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

by Carol J Adams

  19.Annette Kuhn remarks: “Representations are productive: photographs, far from merely reproducing a pre-existing world, constitute a highly coded discourse that, among other things, constructs whatever is in the image as object of consumption—consumption by looking, as well as often quite literally by purchase. It is no coincidence, therefore, that in many highly socially visible (and profitable) forms of photography women dominate the image. Where photography takes women as its subject matter, it also constructs ‘woman’ as a set of meanings which then enter cultural and economic circulation on their own account.” (The power of the image: Essays on representation and sexuality [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985], p. 19.) Also see Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), especially her chapter on “Suture,” pp. 194–236.

  20.William Morris, ed., The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Boston: American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc., and Houghton Mifflin Co., 1969), p. 734. The third edition corrects this and restores the absent referent.

  21.William Hazlitt, The Plain Speaker (EL, n.d.), 173, quoted in Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p. 300.

  22.Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 1 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1955), p. 46. Original reference is found in Hesiod’s Theogony, trans. Apostolos Athanassakis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), lines 886–900.

  23.From Leslie Friedman Goldstein’s The Constitutional Rights of Women: Cases in Law and Social Change (New York and London: Longman, 1979), we learn of a curious coincidence of history: the legal affirmation of the location of slaughterhouses in a distinctly separate part of a community occurred simultaneously with the denial of women’s protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1873, Bradwell v. State of Illinios, the “first women’s rights case” (p. 2), was argued before the Supreme Court. Bradwell challenged sex classification as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. (Myra Bradwell had been denied admission to the Illinois Bar because she was married.) Two weeks later, the Slaughterhouse Cases were argued, which brought a challenge by butchers to a Louisiana statute restricting the location of slaughterhouses. The statute’s purpose was “to protect the general population from the unpleasant fumes, sounds, and other disturbances associated with the slaughtering of animals by limiting those activities to a single, narrowly circumscribed area of town.” However, the statute de facto permitted a monopoly (pp. 2–3). Reversing the chronology in which the cases were heard, the Supreme Court issued its decision in the Slaughterhouse Cases first; it affirmed that zoning could limit the location of slaughterhouses. This first Fourteenth Amendment decision severely limited the potential sweep of the privileges and immunities clause. It appears to have been issued first so as to provide the legal framework that excluded women from protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, a position announced the next day in the Bradwell Case.

  24.Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers and Vivisection in Edwardian England (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1985), p. 177.

  25.Richard Selzer, “How to Build a Slaughterhouse,” Taking the World in for Repairs (New York: Morrow, 1986), p. 116.

  26.Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio: From the Thirties (New York: Dell, 1974), pp. 133–35.

  27.Plutarch, “Essay on Flesh Eating,” in The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-Eating, ed. Howard Williams (London, 1883), pp. 47–48.

  28.”Violence—as distinct from power, force, or strength—always needs implements.” Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), p. 4.

  29.Selzer, p. 120.

  30.Selzer, p. 116.

  31.Quotations in the following paragraph are from the slaughterhouse tour episode found in Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906, New York: New American Library), pp. 38–45.

  32.Sinclair, p. 311.

  33.Robert B. Downs, afterword to Sinclair, The Jungle, as cited above, p. 346. Toward the end of the novel, Sinclair does include a plug for vegetarianism when he has Dr. Schliemann state “[I]t has been proven that meat is unnecessary as a food; and meat is obviously more difficult to produce than vegetable food, less pleasant to prepare and handle, and more likely to be unclean” (p. 337).

  34.Quoted by Downs in Sinclair, p. 349. Referring to Sinclair’s offensive characterization of black laborers, Michael Brewster Folsom concludes, “Clearly Sinclair did not ‘accidentally’ hit his reader’s stomach; he aimed straight at it.” (“Upton Sinclair’s Escape from The Jungle: The Narrative Strategy and Suppressed Conclusion of America’s First Proleterian Novel,” Prospects 4 [1979], p. 261.)

  35.Bertolt Brecht, “Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties,” in Civil Liberties and the Arts: Selections “From Twice A Year, 1938–1948” ed. William Wasserstrom (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1964), p. 295.

  36.Bertolt Brecht, Saint Joan of the Stockyards, trans. Frank Jones (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1969, Second Edition, 1971).

  37.Henry Ford, My Life and Work (1922), p. 81, quoted in Allan Nevins, Ford: The Times, The Man, The Company (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954), pp. 471–72.

  38.Robert B. Hinman and Robert B. Harris, The Story of Meat (Chicago: Swift & Co., 1939, 1942), pp. 64–65.

  39.As James Barrett observes, “Historians have deprived the [meat]packers of their rightful title of mass-production pioneers, for it was not Henry Ford but Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour who developed the assembly-line technique that continues to symbolize the rationalized organization of work.” (Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago’s Packinghouse Workers, 1894–1922 [Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987], p. 20.)

  40.In “Structural Constraints on Learning: Butchers’ Apprentices,” Hannah Meara Marshall observes that being a meat-cutting apprentice can be “a boring and frustrating experience,” suggesting that this double alienation continues over from slaughterhouse to meat departments. (American Behavioral Scientist 16, no. 1 [September/October 1972], p. 35.)

