Neither Man nor Beast Read online

  Neither Man nor Beast

  Selected titles in the Bloomsbury Revelations Series

  The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol J. Adams

  Aesthetic Theory, Theodor W. Adorno

  Being and Event, Alain Badiou

  Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou

  The Language of Fashion, Roland Barthes

  The Intelligence of Evil, Jean Baudrillard

  Key Writings, Henri Bergson

  Roots for Radicals, Edward T. Chambers

  Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Manuel DeLanda

  A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

  Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Michael Dummett

  Marx’s Concept of Man, Erich Fromm

  Truth and Method, Hans Georg Gadamer

  All Men Are Brothers, Mohandas K. Gandhi

  Violence and the Sacred, René Girard

  The Three Ecologies, Félix Guattari

  The Essence of Truth, Martin Heidegger

  Eclipse of Reason, Max Horkheimer

  Rhythmanalysis, Henri Lefebvre

  Libidinal Economy, Jean-François Lyotard

  Can’t We Make Moral Judgements?, Mary Midgley

  Time for Revolution, Antonio Negri

  The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière

  Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure

  Understanding Music, Roger Scruton

  What is Art?, Leo Tolstoy

  Interrogating the Real, Slavoj Žižek

  Some titles are not available in North America.

  Frontispiece Original cover of Neither Man nor Beast.

  In memory of my parents

  Muriel Kathryn Stang Adams

  and Lee Towne Adams

  gifted teachers

  of many topics, one lesson

  And then, occasionally, when [Blue, the horse] came up for apples, or I took apples to him, he looked at me. It was a look so piercing, so full of grief, a look so human, I almost laughed (I felt too sad to cry) to think there are people who do not know that animals suffer. People like me who have forgotten, and daily forget, all that animals try to tell us. “Everything you do to us will happen to you; we are your teachers, as you are ours. We are one lesson” is essentially it, I think. There are those who never once have even considered animals’ rights: those who have been taught that animals actually want to be used and abused by us, as small children “love” to be frightened, or women “love” to be mutilated and raped. ... They are the great-grandchildren of those who honestly thought, because someone taught them this: “Women can’t think,” and “niggers can’t faint.” But most disturbing of all, in Blue’s large brown eyes was a new look, more painful than the look of despair: the look of disgust with human beings, with life; the look of hatred. And it was odd what the look of hatred did. It gave him, for the first time, the look of a beast. And what that meant was that he had put up a barrier within to protect himself from further violence; all the apples in the world wouldn’t change that fact.

  And so Blue remained, a beautiful part of our landscape, very peaceful to look at from the window, white against the grass. Once a friend came to visit and said, looking out on the soothing view: “And it would have to be a white horse; the very image of freedom.” And I thought, yes, the animals are forced to become for us merely “images” of what they once so beautifully expressed. And we are used to drinking milk from containers showing “contented” cows, whose real lives we want to hear nothing about, eating eggs and drumsticks from “happy” hens, and munching hamburgers advertised by bulls of integrity who seem to command their fate.

  As we talked of freedom and justice one day for all, we sat down to steaks. I am eating misery, I thought, as I took the first bite. And spit it out.

  —Alice Walker, “Am I Blue?” 1986

  Neither Man nor Beast

  Feminism and the Defense of Animals

  Carol J. Adams

  Bloomsbury Academic

  An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Contents

  Illustrations

  Preface to the Bloomsbury Revelations Edition

  Preface

  Acknowledgments for the Bloomsbury Revelations Edition

  Part One Examining the Arrogant Eye

  1 Eating Animals

  2 The Arrogant Eye and Animal Experimentation

  3 Abortion Rights and Animal Rights

  4 On Beastliness and a Politics of Solidarity

  Part Two “We Are One Lesson”: Transforming Feminist Theory

  5 Ecofeminism and the Eating of Animals

  6 The Feminist Traffic in Animals

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

  Part Three From Misery to Grace

  8 Bringing Peace Home: a Feminist Philosophical Perspective on the Abuse of Women, Children, and Pet Animals

  9 Feeding on Grace: Institutional Violence, Feminist Ethics, and Vegetarianism

  10 Beastly Theology: When Epistemology Creates Ontology

  Coda

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  Index

  Illustrations

  Frontispiece Original cover of Neither Man nor Beast.

  1

  Greek Moothology, California, March 2016, photograph by Mark Hawthorne.

  2

  Rosie the Riveter, Normandy, France, May 2016, photograph by Camille Brunel.

  3

  Chalk sign, Sydney, Australia, March 2017, photograph by Laura Carey.

  4

  Yard ‘n Coop, Manchester, England, October 2016, photograph by Faridah Newman.

  5

  Tobermory, Scotland, August 2016, photograph by Carol J. Adams.

  6

  Turkey hooker.

  7

  Outside Scarborough, England, September 2016, photograph by Carol J. Adams.

  8

  Monkey and human embryos.

  9

  slink by lynn mowson, photograph by Carol J. Adams, February 2017.

  10

  Sunaura Taylor, Self-Portrait as Butcher Chart, oil paint on photocopy on paper, 11” x 9”, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.

