tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91442442217998040702024-03-08T05:34:03.968-06:00H.E.A.L.T.H.<a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/">Humans, Earth, and Animals Living Together Harmoniously</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.comBlogger45125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-28571040786778882422015-01-22T17:49:00.000-06:002015-01-22T17:49:04.315-06:00Feed your Critical Animal in 2015<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieAles4e1BXbc9_uACIQzRYSrz_Nf8vdoAu4OSr5s8B1aHXDgOLOQu80o9DN_0685pxXXSqsmImyaWX-40-DyndT4hzTCogfJTGqm517KvW1j4qLDFNbaEmDeZMQ7xhAg0qZkvPsh7OY-X/s1600/9780231167765.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieAles4e1BXbc9_uACIQzRYSrz_Nf8vdoAu4OSr5s8B1aHXDgOLOQu80o9DN_0685pxXXSqsmImyaWX-40-DyndT4hzTCogfJTGqm517KvW1j4qLDFNbaEmDeZMQ7xhAg0qZkvPsh7OY-X/s1600/9780231167765.jpg" height="400" width="262" /></a><b>Don't Miss These Provocative Books in 2015.</b><br />
<br />
<b>Outlined below is the fourth annual Animal Reading List.</b> This follows <a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2012/02/animal-theory-going-feral-in-2012.html">2012</a>'s exciting lineup of books challenging conventional approaches to animal ethics and advocacy, <a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2013/01/animal-theory-unleashed-in-2013.html">2013</a>'s
posthuman bonanza, and <a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2014/02/critical-animal-studies-in-2014.html">2014</a>'s expanse of critical animal theory, interspecies relationships, and effective advocacy for animals.<br />
<br />
<b>2015 has yet to prove itself to be as fruitful as the last few in regards to critical animal studies</b>. Does this mean "the animal turn" has been but a five year trend in scholarship or that many 2015 books are yet to be announced? It's hard to tell, but there is so much material from 2014 that you'll be too preoccupied with good reads to really notice any lag. <br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: small;">If you are interested in receiving and reviewing any of these books for the <a href="http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/students-for-cas/journal-for-critical-animal-studies/"><span style="font-size: small;">Journal for Critical Animal Studies</span></a>, please send me an <a href="http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/students-for-cas/journal-for-critical-animal-studies/editorial-team/">email</a>.</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>ETHICS</b> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-16776-5/interspecies-ethics">Interspecies Ethics </a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">(Cynthia Willet, 2014)</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Interspecies
Ethics explores animals’ vast capacity for agency, justice, solidarity,
humor, and communication across species. The social bonds diverse
animals form provide a remarkable model for communitarian justice and
cosmopolitan peace, challenging the human exceptionalism that drives
modern moral theory... Interspecies Ethics develops a communitarian
model for multispecies ethics.. The book’s ethical vision offers an
alternative to utilitarian, deontological, and virtue ethics...
illuminat[ing] a variety of theories and contrasting approaches, tracing
the contours of a postmoral ethics.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://lanternbooks.presswarehouse.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=438993">Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals</a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=f6T1bZ-JEd4C&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false"> </a>(Lori Gruen, 2015)</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">In
Entangled Empathy, scholar and activist Lori Gruen argues that rather
than focusing on animal “rights,” we ought to work to make our
relationships with animals right by empathetically responding to their
needs, interests, desires, vulnerabilities, hopes, and unique
perspectives... Gruen describes entangled empathy as a type of caring
perception focused on attending to another’s experience of well-being...
When we engage in entangled empathy we are transformed and in that
transformation we can imagine less violent, more meaningful ways of
being together. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/113733763X/ref=rdr_ext_sb_ti_hist_1">The Ethics of Animal Re-creation and Modification: Reviving, Rewilding, Restoring</a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"> (Marku Oksanan and Helena Siipi, 2014)</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">The
Ethics of Animal Recreation and Modification studies philosophical and
ethical issues arising from new technological possibilities to repair
the loss of animal diversity. Several research groups are currently
working toward re-creating extinct animals such as the woolly mammoth by
the methods of modern genomic technology and of selective breeding.
These projects challenge the main underlying tenet of conservation
ethics: the extinction of a species is irreversible. For this reason
alone, the idea of de-extinction, or reversing extinction, is
troublesome. </span><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>GEOGRAPHY</b></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDIIJXw5sxIka3fqySoGRdMMkLbtOXLm0KtFo72txaUJZArl9s3WVls0WhgrERPKhMj-T4GQya6V07fJGIrFWGyFeddaPQulXunb5AxItgqMmq4zB61tp2bEpkDPvknWRhf__akP6ykN-X/s1600/index.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDIIJXw5sxIka3fqySoGRdMMkLbtOXLm0KtFo72txaUJZArl9s3WVls0WhgrERPKhMj-T4GQya6V07fJGIrFWGyFeddaPQulXunb5AxItgqMmq4zB61tp2bEpkDPvknWRhf__akP6ykN-X/s1600/index.jpg" height="320" width="204" /></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://routledge-ny.com/books/details/9781138791503/">Critical Animal Geographies</a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"> (Katie Gillespie, Rosemary-Claire Collard 2015)</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Critical
Animal Geographies provides new geographical perspectives on critical
animal studies, exploring the spatial, political and ethical dimensions
of animals’ lived experience and human-animal encounter.... Chapters
draw together feminist, political-economic, post-humanist, anarchist,
post-colonial, and critical race literatures... In doing so, the book
pushes readers to confront how human-animal relations are mixed up with
overlapping axes of power and exploitation, including gender, race,
class, and species.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/sociology/political-sociology/dangerous-crossings-race-species-and-nature-multicultural-age">Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age</a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"> (Claire Jean Kim, 2015)</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Dangerous
Crossings offers an interpretation of the impassioned disputes that
have arisen in the contemporary United States over the use of animals in
the cultural practices of nonwhite peoples. It examines three
controversies: the battle over the “cruelty” of the live animal markets
in San Francisco's Chinatown, the uproar over the conviction of NFL
superstar Michael Vick on dogfighting charges, and the firestorm over
the Makah tribe's decision to resume whaling in the Pacific Northwest
after a hiatus of more than seventy years. Claire Jean Kim shows that
each dispute demonstrates how race and species operate as conjoined
logics, or mutually constitutive taxonomies of power, to create the
animal, the Chinese immigrant, the black man, and the “Indian” in the
white imagination.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>POLITICS & STRATEGY</b></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/political-animals-and-animal-politics-mlj-wissenburg/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137434616">Political Animals and Animal Politics</a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=f6T1bZ-JEd4C&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false"> </a>(M.L.J. Wissenburg & David Schlosberg, 2014)</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">While
much has been written on environmental politics on the one hand, and
animal ethics and welfare on the other, animal politics, as the
interface of the two, is underexamined. There are key political
implications in the increase of animal protection laws, the rights of
nature, and political parties and movements dedicated to animals. What
are the implications of the increasing attention and popularity of
ethical discourses on animal welfare and animal rights for politics and
political philosophy? What is the animal's place in environmental
political thought – and in 21st Century political philosophy per se?
What can, rather than should, politics do for animals – what
institutions and practices are suitable and desirable? Can animal ethics
learn from animal politics?<br /></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.cambridge.org/US/academic/subjects/life-sciences/biological-anthropology-and-primatology/politics-species-reshaping-our-relationships-other-animals">The Politics of Species: Reshaping our Relationships with Other Animals</a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=f6T1bZ-JEd4C&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false"> </a>(Raymond Corbey & Annette Lanjouw, 2014)</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Bringing
together leading experts from a range of disciplines, this volume
identifies the key barriers to a definition of moral respect that
includes nonhuman animals. It sets out to increase concern, empathy and
inclusiveness by developing strategies that can be used to protect other
animals from exploitation in the wild and from suffering in captivity.
The chapters link scientific data with normative and philosophical
reflections, offering unique insight into controversial issues around
the ethical, political and legal status of other species.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Total-Liberation-Promise-Radical-Movement/dp/0816687773/ref=pd_sim_b_7?ie=UTF8&refRID=0ZHCSCJK5AMFMET7K2CM">Total Liberation: The Power and Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement</a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=f6T1bZ-JEd4C&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false"> </a>(David Naguib Pellow, 2014)</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">In
Total Liberation, David Naguib Pellow takes up this claim [“all
oppression is linked"] and makes sense of the often tense and violent
relationships among humans, ecosystems, and nonhuman animal species,
expanding our understanding of inequality and activists’ uncompromising
efforts to oppose it. Grounded in interviews with more than one hundred
activists, on-the-spot fieldwork, and analyses of thousands of pages of
documents, websites, journals, and zines, Total Liberation reveals the
ways in which radical environmental and animal rights movements
challenge inequity through a vision they call “total liberation.” </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><a href="http://www.framingfarming.com/"><span style="font-size: small;">Framing Farming</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.framingfarming.com/">: Communication Strategies for Animal Rights </a>(Carrie Freeman, 2014)</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Professor
Freeman examines the animal rights movement’s struggles over whether to
construct farmed animal campaign messages based more on utility
(emphasizing animal welfare, anti-cruelty farming reforms, dietary
reduction of animal foods, and human self-interest like health) or based
more on ideology (emphasizing animal rights and abolition of farming
and eating fellow animals). Freeman prioritizes the latter, “ideological
authenticity,” to promote a needed transformation in worldviews and
human-animal identity, not just behaviors. This would mean framing “Go
Veg” messages not only around compassion, but also around principles of
ecology, liberty, and justice</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN</b></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjOefmCSigTWJZd5pT0dW9wWMHYyRSXzQuErbRrC5b3qKs1q6-IS2K-URprSQfIvUEqsXJ7T2FCtJDhs0vtKv2IWh3uMHC46jLK9odFL7irP2ubrmxx0qCtpM1RTd-nsEYqC26MXDxuriO/s1600/9781409464600.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjOefmCSigTWJZd5pT0dW9wWMHYyRSXzQuErbRrC5b3qKs1q6-IS2K-URprSQfIvUEqsXJ7T2FCtJDhs0vtKv2IWh3uMHC46jLK9odFL7irP2ubrmxx0qCtpM1RTd-nsEYqC26MXDxuriO/s1600/9781409464600.jpg" /></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><br /></b></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/What-Animals-Teach-about-Politics/dp/082235800X/ref=pd_sim_b_11?ie=UTF8&refRID=142KWYJJEKVEPNRCZ5J9">What Animals Can Teach Us About Politics</a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=f6T1bZ-JEd4C&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false"> </a>(Brian Massumi, 2014)</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">His
is not a human politics of the animal, but an integrally animal
politics, freed from connotations of the "primitive" state of nature and
the accompanying presuppositions about instinct permeating modern
thought. Massumi integrates notions marginalized by the dominant
currents in evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and
philosophy—notions such as play, sympathy, and creativity—into the
concept of nature. As he does so, his inquiry necessarily expands,
encompassing not only animal behavior but also animal thought and its
distance from, or proximity to, those capacities over which human
animals claim a monopoly: language and reflexive consciousness. For
Massumi, humans and animals exist on a continuum... [which] requires a
new logic of "mutual inclusion."</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/095714704X/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=095714704X&linkCode=as2&tag=critianima-20&linkId=IV6XFYBRQC7DSGJH">Zoogenesis: Thinking Encounters with Animals</a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"> (Richard Iveson, 2014)</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Zoogenesis:
Thinking Encounter with Animals offers radical new possibilities for
encountering and thinking with other animals, and thus for the politics
of animal liberation. Examining the machinations of power that
legitimize the killing of nonhuman animals, Zoogenesis shows too how
thoroughly entangled they are with the 'noncriminal' putting to death of
human animals... Iveson thereafter explores the possibility of
interventions...that potentially make it unthinkable that living beings
can be 'legitimately' slaughtered.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=5iHBAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PP5&dq=beasts%20origin%20of%20evil&pg=PP10#v=onepage&q&f=false">Beasts: What Animals Can Teach Us about the Origins of Good and Evil</a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=f6T1bZ-JEd4C&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false"> </a>(Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, 2014)</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Masson
has showed that animals can teach us much about our own emotions—love
(dogs), contentment (cats), grief (elephants), among others. But animals
have much to teach us about negative emotions such as anger and
aggression as well, and in unexpected ways... We link the basest human
behavior to animals, to “beasts”... and claim the high ground for our
species. We are least human, we think, when we succumb to our primitive,
animal ancestry. Nothing could be further from the truth... Our burden
is that humans, and in particular humans in our modern industrialized
world, are the most violent animals to our own kind in existence, or
possibly ever in existence on earth </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409464600">Our Children and Other Animals: The Cultural Construction of Human-Animal Relations in Childhood </a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">(Matthew Cole, 2014)</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Focusing
on the socialization of the human use of other animals as resources in
contemporary Western society, this book explores the cultural
reproduction of human-nonhuman animal relations in childhood. With close
attention to the dominant practices through which children encounter
animals and mainstream representations of animals in children's
culture... Our Children and Other Animals reveals the interconnectedness
of studies of childhood, culture and human-animal relations. In doing
so it establishes the importance of human-animal relations in sociology,
by describing the sociological importance of animals in children's
lives and children in animals’ lives.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>OTHER</b></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1451627009/?tag=slatmaga-20">Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves</a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"> (Laurel Braitman, 2014)</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">For the first time, a historian of science draws evidence from across
the world to show how humans and other animals are astonishingly similar
when it comes to their feelings and the ways in which they lose their
minds. Thankfully, all of us can heal... How do these animals recover?
The same way we do: with love, with medicine, and above all, with the
knowledge that someone understands why we suffer and what can make us
feel better.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.veganpublishers.com/multimedia-archive/injustice-anywhere-essays-connecting-human-animal-and-environmental-well-being/">Circles of Compassion: Connecting Issues of Justice </a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">(Will Tuttle, 2014)</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">This book consists of a series of
essays by internationally recognized authors and activists...focusing on how the seemingly disparate issues of human,
animal, and environmental rights are indeed connected. Authors also provide
practical guidance about how to make the individual, systems, and social
changes necessary to effectively create a peaceful and just world for all.</span></div>
Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-55425531488784115522014-04-18T10:25:00.000-05:002014-07-02T17:13:45.275-05:00REVIEW: Defining Critical Animal Studies (2/2)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">***This is the second half of the review ***<br>
Please see the <a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2014/04/review-defining-critical-animal-studies.html">first half</a> for a discussion of CAS as an alternative form of research and education than HAS and the Posthumanities.<br>
<br>
<br>
<u>VEGANISM as part of CAS</u><br>
Veganism (and vegan education) is a critical component of CAS that most explicitly distinguishes CAS from HAS and the Posthumanities, wherein veganism draws sympathy, but, not uncommonly, also rolling eyes. So significant is veganism that Glasser and Roy recommend adding a twelfth principle of CAS to the original ten that (more-or-less) requires those in CAS to practice vegan in order to be accountable to their research subjects: "<i>scholars must not abuse, injure, degrade, exploit, cage, denigrate, or kill humans, nonhuman, animals and the earth</i>."(p. 100)<br>
<br>
<b>However, just because CAS appraises veganism does not mean it is (ironically) uncritical of the politics surrounding it. While editors call it a "moral baseline," they acknowledge that structural conditions such as a lack of geographic, financial, and educational access obstruct many people from practicing veganism</b> (p. xx). Along these lines, Grubbs and Loadenthal also raise judgement of mainstream veganism, following Dr. Harper, as a “providence of a moneyed minority who can afford expensive foods in which "sizist, racist, and classist discourse [...] replace ideological critique with green capitalism" (p. 187).<br>
<br>
<br>
In Chapter 4, Stephanie Jenkins and Vasile Stanescu likewise critique "vegan lifestyle" discourse which complicity operates within the neoliberal framework of privatizing moral problems through markets and placing full moral accountability on individuals rather than institutions and social structures:<br>
</span><br>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;">Boycott veganism conflates conspicuous consumption with ethical action
and political change… limiting activism to an economic boycott undercuts
the moral force of veganism by reducing it to an individual lifestyle.
