Animals and Women Feminist The

by Carol J Adams

  The chosen focus is on women with reproductive capacity — “ the most reproductive part of the Bosnian population ” — although we know women of all ages have been sexually violated and tortured. Yet this does not seem to “ matter ” in the same way, just as the survival or death of a woman apparently does not really matter — the focus being on her function as reproducer. While to each individual woman it does indeed matter whether she is killed or escapes a camp alive, it apparently does not matter to “ us, ” we who define the problem and assess the damage. The damage we focus on is the damage to the reproductive future of the people; for even if the women return from the camps alive, if their reproductive capacity or willingness has been destroyed, they are apparently as good as dead as far as their people is concerned (or as far as we, as that people ’ s assessors, are concerned). Women surviving, Bosnian Muslim women continuing to live, are not apparently part of the Bosnian Muslim people surviving, they are a loss to that people, a loss to its future reproduction as a people. They do not seem to have lives worth living in their own right, but only as the reproductive members of their own “ species. ” Individual women count as being alive only if they reproduce, just as their destruction — that is, the impact of the violence against them — is measured not in terms of its consequences for them, but in terms of its contribution to the destruction of their ethnic community. If the women live without fulfilling their reproductive function, they are part of “ their ” people ’ s threatening extinction — “ it is part of the genocide of the Moslem people. ”

  Sexism and Reproduction

  Sexism — the construction of the female sex on the basis of its reproductive function — is the sine qua non of speciesism and the zoological paradigm, including all its derivatives. Even if the category of women at particular points in history seemed to stand in competition with, say, blacks or workers as vying for a superior position on the evolutionary ladder, it never was the category of women or females, but a speciesist, racist, or classist subdivision of it. No race, class, species, or ethnicity makes any sense without its “ own ” constituency of females guaranteeing the group ’ s reproduction. Sexism is so central to zoology as to have become truly “ naturalized ” or biologized.

  Feminism has challenged this zoological definition of women, at least on the level of human society. We need to challenge it on every level, including the level of animal species definition. From the practice of breeding through to the protection of endangered species, the reproductive use of females is central and axiomatic. We have seen both breeding and “ species protection ” seamlessly being applied to plants, animals, and “ human species ” — by a master race of humans, of scientific classifiers, technologists, legislators, politicians. If more “ kinds ” of humans and specifically some women in the West have been allowed to join the master race, this does not mean the dissolution of the zoologist paradigm or the sexism at its center. It is the very point of speciesism — what we might also call scientific subjectivity — to exempt the subject of all the determinants it applies to its object categories and to emerge as the polymorphous norm from which all else is defined as other.

  Thus many Western intellectuals today support or assess nationalist endeavors the world over (while regarding the legitimacy of their own nations and nationalities as beyond doubt or question), using the same arguments as do governments shoring up for war and international institutions pretending to mediate. Westerners see themselves, if not personally as the directors of the international zoo, at least as part of the scientific community of zoologists acting as umpires between rivaling claims, granting recognition to new nations here or there, not granting it somewhere else, but never questioning the logic of the zoo. Western feminists can be heard musing along with the General Secretary of the United Nations or the President of the United States about whether to launch an international military intervention to “ end the rapes of Bosnian women ” or whether the Bosnian Muslims should after all be allowed to arm themselves. 33 Ethnic species of Croats, Serbs, or Bosnian Muslims are being constructed by the now-familiar scientific means, the selective use of “ relevant ” features which construct people living today not only as the same among themselves but as the same as their historical antecedents.

