I'm not sure what to say. I haven't written about this in weeks and now I have a proposal due tomorrow at noon.

I just finished reading the chapter on "Ecofeminism and Eating Animals" in "Neither Man Nor Beast" by Carol J. Adams, in which she asserts her reasons why ecofeminist theory should more explicitly address the problem of animal suffering and propose vegetarianism/veganism as a crucial component of ecofeminism in practice.

I face the problem of exploring a field that is widely unexplored. Though academic and popular discussion of these issues is becoming more prevalent, the target of these discussions is, more often than not, the issue of "food" as a whole or "environmentalism" rather than "animals". The few authors that do focus explicitly on animals dominate this budding discourse. There are so many questions and problems that have not yet been addressed in regards to human relationships with other animals.

I am also encountering some difficulty addressing the issue of why I want to approach animal rights (or animal liberation? -- still haven't decided) through feminism or through correlating the two. While I see that in a lot of ways, animal rights is feminist theory extended to other species of animals, I don't see the reciprocal relationship between the two. Feminism does not inherently recognize this extension. I know plenty of feminists that are generally unconcerned with animal suffering. I do think that's problematic--but I think it's problematic for reasons that are outside of the scope of feminism. Or maybe my understanding of feminism is too narrow. Or my perception of the feminism others is too narrow?

Though, even if I don't think feminism must necessarily recognize animal rights, I do think that feminist discourses are important groundwork for animal rights discourses. And surely many feminists will recognize the many important intersections of these two areas of concern and come to the conclusion that animals, like women, are exploited in such a way so as to be consumed by men (and women as well, in the case of animals) and this exploitation is performed in such a way that bodily autonomy, particularily reproductive, is subjugated to the power of the consumer. This exploitation of the body is perpetuated by the social and cultural production of values that attributes more moral weight to the consuming body (man or human) and less to the exploited body (woman or non-human).

And it's moments like this that I recognize what a ridiculous theoretical mess I'm in. And in these moments I truly appreciate the fact that I am graduating in less than a month and a half.

What does feminism have to do with animals?

After meeting with Christine, my thesis class instructor, I wasn’t sure if I felt more nervous or excited. She is enthusiastic about my project and she asked me great questions but I stumbled over my answers and I realized just how far I am from where I need to be in just eight weeks.

She asked something along the lines of, why feminism? What does it add to or take away from the credibility of animal liberationist ideology to compare it with feminism? Why do I feel the need to substantiate animal rights by likening it to feminism?

I hadn’t thought it about it like that before. The foundations of feminist thought certainly do not translate perfectly over to the efforts of animal liberationists. A classical definition of feminism is the, “movement for social, political, and economic equality of men and women.” Most animal liberationists are not fighting on behalf of political equality between humans and other species. We recognize fundamental differences between humans and other animals in regards to a number of characteristics, including the ability to use language and critical reasoning skills, which are necessary requirements of any kind of political participation. For this reason, animal liberationists are not concerned with granting other animals the exact same political rights as humans. That being said, while there is no reason to grant pigs or dogs the right to vote, animal liberation is concerned with extending political concern to pigs and dogs, whose bodies are capable of being exploited and subjugated to torture or mistreatment.

But animal liberation and the feminist movement do share similar struggles and similar opposition. In particular, both movements are concerned with the exploitation of the reproductive body. Eggs and milk, two staples of the American diet, are quite literally the products of the reproductive systems of chickens and cows, respectively. So when we have a food system dependent upon these two products, this means we must have a constant supply of chickens and cows whose reproductive bodies are controlled exclusively for the purpose of producing these food items. In our modern economy, this means that all measures are taken to up productivity and lessen expenses and these decisions are made with little to no regard for the impact on the animals involved.

Women’s reproductive bodies have also been targets of exploitation. Forced prostitution, rape, and laws that limit a woman’s right to abortion or other reproductive health services are just a few examples of how a women’s reproductive bodies have been exploited systematically throughout history. A common struggle for feminists is liberating women from the mandatory role of childbearer. These systems of exploitation—rape, prostitution, culturally mandated social roles—have all been constructed for the benefit of the oppressor, in this case patriarchy. For animals, these systems of exploitation—vivisection, animal farming, hunting—are also constructed for the benefit of the oppressor, in this case humans.