(p. 78)</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;">
Richard White and Erika Cudworth alternatively conceptualize veganism as a micro-resistance, through French anarchist Elisee Reclus' theory of "microgeographies" which privileges practice in the "here and now" (p. 203). Jenkins and Stanescu call this "engaged veganism": <br>
</span><br>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;">[E]ngaged veganism refuses complicity with and symbolically disrupts the instrumentalization and hierarchialization of animal life [necessitating] a micro-political revolution at the level of embodied perception, aesthetics, taste, and affective responses (p. 76)</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span>
<br>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;">
Engaged veganism is thus similar to what I have previously called <i><a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2011/06/socially-centered-veganism-vs.html">social veganism</a> </i>(as opposed to diet, lifestyle, boycott, pragmatic, and ethical veganism), an alternative to what I call <a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2011/06/crtique-of-consumption-centered.html"><i>consumption veganism</i></a>.<br>
</span><br>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;">I understand veganism as a social modality, an affiliation and solidarity with others beyond (species) boundaries, in which animal others are regarded as someones, not somethings... Exploiting animals may not terminate conversations absolutely, but enables and is enabled by an emotional [ignorance] to their resistance whenever it becomes inconvenient to using them.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;">
<b>In other words, veganism is an embodied perception of animals as fellow social creatures whom we
have an inherent curiosity for and permeating compassion for through our
nature as social beings</b>. Veganism is a recognition of something already there, not an additive ideology or identity politics.</span><br>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br>
</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Critically, Adam Weitzenfeld and Melanie Joy state that the consumption of nonhuman animal bodies, far from a matter of personal choice, is at the heart of speciesist narratives and institutions:<br>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Of all the ways humans are subject to speciesism, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnism">carnism</a>—the unrecognized ideology that legitimates the killability and edibility of animal others—is arguably the deepest, most pervasive and catastrophic in modern Western cultures. Vegan praxis is one means of embodying critical animal theory and challenging the hegemony of speciesist institutions and anthropocentrist ideology that keep the human-animal binary and hierarchy alive. (p. 1-2)</blockquote>
As a result Weitzenfeld and Joy, recommend shedding light on flesh-consumption practices as not "normal, natural, and necessary," but a biased schema (a way<b> </b>of perceiving the world) in order to expose carnistic affects as <i>social and political</i> intuitions. <b>While carnism is based upon <i>post-hoc</i> disavowals of animal subjectivity and personal accountability for the consequences of choices</b><b>, veganism is "based
on empathy, authenticity, reciprocity, justice, and integrity—the
principles that underscore true freedom" for nonhumand <i>and </i>human animals</b> (p.25).<br>
<br></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<u>Decolonization and CAS</u><br>
As the above quote implies, Critical Animal Studies is not only committed to animal liberation, but human liberation. CAS scholars argue that one cannot be had without the other for both liberations are obstructed by the violent construction of human identity as "something superior and opposed to animals and animality" (p. 3).<br>
<br>
<br>
</div></div><a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2014/04/review-defining-critical-animal-studies_18.html#more">Read more »</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-27207419184079005032014-04-17T14:52:00.000-05:002014-05-07T10:20:15.673-05:00REVIEW: Defining Critical Animal Studies (1/2)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[H]uman being is not so much a value-neutral biological fact as a violent political fiction. (p. 8)</span> <br>
<div style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">-Weitzenfeld and Joy 2013</span></div>
<br>
<span style="font-size: small;">Just before the eve of 2014, Peter Lang International published the first anthology explicitly dedicated to "Critical Animal Studies." (See my <a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/p/critical-animal-studies-resources.html">resource list</a> for some close predecessors). Given I have yet to see a review of the book online and that many CAS folk across the world are interested in the book but may not have access to the book or time to read it, I've written one myself!<br>
<br>
<b>My purpose is not to judge the book so much as reflect upon and reorganize its themes around questions concerning what CAS is, why it is a significant site of resistance in the university, and what it can contribute to animal advocacy beyond the university. </b>The review is divided into four sections: (1) why CAS is an important field, (2) what CAS research and teaching involves, and CAS's commitment to (3) veganism and (4) decolonization.<br>
<br>
<br>
<u>WHY CRITICAL ANIMAL STUDIES</u><br>
<b>Fittingly, the book opens with a Forward by David Nibert, author of the canonical text <i>Animal Rights / Human Rights</i>, and a Preface by Ronnie Lee, co-founder of the Animal Liberation Front</b>. In a matter of a several pages, Nibert and Lee concisely provide the historical and political context for the value of Critical Animal Studies. Historically, writes Nibert, the domination of human and nonhuman animals have gone chain-in-chain. Since the institution of animals as property,<br>
</span><br>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;">[t]he possession of large numbers of these other animals became a sign of wealth and dominance, and elite male’s treatment of them as property was extended to women and devalued people. (p. ix)</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;">
The result of cattle ownership? Thousands of years of military invasion, cultural destruction, human slavery, zoontic disease, gender warfare, and more. Even the contemporary military and animal industrial complexes function interdependently, with military expenditures and campaigns to capture more animal capital in Latin America (and elsewhere), and the exploitation of animals in military training and testing.<br>
<br>
So how does one respond to these twin industrial machines of violence? The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Liberation_Front">Animal Liberation Front</a> may have been an appropriate response to the industrialization of animal exploitation in the 1980s and 90s, however, after spending nine years in prison, Ronnie Lee has suspicions that its efficacy has declined.<br>
</span><br>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;">Although it is my belief that ALF actions have contributed significantly to a huge reduction in the fur trade and a big decline in animal experimentation here in the UK, I now have doubts as to the value of this type of activity in terms of bringing about widespread animal liberation. (p. xiii)</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;">
Under new legislation such as the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Enterprise_Terrorism_Act">Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act</a> and state <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag">Ag-Gag</a> initiatives, ALF, if it were to ever achieve more influence, would be crushed by the State. In addition, despite its success, such direct action bypasses the public rather than engaging with it to transform its consciousness and behavior. Without transformation and solidarity, change will not be sustainable.<b> Critical Animal Studies thus serves as a conduit for understanding the interdependence of liberatory movements and the value of education as <i>a</i> vehicle for transformation and resistance to oppression.</b> <br>
<u></u><br>
Beyond serving as a conduit of knowledge production and dissemination, why is the university an important site of resistance for nonhumans and their allies? </span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Universities are incorporated in the animal industrial
complex, providing space, funding,
technology, and training to present and future generations of animal
exploiters and the innovation of new forms of torture and massacre</b>. </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">As Glasser and Roy state,<br>
</span></span><br>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">the university is a space hostile to nonhuman animals, who are welcomed
onto campus only insofar as they are used for food, research tools, or
to assist the disabled. (p. 90) </span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">It </span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">is thus not surprising that t</span>hose who research and
advocate the animal liberation movement's tactics and actors are
surveyed, requested to reveal the identities of anonymous research
subjects, <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/25/why_did_the_fbi_label_ryan">prevented from accessing public documents</a> on those who
dissent to animal exploitation, and even fired and <a href="http://www.drstevebest.org/BannedInTheUk.htm">barred to enter foreign countries</a>. </span>Animal activists live in countries whereby decent has become criminalized (what Will Potter calls the <a href="http://www.greenisthenewred.com/">Green Scare</a>), and scholars and students are not somehow removed from this public situation because of their private pursuits (p. 184). Recent legislation such as AETA demonstrate a convergence of “the institutions of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciesism">speciesism</a>, the protection of private property, and the state’s regulation of dissent” (p. 193).<b> CAS thus provides a site of resistance not only for nonhuman animals incarcerated by universities, but also human allies (and humans generally) incarcerated within the prison industrial complex</b> (p. xxx).</span><span style="font-size: small;"> <br>
</span><br>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br>
<u>WHAT IS CRITICAL ANIMAL STUDIES</u></span> </span><br>
<span style="font-size: small;">Given the magnitude of human-induced animal suffering and the complicity of the university, the founders of <a href="http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/">Critical Animal Studies</a> sought to create a distinct field of study from</span><span style="font-size: small;">
less political orientations to "the animal question," <a href="https://www.animalsandsociety.org/main/">Human-Animal Studies</a> and the <a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/series/posthumanities">Posthumanities</a>. In the introduction, the book editors argue that just as nonhuman animals are objects
callously and physically cut apart for the sake of knowledge in the natural sciences
("animal studies"), so nonhuman animals are symbolically dissected in
the humanities. The editors suggest that many in "mainstream animal studies" may very well earn the title "theoretical vivisectors" </span><span style="font-size: small;">(p. xiv).</span><br>
<br>
</div></div><a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2014/04/review-defining-critical-animal-studies.html#more">Read more »</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-60748023882152882032014-02-11T21:43:00.000-06:002014-12-02T20:04:10.834-06:00Critical Animal Studies in 2014<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b>Welcome to 2014. We have yet again an exciting year of cutting edge books on animal advocacy and theory.</b><br>
<br>
<b>Outlined below is the third annual Animal Reading List.</b> This follows <a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2012/02/animal-theory-going-feral-in-2012.html">2012</a>'s exciting lineup of books challenging conventional approaches to animal ethics and advocacy and <a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2013/01/animal-theory-unleashed-in-2013.html">2013</a>'s posthuman bonanza. The Animal Reading List of 2014 is organized into four categories: Critical Animal Theory, Human-Animal-Machine, Ecology, Geography, Effective Advocacy for Animals, and Coffee Table books.<br>
<br>
<u>Critical Theory</u><br>
<b>With the release of two anthologies defining the field, 2014 is a significant year for critical animal studies.</b> In <i>Defining Animal Studies</i>, new and veteran contributors to the field elaborate on the ten principles of critical animal studies from deconstructing the human-animal binary to bridging academics and advocacy to building multi-movement coalitions for total liberation. The <i>Rise of Critical Animal Studies</i> alternatively focuses on the theoretical grounding, challenging methodologies, and effective application of critical animal studies. Finally, <i>Ecofeminism </i>returns attention to two distinguishing themes of ecofeminist theory -- affect and context -- exploring the interspecies phenomenon of joy and grief as well as animal advocactes' complicity with white, class, and gender privilege.<br>
<br>
Several books listed present ontological questions regarding the callous implosion human, animal, and technological natures. In <i>The Silence of Animals</i>, John Gray challenges human exceptionalism and progress, prescribing a Buddhist-like appreciation of our animality including a disciplined suspension to let the world be. <i>Animals and War </i>presents the bloody consequences of human aspirations to compete against others to order the world according to their wills and self interests: exploiting animals as vehicles in war, as test subjects of weapons and medics, as ecological casualties, and as combatants and weapons themselves. Emily Anthes studies the latest violation of body integrity in <i>Frankenstein's Cat, </i>exposing the science fiction realities of remote controlled animals for surveillance, bioenginered pets for profit, and more.<br>
<br>
<u>Geography and Ecology</u><br>
Animal others are, of course, more than the object of ethics and theory as well as the anithesis and prey of technology. Animal others are inhabitants of cherished and forsaken places. Julie Urbanik in <i>Placing Animals</i> draws the most comprehensive map of the spatial arrangements and meanings humans share with animals from the farm, to the woods to the lab, including an introduction to the sub-field of animal geography. <i>Trash Animals</i> is dedicated to the egregiously misunderstood realities of "mis-placed" species, animals who receive little advocacy yet reap a large proportion of violence for being "filthy," "invasive," and "worthless."<br>
<br>
Ronald Sandler gives to us a much overdue in-depth discussion of the value of species in his <i>The Ethics of Species</i>, treading controversies over restoration, assisted colonizations, hybrid animals, engineered species, and human "enhancement." <i>Centering Animals in Latin American History</i> is the first of its kind to delve into contested intra and interspecies power relations in Latin America, teetering between posthuman recognition of animals as historical agents and postcolonial critique of market and state domination through animal protection. Last but not least, Andrew Lindzey's <i>Global Guide to Animal Protection </i>collects synopses of nearly two hundred animal rights causes including amphibian conservation, sanctuary work, habitat restoration, living with predators, sabotaging hunts, combating poachers, managing feral cat populations, and animal law.<br>
<br>
<u>Effective Words and Images</u><br>
Animal activists have another collection of books this year that may very well improve their advocacy. In the first, Russ Mead lays out laws and policies in<i> Nonprofit Animal Law</i> spanning across risk management, fundraising, employment and volunteering, animal disaster response, nonprofit structure, tax exemption, animal cruelty, intellectual property, animal transport, public events, privacy laws and more. <i>Arguments about Animal Ethics</i> is another over-due book from the field of communications containing fascinating essays inclusive of interspecies communication, inner dialogue, analysis of sexualized and racialized rhetorical strategies in advocacy, and critique of the biomedical backlash of said advocacy. Finally, there are the statistics-heavy entries, one on the externalized economic costs of animal flesh production by David Simon in <i>Meatonomics </i>and the other on the efficacy, demographics, myths, and cognitive processes of vegans and omnivores in Nick Cooney's <i>Veganomics</i>.<br>
<br>
After the release of <i>We Animals</i>, a book by Jo-Anne McArthur, star of <i>Ghost in the Machine</i>, I've decided to include a new category for less academic and verbose texts, specifically one dedicated to the power of visual art. McArthur's <i>We Animals</i>, Sue Coe's <i>Cruel</i>, and Daniel Imhoff's <i>CAFO </i>are certainly more than coffee books, but they have a heightened accessibility because of their provocative images. Accompanied by anecdotes and essays, <span style="font-size: small;">all three books provide an opportunity for a reader to witness the popularly unperceptive marginalization and violence against animals<b>.</b><b><br></b></span><br>
<br>
<b><span style="font-size: small;">If you are interested in reviewing a book or film for this blog or in the <a href="http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/students-for-cas/journal-for-critical-animal-studies/"><span style="font-size: small;">Journal for Critical Animal Studies</span></a>, please send me an <a href="http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/students-for-cas/journal-for-critical-animal-studies/editorial-team/">email</a>.</span></b><br>
</div><a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2014/02/critical-animal-studies-in-2014.html#more">Read more »</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-83569695156287981722013-10-26T13:32:00.000-05:002013-11-18T01:44:53.682-06:00Food Justice: Revisiting HEALTH<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHgUlC87I9L6y3T9fIm-urlFCFFq2ObHGBqe3B8-YEUvv3t6k7jkjPBJAFJx86stxmAia7ItIRnFTn5qbY8X2LxEhFvDjIIEwUFg4evOF29VtgMEVIe66zhBVEMHaYNBckZRE_bh1YnfQH/s1600/health.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHgUlC87I9L6y3T9fIm-urlFCFFq2ObHGBqe3B8-YEUvv3t6k7jkjPBJAFJx86stxmAia7ItIRnFTn5qbY8X2LxEhFvDjIIEwUFg4evOF29VtgMEVIe66zhBVEMHaYNBckZRE_bh1YnfQH/s200/health.jpg" width="190"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">HEALTH is an organizational paradigm for Food Justice </td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><u><b>Introduction</b></u><u>:</u></span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #6aa84f;"><b>HEALTH has now been up and running for 5 years. Yay!</b></span><br> </span><br>
<span style="font-size: small;">Okay, now that I've gotten the obligatory anniversary announcement out of the way, I want to draw attention back to a topic deserving of its own post:</span><br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #6aa84f;"><b>What is "health"? What work does the acronym HEALTH perform?</b></span><br>
<br>
In this post, I will elaborate a little bit on how I understand HEALTH after many additional years of life experience as an educator and activist, and why this understanding is preferable to the accepted definition and practice of "health." First, I will discuss the evolution of HEALTH from an organization to a blog to an experimental paradigm for coalition building. Second, I will juxtapose the self-centered normativity of "health" to the socialist politics of HEALTH. Third, I will break down HEALTH into several prerequisites and organizing points. I will conclude with acknowledging the difficulties of navigating this comprehensive vision of HEALTH and invite y'all to chime in with comments as to whether advocating HEALTH is as useful and un-problematic as I suggest.</span><br>
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</span><br>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><u>1. The Evolution of a Vision (2005-2008)</u></b></span><br>
<span style="font-size: small;">Way back in 2005 I founded an <a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2008/09/origings-of-health-sprouting-of-future.html">organization</a> on my college campus dedicated to addressing the intersections of oppressions. The club existed, on the one hand, to operate as an independent project for a course on Sustainable Buildings, and, on the other hand, to provide a much needed outlet for animal advocacy on campus. According to the original constitution submitted on April 5, 2005:</span>
<br>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;">H.E.A.L.T.H. is dedicated to ecological sustainability and conservation,
the adoption of compassionate and ecologically responsible lifestyles,
and global awareness through activism and education. The club will work
to develop an environmental taskforce for Beloit College, create and
enforce environmentally sound policies, and educate the campus and
community about ways to live more harmoniously with the Earth, nonhuman
animals, and humans in developing countries. H.E.A.L.T.H. will be
involved with nonviolent, grassroots environmental and animal activism </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;">
HEALTH was founded upon ecofeminist philosophy, which I had begun studying independently a year before. <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=MnD1D37szowC&lpg=PP1&dq=greta%20gaard&pg=PA11#v=onepage&q&f=false">Ecofeminism</a>, in a nutshell, is a body of work that purports that the domination of nature (at least in the Western tradition) are entangled with the domination of women (as well as poc, working class, queers, and animals) historically, materially, conceptually, and mythologically. Ecofeminists valuably demonstrate, like other radical theories, that the oppression of humans and </span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">nonhuman beings </span>mutually
reinforce one another, and that liberation is only possible when all are free of injustices. HEALTH was conceived of this <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality">intersectional analysis</a>.<br>
<br>
</span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Originally designed to address the unhealthy <i>relationship</i>s between humans, animals, and the Earth, </span><span style="font-size: small;">HEALTH would take on new meaning as an acronym d</span>uring research for my interdisciplinary capstone project when I discovered the work of agrarian writer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Berry">Wendell Berry</a> and ecofeminist <a href="http://www.phil.uga.edu/directory/chris-cuomo">Chris Cuomo</a>. </span><span style="font-size: small;"><br>
<br>
Wendell Berry's essays exemplified what thinkers like <a href="http://www.ecoliteracy.org/essays/systems-thinking">Fritjof Capra</a> and <a href="http://www.ecoliteracy.org/essays/ecological-design-intelligence">David Orr</a> called systems thinking. Systems thinking took into account the process, relationship, dynamism, wholeness, and complexity of "problems" (in contrast to mechanistic thinking which addressed problems by dissecting them into static, discreet parts with simple, predictable, linear cause and effect relationships. The problem with mechanistic thinking (in modern, industrial science, economics, politics, and technology) is that it often creates new problems and so it doesn't "solve for pattern."<br>
<br>
In "<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=1BbJisI9WO4C&lpg=PA232&dq=health%20is%20membership%20berry&pg=PA232#v=onepage&q&f=false">Health is Membership</a>," Berry wishes we return to the etymological root of "health" as the whole-ness of belonging:</span><br>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;">The word "health," in fact, comes from the same Indo-European root as ‘heal,’ ‘whole,’ and ‘holy.’ To be healthy is literally to be whole; to heal to make whole... our sense of wholeness is not just a sense of completeness in ourselves but also in a sense of belonging to others and to our place; it is an unconscious awareness of community, of having in common. (144)</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;">[The contemporary] view of health that is severely reductive. It is, to begin with, almost frantically individualistic... One may presumably be healthy in a disintegrated family or community or in a destroyed or poisoned ecosystem.” (146)</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;">
In another essay, "<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=1BbJisI9WO4C&lpg=PA436&dq=solving%20for%20pattern%20berry&pg=PA436#v=onepage&q&f=true">Solving for Pattern</a>," Berry discusses more concretely the destructive logic of providing health care for one group of a system at the expense of others who belong to that community in agriculture:</span><br>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;">Our dilemma in agriculture now is that the industrial methods that have so spectacularly solved some of the problem of food production have been accompanied by ‘side effects’... the irony of agricultural models that destroy, first, the health of the soil and, finally, the health of human communities. (267)</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;">
The real problem of food production occurs within a complex, mutually influential relationship of soil, plant, animals, and people. A real solution to that problem will therefore be ecologically, agriculturally, and culturally healthful... [I]t is impossible to sacrifice the health of the soil to improve the health of the plants, or to sacrifice the health of plants to improve the health of animals, or to sacrifice the health of animals to improve the health of people. (269, 274)</span></blockquote>
Chris Cuomo provided more depth to Berry's arguments, in part by coming out of an ecofeminist tradition critical of the pastoral romanticization of the heteronormative family and settler colonialism. Cuomo offered an alternative route to addressing ecological ethics that wasn't based in mechanistic utilitarian, individualistic deontological, and apolitical care ethics. Cuomo proposed an eudaimonian ethic, based on the ancient Greek concept of flourishing, but applied to community as a social and ecological construct.
