Clearly identifying the cultural set of human/animal and the meaning of this cultural set, in terms of both anthropomorphic views of animals and the use of animals as “inferior” or “subordinate” beings to further the interests of humans, is a logical extension of any feminist discussion of dualisms and the way they are institutionalized. Furthermore, as with the chimpanzee forced to perform a traditional female action, one way in which animals are oppressed is by associating them with women’s lesser status, and vice versa. That is, linking the subordinated aspects of patriarchal dualisms (animal/woman) reinforces the subjugation of each. (For an example of this intersectional reinforcement of subordination, see Figure 14, “The Hardest Part Is Getting in”—an image reproduced on a T-shirt for a graduating class of a veterinary school, and marketed by their “Food Animal Club.”)
Figure 14 “The Hardest Part Is Getting In.” Veterinary school T-shirt from the early 1990s showing rectal palpation of a cow to see if she is ready to be forcibly impregnated.
Animal exploitation encapsulates several dualisms simultaneously, for instance, the human “mind” studying the animal “body” in animal experimentation; the human “male” hunting the animal who is called “female” when seen as prey; the human whose “selfhood” is defined against the animal “other” who is “beast,” the “cultural” human watching the “natural” animal in the settings of zoos, circuses, rodeos; the voice of “reason” telling us that our “feelings” about animals should not determine ethical positions about corpse eating, animal experimentation, or other forms of exploitation.
“Is species difference, like sex difference, socially constructed and experienced, and if so, how?” This question raises a host of issues about what the categorizing of species entails20 and how those categorizations reflect assumptions regarding power relations, human self-definition, and
the role one’s race, ethnicity, sex, and class play in the social construction of species. This question is a logical step in the challenges feminism offers a racist patriarchy and an important direction for feminist theory.
What Is the Role of Reason and Rationality in Determining the Situation of Women and Animals in Western Philosophy?
When Thomas Taylor parodied Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by writing his Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, his motives were not solely to say, “what will be next if we give women rights, animals?” Wollstonecraft’s text was heavily invested with the goal of demonstrating women as reasonable beings, unlike animals. Wollstonecraft wanted to break the historical association of women with nonrational animals, e.g., the one found in Aristotle. Recall the epigraph to the preface describing Aristotle’s position: “Aristotle does not merely posit the general inferiority of women but describes them as ‘incomplete beings’ . . . creatures in a gray area between beast and man.”21 Taylor wanted, in a sense, to affirm Aristotle’s position by demonstrating that women are no more reasonable than animals.22
The issue of the extent to which women are or are not unlike animals raises several pertinent questions: what is meant by “reason” and “rationality”? Leading philosophers have held that “woman is not rational, at least not in the same way as man.”23 In Western thought, “a lesser, immature, or defective rationality consistently has been attributed to women.”24 Gender metaphors, of necessity, are embedded in patriarchal understanding of rationality.
The animal-defense movement has at times reinforced a rationalist bias that belittles women. This can be seen particularly in the antifur movement. That women wear fur coats is embedded in malestream culture’s image of femininity. Here we find the “arrogant eye” in full glory. Advertisements for fur coats depict women as objects who are gazed upon. But the advertisements “promise” that women who wear fur coats become subjects (“What becomes a legend most? Blackgama” or “The Little Fur Stole That Went to Bifano’s and Became a Star”). Women’s subjectivity is hinted at because of the de facto objectifying of animals that frames the motivations—to sell parts of animals’ bodies. However, women’s subjectivity is never achieved. They can be only stars or legends.
Fur coats, like pornography and striptease, speak a human male language of exchange. And so does the antifur campaign. Or at least one prominent aspect of it. Illustrative of the antifur campaign is the advertisement “It takes up to 40 dumb animals to make a fur coat; but only one to wear it” showing a woman holding a fur coat that leaves a trail
of blood. Granted, women wear the majority of fur coats, but why do they wear them? Who buys them? What is the role of malestream culture in creating the feminine look that requires fur on women? Putting on a fur coat and stripping one’s clothes off to display a female body exist on the same continuum, as this ad implicitly conveys: only the lower half of the woman is shown and she holds the fur coat as though she had just taken it off. She is pure body—wearing high heel shoes, a skirt with a hemline above her knees, while one hip juts out, a sexually suggestive pose. The billboard ratifies the “arrogant eye.” Calling women “dumb animals” is reminiscent of the Western political tradition that has viewed women precisely as dumb animals. And it is fairly obvious that a headless woman cannot be a man of reason.25
According to feminist epistemological insights, before we can begin discussions about reason or rationality, we need to inquire, “Whose knowledge are we talking about?”26 When we see that men have controlled philosophical and political discourse, we must next inquire, “How has human male experience structured/delimited the threshold issues regarding the social contract and inclusion within the moral order?”27 Might not concern about what constitutes being human and rational arise from a basic though unexamined elite human Euro-American male experience? Positing the issues in this way helps us to see that inadequate theories of the social contract based on elite human Euro-American male experience have been taken as adequate. They are flawed not only by omission (of women) but also by commission (i.e., development of theory from the perspective of a masculinely gendered person). The same observations can be applied to the antifur campaigns that err by omission and commission.
