An ecofeminist method complements this ecofeminist philosophy of contingency—it is the method of contextualization. It may be entirely appropriate to refuse to say, “All killing is wrong” and point to human examples of instances when killing is acceptable, such as euthanasia, abortion (if abortion is seen as killing), and the struggles of colonized people to overthrow their oppressors. Similarly, it is argued that the way in which an animal is killed to be food affects whether the action of killing and the consumption of the dead animal are acceptable or not. Killing animals in a respectful act of appreciation for their sacrifice, this argument proposes, does not create animals as instruments. Instead, it is argued, this method of killing animals is characterized by relationship and reflects reciprocity between humans and the hunted animals. Essentially, there are no absent referents. I will call this interpretation of the killing of animals the “relational hunt.”
The issue of method provides a way to critique the argument for the relational hunt. But first let us acknowledge that the relational hunt’s ideological premise involves ontologizing animals as edible. The method may be different—“I kill for myself an animal I wish to eat as meat”—but neither the violence of the act nor the end result, a corpse, is eliminated by this change in actors and method.51 As I argue in the preceding section, the ontologizing of animals as edible bodies creates them as instruments of human beings; animals’ lives are thus subordinated to the human’s desire to eat them even though there is, in general, no need to be eating animals. Ecofeminists who wish to respect a philosophy of contingency yet resist the ontologizing of animals could choose the alternative position of saying, “Eating an animal after a successful hunt, like cannibalism in emergency situations, is sometimes necessary, but like cannibalism, is morally repugnant.” This acknowledges that eating animal (including human) flesh may occur at rare times, but resists the ontologizing of (some) animals as edible.
Applying the method of contextualization to the ideal of the relational hunt reveals inconsistencies. Because ecofeminist theory is theory in process, I offer these critiques sympathetically.52 The relational hunt has not yet been fully developed in theory; it remains a rather imprecisely defined issue and is never described as an achievable practice for many—this uncharacteristic imprecision in ecofeminist discourse suggests that the method of contextualization is in some real ways in opposition to the relational hunt, an opposition that is resisted by maintaining the discussion on an anecdotal level. Additionally, it is never pointed out that this is not how the majority of people are obtaining their food from dead animals. Though the ecofeminist ethic is a contextualizing one, the context describing how we relate to animals is not provided. Just as environmentalists mystify women’s oppression when they fail to address it directly, so ecofeminists mystify peoples’ relations with animals when they fail to describe it precisely.
Ecofeminism has not relied on the notion of speciesism to critique current treatment of animals, though its condemnation of naturism, explicitly and implicitly, offers a broadly similar critique. The word speciesism has been contaminated in some ecofeminists’ eyes by its close association with the movement that resists it, the animal defense movement, which they view as perpetuating patriarchal discourse regarding rights. Animal defense, though, does recognize the right of each individual animal to continue living and this is its virtue. An antinaturist position does not provide a similar recognition; as a result the individual animal killed in a hunt can be interpreted “to be in relationship.” Hunting is not seen as inconsistent with an antinaturist position, though it would be judged so from an antispeciesist position.
An antinaturist position emphasizes relationships, not individuals; the relational hunt is said to be a relationship of reciprocity. But reciprocity involves a mutual or cooperative interchange of favors or privileges. What does the animal who dies receive in this exchange?
The experience of sacrifice? How can the reciprocity of the relational hunt be verified since the other partner is both voiceless in terms of human speech and furthermore rendered voiceless through his or her death? Once the question of the willingness of the silent and silenced partner is raised, so too is the connection between the relational hunt and what I will call the “aggressive hunt.” Ostensibly the relational hunt is different from the aggressive hunt, which is seen to aggrandize the hunter’s sense of (human male) self rather than valuing any relationship with the hunted animal. Yet we can find in discussions of the relational hunt and the aggressive hunt a common phenomenon: the eliding of responsibility or agency. Consider the aggressive hunters’ bible, Meditations on Hunting. 53 In this book, José Ortega y Gasset writes:
To the sportsman the death of the game is not what interests him; that is not his purpose. What interests him is everything that he had to do to achieve that death—that is, the hunt. Therefore what was before only a means to an end is now an end in itself. Death is essential because without it there is no authentic hunting: the killing of the animal is the natural end of the hunt and that goal of hunting itself; not of the hunter.54
The erasure of the subject in this passage is fascinating. In the end the hunter is not really responsible for willing the animal’s death, just as the stereotypic batterer is presumed to be unable, at some point, to stop battering; it is said that he loses all agency. In the construction of the aggressive hunt, we are told that the killing takes place not because the hunter wills it but because the hunt itself requires it. This is the batterer model. In the construction of the rela tional hunt, it is argued that at some point the animal willingly gives up his or her life so that the human being can be sustained. This is the rapist model. In each case the violence is mitigated. In the rapist model, as with uncriminalized marital rape, the presumption is that in entering into the relationship the woman has said one unequivocal yes; so too in the relational hunt it is presupposed that the animal espied by the hunter at some point also said a nonverbal but equally binding unequivocal yes. The relational hunt and the aggressive hunt simply provide alternative means for erasing agency and denying violation.
