Sister Species

Women, Animals and Social Justice

Lisa A. Kemmerer

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780252078118
  9780252036170
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252093210
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

Sister Species: Women, Animals, and Social Justice addresses interconnections between speciesism, sexism, racism, and homophobia, clarifying why social justice activists in the twenty-first century must challenge intersecting forms of oppression.

 

This anthology presents bold and gripping--sometimes horrifying--personal narratives from fourteen activists who have personally explored links of oppression between humans and animals, including such exploitative enterprises as cockfighting, factory farming, vivisection, and the bushmeat trade. Sister Species asks readers to rethink how they view "others," how they affect animals with their daily choices, and how they might bring change for all who are abused. These essays remind readers that women have always been important to social justice and animal advocacy, and they urge each of us to recognize the links that continue to bind all oppressed individuals. The astonishing honesty of these contributors demonstrates with painful clarity why every woman should be an animal activist and why every animal activist should be a feminist.

 

Contributors are Carol J. Adams, Tara Sophia Bahna-James, Karen Davis, Elizabeth Jane Farians, Hope Ferdowsian, Linda Fisher, Twyla François, Christine Garcia, A. Breeze Harper, Sangamithra Iyer, Pattrice Jones, Lisa Kemmerer, Allison Lance, Ingrid Newkirk, Lauren Ornelas, and Miyun Park.

1

fighting cocks

ECOFEMINISM VERSUS SEXUALIZED VIOLENCE

pattrice jones

i’m sitting in a low lawn chair, wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt that says “Feminists for Animal Rights.” My legs are streaked with mud and there’s a bright yellow patch on one ankle that can only be dried egg yolk. My forearms are dotted with abrasions encircled by bruises. It’s sunny and hot.

From under the brim of a floppy hat, I’ve got one eye on a Penguin paperback and the other on a multicolored rooster who might or might not start a fight. My hat sports the colors of the Brazilian flag, but ought to be UN blue, because I’m a peacekeeper today. At any moment, I might be forced to place myself between combatants. In the interim, I wait. And wait.

Welcome to the exciting yet enervating world of rooster rehabilitation. At the Eastern Shore Sanctuary, we help roosters who have formerly been used in cockfighting to live peacefully with other birds. Although illegal in many countries, and in most of the United States, cockfighting persists in parts of Asia, on some Pacific Islands, in parts of South and Central America, and in the southern United States. In this cruel “sport,” roosters are socialized to view other roosters as predators, provoked by injections of testosterone and methamphetamines, armed with steel blades attached to the stumps of their sawed-off spurs, and then matched in bloody battles from which the only escape is death. Between events, they are typically isolated in small cages or tethered to stakes adjacent to A-frame shelters.

Because cockfights are inevitably the site of illegal gambling, authorities are quicker to intervene in cockfighting than in other forms of animal cruelty. Unfortunately, their interventions usually do not aid the true victims of the crime—roosters. Most often, birds confiscated from cockfighting operations are euthanized. We are able to rescue and rehabilitate only a handful of the hundreds of former fighting cocks who are confiscated every year. For each rooster we are able to save, our sanctuary means everything. Because chickens are very close genetically to the wild jungle fowl (the living ancestors of modern chickens), many former fighters choose a feral lifestyle, sleeping in trees and wandering the woods all day. Others move into the coops, joining former egg factory inmates and big “broiler” chickens, in a more sedate lifestyle. It’s their choice, as it should be.

How did a lesbian-feminist from Baltimore end up rehabbing roosters in a rural chicken yard? Just like the old joke, it all started with a chicken crossing a road. Shortly after unknowingly moving to an epicenter of industrial poultry production, my former partner Miriam Jones and I rescued a chicken from the roadside. I’d always admired birds from afar, but I was surprised to find myself growing emotionally close to this ungainly creature, who sometimes looked so much like a reptile that I knew scientists were right about birds being dinosaurs. I also noticed that she had my grandmother’s eyes (as well as her stubborn charm) and that her feet were amazingly similar to human hands. I’d always felt so earthbound, but here was the evidence: People are related to birds! I was excited by this discovery, and very touched by this particular bird’s growing attachment to me.

One day, Mosselle (as we called her, after my grandmother) made a new sound that seemed some kind of announcement. “Maybe she laid an egg!” I thought. I ran around looking for where she might have hidden her prize. A few days later, early in the morning, she gargled like she was choking, and I worried that she might be sick. Luckily, somebody with some sense commented, “That bird’s a rooster.” I had misunderstood an adolescent rooster’s first attempts at crowing!

