Neither Man nor Beast

by Carol J Adams

  The goal of feminist defenses of animals is that humanity will shed its Euro-American malestream orientation, will shed its urge to demarcate some “ultimate” differences between us and the other animals, will reject a vertical hierarchy of humans above animals. Jane Tompkins observes that “to see animals differently would require human beings to see themselves differently also.”5 But upon what theoretical ground should feminists who defend animals stake such envisioning of animals and humans? On the one hand, malestream animal rights and liberation theory appears to place itself squarely within an Enlightenment epistemology of autonomous subjects, a liberal paradigm riddled with the contradictions of concepts of freedom that included enslaved humans. On the other hand, just when feminist grand narratives presuming a unitary “subject,” a universal “woman,” or “one lesson” (or that there is any, much less one, lesson!) come tumbling down, some of us appear to be urging yet another grand narrative—“animals.” Such an anachronism seems to marginalize our theoretical contributions. However, the tumbling away of a unitary subject opens up space for discussing other-than-human subjects.6 As the destablized human subject opens up the space to acknowledge animal subjects, our notions of humanity could also be shorn of gender, race, and species preoccupations.

  Feminist defenses of animals insist that we must acknowledge and accept accountability for what we do to others’ bodies. Concerned about the language of animal rights, we are searching for alternative ways of framing the issues that the exploitation of animals raise. We reject a cultural construction of some bodies as so completely and solely matter that their bodies become immaterial, unimportant. Animals’ bodies do matter. Feminist defenses of animals offer liberation from a conditioned mind frame that devitalizes other beings. We insist that our inactions as well as our actions have consequences. We affirm that we all share the same universe in which we are a community of subjects—no matter how fragmented the notion of subject—not a collection of otherized objects. In this way, we respond with integrity, respecting bodies. We anticipate that from such envisioning all of us will emerge conceptually as neither man nor beast. Through these positions, we honor connections and we refuse complicity with body-denying policies and actions. These responses offer points of connection in solidarity with those who challenge other social oppressions.

  I did not know when I decided to become a vegetarian in 1974 that I was beginning the process of becoming a theorist on the situation of animals in contemporary culture. My primary commitment—then and now—has been the feminist movement, a lightning rod that grounds my work and my thought. In addition, antiracist analysis and activism have been, to me, embedded as a part of this feminism.

  Since the mid-seventies I have been associated with the movement to stop violence against women, and with litigation and activism against institutionalized white supremacy. On the one hand I trained to be an advocate for rape victims; started a hotline for battered women; became involved at the state and natio nal level addressing problems women face when abused by their human male partners. On the other hand, I joined a local branch of the NAACP, challenged racist housing policies, worked to increase black home ownership, oversaw testing (defined by Derrick Bell as “an effective, but too little utilized, technique to ferret out bias in the sale and rental of housing”7 ), and coordinated a challenge to the license renewal of a racist and sexist radio station, the only community-based challenge from the Reagan era that was successful. Throughout this time of confronting both intimate and institutionalized forms of violence, I noticed the times when forms of violence intersect: Where sexual violence, racist violence, and violence against animals were expressed in one act or a sequence of acts that announce the connections between these outwardly disparate forms of violence. Thus I found myself arguing for and attempting to create antiracist feminist theory that includes animals. In this, Neither Man nor Beast presumes the radical shift in perspective my first book, The Sexual Politics of Meat proposed, in which I attempt to place an antiracist feminist analysis in the service of interpreting the exploitation of animals, especially those who are consumed by people.

  I take these as my givens:

  • First, oppression is a reality. Privilege is the state of being for those who benefit from oppression. Race- and sex-hate crimes are ways that oppression is maintained and perpetuated.

  • Second, just as gender and race are constructs, so too is species. They are categories of social construction that have been postulated as essentially natural.

  • Third, environmental exploitation takes place through social domination of the bodies of some people by other people. The legacy of colonialism is that elite Euro-Americans have institutionalized oppressive systems that control non-dominant white people and people of color as well as exploiting the natural resources of the land upon which they live. Owners and decision-makers maintain high profits for the few by passing on the costs to the many in the form of low wages, high prices, bad working conditions, and toxic side effects. Many of us are seeking new structures that do not uphold the exploitation of people or the earth and its other creatures.

  • Last, feminism does not solely address relationships between women and men, but is an analytic tool that helps expose the social construction of reality. For instance, feminism identifies how gender becomes a marker of the oppression of animals too, as when rodeos feature a competition that involves putting lace underpants on a calf.

  Toward the end of The Sexual Politics of Meat I quoted from feminist philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky who observed, “Feminists are no more aware of different things than other people; they are aware of the same things differently. Feminist consciousness, it might be ventured, turns a ‘fact’ into a ‘contradiction.’ ”8 For the past five years, a central aspect of my task as a feminist theorist has been to turn the “fact” of animals’ status as exploitable into a contradiction. To do this, I have drawn upon feminist theory, philosophy, and theology. This book represents the results of this process. The title Neither Man nor Beast captures some of the contradictions that an antiracist feminism seeks to expose.

