Neither Man nor Beast

Feminism and the Defense of Animals

Carol J. Adams

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350040212
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Femminismo e teoria femminista

In this landmark work of animal rights activism, Carol J. Adams - the bestselling author of The Sexual Politics of Meat - explores the intersections and common causes of feminism and the defense of animals. Neither Man Nor Beast explores the common link between cultural attitudes to women and animals in modern Western culture that have enabled the systematic exploitation of both. A vivid work that takes in environmental ethics, theological perspectives and feminist theory, the Bloomsbury Revelations edition includes a new foreword by the author and new images illustrating the continuing relevance of the book today.

PART ONE

EXAMINING THE ARROGANT EYE

The Bible says that all of nature (including woman) exists for man. Man is invited to subdue the earth and have dominion over every living thing on it, all of which is said to exist “to you” “for meat.” Woman is created to be man’s helper. This captures in myth Western Civilization’s primary answer to the philosophical question of man’s place in nature: everything that is is resource for man’s exploitation. With this world view, men see with arrogant eyes which organize everything seen with reference to themselves and their own interests.

—Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality

Chapter 1

Eating Animals

When we talk of eating animals, we are referring to eating nonhuman, rather than human, animals. But then, we rarely talk of eating (dead) animals at all. We talk of eating “meat.” And once we begin talking about eating “meat” we are in the realm of cultural production that poses as individual decision.¹ Herein lies the problem. For what “meat” eaters see as “a nagging moralistic tone” in vegetarians (as one philosopher puts it)² might actually reflect the response that “meat” eaters bring to any attempt to expose the cultural construction of the eating of animals’ corpses. As another philosopher retorts: “There can be no doubt that almost all people in Western countries have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo because they are strongly identified with the taste for meat. . . . The identification promotes a stream of self-supporting arguments.”³ Is the vegetarian voice a judgmental one or is the “meat”-eating listener defensive? Will any discussion that names the raw material—the living animal—and exposes the manner of “meat” production and the accompanying production of “meat’s” meaning face a problem of tone and voice? We will see.

For this (supposed) nagging tone, this (perhaps) resistant response, the admitted self-interest of all involved in the debate, is not without effect on the writer and reader of this work. Either one consumes cooked animal flesh (do you?) or one does not (I don’t). There is no neutral ground from which to survey this activity and the debates about it.

Complicating this contested terrain is a startling but little-acknowledged fact: most abstainers from flesh know a great deal more about “its” production than do most consumers of dead animals. (Since flesh is from once-living animals, I question whether the word it is appropriate to use about them once dead.⁴ ) Ethical vegetarians know (often by heart): the size of a veal crate (twenty-two inches by fifty-four inches), a hen’s cage (four hens in a twelve-by-eighteen-inch cage); the ingenious contraptions for controlling birth mothers’ reproductive activities (“iron maiden” for delivery); the amount of topsoil erosion caused by cattle (85 percent); or the amount of all raw materials consumed in this country for livestock foods (one-third).⁵ Whereas abstainers generally know a great deal more about the production of flesh than the consumers, discursive power resides in those with the least knowledge. When former President Reagan (who did not know French) met French President François Mitterand (who knew both English and French) what language do you think they spoke?⁶ In the dominant culture, bilingual vegetarians must always speak English. Indeed, because of the discursive control exercised by the dominant flesh advocating culture, it is when vegetarians attempt to speak “French” (that is, reporting on slaughterhouses, factory farms, the threat of E. coli from eating dead bodies) that they are accused of having a nagging moralistic tone.

Vegetarians and corpse eaters approach the same phenomenon—the consumption of dead animals—and come to opposite opinions: is it “meat” or a corpse? life or death? humane slaughter or murder? delicious or repulsive? nutritious or fat-laden? departure from tradition or return to tradition? Corpse eaters see vegetarianism as a fad; vegetarians see eating animals as a larger fad. Corpse eaters see vegetarians as Puritans, legislating others’ enjoyments; vegetarians see animal eaters as resisting awareness, indulging in fantasy about where flesh comes from. Corpse eaters generally accept the cultural construction of the farm as benign, friendly, and family-based. Vegetarians see an alternate view: industry-owned, cruel, and factorylike. Corpse eaters ask, “Why did you stop eating animals?” Vegetarians respond with Plutarch, saying, “You ought rather, in my opinion, to have enquired who first began this practice, than who of late times left it off.”⁷ While vegetarians regard the word vegetable with respect (it’s life-giving, the purported root of the name vegetarian), flesh-advocating cultures see it as an appropriate term for brain-dead individuals.

The “moralistic” vegetarian and the “vested interest” corpse eater cannot meet on neutral ground to examine their conflict over what appropriately should be consumed by human animals and the facts that inform this debate. Not only is there no disinterested observer to this tradition—i.e., one is implicated either by choice of flesh or resistance to flesh—but there is no impartial semantic or cultural space in which to hold a discussion. We live in a flesh-advocating culture. One version of reality appears to be the only version, and in this claims its own comprehensiveness. Conflicts in meaning are resolved in favor of the dominant culture. Thus, vegetarians face the problem of making their meanings understood within the dominant flesh-advocating culture. As the feminist detective in Lynn Meyer’s Paperback Thriller remarks early in the novel, “I could tell you now that I’m a vegetarian, but let’s just leave it at that. I won’t go into the reasons. If you don’t understand them, there’s not much I can say; and if you do, there’s no need for me to say anything.”⁸

The battle for interpretation is evident as the dominant culture attempts to redefine even the notion of vegetarianism. Can one eat a dead fish or a dead chicken and be a vegetarian? Yes, according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who coined the words pesco-vegetarian and polio-vegetarian. ⁹ The dominant culture eviscerates the critique of its diet by absorbing it, implying that dead cows, rather than any animal’s corpse, is the problem. In the face of “vegetarians” who eat dead chicken and fish, people who don’t eat anything with eyes (except potatoes) must search for other terms. As I argued in The Sexual Politics of Meat, what is literally transpiring in the widening of the meaning of vegetarianism is the weakening of the concept of vegetarianism by including within it some living creatures who were killed to become food.