<br>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;">Humans cannot flourish without other humans, ecosystems, and species, and nothing in a biotic community can flourish on its own. Likewise, communities (both social and ecological) depend on the existence of other communities. Ethical objects therefore flourish as both social and ecological entities. To be extracted from community, human or otherwise, is to lack relationships and contexts that provide the meaning, substance and material for various sorts of lives.[<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=q9O02OwT3voC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA63#v=onepage&q&f=true">*</a>]</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;">
My ambition to build a coalition between clubs on campus and develop
a sustainability taskforce, however, did not materialize. Several years
organizing campus events and actions brought me to
appreciation of how difficult it was to put this holistic perspective
into practice. Such a comprehensive message and focus was naturally
complex to deliver and we HEALTH spread itself thin attempting to
address issues such as animal liberation and indigenous sovereignty
(which I had come to appreciate after studying in Australia). Under the
lack of general interest in and availability for advocacy on campus,
HEALTH could not sustain itself after I graduated.</span><br>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br>
</span><br>
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</div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><u><b>2. The Evolution of a Vision (2008-2013)</b></u><br> </span><br>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiehOL6SzrZo0M4RrBpe1z0HYxFx3q9x92sNVF9ra2miE8ZqsdTE_D1N8MEZg04zalgV_5H5Fc1e-Mu8d4WdZL9JOWB1C_60AFM91qel_8EYW6hP4CvD-mRuxQRPYEFqbPZFkp-6Qq8bHyq/s1600/South+central+farm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiehOL6SzrZo0M4RrBpe1z0HYxFx3q9x92sNVF9ra2miE8ZqsdTE_D1N8MEZg04zalgV_5H5Fc1e-Mu8d4WdZL9JOWB1C_60AFM91qel_8EYW6hP4CvD-mRuxQRPYEFqbPZFkp-6Qq8bHyq/s400/South+central+farm.jpg" width="400"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">South Central Farm (1994 - 2006) was the largest urban farm and CSA in the USA.</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;">When I returned home from a summer working as an educator at an animal sanctuary, I was inspired to keep my holistic vision and advocacy alive by creating a blog. Having learned from the past of how difficult it was to manage an organization that had potentially infinite possibilities, I narrowed the focus of HEALTH to a food justice blog that would encompass not only food sovereignty (which I learned the importance of through a sustainability project in my community), but also ecological sustainability, and animal liberation. The devotion of HEALTH to food justice seemed a natural fit since food is a site at which so many discourses of health (e.g., bodily, animal, ecological, communal, national) collide.<br>
<br>
The original <a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/p/about.html">mission statement</a> for HEALTH was posted on September 8, 2008:</span><br>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;">HEALTH advocates ecological and social justice through campaigns in
which the intersection of multiple oppressions in the production,
distribution, and consumption of “food" can be addressed simultaneously<i>... Health in its fullest sense cannot be achieved alone.</i></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;">
Over the next year, I would compile an array of resources, spanning form introductory web sites, documentary videos, peer-reviewed articles, academic journals, non-profit organizations, blogs, and books covering animal, agricultural, ecological, and social justice. Although I attempted to avoid doing so, the blog has admittedly leaned harder on the animal justice side of things. In the first two years, however, I did address matters of gender, race, class, and sexuality injustices in food production, consumption, and distribution.<br>
<br>
One post I'm particularly fond of is "<a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2009/04/skinny-bitch-and-bulimic-vegetarians.html">Skinny Bitch and Bulimic Vegetarians</a>" published in April of 2009. Of all my posts, this one most directly addressed the limits of advocating personal "health" (or at least the superficial performance of health). After diagnosing the fat-shaming elements of vegan outreach (particularly the aesthetic appeal of <i>Skinny Bitch</i> and the PETA's campaign media), I shared my perspective on "health":</span><br>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;">HEALTH cannot be achieved by individuals alone; true health is the consequence of an entire community flourishing mutually together. Modern reductionist approaches to health define "health" as something that can be achieved independent of Others and often at the expense of them (e.g., <a href="http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/04/overfishing-causing-marine-animal-starvation.php">(over)fishing to consume more fish oil</a>, <a href="http://www.blogger.com/%20http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2009/03/politics-of-the-plate-the-price-of-tomatoes">enslaving people to pick tomatoes</a>, <a href="http://sustainablog.org/2008/09/02/california-farmers-using-unsustainable-extreme-practices-to-safeguard-crops-from-ecoli/">wiping out wildlife to grow organic leafy greens</a>, <a href="http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/monkeyhivmodel.html">"curing" diseases by giving them first to millions of "animals"</a>). Within this outlook, veg*n outreach that promotes veg*nism as good for "one's health" is playing into the liberal, antagonistic discourse of self-interest.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;">Since HEALTH must be achieved together it ought not, as much as possible, come at the expense of the health of Others.
In this sense, appropriating mainstream means of advertising (i.e. using the promise of becoming a conventionally sexy and beautiful women) so as to exploit common insecurities over body-image (o)pressed into the minds of young women is not healthy. Exploiting, and thus perpetuating, oppression as a means to a "good" end can never be healthy, even if it promotes "health," because it ultimately subordinates the health of Others.
</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;"></span><br>
</div></div><a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2013/10/food-justice-revisiting-health.html#more">Read more »</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-7924750560595015172013-10-04T22:28:00.000-05:002014-09-13T00:59:39.791-05:00Re-Assessing Animal Rights: Resources<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I've been thinking about the state of the animal defense movement* quite a lot after attending four conferences on organizing this summer. Perhaps for the better, the Animal Rights 2013 conference was not one of them. The conferences I attended were either organized by and for grassroots activist or were nearly silent on the status of animal others. Never have I learned so much and been inspired more. There I was exposed to alternative interpretations of the history and politics of the US and the modern world, and there I realized how white and superficial the analyses and strategies of mainstream animal activists often are.</div>
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<b>This post is dedicated to providing resources to those open to re-assessing the history, politics, organization, tactics, theories, and language of the animal defense movement</b>. I intend to write more about the presentations and drama I witnessed at these conferences, but for now I want to share some essays and presentations that have really challenged and inspired me to re-think my assumptions and history of abstract theorizing that is valued in academic settings, especially in philosophy.</div>
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<u><b><span style="font-size: large;">Re-Assessing Animal Defense</span> </b></u></div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="" src="//player.vimeo.com/video/64902387?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=c9ff23" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe>
<b> </b><br>
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<b>The History and Politics of the Animal Defense Movement</b> </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
With the rise of the vegan movements, the politics of animal defense have become increasing personal that many activists have forgotten that vegan-consumption is just one strategy, and not even the most important. On the other hand, large nonprofits have taken to reforms that do not challenge the source of animal oppression: their status as commodities. Yet still, animal defense is often interpreted from the perspective of those who have made careers at nonprofits and universities--what of the history of the grassroots?</div>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<li><a href="http://www.kimstallwood.com/writer/animal-rights-moral-crusade-social-movement/">Animal Rights: Moral Crusade or Political Movement</a> (Kim Stallwood 2013) </li>
<li><a href="http://friendsofanimals.org/programs/animal-rights/issues-ideas/gary-l-francione-state-us-animal-rights-movement">The State of the US Animal Rights Movement</a> (Interview w/ Gary Francione 2002) </li>
<li><a href="http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/5-Hochschartner-J-2011-INTERVIEW-JOSH-HARPER-Vol-IX-Issue-3-pp-83-961.pdf">Animal Rights History, Welfarism, and 'Star Wars'</a> (Interview w/ Josh Harper 2011)</li>
<li><a href="http://vimeo.com/64902387">History of the Anti-Vivisection Movement</a> (Josh Harper 2013) </li>
</ul>
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<b>The Limits of Vegetarian Outreach</b>
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Vegetarian outreach has been a staple of the nonprofit animal defense movement since the 1990's when activists realized that over 95% of animals were killed and exploited by agribusiness. While there is much debate over how to best "sell" vegetarianism, critiques of the sufficiency of veganism as a "baseline" has been less frequent. Is vegan education our most effective tactic? Is "veganism" sufficient for animal liberation?<br>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUEGBDpmX0A&feature=share&list=SPqPXWQAGKrlarTzNwIj-mQ9QelkmFNSzD">The Science of Animal Advocacy</a> (Nick Cooney 2013)</li>
<li><a href="http://directactioneverywhere.com/theliberationist/2013/9/18/science-and-pseudoscience">Science of Science-y</a> -- A Critique of Vegan Outreach Studies (DXE 2013)</li>
<li><a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2009/04/skinny-bitch-and-bulimic-vegetarians.html">Skinny Bitch and Bulimic Vegetarians</a> (Adam Weitzenfeld 2009) </li>
<li><a href="http://files.meetup.com/160880/Boycott%20veganism.pdf%E2%80%8E">Boycott Veganism: Animal rights only begins with your diet</a><b> </b>(Anonymous 2007)</li>
<li><a href="http://earthfirstnews.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/remag-mini-2.pdf">A Critique of Consumption-Centered Veganism</a> (Adam Weitzenfeld 2011)</li>
<li><a href="http://veganideal.mayfirst.org/content/abolition-liberation-and-veganism">Abolition, Liberation, Veganism</a> (Ida Hammer 2011)</li>
</ul>
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<b>The Problem with Analogies to Human Oppression</b></div>
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Some animal activists draw logical analogies between the institutional violence against nonhuman animals and oppressed humans. The presumption is that the public will have a logical breakthrough that violence against nonhuman animals is unjust like violence against oppressed humans. Have the articulation and performances of these analogies bore the breakthroughs as activists hoped, or only further alienated them from their cause?<br>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.timwise.org/2005/08/animal-whites-peta-and-the-politics-of-putting-things-in-perspective/">Animal Whites: PETA and the Politics of Putting things in Perspective</a> (Tim Wise 2005)</li>
<li><a href="http://theveganpolice.com/main/?p=1788">On Analogies as Advocacy Tools: Some Thoughts on Appropriation</a> (BWM 2013)</li>
<li><a href="http://theveganpolice.com/main/?p=1748">Performance Politics: Abstract Animals and Suffering Humans</a> (Dylan Powell 2013)</li>
<li><a href="http://academicabolitionistvegan.blogspot.com/2013/09/why-putting-non-humans-first-is-wrong.html">Why "Putting Non-Humans First"... Doesn't Work</a> (Corey Wrenn 2013)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.upc-online.org/forums/07program.html">Inadmissible Comparisons</a> (UPC 7th Conference 2007)<a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CEAQFjAD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fveganradio.com%2Fepisode%2F34%2Finadmissible-comparisons-animal-exploitation-slavery-genocide&ei=040rU-zLLY7ZoATOwIK4BQ&usg=AFQjCNHCpo0vr0r05IT523kqItU-9HgGJQ&sig2=qy_bPQDoqzqYsTRDTiml1g&bvm=bv.63316862,d.cGU">*</a></li>
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<b>Critiques of Non-Profit Campaigns & Conferences</b><br>
The hegemony of corporate non-profits have "hijacked" the strategy, language, and tactics of animal liberation. Non-profits generate funds and publicity for animals, however, they have also been notoriously conservative on matters of class, race, and gender in their organizations and campaigns.<b> </b>Their collusion with State power, capital, and white supremacy has built a large funding base, but are they building a movement upon the marginalization and oppression of humans?<br>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://veganideal.mayfirst.org/content/smoke-and-mirrors">Smoke and Mirrors -- A Critique of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex</a> (Ida Hammer 2009)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.humanemyth.org/mediabase/1014.htm">Invasion of the Movement Snatchers</a> (James LaVeck 2006) </li>
<li><a href="http://veganideal.mayfirst.org/content/need-address-classism-conferences-seminars-and-festivals">The Need to Address Classism at Conferences, Seminars, and Festivals</a> (Ida Hammer 2008)</li>
<li><a href="http://animalvisions.wordpress.com/2013/07/09/recalling-the-animal-rights-conference-2013/">Recalling the Animal Rights Conference 2013</a> (Anastasia Yarbrough 2013)</li>
<li><a href="http://veganfeministnetwork.com/category/sexualization/">Sexualization (of Women in the Animal Rights Movement</a>) (Vegan Feminist Network 2013) </li>
<li><a href="http://vegansofcolor.wordpress.com/tag/colonialism/">Colonialism (in the Animal Rights Movement)</a> (Vegans of Color 2008) </li>
<li><a href="http://veganideal.mayfirst.org/content/veganism-and-prison-abolition">Veganism and Prison Abolition</a> (Ida Hammer 2009) </li>
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<b>The Intersections of Human and White Privilege in the ADM</b></div>
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The animal defense movement has continued to be the whitest social justice movements in the US for decades, despite that people of color are no less compassionate and no less likely to be vegetarian. We've already looked at colonial campaigns, analogies that alienate, under-representation in leadership, and complicity in racist law enforcement. What analytic tools, strategies, and language can whites adopt and support to build coalitions across racialized experiences?</div>
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<li><a href="http://youtu.be/p4iWmdtta9I">Working With(in) Whiteness</a> (pattrice Jones 2013)</li>
<li><a href="http://vimeo.com/75827602">The Color of Animal Rights</a> (Dr. Harper, L. Ornelas 2013)</li>
<li><a href="http://youtu.be/DOQYBDF51og?t=15m">Intersectionality in Theory and Practice</a> (pattrice Jones 2013)</li>
<li><a href="http://youtu.be/kO97L7hxraY?t=6m">What’s Wrong with ‘Rights’</a> (pattrice jones 2013)</li>
<li><a href="http://vimeo.com/45626814">Beyond Veganism: Food Justice</a> (Lauren Ornelas 2012)</li>
<li><a href="http://youtu.be/Fhu-0q90ANg?t=18m">Decolonizing our Taste Buds and Self-Care</a> (Claudia Serrato 2013)</li>
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<b>How to Disrupt Oppression</b></div>
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Once equipped with more sophisticated theory and more supportive of people of color and queer leadership and projects, animal activists are on their way to building a movement that reaches beyond the single-issue identity politics of "animal rights." This is, of course, easier than it sounds. Because nearly all of us in the US have been colonised by white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy, it will take some effort on our behalf to challenge its "common sense" built into our brains-and-flesh. How can we resist these old habits?</div>
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<li><a href="http://tenureshewrote.wordpress.com/2013/09/26/dont-be-that-dude-handy-tips-for-the-male-academic/">Don't be that Dude: Handy Tips for the Male Academic</a> (Acclimatrix 2013)</li>
<li><a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psysociety/2013/04/02/benevolent-sexism/">The Problem when Sexism Sounds so Darn Friendly</a> (Melanie Tannenbaum 2013) </li>
<li><a href="http://sfonline.barnard.edu/polyphonic/ahmed_01.htm">Feminist Killjoys (and Other Willful Subjects)</a> (Sara Ahmed 2010)</li>
<li><a href="http://youtu.be/b0Ti-gkJiXc">How to Tell Someone they Sound Racist</a> (Jay Smooth 2008)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.socialjusticeleague.net/2012/04/the-revolution-will-not-be-polite-the-issue-of-nice-versus-good/">The Revolution Will Not be Polite</a> (Rachael 2012)</li>
<li><a href="http://youtu.be/C8xJXKYL8pU">Getting Called Out: how to Apologize </a>(Chesaleigh 2013)</li>
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<b>Critiques of <i>Ally</i>, <i>Intersectionality</i>, and <i>Privilege</i></b></div>
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Over the last ten years as the internet has made it easier to "call-out" animal activists for their complicity with racism and other oppressive systems, some mainstream organizations and many white activists have adopted the language of anti-oppression. Have white activists' identification as allies, acknowledgement of their privileges, and references to "intersectionality" transformed their activism or obscured privilege and power?</div>
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<li><a href="http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2013/09/30/no-more-allies/">No More "Allies"</a> (Mia Mckenzie 2013)</li>
<li><a href="http://bitchmagazine.org/post/pushback-at-the-intersections-defining-and-critiquing-intersectionality">Defining and Critiquing 'Intersectionality'</a> (S.E. Smith 2010)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.orchestratedpulse.com/2013/10/tim-wise-failure-privilege-discourse/">Tim Wise & the Failure of Privilege Discourse</a> (Robtheidealist 2013)</li>
<li><a href="http://andrea366.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/the-problem-with-privilege-by-andrea-smith/">The Problem with Privilege</a> (Andrea Smith 2013)</li>
<li><a href="http://veganideal.mayfirst.org/content/why-vegan-oppression-cannot-exist">How Vegan Oppression Cannot Exist</a> (Ida Hammer 2010) </li>
<li><a href="http://www.afed.org.uk/blog/state/327-a-class-struggle-anarchist-analysis-of-privilege-theory--from-the-womens-caucus-.html">A Class Struggle Anarchist Analysis of Privilege Theory -- From the Women's Caucus</a></li>
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<span style="background-color: #990000;"><b>Are there any essays, talks, and books that have changed your advocacy for animals?</b> Please share in the comments. I may add them to the list!</span></div>
