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

by Carol J Adams

  Underlying gender categories are functioning in our representations of and treatment of the other animals, and speciesist attitudes about other species influence the treatment of women. When we recognize the sexual politics of meat we see that additional categories are needed: animalized women and feminized animals.35

  Figure 21 Sexual politics of meat grid

  Figure 22 “Filthy Cow,” a restaurant in Manchester, England, that sexualizes the exploitation of cows, who in death become burgers. An example of a feminized animal.

  Figure 23 Germany, August 2013. An example of an animalized woman. Photograph copyright © Matteo Andreozzi. Used by permission.

  Fast food burger chains like Carl’s, Burger King, and Hardees’ fall over each other in their attempt to find new ways of showing barely-clad women being objectified while eating or desiring hamburgers. Another aspect of the sexual politics of meat: the disempowerment of women is inscribed visually by depicting females in non-dominant positions, in which large burgers hang over their bodies, loom large beside their bodies, or are being stuffed into their mouths. (See Figure 23, p. 205.) The burgers dominate the visual space over or around a woman. They reveal (and enact) fantasies about women’s big mouths and what we can swallow. Women are symbolically silenced by having their mouths stuffed with flesh—that innate and originating patriarchal symbol of power over and violence.

  Figure 24 Vegan-feminist (erasable) graffiti in response to this Dutch advertisement featuring text that says, “Listen now and win tickets to go hard [crazy] at the coolest festivals.” (The phrasing is equally awkward in Dutch.) The vegan-feminist graffiti reads: “Don’t think [this] is sick? Be Feminist! Go Vegan! Read The Sexual Politics of Meat!” The photographer (and author of the graffiti) wrote to me: “Before reading it [The Sexual Politics of Meat], this ad would’ve annoyed me, but I would not have been able to point out precisely why, nor would I have seen this as a symptom of the culture I live in. Or that this kind of visual language is hurtful to everyone, no matter their gender or sex.”

  In April 2010, the “Beef” episode of the NBC series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU) aired in the US. In the days leading up to its showing, some animal advocacy groups had encouraged their members to watch it, promoting it by saying, “HSUS undercover video footage will be featured on Law & Order: SVU tomorrow night! Tune in.”36

  In this episode, the Law and Order team go to a book signing, where a woman is seen showing slides and saying, “Our society views women and animals pretty much the same . . . as cuts of meat.” She clicks and moves to the next slide. She says: “Meat eating and the patriarchal world go hand in hand” and “We can’t stop the objectification of women until we stop eating our four legged and winged brothers and sisters.”

  Law and Order SVU needed this aspect of the plot as it provided a possible sexual aspect to the woman’s death being investigated. The series focuses on the Sexual Victims Unit. But by including it, Law and Order SVU showed that a focus on flesh eating requires a discussion of sexual politics because intersectionality is always happening.

  Like me, my Law and Order fictional counterpart is saying that with the sexual politics of meat our culture is committing discursive violence that allows for a material form of violence. Like me, she wants her listeners to refuse to consume the images on their own terms but to look with resistance and recognize that images are anchored to referents, living beings, subjects, not objects, of our own lives.

  Figure 25 In Living Among Meat Eaters, I argue that nonvegans are perfectly happy eating vegan food as long as they do not know that is what they are doing. Resistance involves enjoying great vegan food so that we can step out into another day, another quarter-century of critiquing the sexual politics of meat.

  Clockwise from upper left: Kim-chi burger with avocado; pizza; scrambled tofu, hash browns, and sausages; Ethiopian veggie combo platter; club sandwiches; and paella. Photographs (and burger, pizza, and paella) by Carol J. Adams.

  NOTES

  Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition of The Sexual Politics of Meat

  1.Scott Glover, “9th Circuit’s Chief Judge Posted Sexually Explicit Matter on His Website,” Los Angeles Times (June 11, 2008). Available at http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-kozinskil2–2008junl2,0,6220192.story

  2.Abigail E. Adams, “Dyke to Dyke: Ritual Reproduction at a US Men’s Military College,” Anthropology Today 9, no. 5 (October 1993), pp. 3–6. I thank Joe Hayns for calling this to my attention.

