Neither Man nor Beast

by Carol J Adams

  The “naturalizing” of the other animals as consumable is inimical to feminist pluralism—a true pluralism that seeks to recognize the other as a subject rather than an object. This pluralism would acknowledge that the social constructions of race, class, and sex are related to the social construction of species and must be confronted as such.

  Politicizing the Natural: 2

  A species-exclusive philosophy establishes human and animal as antithetical categories, and naturalizes human beings’ use of the other animals. In contrast, a species-neutral philosophy would not exaggerate differences between humans and the other animals, or imply that singular human evils such as warehousing animals or rape represent some residual “natural” or “animal-like” tendency. As the “natural” is politicized and labeled oppression, “meat” will no longer be an idea that is experienced as an object. Trafficking will be destabilized by consiousness and solidarity.

  The Politics of Consciousness

  Consciousness of oppression requires responses. Alison Jaggar observes that “to talk of oppression seems to commit feminists to a world view that includes at least two groups with conflicting interests: the oppressors and the oppressed”42 or to put it more bluntly in the terms of this book—corpse eaters and their flesh. Paulo Freire suggests that we can respond to these conflicting interests either as critics/radicals for whom “the importance is the continuing transformation of reality” or as naive thinkers/sectarians who accommodate “to this normalized ‘today.’ ”43 Naive thinkers/sectarians accept prevailing ideological barriers and discursive boundaries; critical consciousness can find no hold here: “sectarianism, because it is myth-making and irrational, turns reality into a false (and therefore unchangeable) ‘reality.’ ” Ellen Goodman accepts an unchangeable “reality” when she argues that

  environmental purity, the ability to live a life without a single cruel act against nature, is impossible. . . . The only answer is to avoid the use—or exploitation—of any other species. . . . We acknowledge ourselves as creatures of nature. . . . The anti-fur extremists prefer to win by intimidation. They have staked out a moral position that leaves no room for the way we live. It is, in its own peculiar way, unnatural.44

  Goodman both reprivatizes and renaturalizes the normalized “today.” Why does Goodman think that the answer—to avoid the exploitation of other species—is unachievable, unnatural? She does not say. The alternative to this accommodation of and mythicizing of reality is to accept the process of radicalization, an actual engagement in the efforts to transform concrete reality. This transformation aligns one with the oppressed rather than the oppressor, the flesh rather than the corpse eater.

  Breaking down ideological boundaries requires that those who are the oppressors must stop “regarding the oppressed as an abstract category,”45 must stop seeing meat as a mass term, must be equipped to examine and challenge the way we live.

  The Politics of Solidarity

  Critical consciousness makes us aware of ourselves as oppressors. It transforms our understanding of reality in which the political has been naturalized. But then what? Freire observes:

  Discovering her or himself to be an oppressor may cause considerable anguish, but it does not necessarily lead to solidarity with the oppressed. Rationalizing one’s guilt through paternalistic treatment of the oppressed, all the while holding them fast in a position of dependence, will not do. Solidarity requires that one enter into the situation of those with whom one is identifying; it is a radical posture. . . . True solidary with the oppressed means fighting at their side to transform the objective reality which has made them these “beings for another.”46

  Trafficking in animals ontologizes them as “beings for another,” making corpse eaters their oppressors.

  The necessary precondition for animals to be free is that there be no trafficking in animals’ bodies. The ontology will not collapse upon itself until the actions that the ontology upholds—for example, corpse eating—are stopped, and we stop being their oppressors.

  Consciousness, Solidarity, and Feminist-Vegetarian Conferences

  A feminist conference is an action—an action comprised of people gathering to plan, educate, and network around issues of justice for women. Alice Walker, reporting on her evolving feminist consciousness, comments: “I think about how hard it would be for me to engage in any kind of action now for justice and peace with the remains of murdered flesh in my body.”47 Walker’s thoughts pose a question: should the remains of murdered flesh be available for consumption during feminist conferences? We live in a flesh-advocating culture. But should feminist conferences be flesh advocating? If I recall correctly, a letter to a feminist publication a few years back raised the issue, “Why are we going home for the holidays to watch our families eat dead animals?” No one has to go home for the holidays to see the traffic in dead animals—they can come to most feminist conferences.

  The assumption that feminist conferences should have an all-inclusive menu has been tacit, a given, and thus untheorized. Feminist conference organizers often think they are assuming a neutral role in the debate about the consumption of animals by offering a vegetarian option that can be adopted personally if desired. In Freire’s terms, they are naive thinkers. They wrongly conclude that there is such a thing as neutrality, that they are not de facto taking an ontological stance that aligns them with the dominant culture. A feminist conference that includes the vegetarian option presumes corpse eating as normative. As Nancy Fraser argues: “Authoritative views purporting to be neutral and disinterested actually express the partial and interested perspectives of dominant social groups.”48 An all-vegetarian conference thus destabilizes what is claimed to be neutral and comprehensive, demonstrating instead its partiality. It says that if feminists want to traffic in animal bodies they must be deliberate and not passive about it. It resists the naturalizing of the political.

