Neither Man nor Beast

by Carol J Adams

  Another feminist, Joan Cocks, critically refers to the ideas that she sees informing feminist cultural practice: “The political strategies generally are non-violent, the appropriate cuisine, vegetarian.”2 Since feminists believe that the personal is political, the debates that have swirled around about vegetarianism indicate that many do not think their personal choice of animal foods reflects a feminist politics. But what if the values and beliefs embedded in the choice to eat animals are antithetical to feminism, so, that, in the case of corpse eating, the personal is political? In fact, feminist theory offers a way to examine and interpret the practice of eating animals so that vegetarianism is not reductively viewed as a “lifestyle” choice.

  This chapter offers an interpretative framework against which the depoliticizing of feminist moral claims on behalf of the other animals can be perceived. It does so by providing a feminist philosophical examination of the dialectic between “the political” and “the natural,” and contends that feminist conferences should be vegetarian. In focusing on the need for feminist conferences to be vegetarian, I am not required to address at this time the necessary material conditions for an entire culture to become vegetarian and whether all members of our society have the economic option to be vegetarian. Indeed, while tax subsidies, free natural resources, and the US-government’s financial support of the animal industrial complex3 keep the cost of animal flesh artificially low, vegetarianism has often been the only food option of poor people. Were government support to producers not available, animal flesh would be even more costly than vegetarian food. In the absence of neutrality on the part of the government, a grassroots resistance is demonstrating that, as more and more people adopt vegetarianism and de facto boycott the corpse industry, vegetable proteins are becoming more prevalent and less costly. In addition, as the fact of a coercive government policy on corpse eating is recognized, alternative political arrangements may become more feasible.4

  Another reason for my focus on making feminist events completely vegetarian is the fact that most ecofeminists who include animals within their understanding of dominated nature have made this their position.5 Furthermore, the conference proposal removes the vegetarian debate from the realm of personal decisions and relieves it of some of the emotional defensiveness that accompanies close examination of cherished personal practices. Moreover, the eating of animals is the most pervasive oppression of animals in the Western world, representing as well the most frequent way in which most Westerners interact with animals. Yet those living in the United States do not require animal flesh to ensure adequate nutrition. Lastly, this topic provides an opportunity to respond to feminists who challenge the movement that defends animals.

  Defining the Traffic in Animals

  Through the use of the term feminist traffic in animals, I wish to politicize the use of animals’ bodies as commodities. The serving of animal flesh at feminist conferences requires that feminists traffic in animals—that is, buy and consume animal parts—and announces that we endorse the literal traffic in animals: the production, transportation, slaughter, and packaging of animals’ bodies.

  Trafficking in animals represents a dominant material relationship. As we have seen, the animal industrial complex is the second largest industry, and the largest food industry, in the United States. Currently 60 percent of American foods comes from animals, including eggs and dairy products or feminized protein and animal corpses or animalized protein. 6 These terms disclose that the protein preexists its state of being processed through or as an animal, that vegetable protein is the original protein. Trafficking in animals relies on this vegetable protein as well, but requires that it be the raw material, along with animals, for its product.

  For feminists to traffic in animals we must accept the trafficking in ideas, or the ideology, about terminal animals. These ideas form the superstructure of our daily lives, a part of which involves the presumed acceptability of this traffic. The difficulty is that the coercive nature of the ideological superstructure is invisible and for trafficking to continue, must remain invisible.

  When I use the phrase “traffic in animals,” I deliberately invoke a classic feminist phrase, appearing in works such as Emma Goldman’s “The Traffic in Women,” and Gayle Rubin’s, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.”7 By choosing the word traffic I imply that similarities in the treatment of “disposable” or “usable” bodies exist.

  To “traffic in animals” involves producers and consumers. Whatever “objects” we determine to be worth purchasing become included within our moral framework, and the production of these objects, too, becomes a part of such a framework, even if this aspect remains invisible. While numerous books on the animal industrial complex are available,8 they rarely are cited in feminist writings other than those by vegetarians, thus ensuring the invisibility of trafficking in animals for those who do so. The phrase “traffic in animals” is an attempt to wrest discursive control from those who wish to evade knowledge about what trafficking entails.

  Discursive Control and Ignorance

  As I argued in chapter 1, no objective stance exists from which to survey the traffic in animals. Either we eat them or we do not. No disinterested observer, nor impartial semantic space exists for discussing the issue. In a flesh-advocating culture, conflicts in meaning are resolved in favor of the corpse eating culture. No matter our individual actions, the place from which we stand to survey the eating of animals is overwhelmed by the normativeness of “meat” and the (supposed) neutrality of the term meat.