I have not as yet addressed the fact that the relational hunt is based on ecofeminists’ understanding of some Native American hunting practices and beliefs. Andy Smith, a member of Women of All Red Nations, raised the concern that
interest in Native American hunting to the exclusion of all other aspects of Native culture, is another way of holding to images of Native Americans as savages. This is then further reflected in the misconception that Native people were all hunter types who lived in sparsely populated areas rather than advanced civilizations that were mainly agricultural. This then contributes to the ideology that it was good that natives were “discovered” because otherwise they would still be living these spartan hunter lifestyles. Moreover, what is true for Native cultures is not transferable to mainstream American culture. Such people would better spend their time preserving Native rights than appropriating their culture.55
Although many indigenous cultures experienced their relationship with animals very differently than we do today, environmentalists further only their own self-interest when appealing to illustrations from Native American hunting cultures. Why not hold up as a counterexample to ecocidal culture gatherer societies that demonstrate humans can live well without depending on animals’ bodies as food?56 And why not work in solidarity with Native Americans rather than cannibalizing what is presumed to be their hunting model?
Furthermore, what method will allow us to accomplish the relational hunt on any large scale? Can we create as an ideal method one developed in a continent with many fewer people than today, and impose it upon an urban population that has by and large eliminated the wilderness in which Native American cultures flourished? The wilderness no longer exists to allow for duplication. As Rosemary Ruether poses the question: “Since there could be no return to the unmanaged wilderness, in which humans compete with animals as one species among others, without an enormous reduction of the human
population from its present 5.6 billion back to perhaps 1 million or so, one wonders what kind of mass destruction of humans is expected to accomplish this goal?”57
I think too of other issues with hunting—the role of men as hunters, advocates of hunting, the connection of hunting with violence against women (see chapter 8), and the relationship, anthropologically, between hunting large animals and the subordination of women.58 Even in traditional gatherer-hunter groups, women provide the majority of calories (and do so while only working what would be the equivalent of 3.5 days a week).
The problem with the relational hunt is that it is a highly sentimentalized individual solution to a corporate problem: what are we to do about the eating of animals? We either see animals as edible bodies or we do not. The hunting issue therefore is ultimately a debate about method.
6. But Plants Have Life Too
The argument that plants also have life is seen by ethical vegetarians as diversionary and a hideous trivialization of the suffering of intensively farmed animals. Yet it proves the necessity of an ecofeminist ethic on the eating of animals. In essence, the position articulated appears to be “If plants can be eaten, then animals can too,” and conversely, “If not animals, then why plants?” Here the search for universals is clearly at work, disregarding the value ecofeminism sets on context.59 Whereas ecofeminism emphasizes diversity and difference, the formulation of the plant argument relies on universalizing. Where ecofeminism would embrace solidarity and recognize that solidarity with animals requires different actions than solidarity with the plant kingdom, this argument presumes sameness. The place of plants in ecofeminist-vegetarian ethics is best understood by returning to the ecofeminist philosophy of contingency and the accompanying method of contextualization.
The current reality is that the greatest exploitation of plant foods, the accompanying deployment of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, the production of monoculture crops that neglect the needs of the soil are all related not to humans’ need to eat plants but to creating foods for terminal animals to eat before they become flesh. The extensive exploitation of the plant kingdom arises because of the extensive exploitation of animals.
What does plant consumption consist of for humans? The majority of plant foods consumed by humans are from intrinsically renewable resources.60 They are annuals. Or, as with sea vegetables, they benefit from being pruned if they have not been cast upon the shores by waves. Sea vegetables reproduce “by regeneration from fragments broken off parent plants and from spores.”61 Another category of plant food that provides a large portion of a vegetarian’s diet are products of plants and not the plants themselves: the pulses, such as beans, lentils, garbanzos, are actually “fruits of leguminous plants.”62 Nuts and seeds, like all fruits and many vegetables, can be separated from the plant without violating the plant itself. Finally, there are sprouts and grasses that can be grown in anyone’s windowsill.
In considering what it is exactly that vegetarians (should) eat the more appropriate question is, how do we minimize harm in the world?63 There is much to be gained from approaching the plant world with a “feeling for the organism.”64 But this does not mean that we cannot get our nourishment from plants. It means we approach our food with questions such as these: do we affirm a process of life, the growth of a plant, or a process of suffering and death, the killing of an animal?65 To equate the process of gathering with the process of killing is simply lying about violence and a distortion of women’s past. Plant gathering has historically been women’s activity; sustainable, organic agriculture, which relies on nature’s capacity to renew itself, has been women’s contribution.66 Indeed, the historic model of gathering by women indicates that plants are not necessarily dominated by being harvested and consumed.
