What we have for the most part in feminism is a species-specific philosophical system, in which (an expanded) humanity continues to negate the other animals precisely because their otherness is located in the natural sphere. Yet, we can find feminist philosophical voices that acknowledge the other animals. Elizabeth Spelman’s important article on “Woman as Body,” discusses the equation of women, slaves, laborers, children, and animals with the body and how this equation facilitates their oppression.16 Barbara Noske points out that “as yet there exists in our thinking little room for the notion of a non-human Subject and what this would imply.”17 Nancy Hartsock wonders “why there must be a sharp discontinuity between humans and [the other] animals. Is this too an outgrowth of the masculinist project?”18 As if in reply, Noske suggests that “even if there is such a thing as a species boundary between ourselves and all animals, might this discontinuity not exist on a horizontal level rather than on a vertical and hierarchical level?”19
Our Current Ontology of Animals Is Unacceptable
Resisting the current ontology of animals as consumable is central to animal defense. Once the human-animal division is perceived as corrupt and as inaccurate as the other dualisms closely examined by feminism, the resubjectification and denaturalization of animals can occur. This involves accepting them ontologically on their own terms and not on the basis of our interests.
The ontology of animals that accompanies animal defense theory involves distinguishing between reforms of certain practices that accept animals as usable and abolition of these practices. The goal is simply not bigger cages but no cages; not bigger stalls for veal calves, but no veal calves; not mandated rest stops but no transporting; not careful placement of downed animals (an animal who cannot get up, for any variety of reasons such as illness, broken bones, cancer, exhaustion, starvation, dehydration, or parasites) into front loader buckets to move them to be slaughtered (instead of tying a chain or a rope around the legs and dragging them) but no system that creates downed animals;20 not “humane” slaughter, but no slaughter. Reform of the current system still subordinates animals to humans. Reform situates itself within the issue of animal welfare rather than animal defense and the concern becomes the appropriate use of animals rather than the elimination of human’s use of animals.
Often when feminists respond to animal defense they attempt to dislodge its ontological claims and argue for the reformist acceptance of animals’ exploitation. Ellen Goodman argues for the “intelligent, responsible use of animals.” Mary Zeiss Stange wants hunters to “promote positive public images of animal use and welfare, as opposed to animal protectionism.”21 In upholding the dominant ontology, the promotion of responsible use of animals grants charity where liberty is needed. Or as Paulo Freire puts it, such paternalism—taking better care of terminal animals—enacts the “egoistic interests of the oppressors”22 :
Any attempt to “soften” the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their “generosity,” the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this “generosity,” which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source.23
An acceptance of the ontological integrity of those who are different from the “normative” human is needed, as well as the recognition of animals’ consciousness and cultures. As much as men’s accounts of women’s li ‘es have been partial, false, or malicious lies, so too have humans’ accounts of the other animals’ lives. In resisting the naturalization of animals, we need, as Noske argues, to develop an anthropology of the other animals that encounters them on their terms. A false generosity only serves to restrict animals to the natural realm that enables their ontologizing as usable.
“Predation” Is Oppressive
Claiming that human consumption of the other animals is predation like that of carnivorous animals naturalizes this act. But if this predation is socially constructed then it is not a necessary aspect of human-animal relations. Instead it is an ongoing oppression enacted through the animal industrial complex.
Using the three-part definition of oppression proposed by Alison Jaggar,24 we can see its applicability to the experience of the victims of the traffic in animals.
First, the “oppressed suffer some kind of restriction on their freedom.”25 Terminal animals suffer literal constraints upon their freedom: most are unable to walk, to breathe clean air, to stretch their wings, to root in the dirt, to peck for food, to suckle their young, to avoid having their sexuality abused, etc. Whether warehoused or not, all are killed. They are not able to do something that is important for them to do, and they lack the ability to determine for themselves their own actions.
Second, “oppression is the result of human agency, humanly imposed restrictions.”26 Humans have a choice whether to eat animals or not. Choosing to purchase flesh at a supermarket or have it served at a conference represents human agency; such human agency requires that the other animals lose their freedom to exist independently of us.
