Neither Man nor Beast

by Carol J Adams

  In the late 1980s, I learned that Theresa Corrigan and Stephanie Hoppe were editing an anthology about animals and women. At that time, I was finishing The Sexual Politics of Meat and reading The Pornography of Representation (1986) by Susanne Kappeler, which seemed to resituate the feminist conversation about pornography by widening it to the role of representations in constructing our subjectivity. We could either experience our subjectivity as a subject to another subject through intersubjectivity, or as a subject to an object through representations. John Berger’s “Why Look at Animals?” became a foundational essay in considering the way humans represented nonhumans. Kappeler’s The Pornography of Representation extended his work by asking, “Why Look at Women?”

  As I read Kappeler, I found myself making notations in the book about animals and specifically about animal experimentation, which seemed to take looking to an extreme level. I wrote to Theresa and Stephanie proposing an article on that subject. Their book With a Fly’s Eye, Whale’s Wit and Woman’s Heart: Relationships between Animals and Women appeared in 1989 from Cleis Press, and went to press while the working title of my own book that became The Sexual Politics of Meat was “Against the Texts of Meat.” (That is another story!)

  In the past few decades, developments in technology have made animal experimentation even less defensible. Alternative, non-animal methods exist including “computerized modeling and predication systems… genetically engineered cell lines, X-ray assays, batteries of human skin and tissue cultures, epidemiological studi es of populations, and carefully controlled clinical trials” (Fano, 136) and 3-D imaging. Most of these are fast, less costly, reproducible, and importantly, more accurate.

  Abortion

  “Abortion Rights and Animal Rights” appeared originally in 1991 in Between the Species: A Journal of Ethics . It came about because the Senior Pastor at the church I attended preached a sermon during Advent that quoted Sister Theresa. She said how fortunate that Mary (the mother of Jesus) did not have an abortion. (This tactic—personalizing a state that does not exist, nonbeing [in this case, the nonbeing of Jesus]—is discussed in my essay on abortion on page 47.) Afterwards, several of us confronted the pastor. We pointed out, among other things, that the Presbyterian Church of which he was a member was pro-choice and that abortion was legal in the United States. It was decided that I would teach a four-week session at the church on the history and ethical framing of abortion as a woman’s right. As I did the research for that program, an inner dialogue about abortion rights and animal rights began to take over, and I found myself making extensive notes. I mentioned to the late Marti Kheel some of my observations and she encouraged me to write it up and submit it to Between the Species. I did, and Chapter 3 is the result.

  In the early 1990s, after I submitted the article, abortion politics came home. My spouse, a pro-choice pastor, was targeted by the head of Operation Rescue, a militant anti-abortion group with their national office based in Dallas. One Sunday afternoon they picketed our home. Through the help of a supportive attorney, we obtained an Order of Protection ordering them to dissent from picketing the church (which they did on Sunday mornings) and our home.

  Then, in April 1995, the Dallas County Constables raided their office and seized their office equipment. It was to be auctioned off to begin paying a $1 million judgment levied against them by a Houston jury for their blockade of a Planned Parenthood clinic during the 1992 Republican convention.

  On May 1, 1995, I was the high bidder at the auction and arranged for the delivery of the Operation Rescue office furniture by a truck, but packed the six computers into my car and delivered them to the Dallas headquarters of Planned Parenthood. During frantic moments before they were seized, the computers had been disabled by an Operation Rescue staff person by deleting the operating system of each computer. A savvy computer tech person inserted an earlier version of the operating system, and the contents revealed themselves in a moment akin to the frisson of excitement captured best in the movie Sneakers. Among the contents was the journal of an anti-abortionist, who admitted in his typed notes to following medical doctors’ cars from the clinic to see where they lived, writing down the license plates of cars bringing women to receive abortions, and going through the garbage of the abortion clinics. This journal and other information on the computers was shared with national pro-abortion groups and used in several cases in various states in which Operation Rescue was being sued (see Gonnerman for a discussion of the contents).

  Operation Rescue is now known as Operation Save America. At the time I bought their equipment and was able to expose them for their harassing behavior, I could not have predicted the state of abortion politics in 2017:

  • States legislatures pass laws intended to shame and blame women. They don’t trust women to make decisions within the larger context of their own lives. (See Harrison quoted on page 39.)

  • Mandatory sonogram laws requiring women to have sonograms before they can obtain an abortion. Margret Talbot describes the constitutional implications of this: “They require a woman not only to look at something, after all, but to yield up the interior of her body so that it may be looked at—all to make the state’s case against abortion. This is something akin to unlawful search and seizure in a criminal case, where, as [Columbia Law professor Carol] Sanger points out, there are limits on what the state can do to extract evidence from a defendant’s body. In this sense, mandatory ultrasounds constitute not only coerced looking but ‘coerced production’ of what is meant to be looked at.” This becomes a new twist on the “male gaze” and “arrogant eye.”