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</div></div><a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2013/10/re-assessing-animal-rights-resources.html#more">Read more »</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-27559174218763019532013-01-26T03:28:00.002-06:002013-11-19T22:39:45.740-06:00Animal Theory Unleashed in 2013<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b>One year ago, in recognition of a turn in animal theory over the last several years I created a post called "<a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2012/02/animal-theory-going-feral-in-2012.html">Animal Theory, Going Feral in 2012</a>."</b> The most exciting trend included advocating for animal others from critical (<i>Critical Theory and Animal Liberation</i>), ecofeminist (<i>Social Lives with Animals</i>), and citizenship theory (<i>Zoopolis</i>) as matters of <i>interspecies justice </i>in contrast to <i>moral rights</i>. In addition, a collection of more nuanced explorations of the ethics of human-animal relations (<i>Animal Kind, Beyond Animal Rights, Animals in Context</i>) as well as an unprecedented piece on plant ethics (<i>Plants as Persons</i>) joined the ranks of the rigorous, groundbreaking classics (<i>Animal Liberation, Case for Animal Rights</i>), but arguably outdated, abstract approaches.<br>
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<b>Innovative explorations and comprehensive presentations of human-animal relations are still a comin'.</b> The last half of 2012 and the first half of 2013 may prove to be just as rewarding as the last few. I'm particularly excited about Margo DeMello's <i>Animals and Society</i>, which from a glance over the table of contents seems to map a brilliant trajectory for thinking through the history, social context, and ethics of human-animal relations. Another well-welcomed book is Ryan Hedinger's <i>Animals and War</i>, which touches on a much neglected subject in critical animal studies: the fraternal [sic] participation and subjection of animals as agents in human warfare. Likewise, Juliet Clutton-Brock's <i>Animals as Domesticates</i> seems like refreshing and comprehensive examination of the history of domestication which dos not reduce animals to the role of hapless object in the popular narrative of monolithic human domination favored by advocates and adversaries of animal rights.<br>
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In addition, <b>several books explore the construction of the modern human subject and contemporary political systems </b>through the non-criminal violence against animal others and biopolitics of demarcating who is a proper (human) political subject.<span style="font-size: small;"> In <i>Animalia Americana</i>, Colleen Glenney Bogg's tracks the construction of human<span style="font-size: small;">ity <span style="font-size: small;">throughout American history from bestiality trials to slave narratives to contemporary feminist theory. Karl Steel's <i>How to Make a Human </i>excavates the <span style="font-size: small;">violent making<span style="font-size: small;"> of "humanity" in <span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Medieval</span> Europe in contrast t<span style="font-size: small;">o the la<span style="font-size: small;">rger body of li<span style="font-size: small;">terature on the emergence of "humanity" in Ancient Greece and Modern England and France. There is also <span style="font-size: small;">Cary Wolfe's work, <i>Before the Law</i>, which ought to attract <span style="font-size: small;">the attention of thos<span style="font-size: small;">e </span>in<span style="font-size: small;">terested in continental political theory. And before one assumes deconstructing the border between human and animal is sufficient, consider checking out two more books dedicated to the value of plants<span style="font-size: small;">, from </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Daniel Chamovitz's fascinating presentation of plant <span style="font-size: small;">abilities</span> in <i>Wha</i><span style="font-size: small;"><i>t a Plant K<span style="font-size: small;">n</span>ows</i> to Michael Marder's challenging <i>Plant-Thinking</i>.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br>
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After so many years mucking through dense theory that doesn't offer itself to political action, I'm enthusiastic for <b>upcoming contributions on tying lived experience with animal advocacy</b>. More than any other animal book this year, I'm highly anticipating <i>Defiant Daughters</i>. The book, edited by Kara Davis and Wendy Lee, focuses on a diversity of women's relationship with a diversity of animal others, including those of queers, differently abled women, and women of color. Norm Phelp's e-book, <i>Changing the Game</i>, genuinely addresses the inherent challenges (and differences) of advocating on behalf of animal others as well as <span style="font-size: small;">"the rising economic, political, and cultural power of nations such as China, India, and Brazil."</span> Finally, if you missed it, Nick Cooney's <i>Change of Heart</i> might be well worth a read for its presentation of empirical evidence on how to be an effective agent for change.<br>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;">If you are interested in contributing a book summary
and review to be posted on this blog or in the <a href="http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/students-for-cas/journal-for-critical-animal-studies/"><span style="font-size: small;">Journal for Critical Animal Studies</span></a>, please send an <a href="http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/students-for-cas/journal-for-critical-animal-studies/editorial-team/">email </a>or comment
below.</span></b><br>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;">Also, <span style="font-size: small;">please check out the updated <a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/p/critical-animal-studies-resources.html">Critical Animal Studies Resource </a><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/p/critical-animal-studies-resources.html">List</a>!</span></span> </span></b><br>
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</div><a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2013/01/animal-theory-unleashed-in-2013.html#more">Read more »</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-40199227922244498502012-11-26T19:54:00.000-06:002013-01-26T03:32:59.079-06:00The Limits of Vegan Consumption<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>When you transform a food into a commodity, there's inevitable breakdown in social relations and high environmental cost </i>- Tanya Kerssen<br>
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<b>Quinoa</b><br>
A gluten-,soy-, GMO-free, complete plant protein. Half of the world's quinoa export comes from Bolivia, where 90% of the crop is grown organically, mostly on small family farms, and where growers' unions protect their livelihoods from the appropriation by multinational corporations. Beyond being an allergen-free, fairly traded, nutritional powerhouse, the increase in demand on the global market is funneling wealth into one of the poorest regions in South America. Families are being able to purchase new technologies that can reduce the stress and increase the efficiency of their farms as well as afford to send their children to university. Superfood indeed!<br>
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As successful as quinoa has become as a replacement for grains and a go-to answer to "where do you get your protein?," its success is beginning to come at a cost to indigenous ecological and cultural sustainability. In a <a href="http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2110890,00.html">Time article</a> published earlier this year, Jean Friedman-Rudovsky reported a breakdown in community, "the traditional relationship between llama herding and soil fertilization," and children's <a href="http://www.wisegeek.org/what-is-sole-food.htm">SOLE </a>food consumption.<br>
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With its entrance into the global market, quinoa has become a force of globalization. Globalization isn't merely a process that attracts wealth, it's also a process that creates an entry for western culture and technology--the good, the bad, and the ugly. The expanse and intensification of quinoa on the Andean high plains disrupts the communal grazing land of llama's, a cameloid who nourishes the harsh earth with their nitrogen-rich guano. Farmers are now competing to establish plot ownership over what has for millenia been 90% communal grazing land, with the result of seasonal kidnappings and violence as well as an increase in soil erosion and use of finite water sources. The rising affluence from the crop also leads to access to media and food once unavailable, corresponding to a change in food preferences away from the indigenous crop toward processed, malnutritious commodities. Further, the tripling of quinoa's market value may make this once local, nutritious, "mother grain" less accessible to locals not directly reaping the economic benefits.<a href="http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/2012/apr/05/underreported-price-quinoas-success/">*</a><br>
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(Quinoa is of the most benign "cruelty-free" foods when compared to <a href="http://www.foodispower.org/ethical_food_choices.php">palm oil </a>and <a href="http://www.foodispower.org/slavery_chocolate.php">chocolate</a>)<br>
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<b>"Beyond Veganism"</b><br>
These less than ideal consequences that trail the otherwise mutual benefits of the global consumption of quinoa is no reason to cut the crop out of vegan diets, but it does offer an opportunity to reflect upon the limits of a <a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2011/06/socially-centered-veganism-vs.html">consumption-centered vegan ethic</a> (a discourse primarily about what we eat and don't eat rather than the restoration of the social responsibility we feel with all sentient beings).<br>
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While the institutional killing of chickens in the US and llamas in Bolivia go against vegan values, so perhaps too does the undercutting of food sovereignty and and biocultural diversity. There is no need to conclude that US vegans ought to condemn international food ways, nor should they finger-wag at the desire of people in the global South to share in modern technologies and western culture. What is important is to be critically engaged with the real impact our lives have on (human and animal) others, to understand that foods do not fit naturally and firmly into categories such as "good" and "bad."<br>
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The just production, distribution and consumption of certain foods vary by the <b>methods</b>, the <b>place</b>, and the <b>time </b>for each food. For instance, <a href="http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/03/21/what%E2%80%99s-in-your-rice-a-look-at-where-rice-in-the-u-s-comes-from/">rice </a>may a have smaller water-footprint when grown in southeast Asia and a than in California; the carbon-footprint may be higher for growing tomatoes in a local greenhouse than on a farm in Florida, but Florida tomatoes may be picked by wage <a href="http://www.ciw-online.org/slavery.html">slaves</a>; people living in tundra and desert often depend upon the exploitation and killing of animal others, but by advocating an animal-free diet would force them into dependency on expensive and/or malnutritious outside food and undermine their <a href="http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2012/hr5092.doc.htm">food sovereignty</a>. In the case of quinoa, a internationally-desired food that at first provided great benefits to Andean farmers may turn into a food that comes at the expense of the local ecology and culture.<br>
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Food is complex. General rules (like eat <b>vegan</b>, <b>seasonal</b>/local, <b>fair</b>, <b>permacultural</b>, and <b>organic </b>food) are important for keeping us sane, productive people. But not everyone has the privilege of living in a California vegan cooperative where SOLE food is accessible and abundant year-round. If you live in a food desert or an isolated part of the world unconductive to sustainable agriculture, one is <a href="http://www.foodispower.org/documents/FEP_Report_web_final.pdf">institutionally constrained</a> into prioritizing certain food values over others (such as cost-effectively meeting one's caloric needs with non-toxic food). Rather than simply asking those with less privilege to work towards a vegan practice, vegans can work in solidarity with other people to transforming present food systems away from not only a species hierarchy, but also class, gender, race, and national hierarchy as well. As I wrote <a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2011/06/crtique-of-consumption-centered.html">before</a>, "[v]eganism will have limited success so long as it remains a luxury reserved for those with privilege, independent of human liberation movements."<br>
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<b>Food Empowerment</b><br>
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</div><a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-limits-of-vegan-consumption.html#more">Read more »</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-39679209612833917642012-08-10T22:48:00.000-05:002012-08-20T20:14:05.589-05:00Confessions from a Sanctuary<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I've never shared impromptu thoughts and feelings on this blog before, but tonight is not like all other nights.<br>
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HEALTH originated out of a desire to continue my scholarship and advocacy outside of the university. While in graduate school it then became an outlet for personal research and stuff that wouldn't make it into a philosophy term paper. Presently, I've been out of school for eight months. The main difference between now and then (four years ago) is that I became burnt out between teaching apathetic students, struggling as a grad student, frustrated as a scholar, and devastated as a friend and a domestic partner. After the final brutal semester of grad school, I decided I needed new direction, one that centered around creativity and embodiment.<br>
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Six months later, I've completed a two month excursion across the West through nine of the USA's National Parks and several of its most exciting cities. Just a month ago, I arrived at an animal sanctuary whose vision is that of reciprocal healing (whereby "people" heal "animals", the animals heal people, and both heal the land). When I found it in a catalogue, it sounded like a perfect opportunity to learn more about animal care taking, therapy, and an alternative to incarceration etc. Unfortunately, this has not been so much the case. I'm going to bite my tongue on this topic and instead share something I've experienced that is much more profound and unsettling.<br>
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<b>I. Moral Monsters</b><br>
If you're on the listserve or email trail of some large animal nonprofit, you are well exposed to brutal narratives of animal cruelty. Upon seeing people kick and torment the animals, one is instantaneously engulfed in moral outrage and perhaps tears: "Those sick monsters! Those evil fuckers are going to hell! They deserve to be treated just like they've treated those poor, innocent animals!" These are just some of the reactions I've seen posted in response to new investigative footage. For a compassionate and righteous person, these attitudes are expressed effortlessly; one must exercise willpower to hold them back.<br>
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Those bearing witness are wounded by these recorded testimonies. The trauma they experience is utter powerlessness. The powerlessness and woundedness they experience are their exposure to a will-less identification with the animal others. What makes these narratives so traumatic is the lack of mercy for those perceived as having so little power. Humans have so much power, the animals have so little, and what an injustice it is to see the abuse of human power over animal innocence.<br>
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As much as people generally identify with the animals undergoing abuse, few identify with the perpetrators of the violence. Although the purpose of these videos is to evoke empathy for the animals and consequentially political action on their behalf, the disturbing truth is that those committing the injustices are human, those bearing witness are human, and those bearing witness are often financially supporting the companies that employ these "monsters." To realize this would perhaps be another trauma, one that would move one who cared generally down one of two paths: to recognize one's participation and become veg*n or to experience intense cognitive dissonance and convince oneself that everything will be better once one of these monsters is behind bars.<br>
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Neither witness, however, is likely to place themselves in that worker's circumstance and potentially risk confronting a terrifying truth about their own nature. I would (hesitantly) agree that many of the folks in these videos who practice the most wanton cruelty are moral outliers in our society. A recent study by <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/809521--probing-the-link-between-slaughterhouses-and-violent-crime">Amy Fitzgerald</a> concluded that of all industrial workplaces, packing plants had the greatest rates of crimes per capita in their communities. Fitzgerald speculated her finding is based on the kind of desensitizing work of the slaughterhouse and/or the type of people who are attracted and willing to work there. Regardless, in no way should environmental conditions or personality type excuse such behavior and guard people from responsibility.<br>
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It's difficult imagining myself--an 8-year anti-speciesist from an affluent suburban background with a graduate degree--as one of these animal abusers. With all the sympathy I have for animal others, with all the theory I have learned, without any history in domestic (animal) abuse, and with experience at animal sanctuaries, identifying with these detested human beings would be a stretch. At least, so I thought until recently.<br>
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</div><a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2012/08/confessions-from-sanctuary.html#more">Read more »</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-10342763464007639822012-02-01T15:47:00.001-06:002013-01-26T03:31:44.771-06:00Animal Theory, Going Feral in 2012<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWUtGJv4oVqYY-C_xsMNWawuxiH4AryP9khE5fLDSlRDq48AigAKBFVKfFUw4RzgwhefS-v71shh4714-gNXGaqaxo_HCd95vFBeZI2-jO283cfQAPKXXtHRNDyO3Arcf06IWt-wIqP4Mz/s1600/image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWUtGJv4oVqYY-C_xsMNWawuxiH4AryP9khE5fLDSlRDq48AigAKBFVKfFUw4RzgwhefS-v71shh4714-gNXGaqaxo_HCd95vFBeZI2-jO283cfQAPKXXtHRNDyO3Arcf06IWt-wIqP4Mz/s320/image.jpg" width="320"></a></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">Since the late 1970s, scholarship in the field of human and nonhuman animal relations</span><span style="font-size: small;">--a development of animal, environmental, and social liberation movements--</span><span style="font-size: small;">has significantly developed, testing the limits of the humanism and liberalism that gave birth to it. In the 1980s and 90s, philosophers, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, feminists, socialists, and literary theorists have contributed to this academic and cultural project. Research in human and non-human animal relations has particularly come into vogue in the last decade. This new literature developed out of increasing interdisciplinary as well a younger generation with more radical political ambitions, those who were dissatisfied with the presuppositions and/or simplicity of earlier theory.</span><br>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Below are a few lists of books published between 2010 and 2012 that I would love to read by the end of the year; books such as <i>Zoopolis</i> which re-conceptualizes interspecies ethics as interspecies justice, <i>Critical Theory and Animal Liberation</i> which organizes the most sophisticated collection of critical animal studies theory to date, <i>Creaturely Poetics</i> which articulates a movement in animal ethics away from reason and power toward vulnerability, and <i style="background-color: #bf9000;">Social Lives with Other Animals</i><span style="background-color: #bf9000;"> which investigates the social formation of species identity within the particular intersections of oppression</span>. <i>Animalkind</i>, <i>Beyond Animal Rights</i>, and <i>Animal Ethics in Context</i> further challenge the traditional and universal morality espoused by animal advocates for more nuanced considerations that are far from self-certain. <span style="background-color: #bf9000;">And if these books aren't tricky enough, the first philosophy book entirely dedicated to the moral considerability of plants, </span><i style="background-color: #bf9000;">Plants as Persons</i><span style="background-color: #bf9000;">, is bound to give the zoocentrist a run for her mone</span><span style="background-color: #bf9000;">y.</span><br><br>Tim Tyler's book <i>CIFERAE</i> and Dominic Pittman's <i>Human Error</i>, and Boddice's <i>Anthropocentrism</i> add further complexity to our understanding of our humanity and the hegemony of anthropocentrism while Pat Shippman and Hal Herzog explore the myths of human-animal relationships with the latest empirical research in anthropology and psychology. Then there is <i>Meat</i>, <i>Animals and Public Health</i>, and <i style="background-color: #bf9000;">Animals as Biotechnology</i> which offer meditations on the relationship between our treatment of animals and the intersections of human, animal, and ecological health. Last but not least, I'm majorly anticipating Kari Weil's <i>Thinking Animals</i>, which seems like it will provide the greatest synthesis of human-animal studies yet published.</span><br>