  Women and their reproductive function are the necessary factor constructing a plurality of individuals as the singularity of a collective entity. Thus one feminist from Zagreb protesting against the rape of women in the war in Bosnia highlights women ’ s reproductive function:

  These are young girls and young women who are being held in the rape camps, the most reproductive part of the Bosnian population. There they are being systematically destroyed. Even if they escape alive, you don ’ t seriously think that they will ever have normal relationships. It is part of the genocide of the Bosnian people. 34

  Hence it is the reproductive consequences of rape that also weigh particularly severely in the eyes of the onlooking experts, namely “ the forcible impregnation of non-Serbian women. ” 35 “ The purpose is to produce what Serbs regard as ‘ chetnik ’ babies to populate the ‘ Greater Serbian ’ state. ” 36 What the warring rapists think and intend obviously is also what the experts think, and what many Western women also seem to think. So, for instance, in Off Our Backs: “ The heinous genocidal rape campaign may have left her [the Bosnian woman who was raped] with the child of her aggressor; a ‘ Chetnik ’ baby she is forced to deliver. ” 37 Or as a woman journalist on German television put it in a question to the Muslim leader of the SDA party: “ What does it mean for the future also of this people? The point is that these women will now gradually give birth to children — that this people will be adulterated/decomposed [ zersetzt ]. Or how do you judge it when now these children will be born by women impregnated by Serbs? ” 38

  Thus the principal problem of rape does not seem to lie in the violence against the woman, but in the nationality of her rapist, and the nationality of the fetus with which she may have become pregnant. It implies that these women do not want these children because they are Serbian or Chetnik babies, rather than because the women are pregnant as a consequence of rape. It moreover supports a nationality principle whereby the child ’ s nationality is strictly determined by the biological father — they are “ Serbian babies, ” not children of Bosnian women. (That the child fathered by a Serbian Chetnik will also be a male child, moreover with a Chetnik political future, is even less in question than the child ’ s nationality.) It is a view that not only makes it more difficult for those women for whom it is too late to have an abortion, but also for those — however few they may be — who have decided to keep the baby, to see the child as their own child and to assert this vis- à -vis their community. As one woman testifying put it: “ This child may be a bastard, but whoever is the father, I am the mother. I will do everything within my power for this child and for my other daughter. I will make no concessions to my husband; if he doesn ’ t accept it, I will take a flat of my own and raise the children conscientiously. If need be, I ’ ll go begging in order to feed them. ” 39 Putting the emphasis on the nationality of the fetus shifts the focus from the women ’ s problems of having to deal with a pregnancy as a consequence of rape to the problem these children may constitute for their people.

  The nationalist analysis reproduces the violators ’ perspective, and indeed the perspective of most men of any nationality, as well as of the nation-state, all of whom continue to regard women as men ’ s individual and national-collective possession. The rape of women becomes an assault on the masculinity and nationality of the men “ owning ” these women, and on the state or the “ nation ” that similarly owns them. The perspective of the victims is sacrificed in favor of a “ universalistic scientific ” perspective, the subjectivity of power and dominance.

  Reproduction, the sexist instrumentalization of women as reproducers of their “ kind, ” is the pivot of all speciesism, racism, ethnicism, and nationalism — the construction of collective ent
ities at the cost of the rights and interests of individuals. This is true not only in the context of genocide and the threat of collective extinction, but equally in the context of the “ positive ” construction of nations, peoples, and ethnicities, in whose interest women are instrumentalized as reproducers and women ’ s reproductive choices are regarded not as their individual right, but as an interest of the state or the community. What was intended as a defense of women raped in war — the protesting of rape as an instrument of genocide — implicitly reaffirms the position of women as the nations ’ reproducers, whose duty is not only to reproduce but to reproduce within her own “ kind ” — a definition few women in the West would accept for themselves. The emphasis lies on the violation of the nation ’ s reproduction, rather than the violation of the women.

  Life vs. Life

  Species, nations, and ethnic communities are not just “ communities ” constituted through the self-determined choice of their individual members: they are collective entities requiring men and women (males and females) to serve that entity ’ s reproduction. Neither are they historical communities determined by their actual members; they are transhistorical entities, constructs of the mind, endowed (by that mind) with a life that supersedes the lives of their individual members. Affirming the life of the collective entity means to affirm the instrumentalization of individuals as reproducers, sacrificing their lives and their right to life in the interest of the collective entity ’ s survival. Reproduction becomes an interest on the meta-level of the collective, a positive expectation of individual members ’ reproductive activity. Reproductive choice thus ceases to be the right of individuals, their choice against reproduction becoming a threat to the species ’ survival.