  • Parental notification that treats a young woman under 18 as not mature enough to make a decision about her own body but old enough to become a mother.

  • The creation of the mythical and disproven “post-abortion syndrome” of regret.

  • The development of deceptive “crisis pregnancy centers” often placed near abortion clinics, promising “choice” and “confidentially” but whose purpose is to talk women out of getting an abortion.

  • Waiting periods for abortions.

  • Mandated state counseling.

  Columbia Law Professor Carol Sanger concludes, “If abortion can’t be made illegal, it can still be made to feel illegal” (quoted in Talbot).

  According to the Guttmacher Institute, “over the last few decades, abortion and unintended pregnancy have become increasingly concentrated among poor patients.” Irin Carmon explains what this means: “These women, who face the most significant barriers to preventative care and difficult decisions about whether they can afford to travel for an abortion or even pay for the procedure, are easier to demonize when their circumstances are more remote to prosecutors, politicians and the voting public.”

  Debate in the United States about the Trumpcare health bill and other health initiatives sought by right-wing politicians have included references to women as being merely “hosts” of the fetus. Most of us do not realize that a conversation about female pregnancy has been going on for years that views female animals as “hosts” for future meat. Expressed in advertisements in the pages of animal industry magazines, they confirm the right of others to make reproductive decisions for female animals. The leaders in this field are the drug companies pushing their products. In their advertisements, drug companies depict sexy, buxom animals who want to be pregnant, who want to give the farmers more babies each year, who want to “pump out baby pigs.” A chicken holds her sexualized, hairless leg out—she wants those drugs too, wants to be the subservient pregnant “host.”

  Bovi-Shield Gold, a pharmaceutical company, developed an advertisement campaign, “If she can’t stay pregnant, what else will she do?” The question was about cows. The answer Bovi-Gold offered was that, without constant pregnancy, the cow’s life would become unanchored, unembodied, imitative of other animals, not herself. In smaller print, it advises farmers: “Keep your cows pregnant and on the job.” Cows who are not pregnant are on the job—they are pr
oducing milk and it is being taken from them, two or three times a day. What is elided in the Bovi-Gold statement is that the pregnancy is needed because her milk is drying up. Decades ago, a cow’s pregnancy was one thing: a pregnancy. It was not also a time when her milk was taken. But production expectations mean that for seven-twelfths of the year she is pregnant and lactating. Élise Desaulniers’s Cash Cow: Ten Myths about the Dairy Industry (2016) reports that this effort is equivalent to jogging six or more hours a day.

  The absence of respect for women’s bodily integrity results in politics that restrict reproductive freedom. That female animals might also possess bodily integrity slips even further from ethical consideration when women’s rights to reproductive care are restricted. And vice versa: in advertisements about female farm animals, I find attitudes that justify the current rollbacks on reproductive freedom and access to abortion.

  Eating Animals

  In The Sexual Politics of Meat , I applied the literary concept of the “absent referent” to animals used as a food and to women’s experience in patriarchal culture (see pages 5–7). The process of politicizing flesh eating, dairy and egg products continues in Neither Man nor Beast. In the following pages, I introduce the concept of animals used as meat as false mass terms (page 5). I also refer to animals used as meat as “terminal animals.” At the last minute before submitting the manuscript, realizing how speciesism influenced my own terminology, I did a global search and changed references to animals’ carcasses to animals’ corpses . I also explain how something becomes an ethical issue, how eating flesh is institutional violence, and offer other interventions that seek to problematize what has been normalized.

  Since 1994, in place of “complete vegetarian” or “pure vegetarian” to denote a vegetarian who does not eat eggs or dairy products (as opposed to “lacto-ovo vegetarians”), the word vegan has taken off. I liked the word vegetarian, but gave it up more than a decade ago because it had lost its radical meaning, and because the de facto (or unmarked) vegetarian was thought to be lacto-ovo.

  Since finishing Neither Man nor Beast in 1994, I have written and co-authored several books that might be considered a “Vegan Life Cycle Series”: Help! My child stopped eating meat! The Parents’ A-Z Guide to Surviving a Conflict in Diets; Living Among Meat Eaters: The Vegetarian’s Survival Handbook; How to Eat Like a Vegetarian Even If You Never Want to Be One; The Inner Art of Vegetarianism; Never Too Late to Go Vegan: The Over-50 Guide to Adopting and Thriving on a Plant-Based Diet, and most recently, Even Vegans Die: A Compassionate Guide to Living your Values and Protecting your Legacy. The last book seeks to challenge some of the health dogmas of veganism, as well as challenges the disease-shaming, fat-shaming, and care-shaming that are sometimes exhibited by vegans.

  Working with Virginia Messina, R.D., I learned how to evaluate vegan claims about health. I would no longer claim that we are a vegan species. And I am more cautious in singing the health benefits of a vegan diet.