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<span style="font-size: small;">If you are interested in contributing a book summary and review to be posted on this blog, please send me an email or comment below.</span><br>
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<b>NEW DIRECTIONS IN ANIMAL ETHICS / JUSTICE:</b><br>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=LLE3UEe5LMoC&lpg=PP1&dq=zoopolis&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights</a> (Sue Donaldson, Will Kymlicka, 2012)</span><br><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Zoopolis offers a new agenda for the theory and practice of animal rights. Most animal rights theory focuses on the intrinsic capacities or interests of animals, and the moral status and moral rights that these intrinsic characteristics give rise to. Zoopolis shifts the debate from the realm of moral theory and applied ethics to the realm of political theory, focusing on the relational obligations that arise from the varied ways that animals relate to human societies and institutions. Building on recent developments in the political theory of group-differentiated citizenship, Zoopolis introduces us to the genuine "political animal". It argues that different types of animals stand in different relationships to human political communities. Domesticated animals should be seen as full members of human-animal mixed communities, participating in the cooperative project of shared citizenship. Wilderness animals, by contrast, form their own sovereign communities entitled to protection against colonization, invasion, domination and other threats to self-determination. `Liminal' animals who are wild but live in the midst of human settlement (such as crows or raccoons) should be seen as "denizens", resident of our societies, but not fully included in rights and responsibilities of citizenship. To all of these animals we owe respect for their basic inviolable rights. But we inevitably and appropriately have very different relations with them, with different types of obligations. Humans and animals are inextricably bound in a complex web of relationships, and Zoopolis offers an original and profoundly affirmative vision of how to ground this complex web of relations on principles of justice and compassion.</span></span><br>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=s0P_oQWHKk8C&lpg=PA99&ots=cXw5GpjHjg&dq=benton%20humanism%20%3D%20speciesism&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">Critical Theory and Animal Liberation</a> (John Sabonmatsu, 2011)</span><br>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Critical Theory and Animal Liberation is the first collection to approach our relationship with other animals from the critical or 'left' tradition in political and social thought. Breaking with past treatments that have framed the problem as one of 'animal rights,' the authors instead depict the exploitation and killing of other animals as a political question of the first order. The contributions highlight connections between our everyday treatment of animals and other forms of social power, mass violence, and domination, from capitalism and patriarchy to genocide, fascism, and ecocide. Contributors include well-known writers in the field as well as scholars in other areas writing on animals for the first time. Among other things, the authors apply Freud's theory of repression to our relationship to the animal, debunk the 'Locavore' movement, expose the sexism of the animal defense movement, and point the way toward a new transformative politics that would encompass the human and animal alike.</span></span><br>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14786-6/creaturely-poetics">Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film</a> (Anat Pick, 2011)</span><br>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Simone Weil once wrote that “the vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence,” establishing a relationship between vulnerability, beauty, and existence transcending the separation of species. Her conception of a radical ethics and aesthetics could be characterized as a new poetics of species, forcing a rethinking of the body’s significance, both human and animal. Exploring the “logic of flesh” and the use of the body to mark species identity, Anat Pick reimagines a poetics that begins with the vulnerability of bodies, not the omnipotence of thought. Pick proposes a “creaturely” approach based on the shared embodiedness of humans and animals and a postsecular perspective on human-animal relations. She turns to literature, film, and other cultural texts, challenging the familiar inventory of the human: consciousness, language, morality, and dignity. Reintroducing Weil’s elaboration of such themes as witnessing, commemoration, and collective memory, Pick identifies the animal within all humans, emphasizing the corporeal and its issues of power and freedom. In her poetics of the creaturely, powerlessness is the point at which aesthetic and ethical thinking must begin.</span></span><br>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=380230">Social Lives with Animals: Tales of Sex, Death and Love</a> (Erika Cudworth 2011)</span><br>
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">The conventional trilogy of social domination, of class, 'race' and gender has been challenged by new concerns around other distinctions – of place and location, age and generation, sexuality and forms of embodied difference. Despite these important developments, sociology has mostly stopped short at the difference of species. Erika Cudworth draws on various traditions of critical theorizing in sociology and animal studies in arguing that the social is not exclusively human and that species should be understood as a complex system of social domination which is co-constituted with intra-human social dominations. This understanding of species as a social system of relations is exemplified through three case studies: the eating of animals as food, the rearing of animals in industrial agriculture and the keeping of animals as companions. These sites reveal ways in which relations of species domination shape the lives both of humans, and of domesticated animals. Social Lives with Other Animals is a critical sociology of species which takes us beyond theories of speciesism or anthropocentricity and presents a necessary challenge to the power relations in the social formations of species.</span><br>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=hN8DlaA-oMwC&lpg=PP1&dq=animal%20connection&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">Animalkind: What We Owe to Animals</a> (Jean Kazez, 2010)</span><br>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">By exploring the ethical differences between humans and animals, Animalkind establishes a middle ground between egalitarianism and outright dismissal of animal rights. A thought-provoking foray into our complex and contradictory relationship with animals. Advocates that we owe each animal due respect. Offers readers a sensible alternative to extremism by speaking of respect and compassion for animals, not rights. Balances philosophical analysis with intriguing facts and engaging tales</span></span><br>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=sWguuJQC1vIC&lpg=PP1&dq=beyond%20animal%20rights&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">Beyond Animal Rights: Food, Pets, and Ethics</a> (Tony Milligan, 2010)</span><br>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Issues to do with animal ethics remain at the heart of public debate. In "Beyond Animal Rights," Tony Milligan goes beyond standard discussions of animal ethics to explore the ways in which we personally relate to other creatures through our diet, as pet owners and as beneficiaries of experimentation. The book connects with our duty to act and considers why previous discussions have failed to result in a change in the way that we live our lives. The author asks a crucial question: what sort of people do we have to become if we are to sufficiently improve the ways in which we relate to the non-human? Appealing to both consequences and character, he argues that no improvement will be sufficient if it fails to set humans on a path towards a tolerable and sustainable future. Focusing on our direct relations to the animals we connect with the book offers guidance on all the relevant issues, including veganism and vegetarianism, the organic movement, pet ownership, and animal experimentation</span></span><br>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=e4AZX1JZuhgC&lpg=PP1&dq=animal%20ethics%20in%20context&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">Animal Ethics in Context</a> (Clare Palmer, 2011)</span><br>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">It is widely agreed that because animals feel pain we should not make them suffer gratuitously. Some ethical theories go even further: because of the capacities that they possess, animals have the right not to be harmed or killed. These views concern what not to do to animals, but we also face questions about when we should, and should not, assist animals that are hungry or distressed. Should we feed a starving stray kitten? And if so, does this commit us, if we are to be consistent, to feeding wild animals during a hard winter? In this controversial book, Clare Palmer advances a theory that claims, with respect to assisting animals, that what is owed to one is not necessarily owed to all, even if animals share similar psychological capacities. Context, history, and relation can be critical ethical factors. If animals live independently in the wild, their fate is not any of our moral business. Yet if humans create dependent animals, or destroy their habitats, we may have a responsibility to assist them. Such arguments are familiar in human casesùwe think that parents have special obligations to their children, for example, or that some groups owe reparations to others. Palmer develops such relational concerns in- the context of wild animals, domesticated animals, and urban scavengers, arguing that different contexts can create different moral relationships.</span></span><br>
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</div><a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2012/02/animal-theory-going-feral-in-2012.html#more">Read more »</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-29714199931487367472011-07-28T15:37:00.002-05:002011-07-31T12:02:47.427-05:00Let Them Eat Meat: An Interview by an Ex-Vegan<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><b><u>INTRODUCTION</u></b><br>
Rhys Southan's <a href="http://letthemeatmeat.com/post/7958063624/interview-with-a-vegan-adam-weitz">interview </a>of me on his ex-vegan blog, <a href="http://letthemeatmeat.com/">Let Them Eat Meat</a>, went up this morning. According to Rhys:<br>
<blockquote>If anyone could convince me that I’m wrong about veganism, it’s Adam... [T]he interview is worth reading if you’re curious to see the strongest formulation of vegan beliefs that I’ve seen.</blockquote>Please check out the interview if you haven't read my posts this summer. (Below I've included some not previously posted excerpts from the interview and several links to challenging articles written by Rhys).<br>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;">Questions in the interview include:</span></b><br>
<ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-size: x-small;">What do you believe is wrong with the standard consumer veganism that the most mainstream advocates promote?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">How would you describe the form of veganism that you advocate?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Most vegan solutions for ending the exploitation and killing of animals (animal liberation) seem to require a human/animal separatism. How would your idea of veganism avoid that? </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Why do you refer to animals that aren’t humans as “animal others”? </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Is veganism a moral obligation?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Do you think veganism, particularly your take on veganism, fits into Nietzsche’s idea of slave morality? </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">When you first emailed me, you mentioned an interest in Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, which is a book that was influential on my thinking after I quit veganism... However, you believe Becker’s arguments could work for veganism. How so?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Veganism is an attempt to not cause death — is this not also a denial of death?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Vegans admit that veganism is imperfect, and that we can’t really follow the ethics to where they want to take us — being truly anti-speciesist and not causing animal death and suffering. What is the point of having an ethics that we can’t actually follow? </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Why should I accept your vision and make the one life I have to live worse in order to say that I am against speciesism?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Why should people become vegan despite the ineffectiveness of becoming vegan on an individual level?</span></li>
</ol><br>
<b><span style="font-size: small;">Most of my answers are abridged versions of pieces I've previously posted in June and July:<br>
I.<a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2011/06/crtique-of-consumption-centered.html"> A Critique of Consumption-Centered Veganism</a><br>
II. <a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2011/06/socially-centered-veganism-vs.html">Socially-Centered Veganism vs. Consumption-Centered Veganism</a><br>
III. <a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2011/06/veganism-without-vegetarianism-on-guilt.html">Veganism Without Vegetarianism: On Guilt, Disability, and Ex-Vegans </a><br>
IV. <a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2011/07/veganism-as-social-somatic-response.html">Veganism as Social Somatic Response-Ability</a> <br>
V. The Animal Therefore I am Not: Eating Animals and Terror Management Theory (forthcoming)<br>
</span></b></div><a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2011/07/let-them-eat-meat-interview-by-ex-vegan.html#more">Read more »</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-38750959386381836132011-07-04T15:06:00.003-05:002011-07-04T15:16:12.383-05:00Veganism as Social Somatic Response-Ability<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaCPH-O_JM6yFObfmIbJdAeHz7IvdCdasCh-9kkER11IytsFY70X_n-1rk1d6KLWYS2eZXMz8xb88gSIHQ5N-rW5wb-V5azsYWm8hAk3nP1XpAQ3Lnnz9OwEL98-8bsUF186xSBNTiYekP/s1600/5282800151_a8884147a3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaCPH-O_JM6yFObfmIbJdAeHz7IvdCdasCh-9kkER11IytsFY70X_n-1rk1d6KLWYS2eZXMz8xb88gSIHQ5N-rW5wb-V5azsYWm8hAk3nP1XpAQ3Lnnz9OwEL98-8bsUF186xSBNTiYekP/s1600/5282800151_a8884147a3.jpg"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Igualdad Animal </i>Demonstration in Spain (www.igualdadanimal.org) <www.igualdadanimal.org><http: www.igualdadanimal.org=""><br>
</http:></www.igualdadanimal.org></td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-size: x-small;">No one can deny the suffering, fear or panic, the terror or fright that humans witness in certain animals... the response to the question "can they suffer?" leaves no doubt… War is waged over the matter of pity... To think the war we find ourselves waging is not only a duty, a responsibility, an obligation, it is also a necessity... I say "to think" this war, because I believe it concerns what we call "thinking." --Jacques Derrida (1997, 2002)</span><br>
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<u>The Ethics of Veganism: an Open Wound called Compassion</u><br>
When I advocate veganism, I’m advocating it as <i>recognition of a phenomenon</i>, not as a <i>prescription of a principle</i>. That is, v<b>eganism is a recognition of the human condition of finitude, fallibility, and meagerness in a universe shared by other finite, fallible, and meager beings</b>. As I wrote before, veganism as a social existence with animal others is not a foreign attitude. Rather, it is a mode we are “thrown into” when we become subjected to our own curiosity and compassion for other mortal creatures. Recognizing veganism as such holds us responsible to animal others’ interests, and holds us accountable for closing off this mode for relating to animal others as “killable” instruments for some so-called higher-value (i.e. profits, “life,” “humanity”). Thus, veganism as a social attitude motivates and is facilitated by <a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2011/06/veganism-without-vegetarianism-on-guilt.html">vegetarian consumption</a>. Veganism-vegetarianism are the means and the end of a non-exclusive social responsibility.<br>
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<b>Veganism is therefore not the application of a principle of obligation, but the phenomenon of obligation from being addressed by the animal other to respond in return as a social being</b>. I’m not saying that a pig or salmon speak to us or voice themselves as a human might, but that we experience the phenomenon of being addressed, being called to ourselves as social and ethical beings, by recognizing the others’ different perspective, interests, and shared vulnerability. This phenomenon is with us from infancy. Just watch the expression of wonder watching the expressions of other species. It’s similar to their gaze into the face of a human. Children are not born distinguishing the moral considerability between humans and many other animals. Just recently, psychologists <a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100517204409.htm">Patricia Hermann</a> and others found that anthropocentirsm is a perspective acquired around the age of five, not something innate.<br>
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The veganism I advocate fits well with Ralph Acampora articulation of ethics as a phenomenon of the body’s existence as an ecologically and socially interrelational being in contrast to popular thought that ethics is the <i>product </i>of transcendental principles of pure reason or codes intersubjectively consented to. Reason may be valuable in that it exposes latent prejudices and inconsistencies in how one treats others, but only by presupposing our existence as social, caring, vulnerable, and potentially violent bodies. <b>From an ethical paradigm of the interrelational lived body, the “burden of proof” is not placed upon veganism as an extension of ethics, but rather the “ethical isolationism or contraction” of a an ethics based upon self-interest</b>.<br>
