Neither Man nor Beast
Page 36
Chapter 10
Epigraphs: Xenophanes cited in Mary E. Hunt, Comprehensive Examination II, “God-Language: Critique and Construction,” Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, May 1977. Bernard Rollin, The Unheeded Cry: Animal Consciousness, Animal Pain, and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 23.
1. Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), p. 125.
2. I develop this idea more fully in chapter 2 of The Sexual Politics of Meat.
3. Quoted in Yi-Fu Tuan, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 69. While Lewis inscribes a further dualism upon animals (beasts versus tame animals), I will be using beast to refer to all other-than-human animals.
4. Barbara Noske, Humans and Other Animals: Beyond the Boundaries of Anthropology (London: Pluto Press, 1989), p. 77.
5. Conversation, February 28, 1994.
6. This issue is developed more fully in Carol J. Adams and Marjorie Procter-Smith, “Taking Life or ‘Taking on Life’?: Table Talk and Animals,” in Ecofeminism and the Sacred, ed. Carol J. Adams (New York: Continuum, 1993).
7. Bernard Rollin, Animal Rights and Human Morality (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1981), p. 32.
8. Donald Griffin, “The Problem of Distinguishing Awareness from Responsiveness,” in Self-Awareness in Domesticated Animals: Proceedings of a Workshop Held at Keble College, Oxford, ed. D. G. M. Wood-Gush, M. Dawkins, R. Ewbank (Hertfordshire, England: The Universities Federation for Animal Welfare), p. 6. Griffin suggests the term “anthropomorphophobia” to convey the “apprehension that one may be accused of uncritical sentimentality if one suggests that any nonhuman animal might experience subjective emotions such as fear, or think consciously in even the simplest terms, such as believing that food is located in a certain place.” Donald R. Griffin, “Foreword,” Interpretation and Explanation in the Study of Animal Behavior. Volume 1: Interpretation, Intentionality, and Communication, ed. Mark Bekoff and Dale Jamieson (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990,), p. xiii.
9. Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), p. 9.
10. See Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, pp. 72–73.
11. Anyone who thinks that this resistance is not keen in the mid-1990s should examine the response by conservative and many mainstream members of the mainline denominations to the “RE-Imagining Conference” held in Minnesota in November 1993. One of the main complaints is that God was referred to as Sophia.
12. Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web, pp. 38–39.
13. Sallie McFague, Models of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1987), p. 33.
14. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 41.
15. Mary Midgley, “The Concept of Beastliness: Philosophy, Ethics, and Animal Behavior,” Philosophy, 48 (1973), p. 114.
16. Maureen Duffy, “Beasts for Pleasure,” in Animals, Men, and Morals: An Enquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-Humans, ed. Stanley Godlovitch, Roslind Godlovitch, John Harris (New York: Taplinger, 1972), p. 113.
17. McFague, Models of God, p. 3.
18. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, (New York: Penguin, 1988), p. 286.
19. Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 2.
20. Alison M. Jaggar, “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology,” in Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), p. 156. Jaggar is referring to the work of Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987) and Jane Flax, “Political Philosophy and Patriarchal Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Epistemology and Metaphysics,” in Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy, ed. Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983).
21. Barbara Noske, Humans and Other Animals: Beyond the Boundaries of Anthropology (London: Pluto Press, 1989), p. 117, see also Stephen Clark, The Nature of the Beast (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 112–15.
22. See Nancy Tuana, The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious, and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman’s Nature (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993).
23. Noske, Humans and Other Animals (London: Pluto Press, 1989), p. 88.
24. Josephine Donovan, “Animal Rights and Feminist Theory” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15, no. 2 (1990), p. 353.
25. Jaggar, “Love and Knowledge,” p. 161.
26. Ibid., p. 163.
27. Quoted in “Second Strike Against Noted Author in California Test,” New York Times, February 27, 1994.
28. Cited in Sharon D. Welch, Communities of Resistance and Solidarity (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1985), p. 9.
29. While many of these examples may appear to arise and apply only to specific culture s, i.e., the animals deemed inedible in the West may not be deemed inedible elsewhere (dogs, for instance), what is universal is that animals are viewed as less valuable than human, and thus can be made into an object for humans’ survival or pleasure, so that some kinds of animals—even if they differ within cultures—will fill these roles.
30. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Fall 1988), p. 586.
31. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” p. 584.
32. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1929), p. 48. When Virginia Woolf grants subjectivity to a dog in her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog Flush, she seems to get even with the Bishop’s denigration of both women writers and animals.