  41.John Robbins, Diet for a New America (Walpole, NH: Stillpoint Publishing, 1987), p. 136.

  42.“Up to this time one skilled worker had taken a little pile of materials and assembled one flywheel-magneto complete. The average employee in this section finished thirty-five to forty magnetos in a nine-hour day, averaging about twenty minutes to each assembly. Now the assembly was divided into twenty-nine operations performed by twenty-nine men spaced along a moving belt. At once the average assembly time was cut to thirteen minutes ten seconds.” Concluding his discussion of the “moving line,” Nevins observes “Thus was mass production born—the mass production that Ford gave its classic definition as the focusing of power, accuracy, speed, continuity, and other principles upon the manufacture of a standardized commodity in great quantities.” Nevins, Ford, pp. 472, 476.

  43.Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1974), pp. 148–49.

  44.Ray Allen Billington, Land of Savagery Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1981), p. 235.

  45.Lenore E. Walker, The Battered Woman (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 120. The following quotation in this paragraph is from Walker, p. 5.

  46.Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Random House, 1969, New York: Bantam Books, 1970), p. 19.

  47.These questions were raised by Carol Barash.

  48.See Gena Corea, The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 12–13.

  49.Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872), Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 230.

  50.Marabel Morgan, “365 Ways to Fix Hamburger,” Total Joy (New Jersey: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1971), p. 113.

  51.G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New Yo
rk: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 113.

  52.Although it might be thought that animals killed according to Jewish and Islamic dietary laws are killed instantly and thus do not suffer, this assumption is wrong. Peter Singer reports: “Instead of being quickly knocked to the floor and killed almost as they hit the ground, animals being ritually slaughtered in the United States may be shackled around a rear leg, hoisted into the air, and then hung, fully conscious, upside down on the conveyor belt for between two and five minutes—and occasionally much longer if something goes wrong on the ‘killing line’—before the slaughterer makes his cut.” Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals 2nd Edition (New York: A New York Review Book, 1990), p. 154. See also, Roberta Kalechofsky, “Shechitah—The Ritual Slaughter of Animals,” which can be found at: .

  53.P. Thomas Zeigler, The Meat We Eat (Danville, IL: The Interstate Printers and Publishers, 1966), p. 10. Travers Moncure Evans and David Greene, The Meat Book (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), p.107.

  54.These descriptions accompany illustrations in Ziegler, The Meat We Eat, pp. 40–44.

  55.Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980, New York: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 75.

  56.Ronald Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality (Toronto: The Macmillan Co., 1969), p. 308.

  57.Judith R. Walkowitz, “Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence,” Feminist Studies 8, no. 3 (1982), p. 550.

  58.Quoted in Pearsall, p. 308.

  59.Quoted in Walkowitz, p. 551.

  60.Stephen Knight, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1977), p. 59.

  61.Pearsall, p. 307.

  62.Quoted in Pearsall, p. 313.

  63.Marge Piercy, “In the men’s room(s),” Circles on the Water (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1982), p. 80.

  64.Dworkin, Pornography, p. 67.

  65.Phyllis Chesler, “Men and Pornography: Why They Use It,” in Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography, ed. Laura Lederer (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc. 1980), p. 155.

  66.Dario Fo and Franca Rame, “A Woman Alone,” Female Parts: One Woman Plays, adapted by Olwen Wywark, trans. Margaret Kunzle (London: Pluto Press, 1981), pp. 15–16.

  67.Norma Benney, “All of One Flesh: The Rights of Animals,” in Reclaim the Earth: Women Speak out for Life on Earth, ed. Léonie Caldecott and Stephanie Leland (London: The Women’s Press, 1983) p. 148. Benney cites an uncredited photographic centerfold from Zig Zag no. 129 (August 1982).

  68.Phyllis Trible’s translation in Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), pp. 76–77. Trible concludes her commentary on this biblical story of violence by saying that we should “recognize the contemporaneity of the story.. . . Woman as object is still captured, betrayed, raped, tortured, murdered, dismembered, and scattered. To take to heart this ancient story, then, is to confess its present reality.” Her footnote refers to the brutal New Bedford gang rape of a woman.

  69.Judges 19:29, Trible’s translation, p. 80. Trible notes that the Hebrew verb “divide” used in this passage “is used elsewhere only for animals” (p. 90 note 51). Alice Thomas Ellis’s The Sin Eater refers to this passage. One of the female characters “was back in Judges 19 and the dreadful country of the Benjamites, wondering wholly against her will how the Levite had jointed his concubine—with what affronted, legalistic skill he had made her into twelve pieces: one each for each of the tribes of Israel.. . . People didn’t cut up naturally into twelve pieces. Eleven pieces was what people would cut up into. If the Levite had had a mind inclined to symmetry, and she was sure he had from what she knew of him, it would have annoyed him, the tiresome inability of the human body to fall into twelve even pieces.” (London: Duckworth, 1977), p. 145.

  70.Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1970), p. 292.

