Animals and Women Feminist The Page 5

  Schor, Saul D. 1989. Bulldogs: Breeding Instructions. Pure-Bred Dogs — American Kennel Gazette, December, 139 – 40.

  Serpell, James. 1986. In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships . Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

  The Shame of Fur [booklet]. 1988. Washington, D.C.: Humane Society of the United States.

  Simpson, J. A., and E. S. C. Weiner, eds. 1989. The Oxford English Dictionary . 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

  Singer, Peter. 1990. Animal Liberation . 2nd ed. New York: New York Review of Books.

  Smith, Page, and Charles Daniel. 1975. The Chicken Book . Boston: Little, Brown.

  Spender, Dale. 1985. Man Made Language . 2nd ed. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

  Thomas, Keith. 1983. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500 – 1800 . London: Allen Lane.

  Todasco, Ruth, ed. 1973. An Intelligent Woman ’ s Guide to Dirty Words: English Words and Phrases Reflecting Sexist Attitudes toward Women in Patriarchal Society, Arranged According to Usage and Idea . Chicago: Loop Center YWCA.

  U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment. 1986. Alternatives to Animal Use in Research, Testing, and Education . Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

  U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1993. 1991 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation . Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

  Van Voorhees, David A., John F. Witzig, Maury F. Osborn, Mark C. Holliday, and Ronald J. Essig. 1992. Marine Recreational Fishery Statistics Survey, Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, 1990 – 1991 . Silver Spring, Md.: National Marine Fisheries Service, U.S. Department of Commerce.

  Wolfensohn, Simon. 1981. The Things We Do to Dogs. New Scientist, 14 May, 404 – 7.

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  Lynda Birke

  Exploring the Boundaries: Feminism, Animals, and Science

  My concern in this essay is twofold. First, I want to explore how feminism — as a movement dedicated to social change — either has ignored issues to do with animals or has itself relied on particular ideas of “ animals ” (and of “ humans ” ) that might be challenged. Secondly, I want to do this in relationship to the rapidly burgeoning literature on feminism and science; despite the fact that large areas of the natural sciences are about animals, this literature has barely considered them. One reason for this, Barbara Noske has suggested, is that contemporary feminism is only superficially critical of science: it takes at face value at least some of science ’ s premises about human relationships to nature. In particular, she says “ feminists have uncritically embraced the subject-object division between humans and animals, an attitude inherited from Western scientific tradition as a whole. . . . Objectifying portrayals of animals continue to be accepted as true ” (1989, 114).

  Exploring connections between two areas of thought — in this case, feminism and how we perceive animals — could take us in many different directions. Here, my primary concern is to look at these connections in relation to science. I begin by considering one area that is of considerable importance to feminist thinking — the rejection of biological determinism/essentialism — and note how this depends upon making particular assumptions about animals. This is both an issue of general concern to feminism and one of specific concern in that it raises questions for feminist analyses of science. The second part of this essay focuses more specifically on animals and their place in science, in terms of how they are used in the laboratory, for example, or observed in the wild — as well as how scientists write about them.

  But first a note on writing about these issues and personal politics. It is no longer enough in feminism to talk simply and naively about “ women ” as women. My own experience is not only as a woman, but is also situated in my experiences of being white, of being middle-class, of growing up in postwar London, of being a lesbian. Each of those categories has its own political and ethical frameworks, and has shaped my experience. Sometimes these overlap — they are, after all, embedded in the same structures of power and domination. Sometimes, they do not (as a lesbian, for example, I am part of an oppressed minority; as white/middle-class, I am part of the dominant culture). The issues are complex and are often located simultaneously in different ethical and political spaces. So too are many of the issues concerning animals. I ’ m vegetarian, because I choose not to eat animals; yet I have done things “ in the dominant culture ” that some people feel exploit animals (like working in science). Although I write about the issues in largely academic style (that is my training), these kinds of contradictions, the different ethical spaces, will inevitably weave in and out of my thinking, both as a feminist and as someone concerned about animals.

  Feminism and the Human-Animal Relationship

  To what extent do these things matter to feminism? One response to exploring issues relating to feminism and animals (and science) is “ What has that got to do with women? ” One of the strengths of feminist thought is that it is never “ just ” about women: it is a critical discourse that tends to ask uncomfortable questions about everything. To ask questions about how our theorizing relates to what we understand of the natural world is as much a part of our remit as anything else.

  Feminists have certainly made some links between their concerns and concerns around animals; in the nineteenth century, this took the form of feminist involvement in antivivisectionist campaigns (Elston 1987). For these feminists, there were clear parallels in the ways that women and animals were treated by science. Today, the links have been made mainly in relation to a broader environmentalist politics (e.g., Benney 1983; Slicer 1991).

  In feminist critiques of science, analysis of issues to do with animals has been patchy. Field studies of animals, particularly primates, have been the focus of Donna Haraway ’ s work for many years (1979 – 1989); in that, she has traced the ways in which the narratives of primatology have been located in wider politics around race and gender (Haraway 1989a).