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For example, reflect upon the times when reason has been used not as a preventative measure against violence and prejudice, but as an instrument against our sociality with and care for others (e.g. “just war,” “ethnic cleansing,” “honor killings,” vivisection etc). It is through manufacturing a code and imposing it upon the world that we can justify acting violently toward others because of the class we place them into. <b>Arguments for fending off veganism and vegetarianism are usually no more than an elaborate game of logic to preserve one’s power and privilege over others by making violence reasonable</b>. They defy our underlying capacity to recognize others as social beings.<br>
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<u>Humanism's Double Standard: The Unreasonableness of Consistency</u><br>
<b>Veganism is the immanent, not the abstract, relationship we have to animal others as social beings</b>. Although my description of veganism is abstract in form, in practice, the reasons we assign to violence are the abstractions. Animal others are exploited under the justification that they belong to a separate race we’ve created and called “animals,” and they are institutionally exploited for the good of something we call “civilization” and the “economy” for something called “capital.”<b> </b><br>
</span></div><a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2011/07/veganism-as-social-somatic-response.html#more">Read more »</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-86066955166895119062011-06-17T17:45:00.001-05:002011-06-17T17:47:42.174-05:00Veganism without Vegetarianism: On Guilt, Disability, and Ex-Vegans<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQjkygfqFZBYuKhmsFc_rzUkGiAoiabhgcsCzfl5Pd_8J2NM0C-rrEzcQTAAqAqWUg9RHMMuegY1AQvyEwcyI1A2yrEZUF4ggQNSWJpo6t9LoAV7oxC2Rpx4mZKR7nyqMlLnizLskiJcbI/s1600/vegans-do-it-without-guilt.american-apparel-juniors-organic-tee.natural.w760h760.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQjkygfqFZBYuKhmsFc_rzUkGiAoiabhgcsCzfl5Pd_8J2NM0C-rrEzcQTAAqAqWUg9RHMMuegY1AQvyEwcyI1A2yrEZUF4ggQNSWJpo6t9LoAV7oxC2Rpx4mZKR7nyqMlLnizLskiJcbI/s320/vegans-do-it-without-guilt.american-apparel-juniors-organic-tee.natural.w760h760.jpg" width="320"></a></div><span style="font-size: small;"><u>THE QUESTION</u> </span><br>
<span style="font-size: small;">While attending the <a href="http://www.brocku.ca/social-sciences/undergraduate-programs/sociology/thinking-about-animals">Thinking About Animals </a>conference in the spring 2011, I stumbled upon an odd and heretical questions: <i>Could someone practice veganism without being vegetarian?</i>”</span><br>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The question is intended to be provocative in order to challenge vegans’ complicity or even dogmatic adherence to a particular understanding of veganism. That veganism is becoming <a href="http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_16043/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=EahOu2yH">mainstream </a>through its assimilation into the capitalist economy as a lifestyle choice or a fashionable diet leaves a stale taste in my mouth. Veganism should be revolutionary, not marketable. This question also enabled me to experiment with creating a more <a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2011/06/socially-centered-veganism-vs.html">productive tension</a> between veganism and vegetarianism.*</span><br>
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<span style="font-size: small;">So could someone practice veganism without being vegetarian? My <a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2011/06/crtique-of-consumption-centered.html">answer</a> is </span></div><a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2011/06/veganism-without-vegetarianism-on-guilt.html#more">Read more »</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-25576845467989419852011-06-12T11:48:00.001-05:002011-06-12T13:21:38.989-05:00Socially-centered Veganism vs Consumption-centered Veganism<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYqddgj0sq0IKsr-IpzhVoqjZH31xiQqCylJcpzhc9dnggLxKw4WL3GABXIEqUGnQn-5CtceWsZ7CTnacJXLM8GZ4yLaYZr7z-LgLq2LOwpYq495LIftDfpumfl7Uygzrg81uLdyOxyg4R/s1600/owen+mzee.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYqddgj0sq0IKsr-IpzhVoqjZH31xiQqCylJcpzhc9dnggLxKw4WL3GABXIEqUGnQn-5CtceWsZ7CTnacJXLM8GZ4yLaYZr7z-LgLq2LOwpYq495LIftDfpumfl7Uygzrg81uLdyOxyg4R/s320/owen+mzee.jpg" width="320"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Owen (right) & Mzee (left) @ Haller Park (Malindi, Kenya)</td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-size: small;">The most fundamental difference between the veganism I advocate and that advocated by others is focus. Veganism as a purely vegetarian lifestyle typically focuses on consumption practices associated with the individual, abstention, and identity; however, I’m interested in veganism as a social practice, a mode of being with others, that is relational, affirmative, and transformative.<br>
<br>
I understand veganism as <a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2010/08/deconstructing-veganism-commodity.html">a social modality</a>, an affiliation and solidarity with others beyond (species) boundaries, in which animal others are regarded as <i>someones</i>, not somethings. The origin, the means, and the end of veganism are being in “conversations” with others. Veganism, in other words, is fundamentally an affirmation of and care for the “voices” of animal others through “<a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2010/10/on-veganism-love-and-forgiveness.html">listening</a>” (i.e. receptive curiosity and regard). Since careful listening takes place between particular responsive beings, not abstract or inanimate ones, killing animals irreversibly terminates conversations, silencing animal others. Exploiting animals may not terminate conversations absolutely, but enables and is enabled by an emotional “deafness” to their resistance whenever it becomes inconvenient to using them. Like a good conversation, a vegan social modality is incompatible with asserting oneself onto and over others. If their singularity and agency are to be recognized, affirmed, and cared for in conversation, we must act least violently toward them. By baring us to the responsibility of our care for animal others, veganism is the practice of <i><a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2009/09/veganism-as-intersectional-social.html">intersectional</a> and interspecies participatory justice</i>, not <i>personal purity</i> (i.e. cruelty-free, body-as-a-temple), <i>moral pragmatism</i> (i.e. “the best choice for our health, the environment, and animals”), or <i>political protest</i> (i.e. economic boycott).<br>
</span></div><a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2011/06/socially-centered-veganism-vs.html#more">Read more »</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-55527925567586175462011-06-03T13:17:00.002-05:002013-06-03T15:03:22.139-05:00A Critique of Consumption-Centered Veganism<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizCUieLcxrwj1_HDFiQrkdzRMRq-pxaFOHbZd6NvWSA28h5b6-6dLAQQb4y2uLsKWSt458GBIlhlsXvvEW59wBLV7kGzjCKIK5U5MhB5bl5689yWvJYMZFNFYcNpgBqdRyCgJCHSoqqsSV/s1600/ConsumerVegan_Mainstream_500x700.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizCUieLcxrwj1_HDFiQrkdzRMRq-pxaFOHbZd6NvWSA28h5b6-6dLAQQb4y2uLsKWSt458GBIlhlsXvvEW59wBLV7kGzjCKIK5U5MhB5bl5689yWvJYMZFNFYcNpgBqdRyCgJCHSoqqsSV/s320/ConsumerVegan_Mainstream_500x700.jpg" width="320"></a></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>INTRODUCTION</b>: The mainstream discourse and practice of veganism as an individual’s (abstention from the) consumption of animal products, I believe, is problematic in three interrelated ways: <i>practically </i>as an economic boycott, <i>socially </i>as a privileged consumerism, and <i>philosophically </i>as an equivocation with a vegetarian lifestyle. I propose a new understanding of veganism as a social modality with and in regard to animal others which can be distinguished from and exist independently of vegetarian consumption. However, this distinction does not so much as invalidate vegetarian consumption so much as place it in a dialectic relationship with veganism, in which it can be regarded as a valuable means, but not an end.<br>
</span><span style="font-size: small;"><br>
<br>
<b> PRACTICALLY</b>, positioning veganism as an economic boycott is a very limited tactic given the prevalence of global capitalism. Mainstream veganism only addresses the <i>content </i>(i.e. animal products) and not the <i>form</i>/structure (i.e. capitalism) of the global market that facilitates the exploitation of animals as commodities and obstructs people from transforming society. This is evident in several ways.<br>
<br>
<i>First</i>, many mainstream vegans tend to regard the very culprits of animal exploitation as the remedy. Veganism is <a href="http://veganideal.org/content/boca-burgers-are-veganism-virginia-slims-are-feminism">now sold</a> to people in the form of products (sometimes explicitly labeled “vegan”) by the very <a href="https://www.msu.edu/%7Ehowardp/organicindustry.html">corporations </a>(i.e. Kraft, Dean, Con-Agra, Burger King, etc.) that exist and profit off the exploitation of animals. While the availability and convenience of these products is celebrated as “victories,” their support only sediments the control these corporations have over the market and government. These agri-businesses that own, produce, and distribute most of our food supply have tremendous political power winning government subsidies and combating policy changes that would abolish animal exploitation practices..<br>
<br>
<i>Second</i>, even if consumer vegans extend their boycott from the individual product consumed to the company who profits from it, without also challenging the present political-economic order of capitalism in which the interests of corporations persistently trump the interests of the general public, vegans remain complicit in the system that entitles businesses to exploit animal others (and human others as well). Besides, it’s not as if animal agribusiness is an isolated phenomenon; it is sustained by what Barbara Noske calls “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Boundaries-Animals-Barbara-Noske/dp/1551640783/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1307117795&sr=1-1">the animal industrial complex</a>”—an amalgamation of feed and chemical companies, the pharmaceutical industry, representatives and officers in government, public research and educational institutions etc. that are all mutually dependent upon one another through capital. Animal agribusiness will not be overthrown until these regimes and what gives them power are transformed. Even if consumer vegans were able to make significant dents in the national market, all this will be reversed by the rise of the affluent animal-eating class in the <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=cBIgow_0lVkC&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">developing world</a> to whom animals raised nationally will be exported, or—in “a race to the bottom”— to where the industry will be exported—displacing farmers and wildlife and externalizing production costs upon their communities.<br>
<br>
<i>Third</i>, veganism as an economic boycott does not even universally enable people to practice veganism. Since <a href="http://veganideal.org/content/pay-more-high-cost-class-bias-food-politics">wholesome food</a> is regarded as a commodity rather than a socio-political right, large populations of disadvantaged people have little to no financial and/or geographic <a href="http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/July-2009/The-Food-Desert/">access </a>to vegetarian food and goods, and thus are severely disadvantaged from living a secure vegan life. Food will continue to be grown for profits before people’s needs and preferences so long as food remains a commodity. A vegan world will not be brought about by the asocial, amoral market but by people in what Vandana Shiva calls “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Stolen-Harvest-Hijacking-Global-Supply/dp/0896086070">food democracy</a>”—when food production and access is determined by people, not the imperialism of the market. In sum, <i>mainstream vegan discourse and activism's focus on economic boycott is problematic not because it is ineffective, but because it is insufficient. Without challenging the political, economic, and social structure of society, veganism as a movement will make little progress reducing and abolishing animal exploitation</i>.<br>
</span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><br>
</div><a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2011/06/crtique-of-consumption-centered.html#more">Read more »</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-16723414430821388972011-03-11T20:27:00.000-06:002011-03-11T20:27:01.094-06:00Favorite Human-Animal Relation Quotes<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1iXUQSkMf1hMwpRwX65xBJVQl0goyQJnla03lXRWi2cj3mCgCJxteNCdn2XiTzoiKckOo_c4zgdOI5ZUEqFZ87YukQqcUTBA3PFMaHjPyY3Y96TSTaTdHESBgOhl4PR8lKnSy1D9mWsKt/s1600/vegan+revolution.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1iXUQSkMf1hMwpRwX65xBJVQl0goyQJnla03lXRWi2cj3mCgCJxteNCdn2XiTzoiKckOo_c4zgdOI5ZUEqFZ87YukQqcUTBA3PFMaHjPyY3Y96TSTaTdHESBgOhl4PR8lKnSy1D9mWsKt/s320/vegan+revolution.jpg" width="302" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Designed by Christie Nicole and Adam Weitzenfeld</td></tr>
</tbody></table><i>Thought I'd share some quotes I've encountered researching Human-Animal relations, ethics, and subjectivity as I pull together a post on the moral psychology of animal encounters. Enjoy!</i><br />
<br />
Stories with animals are older than history and better than philosophy.<br />
--<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Others-How-Animals-Made-Human/dp/1559634332/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1299721254&sr=1-1">Paul Sheppard</a><br />
<br />
The more I spoke about animals, the less possible it became to speak to them.<br />
--<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Spell-Sensuous-Perception-Language-More-Than-Human/dp/0679776397/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1299721344&sr=1-1">David Abram</a><br />
<br />
Man becomes aware of himself returning the [animal’s] look… [Today] animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance... The more we know, the further away we are.<br />
--<a href="http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/gustafson/FILM%20161.F08/readings/berger.animals%202.pdf">John Berger</a><br />
<br />
The most matter of fact person could not help thinking of the hogs they were so innocent they came so very trustingly and they were so very human in their protests and so perfectly within their rights... It was like some crime committed in a dungeon all unseen and buried out of sight and of memory... Relentless remorseless it was all his protests... his screams were nothing it it did its cruel will with him as if his wishes feelings had simply no existence at all it cut his and watched him gasp out his life<br />
<br />
He had stood and watched the hog-killing, and thought how cruel and savage it was, and come away congratulating himself that he was not a hog; now his new acquaintance showed him that a hog was just what he had been--one of the packer's hogs!...What they wanted from a hog was all the profits that could be got out of him; and that's what they wanted form the working man... What the hogs thought of it, and what he suffered, was not considered; and no more was it with the working man... That was true everywhere under capitalism.<br />
--<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=lDTuAAAAMAAJ&dq=the%20jungle&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">Upton Sinclair</a><br />
<br />
How many of my ancestors<br />
Were treated like today’s farm animals?<br />
How many of us look the other way?<br />
When I hear of calves<br />
Being taken from their mothers<br />
To be sold as veal<br />
I can hear the wailing voices of mothers<br />
Crying for their babies<br />
As the slave master takes them away<br />
The mother cow breastfeeds the human race<br />
My ancestors breastfed the white race<br />
So when I looked into those stunned eyes today,<br />
No one could have said to me,<br />
‘What’s the big deal?’ ‘ It’s only an animal.’<br />
I could have remembered a time<br />
When someone might have said the same thing about me<br />
--<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=JlRK0tfulkwC&lpg=PP1&dq=sistah%20vegan&pg=PA80#v=onepage&q&f=false">Mary Spears</a><br />
<br />
The possibility of the pogrom is decided in the moment when the gaze of a fatally-wounded animal falls on a human being. The defiance with which he repels this gaze—‘after all, it’s only an animal’—reappears irresistibly in cruelties done to human beings, the perpetrators having again and again to reassure themselves that it is ‘only an animal,’ because they could never fully believe this even of animals<br />
--<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=MI00WVkS1BsC&lpg=PP1&dq=minima%20moralia&pg=PA105#v=onepage&q&f=false">Theodore Adorno</a><br />
<br />
Men do all they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty or to hide it from themselves, in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence that some would compare to the worst cases of genocide (there are also animal genocides)… conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every supposed norm of a life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of their continued existence or even their overpopulation.<br />
<br />
No one can deny the suffering, fear or panic, the terror or fright that humans witness in certain animals… the response to the question "can they suffer?" leaves no doubt… War is waged over the matter of pity… To think the war we find ourselves waging is not only a duty, a responsibility, an obligation, it is also a necessity … I say "to think" this war, because I believe it concerns what we call "thinking."<br />
--<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=y8Drc-QghEIC&lpg=PP1&dq=the%20animal%20therefore&pg=PT51#v=onepage&q&f=false">Jacques Derrida</a><br />
<br />
There were seventy of us in a forestry commando unit for Jewish prisoners of War in Nazi Germany… halfway through our long captivity, for a few short weeks before the sentinels chased him away, a wandering dog entered our lives... we called him Bobby, an exotic name, as one does with a cherished dog. He would appear at morning assembly and was waiting for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight. For him, there was no doubt that we were men... This dog was the last Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the brain needed to universalize maxims and drives<br />
--<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=P-vrCZWj4Z4C&lpg=PP1&dq=animal%20philosophy&pg=PT69#v=onepage&q&f=false">Emmanuel Levinas</a><br />
<br />
However, even vegetarianism in your hands, would make a capital article... its connection with modern socialism, atheism, nihilism, anarchy and other political creeds... Brussels sprouts seem to make people bloodthirsty, and those who live on lentils and artichokes are always calling for the gore of the aristocracy and for the severed heads of kings... in the political sphere a diet of green beans seems dangerous.<br />
--Oscar WildeAdamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-24451261264616145862011-01-16T12:44:00.000-06:002011-01-16T12:44:54.777-06:00Decolonization and Animal Liberation: Love, Violence, Becoming-Other-Wise<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSlSBIG1N0VeLhmMELyhG9_zerwYpTALipQLLVJJu1F-MtXW7ziZOviYORngCyJVgGiSgYZZdW6-HOBvL2RDgY0WG5MlMc5SAWnwJpAf5e2XE2KFbZMK10j_KSRHz9Bq8eRYGpaiT7Aptd/s1600/ftaa_gate.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="197" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSlSBIG1N0VeLhmMELyhG9_zerwYpTALipQLLVJJu1F-MtXW7ziZOviYORngCyJVgGiSgYZZdW6-HOBvL2RDgY0WG5MlMc5SAWnwJpAf5e2XE2KFbZMK10j_KSRHz9Bq8eRYGpaiT7Aptd/s400/ftaa_gate.jpg" width="400"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Beehive Design Collective. "FTAA." Source: www.beehivecollective.org<span class="addmd"></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><b>Introduction</b> <br>