I struggled with the realization that my beloved friend was a rooster, rather than a hen. Even though he hadn’t changed, it was hard not to see him differently. I struggled not to let all of the things I had heard about arrogant, posturing, aggressive roosters change the way I saw this dear young bird, who had come to count on me. This was my first inkling of the ways that gendered preconceptions alter our perceptions of chickens and other nonhuman animals.

That insight was a long time coming. “What was I thinking?!?” That’s what I wonder every time I remember the years I spent as a vegetarian-but-notvegan lesbian/feminist/antiracist/pro-peace/antipoverty activist who insisted that everything—racism, sexism, homophobia, capitalism, militarism, etc., etc.—was connected … but somehow managed to leave nonhuman animals out of the equation. For me, the question is not “what led me to include other animals in my activism?” but, rather, “what took me so long to include other animals in my activism?” It is a question worth answering. After we make a radical change in thought or behavior, we have a tendency to distance our new selves from our previous selves. That’s understandable, but not useful. If we can’t remember—much less have empathy with—our former ways of thinking and feeling, how can we make meaningful contact with those who still think and feel as we used to do? And, if we can’t make contact, how can we prompt others to rethink what feel to them like intensely personal choices?

So, as much as it makes me feel queasy to do so, I’m going to try to actually answer the question of why an altruistic, animal-loving, vegetarian feminist activist, who insisted that all forms of oppression were linked, took so damn long to go vegan.

I quit eating meat in 1976, the same year I turned fifteen, came out, and went to my first gay rights rally (not in that order). When I say that I “came out,” I mean that I resolved to never lie about my love for women, never deliberately pass for straight, and never deny a lover by calling her “him.” To do so, I felt, would be to betray not only the women I desired, but my deepest self.

My decision to quit meat was equally simple. Somehow, through the confluence of midseventies influences, I knew that vegetarianism was a particularly healthy way to eat. One day, quite suddenly, I realized: If I didn’t need to eat meat to stay alive, then eating meat was killing for pleasure. I couldn’t live with myself, wouldn’t be the nonviolent person I believed myself to be, if I killed other beings—beings who had their own desires—merely to satisfy my desire for the taste of their flesh.

Looking back, I see that both decisions, coming out and quitting meat, are about the interplay of desire and integrity. Sometimes integrity means being true to your desires, and sometimes integrity requires you to refuse your desires. I also notice that both decisions were about bodies and consent. A primary tenet of gay liberation is that what consenting people do with each other’s bodies is nobody else’s business. And, of course, eating meat is something you do to somebody else’s body without their consent.

Since both of these ethical decisions were about bodies, I don’t want to leave out their visceral dimensions. These were full-bodied decisions. I didn’t just think, “I’m going to quit meat,” and “I’m not going to lie about my sexuality.” Once I had thought through the questions, my body recoiled at the notion of eating a cow or pretending to be straight. I remember very clearly the feeling of revulsion that arose whenever I summoned up the mental image of a cow and imagined eating her, which is particularly interesting in light of what I’m going to tell you a little later.

When I look back on that earnest teenager making those two seemingly unrelated decisions, it seems to me now that in both instances she was decisively rejecting patriarchal control of her body. I know now that homophobia is what Suzanne Pharr calls “a weapon of sexism,” one of many means of coercing people into patriarchal families. And I know now that patriarchy (male rule) and pastoralism (herding farmed animals) coevolved, the ideas and practices of each commingling with and compounding the other.

But I didn’t know any of this back in 1976. Or 1986. Or even 1996, although then I was on the brink of an emotional and intellectual breakthrough that would lead me to go vegan and become an animal advocate.

Meanwhile, I was vegetarian, not vegan. Not even reliably vegetarian. I held out well enough while I was living rough, as a teenager, supporting myself at an urban fast-food restaurant. All of us relied on free food from the restaurant to augment salaries that didn’t cover rent and groceries. Sometimes, when I was really hungry and couldn’t bring myself to stomach one more meal of salad and french fries, I’d break down and resentfully eat a burger or piece of chicken. I have a very clear memory of me, at about seventeen, sitting in a cheap molded plastic chair, looking out the grimy window at a grey day, choking down chicken flesh, thinking, “this is so wrong!”