  The tension between discontinuity and continuity in our writing may, of course, reflect different positions within feminism, but it may also indicate an ambivalence that Ritvo (1991) has noted in the wider culture. She refers to evidence suggesting that “ when people are not trying to deny that humans and animals belong to the same moral and intellectual continuum, they automatically assume that they do ” (70). That assumption, she points out, permeates many scientific studies of animals in the late twentieth century as much as it does popular culture.

  Outside her work, however, feminist literature on science has paid little heed to animals — including the animals within laboratory research. Despite the emphasis in feminist critiques on the ideological power of science, we have paid insufficient attention to the structures of power that enable scientists to justify the way animals are treated. To give one example, in a discussion of feminist method, Sandra Harding notes the sexist bias of science in the way that scientists typically ignore females: “ it is a problem that biologists prescribe that cosmetics be tested only on male rats on the grounds that the estrous cycle unduly complicates experiments on female rats ” (1989, 18). That is indeed a problem: but so is the assumption that rats should be used to test cosmetics at all.

  The “ animal question ” does, however, raise several questions for feminist critiques of science. Feminists have criticized particularly the content of science, for example, in critiques of biological determinism (e.g., Hubbard 1990; Fausto-Sterling 1985). Yet that content is founded upon the use of animals by science, for how else has the knowledge about, say, hormones or brain function been acquired except through the use of animals? Other critics have emphasized the process and practice of science (e.g., Longino 1989); within at least some parts of the biological sciences, learning to do experiments on animals is the practice. And the science that we criticize (and make use of, in relation to women ’ s health issues, for instance) is built up on knowledge gained from experiments on animals.

  Perhaps one reason why feminis
ts have not been quick to debate the ethics of animal use in science has to do with our unease about talking about animal issues at all. There is an emerging social and political concern about animals, as there is about the environment; yet feminism seems almost to have ignored the former. Not seeing it as relevant may, it seems to me, come from two related sources: first, there is the danger of women being seen as “ closer ” to animals or nature once we have tried to connect feminist politics to any concerned with animal issues. And to be “ closer to animals ” in our culture is to be denigrated.

  Secondly, the denigration follows from the way the dominant culture defines the human (or male) self against others — including nature. Whatever is other in these definitions becomes less valued. Such separation of nonhuman animals from ourselves (either humans generally or women specifically) derives from the humanist/rationalist traditions of the Enlightenment, in which the human world is sharply divided off from the nonhuman, and “ lacks essential connections to them ” (Plumwood 1991, 19). To some extent, Western feminism has bought into this separation, and it is only recently that feminist theorizing has begun to question that tradition seriously (in, for example, writing about ecofeminism). 1

  Where feminist writing has addressed issues to do with animals, it has tended to adopt a “ commonsense ” view of them. This is what Lynch (1988) called the “ naturalistic ” animal — the image we associate with wild animals, or perhaps with certain kinds of domesticated ones: it is a familiar, everyday kind of image of an animal (and different from at least some of the images of “ animal ” that are implicit in science, as I indicate below). There is something of a paradox here: on the one hand, much feminist writing relies on the assumption that humans are separate from other animals (a belief in evolutionary discontinuity). That is, embedded in feminist writing is the notion that our critical questions are bounded firmly by what is essentially human: nonhuman species do not enter our theoretical frameworks. On the other hand, a position of continuity, of similarity to other animals, is evident in other feminist writings — in ecofeminism, for instance, or in some feminist fiction that stresses the links between women and animals (e.g., Corrigan and Hoppe 1990, Zahava 1988).

  The place of animals in science is largely as objects of inquiry. But there are several ways in which animals fulfill that role. First, they may serve the function of being thought of as a mirror to human society, particularly those species that are closest to humanity. Not only does this role depend upon interpretations of animal societies that are deeply embedded in particular assumptions about human behavior, but it also depends upon seeing animal societies as somehow “ out there, ” independent of human culture. Yet, as Donna Haraway has noted of Western studies of African primates, “ baboons and people had coexisted and interacted on large areas of the African continent throughout hominid evolutionary history ” (1989b, 297). Primatology is “ politics by other means ” ; it is deeply imbued with the politics of gender, class, and race (also see Haraway 1989a).

  One reason why feminist theorizing has paid little heed to “ the animal question ” is our resistance to seeing humans as animals. Partly, feminist resistance has to do with a refusal to be reduced to the level of the “ beast within, ” the “ animal ” or dark side of ourselves. For feminists, it has seemed necessary to repudiate any connections between women and nature, to see them as regressive: women are fully human, feminists have rightly insisted, and to be human means to be preeminent over animals (see Plumwood 1990). To be aligned with nature (either “ out there ” or as nature within) is to be diminished, to lose free will; not surprisingly, feminists have resisted this move (Birke 1991a, 1994).

  Partly, too, setting humans apart from other animals has been implicitly part of our opposition to biological determinism. In doing so, we have objected to the ways in which biologically determinist arguments have been used to justify women ’ s oppression; we have also emphasized the myriad ways in which gender can be seen to be socially and culturally constructed.