  Issues I raise in the following pages are not meant to be a systematic laying out of a grand theory, but rather are suggestive of the issues that need to be addressed. They emerge out of concrete experience and address survival issues of women and animals, rather than arising from a philosophical a priori. The building of the book reflects the contigencies and necessities out of which feminist theory arises. Specific instances and occasions offered an opportunity to reflect further on certain aspects of a feminist defense of animals. Each of the chapters therefore is a discrete analysis of a specific issue, yet together the chapters build toward a conceptual and philosophical framework for discussing animals, women, and domination. My goal is to equip us to recognize what we humans do to the other animals, especially through the institution of corpse eating, while also helping us understand why it is difficult to take a critical stance.

  My starting point is not that of animal-rights theory, which seeks to extend to animals moral considerations based on their interests, sentience, and similarity with humans. Although my writing is informed by this argument, I recognize many other issues besides that of animals’ subordination as problematic. I am not patching animals onto an undisturbed notion of human rights, but am examining the place of animals in the fabric of feminist ethics—a starting point that already presumes that exploitation entails more than the exploitation of animals. This clarification is necessary to insure that this book is cleary situated in the reader’s mind in an a priori problematic of human-nature relations.

  My emphasis here is on ideology. An ideology that ontologizes animals as usable precedes the issues associated with animal-rights discourse and feminist theory. My attempt is to expose this ideology, not through what some see as the animal-rights strategy of ethical extensionism from humans to some nonhumans, but by exploring the result of a human-animal dualism that is embedded within a racist patriarchy. This dualism
has precipitated both animal defense as well as the suspicions of it.

  Once one begins to make the theoretical, theological, philosophical, and inherently political claim “neither man nor beast” in response to sexist, racist, and speciesist beliefs, a raft of objections to resituating animals erupts: “What about hunting?” “Don’t plants have life too?” “What about the (human) fetus?” “What about carnivorous animals?” “What about feminism’s commitment to pluralism?” “What about Genesis 1 where God gives man dominion over the earth?” In the following pages I provide answers to these questions; the framework I offer in which to place discussions about animals arises from my understanding of feminism. I conclude by using this feminist philosophical framework to critique Christian humanocentric theology. This inclusion of theological issues is necessary because of the coercive nature of God-talk in reinforcing the human/animal dualism in this christianized culture.

  Feminist theory explores a range of concerns using a range of theoretical approaches. Issues of representations of women, reproductive rights, sexual violence, racist violence and white supremacy, environmental exploitation, the relationship between knowledge, power and value, the imaging of God, are issues that intersect with the defense of animals. Responding to specific questio ns that presented themselves about these feminist concerns, the chapters in this book grew organically. They are based on social justice issues—in this my methodology and theory reinforce each other. They presume the integrity of those who have been made neither man nor beast in a white supremacist patriarchy—women, people of color, gender nonconforming men, and animals. They protest inequities and injustice. They envision possibilities.

  In approaching the same things differently, a profound dissonance occurs. Of course, exposing contradictions by its very nature produces dissonance: that is one of the tasks of feminism in defending animals. Traveling around the country, I have often been asked what I thought of Julia Child’s comment about vegetarians, viz. that we have a “hangup” with food. But, incorporating contradictions into my response, I counter, we do not have a hang-up with food, we have a “hang-up” with what some people call food. Whose bodies matter? In debates about corpse eating, most people have a tendency to identify with the consumer rather than the consumed.

  In the many discussions about animal experimentation that animal defense has prompted, a basic feminist insight has been ignored: feminist philosophy has turned the “fact” of scientific objectivity into a contradiction. Before we can debate the efficacy of “animal models” we must ask: “Whose science are we talking about?” Just as we more readily identify with the consumer rather than the consumed in corpse eating, so with science we identify with the knower, not the known.

  Similarly, much Western debate on the environment and treatment of animals includes a discussion of Genesis 1. It appears that even atheists believe they have a God-given right to eat animals. But as a feminist theologian, I step back and say, “Whose God?” Again, I find that the process of identification is usually with the (male) Creator, and not (his) Creation or creatures.

  In The Sexual Politics of Meat I developed the concept of the absent referent to identify the process by which the animal used for corpse eating disappears both literally and figuratively. Animals in name and body are made absent as animals in order that flesh can exist. If animals are alive they cannot be meat. Thus a dead body replaces the live animal and animals become absent referents. Without animals there would be no corpse eating, yet they are absent from the act of eating flesh because they have been transformed into food. Animals are also made absent through language that renames dead bodies before consumers participate in eating them. The absent referent permits us to forget about the animal as an independent entity. The roast on the plate is disembodied from the pig who she once was.