Some cyber-friends have been pestering me to put up another blog post since I haven't posted anything in three months--well, maybe that's an exaggeration but i really wanted to use the word pestering--, so I'm posting two abstracts I recently submitted to the <a href="http://libnow.org/2010/09/thinking-about-animals-brock-university-10th-annual-conference-for-critical-animal-studies/"><i>Thinking About Animals</i> conference</a> at Brock University (St. Catharines, ON, Canada) going on between March 1 and April 1, 2011. This will be the 10th <a href="http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/">Critical Animal Studies</a> conference, and Brock is perhaps one of the most deserving universities since its establishment of a <a href="http://edit.brocku.ca/webfm_send/6026">critical animal studies minor</a> and an official vegan policy in the Sociology department.<br>
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On that note, I encourage you to check out the <a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/p/critical-animal-studies-resources.html">Critical Animal Studies resource page </a>I created over winter break!!!<br>
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The first paper, on Frantz Fanon's <i>The Wretched of the Earth</i>, is a paper I wrote for Existentialism in the Fall. I went through some angst writing it, but came out overall satisfied with the paper. If any of you are interested in reading it, I'll send you a copy in exchange for some good feedback. The second paper ought to be more familiar to avid readers of this blog. It's basically a summation of what I have written on the understanding of veganism over the last two years or more.<br>
<br>
1.<br>
<b>Decolonization and Animal Liberation:</b><br>
<b>Violence and Becoming-Animal in Frantz Fanon’s <i>The Wretched of the Earth</i></b><br>
In 1961, the Algerian psychoanalysist, Frantz Fanon, published, <i>Les Damnés de la Terre</i>, a book specifically about the revolutionary movement in French Algeria, but a guide to decolonization in general. In <i>The Wretched of the Earth</i>, Fanon gives a phenomenological account of the Algerian independence movement, from its inception in local, spontaneous violent uprisings, to a national political movement, to the development of a national culture and new humanism. For Fanon and his friend Sartre, violence is a necessity for the colonized to become fully human and political subjects. Similarly, the development of a national culture is necessary development for not only the liberation of Algeria, but for the future of humanity.<br>
<br>
While Fanon’s primary goals are the achievement of national consciousness and a new humanism, a subversive reading of this text foregrounds “the animal” that beseeches his description of decolonization. Fanon’s characterization of the relationship between decolonization and animals is complex: on the one hand, animal being is to be transcended, if not negated through self-assertion and violence, yet the animal virtues of spontaneity, ferocity, and pack-forming are crucial for the overthrow of the colonizers. If humans’ metaphoric relationship to “animality” and animal others materialize in their relationship with one another, as is argued, then decolonization will not be achieved so long as a hierarchical and exclusionary identity politics exists between human and animal others (as is inferred by Fanon and Sartre’s subject-centered humanist discourse). It is argued that the anarchistic process of “becoming-animal” described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri is a more transformative and promising alternative to humanism for not only human liberation, but also the liberation from humanist violence against “animality” and animal others.<br>
<br>
2.<br>
<b>Deconstructing Veganism:</b><br>
<b>Love, Listening, Conversations, and Companionships Beyond Boundaries</b><br>
For over a decade, Gary Francione (1996, 2008) has been championed for his bold challenge to the efficacy of “new welfarism” and the sufficiency of lacto-ovo-vegetarian advocacy in the contemporary “animal rights” movements. Yet relatively few animal abolitionists have ever challenged the sufficiency and status quo of veganism. In a time when neoliberalism has come into a greater appropriation of veganism (Hammer 2008), real animals have become absent from the discourse of many animal and vegan advocacy campaigns (Adams 2006), and to be a vegan is more about one’s way of life (i.e. the subculture one belongs to) than one’s actual relationship to animals, a more radical critique of not only vegetarianism but veganism too is needed.<br>
<br>
While many celebrate the mainstreaming of veganism, <i>I would like to caution self-identified vegans and animal activists from accepting the present understanding of <b>vegan as an identity of (abstention from) consumption</b></i>. The present understanding of veganism as a) an identity b) defined negatively as an abstention from c) consumption has lead to a certain modality of political and private life which has been legitimately accused of self-righteousness, identity politics, militancy, colonialism, and privileged consumerism. In light of this, we are called to a radical rethinking of veganism not as a noun (“ vegan”) to be identified with, purchased, consumed, and completed, but as a modality and relationship with others that is never yet complete. <br>
<br>
Veganism is something to be understood affirmatively, as an affirmation of our own feelings and the voices of others. Those who have come into veganism as a liberation project must adamantly recall that they did not do so because of convenience, out of tradition, or merely out of pleasure, but because they are in search of affirming love. This love must never be forgotten as their point of departure and arrival. The ends of veganism are in the means of not forgetting, disavowing others. It is through disavowal that people commit the most violence by ignoring their own and others’ sentiments; they wage war on themselves and others for foreclosing ends, ideals, and identities, rather than waging conversation. The end of veganism is thus not to become a vegan, but to become other-wise in conversations and companionships beyond boundaries and “language.”<br>
<br>
<a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2011/01/decolonization-and-animal-liberation.html#more">Read more »</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-83759308935206214822010-10-26T05:39:00.000-05:002010-10-26T05:39:14.988-05:00On Veganism, Love, and Forgiveness<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_mpv4AkgRKF9KomqI8Wmf8VaNrDPDuaMnSNNIYbMe6mJm9v7m0VO5AzC-5dV-fhDyWkZUoiCLYvELe4ZwsNU4Ba8Z3cypA-fDvZWtSyLdk2CUjFfDgkenDV21vpTqPr6zIe8hKs2aZTht/s1600/IMG_0261.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_mpv4AkgRKF9KomqI8Wmf8VaNrDPDuaMnSNNIYbMe6mJm9v7m0VO5AzC-5dV-fhDyWkZUoiCLYvELe4ZwsNU4Ba8Z3cypA-fDvZWtSyLdk2CUjFfDgkenDV21vpTqPr6zIe8hKs2aZTht/s320/IMG_0261.JPG" width="320"></a></div><span style="font-size: small;">Once upon a time in the summer of 2008, I interned at an animal sanctuary in upstate New York. It was by far one of the best experiences of my life, and certainly also one of the most transformative ones, but it was not without its growing pains. While living in the intern house for nearly four moths, a feeling grew within me that <b>many people who dedicate them to animal issues are often in need of much healing, self-acceptance, and forgiveness</b>. So many of the interns were on medication for emotional health or had serious self-esteem issues (including myself). It was a dramatic summer of people not only struggling against and with one another, but also with themselves. One intern left early due to the hard emotional and physical labor of caring for the animals, while others got in terrible feuds with their distant partners, or even fell into self-hatred and bewilderment.<br>
<br>
I began to see some truth in animal studies literature that many people in western, industrial societies turn to animal others as emotional cruxes in a fragmented, disenchanted society. However, rather than thinking that animal others simply stood as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Others-How-Animals-Made-Human/dp/1559634340">surrogate </a>humans, it seemed that perhaps there is something about animal others that gives us something more-than-human. It seems that we turn our attention to animal others when we cannot accept ourselves or other humans, or it is they (fellow humans) whom we feel have not accepted us. It’s no coincidence that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal-assisted_therapy">animal therapy</a> can be so powerful in prisons, with children, and in nursing homes. </span><span style="font-size: small;"> <b>Animal others give us something few humans can give, even ourselves.</b><br>
</span><a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2010/10/on-veganism-love-and-forgiveness.html#more">Read more »</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-69151759682649029562010-10-06T16:42:00.004-05:002011-01-24T14:11:47.773-06:00Queering the Breast and Cross-nursing Queer Kinships<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUCioEhV6wP_aq7aaXprXalfwCRaTt60Ej3dLvGpgRRRlWyKvpFGG9j5bvIhjgoYQ9iu9rSGt6cb06IhCTiuzYKUVltgQvJlAn05dq4mgOl-YjiMgSDDXRycizSUU4fIijsXp-GD3gP3Ba/s1600/Second+Nature.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUCioEhV6wP_aq7aaXprXalfwCRaTt60Ej3dLvGpgRRRlWyKvpFGG9j5bvIhjgoYQ9iu9rSGt6cb06IhCTiuzYKUVltgQvJlAn05dq4mgOl-YjiMgSDDXRycizSUU4fIijsXp-GD3gP3Ba/s320/Second+Nature.jpg" width="291" /></a></div><span style="font-size: small;">I recently submitted this abstract to the "<a href="http://sexgenderspecies.conference.wesleyan.edu/">Sex Gender Species</a>" Conference affiliated with the Summer 2011 issue of <i>Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy</i> on "<a href="http://depts.washington.edu/hypatia/cfps.html">Animal Others</a>." This is an adaptation from "<a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2009/06/identity-politics-of-breasts-male.html">The Identity Politics of Breasts</a>" series I began researching approximately a year ago, posted last June and July, and updated and presented on June 27, 2010 at the "<a href="http://www.animalsandanimality.com/schedule.html">Animals and Animality</a>" graduate conference at Queen's University. There is a lot being analysis being crunched into those fourth and fifth paragraphs, and quite a bit missing before the second. Hopefully, I won't have to cut out too much; but if I do,maybe it's for the better and will be material for a future paper.<br />
<br />
The seeds for this research direction are numerous, but certainly the works of Karen Warren, Val Plumwood, and Carol Adams have been enormous early inspirations. Over the last four years, I am especially grateful to <a href="http://www.beloit.edu/english/faculty/ketabgian_cv/">Tamara Ketabgian</a> (Professor of English at Beloit College), <a href="http://www.yorku.ca/fes/about/people/students/phd/profiles/CormanLauren.htm">Lauren Corman</a> (Professor of Sociology at Brock University and co-host of <a href="http://animalvoices.ca/front/">Animal Voices</a>), and <a href="http://veganideal.org/content/about-vegan-ideal">Ida Hammer</a> (of The Vegan Ideal) whose teachings have ruptured and transformed my ideas. I would love to hear any feedback on this. I can see several lines of criticism and would love to articulate a defense for my position /ideas just as much as I am open to a modification of them.<br />
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<br />
<u><b>Queering the Breast and Cross-nursing Queer Kinships</b></u><br />
The human breast is a cultural site at which dominant western discourses demarcate nature from culture, woman from man, human from animal, sacred parenthood from perverse sexuality, and generosity from self-interest (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=6F6F4Tq4d3kC&lpg=PP1&dq=nature%27s%20body&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">Schiebinger 2004</a>). The objective of this paper it to queer sex, gender, and species identity in order to imagine different human-animal-food relations than those found in vegan literature today. Ultimately, I argue for the re-conceptualization of breasts as sites for queer productions that nourish cohabitation across difference and subvert cissexism, hetero-patriarchy, human supremacy, and the human-animal dichotomy.<br />
<br />
Feminist scholars on breastfeeding have critiqued both the commodificaiton of breasts as objects of male desire as well as contemporary disciplinary state and medical discourses on breastfeeding (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/History-Breast-Marilyn-Yalom/dp/0345388941/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1286399385&sr=1-1">Yalom 1997</a>). Iris Marion Young’s (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=0DxB3v0Y_HoC&lpg=PP1&dq=throwing%20like%20a%20girl&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">1990</a>) chapter, “Breasted Experience,” has played a significant role in challenging the meaning of women’s breasts being measured by and for others (i.e. hetero-men, infants, the state) in that it proposes that a woman’s breasts ought to be for that woman, as they are constitutive of her as a subject. Young ultimately rejects a breasted experience based in “a love that is all give and no take,” arguing that a female sexual pleasure need not be mutually exclusive with maternal care (87).<br />
<br />
In a recent paper, “Queer Breasted Experience,” Kim Hall argues that “the possibility and meaning of queer breasted experience… has been overlooked in [cissexual] feminist accounts” of subjectivity (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=UPRUqVGtCYoC&lpg=PA121&dq=queer%20breast&pg=PA121#v=onepage&q&f=false">2007</a>, 16). Young’s account, she argues, omits the subjectivities of trans men who, born female-bodied, experience breasts more ambivalently than cis women. Essentialist and monistic accounts of female subjectivity, in other words, have ironically, in an attempt to recognize sexual difference between women and men, have thus eliminated the recognition of sexual difference among female-bodied people who do not recognize themselves as women. Just as violence to queer subjectivities have been done in the name of a single limit between man and woman, so to has violence been done in the name of the animal to the vast heterogeneities of animal others (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=RQHQ8Vq97B8C&lpg=PP1&dq=the%20animal%20therefore%20i%20am&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">Derrida 1997</a>). Rethinking sex and species difference both is critical for living- and eating-well with others (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Comes-After-Subject-Eduardo-Cadava/dp/0415903602/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1286399565&sr=1-1">Derrida 1991</a>).<br />
<br />
In more ways than one, breasts offer an apt site at which to throw into question sex, gender, and species essentialism. First, breastfeeding is not a capacity exclusive to female-bodies; male-bodies, too, can produce milk and nurse children (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=yreSJwI8TwIC&lpg=PP1&dq=why%20sex%20fun&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">Diamond 1998</a>; <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=tdveAcAZQ-kC&lpg=PP1&dq=fresh%20milk%20giles&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">Giles 2003</a>). Second, breastfeeding need not be exclusively practiced between child and biological parent, but any parent who is lactating, even if of another species. Human-animal cross-species nursing has been practiced in cultures worldwide, including the West, perhaps since the domestication of dogs (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=v9gKhfo0MDgC&lpg=PP1&dq=company%20of%20animals&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">Serpell 1986</a>; <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Milk-Money-Madness-Politics-Breastfeeding/dp/0897894073/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1286399655&sr=1-1">Baumslag and Michels 2005</a>; <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=skS2zZTvTOUC&lpg=PP1&dq=olmert%20animals&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">Olmert 2009</a>). Third, food represents a new way of thinking subjectivity beyond sexual difference, in which we eat our way into new identities (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=3c79RRzZmoEC&lpg=PP1&dq=carnal%20appetites&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">Probyn 2000</a>). Breasts thus offer a site at which sex, gender, and species identities can proliferate through creative, queer assemblages.<br />
<br />
Condemning any and all human-animal-food relation as intrinsically exploitative assumes, or at least prescribes, species essentialism. For example, in her paper “Disturbing Images,” Maneesha Deckha welcomes a <a href="http://www.spike.com/video/milk-gone-wild/2712791">PETA video</a> (in which young women lift up their shirts to reveal udders and ecstatically spray milk at men) because it subverts both the medicalized and hetero-normative discourses of the Madonna-and-child dyad as well as “the wholesome image of [cows’] milk” (<a href="http://philpapers.org/rec/DECDIP">2008</a>, 63). Ironically, Deckha commits herself to the very hetero-normative discourse she opposes by asserting that cows’ milk is “meant for that mammal’s offspring,” repeating several times how “unnatural” it is for humans to drink it (64). Deckha’s privileging of the abjectness of the video makes it difficult to imagine more productive and transformative human-animal-food relations that do not reproduce the species barriers she wants to overcome. At least when human women are nursing animal others, audiences are most disturbed by what they interpret to be the woman’s perverse pleasure and disloyalty to her species (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=6uCEhroo-oEC&lpg=PP1&dq=brutal&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">Luke 2007</a>). In such instances, cross-species nursing subverts the human-animal dichotomy, but also human supremacy and hetero-patriarchy.<br />
<br />
One need not fear that by appraising cross-species nursing they will have committed themselves to the evolutionary, postmodern accounts of naturecultures, which forfeit philosophical rigor for philosophical play (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=RXSq8sZ9nsEC&lpg=PP1&dq=when%20species%20meet&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">Haraway 2008</a>). Instead, cross-species nursing offers vegan feminists a figure to redefine vegan human-animal-food relations as something other than privation and/or abstinence from consuming animals (and their products). Cross-species nursing disrupts the human-animal dichotomy, inverts the standard narrative applied to human-animal-food relations, and does not necessitate that either nurse or nursed be sacrificed for the nourishment of the other.</span>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-54513738147915921662010-08-29T16:43:00.001-05:002010-08-29T16:47:58.610-05:00Moving Animals: Spectacular Animal Films (Part 2)<span style="font-size: small;">3. <u><b><i>The Animals Film</i></b> (Beyond the Frame 1981, 137min)</u><br>
<object height="405" width="500"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/xjRi_pcuzDM?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b&border=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/xjRi_pcuzDM?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b&border=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="500" height="405"></object><br>
To my knowledge, <i>The Animals Film</i> was the first documentary to me made on the animal protection movement and the first to be aired on public television--an amazing feat given that it was released just 6 years after the publication of <i>Animal Liberation</i>, 1 year after Henry Spira's ad campaign against Revlon, 2 years before <i>The Case for Animal Rights</i>, and 3 years before <i>Unnecessary Fuss</i>. Filmed in the United States by an Israeli and released in England, <i>TAF</i> had been the most comprehensive film on animal welfare up until the release of <i>Earthlings</i> 16 years later. Yet, despite its age, sadly, little has changed since its release except that industry practices and problems have increased in magnitude and extended into other countries. (In 1980, about 5 billion animals were slaughtered in America annually compared to nearly 9 billion by 2000). In fact, it is my opinion that despite the praise for <i>Earthlings</i> and the absence of knowledge about this film, <i>TAF</i> is better. (Whether it is more effective at recruiting vegans--<i>Earthlings </i>supposedly is nicknamed "the Vegan maker"--, that is for empirical studies to determine).<br>