It could be argued that the position that “plants have life too and so we can eat animals” is implicitly patriarchal. To draw lines where lines should not exist (i.e., by claiming that eating an animal is essentially different from eating a human being) does not mean that we can’t draw lines at all (i.e., distinguishing between eating a cow and eating a carrot). Questioning the appropriateness of drawing such lines is an example of Cartesian doubt. As Catharine MacKinnon argues, Cartesian doubt is a function of human male privilege. This privilege enables a standpoint that considers that everything is made out of ideas.67 It collapses the epistemological and the ontological. It may be theoretically asked whether carrots are being exploited, but once we situate ourselves within the lived reality we know as this world, we must surely know or intuit that the eating of a horse, cow, pig, or chicken is different from the eating of a carrot. The apparent failure of environmentalists to stipulate this is a failure to participate in embodied knowledge; it reinforces the idea that we live by abstractions. Abstractions and the absence of embodied knowledge arise from the bias toward masculine reasoning that is as much a part of the logic of domination as the eating of animals. Those who disassociate corpses from the process of producing corpses and instead associate them with the plant world perpetuate a mind/body and rational/emotional dualism that ecofeminism seeks to eliminate.
7. Autonomy and Ecofeminist-Vegetarianism
As long as animals are culturally constructed as edible, the issue of vegetarianism will be seen as a conflict over autonomy (to determine on one’s own what one will eat versus being told not to eat animals). The question, “who decided that animals are or should be food?” remains unaddressed.
After the Women and Spirituality Conference held in Boston in 1976, which offered only vegetarian food on-site, indignant letters to off our backs appeared from angry feminists who said they were forced to matronize nearby fast-food hamburger places due to the lack of flesh at the conference itself. Rather than being seen as agents of consciousness, raising legitimate issues, ecofeminist-vegetarians are seen as violating others’ rights to their own pleasures. This may represent the true “daughter’s seduction”—to believe that pleasure is apolitical and to perpetuate a personalized autonomy derived from dominance. The way autonomy works in this instance appears to be: “By choosing to eat meat, I acquire my ‘I-ness.’ If you say I can’t eat meat then I lose my ‘I-ness.’ ” Often the basic premise of the supposed gender-neutrality of autonomy is accepted, leaving both the notion of autonomy and the social construction of animals unexamined. As a result, animals remain absent referents.
The ecofeminist-vegetarian response to this idea of autonomy is: “Let’s redefine our ‘I-ness.’ Does it require dominance of others? Who determined that a corpse is food? How do we constitute ourselves as ‘I’s’ in this world?”
Giving conceptual place to the significance of individual animals restores the absent referent. This ecofeminist response derives not from a rights-based philosophy but from one arising from relationships that bring about identification and thus solidarity. We must see ourselves in relationship with animals. To eat animals is to make of them instruments; this proclaims dominance and power-over. The subordination of animals is not a given but a decision resulting from an ideology that participates in the very dualisms that ecofeminism seeks to eliminate. We achieve autonomy by acting independently of such an ideology.
Ecofeminism affirms that individuals can change, and in changing we reposition our relationship with the environment. This form of empowerment is precisely what is needed in approaching the issue of where animals stand in our lives. Many connections can be made between our food and our environment, our politics and our personal lives. Essentially, the existence of terminal animals is paradigmatic of, as well as contributing to the inevitability of, a terminal earth.
Figure 12 Reproduced from Deconstructing Elsie (limited edition, 2014), Nava Atlas.
Figure 13 Reproduced from Deconstructing Elsie (limited edition, 2014), Nava Atlas.
Artist’s Statement: Deconstructing Elsie
Digital offset artist’s book, spiral bound
Edition of 200, © 2014
When I began working on Deconstructi
ng Elsie, my purpose was to create a visual exploration of the dark side of the dairy industry in a nutshell, from the heartbreaking abuse of cows (as well as the discarded calves that become veal) to pollution of soil and water, dissemination of false information, and much more in between. What I didn’t expect was to find such a huge intersection between the stark facts about Big Dairy and ideas about oppression as they pertain to patriarchy and misogyny. Altering midcentury Elsie the Cow advertisements seemed a perfect vehicle for presenting the disturbing themes in these intertwined subjects with a bit of levity.
In her preface to the feminist classic, The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol J. Adams writes, “What, or precisely who, we eat is determined by the patriarchal politics of our culture, and that the meanings attached to meat eating include meanings clustered around virility.” The Elsie ads make this concept almost glaringly obvio us. Elsie’s “husband,” Elmer the bull, constantly bellows at and belittles her with searing sarcasm. And she, representing the accommodating housewife trope, seeks only to please and placate.
Deconstructing Elsie weaves health, environmental, political, and ethical issues particular to the dairy industry with notions of gender, animal oppression, and male dominance.
Nava Atlas
Chapter 6
The Feminist Traffic in Animals
Given the ecofeminist commitment to challenging patriarchal naturism, a naturism that includes the exploitation of animals, ecofeminism should incorporate vegetarianism both theoretically and practically. But should feminists who have not adopted an ecofeminist perspective be vegetarians? This question has appeared more and more frequently in recent years. Claudia Card offers one opinion: “Must we all, then, be vegetarians, pacifist, drug-free, opposed to competition, antihierarchical, in favor of circles, committed to promiscuity with women, and free of the parochialism of erotic arousal? Is this too specific? These values are not peripheral to analyses of women’s oppressions.”1
Neither Man nor Beast Page 15