The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Bloomsbury Revelations) Read online

  I asked Matthew Calarco, an expert on Continental Philosophy and animal theory, to help me think about the intersections between Derrida’s ideas and The Sexual Politics of Meat. He wrote:

  To my mind, the most obvious linkage between your work and Derrida’s work concerns the way in which being a meat eater is understood by both of you as central to being a subject. Both of you call explicit attention to the carnivorism that lies at the heart of classical notions of subjectivity, especially male subjectivity. You lay this point out at length, though, and Derrida only addresses it in a schematic and incomplete manner.

  Derrida’s term carno-phallogocentrism is an attempt to name the primary social, linguistic, and material practices that go into becoming and remaining a genuine subject within the West. He suggests that, in order to be a recognized as a full subject one must be a meat eater, a man, and an authoritative, speaking self. There are, of course, other requirements for being recognized as a full subject, but Derrida names these three requirements in succession and in close relation to one another because they are perhaps the three primary conditions of recognition.

  What was so powerful about The Sexual Politics of Meat was precisely this same, central insight. The initial pages on virility and eating meat gave such a powerful voice to the idea that meat eating is not a simple, natural phenomenon, but is irreducibly linked in our culture to masculinity along multiple material, ideological, and symbolic lines. Derrida’s work on the question of the animal throughout the 1980s and ‘90s seeks to address this connection between masculinity and carnivorism, but you were writing about it at length and developing the implications of that connection in much more detail.5

  With Derrida (and Calarco’s help) we can comprehend the problem when animal rights organizations chose to use pornographic ads to reach meat eaters: they are speaking to the male subject and assume he basically cannot change. We who object to the sexual politics of meat imagine something better. We imagine that the male subject truly can change.

  We imagine the end of the transformation of living beings into objects. We imagine the end of predatory consumption. We imagine equality.

  Here’s what we know: ideas and beliefs have consequences. They create subjects who act in certain ways—through dominance or through equality—and these actions have consequences. In coining the phrase, “the personal is the political,” feminist activists of the 1970s recognized that our culture had unmoored causes and consequences. Dominance functions best in a culture of disconnections and fragmentation. Feminism recognizes connections.

  Imagine a time when our culture no longer proves me right about the sexual politics of meat. Activists don’t just imagine that world. We work to bring the world we imagine into existence. Join us.

  PREFACE TO THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

  * * *

  “My vegetarianism had little to do with my feminism, or so I thought.” These words begin the preface to the first edition of The Sexual Politics of Meat. I wrote them in 1975 as the opening sentence for a paper in a feminist ethics class taught by Mary Daly. I used these words again in 1990 to honor the strivings of the individual I was when I began my quest for a feminist-vegetarian theory and in quiet homage to Mary Daly’s early support of my work as well as her ongoing biophilic vision. What occurred in those intervening years? That poses in an oblique way the most frequently asked question of me in the past decade: “How did you come to write The Sexual Politics of Meat?” The answer spans seventeen years of my life, and describes a long process that was both painful and exhilarating.

  Feminism challenges the gender binary. But it is also an analytic tool that helps expose the social construction of relationships between humans and the other animals. In chapter 9, I quote feminist philosopher Sandra Bartky, who observes that feminists are not aware of different things from other people; “they are aware of the same things differently. Feminist consciousness, it might be ventured, turns a ‘fact’ into a ‘contradiction.’ ” I was a feminist and a lifelong meat eater when I bit into a hamburger in 1973. Before that, consciousness raising about the political meaning of ostensibly personal acts had already been a part of my life. Inevitably the practice of consciousness raising extended to my eating habits. What prompted me to see the same thing—meat eating—differently? What changed a fact into a contradiction?

  At the end of my first year of Yale Divinity School, I returned home to Forestville, New York, the small town where I grew up. As I was unpacking I heard a furious knocking at the door. An agitated neighbor greeted me as I opened the door. “Someone has just shot your horse!” he exclaimed. Thus began my political and spiritual journey toward a feminist-vegetarian critical theory. It did not require that I travel outside this small village of my childhood—though I have; it involved running up to the back pasture behind our barn, and encountering the dead body of a pony I had loved. Those barefoot steps through the thorns and manure of an old apple orchard took me face to face with death. That evening, still distraught about my pony’s death, I bit into a hamburger and stopped in midbite. I was thinking about one dead animal yet eating another dead animal. What was the difference between this dead cow and the dead pony whom I would be burying the next day? I could summon no ethical defense for a favoritism that would exclude the cow from my concern because I had not known her. I now saw meat differently.

  Yet change was not immediate. I know how overpowering the meat-eating culture is; I continued to be a part of it for another year. I lived in a communal household in Philadelphia, and issues about food and money, and not knowing how to cook, combined to keep me a passive, and conflicted, meat eater. But I vowed that when I moved I would pick a vegetarian household. That opportunity came the following year. In moving to the Boston area, I checked the housing bulletin board at the Cambridge Women’s Center and linked up with two feminist-vegetarian apartment mates.