  71.Beverly LaBelle, “Snuff—The Ultimate in Woman-Hating,” in Lederer, Take Back the Night, pp. 273–4. In reflecting on the shower murder scene in Psycho, Kaja Silverman observes: “When the stabbing begins, there is a cinematic cut with almost every thrust of the knife. The implied equation is too striking to ignore: the cinematic machine is lethal; it too murders and dissects.”(Subject of Semiotics, p. 211.)

  72.Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans, and ed. H. M. Parshley (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1972), p. 236; Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), p. 31. Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1974), p. 63; TiGrace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey (New York: Links Books, 1974), pp. 57–63; bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: black women and feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981), p. 112. Each of these feminist critics is commenting on a different aspect of patriarchal culture, and this list does not communicate the range of theoretical assumptions upon which their ideas build. What fascinates me is that each writer gravitates to metaphors of butchering or consumption.

  73.Carol Barash suggested the phrase “butcher the metaphor” for the dependence in radical feminist theory on images of women’s (and animals’) violent dismemberment.

  Chapter 3

  Epigraph: Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), p. 8.

  1.Beverly Wildung Harrison, “Sexism and the Language of Christian Ethics,” in Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics, ed. Carol S. Robb (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), p. 29.

  2.Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York: A New York Review Book, 1975), p. 96.

  3.Dale Spender, Man Made Language (London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 145.

  4.Spender, p. 183.

  5.Reported in James Serpell, In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp.158–59.

  6.M. R. L. Sharpe, [later Freshel] The Golden Rule Cookbook: 600 Recipes for Meatless Dishes (Cambridge, MA: The University Press, 1908), p. 18.

  7.Except for the statistics on veal calves, chickens, and turkeys, all statistics are from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, “Living without Cruelty” (501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510). Animal Place News supplied the statistic of chickens and turkeys (Summer 1999 4, no. 2). These statistics provide no breakdown according to gender, race, or class.

  8.T. H., “Pythagorean Objections against Animal Food,” London Magazine (November 1825), p. 382.

  9.J. Byrnes, “Raising Pigs by the Calendar at Maplewood Farm,” Hog Farm Management, September 1976, p. 30, quoted in Jim Mason and Peter Singer, Animal Factories (New York: Crown Publishers, 1980), p. 1.

  10.Colman McCarthy, “Sins of the Flesh,” Washington Post, March 25, 1990.

  11.Paul M. Postal, “Anaphoric Islands,” in Papers from the Fifth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, April 18–19, 1969, ed. Robert I. Binnick, Alice Davison, Georgia M. Green, Jerry L. Morgan (Chicago: Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago, 1969), p. 235.

  12.Daly, p. 8.

  13.Joseph Ritson, “A new Dictionary for the Orthography, Pronunciation, and Etymology, of the English Language,” left in manuscript at his death, quoted in Bertrand H. Bronson, Joseph Ritson: Scholar-at-Arms volume 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1938), p. 136.

  14.Elsa Lanchester, Herself (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), p. 12.

  15.Quoted in Cheris Kramarae and Paula A. Treichler, A Feminist Dictionary (Boston, London and Henley: Pandora Press, 1985), p. 33.

  16.Geoffrey L. Rudd, Why Kill for Food? (Madras, India: The Indian Vegetarian Congress, 1973), p. 77; Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, p. xii; Bernard Shaw quoted in Dudley Giehl, Vegetarianism: A Way of Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 137; The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree, Ralph L. Ketcham, Helen Boatfield, and Helene Fineman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 196
4), p. 87; Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1975), p. 129. This may have been tongue-in cheek, yet as she and Percy Shelley were attempting vegetarianism at this time, Harriet reveals the attitudes that they associated with vegetarianism.

  17.These stickers are advertised in PETA News 1, no. 9 (Winter 1986).

  18.Mary Daly with Jane Caputi, Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Langauge (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), p. 257.

  19.Daly, Wickedary, p. 250.

  20.Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, 1940, trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 1956, 1970), p. 3.

  21.Mary Rayner, Garth Pig and the Ice Cream Lady (New York: Atheneum, 1977), p. 5.

  22.Richard Selzer, “How to Build a Slaughterhouse,” Taking the World in for Repairs (New York: Morrow, 1986), p. 129.

  23.André Joly, “Toward a Theory of Gender in Modern English,” in Studies in English Grammar, ed. A. Joly and T. Fraser (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1975), p. 267. The following quotations are from pp. 270, 271.

  24.Mason and Singer, p. 5.

  25.P. Thomas Ziegler, The Meat We Eat (Danville, IL: The Interstate Printers and Publishers, 1966), p. 23.

  26.A. R. Miller, Meat Hygiene (Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1951, 1958), p. 41.

  27.Maureen Duffy, “Beast for Pleasure,” in Animals, Men and Morals: An Enquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-Humans, ed. Stanley Godlovitch, Roslind Godlovitch, and John Harris (New York: Taplinger, 1972), p. 117.

  28.Paul Shepard, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), p. 172.

  29.Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1970), p. 292n.

  30.Cited in E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (London: William Heinemann, New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1906), pp. 55–56.