Because my goal has been to challenge the values of the dominant culture—and place our individual actions within this challenge—I try to maintain a macroanalysis of culture rather than a microcritique of the individual that could be potentially experienced as an attack. That is why, for instance, in chapter 6, “The Feminist Traffic in Animals,” I address the issue of what foods should be served at feminist conferences. I believe conversations about issues associated with the defense of animals can occur; I do not think they can be imposed from outside but they grow from a common base of working together on issues that arise from within the community. They must grow organically from the ground where we recognize our common commitments to justice. But white animal defenders will have to relinquish ownership over concepts such as “animals do matter” since they may be changed by different contexts.30
Our concern must be with narratives that have meaning within communities, not that are usurped to further a different agenda. The model for such discussions can be found in the recognition that identity is not additive: for instance, one is not a woman ± black ± poor. Kimberlé Crenshaw explains the failure of the additive approach this way: “Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which black women are subordinated.”31 Patricia Hill Collins argues that
Additive models of oppression are firmly rooted in the either/or dichotomous thinking of Eurocentric, masculinist thought. . . . Instead of starting with gender and then adding in other variables such as age, sexual orientation, race, social class, and religion, Black feminist thought sees these distinctive systems of oppression as being part of one overarching structure of domination. . . . The significance of seeing race, class, and gender as interlocking systems of oppression is that such an approach fosters a paradigmatic shift of thinking inclusively about other oppressions, such as age, sexual orientation, religion, and ethnicity.32
Focusing attention on how oppressions interconnect creates the space for raising the issue of animals. When we recognize that identity is not additive, we begin to concentrate on what bell hooks calls “interlocking systems of domination,” a “politic of domination.” This latter term refers both to the systems and “to the ideological ground that they share, which is a belief in domination, and belief in notions of superior and inferior, which are components of all of those systems. For me it’s like a house, they share the foundation, but the foundation is the ideological beliefs around which notions of domination are constructed.”33 Similarly, feminist theologian and biblical scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza does not identify patriarchy as male–female domination, but argues that “one must construe the term in the classical sense, specifically, as a complex pyramidal political structure of dominance and subordination, stratified by gender, race, class, religious and cultural taxonomies, and other historical formations of domination.”34
Just as identity is not additive but interlocking, so I am not interested as much in analogies between the status of oppressed humans and the status of animals as I am interested in intersections. Analogies on their own can be parasitical. But in intersectional thinking we apprehend the shared ideological beliefs that exist as the foundation of a white supremacist and speciesist patriarchy. For instance, the analysis of racism against African-Americans points both to the specific way attitudes toward animals intersect with human oppression, and grounds the rejection of the additive notion of oppression. But, as the dictionary definition of buck revealed an offensive term against both black and Native American men, just so any peoples of color may be—and have been—targets of white supremacy’s politics of domination. When racism uses an animalizing discourse against black people, it demonstrates the way supremacist ideology inscribes intersecting forms of otherness (race and species). The foundation of such ideological practices has undergirded racist treatment of other people of color as well. It is important therefore, always to keep one’s perspective on both the methodology of oppression and the configuration of the oppressor. Ecofeminism offers such an approach.
Ecofeminism and Solidarity
Ecofeminism recognizes the maldistribution of wealth and power and its relationship to the abuse of nature. Social domination and the domination of nature are interdependent. Moreover, an ecofeminist approach finds common ground with the environmental activism of people of color who have defined, exposed, and are challenging environmental racism.35 In describing ecofeminism’s focus, Karen J. Warren has identified a “logic of domination” in which differences are deemed to carry meanings of superiority and inferiority and that which is morally superior is morally justified in subordinating that which is not:
Ecofeminists insist that the sort of logic of domination used to justify the domination of humans by gender, racial, or ethnic, or class status is also used to justify the domination of nature [naturism]. Because eliminating a logic of domination is part of a feminist critique—whether a critique of patriarchy, white supremacist culture, or i mperialism—ecofeminists insist that naturism is properly viewed as an integral part of any feminist solidarity movement to end sexist oppression and the logic of domination which conceptually grounds it.36
The logic of domination undergirds the creation of the other: When others—“not-me’s”—are demarcated as “less than” or “lower” because of reified differences, we know to look for some exclusively-defined sameness constituting and empowering the domination of “me’s” through negation.
Ecofeminism does not presuppose or posit a unitary voice of women. Its theory-making and activism is global in perspective and authorship. We are not talking about a unity with other women that would erase differences among us, nor enable us to flatten the various experiences that arise from these differences.37 We are talking about solidarity against an “othering” that motivates and justifies oppression. In recognizing the interlocking systems of oppression and its othering discourse, one sees that, as Alice Walker argues, “we are one lesson.” Then our understanding of any individual experience of oppression finds its appropriate framework.
