The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams

  I recently had the privilege to see the greatest band of all time—Propagandhi—two nights in a row. On both nights, they took a break from playing their recent album and went back to 1996 for two minutes to play their song “Apparently, I’m a ‘P.C. Fascist’ (Because I Care About Both Human and Non-Human Animals),” which (on their album Less Talk, More Rock) transitions into the song “Nailing Descartes to the Wall / (Liquid) Meat Is Still Murder.” When the music stops, there is a spoken word transition that everyone knew to sing along with at the concert: “Consider someone else. Stop consuming animals.”

While Propagandhi have been much less militant than their reputation from the 90s, singer Chris Hannah still took a moment to advertise the book Little Red Barns by Will Potter, which was for sale at their merch table, and advertised the message that “it’s never too late to learn about animal agriculture” and to make changes. It was a really affirming moment, especially since I had just finished The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams, which I believe to be a seminal text in the animal liberation movement.

I have a complicated relationship with meat in that I recognize the problems of consuming animal corpses and yet I still haven’t made the leap to being vegetarian or vegan. I have significantly reduced my consumption of meat and dairy from my younger years, but I’m still not there yet.

In this vein, I read The Sexual Politics of Meat, which is an account of how vegetarianism and feminism are part and parcel with one another. The feminization of animals and the animalization of women have occurred concurrently and have led to the devaluation of each. Adams’ argument hinges on what the opening paragraphs of this review already reveal: the “absent referent.” The absent referent is the idea that reality is displaced, hidden, or abstracted through a series of tactics. For example, we talk about beef, not animal corpse. We talk about pork instead of dead big. Through this concealment, people like me are able to continue eating meat, since it exists in the abstract.

I think what most surprised me about Adams’ argument is how much of it hinges on literary referents. She offers a review of feminist literature and highlights their long history of connection to animal liberation. She also documents the reactionary responses that strove to minimize or trivialize both women and animal activism. A particularly compelling part of the book is a reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The chapter-length analysis goes through the way that Victor Frankenstein’s creature is aligned with subalterns like women and animals, highlighting in particular the creature’s vegetarianism as an indicator of its status as a virtuous outsider.

Adams also goes through a number of ways that anti-vegetarian movements have tried to de-politicize the choice not to eat meat. For example, when abstaining from meat was reframed as a matter of health, it took away its fangs as a truly subversive act. Adams discusses the “history of distortion” that revises our cultural narrative so that, rather than seeing society as dysfunctional, we see individual people as dysfunctional. Within vegetarianism is a “critique of the dominant culture by attributing psychological motives rather than political motives” and society offers explanations “such as status displacement, the erosion of rural society, or a strong identification with pets” as “obvious attempts to eviscerate” those critiques and diminish “those who protest the activities of the dominant culture.” There’s a great quip from Nobel Laureate Isaach Bashevis Singer in response to people who say they became vegetarian for their health; he responds: “I do it for the health of the chickens.” I think it’s a great way to restore the subversiveness to the defanged claims of casual vegetarianism.

She continues on to note that “one way that the dominant culture avoids the radical critique of vegetarianism is by focusing on individuals who seem to disprove the claims of vegetarians.” She points to the fact that people refer to Hitler being a vegetarian (Adams notes that he was not) as a way of showing how the choice not to eat meat is disconnected from morality, politics, or ethics. I can’t possibly think of any contemporary examples of people (falsely) pointing to one exceptional example and building an entire case against a political movement. Not a’one.

In any case, Adam makes a compelling case against eating meat by exposing how women and animals have been conflated by the patriarchal system that offers them both up to consumption via the absent referent. As a work of literary criticism, there is a lot to discuss. As a work of social justice, there is a lot to discuss. As a seminal text of an ongoing discourse towards the liberation of all living beings, there is a lot to discuss.

Happy reading!