  11

  Sunaura Taylor, Self-Portrait Marching with Chickens, oil on wood, 12” x 12”, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

  12

  Reproduced from Deconstructing Elsie (limited edition, 2014), Nava Atlas.

  13

  Reproduced from Deconstructing Elsie (limited edition, 2014), Nava Atlas.

  14

  “The Hardest Part is Getting In,” veterinary school T-shirt, early 1990s.

  15

  Duck Lake by Yvette Watt, photograph by Michelle Powell.

  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

  17

  Vestiges by Susan kae Grant

  18

  Vestiges by Susan kae Grant.

  19

  Carol J. Adams from Warriors series, 2017, Kyle Tafoya, illustrator.

  20

  Amanda Houdeschell at the Women’s March, Cleveland, January 2017.

  Figure 1 Greek Moothology, California, March 2016, photograph by Mark Hawthorne.

  Preface to the Bloomsbury Revelations Edition

  At a time when certain patriarchal values are making a comeback, as they invariably do during periods of conflict and stress, women must be staunch in refusing their time-honored role as victims, or mere supporters, of men. It is time to rethink the bases of our position and strengthen them for the fight a
head. As a feminist, I fear this moment’s overt reversion to the most blatant forms of patriarchy, a great moment for so-called real men to assert their sinister dominance over “others”—women, gays, the artistic or the sensitive—the return of the barely repressed.

  Linda Nochlin, “ ‘Why Have There Been No Great

  Women Artists?’ Thirty Years After” (2006)

  A California billboard advertisement for a Greek yogurt product called Clover appeared in 2016. It depicts a hoofed cow standing on a shell, with flowing reddish-auburn hair covering her genital area. Waves of milk lap against Clover yogurt containers positioned on either side of the cow. “Greek Moothology,” the billboard announces. The advertisement recalls Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (the archetypal image of Western female beauty) except that Botticelli’s Venus has breasts; the bovine has none. No mammary glands, breasts, udders—nothing conveys the very reproductive organ from which the advertised yogurt is derived. While the cow’s function is thus rendered absent, what is made present is a hybrid femaleness. She is a new example of the image on the original publication of this book; she, too, is neither man nor beast. As the Bloomsbury Revelations cover reminds us, she—and her days—are numbered.

  I am honored that Neither Man nor Beast has been selected to enter Bloomsbury’s Revelations series. It is sobering to re-encounter one’s work of almost a quarter of a century earlier. Rereading the essays that make up the book, I register the optimism and energy that were their sources. Elsewhere I have said it is difficult to argue with a culture’s mythology, and yet that is what I do here. With each topic I engage, I try to disentangle the body-denying, racist, hierarchical, patriarchal perspectives, and offer instead a non-species specific theory of liberation.

  Because this book, like The Sexual Politics of Meat constitutes a part of the history of feminist and animal activism encountering each other, I wish to describe how some of the essays came into being. I believe their history is important because each of us is an embodied being with our own stories. Our task is to record those stories and leave to future historians the work of telling the further story of how our individual experiences interweave.

  The Mothers Who Disappeared

  Greek mythology, like patriarchal history, often causes the mother to disappear, as with Athena, born from the head of Zeus after he swallowed Metis. Venus is said to have sprung from no woman’s womb but from the heavens themselves. Pregnancy and delivery are painful, demanding, and messy biological processes. Better to think of goddesses who simply appear from the sea (the primordial female water, the uterine water) or the father’s head. When one rises from the sea, one doesn’t have a past, or a biography. A cow’s milk production is prompted by pregnancy and delivery, but any calf who drinks the mother’s milk prevents the product from reaching the market. Thus, milk must be reconceptualized as a relationship between the cow and those who drink the milk taken from her, or between milk and milk-drinkers. In the original image from the Second World War that inspired Figure 2, Rosie the Riveter announced “We Can Do It.” Her noun and verb referred to the collective work efforts of women. With the “You Can Drink It” postcard, the cow’s work at producing milk disappears, and the relationship is between the consumer and the product. As is usual with patriarchal efforts at commodifying women’s work, the power of Rosie the Riveter the worker becomes instead a front for female reproductive exploitation.

  A patriarchal culture is obsessed with fathers. In the story of culture, fathers are revered; mothers often ignored. This is true for the animal rights movement as well. The way our story is told is that Peter Singer is the father of the animal liberation movement; if not Peter, then the late Tom Regan is assigned the title. The work of both Tom and Peter is important for the movement, though along with other feminists I have challenged the focus on the autonomous individual and the disowning of emotions that undergirds liberation and rights theory. (See The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics [Donovan and Adams].)

  The publication of Ruth Harrison’s 1964 Animal Machines described the new (factory) industrial farming of animals. Her book could have joined Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in shaping the perspective of environmental activists, in Harrison’s case to include industrial agriculture. Some expected her book would influence the nascent environmental movement. Sadly, they were wrong.

  Figure 2 Rosie the Riveter, Normandy, France, May 2016, photograph by Camille Brunel.