  With the emergence of critical animal studies and vegan studies, wonderful new scholarship has appeared. I think of books like Annie Potts’ edited collection, Meat Culture , and Laura Wright’s The Vegan Studies Project (for which I wrote the preface), and the exciting work of younger scholars like Vasile Stanescu, Jessica Eisen, Sunaura Taylor, Kathryn Gillespie and many others.

  White Privilege

  Chapter 4 is one of the earliest articles by a white animal activist seeking to develop antiracist feminist theory about animals, and examines the relationship between racism and animality. (It is further expanded upon in “What Came Before The Sexual Politics of Meat ” in The Carol J. Adams Reader: 1995–2015 , which gathers articles published subsequent to Neither Man nor Beast .)

  With the publication of The Sexual Politics of Meat, I began to be invited to speak at animal rights conferences. I became troubled by the unproblematized nature of white privilege. Chapter 4 was written for Neither Man nor Beast, drawing on my experience working against racism in upstate New York in the 1980s and reflecting on the insights from that antiracist activism as they applied to animal rights.

  I celebrate the appearance of important work by African-American feminist writers including Breeze Harper’s Sistah Vegan and Aph Ko and Syl Ko’s Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters. Syl writes, “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.” Aph writes, “the racial grammar of the [vegan] movement is white.” Using the effects of white supremacy on Blacks as a comparison with what the other animals suffer is one example of this grammar. We cannot do our progressive, antiracist, feminist work without an understanding of the interaction of race, gender, and animality. Some vegans want a de-racialized veganism that is a lie, clinging to the idea that animals “need” us most and so trying to make the role of white privilege disappear. All of dominant culture has allowed for this reductionist reaction. Aph and Syl invited me to write the afterword to their book and I created the chart below to illustrate the transformation in perspective needed.

  Critical Theory

  Depoliticized Privilege of Some Form

  It’s white supremacy

  It’s “prejudice”—results in defensiveness

  systemic

  personal—unable to think themselves out of the individualized explanation, results in guilt

  critical thinking/epistemological revolution

  framework that can’t be disturbed (for instance, animal oppression should be understood in terms of “speciesism”)

  decenters whiteness in vegan theory

  Why introduce race as an issue? “helping the animals”

  whiteness informs definition of human/animal

  whiteness unlinked to animal oppression

  Decolonize antiracist and animal advocacy thinking

  It’s about “Diversity,” reproducing the conditions that created the original problems

  human/animal binary aspect to racist logic

  analogies that inadequately reflect reality, exploit one oppression in seeking another’s liberation

  theory that links animality and white supremacy and misogyny

  Separate issues: “helping the animals” or feminism or Black liberation. Don’t confuse issues

  multiple ways of veganism

  the right way (and the right body) to be vegan

  disruptive

  comforting

  Note: chart reprinted with permission of Lantern Books.

  In terms of radical critiques, Alice Walker’s concept, that this book uses as an epigraph, that “we are one lesson” might be too simple a message in the pluralistic twenty-first century, but “we are one lesson” was an early way of talking about interconnected oppressions. Oppressions are not equivalent, nor are they analogous. But animality is an aspect of social oppression and racism and misogyny are at work on the other side of the species boundary, too.

  Ecofeminism

  Back in the early 1990s, with the support of feminist philosopher Karen Warren, I began to develop explicitly ecofeminist essays. The result was “Ecofeminism and the Eating of Animals” and “Bringing Peace Home,” both published in Hypatia. Toward the middle of the 1990s, ecofeminism was charged with being “essentialist.” Ironically, ecofeminist work was both disparaged and appropriated. Lori Gruen and I explain this reception to ecofeminism:

  Exposing dualistic frameworks operating in oppressive situations did not mean that ecofeminists valorized the non-dominant parts of the dualism nor viewed the characteristics of the non-dominant part as “natural.” In arguing relationally and developing a care tradition in animal ethics, ecofeminists were challenging, not accepting, the essentializing structure of the division between men as rational and women as emotional.

  At the turn into the 21st century, the persis
tent mischaracterizations of ecofeminism as essentialist continued to surprise many of those working in the field. This mischaracterization provided another way to exclude ecofeminist work that challenged the dominant discourse. Enabled in part by this continuing misreading, another problem became obvious, the failure to credit ecofeminism’s influence. The emerging field of Animal Studies grows out of, at least in part, feminist and ecofeminist theory. But this background and history is often ignored or distorted in many discussions of animal studies. The result is not only the disappearance of ecofeminism, but the appropriation of ecofeminist ideas in which embodied authorship disappears.

  Gaard’s “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism” that was initially presented at Wesleyan’s 2011 Sex/Gender/Species conference, provides an intervention against the erasure of ecofeminism 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.” 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.” (Adams and Gruen, 30)