  Focusing on the preservation of peoples, of species, of collective entities in the interest of maintaining for “ the world ” the rich multiplicity of life-forms is equally to advocate species ’ survival through reproduction, at the cost not only of the lives of individuals, but of the dignity of their living. This perspective is already so “ naturalized ” in the “ scientific ” Western perspective that environmentalists as well as scientists foreground the preservation of the multiplicity of life-forms and of the planet ’ s genetic pool. Hence California scientists may propose to archivize and explore the genetic information of the “ Bushmen ” of South Africa, the “ Hill People ” of New Guinea, African “ Pygmies, ” the Yanomami of the Amazon, and the Basque people of Spain before they finally become extinct. 40 The dying out of these peoples is calmly presumed, but genetics and reproductive technologies will preserve the survival of the genetic wealth of humanity. Instead of a political struggle in favor of securing living conditions for people in this world, we — the certain survivors continuing to live on this planet — invest in a scientific struggle to engineer “ their ” genetic survival — at the cost of the dignity of living people and for our own benefit after the people themselves may have died.

  In this way the focus on species survival and extinction deflects attention from the need for political action on behalf of the oppressed where their survival as a “ species ” is assured through reproduction or, indeed, breeding. The necessity for support for Croatian and all other women raped receded behind the need to protect the Bosnian Muslim people. People in the Third World may be oppressed, with thousands dying of poverty and hunger, yet the Western world ’ s political focus is not on the elimination of the causes of this oppression, but on the contrary, on controlling their reproduction. 41 Similarly, factory animals produced for human consumption, scientific experimentation, and pet keeping — who therefore are in no danger of collective extinction, human breeding ensuring their “ survival ” — do not have the support of animal conservationists to end violence against them. 42 While there is no suggested analogy between the groups of “ objects ” — people in oppressed conditions and animals in oppressed conditions — there is a similarity in the subjectivity producing that oppression, a similarity in the doing.

  “ Breeding ” is the answer of human science to the threat of extinction, with a technology developed side by side with the technology for the industrial mass destruction of people and life on the planet. The two technologies are two sides of the same intent: the engineered destruction of people, other living beings and life-forms, and the artificial “ production of life ” under the control of the superrace, the exterminators of all else. Behind the science of an “ object world ” is a scientific human subject with the desire to have complete power over that world.

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  Notes

  1. Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat (New York: Continuum, 1990).

  2. Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery (New York and London: New York University Press, 1979), 43 – 46.

  3. Ibid., 45.

  4. Laura Pitter and Alexandra Stiglmayer, "Will the World Remember? Can the Women Forget?" Ms . 3, no. 5 (March/April 1993):20.

  5. Melanie Beyer, "Interventionsstrategien und feministische Politik," in Vergewaltigung, Krieg, Nationalismus: Eine feministische Kritik, ed. Susanne Kappeler, Mira Renka, and Melanie Beyer (Munich: Frauenoffensive, 1994), 81.

  6. Nihada Kadi ć , cited in Alexandra Stiglmayer, "Die totale Degradierung der Frau zu einer Ware," Weltwoche 45, 5 November 1992, 9; also in Alexandra Stiglmayer, "Massenvergewaltigungen in Bosnien-Herzegowina," Blattgold 1 (January 1993), 3 (my translation). This became the dominant interpretation in the German media and for many women ’ s groups; see Susanne Kappeler, "Massenverrat an Frauen im ehemaligen Jugoslawien," in Vergewaltigung, Krieg, Nationalismus, ed. Susanne Kappeler et al.