Third, “oppression must be unjust.”27 It includes the thwarting of an individual’s liberty because of her or his membership in a group that has been targeted for exploitation. From the perspective of human-skin privi lege, the oppression of other animals is seen as just, even though it arises from targeting for exploitation specific groups—in this case, the other animals. But why is human skin the sole referent for what is moral? Viewed from a philosophical system that rejects the intertwined human/animal and subject/object dualisms, humans’ treatment of terminal animals is unjust. Beverly Harrison proposes “no one has a moral right to override basic conditions for others’ well-being in order to have ‘liberty’ inconsistent with others’ basic welfare.”28 This is what people are doing when they traffic in animals. As Alice Walker observes, “The oppression that black people suffer in South Africa—and people of color, and children face all over the world—is the same oppression that animals endure every day to a greater degree.”29
Naturalizing the Political: 2
In response to efforts to resubjectify the other animals and label our treatment of them as oppression, people who do not wish to give up human-skin privilege seek ways to banish animal defense discourse from the political realm, to reprivatize and re-“naturalize” it. Reprivatization defends the established social division of discourses—that is, the personal is not the political, the natural is not the social, the domestic is not the economic—thus denying political status for animal defense. For instance, when Ellen Goodman contends that animal defense is “unnatural,” she implicitly accepts discursive boundaries she otherwise finds disturbing. If animal defense is unnatural, then animal oppression is natural; if it is natural, it is not political. She is attempting to encase the debate once again in discursive privacy. Or, when a feminist refers to the “so-called animal liberation movement”30 she implicitly denies political content to this movement. When Nel Noddings claims that domestic animals do not have meaningful relationships with other adult animals nor do they “anticipate their deaths,”31 she delimits their lives within the sanctity of the “natural,” which it is presumed we can identify (and control), rather than the social. It may be reassuring to believe that animals have no social network and do not object to their death; however these beliefs are possible only as long as we do not inquire closely into the lives of animals as subjects. Then we see that certain cultural structures facilitate these efforts at depoliticizing and renaturalizing animals’ oppression.
The Flight from Specificity
Feminist theorist Nancy Hartsock observes that ruling-class ideas “give an incorrect account of reality, an account only of appearances.”32 The dominant discourse about animals has been determined largely by the appearance of flesh in animals’ marke
table form—T-bone, lamb chops, hamburger, “fresh” chickens—an appearance positing that “meat,” like George Eliot’s happy women, has no history. As long as a corpse has no past, its identity will come only from the constructed context of appetites and appearances. This permits a flight from specificity.
The flight from specificity favors generalities instead of engaged knowledge, mass terms over individual entities. To be specific would require confronting the actual practice and the meaning of what is done to animals. Generalities safely insulate one from this knowledge, keeping debates at a predetermined, unbloodied level. Most frequently they do not pinpoint the victim, the perpetrator, or the method. Just as most feminists would recognize that the statement “some people batter other people” or the term family violence as imprecise—who and how left undefined—so is the statement “we eat ‘meat.’ ”
When, for instance, in her defense of eating animals, Nel Noddings refers to ensuring that domestic animals’ “deaths are physically and psychically painless”33 she presumes that such a practice exists and that we all sufficiently understand what she means so that we can agree that such a practice either exists or is attainable for terminal animals. In this, ignorance about the act of slaughtering prevails, though it remains unexposed.34 In fact, such a practice neither exists nor is attainable.
Another example of the flight from specificity occurs when the term meat eating is applied transhistorically, transculturally, implying that the means by which flesh is obtained have not changed so much that different terms are needed, or else that the changes in the means of production are immaterial to a discussion. Consider Luisah Teish’s encouragement to feed the ancestors flesh if this is what they want:
I have said that cooking for your ancestors is simple. It is, with one exception. Do not think that you can impose your diet on them. It won’t work for long.
I knew a woman who tried to force her ancestors to keep a vegetarian diet. The oracle kept saying that they were not satisfied. I suggested she make some meatballs for them. She did and got “great good fortune” from the oracle. I could advise her this way because I’d tried to impose a pork-free diet on my ancestors, but much to my disgust they insisted on pork chops to accompany their greens, yams, and cornbread.35
How can the flesh obtained from mass-produced, warehoused, terminal animals in any way actually duplicate the flesh eaten by the ancestors when they were alive, when a different material reality constructed the meaning of “meatballs”? Meat is not an ahistorical term, though it functions here as though it is, as representation. Surely the ancestors know that “pork” obtained from a twentieth-century warehoused animal—pumped full of chemicals, who never saw the light of day until transported to be butchered, whose relationship with other animals, including mother and/or children was curtailed, and who never rooted in the earth—is not at all the “pork” they ate.
In each of these cases, terms such as painless or meatballs or pork convey little specific knowledge about the production of flesh. Those aspects unidentified or misidentified are then presumed to be unproblematic or inconsequential. The result of this discursive control is that corpse eaters can set the limits on what types of information about corpse eating is allowed into a discussion.36 What Sally McConnell-Ginet observ es about the sexual politics of discourse holds true, too, for the debate over animal defense: “The sexual politics of discourse affects who can mean what, and whose meanings get established as community currency.”37
The meanings that are established regarding flesh are almost always general, rarely specific. They recognize neither the specific animal killed to be food, nor the specific means for raising, transporting, and killing this animal. This flight from specificity regarding corpse production bars from the discourse matters that in other areas of feminist theory are considered the basis for making ethical decisions: material reality and material relationships.