  In October 1965, novelist Brigid Brophy’s “The Rights of Animals” appeared in The Sunday (London) Times. Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation arose from a book review of the 1971 anthology Animals, Men and Morals: An Inquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans (edited by Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch and John Harris). Their book’s initial inspiration was Brophy’s essay. Thus Singer’s book is the grandson of Brophy’s article. By dating the modern animal movement from Singer’s 1975 book, women (Harrison and Brophy among others) are lost to view.

  If we trace the animal liberation movement only as far back as Singer’s book, what is lost is not just the women’s voices but also the role of feminism and specifically ecofeminism in creating intersectional theory that recognizes connections among oppression. (Lori Gruen and I provide an alternative history in the chapter “Groundwork” in Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth.)

  During 1975 and 1976, I interviewed more than forty feminists who were also vegetarians about the reasons they had adopted a vegetarian diet. Many of them articulated an ecofeminist perspective that located animals within their analysis. None of them had encountered Singer’s writings. (See Chapter 5.) But the animal movement, like the patriarchal world in which it exists, lifts up fathers (whether Singer or Regan) and disowns its mothers, those little old ladies in sneakers that male activists continually assert the movement has superseded. In 2008, Wayne Pacelle, head of the Humane Society of the United States, told the New York Times Magazine: “ ‘We aren’t a bunch of little old ladies in tennis shoes,’ Pacelle says, paraphrasing his mentor Cleveland Amory, an animal rights activist. ‘We have cleats on.’ ” (Jones). I concluded Neither Man nor Beast with a “Coda” that offers a meditation on little old ladies in tennis shoes, never anticipating that into the twenty-first century this stereotype would still haunt the men leaders of the movement, who seem always to be searching for new metaphors to recuperate a dominant masculinity.

  If Singer is not claimed as “father,” then, in the new postmodern, posthumanist environment, it is Derrida. In “Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals: Tracking Gender in Animal Studies,” Susan Fraiman challenges the way that feminist writers have been eclipsed in the presentation of the history of animal studies by looking at the way Cary Wolfe elides work such as mine in favor of the writings of Derrida:

  The substitution of Derrida for Adams, poststructuralism for ecofeminism is a move shaping Animal Rites as a whole and that, in general, subtends Wolfe’s posthumanist approach to animal studies. In fact, notwithstanding his wish to downplay liking, much of the work Wolfe does under a Derridean rubric revisits arguments previously made by ecofeminists: their interrogation of dualistic thinking; their quarrel with arguments for animal “rights” that remain steeped in liberal humanism, especially those by Singer and Regan; their claim that women and animals are categories liable to trope one another in producing the dominant category of white, human masculinity. Yet despite this continuity with Adams, Donovan, and others, Animal Rites effectively authorizes its critique of speciesism and model for contemporary animal studies by means of a revamped genealogy—one skewed to privilege Derrida and disregard the groundwork laid by ecofeminism. (Fraiman, 103)

  Early feminist and ecofeminist writers like Josephine Donovan, Lori Gruen, Marti Kheel, Greta Gaard and myself offered a way of looking with feminist insights not only into the status of animals, but into the concept of animality. While our work authorized subsequent work, in the telling of Wolfe and others, we are not cast as the “authorities.” In
subtle ways, the message is communicated that, somehow, like those little old ladies that troubled Amory and then Pacelle, there’s something off, something we missed, some power we failed to seize or theory we failed to develop in the right way.

  While regressive politics are reflected in how animal rights and animal studies history is told, equally disturbing is the status of women in the movement itself, often relegated to sex-stereotyped roles. The visible spokespeople, theoreticians, and writers were overwhelmingly white and male. The view that their contributions makes their position “too important to the movement to lose” becomes a self-fulfilling privilege. The result is that numerous women, victims of a male leader’s sexual aggression, leave the movement when they see how they are ostracized for discussing what happened to them. Meanwhile, the male leaders become only further entrenched. (See my “After McKinnon: Sexual Inequality in the Animal Movement.”)

  In the “Coda” to this book, I consider the backhanded compliment that is offered to little old ladies when the movement announces it is no longer just like them. But, almost a quarter of century after I wrote that “Coda,” I am also a quarter of a century older, and in some people’s eyes am myself akin to those little old ladies. I certainly don’t avoid the appellation, but I note that there seems to be no equivalent sobriquet for older men. They remain fathers, and what they wear on their feet is of no concern. As for the cows depicted in representations, whether Rosie or a de-breasted “Venus,” they will not know old age. Though they could live to be twenty years old or more, most cows exploited for their milk are dead by the age of four.

  Writing Neither Man nor Beast

  I have described elsewhere how it was as I walking to Harvard Square in the autumn of 1974 that the idea that become The Sexual Politics of Meat took hold (Adams, 2015, xxii). As I walked, my mind carried on a conversation about the links between feminism and vegetarianism I encountered in my life and in my courses at Harvard Divinity School and Boston College. I realized there was a connection between feminism and vegetarianism, and patriarchal ethics and meat consumption, and this began my work that culminated in my first book fifteen years later. This inner dialogue, as well as a rhythmic act (like walking), has stimulated other insights as well and contributes to the ideas in this, my second, book.