[Takes a moment. Breathes. Remembers she is not writing her thesis just yet]

So that’s where I’m going with that. That’s why I’m comparing animal liberation with feminism. But I also appreciate Christina’s suggestion that it might take away from our concern for animals if we are only able to justify it through a comparison with human struggles.

I started reading Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals, edited by Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams, today. Essentially it is another take on understanding animal liberation in contrast to the reason-based approaches presented by Peter Singer and Tom Regan. But I will get into it in more detail at another time. That’s enough for one day.

I guess I have to start somewhere

So it’s the first blog. And frankly, I’m not even sure what this blog is supposed to look like, or sound like, or even be about. I guess this will be my space for processing.

I am finally doing my thesis this quarter, and I’m focusing on an issue that, in many ways, has been on my mind since I first ate lamb as a child and made the connection between that charred piece of meat on my plate and the fuzzy sheepskin blanket I had been so emotionally attached to since birth. Far from being my first time eating animals, my first (and last) time eating lamb served as a small wake up call that what I was eating had once been alive, had once had a face, and had once been not so different from the animals my family loved and kept as pets. My five-year-old reaction to this was to burst into tears, refuse to eat my dinner, and forever associate the smell of lamb roast with the smell of death.

But this association did not extend to the other foods I ate until well into my teens. Until that point, I consumed meat and dairy, with the exception of lamb, with little to no conscious recognition of where that food came from and how it came to be on my plate—let alone why. Exposure to some graphic footage of fur farms and factory farms convinced me to take up vegetarianism half-heartedly for about a year and half at the age of sixteen, but in hindsight I attribute this more to self-exploration and an adolescent desire to distinguish myself from others. I returned to eating meat on a regular basis after my first indulgence of chicken stir-fry and looked back only occasionally to wonder if maybe I had been onto something with that vegetarian thing.

Several years passed, and it wasn’t until I took a class on human-animal relations and animal suffering that I returned to my concern for the treatment of animals. It was almost entirely by chance, as I sat in at my laptop in my apartment in Prague trying to decide what classes to take the following quarter, when my roommate suggested a CHID class her friend had told her about. “Articulating Human and Nonhuman Struggles,” it was called. I was curious. Buried beneath my love of spaghetti bolognese and BLTs was my latent conviction that there was something inherently wrong with my unconscious consumption of other beings. I took the class.

Everything changed. I entered as a skeptic and emerged a believer—so to speak. Looking back, I think it was Singer’s Animal Liberation that won me over in the end, but every reading and video leading up to it was just as influential. I began to start examining the assumptions most people make about other species, and the assumptions that we have about ourselves as humans. I had long since done away with my religious upbringing, rejecting all the binary notions of morality and truth that came with it. It no longer seemed rationale to assume that humanity was the center of the universe—but I was still living under the assumption that it was okay for humans to control the entire lives of other animals for the sake of food. Soon, however, I realized that this assumption was the product of an institutionalized social hierarchy—incidentally the same social hierarchy that sought to subjugate my queer womanhood. I could no longer continue participating in the rampant exploitation of animals while I fought in the name of feminism and social equality. These were no longer isolated struggles to me.

So here I am. Not quite two years since I started thinking critically about these issues, now I attempt to write at least thirty pages trying to convince you all that my struggle is your struggle. To convince you all that if you care about liberating oppressed human groups, you must also care about liberating oppressed animals. Of course the implications of such liberation are not clear. Constructing a new moral philosophy from which to address human-animal relations is not a linear process, and it does not lead every person to the same end point—or an end point at all for that matter. This discourages me, a bit, but I also realize that even engaging in such a process is a significant leap from our habits of unconscious consumption.

I will put my own desire for radical social change on the backburner in hopes of getting people to at least think, and think differently, about their own attitudes toward other species, toward “others”, and how their everyday choices are, quite literally, an active engagement with (or avoidance of) exploitative institutions. I want the everyday consumer to stop feeling so isolated, so ineffective, and, frankly, so innocent. We can and do make a difference through our choices and purchases. Choosing not to think about animals IS choosing to exploit them. Silence and compliance IS participation. I believe significant change comes only when each and every individual comes to the terms with the reality of the power they possess.