  3.Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007), p. 49.

  4.Seth Stevenson, “Original SUVs for Hippies? Hummer courts the tofu set,” Slate (August 14, 2006). Available at http://www.slate.com/id/2147657/

  5.Since the publication of the twentieth anniversary edition of The Sexual Politics of Meat, Matthew and I have continued our conversation about Derrida’s concept of carnophallogocentrism and the ideas in The Sexual Politics of Meat. The conversation will appear as “Derrida and The Sexual Politics of Meat,” in Critical Perspectives on Meat Culture, ed. Annie Potts, as part of Brill’s Human–Animal Studies.

  Preface to the Original Edition

  1.Quoted in Dudley Giehl, Vegetarianism: A Way of Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 128.

  2.This is my interpretation of the properties of a text enumerated in Thomas A. Sebeok, “Poetics in the Lion’s Den: The Circus Act as a Text,” Modern Language Notes 86, no. 6 (December 1971), p. 845.

  3.From the Introduction by Blanche W. Cook, Clare Coss, Alice Kessler-Harris, Rosalind P. Petchesky, and Amy Swerdlow in Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. xxiv.

  4.See for instance Frances Moore Lappé’s statement: “Virtually all traditional societies based their diets on protein complementarity; they used grain and legume combinations as their main source of protein and energy.” Frances Moore Lappé, Diet for a Small Planet: Tenth Anniversary Edition (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982), p. 161. In 1965 Aaron M. Altschul reported that “the average person in the Far East eats about 50 grams of protein per day of which 39 grams are of vegetable origin whereas in Northern Europe the total eaten per day is about 95 grams of which 53 or so are of animal origin.” Aaron M. Altschul, Proteins: Their Chemistry and Politics (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1965), p. 13. Jane Brody quotes the American Dietetic Association in noting that “most of mankind for much of human history has subsided on near-vegetarian diets.” Jane Brody’s Nutrition Book (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1981), p. 438.

  See also Thelma Barer-Stein, You Eat What You Are: A Study of Canadian Ethnic Food Traditions (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979).

  Epigraphs to part 1: Robert B. Hinman and Robert B. Harris, The Story of Meat (Chicago: Swift & Co., 1939, 1942), p. 194; from The Man of Pleasure’s Pocket Book, quoted in Ronald Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality (Toronto: The Macmillan Co., 1969), p. 259.

  Chapter 1

  Epigraph: H. R. Hays, The Dangerous Sex: The Myth of Feminine Evil (New York: Pocket Books, 1964), p. 37.

  1.P. Thomas Ziegler, The Meat We Eat (Danville, IL: The Interstate Printers and Publishers, 1966), pp. 5, 1.

  2.Frank Gerrard, Meat Technology: A Practical Textbook for Student and Butcher (London: Northwood Publications, Inc., 1945, 1977), p. 348.

  3.Waverley Root and Richard de Rochemont, Eating in America: A History (New York: William Morrow, 1976), p. 279.

  4.Lisa Leghorn and Mary Roodkowsky, Who Really Starves: Women and World Hunger (New York: Friendship Press, 1977), p. 21.

  5.Lloyd Shearer, “Intelligence Report: Does Diet Determine Sex?”, summarizing the conclusions of Dr. Joseph Stolkowski, Parade 27 June 1982, p. 7.

  6.William S. Baring-Gould and Ceil Baring-Gould, The Annotated Mother Goose (New York: Bramhall House, 1962), p. 103.

  7.Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible: Part I (New York: European Publishing Co.,
1898; Seattle: Coalition Task Force on Women and Religion, 1974), p. 91.

  8.Frederick J. Simoons, Eat Not This Flesh: Food Avoidances in the Old World (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1961, 1967), p. 12. The quotation in the following paragraph is found in Simoons, p. 73.

  9.Bridget O’Laughlin, “Mediation of Contradiction: Why Mbum Women do not eat Chicken,” Woman, Cultwre, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), p. 303.