The Case of the False Mass Term

In the use of the term meat we have a clue to the cultural hegemony achieved for the eating of animals. We also witness the production of meaning and the actual production of (what some see as) food. The term meat represents what Willard Quine calls a “mass term.”¹⁰

Mass terms refer to things like water or colors; no matter how much you have of it, or what type of container it is in, water is still water. You can add a bucket of water to a pool of water without changing it at all. Objects referred to by mass terms have no individuality, no uniqueness, no specificity, no particularity.

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. When you add five pounds of hamburger to a plate of hamburger, it is more of the same thing, nothing is changed. But if you have a living cow in front of you, and you kill that cow, and butcher that cow, and grind up her corpse, you have not added a mass term to a mass term and ended up with more of the same.¹¹

Because of the reign of meat as a mass term, it is not often while eating a corpse that one thinks: “I am now interacting with an animal.” We do not see our own personal “meat” eating as contact with animals (in the lifetime of an average animal eater that would be 984 chickens, 37 turkeys, 29 pigs, 12 cattle, 2 lambs, 1 calf, and more than 1,000 fish) because it has been renamed as contact with food. But what is on the plate in front of us is not devoid of specificity. It is the dead flesh of what was once a living, feeling being. The crucial point here is that we make someone who is a unique being and therefore not the appropriate referent of a mass term into something that is the appropriate referent of a mass term. We do so by removing any associations that might make it difficult to accept the activity of rendering a unique individual into a consumable thing. Not wanting to be aware of this activity, we accept this disassociation, this distancing device of the mass term meat.

Mass terms also function when a specific term is being used ambiguously such as chicken, lamb, turkey. ¹² In accepting their presentation in Saran Wrap packages as mass entities and calling this “chicken,” the individuality of each chicken is lost; thus does the dominant culture acquiesce to gathering eighty thousand living chickens together in one warehouse. Just as the dominant language denies them individuality, the institutions created to hold them while alive deny them the opportunity to make the expressive gestures that characterize and give meaning to their individual lives. Pigs cannot root; chickens cannot peck, calves cannot nurse. These activities do not fit into the profit requirements. “The meat industry is a high-volume, low-profit-margin business, and it is structured to raise, fatten, slaughter, and merchandise its product as quickly and cheaply as possible.”¹³

In essence we are to view the living animal as though already dead, already a mass term (this may explain the existence of the redundant term dead meat: through warehousing of animals we now have living meat). We are encouraged to “Forget the pig [or a cow, a chicken, etc.] is an animal.”¹⁴ Instead we are to see them as machines or crops. A recent example of erasure of animals can be found in the United States Department of Agriculture’s description of cows, pigs, and chickens as “grain-consuming animal units.”¹⁵ As Colman McCarthy points out, this makes people “animal-consuming human units.”¹⁶

Using meat as a mass term implies its own comprehensiveness though it only transmits a partial reality. It appears to represent the sole meaning; rather, it actually represents one of many competing meanings. Not only does it require all to speak English, it implies that there is no other language, such as French, in which to converse. The conflict in interpretation that besets the vegetarian-corpse eater debate occurs in part because of the false comprehensiveness accorded to the flesh-advocating perspective. The term meat eater appears neutral, but it is instead evasive. The terms corpse eater or flesh eater (or the Greek-derived creophagist) may feel judgmental, but they are, in fact, accurate. And as we are helpfully reminded by the 1881 quotation from the Saturday Review that the Oxford English Dictionary uses to illustrate its definition of creophagous: “The average kreophagist is by no means convinced that kreophagy is the perfect way in diet.”¹⁷

Although meat is accepted as a mass term, it is not one. Production of meat can occur only with individuals (seven to nine billion of them a year). Since mass terms require no modifiers (i.e., we do not have to say extremely wet water), appropriate and informative modifiers that might challenge meat’s neutral associations are omitted—such as recently butchered, individual cow-meat. Indeed, an animal’s name modifies the word meat only when that form of animal flesh is not consumed, i.e., dogmeat or horsemeat, but not fishmeat or lambmeat.

In accepting meat as a mass term, we assume that it is accurate and adequate. As a result the rendering of animals as consumable bodies is a given rather than a problem. But none of us chooses meat’s meanings, we either adhere to them or reject them.

In rejecting meat as a mass term, renaming occurs. One begins to speak French. We reorient our relationship with the dominant culture in part by reevaluating that culture’s language. Where corpse eaters see “complete protein,” or “a man’s meal” or “what would a meal be without it?” vegetarians see dead bodies, plain and simple. Language about “meat eating” normalizes the eating of dead bodies. As Colman McCarthy observes, “Such words as meat, beef, pork, veal or poultry a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface to the Bloomsbury Revelations Edition
• Preface
• Acknowledgments for the Bloomsbury Revelations Edition
• Part One Examining the Arrogant Eye
• Part Two “We Are One Lesson”: Transforming Feminist Theory
• Part Three From Misery to Grace
• Coda
• Bibliography
• Copyright Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright