An Intro & 10 (plus!) Essential Readings on Animal Rights and Intersectionality

Welcome, readers! Some of y’all might recognize me as one of several guest-posters on the Animal Rights blog at changedotorg. Stephanie kindly invited me to blog about issues of intersectionality at her place, and while I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity as often as I should have, I hope to be a more active member of Animal Rights & AntiOppression. I also blog at www.easyVegan.info, and am addicted to Flickr and Library Thing. (You know, just in case anyone wants to oooh! and aaah! over photos of my furkids or browse my bookshelves.)

Anyhow, my focus in this here space will be on intersectionality, or the ways in which different forms of oppression mirror and interact with one another. Being a white, heterosexual, cisgendered, middle-class woman, I’m relatively privileged: I have white privilege. Class privilege. Heterosexual privilege. Cisgender privilege. Species privilege, too. Given this heavy old backpack I’m toting around, most of my writing centers on misogyny and speciesism. As a woman, these are the comparisons I feel most comfortable making. But I do believe that all forms of oppression and exploitation – sexism, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, colonialism, homophobia, transphobia, sizeism, ableism, and, yes, speciesism and the domination of nature – are related, share a common origin and etiology, and reinforce and magnify one another.

In this vein, I come bearing a reading list!

While there are a number of books that address these issues (indeed, more and more every year), the following are must-reads. In particular, I’ve already read the first five and “enjoyed” them immensely. (As much as one can “enjoy” books about animal exploitation, that is.) The second five selections are books that I’ve been itching to read, and come highly recommended by others. Feel free to share your own favorites in the comments!

1. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (1990/2010) and The Pornography of Meat (2003) by Carol J. Adams – Ecofeminist-vegetarian (vegan?) Carol Adams links the dehumanization, objectification and exploitation of women with that of nonhuman animals in these vegetarian/feminist/patriarchy-blaming classics. While there are many points of intersection between misogyny and speciesism, the link between the two is especially cogent when it comes to “meat” and “meat” consumption. For example, advertisers commonly feminize and sexualize dissembled “meat” products, whereas living women are treated like or depicted as “pieces of meat.”

The Sexual Politics of Meat, which is scheduled for a re-released this March in honor of its 20th anniversary, is an enlightening but rather academic (read: sometimes dry) read. In contrast, The Pornography of Meat is a bit shorter, easier to grasp, and – yay! – contains a few hundred photos and illustrations to bolster Adams’s arguments. For a few examples, check out The Sexual Politics of Meat Slideshow.

2. The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery (1988) by Marjorie Spiegel – In this brief-but-tidy thesis, Marjorie Spiegel outlines the similarities between human and animal slavery, with a focus on American slavery and our recent treatment of nonhuman animals. While the subject certainly deserves much more attention than it’s received thus far (to the best of my knowledge, The Dreaded Comparison is the only book of its kind), this is a must-read for all animal advocates. Just don’t let it be your only source of knowledge on slavery, medical misconduct and African-American issues, mkay?

3. Animal Equality: Language and Liberation (2001) by Joan Dunayer – Words matter. Language matters. From our choice of insults, to our pronoun usage, to the way we frame an issue, the way we speak (both out loud and internally, to ourselves) influences how we see the world – and how we encourage others to view it. In Animal Equality, Joan Dunayer examines a number of animal exploitation industries (hunting, fishing, zoos, the circus, animal agriculture, etc.), detailing how they pervert language to justify their misdeeds. Nor are animal exploiters alone in this: because animal advocates have been raised in a culture of speciesism, we have adopted the language of the oppressors. In order to liberate nonhumans animals (and marginalized humans, as well), we must start with our own words.

4. Terrorists or Freedom Fighters?: Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (2004) and Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (2006) by Steve Best and Anthony J. Nocella II (eds.) – While these two anthologies primarily focus on “terrorism” and the ethics of (non-/)violence within the animal rights and environmental movements, respectively, essayists in each volume touch upon issues on intersectionality. In Terrorists or Freedom Fighters?, for example, violence on behalf of nonhuman animals is examined in relation to other violent struggles in (human) social justice movements. pattrice jones contributes an awesome eco-anarcha-feminist piece to each; her contributions alone make these worth the purchase price.

5. Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry (1997) by Gail Eisnitz – A decade ahead of Jonathan Safran Foer and Eric Schlosser, investigative journalist Gail Eisnitz detailed the “shocking” cruelty in American factory farms (ten years after reading Slaughterhouse and five years after going vegan, rare is the instance of animal abuse which shocks me.) Eisnitz’s books is unabashedly anthropocentric, focusing primarily on the impact of “greed, neglect, and inhumane treatment” on humans – residents who live near sprawling, pollution-spewing farms; consumers who purchase and eat animal-based products; and, above all else, slaughterhouse workers themselves. Often working-class, undocumented workers and people of color, those who labor in the animal ag. industry have some of the dangerous – not to mention dehumanizing and desensitizing – jobs in the country. This story is primarily about them – marginalized, abused, and taken advantage of by an industry that puts a premium on profits. However, in detailing the plight of slaughterhouse workers, Eisnitz demonstrates how one abuse is more often then not accompanied by others; in this case, the degradation of our environment and the enslavement, torture and murder of 10 billion land animals a year.

