Animal rights activists may believe that those who already fight other forms of oppression are likely to be amenable to the cause of animal rights. Within this context, the animal rights theorist must explain the relevance of animal oppression to the feminist theorist, rather than the other way round. The end result is a conversation which is around animals, rather than about animals. Therefore, it is inevitable that feminism ends up as the dominant frame within thIs synthesis, leaving the animal rights cause largely ignored.
LUKE RYAN: The women’s rights movement and animal rights movements have a long history of overlap, as identified by Carol J Adams in The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (1990). This book documents the history of vegetarian feminism, going back to the 19th century. It also lays out the case that the dominant ideological frameworks which normalise the exploitation of women and non-human animals and are one and the same…
Why has the marriage really failed?… A pragmatic explanation as to why works in the vein of The Sexual Politics of Meat are created, and why they have decentred animals. I hypothesise that the motivation behind these syntheses is to attempt to tie animal rights to a larger movement in order to recruit more vegans. Animal rights activists may believe that those who already fight other forms of oppression are likely to be amenable to the cause of animal rights. Within this context the animal rights theorist must explain the relevance of animal oppression to the feminist theorist, rather than the other way round. This leads to an explanation of the oppression of animals oppression couched in terms of the oppression of women. Therefore it is inevitable that feminism ends up as the dominant frame within the synthesis.
The problem with this approach, from the animal rights perspective, is that non-vegan feminists can criticise the synthesis solely by disputing the strength of connection between the two forms of oppression. Therefore they can debunk a work of this kind without ever addressing the vegan’s central question: whether the killing and enslavement of animals for food, clothing etc. is morally justified. The end result is a conversation which is around animals, rather than about animals. For the vegan, violation of animal rights would be wrong even if it did not affect marginalised humans whatsoever. Despite this, activists following Adams’ line have tied their advocacy to the existence of a causal link between these different oppressions.
For the feminist activist, they have a lot to lose from endorsing veganism and animal rights. Firstly, to become vegan requires changing one’s lifestyle. Adams recalls how she heard that some feminists at the Modern Language Association refused to read The Sexual Politics Of Meat because they did not want to stop eating animal bodies. Becoming vegan means one must not just change what they eat and wear, but one must also admit that they have participated in an atrocity up until the point of change, making it a doubly bitter pill. Like the theologian confronted with alien intelligences, or the physicist confronted with Boltzmann brains, the critical theorist confronted with animals as subjects must relitigate the base assumptions of their analysis. The sheer number of animals exploited by humans demands that we reorient our understanding of the “typical observer” of our society. Animals are exploited in such extreme ways, and largely for reasons as trivial as taste pleasure. The fact that even within justice movements this exploitation is largely ignored and/or justified casts non-vegan critical theory in a concerning new light. SOURCE…
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