Feminist Defenses of Trafficking in Animals
Before examining specific feminist defenses of trafficking in animals, some further problems of discursive control must be identified. Feminists, like nonfeminists, generally seek to banish animal defense by reprivatizing decisions about animals and renaturalizing animals’ lives as subordinate to humans. In this, several factors function in their favor. They assume that their predefined understanding of the issue is adequate: for example, that it is correct to label animal defense as being in opposition to pluralism because their definition of pluralism excludes animal defense. Any predefined feminist principle that is established as in opposition to animal defense requires closer examination: does it presume that the socially authorized forms of feminist debate available for discussing this issue are adequate and fair? To paraphrase Fraser, does it fail to question whether these forms of public discourse are skewed in favor of the self-interpretations and interests of dominant groups (including human females)—occluding the fact that the means of public discourse themselves may be at issue?38
Hidden ethical stances prevail even in pluralistic feminisms. In an evolving community of individuals who share ideas and goals for changing a racist patriarchy, some values are so given, so taken for granted, that we never examine them. For instance, we agree that cannibalism is not a legitimate way to obtain nutrition, even though human flesh can be very tasty. Cannibalism is not a question of individual tastes, appetites, autonomy, or ritual; it is a forbidden activity whose forbiddenness appears obvious to almost everyone, and therefore this forbiddenness disturbs very few. Clearly this is not so when it comes to eating nonhuman animal flesh. In this case the flesh is considered both tasty and acceptable, based on a decision individuals and cultural traditions have made about nutrition and ethics. To suggest that nonhuman animal flesh be forbidden disturbs many.
The differing ethical stances regarding the flesh of human animals versus the flesh of nonhuman animals illustrates that the issue is not whether a community can forbid an action but who is to be protected from being consumed. Since a community-wide vegetarianism is seen as problematic but a community ban on cannibalism is a given, it is obvious that theorizing about species at this point in time is receiving different discursive space than theorizing about race, class, gender, and heterosexism.
Confusing Privilege with Autonomy
The invocation of autonomy—the insistence that enforcing vegetarianism at a conference restricts an individual’s autonomy—presumes that no one else’s liberty is at issue in food choices. This is simply not so. The invisibility of animals’ oppression permits the debate to be about individual human’s liberties, rather than making animals’ oppression visible. Staking a preeminent claim for autonomy is an attempt at reprivatization. As Ruby Sales remarked during the 1990 NWSA Conference: “Privilege is not a condition. . . . It is a consequence of the condition of oppression.”39 From this politicized perspective, eating animals is a privilege humans have granted themselves, and this privilege is called “autonomy.” The ideology that ontologizes animals as consumable preexists and provides the foundation for the easy confusion of privilege with autonomy.
Pluralism
The position that feminist conferences (and theory) should be pluralistic also is seen to be at odds with political claims for vegetarianism. Imposing one’s dietary decision on all races or ethnic groups is viewed as racist, because the inability to exercise personal food choices severs an individual from her racial/ethnic tradition. I deeply respect the need to preserve nondominant cultures. However, I do not believe that pluralism requires siding with human-skin privilege in order to avoid white-skin privilege. We do not embrace nondominant cultural traditions that, for instance, oppress women. An unspoken “in-order-to” is buried in the assumptions about pluralism: We want feminism to be pluralistic; in order for this to be, we must be species-exclusive in our theory. From this context, we can see that a politicized issue, pluralism, is made to contest with a yet-unpoliticized issue, the traffic in animals. Moreover, we see that pluralism is defined in such a way that i
t applies only to other human beings. Conventional wisdom implies that for the one issue to prevail, the other must be kept in the realm of discursive privacy. Pluralism becomes a boundary enforcer rather than a boundary destablizer. Pluralism in food choices, including eating dead animals, can be argued in this way as long as the dominant culture’s current ontology of animals remains unchallenged.
Through reprivatization, vegetarianism is seen as a white woman’s imposing her “dietary” concerns on women of color. However, since I am arguing on behalf of feminist-vegetarian conferences, let us agree that at present the foods offered at most conferences represent the dominant culture. They already ignore ethnic and racial traditions around food.
In addressing the right of racial and ethnic groups to eat animals we are not talking about food as nutrition but food as ritual. Poet Pat Parker argues that her “meat” eating is literally soul food.40 But the ritual meaning of a meal may serve to reprivatize something that has broken away from discursive privacy. Alice Walker can see barbarity in her childhood diet in which “meat was a mainstay”41 and yet still respect rituals that were not barbarous—her mother’s gardening, for instance.
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