  The contamination of the discursive space in which we might discuss the matter of cross-species consumption is further complicated by ignorance. Although vegetarians know a great deal more about the material conditions that enable corpse eating than corpse eaters do, discursive power, however, resides with the latter, not the former. Lacking specific information regarding the topic, people with the most ignorance still are able to set the limits of the discussion.9 Thus, when Ellen Goodman argues that “people make choices in these matters [animal defense] from the first time they knowingly eat a hamburger or catch a fish” she makes an epistemological claim.10 What exactly do corpse eaters know? That a hamburger comes from a dead animal? The details of the literal traffic in animals that has brought the dead animal into the consumer’s hands? Goodman implies that people have specific knowledge about corpse production that in reality they do not have and usually do not want. She also assumes that this claim dispenses with the challenges of animal defenders.

  Discursive Privacy

  It is necessary to politicize the process of obtaining animal bodies for food by using terms such as trafficking because of the prevailing conceptual divisions of the dominant culture. The context for talking about the use of animalized and feminized protein is one of rigid separation between political, economic, domestic, and personal. As Nancy Fraser explains in Unruly Practices: “Domestic institutions depoliticize certain matters by personalizing and/or familiarizing them; they cast these as private-domestic or personal-familial matters in contradistinction to public, political matters.”11

  The result of this social division is that certain issues are banished to zones of discursive privacy rather than seen as foci of generalized contestation. For instance, purchasing, perparing, and eating food is cast as a private-domestic matter. A similar separation exists between economic and political:

  Official economic capitalist system institutions, on the other hand, depoliticize certain matters by economizing them; the issues in question here are cast as impersonal market imperatives, or as “private” ownership prerogatives, or as technical problems for managers and planners, all in contradistinction to political matters.12

  Thus, while issues associated with marketing and purchasing dead animals become privatized to the domestic sphere of individual choice, issues involving the production of animals are economized, such as when the rise of “factory farms” is attributed solely to the demands of the marke
t, or it is argued that we cannot interfere with the prerogatives of the animals’ “owner.”

  When issues are labeled domestic or economic, they become enclaved, shielded from generalized contestation, thus entrenching as authoritative what are actually only interpretations of issues. Furthermore, “since both domestic and official economic institutions support relations of dominance and subordination, the specific interpretations they naturalize tend, on the whole, to advantage dominant groups and individuals and to disadvantage their subordinates.”13 This is precisely what happens with the consumption of animals’ bodies: it has been naturalized to favor the dominant group—people who eat flesh—to the disadvantage of the consumed animals.

  As feminism demonstrates, the divisions between politics, economics, and domestic issues are false. The problem that an analysis such as mine faces is that these divisions continue to be accepted even by many feminists when the issue is animals; and the response by dominant groups is to banish the issue back to a zone of discursive privacy. When the issue is people’s oppression of the other animals, this tendency to enforce discursive privacy when issues are being politicized is further complicated. Another social division exists—that between nature and culture.

  We do not think of the other animals as having social needs. Since animals are ideologically confined to the realm of nature, making any sorts of social claim on their behalf already introduces dissonance into established discourses. It appears that we are confusing the categories of nature and culture. But this in itself reflects a cultural classification enabled by predetermined ideologies that maintain a narrow, uncontextualized focus. Thus, any feminist animal defense position must challenge what has been labeled as “natural” by the dominant culture.

  Ideology: Hiding the Social Construction of the Natural

  Any debate about the place of animals in human communities occurs within a cultural context and a cultural practice. Here ideology preexists and imposes itself on individual perceptions, so that what is actually a problem of consciousness—how we look at animals—is seen as an aspect of personal choice and is presented as a “natural” aspect of our lives as human beings. Claiming human beings to be predators like (some of) the other animals (remember that less than 20 percent of animals are actually predators) is an example of the naturalizing of the political. Distinctions between people’s carnivorism and carnivorous animals’ predation are ignored in such a claim: human beings do not need to be predators, and there is no animal counterpart to human perpetuation of the grossly inhumane institutions of the animal industrial complex. Nel Noddings summons natural processes when she states that “it is the fate of every living thing to be eaten”14 implying a similarity between the “natural” process of decay and the activity of slaughterhouses (which remain unnamed). Eating animals is also naturalized by glamorizations of hunting as an essential aspect of human evolution or as representing the “true” tribal relationship between indigenous people and animals. The result is that exploitation of animals is naturalized as intrinsic to people’s relationships with the other animals. The “naturalization” of the ways we are socialized to look at animals affects how we act toward animals—that is, if we see animals as “meat,” we eat them. Thus we can read in a letter responding to an article on “Political Correctness”: “None of us has the whole picture. For one woman, vegetarianism is an ethical imperative; for another, eating meat is part of the natural world’s give and take.”15

  Attempts to make the ideology and the material reality of corpse production visible, to denaturalize it, result in responses by feminists who through further promulgation of the superstructure and its importance for individual, or certain groups of, feminists, uphold the trafficking in (traditional) ideas about animals and actual trafficking in animal flesh. “Meat” is thus an idea that is experienced as an object, a relationship between humans and the other animals that is rendered instead as a material reality involving “food choices,” a social construction that is seen as natural and normative. When the concept of species is seen as a social construction, an alternative social construction that recognizes animals as a subordinated social group, rather than naturally usable, becomes apparent.