</span><br>
<a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2010/08/moving-animals-spectacular-animal-films_29.html#more">Read more »</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-8235752717494096042010-08-28T16:24:00.002-05:002010-08-28T17:16:24.741-05:00Moving Animals: Spectacular Animal Films (Part 1)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Muybridge_race_horse_animated.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Muybridge_race_horse_animated.gif" width="400"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Eadweard Muybridge's "The Horse in Motion" (1878)</td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-size: x-small;">"Animals: The Most Moving Things in the World"<br>
--Jim Mason in <i>An Unnatural Order</i> (2005 [<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=7nTUkoLzSk0C&lpg=PP1&ots=lfNizwEzxq&dq=unnatural%20order&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">1993</a>])<br>
<br>
“The animal look can be seen as a continuation of the photographic look... Animals appeared to merge with technological bodies that replaced them... If the animal cannot die but is nonetheless vanishing, then it must be transferred to another locus, anther continuum in which death plays no role... the cinema developed, indeed embodied, animal traits as a gesture of mourning for the disappearance of [animals]"<br>
--Akira Lippit in <i>Electric Animal</i> (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=L8o4fTGk7uUC&lpg=PP1&dq=electric%20animal&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">1998</a>)</span><br>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><u><b>Moving Animals, Animal Affect, and Effective Movies</b></u><br>
Since its inception, the animal movement has relied upon images to evoke sympathy--from William Hogarth's "The Four Stages of Cruelty" (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Stages_of_Cruelty">1751</a>) that connected cruelty to animal to cruelty to humans, to the <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/3827303">anti-vivisectionist posters</a> that re-figured the medical oppression of women to that of animal others, and PETA's "<a href="http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/05/05/petas-holocaust-on-your-plate-campaign/">Holocaust on Your Plate</a>" and "<a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2008/11/privilege-us-vegan-movement-whiteness.html">Animal Liberation</a>" exhibits that juxtaposed images of human and nonhuman oppression. Undercover investigation footage of labs, in particular, played a crucial role in the 1980's, especially within the efficacy of the ALF and PETA (videos like <a href="http://www.petatv.com/tvpopup/video.asp?video=unnecessary-fuss&Player=wm">Unnecessary Fuss</a> and <a href="http://www.petatv.com/tvpopup/video.asp?video=biosearch&Player=wm">Inside Biosearch</a>). However, with increased vandalism and exposure, the Animal Industrial Complex has been vigilant to guard its practices from public knowledge. Since the 1990's, these industries have installed hi-tech security systems in addition to lobbying for the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act [<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Enterprise_Terrorism_Act">AETA</a>], which gained increasing government backing post-9/11. Such footage, has been crucial to educating the public about animal welfare within the age of televisions, computers, and cinema. Over the last decade, activists have even accompanied themselves with video harnesses to literally carry the animals' voices to protests and demos.<br>
</span><br>
<a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2010/08/moving-animals-spectacular-animal-films.html#more">Read more »</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-48122689353594780692010-08-17T04:50:00.001-05:002010-08-17T05:56:00.618-05:00Social(ist) Animals: Toward Mutual Aid against the Great Butcher<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyT9vKgIezNvOmYBJxol_igq6AWYgvjvZ8E-GLRZMMxrWEUFb03HOD2VKkGnwa7ZY8RqPzg_GjGV6NEQu3c6TsPyhszzp6JidUluyoJfXtjFW5DTCSaGlKzqcDcIkn9zG7Llaf5fzqxmCK/s1600/001newcover1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyT9vKgIezNvOmYBJxol_igq6AWYgvjvZ8E-GLRZMMxrWEUFb03HOD2VKkGnwa7ZY8RqPzg_GjGV6NEQu3c6TsPyhszzp6JidUluyoJfXtjFW5DTCSaGlKzqcDcIkn9zG7Llaf5fzqxmCK/s400/001newcover1.jpg" width="400"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sue Coe. 2004. "Ox Pull." From "Bully!: master of the Global Merry-go-round" Source: http://www.graphicwitness.org/coe/bullya.htm</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-size: x-small;">"However, even vegetarianism in your hands, would make a capital article... its connection with modern socialism, atheism, nihilism, anarchy and other political creeds... Brussels sprouts seem to make people bloodthirsty, and those who live on lentils and artichokes are always calling for the gore of the aristocracy and for the severed heads of kings... in the political sphere a diet of green beans seems dangerous." -Oscar Wilde, <i>The Complete Letters</i>, p. 334, from a letter dated Nov. 12, 1887. </span><br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: small;"><u><b>Introduction</b></u><br>
Ten months ago, Paul D'Amato's article "<a href="http://socialistworker.org/2009/10/26/socialism-and-animal-rights">Socialism and 'animal rights'</a>" sparked a small controversy that fizzled out within a month of its release. Unfortunately, out of the dozen responses only two or three were more argument than opinion. My aim here is to provide a more rigorous and comprehensive critique of D'Amato's article absent in the responses in order to better reconcile the perceived tension between socialistm and animal rights.<br>
<br>
In "Socialism and 'Animal Rights'," D'Amato's reasoning starts off strong, making critical and important insights on the idea of animal liberation; however, it soon strays into weak, dangerous, and unnecessary territory. D'Amato comes to several conclusions (not presented in this order):<br>
</span><br>
<ol><span style="font-size: small;">
<li>"There is a clear connection between how a rapacious capitalism mistreats animals... environment... [and] human[s]"</li>
<li>"Non-human animals are helpless… incapable of organizing and fighting for their rights"</li>
<li>"To compare the condition of animals to that of... [humans] for freedom and equality is to view the latter through a paternalistic lens, rather than a lens of human liberation"</li>
<li>"we need to insist on the essential differences between human beings and other animals, and reject the idea of 'animal liberation.'"</li>
<li>"seeking more humane treatment of animals is not the same as calling for 'animal rights'"</li>
</span></ol><span style="font-size: small;">In the first conclusion, he displays sympathy for nonhuman animals and their human allies. In the second, D'Amato properly points out the obvious but sometimes overlooked fact that no other (with a possible exception of a few) species can and/or is capable of politically organizing to declare their rights. This point leads into the subtitle and thesis of D'Amato's piece: to compare the animal liberation <i>movement</i> to human liberation <i>movements</i> is paternalistic (and reeking of white, middle-class, male privilege).<br>
<br>
I'm totally on board with D'Amato's thesis if we are only discussing <i>movements</i> and not also mental, material, and legal outcomes. But he does not enclose his argument to his thesis; he continues on to argue that humans are essentially different from all other animals (despite being careful to say that humans are only "qualitatively" different"), and that the "liberation" and rights of nonhuman animals be rejected in favor of merely "more humane treatment." It is these last two conclusions, I find objectionable and weakly argued.<br>
<br>
In this response, I will critique four positions D'Amato either asserts or ignores. First, he implicitly argues that one cannot have rights unless one asserts one has them, a contractualist argument that would exclude many humans from possessing rights. Second, he explicitly draws on evolutionary biology to make arguments for an essential difference between humans and other animals that contradict themselves and are analogous to arguments that have been used to rationalize racism. Third, D'Amato misses how worker and animal exploitation are not only increased by capitalism, but that they are intersecting oppressions that mutually reinforce one another just as socialism and animal rights are ethico-political positions that intersect and mutually reinforce one another. Finally, he is naive to the historical, cultural, and ecological ties between the exploitation and well-being of human and animal.<br>
<br>
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<a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2010/08/socialist-animals-toward-mutual-aid.html#more">Read more »</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-23583637570287472822010-08-14T01:49:00.007-05:002010-08-14T22:44:56.283-05:00Deconstructing Veganism: Commodity, Reciprocity, & the Killing Contract<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbBPtih1SLFT4LLQsOCmz5hGaf6gtvAEokMk2ZexrxGu7IxPa3bSKRHZtOrm3ixqj0i7uYS8RmUEWSdOZ3Nk1xsh_rHAyn_uzYfVL42LsrdicZQ2mwjElCWNdj_Gz8OtA-hw1Bx9K0OJS7/s1600/Rhesusx2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbBPtih1SLFT4LLQsOCmz5hGaf6gtvAEokMk2ZexrxGu7IxPa3bSKRHZtOrm3ixqj0i7uYS8RmUEWSdOZ3Nk1xsh_rHAyn_uzYfVL42LsrdicZQ2mwjElCWNdj_Gz8OtA-hw1Bx9K0OJS7/s320/Rhesusx2.jpg"></a></div><span style="font-size: small;"><u><b>Preface</b></u><br>
As I previously mentioned, most of my blogging over the last year has been on Facebook. I do not have the time to write as masterful posts with extensive and precise citations as before, so I cannot promise future posts will be as organized and nuanced as previous ones. That said, although I have not done so in the past here, future posts like this one will be in response to either a provocative blog entry elsewhere on the web or several related news stories. If we are both so lucky, these posts will probably be shorter reads. Well, we'll see!<br>
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<u><b>Insturmentalism: the Logos of Animal Capital</b></u><br>
Anastasia @ <a href="http://animalvisions.wordpress.com/">Animal Visions</a>, a highly welcomed blog that just hit the cyber-scene, writes in "<a href="http://animalvisions.wordpress.com/2010/05/27/whats-the-deal-with-animal-use/">What’s the deal with animal use?</a>":<br>
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<blockquote><span style="font-size: small;">From an ecofeminist and indigenous perspective, use of another living being is not inherently bad; in fact, it’s necessary for survival. The use becomes a major problem when it’s one-sided. That is, living beings in the ecosystem are made... into resources in order to serve one species, and members of that species do not give back in response to what they have received. ... What’s missing in this scenario is reciprocity, which is also missing in our conceptualization of exploitation... The act of “use” wouldn’t be a problem because everyone would be used, and the use would simply be an act of life, a way of participating in the biosphere. Alas, as it stands, we do not. Our global civilization exploits many and holds no values for giving back...</span><br>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Do animal liberation proponents really want to abolish all forms of animal use, thereby disregarding our interdependence in the biosphere and severing any possibility for us to give unto other animals and to be open to our use in return? This animal liberation proponent certainly doesn’t.</span></blockquote><span style="font-size: small;">I really like this and is kind of what I've been thinking about for several years and why I share Donna Haraway's (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=RXSq8sZ9nsEC&lpg=PP1&dq=when%20species%20meet&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">2007</a>) criticism of abolitionist views that always cast nonhuman animals as victims, ignoring their agency and affect upon humans. Animal rightists have overlooked that their positioning of nonhuman animals as "voiceless", "defenseless," and "helpless" have only re-instituted their passivity, having presupposed a human-reason-agent vs nonhuman-passive dualism. Writers like Haraway, but especially James Hribal (<a href="http://courses.csusm.edu/hist460ae/classanimals19th.pdf%20">2003</a>, <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/hribal11112006.html">2006</a>, <a href="http://www.humanecologyreview.org/pastissues/her141/hribal.pdf%20">2007</a>, <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/hribal02252010.html">2010</a>), have repositioned animals not as slaves, a la Marjorie Speigel's <i>Dreaded Comparison</i> (<a href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1594/is_n6_v6/ai_17847939/">1996</a>), but as "the working class." <b>Reconfigurations of animals as fellow agents on the one hand may affirm their subjectivity and role in society, while on the other risks reinstating their oppression on new terms</b> (as I will argue against reciprocity being a sufficient condition for ethical relations).<br>
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<a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2010/08/deconstructing-veganism-commodity.html#more">Read more »</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-12744120086409502972010-08-11T04:20:00.139-05:002010-08-11T23:56:31.783-05:00Sperm Banks & Meat-Markets: The Sexual Economy of Meat<span style="font-size: small;"><u><b>"$uper Cow", $uper Profits: Cyber Chattel, $ex Exchange, and $perm Banks</b></u><object height="405" width="500"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Nmkj5gq1cQU&hl=en_US&fs=1?rel=0&color1=0x234900&color2=0x4e9e00&border=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Nmkj5gq1cQU&hl=en_US&fs=1?rel=0&color1=0x234900&color2=0x4e9e00&border=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="500" height="405"></object><br>
In a recent National Geographic <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=P-vrCZWj4Z4C&lpg=PT142&ots=TQphlXvaRr&dq=exterminated%20by%20means%20of%20their%20continued%20existence%20or%20even%20their%20overpopulation%E2%80%9D&pg=PT142#v=onepage&q&f=false">program</a> on the technoscientific management of "nature," we get a glimpse at a very much neglected element in contemporary animal agribusiness, the sperm banks by which, animals are, according to Jacques Derrida (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=RQHQ8Vq97B8C&lpg=PP1&dq=animal%20therefore%20i%20am&pg=PA26#v=onepage&q&f=false">1997</a>), "exterminated by means of their continued existence or even their overpopulation”:</span><br>
<blockquote><span style="font-size: small;">Selective breeding is the first stop on our tour of how man is using science to control nature... In fact, selective breeding is all about managing sex...Over a hundred years, Farmers have only allowed the cows and bulls with the largest muscle mass to mate</span></blockquote><span style="font-size: small;">The technoscientific sacrifice of animal heathcare for economic welfare is explained:</span><br>
<blockquote><span style="font-size: small;">There is a gene that regulates the growth of muscles in cattle. These cows have been selectively breed from animals that contain a copy of this gene that doesn't work. As a result their muscles grow far larger than normal. To insure that the effective gene is passed on, sex for the Belgian Blues has been replaced by technology in the form of artificial selection </span></blockquote><span style="font-size: small;">The men in the video discuss the homoerotic, predatory gaze:</span><br>
<blockquote><span style="font-size: small;">The bulls are shaved to best display their muscles... so you can see where all the meat is... because when you look at him, you cannot help but think of lunch</span><br>
</blockquote><a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2010/08/sexual-liberation-animal-liberation.html#more">Read more »</a>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9144244221799804070.post-72572297868036789422010-06-17T17:36:00.006-05:002010-08-28T21:53:28.579-05:00Update: Taste of Yesterday and Tomorrow<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyHQymHvAiUXekhhr3sJsoUgg8JtBADafHKlyCQ2efDS2XEdUN5iT_xhpsC6jUuGFC1K_yCNlWQmYA7l1-exbyvLR4tENx__ySzIZIZ6xRLqq70IK06vgaszhh_zhmyFZGEJxAIz_QSCJ1/s1600/n53600408_30354826_7256.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="376" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyHQymHvAiUXekhhr3sJsoUgg8JtBADafHKlyCQ2efDS2XEdUN5iT_xhpsC6jUuGFC1K_yCNlWQmYA7l1-exbyvLR4tENx__ySzIZIZ6xRLqq70IK06vgaszhh_zhmyFZGEJxAIz_QSCJ1/s400/n53600408_30354826_7256.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-size: 85%;">Sorry, for being away for so long.<br />
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Don't worry, I've been at work on a pretty interesting piece called "Weakening Veganism: Intersectional, International, Interspecies Conversations." In it, I argue that veganism should be thought of as a conversational process with others that affirms and enriches human-animal relationships rather than an antagonistic identity based on following a fixed moral system based on abstaining from human-animal relationships. You can get a taste of it by visiting the "<a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/p/paradigm-shift.html">Paradigm Shift</a>" page.(Yep, it's a new feature just like the "About" and "Table of Contents" pages. I may also try adding a "Video" page, too.)<br />
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If you're an old reader, you'll notice the blog has undergone a major template change... and I love it! Yeah, it's not green, but I like the earthiness of the browns. And it's damn sexy, too. But I'm not opposed to changing things around if people have suggestions.<br />
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In other news, I will be presenting a paper called "<a href="http://www.animalsandanimality.com/schedule.html">Queering the Breast: De-Naturing the Hu/man through Breastfeeding Practices</a>" that articulates a new relationship between humans, animals, and food based on experience, transformation, and nourishment. It's based on the "<a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2009/06/identity-politics-of-breasts-male.html">The Identity Politics of Breasts</a>" series I posted last summer and is a hybrid creature of animal, feminist, queer, and trans* studies. I hope to get this published in an upcoming special issue on animals in <i><a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CB8QFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdepts.washington.edu%2Fhypatia%2Fcfps.html&ei=PPgYTOf2N4W0lQek8LSdCw&usg=AFQjCNGy0aJSIYJvFCO0kovkyNnZnWPTKg&sig2=ExuZSKW-fhxP1Gpx32_UZA">Hypathia</a></i>. I also plan on publishing a refined version of my "<a href="http://eco-health.blogspot.com/2008/12/racial-and-colonial-politics-of-meat.html">The Racial and Colonial Politics of Meat</a>" when I get the chance in addition to a piece on "Animal Anarchist Ethics in the Flesh" based on the "Weakening Veganism" post described above. So that's a taste of what's to come.<br />
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Finally, most of my blogging has been done on Facebook. I usually type responses to other blogs and new pieces that are maybe 200-500 words without any citations.Would people prefer I post these on here?<br />
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I've been reluctant because I've tried to maintain very high quality posts, but, then again, its only a blog. Also, 2) how much <i>would you prefer shorter posts</i>--does anyone read through the whole thing ever?<br />
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<i>Throw some feedback at me if you're interested in any of this!</i></span>Adamashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09054174763612949293noreply@blogger.com0