  7. Helga Wullweber, "Kriegsverbrechen Vergewaltigung," in Massenvergewaltigung: Krieg gegen Frauen, ed. Alexandra Stiglmayer (Freiburg im Breisgau: Kore Verlag, 1993), 248.

  8. Ruth Seifert in an interview in the German daily taz (17 February 1993); see also Ruth Seifert, "Krieg und Vergewaltigung: Ans ä tze zu einer Analyse," in Massenvergewaltigung: Krieg gegen Frauen, ed. Alexandra Stiglmayer, 96 – 98.

  9. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973, rev., 1978).

  10. Jutta Ditfurth, Feuer in die Herzen: Pl ä doyer f ü r eine ö kologische linke Opposition (Hamburg: Carlson Verlag, 1992), 30 – 32, 62.

  11. Ibid., esp. 37 – 42.

  12. Gena Corea, The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs (London: The Women ’ s Press, 1988).

  13. Jutta Ditfurth, Feuer in die Herzen, 42 – 47.

  14. Janice Raymond, Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and The Battle Over Women ’ s Freedom (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993); Theresia Degener and Swantje K ö bsell, " Hauptsache, es ist gesund"? Weibliche Selbstbestimmung unter humangenetischer Kontrolle (Hamburg: Konkret Verlag, 1992).

  15. bell hooks, Ain ’ t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (London: Pluto Press, 1981), 90, 127.

  16. See Catharine A. MacKinnon on aperspectivity in "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 7, no. 3 (1982), 537 – 38; and Catharine A. MacKinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 97, 121.

  17. See Josephine Donovan, "Animal Rights and Feminist Theory," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 15, no. 2 (1990), 355 – 56.

  18. Ibid., 354.

  19. Theresia Degener and Swantje K ö bsell, " Hauptsache, es ist gesund"? , 21 – 22, 62 – 63; T ö dliche Ethik: Beitr ä ge gegen Eugenik und "Euthanasie," ed. Theo Bruns, Ulla Penselin, and Udo Sierck (Hamburg: Verlag Libert ä re Assoziation, 1990), passim.

  20. Thus a professor of aesthetics, Bazon Brock of the University of Wuppertal in Germany, writes: "Every fourth person in Frankfurt is a foreigner . . . I cannot see how someone from the Third World should be able to develop an interest in our architectural facades . . . You cannot teach a Persian painter here how we see our paintings. Our imagery is not intelligible to him. ” C
ited in Jutta Ditfurth, Feuer in die Herzen, 159 (my translation).

  21. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination — The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization, 1990 (London: Picador, 1993), 34.

  22. Cf. Paula Gunn Allen ’ s introduction to Spider Woman ’ s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women, ed. Paula Gunn Allen (London: The Women ’ s Press, 1990), 6, 8f. See also Paula Gunn Allen, cited in Josephine Donovan, "Animal Rights and Feminist Theory," 370.

  The claim to an exclusive national territory — apartheid on a world scale — is structurally continuous with that “ horrendous refusal to share the world with another ‘ race, ’ ” which Finkielkraut sees at the root of the crime against humanity we call genocide. 32 Nationalism today — in contrast to the history of the emergence or construction of modern nation-states — signifies both the so-called “ naturalness ” of a community (like a species) and its apparent will to self-determination on an exclusive territory of its own. The hegemony of this ideology of nationalism within the political reality of today ’ s international “ community of nations ” thus seems to oblige any oppressed community, be it a statistical minority within a nation-state or a statistical majority that is a political minority, to assert its rights and its survival by seeking to obtain the status of a nation on a territory of its own. Governments as well as individuals, whether conservative or progressive, support (select) national liberation struggles the world over, as seemingly the only means for oppressed communities below nation status of achieving freedom and rights. Not only do we thereby legitimate nationalism and the racist idea of “ pure ” nation-states, we also undermine any political resistance struggles within given societies: struggles for equality, political autonomy, and self-determination within heterogeneous communities and the understanding of community as heterogeneous.