Those were raw years for me, with the wounds of a troubled childhood still oozing anger and pain that anybody could see. Maybe that’s why it was so easy for me to hold on to the bodily empathy in which my vegetarianism was most deeply rooted. But then I entered a period of years wherein I walled off feelings in order to focus on pulling myself out of the dangerous lifestyle into which I had drifted. I got a good job. I started night school. And I forgot about nonhuman animals.

In the early- and mideighties, I lived with lovers who ate meat and I also occasionally ate, or even prepared, meat. But when those relationships ended, I went back to being steadily vegetarian at home, and happily so. But if I had a really strong urge for a hamburger or a pepperoni pizza, I sometimes gave in, rationalizing that compromise would maintain a vegetarian diet in the long run better than rigidity.

Somehow, the ethical clarity of my original decision to be vegetarian had become muddied and muddled. I knew very well that I tended to want to eat meat when I felt angry. I knew very well that eating that hamburger would be displacing my aggression onto an innocent nonhuman. And yet I did eat that hamburger every once in a while. More often than I want to admit.

Those murderous “lapses” were mentally and morally tolerable to me, leaving me feeling only slightly more guilty than I already felt, because non-human animals had gone missing from my emotional landscape. Those occasional hamburgers were just “meat” to me rather than the remains of dead nonhumans with whom I actively empathized.

All of that stopped, thanks to Alice Walker. In her essay, “Am I Blue?” Walker describes going out for a celebratory steak dinner only to have the thought, “I am eating misery” interrupt her pleasure. That phrase must have stealthily planted itself in my brain, because the next time I tried to give into a craving for meat, I had no sooner taken a bite than the words “I am eating misery” echoed in my head. My stomach reeled. I spit out the half-chewed flesh and have never been tempted again.

So, for me at least, the ethical mandate had to be full-bodied—a matter of heart and gut as well as mind—in order to be truly sustainable. I suspect that’s true for many people. Abstract rules are easily broken. People often do things they know they ought not to do, if they can get away with it, especially if they can tell themselves that it doesn’t hurt anybody.

Which brings us to the next lesson we can learn from my past misdeeds: We must keep the real repercussions of our actions (or inaction) on actual nonhuman animals always in mind. That’s true, I think, not only for would-be vegans but also for those who purport to be advocates for nonhuman animals.

The question remains: Why did I think of the decision whether or not to eat meat as an apolitical personal choice rather than a political decision (like every other decision)? The ardent activism of my teens returned with a vengeance in my late twenties, once the chore of working my way through college was behind me, and I was safely ensconced in graduate school. I involved myself in local struggles for fair housing and against police brutality and in national struggles against AIDS and for peace. I marched and chanted, led workshops, organized sit-ins and kiss-ins, distributed condoms and clean needles, and sat through endless hours of tedious meetings. Whenever I had a little extra money (which wasn’t often), I gave it to PETA (the only animal organization I knew about). And yet, when one of the students in the social change class that I was teaching asked me why our lineup of social change movements didn’t include the animal rights movement, I incoherently responded that I supported animal rights, but that this issue was tangential to the linked oppressions (racism, sexism, etc.) that were the focus of our scrutiny.

What was I thinking?!? As a feminist, I was well-versed in the theory behind the slogan, “the personal is political,” which simply means that everything we choose to do (or not do) matters. What in the world led me to believe that every decision in life—including decisions about how to conduct one’s most intimate relations—was a political decision except the decision whether or not to eat meat? I can’t even say “except what we eat,” since I was boycotting grapes (farm workers) and Coca-Cola (apartheid) at the time. I also believed in, although couldn’t always afford to support, organic agriculture. I recognized that many food decisions were political decisions.

This very strange notion that the decision whether or not to eat nonhuman animals is a purely personal decision, uniquely exempt from the ethical and political considerations that ought to inform every other decision, is quite common and worthy of our attention. When I interrogate this notion, I find that, for me, declaring vegetarianism a political decision would have been tantamount to mandating vegetarianism for everybody, and that there were two reasons I hesitated to do this: excessive deference to religion and a misplaced application of the right to bodily self-determination.

Like many people raised to respect “freedom of religion,” I used to shy away from analyzing the implications of the political ideologies that call themselves religions. Even though I was an atheist, I never challenged anybody about their religious beliefs. And though I had not yet had the pleasure of hearing Christians shout “God made chickens for us to eat!” I knew that most Christians view the eating of meat as a literally God-given right. Since I saw religion as a sacrosanct personal decision, I felt that I had no right to challenge this religious understanding. Only when I quit thinking of religious ideologies as uniquely exempt from ethical scrutiny was I free to directly challenge the human hubris implicit in most of the belief systems that men have constructed to explain the world and claim dominion over nonhuman animals.