  10.Robert B. Hinman and Robert B. Harris, The Story of Meat (Chicago: Swift & Co., 1939, 1942), p. 191.

  11.Sunset Books and Sunset Magazines, Sunset Menu Cook Book (Menlo Park, CA: Lane Magazine and Book Co., 1969), pp. 139, 140.

  12.Oriental Cookery from ChunKing and Mazola Corn Oil.

  13.Edward Smith, M.D., Practical Dietary for Families, Schools and the Labouring Classes (London: Walton and Maberly, 1864), p. 199.

  14.Laura Oren, “The Welfare of Women in Laboring Families: England, 1860–1950,” Feminist Studies 1, no. 3–4 (Winter-Spring 1973), p. 110, quoting B. S. Rowntree and May Kendall, How the Labourer Lives: A Study of the Rural Labour Problem (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1913). The quotations in the following paragraph are from Oren, p. 110, quoting Rowntree and Maud Pember Reeves, Round About a Pound a Week.

  15.Maud Pember Reeves, Round About a Pound a Week (G. Bell and Sons, 1913, London: Virago Press, 1979), pp. 144 and 97.

  16.Cicely Hamilton, Marriage as a Trade (1909, London: The Women’s Press, 1981), p. 75.

  17.Todd L. Savitt, Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1978), p. 91.

  18.Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies: A Love Story (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), p. 257.

  19.George M. Beard, M. D., Sexual Neurasthenia [Nervous Exhaustion] Its Hygiene, Causes, Symptoms and Treatment with a Chapter on Diet for the Nervous (New York: E. B. Treat & Co., 1898, New York: Arno Press, 1972). This and succeeding quotations are found on pp. 272–78.

  20.Hinman and Harris, The Story of Meat, p.1.

  21.W. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

  22.Russell Baker, “Red Meat Decadence,” New York Times 3 April 1973, p. 43.

  23.Aaron M. Altschul, Proteins: Their Chemistry and Politics (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1965), p. 101.

  24.Reeves, p. 131.

  25.Helen Hunscher and Marqueta Huyck, “Nutrition,” in Consumer Problems in Wartime, ed. Kenneth Dameron (New York and London: McGraw-Hill, 1944), p. 414.

  26.Irving Fisher, “The Influence of Flesh Eating on Endurance,” Yale Medical Journal 13, no. 5 (March 1907), p. 207.

  27.Quoted in “Red Meat: American Man’s Last Symbol of Machismo,” National Observer 10 July 1976, p. 13.

  28.Marty Feldman, quoted in Rynn Berry, Jr., The Vegetarians (Brookline, MA: Autumn Press, 1979), p. 32.

  29.New York Times 15 April 1973, p. 38.

  30.She concludes, “and I wish he’d taken us with him.” Carolyn Steedman, “Landscape for a Good Woman,” in Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing Up in the Fifties, ed. Liz Heron (London: Virago Press, 1985), p. 114.

  31.Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar (San Diego, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), p. 50.

  32.Richard E. Leakey and Roger Lewin, People of the Lake: Mankind and Its Beginnings (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1978, New York: Avon Books, 1979), pp. 210–11.

  33.Peggy Sanday, Female power and male dominance: On the origins of sexual inequality (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 65, 66.

  34.Sanday, p. 39.

  35.Sandy Grady, “The Duke as Boring as Spinach,” Buffalo News 26 March 1988.

  36.From a catalog from Northern Sun Merchandising, 2916 E. Lake Street, Minneapolis, MN, 55406.

  37.From Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, para. 166, p. 263, quoted in Nancy Tuana, The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious, and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman’s Nature. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1994.

  38.Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” in Implicit meanings: Essays in anthropology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 273.

  39.Marabel Morgan, Marabel Morgan’s Handbook for Kitchen Survival: The Total Woman Cookbook (New Jersey: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1980), p. 13.

  40.Mary McCarthy, Birds of America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965, New York: New American Library, 1972), pp. 167, 180, 183.