  Turning a fact into a contradiction often involves restoring the absent referent, so that we reclaim the consumed, the known, the creation. That is the project of this book: identifying the terrain occupied by those who as “animals” are neither man nor beast, and the interlocking system of oppression that defines them as such and places them there. As part of the process of restoring the absent referent I will intercede with [sic]s when animals are referred to as “its” and presume the personhood of animals. Each animal possesses a unique individuality, sentience, and completeness of self in one’s self and not through others, and should exist as such for human beings, not as tools or as food.9

  When I became a vegetarian, I did not knowingly set out to become a theorist about animals. But this is where my feminist consciousness has taken me. One aspect of animal oppression is that benefiting from their oppression is made easy for us all, while resisting that oppression is more difficult. Vegetarians for instance cannot assume that we will be able to be fed at any restaurant we enter, while corpse eaters have their diet federally subsidized through a variety of programs that keep down the cost of producing dead bodies. Privilege is protected. From the position of privilege, responding to injustice appears to have many impediments.

  This book arises from and speaks to this privileged experience, rooted in my instance in the United States. It is this privilege of consuming animals with impunity that deeply concerns me, our habits of consumption that I challenge. At times I use feminist insights about violence against women to identify patterns in the treatment of animals. My presumption here is that systems of violence are interlocking, thus insights from one elucidate experiences of another. For instance, this is the framework for “The Feminist Traffic in Animals” and “The Arrogant Eye and Animal Experimentation.” At times I establish a dialogue between seemingly separate movements, such as in “Abortion Rights and Animal Rights” and “Reflections on a Stripping Chimpanzee.” Sometimes I apply basic insights about the structural nature of violence to both issues, such as when I examine institutional violence in “Feeding on Grace,” which draws on work I have pursued in understanding sexual violence.10 In “On Beastliness and the Politics of Solidarity,” I draw upon my own experiences challenging white supremacy to explore the way the concept of beastliness has been used against people of color in general and African-Americans in specific. My goal is to place the animal defense movement firmly within movements that challenge the social oppression of humans, to establish points of connections that create solidarity. In “Bringing Peace Home,” I articulate an intersectional approach to understanding violence against women and violence against animals.

  In earlier years of this wave of feminism, feminist theory erred by speaking about the experiences of women when what it was actually addressing was the experience of white, middle-class women. This book seeks to expand even further the accountability of feminist theory. Women live embedded in a social world that includes the other animals (both dead and alive), representations of the other animals, and attitudes toward the other animals. These inevitably influence women’s lives and the way that oppression is experienced and resisted. Recognizing how women are positioned as neither man nor beast allows us to embrace aspects of women’s lives often left unexamined by anthropocentric approaches.

  When one recognizes that systems of domination are interconnected, one sees that as Alice Walker argues “we are one lesson.” Thus, for instance, during the Clarence Thomas hearings, when Anita Hill spoke of her experience of sexual harassment, her reference to Thomas’s description of pornographic representations of bestiality begged for interpretation. This aspect of her experience received little or no commentary. Pondering the humiliation she reported feeling at hearing about women having sex with animals, I thought of many instances when women’s sexual violation and exploitation were linked with that of animals. I also recalled the specific bestializing discourse applied to African-Americans in the dominant culture.11 Her humiliation of hearing about bestial ity must be set within a framework that recognizes the unique situation of African-American women, positioned as they were by white supremacy between white women and animals: pornographic images exploite
d that positioning as neither man, white woman, nor beast.

  The pages that follow represent a feminist quarrel with the “facts”—the givens—of all animals’ lives today, including ours. I am not alone in this. I know of at least one feminist bookstore owner who slips Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation into book purchases feminists make while wearing fur coats, or another feminist who puts literature about vegetarianism into others’ book bags when lunches feature dead chicken sandwiches. They offer opportunities for others to acknowledge the contradictions, to recognize the opportunity for solidarity given to those who are “neither man nor beast.” When we acknowledge the contradictions—living beings treated as food, as models, as objects—will we respond by further conceptual distancing that disowns our relationship with other animals? Or will we seize the opportunity to reclaim the consumed, the known, the creation?

  Acknowledgments for the Bloomsbury Revelations edition

  We are one lesson, but there are many teachers. I am greatly indebted to feminist philosophers Nancy Tuana, Melinda Vadas, and Karen J. Warren for recognizing that my work resonated with feminist philosophy, setting me down the path of feminist philosophy, and being loving and caring guides along the way. They asked the questions that began this book, and have provided attentive readings of much of it. Josephine Donovan and Susanne Kappeler have been important colleagues in the work of bringing feminist theory to the subject of animals’ lives. I thank them for their constancy, their insights into the issues, and their suggestions in response to my writings. Thanks to Batya Bauman, Marti Kheel, and Tom and Nancy Regan, consistent supporters and advocates for my work. In addition to these supportive critics, parts of the book have been read and critiqued by Duane Cady, Gary Comstock, Paula Cooey, Theresa Corrigan, Marie Fortune, Greta Gaard, Stephanie Hoppe, Mary Hunt, Ynestra King, Jay McDaniel, Charles Pinches, Marjorie Procter-Smith, Beth Robinson, Ron Scapp, Brian Seitz, Andy Smith, and Teal Willoughby. I thank them for their criticisms and wisdom in response to my work.