  Yet this emphasis on social construction has its drawbacks. For example, it has left little space for bodies and their functions: it is almost as if our bodies were not part of our selves. Instead, the body becomes “ a blank page for social inscriptions including those of biological discourse ” (Haraway 1991, 197). Emphasizing social construction has also cut us off from the rest of the animal kingdom, thus reinforcing the view that humans are not animals. In criticizing biological determinism, feminists have objected to the idea that human behavior and capabilities are the product of some underlying biological urge. We have also objected to the ready extrapolation from animals to humans, which is characteristic of so much biological determinism.

  In these objections, however, the behavior of animals is not seen as problematic. Thus, we might object to the notion that human gender differences are determined uniquely by hormonal effects on the brain, or to the idea that there exists a “ homosexual brain. ” But there is usually much less objection to such ideas being applied to other species.

  The behavior of all nonhuman species, by contrast, is relegated to the catch-all category of biology. So, everything about animals — including their behavior — is biological, while for humans it is only our physiology that might be so labeled (that is, feminists are unlikely to object to the idea that ovarian hormones bring about changes in the lining of the uterus, but are highly critical of any suggestion that such hormones might have anything to do with brains or behavior).

  Feminist beliefs about our gender-specific behavior, then, rest on a belief in evolutionary discontinuity — that humans are fundamentally different from other species. In doing so, they make certain assumptions about what constitutes “ the biological. ” I want to examine two consequences of these assumptions. One is that the human/animal distinction rests on a notion of “ animal nature ” that is overgeneralizing and often untenable; the second is that if determinism is a problem for how we interpret our own behavior, then surely it should also raise questions for how we interpret the behavior of other species. It matters, I would argue, that some scientists talk blithely of creating, for example, a “ homosexual rat ” (Dorner 1976; for critiques, see Birke 1982, Fausto-Sterling 1993); and it matters both because that talk feeds into determinist ideas applied to ourselves and because it is crudely simplistic about the behavior of animals. Whether we like it or not, there is a reciprocal relationship between the two knowledges, of humans and of animals — each structures the other, and does so within particular political frameworks.

  Culturally, we have made much of separating ourselves from “ other animals. ” As the influence of organized religion began to wane in the early modern period, so theological explanations of our relationship to other animals lost their power (Thomas 1983). One response to this shift was to seek to define “ human uniqueness ” ever more closely, to emphasize our special characteristics — language, tool use, cognitive skills. The boundaries shift from time to time, as each characteristic is called into question and shown to exist in some form in other species; but they still serve to demarcate, to draw the line firmly between “ humans ” and “ other animals. ” 2

  Yet whatever are these “ other animals ” ? What is the “ animal nature ” that they allegedly have? The trouble is that I cannot recognize any particular kind of animal in these pronouncements: there simply is no one animal nature against which we can compare our wonderful human achievements. Each species, including ourselves, is more or less adapted to the environment in which it finds itself: and each is different. Humans are indeed unique, but so are dogs, ostriches, and parrots, or anything else.

  What is important here is not to establish how special each species is, but to emphasize how we make use of the argument. It is not usually specific species against which we compare ourselves, but a vague notion of “ other animals. ” This serves as a rhetorical device, a generalization that serves to elevate our own status, and as a corollary to reduce that of the “ others. ” That is, w
e seek constantly to find new ways of shoring up the boundaries, and of attaching ethical significance to them. This is how we can justify using animals for our own ends in science and elsewhere. And feminists have gone along with that distinction in our emphasis on social constructionism. It seems paradoxical that at a time when feminist theory is moving beyond dualisms of gender it should do so by building analysis on yet another dichotomy: humans versus “ other ” animals.

  The tendency to universalize “ other animals ” is apparent not only in feminist theory (even if it is largely implicit there). It also, I believe, underlies the work of many of those who advocate animal rights. That is, in speaking of “ animal rights ” they seem to generalize across a great many (or all) animal species. One inevitable consequence has been that opponents will seize on the notion of granting rights to, say, a worm and poke fun at it.

  Now some generalization is necessary if there is to be any discussion of what we might mean if we are to extend notions of justice to nonhumans; this position is clearly useful to stand against trenchant beliefs in human superiority and exploitation of other animals. Yet it can be criticized for its universality. To counterpose ourselves to “ other animals ” is to universalize on both counts: which humans are we talking about? And which animals? Would we always want to grant “ rights ” to all species, or only to some in some circumstances? What kinds of behavior, capabilities, and social organizations are lumped in the category of “ other animals ” ?

  The second problem resulting from our assumption that somehow animals are nothing but biology is that their behavior is interpreted as determined, as fixed. Partly, of course, this itself depends upon the reductionist logic of science, for that is precisely how the behavior of those animals tends to be studied in the first place. If, for example, scientists observe that there are sex differences ( sic; that is what they typically are called in relation to animals) in the behavior of animals, then they are likely to assume that the origin of such differences lies internal to the animals — that they are caused by some physiological event or process.