Animals and Women Feminist The Read online

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Note

  References

  Part 1 Sexism/Speciesism: Interlocking Oppressions

  Sexist Words, Speciesist Roots

  References

  Exploring the Boundaries: Feminism, Animals, and Science

  Feminism and the Human-Animal Relationship

  Animals in Science

  Asking Feminist Questions

  References

  Woman-Battering and Harm to Animals

  Woman-Battering

  Forms of Battering

  How Do Batterers Harm Animals? Anecdotal Evidence

  Psychological Battering in the Wake of Harm to Animals

  Forced Sex with Animals

  Animals and Batterers’ Strategies for Control

  Control Strategies and Harm to Animals

  Harm to Animals, Woman-Battering, and Feminist Theory

  References

  License to Kill: An Ecofeminist Critique of Hunters’ Discourse

  Introduction

  Common Themes—The Hunting-Sex Connection

  The Ethical Discourse of Hunters

  The Hunt for Masculine Self-Identity

  Conclusion

  References

  Speech, Pornography, and Hunting

  Introduction

  Pornography and Hunting

  Sexual Harassment and Hunter Harassment

  Rape and Hunting

  Conclusion

  References

  Abortion and Animal Rights: Are They Comparable Issues?

  Sentience, Animal Welfare, and Animal Rights

  The Problems of the Prevailing Theories and the Politics of Abortion

  Conclusion

  References

  Part 2 Alternative Stories

  Beyond Just-So Stories: Narrative, Animals, and Ethics

  Introduction

  Ethics Constructs the Animal

  Ethical Narratives

  Epilogue: Can This Narrative Be Saved?

  References

  Thinking Like a Chicken: Farm Animals and the Feminine Connection

  Prologue

  Clucking Like a Mountain

  Epilogue

  Notes

  References

  Of Wolves and Women

  The Ethic of Care Respect

  Care Respect for What Is Different

  Whose Wolf Is This Anyway?

  Reinventing the Wolf

  Notes

  References

  The Power of Otherness: Animals in Women’s Fiction

  Contextualizing the Problem

  Victims

  Identity

  Community

  Conclusion

  References

  Birds Don’t Sing in Greek: Virginia Woolf and “The Plumage Bill”

  References

  Appendix: “The Plumage Bill” by Virginia Woolf

  Taming Ourselves or Going Feral? Toward a Nonpatriarchal Metaethic of Animal Liberation

  Patriarchal Animal Liberation

  The Maintenance of Animal Exploitation

  Going Feral

  Notes

  References

  Speciesism, Racism, Nationalism . . . or the Power of Scientific Subjectivity

  Victimism and Protectionism

  Conservationism

  Zoology and the “Human Sciences”

  From Human Rights to Species Rights

  Speciesism, or the Constitution of Power

  Identity Politics or Cultural Biologism

  The International Zoo of Nations

  Sexism and Reproduction

  Life vs. Life

  Notes

  Bibliography of Feminist Approaches to Animal Issues

  Notes on Contributors

  Animals and Women

  Animals and Women

  Feminist Theoretical Explorations

  Edited by

  Carol J. Adams

  and

  Josephine Donovan

  Duke University Press

  Durham and London 1995

  Second printing, 1999

  © 1995 Duke University Press

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞

  Designed by Sylvia Steiner

  Typeset in Trump by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

  “ The Plumage Bill, ” excerpt from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume II: 1920 – 1924 by Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, copyright © 1978 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett.

  Published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in the U.S. and The Hogarth Press in Great Britain. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company, Chatto & Windus, and by the Estate of Virginia Woolf.

  Chapter 6, “ Abortion and Animal Rights: Are They Comparable Issues? ” copyright © Gary L. Francione

  Why do I care so much?

  Why, in order to change attitudes and actions in the labs, do I subject myself repeatedly to the personal nightmare of visiting these places . . . ?

  The answer is simple. . . . It is time to repay something of the debt I owe the chimpanzees.

  — Jane Goodall (1993)

  A third approach (one that is very widespread) asserts that feminist theory has nothing to do with animals. It may make this assertion implicitly, by failing to engage directly with any issues concerning animals. The premise here is that silence about oppression has no theoretical implications — that is, that silence can be value neutral. But in reality there is no neutral place from which to observe evil. To observe in silence is to be complicit. Thus we have two choices before the evil of animal abuse: either we participate in their oppression or we challenge it.

  Sometimes advocates of this approach explicitly oppose the idea that there should or can be a feminist perspective on animals ’ oppression. Thus, in periodicals as diverse as Signs, Women ’ s Review of Books, and Fur Age Weekly, we can encounter explicit feminist rejections of feminist theorizing about animals. Moreover, some feminists complain that feminist attention to issues involving animals diverts women from attention to the pressing human needs of violence against women, homelessness, and health crises such as AIDS and breast cancer. We are asked: How can we justify such diversions? How can we devote our attention to animals when there is so much human suffering?

  We cannot allow the biases of such questions to go unchallenged. The presumption that these efforts are opposed to each other arises from the dualistic premise that humans ’ and animals ’ needs are in conflict. It also implies that human needs are paramount, reinforcing a status hierarchy that has favored neither women nor other animals. It is a haunting repetition of the traditional trivializing of women ’ s issues. We could respond by saying that these efforts are not in opposition to one another. That is, we can, for instance, challenge homelessness and be vegetarian, work against violence against women while refusing to wear fur or leather. Should we have to justify concern for animals by indicating that human beings are not neglected? Just as feminists were charged with man-hating when we began to channel our energies and our theorizing to women ’ s needs and experiences, animal activists now stand accused of people-hating. Such charges reveal anxiety about the moral content of the activism as well as ignorance about the underlying and interconnected roots of oppression.

  We could respond that many efforts on behalf of animals will qualitatively improve humans ’ living conditions as well, which is likely to be the case. But such an argument reduces an analysis of interspecies oppression to a human-centered perspective. Yes, in term
s of reducing environmental degradation, challenging the maldistribution of food because of the squandering of food resources in the production of “ meat, ” and preventing human diseases associated with eating animals, such as heart disease and certain forms of cancer, it is true that it is in humans ’ interest to be attentive to and to challenge animal exploitation. But these responses concede to an insidious anthropocentrism while trying to dislodge it.

  It is not our goal to assimilate animals into feminist theory only to the point where it furthers women ’ s issues. This may be one consequence of the feminist theoretical explorations represented here because of the historical association of women and animals. But we wish to propose a vision that goes beyond anthropocentric theory. We believe it is important that feminist theory accede to this broader perspective for the good not just of women, but also of animals and indeed of life on earth.

  It also makes for sounder theory. In this collection, for example, Lynda Birke demonstrates how problematic it is that feminism has relied on overgeneralized and inaccurate ideas of “ animals, ” as well as “ humans, ” in rejecting biological determinism for women. Maria Comninou explains how the conjoining of animals ’ issues and women ’ s issues exposes the patriarchal biases of recent court decisions;she shows, for instance, how the term “ harassment ” is treated differently depending upon whether it is women or (predominantly male) hunters being harassed; so too, does the freedom of speech issue find different advocates depending upon whose speech is being infringed: animal rights activists or pornographers. Similarly, Carol Adams ’ s article argues for the importance for both the human and animal victims of recognizing the abuse and use of animals by men who batter, while Marian Scholtmeijer strives to unite the interests and powers of women and nonhuman animals by seeking, in works of fiction, interspecies terms of resistance to dominant ideological constructions.

  In challenging the human-biased premises of feminist theory, we challenge all human-biased theorizing, including that found in environmental theory. Articles by Linda Vance and Karen Davis expose its anthropocentrism, and indicate how this anthropocentrism is fed by sexism. Just as the imputed animality of women precluded our inclusion in the political community, so a great deal of exploitation and abuse of animals is legitimized by feminizing them. This is especially the case, as Karen Davis notes, with farm animals, and, as Marti Kheel explains, with wild animals who are sexualized in the hunt. Conversely, as Joan Dunayer argues, speciesism underlies much linguistic sexism.

  Some feminists hostile to animal rights base this hostility on a concern that animal rights offers an ideological platform for granting rights to human fetuses based on issues of sentience. Gary Francione points to a new way of looking at the abortion/animal abuse equation by comparing the context of an abused animal (home or laboratory) rather than comparing the fetus and the animal per se.

  Many women in the Western tradition have an ethical history that is rooted in culturally prescribed practices of caring. Part of this history is an active concern about animals. The great majority of activists in the nineteenth-century antivivisection and anticruelty movements were women, as today, it is estimated, 70 to 80 percent of animal rights movement adherents are women. To us this suggests a fourth approach to the question of the interconnections between women and animals, one in which women exert leadership in the animal advocacy movement out of a sense of ethical responsibility, deriving from our historical praxis of care. In the collection Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals (1996), we propose a new direction in “ animal rights ” theory, one rooted in women ’ s caring traditions.

  Several articles consider this tradition and ethical position. Diane Antonio selected Canis lupus as the subject of her inquiry about ethical caring due to the imminent extinction of wolves, whom she sees as sharing with women a peculiar history of violent mistreatment by human males. Brian Luke asserts that contrary to the assumptions of prevailing patriarchal animal rights theory, humans ’ caring connection with animals goes very deep; animal liberation, he argues, is less a matter of taming ourselves — imposing controls on naturally antisocial tendencies — and more a matter of going feral — breaking free from institutionalized constraints on our compassion.

  Virginia Woolf ’ s essay on the Plumage Bill reflects the complexities that can arise in the encounter between feminism and animal protectionism. While Woolf was herself clearly a proponent of animal welfare, the attacks on women by advocates of the Plumage Bill piqued her ire, provoking her to write her first feminist polemic, which paved the way for A Room of One ’ s Own and Three Guineas . Reginald Abbott ’ s article analyzes Woolf ’ s essay in its historical context. Her essay follows as an appendix.

  We have assembled this collection to further explorations of the theoretical connections between feminism and animal advocacy, as well as between women and animals. In the process of gathering these essays we discovered that certain areas need further research and theoretical attention. We found, for example, that ecofeminists and deep ecology theorists in general had paid little attention to domesticated animals and the evils of factory farming. One major reason for this, as Karen Davis suggests, is that farm animals are feminized and therefore trivialized in our cultural iconography. Wild animals — and the natural world in general — remain perceived as masculine, and therefore wild animals are seen as having higher status. To be concerned about chickens ’ welfare is to be concerned about the most trivial of the lowly, at least so most people (including most feminists) would maintain. Here we see an important intersection between sexism and speciesism that merits the feminist exploration Davis brings to the issue. We would like to see more feminist analysis of the status of domesticated animals.

  Introduction

  Why should feminists be concerned about the treatment of animals? Why should there be a feminist perspective on the status of animals? This collection of articles begins to answer these questions.

  It could be argued that theorizing about animals is inevitable for feminism. Historically, the ideological justification for women ’ s alleged inferiority has been made by appropriating them to animals: from Aristotle on, women ’ s bodies have been seen to intrude upon their rationality. Since rationality has been construed by most Western theorists as the defining requirement for membership in the moral community, women — along with nonwhite men and animals — were long excluded. Until the twentieth century this “ animality ” precluded women ’ s being granted the rights of public citizenship.

  At least three responses to this historical alignment of women and animals have appeared in feminist theory. The first approach is perhaps the most familiar. It argues that women are not like animals, but are distinctly human. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir contended that women need to move beyond the physical, material level of existence and to engage in masculine transcendence, thus rejecting their “ animal ” aspects. Liberal feminists have similarly conceived women ’ s liberation as requiring a denial of women ’ s “ animality ” and an affirmation of their rationality. From Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to contemporary theorists, liberal feminists have stressed that women are intellects and have rational minds — like men and unlike animals. It may be that this emphasis on severing the woman-animal identification was a necessary phase in the transformation of cultural ideology about women.

  More recently, however, some feminists have argued against rejecting the woman-nature connection. They maintain that what Rosemary Radford Ruether called “ the male ideology of transcendent dualism ” is at the root of both the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature, including animals (Ruether 1974, 195). Similarly, in Beyond Power (1985), Marilyn French saw the domination of women as a result of the Western masculine denial of the human-animal connection. “ Patriarchy, ” she argued, “ is an ideology founded on the assumption that man is distinct from the animals and superior to [them]. The reason for this superiority is man ’ s c
ontact with a higher power/knowledge called god, reason, or control. The reason for man ’ s existence is to shed all animal residue and realize his ‘ divine ’ nature, the part that seems unlike any part owned by animals — mind, spirit, or control ” (341). Feminist philosopher Elizabeth Spelman coined the term somatophobia to denote the equating of women, children, animals, and “ the natural ” with one another and with the despised body. Somatophobia refers to the hostility to the body that is a characteristic of Western philosophy and its emphasis on reason (Spelman 1982, 120, 127). Spelman explains that somatophobia, a legacy of the soul/body distinction, is often enacted in unequal relationships, such as men to women, masters to slaves, fathers to children, humans to animals (127). Feminists need to recognize somatophobia, Spelman argues, to see the context for women ’ s oppression and the relationship it has with other forms of oppression.

  The insights of Ruether, French, and Spelman suggest a second approach to the question of the historical connection between women and animals. This approach holds that feminist theory must engage itself with the status and treatment of the other animals. This position rejects a narrowly construed liberal feminism that pursues rights and opportunities only for women. Instead, it proposes a broader feminism, a radical cultural feminism, which provides an analysis of oppression and offers a vision of liberation that extends well beyond the liberal equation, incorporating within it other life-forms besides human beings. This is the approach represented in this anthology. We believe that feminism is a transformative philosophy that embraces the amelioration of life on earth for all life-forms, for all natural entities. We believe that all oppressions are interconnected: no one creature will be free until all are free — from abuse, degradation, exploitation, pollution, and commercialization. Women and animals have shared these oppressions historically, and until the mentality of domination is ended in all its forms, these afflictions will continue.

  This book is dedicated to all the nonhuman creatures who have touched our lives, in partial repayment of our debt to them.