What Is the Place of Emotion and Feeling in Morality?
Feminist philosophers have struggled with the message and history of Cartesian thought and brilliantly pinpointed its androcentricity.28 Cartesian thought also is of central concern to animal-defense philosophy since it is seen as providing the carte blanche for invasive scientific experimentation on animals29 and for animal “machines” and “factory” farms that characterize current corpse production.
Feminist theory has raised important questions about the Western philosophical tradition’s emphasis on rigorous logic and its simultaneous devaluing of emotions as legitimate sources for decision making. This devaluing has been seen as intimately connected to the devaluing of women. Yet, animal-rights discourse currently emphasizes rationality and reason in its arguments on behalf of the sentience and moral rights of other animals.30 Meanwhile, the response to the animal-defense movements of both the nineteenth and twentieth century is to use terms such as anti–intellectualism, obscurantist, irrational, and antihuman. As Roberta Kalechofsky points out, these same words “were used to describe women in the nineteenth century, and most particularly intellectual women who were regarded as desexed.”31 The accusation that people concerned about animals are merely sentimental builds upon the equation of the emotional with the sentimental, irrational, feminine, and womanish. In upholding the rational/emotional dualism, animal rights theory appears to disallow humans’ feeling about other animals into the realm of ethical decision making.
If animal-rights theory—perhaps defensively at times—upholds a rigorous rationality to spare it the accusation of being simultaneously emotional and feminine, this may signal a failure to recognize how deeply the Cartesian dualism of feeling and reason impacts both gender-based notions of rationality and the resistance to seeing the sentience of animals as an issue. Yet typically our empathy for the plight an
d well-being of animals is grounded in the recognition of their sentience. While some ecofeminists and environmentalists—perhaps defensively at times—shrug off animal-defense arguments on behalf of animals’ sentience on the grounds that it depends on traditionally male-defined notions of both reason and rights, an alternative dialogue suggests itself.
To begin with, one could build on feminist ethicists who develop a theory of embodiment. For instance, Beverly Harrison writes: “If we begin, as feminists must, with ‘our bodies, ourselves,’ we recognize that all our knowledge, including our moral knowledge, is body-mediated knowledge.” She continues, “We know and value the world, if we know and value it, through our ability to touch, to hear, to see.”32 When I argue that animals are absent referents, in one sense of that term I mean that they are disembodied entities, beings whom we never touch, hear, or see. Disembodied knowledge literally brings about disembodied animals who have little potential of being touched, heard, or seen, except as means to our ends.
A strength of writings such as that of Singer’s and Regan’s is that a part of their discussion is devoted to describing exactly what is happening to animals—they restore the absent referent. While this does not mean that as readers we are touching, hearing, or seeing the animals, our imagination provides the opportunity to link the knowledge we have gained about animals’ current extensive suffering with animals we have known, heard, and seen, and further, to reflect on what this means. Despite their disclaimers concerning reason in the forewords of their books, in recognizing the necessity of setting out precise information about animals’ current state of existence, they affirm embodied knowledge. One could ask: Do Regan and Singer and other animal-defense theorists have the analysis correct—they understand and act upon the problem of animals’ instrumentality—but incorrectly attempt to fit it within a framework delimited by its own human male bias?
Integrating Harrison’s understanding of embodiment with the issue of animals in contemporary society requires that we situate ourselves. Alice Walker’s articles on her interactions with animals provide a challenging and effective starting place for each of us to begin asking: How do I feel about animals? How are animals present in my life, e.g., alive (companions, “wildlife”) or dead (as food, garment)? How do I feel when reading about animals’ suffering and what should be the ethical and philosophical responses to this feeling? Do I feel differently about different types of animals? How do I decide personally how I should act toward animals? What have I learned and what is actively repressed about animals’ lives? How are the conflicts between feeling and knowing resolved for myself when the issue is animals?
Moving from an introspective examination to the theoretical implications of animals’ experiences, other questions arise: Do the various feminist challenges to malestream conceptions of moral reasoning also effect and transform the debate about animals? Does the question of the use of animals gain legitimacy only if one redefines the relationship between reason and emotions and the role of each in moral theory and decision making?
What Is Knowledge and How Do We Gain It?
Feminist philosophers have identified ways in which the methodology of science both arises from and valorizes human male experience. Evelyn Fox Keller, Sandra Harding, and Carolyn Merchant have argued that science is not value-free, that the scientific concept of objectivity is itself a value—a value that remains unexamined by science’s claim to be value-free.33 Feminist philosophers also have described science as generally characterizing individuals as autonomous, independent, and solitary, and the scientist as one who is and should be a disinterested human observer.
