In her now classic The Sexual Politics of Meat, recently reissued in its 35th anniversary edition, Carol J. Adams lays bare how the logics of meat consumption mirror those structuring oppression and violence against women. Carrying this work forward, The Pornography of Meat documents in prose and vivid imagery how popular culture representations exploit asymmetrical gender relations of power to normalize violence against and consumption of non-human animals. Adams’s pioneering work laid the foundation for explorations of the intersections between the myriad systems of human oppression and animal exploitation. Feminist critiques of how gender (and other intersecting systems of domination) are intimately intertwined with human violence against non-human animals have informed a robust and growing body of scholarship, as evinced by rich collections such as Feminist Animal Studies, edited by Erika Cudworth, Ruth E. McKie, and Di Turgoose, and outstanding reference guides like the Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals, edited by Chloë Taylor.
Just as meat-eating is embedded in patriarchal logics, so too does it rely on other axes of oppression. Several of the chapters in Meat Culture, edited by Annie Potts, exemplify this convergence. The chapter by Jacqueline Dalziell and Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel (“Live Exports, Animal Advocacy, Race and ‘Animal Nationalism’”) explores how animal welfare and environmental activism target the Global South, for instance. It follows, then, that human-animal relationships are key to struggles for justice in marginalized communities. The volume Critical Animal Studies and Social Justice, edited by Anthony J. Nocella II and Amber E. George, furthermore, explores how total liberation, including that of non-human animals, offers new insights into struggles for Black liberation, disability justice, feminism, and more. Rainbow Cattle Co. by Nicholas Villanueva explores how LGBTQ+ athletes challenged heteronormativity and gendered and sexual stereotypes through gay rodeo since the 1970s. Though the gay rodeo included a broader variety of interactions with animals, it still featured the more stereotypical bovine events, like bull riding, characteristic of patriarchal attitudes condoning animal oppressions. In a similar vein, Carol Adams’s critiques of the hypocrisy of meat-eating feminists in the seminal works mentioned earlier have inspired a range of works exploring how struggles for animal liberation contribute to a more just world across difference.
The relationship between struggles for racial justice and animal rights movements has been more uneasy, as the ambivalent response to a 2005 PETA ad comparing cattle slaughter to racist lynching suggests. Books like The Dreaded Comparison by Marjorie Spiegel posit such analogies between slavery and institutionalized racism, on the one hand, and speciesism on the other. As Bénédicte Boisseron explains in Afro-Dog, the forms of racial oppression, such as the enslavement of Africans and their descendants, lynching, and police violence, are clearly intertwined with animal subjugation, but analogizing these becomes problematic when it aims to privilege one or the other cause. In Race Matters, Animal Matters, Lindgren Johnson adds to this conversation by tracing the ways key African American thinkers, including Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, engaged in an interspecies ethics by challenging both white and human exceptionalism in their demands for recognition.
In Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals, Karen M. Morin traces the overlapping trajectories of industrial complexes associated with carcerality, arguing that the distinctions between human and animal are constructed and deconstructed through encounters with carceral spaces, including through death in the slaughterhouse and the execution chamber. Lori Gruen and Justin Marceau’s Carceral Logics explores the paradoxes and limits of carceral strategies in animal protection, animal law, and spaces of confinement, including CAFOs and ranches. Bringing the reform vs. abolition debate into animal studies, the book makes a case for imagining a future for humans and animals beyond confinement.
The insight that meat—and human exploitation of cattle more broadly—is entangled with the oppression of marginalized groups of humans has proved tremendously fruitful. Applying a Marxist lens to factory farms and the exploitation of animal labor, Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel shows how anthropocentrism is central to capitalism in Animals and Capital. In Making a Killing, Bob Torres uses anarchist theory to argue for including animals, including those farmed for food, within broader struggles for liberation from capitalist systems of oppression. Postcolonial, queer, trans, and crip critiques have enriched the debates surrounding critical animal studies, as volumes such as Colonialism and Animality, edited by Kelly Struthers Montford and Chloë Taylor; Tranimacies, edited by Eliza Steinbock, Marianna Szczygielska, and Anthony Clair Wagner; Disability and Animality, edited by Stephanie Jenkins, Kelly Struthers Montford, and Chloë Taylor; and Postcolonial Animalities, edited by Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya show. In Beasts of Burden, Sunaura Taylor problematizes binaries, including human-animal and disabled-nondisabled, showing how disability justice is deeply intertwined with animal rights. Ableist attacks on Temple Grandin allege that her slaughter designs reflect an inability to empathize with animals supposedly rooted in her autism. However, others have pointed out that the oppressions of neurodivergent people and of animals are deeply intertwined. By parsing out the intersections of animal oppression and the oppression of marginalized groups of humans, animal studies brings scholars closer to understanding how these systems operate and thus how they might be dismantled.
The Sexual Politics of Meat - 35th Anniversary Edition
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The Pornography of Meat - New and Updated Edition
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