33. As Brigid Brophy suggests in an imagined heavenly conversation between Bernard Shaw and God:
“I suppose,” God said, “theology impresses them with the notion that animals have no souls—and hence no ghosts.”. . . “No, what prevents people from, on the whole, seeing animals’ ghosts is not theology but bad conscience. If they do see an animal ghost, it will be a dog or a cat, not an animal they are in the habit of eating. . . . [P]eople see ghosts for the same reason that they read ghost stories: as self indulgence. It is not murderers who are haunted. It is the innocent. . . . It is because people truly are guilty of murdering animals that the folk imagination has to contrive not to see the ghosts of the folk diet.”
Brigid Brophy, The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1968), pp. 189–90. Regarding the question of whether animals have souls see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (New York: Pantheon, 1983), pp. 137–42.
34. Lorraine Code, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 148.
35. Donovan, “Animal Rights and Feminist Theory,” p. 375.
36. This is a paraphrase of a remark by Melinda Vadas as she analyzed Catharine MacKinnon’s insights and their applicability to the issue of animal exploitation.
37. These are Catharine MacKinnon’s insights, with my addition of species construction to her analysis of gender construction. See Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 237.
38. Ibid., p. 238.
39. Ibid., p. 240.
40. Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), p. 33.
41. Code, What Can She Know?, p. 82, quoting Annette Baier, “Cartesian Persons,” in Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
42. Code, What Can She Know?, p. 85.
43. Ibid., p. 121.
44. Hearne, Adam’s Task, p. 59.
45. Sally Carrighar, Home to the Wilderness: A Pe
rsonal Journey (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 304. This is excerpted in Theresa Corrigan and Stephanie Hoppe, eds., With a Fly’s Eye, Whale’s Wit, and Woman’s Heart (Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, 1989), pp. 23–24.
46. Brigid Brophy interviewed in Rynn Berry, Jr., The Vegetarians (Brookline, MA: Autumn Press, 1979), p. 80.
47. Noske, Humans and Other Animals, p. 53.
48. Keller, From a Broken Web, p. 2.
Coda
1. “Many people, but especially women, observe that as they get toward middle age they are less attracted to meat, while finding dairy products, fruits and vegetables more appetizing.” Barbara Seaman and Gideon Seaman, M.D., Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones (New York: Rawson Associates Publishers, Inc., 1977), p. 372.
2. Mary Daly in cahoots with Jane Caputi, Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), p. 114. On crones, see also, Jane Caputi, Gossips, Gorgons, and Crones: The Fates of the Earth (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Bear & Company Publishing, 1993).
3. Anne Llwellyn Barstow argues that the figures in the millions often cited are too high, she proposes a conservative estimate of two hundred thousand accusations and “a figure of one hundred thousand dead.” Anne Llwellyn Barstow, Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts (San Francisco: Pandora, 1994), p. 23.
4. Barstow reports that “though the majority of alleged witches in New England were middle-aged, most European victims were older, over fifty.” She continues: “One aspect of the witchcraze, undeniably, was an uneasiness with and hostility toward dependent older women. Witch charges may have been used to get rid of indigent elderly women, past childbearing and too enfeebled to do productive work.” Witchcraze, pp. 27, 29.
5. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (Hammondsworth: Penguin University Books, 1973), p. 626, quoting J. R. Ackerly, My Father and Myself (1968), p. 174.
6. Benedict de Spinoza, Ethic 4, prop. 37, trans. W. Hale White, 4th ed., 1910, p. 209. Quoted in Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 298.
7. Louise Armstrong, “Ideal Freedoms, Real Fears,” a review of Wendy Kaminer’s A Fearful Freedom: Women’s Flight from Equality, in The Women’s Review of Books 8, no. 2 (November 1990), p. 9.
8. See, for instance, David Fraser, “The Role of Behavior in Swine Production: A Review of Research,” Applied Animal Ethology 11 (1983–84), pp. 317–39; and David Fraser, “Attraction to Blood as a Factor in Tail-Biting by Pigs,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 17 (1987), pp. 61–68; A. B. Lawrence, M. C. Appleby, and H. A. Macleod, “Measuring Hunger in the Pig Using Operant Conditioning: The Effect of Food Restriction,” Animal Production 47, pp. 131–37; D. G. M. Wood-Gush and R.G. Beilharz, “The Enrichment of a Bare Environment for Animals in Confined Conditions,” Applied Animal Ethology 10 (1983), pp. 209–17.
9. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984), p. x.
10. See Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 1.
11. For a fuller analysis see Carol Wiley, “Why It’s Impossible to be a Vegetarian,” Vegetarian Times, May 1991.
12. Howard W. Winger, “Book,” Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 3 (Chicago: William Benton, 1966), p. 921.
Index
Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to endnotes.
abortion rights and animal rights here–here. See also reproductive control
absent referent concept and here–here
anthropocentrism and here–here
antivivisectionism and here–here
crisis pregnancy centers here
difference between human fetus and animals here, here–here, here here
identification with the vulnerable and here
individuality and here–here, here
mandatory sonogram laws here
medical profession and here–here, here here
men and here, here
moral dilemmas of here–here
nonbeing argument and here
nonviolence and here–here
overview of here–here
parental notification here
personhood and here–here
self-determination and here–here, here
sentiency and here–here
technology and here here
waiting periods here
women as “hosts” here
absent referent concept here–here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here. See also invisibility
abuse. See animal abuse/pet abuse; children, sexual abuse of; violence
Adams, Carol J. See also Sexual Politics of Meat, The
background of here–here
basic position of here–here, here
African-Americans. See racism
anger here–here
animal abuse/pet abuse by batterers here, here–here, here, here here. See also animal experimentation; eating animals
bestiality here, here–here, here
by children here–here
child sex abuse and here, here–here, here, here
hunting here–here, here
invisibility of here–here, here
philosophical implications of here–here
pornography and here, here–here, here, here–here
religious sacrifice here
ritual abuse here
by serial murderers here–here, here
sexual mutilation here
war and here
animal-assisted therapy here
animal defense movement. See also animal rights theory; feminism, defense of animals and
basic arguments of here–here
Cartesian thought and here, here
ecofeminism and here
integrating with feminism and environmentalism here–here
progressive’s suspicion of here–here
reason and here–here
women’s participation in here, here, here here
animal experimentation here–here. See also science
agency and here–here
antiabortionism and here
consumer mentality and here–here
disease and here, here
distancing and here–here, here
dominant reality and here–here
Draize test here–here, here–here
epistemology and here
feeling and suffering and here
feminism and here, here
gendered nature of here–here
hermeneutics and here
human likeness and here, here, here
human male gaze (arrogant eye) and here–here, here, here
human survival and here–here
less-alive period of here–here
Lethal Dose here test here
“necessity” for here–here
patriarchy and here–here
pornography and here–here, here, here–here
pound seizure and here
product testing here
repetition and here, here
representation and here–here, here, here
ritual and here–here
sadism and here–here
scientific knowledge and here, here–here, here–here
scientific objectivity and here, here
as social and economic end in itself here
subject/object dichotomy and here–here, here–here
technology and here here
women protesting against here
animality here, here, here, here
animal rights theory. See also abortion rights and animal rights; animal defense movement
Adams’s position and here
ethical extensionism of here
freedom and here
malestream here
moral dilemma of here–here
&nb
sp; reason and here–here
relational epistemology and here–here
“rights” language here, here, here–here, here here
animal studies here, here, here
animals. See also absent referent concept; beast concept
categorizations of here–here
individuality of here, here–here, here–here, here, here–here
inviolability of here–here
nonbeing argument here
ontological status of here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here
pain of becoming conscious about here–here
personhood of here, here–here, here, here, here here
relationships with here–here, here–here, here, here, here–here
women and (see women, link with animals)
anorexia here
anthropocentrism here–here, here–here, here
anthropomorphism here–here, here, here here
Araújo, Virginia de here
Aristotle here, here, here, here here
Armstrong, Louise here
arrogant eye here–here, here, here
Ascione, Frank here, here
autonomy here–here, here, here. See also privacy; self-determination
Baier, Annette here
Baker, Steve here, here here
Barr, James here
Bartky, Sandra Lee here
battering. See violence
beast concept here, here, here, here, here, here, here
beastly theology. See theology, Christian patriarchal
Beauvoir, Simone de here
beef. See eating animals
Bell, Derrick here
Benney, Norma here
Bentley, Sarah here
Berger, John here
bestiality here, here–here, here
Bible here, here, here–here, here here. See also religion; theology
birds here
Bishop, Arthur Gary here
body
and eating animals here–here, here–here, here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here–here
ecofeminism and here, here, here–here, here–here
feminism and here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
listening to the here
patriarchy and here
somatophobia here, here–here, here, here
vegetarianism and here, here
Borges, Jorge Luis here–here
Bowie, Walter here