  The individual vegetarian option at a conference is inadequate because it perpetuates the idea that what we eat and what we do to animals (a simultaneous act if we traffic in dead animals) are solely personal concerns. It reprivatizes a political issue, making flesh the default diet. It removes the actions of a community fro m the consciousness of that community. Issues related to corpse eating such as the environment, women’s health, and the politics and ethics of conflicting ontologies are rendered invisible. The Ecofeminist Task Force Recommendation to the 1990 NWSA Conference considered these aspects by calling attention to the environmental consequences (deforestation, soil erosion, heavy water consumption, the presence of unrecyclable animal excrement, immense demands on energy and raw materials) and the health consequences (identifying the correlation between corpse consumption and heart attacks, breast cancer, colon cancer, ovarian cancer, and osteoporosis).49

  Trying vegetarianism at a feminist conference could be a catalyst for a changed consciousness about animals. The only way to experience vegetarian nourishment is by eating vegetarian food. The feminist-vegetarian conference proposal recognizes the practical hurdles to moving away from a flesh diet: many worry that they will not feel full after a vegetarian meal; that the dishes are unappetizing; or that insufficient protein will be ingested. Vegetarian meals therefore speak to practical fears: one can feel full; food can be tasty; vegetarians do get the same amount of protein each day that corpse eaters do—twice as much as our bodies require. As the Ecofeminist Task Force urged, conference organizers should “make every effort to provide meals that satisfy the health, conscience, and palate.”50

  Reprivatizers insist that the eating of animals is not a legitimate subject of feminist discourse, but a personal decision. Whether we eat blood and muscle or not is seen solely as an individual act, rather than a corporate one. This attitude toward corpse eating as solely personal is then actually enacted as individuals are given the choice to select competing meal options. Reprivatizers, keeping the debate at the personal level, also keep the debate about the issue of food. Animal defense discourse argu
es that the debate is a political one and the issue is ontology. Flesh at a meal automatically undermines a discussion of vegetarianism because the prevailing consciousness about animals—ontologizing them as consumable—is literally present.

  The inappropriateness of this ontology, the naturalizing of it by humans’ self-interest, the consequences of it for our health and the environment—the entire oppositional discourse that vegetarianism represents—can only become apparent in an atmosphere that respects animals. The current ontology will never offer this. It is an ontology at odds with feminism.

  Chapter 7

  Reflections on a Stripping Chimpanzee: on the Need to Integrate Feminism, Animal Defense, and Environmentalism

  I was a guest at a surprise birthday party that was being given for a [human] male friend. In the midst of the celebration, music began to play and a chimpanzee dressed as a stripper was brought into the room. As the poor little animal prodded by the owner began its [sic] act, I watched the faces of those witnessing this pathetic sight. Most of the guests were visibly embarrassed. I could hear scatterings of nervous giggles, the kind that come out when you’re embarrassed and just don’t know what to say. The guest of honor was so uncomfortable that he left the room.

  The party was a miserable failure. The person who had arranged for this “entertainment” apologized and kept saying, “I had no idea it would be like this.” He had paid one hundred dollars to watch a wonderful, intelligent animal be stripped of all dignity.1

  What is the meaning for feminism that women are thought to constitute at least 75 percent of the animal defense movement? And what does it mean for the animal defense movement that some want to “feminize” it?2 What is to be made of the charge by the Canadian fur industry and some feminists that the antifur movement is sexist?3 What are the implications that for many years, a woman who was not a ball player’s wife, but with whom the player was in a sexual relationship was called his “beast”? Why does someone train a chimpanzee to strip? Why is it that animal defense is not seen as an environmental issue? Applying the feminist critique of traditional philosophy to the evolving political discourse regarding animal defense offers answers to these questions.

  The Need to Integrate Animal Defense, Feminism, and Environmentalism

  Animal defense and feminism, including environmental feminism or eco-feminism, are frequently seen to be independent (rather than interdependent) of and even in conflict with each other. As we have seen, feminism to a large extent has not explicitly incorporated animal-defense concerns into its activism and theory; while some feminists have been overtly critical of the animal defense movement, including charging it with sexism.4 Other feminists explicitly reject the rights-based discourse that undergirded the theory of the animal defense movement in the 1980s.5 Since animal-defense theory holds that animals are not mere instruments, it challenges the unquestioned use of research on animals by feminist scientists and raises important concerns about animal experimentation as a manifestation of sexist bias in science. It challenges feminists to see animals as deserving of moral consideration. Despite efforts by many to unite the issues of environmentalism (superficially conceived as a “holistic” concern for species preservation and other life forms besides animals) and animal defense (superficially conceived as an “individualistic” concern for the preservation of individual animals, usually mammals rather than bugs), many philosophical papers have been written in the past ten years that widen the gulf between the two rather than close it.6 This, it seems to me, is a case of going in the wrong direction.

