, at first talking only to herself, yet she is empowered to speak on behalf of another being. This empowerment may arise from recognizing the fused oppression of women and mules—silenced and overworked. As her grandmother told here: “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.”40 Lorraine Bethel, interpreting this passage’s meaning, explains: “Throughout the remainder of the novel we observe Janie’s struggle against conforming to this definition of the Black woman.”41 When Janie is concerned about the fate of a real mule, she herself could be seen as the absent referent in an oppressive structure. To Janie, challenging the fate of domesticated, objectified beings follows upon her grandmother’s insights; Janie is defying “her status as mule of the world” simultaneously with challenging the mule’s status.42

  Janie’s muted voice is heard and responded to; when she proclaims Jody a liberator her public speaking is applauded: “ ‘Yo’ wife is uh born orator, Starks. Us never knowed dat befo’. She put jus’ de right words tuh our thoughts.’ ”43 But the applause is indirect; it is her husband who is complimented, and Janie is only the indirect recipient of recognition for raising a muted voice against dominant beliefs. She remains still an object who reflects glory upon her husband.44 “It ain’t no everyday thought” to think about those beings who become our absent referents; these thoughts are muted. Janie’s is a female voice muted in a male world; this is how we need to consider vegetarian protests.

  When vegetarians attempt to disarm the dominant control of language, they are seen as picky, particular, embittered, self-righteous, confrontative, and especially sentimental, rather than political liberators like Washington and Lincoln. The objection to the killing of animals is equated with sentimentality, childish emotions, or “Bambi-morality.” By extension, this objection is seen as “womanish.” Spinoza’s oft-quoted opinion was that “The objection to killing animals was ‘based upon an empty superstition and womanish tenderness, rather than upon sound reason.’ ”45 Consequently it is no wonder that vegetarianism has been seen as a woman’s project and equated with women’s status.

  The attack on vegetarians for being emotional demonstrates how the dominant culture attempts to deflect critical discourse. As Brigid Brophy comments, “To assert that someone other than oneself has rights is not sentimental. Not that it would be the gravest of sins if it were. ‘Sentimentalist’ is the abuse with which people counter the accusation that they are cruel.”46 The characterization of the objection to animals killed for food as feminine or “womanish” because of its perceived “emotional” tone contributes to its muting through its association with women who are also muted in a patriarchal culture.

  New naming

  What are the words you do not have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?

  —Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”47

  Vegetarians reform inadequate language by coining new words. Through new naming, vegetarians apply principles that demand that the existing relationship between human beings and the other animals be changed.

  Let us consider some examples of the new naming engendered by vegetarianism:

  New naming: Vegetarian

  Until 1847 and the self-conscious coining of the word “vegetarian,” the most common appellation to describe those who did not eat animals was the term “Pythagorean.” As with many other reform movements, self-naming through the coining of the word “vegetarian” was an important milestone. The word vegetarian can be described in words similar to those Nancy Cott uses to explain the appearance of the word feminism: “Feminism burst into clear view a few years later because it answered a need to represent in language a series of intentions and a constituency just cohering, a new moment in the long history of struggles for women’s rights and freedoms.”48 The word “vegetarian” represents the intersection of a historic moment with centuries of protest against the killing of animals.

  Yet the coining of this word has caused a conflict in interpretation about its etymology. The Oxford English Dictionary states that the name is derived irregularly from “veget-able” plus “arian”. Vegetarians hold to a different etymology. They argue that it is “from the Latin word vegetus, meaning ‘whole, sound, fresh or lively,’ as in the ancient Latin term homo vegetus—a mentally and physically vigorous person. Thus, the English vegetarians were trying to make a point about the philosophical and moral tone of the lives they sought to lead. They were not simply promoting the use of vegetables in the diet.”49 (Later in the nineteenth century when the Vegetarian Society debated a name change, Francis Newman proposed “anti-creophagist” but got little support for this new name.50)

  From this self-naming arises a constant battle for meaning, which consigns vegetarians to appearing even more literal minded (or petty or narrow-minded), for inevitably the word has been corrupted. The battle for meaning occurs over who, precisely, is a vegetarian. Vegetarianism as a word defining a certain set of “restrictions” has been appropriated by meat eaters who dilute it by the inclusion of chickenmeat and fishmeat in their definition. Can one eat dead fishes or chickens and be a vegetarian?

&nbs
p; What is literally transpiring in the widening of the meaning of vegetarianism is the weakening of the concept of vegetarianism by including within it some living creatures who were killed to become food. Ethical vegetarians complain of this because they know it signifies that the structure of the absent referent is prevailing; once the concept is tolerated — i.e., some beings maybe consumed—then their radical protest is being eviscerated. People who eat fishmeat and chickenmeat are not vegetarians; they are omnivores who do not eat red meat. Allowing those who are not vegetarians to call themselves vegetarians dismembers the word from its meaning and its history. It also, on a very practical level, redounds on vegetarians who appear at restaurants or parties where non-vegetarians have prepared “vegetarian food” only to find that this means dead fishes or a dead chicken.

  Vegetarians are muted when made to feel that they are the insensitive, picky ones by complaining when people call themselves vegetarians even though they eat dead chickens and fishes. The process of neutralization/ generalizing of the word vegetarian so that it only means objection to red meat—which even meat eaters see as having merit because of cholesterol concerns—is one of the consequences of seeking to establish new naming within a dominant culture resistant to it.

  New naming: Animalized and feminized protein

  Animalized protein is a historical term deserving current use. This term was used in the nineteenth century to refer to food from animals’ bodies. A letter from Ellen G. White in 1896 represents the way vegetarians used this term:

  The diet of the animals is vegetables and grains. Must the vegetables be animalized, must they be incorporated into the system of animals, before we get them? Must we obtain our vegetable diet by eating the flesh of dead creatures?51