Scientists offer three reasons why the knowledge gained from experimenting on animals is justified: that knowledge is valuable; it is unreproducible without animals; and the complexity of the issues makes it difficult for laypeople to comprehend. These reasons suggest that the issue of animal experimentation is primarily a question of epistemology and secondarily one of hermeneutics. It is a question of epistemology because issues associated with the acquisition of knowledge are primary in the debate: What is it? How do we get it? It is a question of hermeneutics because issues associated with meaning are also pertinent: How is knowledge interpreted or applied? Through feminism the issues of epistemology and by extension hermeneutics are unresolved and destabilized rather than made static and apolitical in nature.
If the feminist critiques of science are correct, animal experimentation seems less a scientific question than a power issue filtered through the current, malestream power discourse. Gendered notions of knowledge acquisition mean that disenfranchised bodies are used to gain knowledge.
Is “Rights” Right?
Contemporary animal-defense theory has been deeply dependent on the dominant philosophical traditions that feminism seeks to expose. Some feminist philosophers have argued that rights theory rests on social contract theories that are at the very least inadequate and biased.34 Many ecofeminists experience a double uneasiness with the notion of rights: there is the general uneasiness expressed by some feminist theorists that our current philosophical inquiry about rights, interests, and the status of the individual over-and-against others, as well as what constitutes being human, arises from a traditional male rather than female experience. It also posits a liberal subject, the idea of which is no longer tenable in postmodern theory. And, there is sympathy with environmentalists’ concern that rights discourse on behalf of animals is a form of ethical extensionalism that recognizes only some animals (especially other mammals) while neglecting other animals and the environment as a whole.
Unfortunately, the tendency for feminists to dismiss the defense of animals because of the contaminated notion of “rights” means that animals themselves become absent referents. The virtue of animal-rights theory is that it recognizes individual animals and argues against their instrumentality. In light of feminist critiques of rights language, the task becomes one of searching for language that can just as effectively say that each individual animal’s life matters, that people should see their treatment of animals as ethical issues.
Embodied knowledge is an alternative that emerges as the dialogue among feminists, environmentalists, animal-defense advocates and others continues. Beverly Harrison, for instance, argues that feminist behavior will arise not from truths grounded in abstract knowledge (as is suggested by the question, “Do animals have rights?”) but in refusing complicity in destructive social forces and resisting those structures that perpetuate life-denying conditions.35 The problem becomes then that of making visible the invisible—explaining why the current treatment of animals is a destructive social force. Feminist theories about “different voices” (Gilligan), “maternal thinking” (Ruddick), and connectional selves (Keller) offer the grounds for exploring the meaning of our connection to the other animals and how we act morally upon these connections or lack of them.36
Interrelated oppressions cannot be eliminated if they are attacked separately; chimpanzees who strip, furbearing animals needed to uphold the feminine look, dead animals required as “virile” food—and all the animals they represent—will not be free if women, people of color, non-dominant men, and children are not.
Once the elite Euro-American male bias of Western theory is acknowledged, the question becomes: Do we begin from this position of biased male experience or first redefine the threshold issues based on human experience that consciously includes (and tests itself against) women’s experience? Do we then find ourselves at a different point of departure for discussing the status of animals; i.e., might we be in a culture in which animals were already included? In suggesting this, I am not positing any essentialist attitude toward women as theorists; it is not the female psyche or our biology as such that will determine the development of an alternative theory, but a discourse that evolves from the experience of beings who have been excluded from most of the powerful positions in Western culture.
Feminism and environmentalism should not simply dismiss animal
defense and the theories that accompany it because of a reliance on philosophical concepts of rights and interests; instead a more sophisticated response is called for, one that is able to separate this solution from the illuminating analysis that animal defense offers of the destructive social forces against animals. Identifying these destructive social forces and interrogating them from a “nonimperialistic and life-affirming” ethic that respects “nonhuman life forms”37 is an important next step in integrating feminism, animal defense, and environmentalism. In the concluding section of this book, I attempt such integration.
Figure 15 Duck Lake by Yvette Watt, photograph by Michelle Powell.
Figure 16 Yvette Watt and other defendants leave court after the case against them for their performance of Duck Lake was thrown out, June 2017, photograph by Catherine Wright.
Artist’s Statement
The Duck Lake project was an art-meets-activism event held on the opening morning of duck shooting season in Tasmania, Australia, in March 2016, at Moulting Lagoon. The lagoon is named for the swans that go there every year for their annual moult. The performance, which took place on a stage floating on the lagoon, involved six dancers in hot pink tutus, hard hats and pink camo leggings performing a choreographed routine based on Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. The aim was to counter the hyper-masculinity of the duck shooters, while drawing attention to the issue via the media, and encouraging more duck rescuers to the opening weekend meaning that less ducks would be shot. It was a huge success on all levels—media coverage was overwhelmingly positive and thorough, and a group of 30+ rescuers were on the lagoon with pink sparkly flags and in kayaks towing pink “decoys,” successful scaring many duck from the shooters guns. Some 10 months later I was charged by the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service for non-compliance with the permit for the event. The case was heard on Friday June 2, 2017. At the court hearing, the case was dismissed. The prosecution entered no evidence and so the magistrate threw the case out. Through our legal representation, we made clear we would not go down without a fight. The court case also provided more media attention for the ducks themselves.
Neither Man nor Beast Page 19
