Élise Desaulniers
@edesaulniers
Text
Kimberlé Crenshaw, 1991
Intersectionality
"Racial and gender discrimination overlapped not only in the workplace but in other other arenas of life; equally significant, these burdens were almost completely absent from feminist and anti-racist advocacy."
Why intersectionality can't wait
But... MECHANISMS ENABLING THE OPPRESSION OF MINORITIES ALSO ENABLE THE OPPRESSION
OF NON-HUMAN ANIMALS
All forms of oppression must be fought together
If you think about it...
A
- White
- Culture
- Rationality
- Wealth
- Cisgender
- Able
- Heterosexuality
- Men
- Humans
NON-A
- Non-white
- Nature
- Emotions
- Poverty
- Transgender
- Disabled
- Homosexuality
- Women
- Animals
Pattrice jones
The terms on each side of the hierarchical divide are linked: Men are seen as more rational, women and people of color are seen as closer to nature, classes of people are put down by calling them animal names.
"If you want to dismantle a structure, the thing to do is knock out the joints"
Intersectionality and Animals
Carol J. Adams,
1990 and 2004
Objectification permits an oppressor to view another being as an object. The oppressor then violates this being by object-like treatment: e.g., the rape of women that denies women freedom to say no, or the butchering of animals that converts animals from living breathing beings into dead objects. This process allows fragmentation, or brutal dismemberment, and finally consumption.
Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, p. 73
Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The “absent referent” is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product.
Just as dead bodies are absent from our language about meat, in descriptions of cultural violence women are also often the absent referent.
Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat
25
Indeed, women are meat. Hunted, purchased, grilled. Everywhere, food, and especially meat, is compared to the female body, just like the vocabulary of food is used to represent woman.
Martine Delvaux, Serial Girls
PETA sells inequality.
Here's their real message: Dominance, in and of itself, is sexy. Veganism, in and of itself, isn't.
the end doesn't justify the means
Intentions to support the ethical organization were reduced for those exposed to the sexualized advertising, and this was explained by their dehumanization of the sexualized women, and not by increased arousal. (...) When promoting ethical causes, organizations may benefit from using advertising strategies that do not dehumanize women.
When Sex Doesn't Sell: Using Sexualized Images of Women Reduces Support for Ethical Campaigns
The animal rights movement has been a feminist movement since (at least) the 19th century
The Brown Dog Affair, 1903-1910
"Seeing this sheep seemed to reveal to me for the first time the position of women throughout the world. I realised how often women are held in contempt as beings outside the pale of human dignity, excluded or confined, laughed at and insulted because of conditions in themselves for which they are not responsible, but which are due to fundamental injustices with regard to them, and to the mistakes of a civilisation in the shaping of which they have had no free share."
Constance Bulwer-Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, 1914.
A. Breeze Harper
Sims believed in the lesser pain receptivity of black people, and acknowledged in his later lectures and publications that he couldn’t have operated on white women without anesthesia. He didn’t feel the same impossibility in relation to his slaves – his knowledge of their lesser pain receptivity (and their easily silenced voices?) allowed him to operate (and restrain). Sims would not have started his program of multiple, endless surgery on vaginas if the women available for this operation had been white rather than black.
Petra Kuppers,
Remembering Anarcha, Objection in the Medical Archive
A critic of this point of view
can be read here.
S. Trawalter et al. (2012) Racial Bias in Perceptions of Others’ Pain
The present work provides evidence that people assume a priori that Blacks feel less pain than do Whites
The same mentality that made it okay to conduct cruel experiments on black women by the ‘father of gynecology’ in the 19th century is the same mentality that continues to allow nonhuman animals to suffer heinous atrocities today.
I usually don’t mention that I’m vegan but that has evolved. I think it’s the right moment to talk about it because it is part of a revolutionary perspective – how can we not only discover more compassionate relations with human beings but how can we develop compassionate relations with the other creatures with whom we share this planet and that would mean challenging the whole capitalist industrial form of food production.
Agela Davis