  41.R. Emerson Dobash and Russell Dobash, Violence Against Wives: A Case Against the Patriarchy (New York: The Free Press, 1979), p. 100.

  42.Erin Pizzey, Scream Quietly or the Neighbours will Hear (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 35.

  43.James C. Whorton, “ ‘Tempest in a Flesh-Pot’: The Formulation of a Physiological Rationale for Vegetarianism,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 32, no. 2 (April 1977), p. 122.

  44.Editorial, New York Times, 17 August 1981.

  Chapter 2

  Epigraphs: John Berger, About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 5. Mary Gordon, Final Payments (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 119. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906; New York: New American Library, 1973), p. 40.

  1.The Beast: The Magazine That Bites Back 10 (Summer 1981), pp. 18–19.

  2.Heidnik was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder, six counts of kidnapping, five counts of rape, four counts of aggravated assault and one count of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse.

  3.Whereas feminist critics have examined the correspondences between the treatment by Western, scientific culture of women and nature in a generalized sense, (see, for instance, Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution [New York: Harper & Row, 1980]) and even some of the specific alliances between animals and women (as is found in Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her [New York: Harper & Row, 1978]), none has addressed explicitly the significance of the overlap in representations of women and animals who are butchered. However, feminist analysis of the metaphors for nature used by early modern scientists reveals the scientists’ sexualized view of nature and hence of animals.

  4.Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 141.

  5.I am indebted to Margaret Homans’s discussion of the absent referent in literature for this expanded explanation of the cultural function of the absent referent. See her Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 4.

  6.Kathy Barry, Female Sexual Slavery (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1979), p. 3.

  7.Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 44.

  8.Marjorie Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery 2nd Edition (New York: Mirror Books, 1989).

  9.Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981, New York: Vintage Books, 1983), p. 7. Harding’s source is Peter H. Wood’s Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina From 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974). Wood discusses the reasons that the Proprieters of the Carolina colony protested the enslavement of Indians. They did so not only because they feared “prompting hostilities with local tribes” but also because “they were anxious to protect their peaceful trade in deerskins, which provided the colony’s first source of direct revenue to England. With the opening up of this lucrative Indian trade to more people in the 1690s, the European settlers themselves became increasingly willing to curtail their limited reliance upon native American labor.” Black Majority, p. 39.

  10.Dick Gregory, The Shadow That Scares Me, ed. James R. McGraw (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1968), pp. 69–70.

  11.See Carol J. Adams, �
��Bringing Peace Home: A Feminist Philosophical Perspective on the Abuse of Women, Children, and Pet Animals,” in Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1994), pp. 144–61.

  12.See Carol J. Adams, “Woman-Battering and Harm to Animals,” in Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, ed. Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995).

  13.Susan Glaspell, A Jury of Her Peers (London: Ernest Benn, Ltd., 1927).

  14.R. Emerson Dobash and Russell Dobash, Violence Against Wives: A Case Against the Patriarchy (New York: The Free Press, Macmillan, 1979), p. 110.

  15.Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Perigee Books, 1981), p. 209; Gena Corea, The Hidden Malpractice: How American Medicine Mistreats Women (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1977, New York: Jove-Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Books, 1978), p. 129.

  16.Linda Lovelace with Mike McGrady, Ordeal (New York: Citadel Press, 1980, Berkley Books, 1981), p. 96. Note that this is one woman looking at another as “meat.”

  17.Susan Griffin, Rape: The Power of Consciousness (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 39.

  18.Ecofeminists, including Susan Griffin, discuss the matter/spirit dualism as it interacts with other major dualisms (including human/animal and male/female) that are associated with patriarchal culture. Val Plumwood, in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), provides a profound discussion of these dualisms in her chapter “Dualism: The Logic of Colonisation.” In the light of interconnected forms of violence, I extend Elizabeth Spelman’s analysis of somatophobia (or hostility to the body) to include the way animals are always equated with their bodies (matter) and are not seen as having souls (spirit). See “Bringing Peace Home,” p. 152.