I say “men” rather than “people” because it was men and also because those same stories have been and continue to be used to assert male dominion over women and girls. So, it’s not surprising that an association between animal advocacy and feminism dates back to those hunger-striking vegetarian suffragists who were force-fed meat in a vain effort to get them to swallow male domination. Of course, control of female bodies is precisely the point of patriarchy. Maybe that’s why—in spite of the fact that women have made up the majority of animal advocates from the earliest days of antivivisection agitation to the current era of open rescues—many women feel oppressed when somebody tells them they ought not to eat farmed animals. The mandate to “go vegan” can feel to some women like one more instance of others telling you what you must or cannot do with your own body. That’s because, as was the case for me during my lapses from vegetarianism, the nonhuman animals are absent from the mental equation. Only if other animals enter the picture is it possible to see that eating meat is doing something to somebody else’s body.

Women make most food purchases and preparation decisions. If women are going to both go vegan and withstand the demands of male family members for meat, women must be emboldened to resist their own subordination and at the same time reject the oppression of nonhuman individuals. In other words, animal advocates must balance the demand that women give up their power over nonhuman animals by encouraging them to seize their power among human animals. This sounds tricky but comes easy once you see that sexism and speciesism, having grown up together across the centuries, are codependent siblings of dysfunctional patriarchal families.

Before I illustrate this assertion, I have one more question for my former self: Why did it take me so long to extend my personal ban on meat to include dairy and eggs?

Here are some of my predictable and common answers to “What was I thinking?”: I didn’t know about battery cages and forced pregnancies. I didn’t think about what happened to cows and hens after their bodies stopped producing economically profitable quantities of milk and eggs. I had been seduced by Elsie the Cloverland cow and other fictions designed to deceive us into believing that happy hens and placid cows live on spacious farms and are not at all inconvenienced by the friendly farmers who collect their eggs and relieve them of excess milk.

My former partner, Miriam Jones, burst my bubble a couple of years before we moved to the country and found that first chicken. We jiggled our checkbook and I was able to donate a lot more money than I had ever been able to donate before. Soon the newsletters of the animal rights organizations, farmed animal sanctuaries, and antivivisection societies began flooding our mailbox, and we learned more than we ever wanted to know. Thanks to an early childhood trauma involving a flood of blood, I have a hard time with gory images, so Miriam screened the brochures, telling me the relevant facts and showing me the photos she felt I really needed to see. One picture I really needed to see was of hens in battery cages. I quit eggs.

Dairy was more difficult. I had a really hard time believing what Miriam was reading to me. Something about the whole issue was deeply destabilizing, so much so that I half-believed that animal advocates were trying to trick me, even though I knew that was an absurd idea. What was I thinking?!? Perhaps the more apt question would be: What wasn’t I thinking and why wasn’t I thinking it?

To answer this question, we need to explore an incident years earlier. I really don’t want to tell you about this; I had forgotten all about it until I started writing this essay. Indeed, my wish not to speak of this incident was so strong that I was even more belated in meeting this essay’s writing deadline than I usually am. I repeatedly stopped right at this point in the essay, set my work aside, and forgot about it for days or even weeks. What I kept wanting to forget, what I don’t want you to know, is that I did know that something was very wrong with dairy. I did see, felt uncomfortable, and then promptly forgot that cows were hurt in the process of producing milk and cheese.

Here’s what happened: ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Fighting Cocks: Ecofeminism Versus Sexualized Violence
• 2 From Rural Roots to Angels’ Wings
• 3 Are You Waving At Me?
• 4 Connections: Speciesism, Racism, and Whiteness as the Norm
• 5 Fighting “Other”
• 6 Small Small Redemption
• 7 Compassion Without Borders
• 8 Theology and Animals
• 9 Freeing Feathered Spirits
• 10 The Art of Truth-Telling: Theater as Compassionate Action and Social Change
• 11 From Hunting Grounds to Chicken Rights: My Story in an Eggshell
• 12 Isn’t Justice Supposed to be Blind? Practicing Animal Law
• 13 An Appetite for Justice
• 14 A Magical Talisman
• Appendix: Factory Farming and Females
• Index