  Three considerations suggest, instead, that the concerns of environmentalism, animal-defense theory, and feminism, particularly ecofeminism, can and ought to be brought together:

  Feminist Analysis of the Status of Animals

  First, a dialogue between feminist and animal-defense scholarship offers new ways for discussing women’s experience, feminist theory, and the status of animals in a racist, capitalist patriarchy.7 Like a chimpanzee made to strip, every category of animal exploitation reveals gender issues: descriptions of the hunting of animals that often use rape imagery in such a way that rape is seen as benign; animals incorporated either dead or alive as trappings in pornography; the equation of the eating of animals with human maleness so that a corpse-eating culture is called a “virile” culture; the killing of animals by batterers. It may be that, as some feminists argue, women’s experience of exploitation equips us to understand what animals experience: “When I see the dominance/submission pattern of man’s relation to animals, the way in which he reduces the animal to an object, a tool for his use, I understand the horror of that pattern for the dominated ‘object.’ I have lived it. I am living it.”8

  In reconstructing the history of the domination of nature, women, and colonized peoples, ecofeminists like Rosemary Radford Ruether have established a connection between the domestication of animals, the development of urban centers, the creation of slavery, and the establishment of the inequality of the sexes,9 while some anthropologists have correlated human male domination with animal-based economies, i.e., hunting societies rather than gatherer societies.10 Nancy Jay proposes that the sacrifice of animals in many religious ceremonies arises from the need of a patriarchal culture to purify itself from the fact of being born of women. The shedding of animals’ blood—an action as serious as giving birth—provides a “ritual instrument” for maintaining a human male-dominated social order.11 Animals’ freedom from a religion that oppresses them will not occur until the need for animals to act as sacrificial lambs is eradicated. Animals’ status and women’s status are interdependent.

  Animal Defense and Environmentalism

  Second, the animal-defense movement should be seen as addressing environmental issues. There are several reasons for this. With regard to food production and consumption, both the untoward consequences of livestock production, which has been called “one of the major ecological disasters of our time”12 and the symbolic role domesticated “food” animals play as emblematic of nature’s fate—controlled, used as a resource, and annihilated—are environmental issues addressed by animal-defense theorists.13 Although different issues are raised for so-called wildlife, environmental issues concerning the necessity, d esirability, and justification for protecting and preserving wildlife are addressed by the animal-defense movement.14 The work of ecofeminists such as Susan Finsen and Marti Kheel, among others, attempts to bridge the perceived gulf between “individualists” and “holists.”

  Voices have arisen from within the animal-defense movement that combine a theory of animal defense with theories about the environment and feminism to produce what is called a life-centered theology.15 Feminist theory offers ways to examine environmental issues without sacrificing individual animals as environmentalists often seem to do. Moreover, environmental issues are often survival issues for people of color. Thus, they offer a way of addressing other social oppressions, and in particular, of challenging environmental racism. Finally, flesh foods are the paradigmatic capitalist product as they fulfill the capitalist demands for constantly expanding consumerism. Few things are more wasteful than corpse production. Because flesh production consumes so many resources, an animal-based agriculture can expand indefinitely. A socialist feminist approach to the issue offers valuable insights into the material nature of environmental exploitation.16

  The Contributions of Ecological Feminism

  Third, ecological feminism offers an interpretative framework for analyzing the domination of nature, including the domination of the other animals. As we have seen, ecological feminists claim that the dominations of women and nature are intimately connected and that any adequate feminism, environmentalism, or environmental ethic must acknowledge these connections.17 The contribution of ecofeminism’s insights into social “isms of domination” such as sexism, racism, classism, and naturism and the ways these sanction and perpetuate a “logic of domination” that (falsely) assumes that the superiority of (some) humans
provides a theoretical basis for recognizing the intersectional nature of oppression.18 Furthermore, drawing on the insights of various strands of feminist ethics, ecofeminism also offers a critique of the strictly philosophical rights and interests arguments that cause many environmentalists unease. Thus ecological feminism provides a philosophical framework for analyzing the connections among feminism, environmentalism, and animal defense. It also acknowledges the interrelated aspects of social domination and domination of nature, and through its global manifestations, demonstrates the possibility of multicultural theory and action.

  Five Questions/Five Vantage Points

  Feminists in all fields have pointed out that the questions one asks often affect what one takes to be significant to an issue, the methodology one uses to determine answers, and even the answers one gets or countenances. This is certainly so in the present case. Consider five questions that suggest interconnections among the issues raised by feminists, environmentalists, and the animal-defense movement.

  Are Animals to Humans as Women are to Men? Exploring a Variety of Cultural Dualisms

  As previous chapters indicate, many contemporary feminist theories address a variety of conceptual sets that are historically characterized by these opposing terms: subject/object; self/other; domination/agency; culture/nature, sameness/difference; male/female; white/nonwhite; human/animal. We have seen how these dualisms mediate power and value hierarchies of domination: man dominates woman; culture dominates nature; whites dominate people of color whom they label “non-white”; a subject dominates an object; humans dominate animals. The eradication of a logic of domination as it is sustained, perpetuated, and enacted through these cultural sets becomes one of the goals of ecofeminism.19