Within systems of oppression we may at times be victims, and at other times beneficiaries, of oppression, if not ourselves oppressors. Euro-Americans who defend animals must acknowledge these multiple identities and precisely how each is a beneficiary of a racist and classist system. So too must men acknowledge how they benefit from patriarchal systems of domination. Within a framework of the interlocking systems of domination, privilege and oppression co-exist. We may ourselves be oppressed by a white supremacist patriarchy and yet also benefit from the oppression of others, especially animals.
Fleshing Out the Connections
Just as there was a material basis motivating the lynchings of black businessmen, so material reasons lie behind the dehumanizing politics of racism. Desire to control (and justify control) of land and resources often motivates bestializing discourses. Furthermore, the image of beast is connected to performing manual labor. Beasts of burdens, especially mules and oxen, do mindless, heavy labor; the presumption that people of color were most capable of doing manual labor, is one aspect and result of the projection of beast upon them. As Patricia Hill Collins comments, “While the sexual and racist dimensions of being treated like an animal are important, the economic foundation underlying this treatment is critical. Animals can be economically exploited, worked, sold, killed, and consumed.”38 Precisely here—in the material production of flesh from animals who are sold, killed, and consumed—can we find the current-day enaction of the effects of a bestializing discourse that designated people of color as manual laborers.
There are approximately fifty-four-thousand nonunionized North American meatpacking workers—almost all of whom are women with a high school education or less, of black, Hispanic, or French-speaking ethnic background. Meatpacking is considered one of the ten worst jobs in the United States, it sounds especially so for women: “Per
due’s slaughterhouse workers are mostly poor women who work for approximately $5.50/hour. One North Carolina worker said, ‘Most of us treat our pets better . . . than Perdue treats its workers.’ She detailed filthy working conditions, sexual harassment and ignored or poorly treated employee injuries.”39
The flesh packing industry has become increasingly centralized. A few large corporations that are strongly antiunion have driven down industry wages and benefits. Increased technology has permitted an industry-wide speedup, and resulted in some of the most dangerous jobs in America.40 Meatpacking accounts for the second highest rate of personal injury of any occupation in America.41 According to the U.S. Department of Labor, “almost one-fourth of the workforce in the poultry industry suffers each year from industrial injuries.”42 Partly because of the frequent injuries, the annual U.S. and Canadian meatpacking plant employee turnover rate is around 60 percent, running as high as 100 percent in poultry plants. Eleanor Kennelly of the United Food and Commerical Workers Union (UFCW), observed that “A meat-packing plant is like nothing you’ve ever seen or could imagine. It’s like a vision of hell.”43 A fire in a chicken processing plant in North Carolina in 1991, resulted in the death of twenty-five workers, most of whom were poor women.
Ninety-five percent of all poultry workers are black women who face carpal tunnel syndrome and other disorders caused by repetitive motion and stress. As “lung gunners,” each hour they must scrape the insides of five thousand chickens’ cavities and pull out the recently slaughtered chickens’ lungs.44 Most workers who produce dead animals for consumption have not actively chosen these jobs: as African-American activist and writer Beverly Smith observes about the poor black women who work in chicken factories: “Their health was tremendously compromised by what they were doing, but they didn’t have control over how they were going to earn a living, or over their work lives. It’s not like they decided, ‘Well, I’ll clean toilets even though I could be a corporate lawyer’ or ‘I’ll go cut up chickens though I could go and be a college professor.’ ”45
The mass term of meat accomplishes something else besides euphemizing the process of destruction that enables corpse consumption: it conceals the fact that this process does not happen naturally. Who does the dominant culture employ to effect this destruction? Those most oppressed because of race, sex, and class are those who become the mediators, the transformers of animals into food. Here we can see the interlocking system of domination at work, as it intersects sex, class, race, and species oppression. Rosemary Ruether observes that environmental exploitation is not unmediated: “The exploitation of natural resources does not take place in an unmediated way. It takes place through the domination of the bodies of some people by other people.”46
Defending Animals: A Progressive, Antiracist Possibility
A progressive, antiracist defense of animals locates itself at the point of intersection of race, class, sex, and species. At this point of intersection, the defense of animals will not be sentimental, but rather it will be filled with sentiment. To be sentimental is to identify, in a limited and limiting way, with the victim and with innocence lost. As I indicated in the last chapter, this plays exactly into a profetal life discourse. It also enacts a controlling patriarchal response that believes in the necessity of avenging anyone under men’s protection in a way that recalls white men “avenging” white womanhood by lynching black men.
Sentiment, genuine concern, enacts feminist ethics; it understands what brought about the victimization, and does not ignore our own complex roles within the structures of social oppression. Our goal cannot be to paternalistically advocate for and avenge the “innocent,” but to think systematically about the politics of domination. Nor can we attempt to make connections by ripping experience from its history, for instance by claiming that it is a “Holocaust of animals;” this does harm to Holocaust survivors. We must locate our ethic for animals so that it does not hurt people who are oppressed.
My argument about not using animals may be heard as one of ideological purity. But it is not that. The instrumental view of animals that concerns me arises within Western developed culture, in which a discourse of otherness has been used to maintain dominance. My critique is aimed at that dominance. The Cartesian dualism of human/animal, soul/body that inscribes animals as useable is not a legacy of most native peoples. Conversations with native peoples will be different because the ontological positioning of animals in their cultures is different. It is not my goal to condemn the diet of the Inuit, nor weigh in against the fishing rights struggles of native people in North America.47 Such a stance would not represent the dialogical nature of solidarity, nor would it enact solidarity because it would continue to deflect attention from the oppressive colonial system that has betrayed relationships with native people.
Defense of animals can be embedded in progressive ecofeminist, antiracist work. I envision a rejection of the human/animal dualism as well as a rejection of a dualistic politics that implies we may be for humans or for animals but not for both. Yet, given that oppression works against humans by dehumanizing and animalizing, then attempts at creating a solidarity politics that includes animals runs the risks of appearing to continue that analogy. That is, from a humanocentric perspective of oppressed peoples who have been, if not equated with animals, treated like animals, the introduction of animals to resistance politics suggests that, once again, even in resistance, humans are being equated with animals. But again this is a result of thinking analogically, of seeing oppression as additive, rather than of comprehending the interlocking systems of domination. Patriarchy would suggest we were adding animals on, and through this suggestion keep us from seeing the politics of domination. The arrogant eye resists self-examination.
Figure 10 Sunaura Taylor, Self-Portrait as Butcher Chart, oil paint on photocopy on paper, 11” x 9”, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 11 Sunaura Taylor, Self-Portrait Marching with Chickens, oil on wood, 12” x 12”, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.
Artist’s Statement
Through painting, drawing, printmaking, writing and other forms of political and artistic engagement, my work intervenes with dominant historical narratives of disability and animal oppression. I am interested in exposing how the systems of oppression that degrade and devalue both animals and disabled people are interlocking—systems which are informed by and maintained by ableism. Ableism names a form of discrimination and oppression against disabled people and the idea of disability, but it also points to the ways concepts of ablebodiedness and ablemindedness are perpetuated and upheld, becoming naturalized and normalized in the process. As disability scholars have shown, ableism is a force that expands beyond disabled people. All bodies are subjected to the oppression of ableism. It helps form our cultural opinions and values as well as our notions of what it means to be independent, how to measure productivity and efficiency, what is normal, and even what is natural. These values not only affect disabled individuals and the able-bodied population, but they also affect the nonhuman animals with whom we share this planet, because the able body that ableism perpetuates and privileges is always not only able-bodied but human.
While much of my work examines the systemic violence of ableism and its relationship to speciesism, I am also interested in thinking about spaces of disability community and kinship across species—alliances forged through spaces of vulnerability, dependency and interdependency. In the two images reproduced here, Self-Portrait Marching With Chickens and Self-Portrait as Butcher Chart, I have painted a small caricature of myself—a caricature which often reoccurs in my visual work—into spaces where my disabled body becomes entangled with the bodies of animals, specifically of “food” animals. These images attempt to be both humorous in their cartoonish absurdity and sincere in the confrontation with violence, and the commitment to kinship, that they try to represent. In one, I march for liberation, hunched over and naked, side by side with industrially bred hens. In the other, my abnormal body take
s the place of a lamb’s on a traditional butcher chart. In these images I am interested not only in spaces of shared vulnerability, but in what solidarity means across species and ability.
Sunaura Taylor
PART TWO
“We Are One Lesson”: Transforming Feminist Theory
A small girl and her mother passed a statue depicting a European man who had barehandedly subdued a ferocious lion. The little girl stopped, looked puzzled and asked, “Mama, something’s wrong with that statue. Everybody knows that a man can’t whip a lion.” “But darling,” her mother replied, “you must remember that the man made the statue.”
—As told by Katie Cannon
[The question is] how to effect a political transformation when the terms of the transformation are given by the very order which a revolutionary practice seeks to change.
—Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision
Chapter 5
Ecofeminism and the Eating of Animals
Jean: Would you feel raping a woman’s all right if it was happening to her and not to you?
Barbie: No, I’d feel like it was happening to me.
Jean:Well, that’s how some of us feel about animals.
Neither Man nor Beast Page 12