6. An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature (1997/2005) by Jim Mason – An Unnatural Order is an obvious choice for anyone interested in the intersections between human- and animal-based “isms.” Of the book, Publisher’s Weekly says:

Mason here writes an eloquent, important plea for a total rethinking of our relationship to the animal world. He analyzes the West’s “dominionist” worldview which exalts humans as overlords and owners of other life, an outlook that he believes is rooted in millennia of animal husbandry. Speculating that dominionism arose with the transition from ancient mother-goddess religions to patriarchy, he ambitiously links our current exploitation and domination of nature to fears of our own animal nature, repressive antisexual attitudes, misogyny, curtailment of women’s power, racism and colonialism. Human brains and thought processes evolved through close contact with animals, Mason argues, and restoring our kinship with animals is central to bridging the rift between humanity and nature. His powerfully argued manifesto will change many readers’ attitudes toward hamburgers, animal experimentation, hunting and circuses.

This is a book that’s been on my reading list for years; I purchased it a while back, but somehow it keeps getting shunted to the bottom of my book pile. Perhaps I’ll tackle it in 2010.

7. Animal Rights/Human Rights (2002) by David Nibert – Nibert’s Animal Rights/Human Rights seems a close cousin to Mason’s An Unnatural Order: both trace our oppression of nonhuman animals to its root, where it dovetails with with misogyny, racism, colonialism, religious intolerance, and the like. I’m curious to see whether there are any points of divergence between Nibert’s and Mason’s theories, but the product descriptions aren’t much help. Has anyone read either or both of these books? Thoughts?

8. Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals (2007) by Brian Luke – Brutal looks to be the kind of book that feminists happily appropriate in their patriarchy-smashing discourse – while conveniently ignoring the theory’s implications vis-à-vis our treatment of nonhuman animals. (See also: The Sexual Politics of Meat.)

From the book’s back flap:

In Brutal, Brian Luke explores the gender divide over our treatment of animals, exposing the central role of masculinity in systems of animal exploitation. Employing philosophical analysis, reference to empirical research, and relevant personal experience, Luke develops a new theory of how exploitative institutions do not work to promote human flourishing but instead merely act as support for a particular construction of manhood. The resulting work is of significant interest both to animal advocates and opponents of sexism.

With chapter headings like “The Species Boundary” and “The Erotics of Men’s Predation,” Brutal sounds like a can’t-miss.

9. Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (2002) by Charles Patterson – This is another book that’s been languishing in my to-read book pile for way too long. Here, Charles Patterson – a social historian and Holocaust educator – examines parallels between the attitudes underlying our oppression of nonhuman animals, and of each other, most notably during the Holocaust.

The book’s epigraph and title are from “The Letter Writer,” a story by the Yiddish writer and Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer: “In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.” The first part of the book (Chapter 1-2) describes the emergence of human beings as the master species and their domination over the rest of the inhabitants of the earth. The second part (Chapters 3-5) examines the industrialization of slaughter (of both animals and humans) that took place in modern times. The last part of the book (Chapters 6-8) profiles Jewish and German animal advocates on both sides of the Holocaust, including Isaac Bashevis Singer himself.

On a related note, Roberta Kalechofsky’s Animal Suffering and the Holocaust: The Problem with Comparisons (sigh, yes, also in my mile-high book pile) seems a natural counterpart/point to Eternal Treblinka. A Jewish animal activist, Kalechofsky penned Animal Suffering and the Holocaust as a response to PETA’s “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign.

10. Sistah Vegan! Food, Identity, Health and Society: Black Female Vegans Speak (2010) by Breeze Harper (ed.) – Last but not least, I am seriously looking forward to this upcoming anthology from Breeze Harper (whom you might already know from Sistah Vegan Project or the Vegans of Color blog).

Sistah Vegan is a series of narratives, critical essays, poems, and reflections from a diverse community of North American black-identified vegans. Collectively, these activists are de-colonizing their bodies and minds via whole-foods veganism. By kicking junk-food habits, the more than thirty contributors all show the way toward longer, stronger, and healthier lives. Suffering from type-2 diabetes, hypertension, high blood pressure, and overweight need not be the way women of color are doomed to be victimized and live out their mature lives. There are healthy alternatives.

March 2010 – look for it! Until then, you can learn more at the Sistah Vegan Project Blog, as well as the aforementioned websites.