  It was the fall of 1974. My life was filled with feminism: a coveted class with Mary Daly, a history of women and American religion, a class on the theory of women’s history at Harvard Divinity School. For Mary Daly’s feminist ethics class I was reading Elizabeth Gould Davis’s book, The First Sex. Scholars discredit it now, but as mythopoesis, as a book that invited the rethinking of the givens of a patriarchal world, it was revelatory. I was also reading Marge Piercy’s Small Changes. I remember walking down the street toward Harvard Square thinking about Piercy’s hero, who had come to live in the Boston area too. She seemed so real that I imagined I could run into her on the street. I mused on the predicament she had been caught in—a controlling husband seeking to force her to be pregnant. Her escape, discussed in chapter 7, linked to a dead animal, brought about her abstinence from eating warm-blooded animals. My mind started thinking of vegetarianism within a feminist context: Gould Davis’s claim that a vegetarian matriarchy was overthrown by an animal-eating patriarchy; numerous nineteenth-century feminists who were vegetarian; other novels like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. My own intuitive sense of connection hummed deep within, not yet articulated. Like the three cherries that click into place in a slot machine, these vegetarian-feminist references suddenly did the same. There was a connection! I quickened my pace, and began to see all the scattered references I had been encountering as part of a larger whole.

  I was fortunate to be in Cambridge. Mary Daly allowed me to pursue the issue as a paper for her class and the women at New Words, a feminist bookstore, suggested other books that contained pertinent references. In the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, I encountered the manuscripts of Agnes Ryan, an early twentieth-century feminist-vegetarian. The women in the Harvard metahistory class listened to my presentation and offered other associations. References spiraled into connections; connections curved toward a theory. I interviewed over 40 feminists in the Boston-Cambridge community who were vegetarian. The women at Amazon Quarterly, an early lesbian-feminist journal, accepted for publication my paper for Mary Daly’s class and it appeared in 1975 in the anthology T
he Lesbian Reader.

  By 1976, I knew there was a connection; many feminists were responding with energy (both positive and negative) to my ideas. A small press had offered to publish my ideas as a book if I expanded my paper. The Oedible Complex was coming into being as a book. (Indeed the Boston Women’s Health Collective carried a reference to that book through several editions of Our Bodies, Ourselves.) But something bothered me. I felt that I would have only one chance to claim a connection between feminism and vegetarianism, and my 1976 book did not feel ready. It wasn’t “cooked.” How exactly did I explain the connections? What was my theory? The intellectual quandary was not the only brake being applied to my early efforts at writing this book. I had also experienced some negative repercussions for my work, and I felt exposed and vulnerable. My book was not ready, nor was I. I left the Boston area and put my book aside. Friends warned me. “But someone else might do the book. Someone might beat you to it if you abandon this”

  “I’ll have to take that chance,” I replied. “It’s not ready”

  Despite other exciting alternatives, including the offer of a fellowship to study in Australia and travel around the world, I returned to upstate New York and became involved with social activism. With my partner I started a Hotline for Battered Women, which we housed at nights in our home. I became immersed in a fair-housing battle that was raw, cruel, enervating, and heartbreaking. We started a soup kitchen and a secondhand clothing store. I wrote grant applications for the purchase and renovation of an old building to become a service center and apartments. I was appointed to Governor Cuomo’s Commission on Domestic Violence and chaired the housing committee, trying to innovate connections between housing advocates and battered women advocates. My life was filled with activism.

  Though I was busy from morning to night with meetings, phone calls, deadlines, organizing, I also harbored the desire to create this book. The desire was painful and deep; its depth provoked the pain and the ache to write. My day was filled with responding to immediate needs, marshaling resources, agitating, and educating. When was the time to write? I felt a sense of incompleteness, of failing to achieve coherence to something inchoate but vibrant. I was confused because I also felt shame; the shame of wanting to be a writer but not succeeding.

  I continued to collect citations and references. Everything I read, from mysteries to herstories, from practical books about ending battering to feminist literary criticism, contained nuggets of meaning. Yet everywhere I went I encountered disconnections—battered women’s advocates eating hamburgers while talking about peace in the home; biographies of feminists that failed to consider the vegetarianism of their subject; peace-activist potlucks with dead animals. What I harbored was a terrible burden. I felt I would implode with the blocked energy of making the connection internally and yet not finishing the book I had envisioned years earlier. I felt anger, alienation, and determination.

  So I tried to write this book. Not once, or twice, but with many false starts and numerous drafts. All through the Reagan years, I kept at it. Time off from work brought time to research and write. I had drawers full of connections—historical, literary, social. But still the theoretical that would hold it altogether eluded me.

  In 1987, I moved with my partner to the Dallas area so that he could pursue a ministry with the homeless and I could devote myself full time to writing what became The Sexual Politics of Meat and rearing our young child. On our second night on the road, we stayed in Arkansas. Reading Margaret Homans’s Bearing the Word, I discovered the concept of the absent referent in the first few pages of the book. I stopped reading; I lowered the book and held it as I contemplated this idea. The absent referent: that was what animals eaten for meat were! The next day, I realized that the absent referent was what enabled the interweaving of the oppression of women and animals.

  Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The “absent referent” is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our “meat” separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal, to keep the “moo” or “cluck” or “baa” away from the meat, to keep something from being seen as having been someone. Once the existence of meat is disconnected from the existence of an animal who was killed to become that “meat,” meat becomes unanchored by its original referent (the animal), becoming instead a free-floating image, used often to reflect women’s status as well as animals’. Animals are the absent referent in the act of meat eating; they also become the absent referent in images of women butchered, fragmented, or consumable.

  When we arrived in Dallas, I not only had the time to write but a theory that explained the connections. Earlier drafts that meandered were torn through; I uprooted material; and two years later I finished the book.

  Nearly fifteen years after withdrawing my initial efforts at this book from a publisher, The Sexual Politics of Meat appeared. I was amazed at the immediate responses to it. People who read it and felt confirmed by it began to send me evidence of the connections. I have a veritable museum of matchbox covers, menus, advertisements, photographs of billboards, and other items that confirm the connection between the oppression of women and the oppression of animals. From these I have created a slide show on the sexual politics of meat and have traveled around the country with it.

  On the other hand, reporters and commentators who were seeking for the ultimate example of “political correctness” landed upon The Sexual Politics of Meat and trumpeted it as the academic excess of the year. I am not an academic; I am a cultural worker. Once in a while I teach one course at Perkins Theological School, but this does not an academic make. I am grateful that with this tenth anniversary edition I can establish that this book evolved from an activist. I am an activist immersed in theory, to be sure. But I am still an activist, with all the war wounds of having our house picketed by anti-abortionists; of hearing racists talk about my partner and me on the radio; of having harbored abused women, as well as the hotline itself, in our home.

  In chapter 7, I quote philosopher Mary Midgley who observes that “the symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral.” Meat eaters see themselves as “eating life.” Vegetarians see meat eaters as “eating death.” Midgley says that “there is a kind of gestalt-shift between the two positions which makes it hard to change, and hard to raise questions on the matter at all without becoming embattled.” Reaction to The Sexual Politics of Meat is influenced by which side of the gestalt shift one is on. For many who have enthusiastically embraced its thesis, it has become a touchstone for an empowering worldview and for activism. This is what has given the book that paradoxical status some have termed “an underground classic.” For others, it is the book that goes too far. The most enjoyable example of this was a long review by the British essayist and critic Auberon Waugh in the Sunday Telegraph in which he speculated that the entire book, the author, and her family, were conceived by a male academic emigre from Eastern Europe, who poses as a madwoman (me!). And I had a good laugh when critics complained that The Sexual Politics of Meat proved that the left still did not have a sense of humor. What they meant is that I did not have their kind of humor.

  In the years since 1976, I became not only the person who could write this book, but also the person who could handle the responses to this book. By the time Rush Limbaugh began talking about The Sexual Politics of Meat on his radio and television shows, I was inured to my work being an object of speculation. And when people buttonhole me demanding “What about the homeless, what about battered women?” and insist that we have to help suffering humans first, I am not thrown off by such assertive narrowing of the field of compassionate activism. I know that vegetarianism and animal activism in general can accompany social activism on behalf of disenfranchised people. I also know that this question is actually a defensive response, an attempt to deflect from an issue with which the interrogator feels uncomfortable. It is an atte
mpt to have a moral upper hand. Only meat eaters raise this issue. No homeless advocate who is a vegetarian, no battered-women’s advocate who is a vegetarian, would ever doubt that these issues can be approached in tandem. In addition, the point of The Sexual Politics of Meat is that we have to stop fragmenting activism; we cannot polarize human and animal suffering since they are interrelated.

  It is a truism that you cannot argue with a people’s mythology. Yet, this is what consciousness raising does. It argues with the mythologies we are taught to live by until suddenly we are able to see the same thing differently. At that moment a fact becomes a contradiction. The Sexual Politics of Meat represents one attempt at turning a fact into a contradiction.

  The process of viewing another as consumable, as something, is usually invisible to us. Its invisibility occurs because it corresponds to the view of the dominant culture. The process is also invisible to us because the end product of the process—the object of consumption—is available everywhere.

  The Sexual Politics of Meat means that what, or more precisely who, we eat is determined by the patriarchal politics of our culture, and that the meanings attached to meat eating include meanings clustered around virility. We live in a racist, patriarchal world in which men still have considerable power over women, both in the public sphere (employment and politics) and in the private sphere (at home, where in this country woman-battering results in the death of four women a day). What The Sexual Politics of Meat argues is that the way gender politics is structured into our world is related to how we view animals, especially animals who are consumed. Patriarchy is a gender system that is implicit in human/ animal relationships. Moreover, gender construction includes instruction about appropriate foods. Being a man in our culture is tied to identities that they either claim or disown—what “real” men do and don’t do. “Real” men don’t eat quiche. It’s not only an issue of privilege, it’s an issue of symbolism. Manhood is constructed in our culture, in part, by access to meat eating and control of other bodies.