  To understand why feminists defend their trafficking in animals, we must perceive the dialectic that is at work between the political and the natural.

  Naturalizing the Political: 1

  In a flesh-advocating culture, decisions that are actually political are presented as “natural” and “inevitable.” When Ellen Goodman argues that “we acknowledge ourselves as creatures of nature” in “knowingly” eating a hamburger or catching a fish, she presumes that her readers share with her an understanding that “creatures of nature” eat dead bodies. She also assumes that we will find it acceptable to be likened to the other animals when the issue is the consumption of animal flesh, even though so much of human nature (and justification for such consumption) is precisely defined by establishing strict notions of differentiation between humans and the other animals. Two prevalent conceptualizations assist in the naturalizing of the political choice to use animals as food and explain Goodman’s confidence in her line of defense of such actions.

  Meat as a Mass Term

  The existence of meat as a mass term contributes to the naturalizing of the phenomenon of eating animals’ bodies. Recall from chapter 1 (Quine) that objects referred to by mass terms have no individuality, no uniqueness, and that when we turn an animal into “meat,” someone who has a very particular, situated life, a unique being, is converted into something that has no distinctiveness, no uniqueness, no individuality. The existence of meat as a mass term naturalizes the eating of animals, so that consumers do not think “I am now interacting with an animal” but instead consider themselves making choices about food.

  Ontologizing Animals as “Naturally” Consumable

  The prevailing ideology ontologizes animals as consumable, as mass terms. This ontology is socially constructed: there is nothing inherent to a cow’s existence that necessitates her future fate as hamburger or her current fate as milk machine. However, a major way by which we circumvent responsibility for terminal animals’ fate at the hands of humans is to believe that they have no other fate, that this is their “natural” existence, to be food. As a result, this ontologizing of animals that normalizes corpse eating may be embraced by people across the divisions of race, class, and sex. Unless some factor dislodges these positions and brings about a critical consciousness concerning corpse eating, these positions will continue to be held and, when under attack, fiercely defended as natural, inevitable, and/or beneficial.

  The existence of meat as a mass term contributes to the ontologizing and thus “naturalizing” of animals as consumable. The ideology becomes sanctioned as eternal or unalterable, rather than suspect and changeable. To be a pig is to be pork. To be a chicken is to be poultry. When Nel Noddings raises the issue of the possible mass extinction of certain domesticated animals if humans were to stop eating them, she is reproducing this ontology. She continues to see the animals as being dependent on their relationship to us, as literally existing (only) for us. To be concerned about whether animals can live without us needing (eating) them continues their ontologized status as exploitable. Indeed, it clearly evokes this ontology: without our needing them, and implicitly, using them as food, they would not exist.

  The current ontology requires that we acquiesce to the hierarchical structure that places humans above animals and defines “human” and “animal” antithetically. The current ontology continues to subordinate nonhuman nature—in this case, the other animals—to people’s whims. Intensive factory farming is inevitable in a flesh-advocating, capitalist culture. It has become the only way to maintain and meet the demand for flesh products that currently exists and must be seen as the logical outcome of this ontology. Warehoused animals account for from 90 to 97 percent of the animal flesh consumed in the United States. Thus, those who argue that warehousing is immoral but
alternatives to obtaining animal flesh are acceptable deny the historical reality that has brought us to this time and place. They conceive of some “natural” practice of corpse consumption that is free from historical influence, that is essentially atemporal and thus apolitical. Thus they naturalize the political decision to eat other animals.

  Politicizing the Natural: 1

  Animal-defense discourse refuses to see the consumption of dead animals as a natural act and actively asserts it to be a political act. It does so by refusing to accept the discursive boundaries that bury the issue as natural or personal. In doing this, animal-defense discourse exposes a matrix of relations that are usually ignored or accepted as implicit (the matrix that I call trafficking in animals) by proposing three interrelated arguments: a species-specific philosophy is limiting, our current ontology of animals is unacceptable, and our current practices are oppressive.

  The Limitations of a Species-Specific Philosophy

  As I argue in chapter 4, through the human/other dialectic “human” de facto represents Euro-American (human) maleness and “other” represents that which white maleness negates: other races, sexes, or species. This representation of otherness and the equation of it with animalness is central to the process of “naturalizing” the political. The traditional feminist resolution to the equation of any oppressed human group with animalness has been to break that association, to argue in a variety of ways for women’s work and lives as representatives of culture rather than nature. It has most often left undisturbed the notion that animals represent the natural. While feminism works to liberate white women and people of color from the onerous equation with animals and otherness, it has not disturbed the equation of animals with otherness.