From: altar@beaufort.sfu.ca (Ted Wayn Altar)
Subject: Sexual Politics of Meat: Review
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1992 02:49:31 GMT

Below is book review of Carol J. Adams, THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF
MEAT: A FEMINIST-VEGETARIAN CRITICAL THEORY (N.Y.: Continuum Pub.
Co., 1991, 256 pages, $12.95).  Has anyone else out there read
Carol Adam's book?

Below is copied most of Deborah Slicer's (Dept. of Philosophy,
U. of Montana) book review of this important book by Carol Adams.
This review can be found in ENVIRONMENT ETHICS, 1992, 14(4):365-
369.  I would have copied it all out, but I would like to
encourage people to take a look for themselves at his 
interesting journal :-)
                                 ted

     The "Cattle Queen" graces the front cover of the SEXUAL
     POLITICS OF MEAT, an image which Carol Adams says was
     printed on beach towels a few years ago along with the
     imperative to "Break the Dull Beef Habit."  She is depicted
     from the back, kneeling, looking fetchingly over her
     shoulder, and except for a red cowboy hat, she is nude.
     Although, so far, the picture is offensive enough, there is
     more.  Her body is marked off into butcher cuts: her thigh
     is labeled "soup bone," her hips "round," her buttocks
     "rump."  Working up her torso, she is marked "loin," "ribs,"
     and "chuck."  Her upper arms reads "shank."  Printed to the
     right of her upper arm is a question, or more likely an
     invitation: "What's your cut?"
     
     Is the Cattle Queen a woman? A corpse? "Meat"?  Moreover,
     who is being invited to eat?  Adams explores the confluence
     of these ideas in partriarchal culture, and she does so in a
     way that is far more thorough and convincing than any of the
     animal rights or ecofeminist literature to date on this
     subject.  Unlike the other literature, THE SEXUAL POLITICS
     OF MEAT is an account of flesh eating as a partriarchal
     institution, and of women, including feminists, as both
     victimized by and complicit in the ideologies of "meat."
     
     The book is divided into three parts.  In the first, Adams
     defines what she calls the "partriarchal text of meat," the
     social, political, economic, and linguistic contexts in
     which animal flesh is associated with woman and flesh eating
     is associated with maleness.  For the most part, Adams
     focuses on the British and American "texts" of the
     nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  She makes it clear that
     and how we associate flesh eating with power -- that is,
     with maleness, with white skin, and with the rich and
     powerful nations.  Clearly, these associations are not value
     neutral or benign.  Meat eating is linked with virility,
     intelligence, courage, and material affluence.  The
     "superior" sex requires and consumes more flesh in his diet
     than does the "inferior" sex which can live on inferior
     foods -- that is, on grains, vegetables, and fruits.  The
     same holds for inferior races, classes, and nations,
     although, Adams explains, even among the British and
     American lower-economic classes, disproportionately large
     shares of flesh have been reserved for males, while women
     and children do without.  Our language reflects the idea
     that "meat" is man's food when we serve "manhandlers," such
     "he-man" food as steak and "hero" sandwiches to our "meat
     and potatoes" men.
     
     Adams cites a number of eclectic nineteenth and twentieth-
     century sources including cookbooks, pub menus, meat
     advertisements, dietary studies, philosophy texts, and
     histories.  These report, among other things, for example,
     that, according to Hegel, "[t]he difference between men and
     women is like that between animals and plants," as "[m]en
     correspond to animals, while women correspond to plants
     because their development is more placid"; that, according
     to various cookbooks, on Father's Day we should serve London
     broil, but on Mother's Day light soups and salads; that,
     according to the nineteenth-century physician, George Beard,
     savages and semi-savages (non-Westerners) are "little
     removed from the common animal stock from which they are
     derived," as "[t]hey are much nearer the forms of life from
     which they feed than are the highly civilized brain-workers,
     and can therefore subsist on forms of life which would be
     most poisonous to us'; and that, finally, Napoleon was
     defeated at Waterloo because, in part, he was battling a
     nation of beef eaters (pp. 30-37).
     
     Adams' social-historical account of the multiple politics of
     meat, although brief, is provocative, and suggests that a
     great deal more research should be done in this area.  Her
     analyses are strongest, though, when she focuses on the
     sexual politics of meat, and when she does so analytically
     rather than historically.  In chapter two of section one,
     Adams introduces a tool that is exceedingly helpful in
     understanding the dynamics of the sexual politics of meat.
     Animals become "absent referents" when they become "meat."
     They are absent in three ways: literally, because they are
     dead; linguistically, because they no longer cows, pigs,
     chickens, sheep, OR animals, instead become "beef," "pork,"
     "poultry," "mutton," "food-producing units," or "meat"; and
     metaphorically, because animals and their experiences are
     appropriated in metaphors which we used to describe our
     experiences rather than theirs.  Adams claims, I think
     correctly, that "[s]exual violence and meat eating, which
     appear to be discrete forms of violence, find a point of
     intersection in the absent referent" (p. 43).  For example,
     Kathy Barry, in FEMALE SEXUAL SLAVERY, writes of `maisons d'
     abattage' (houses of slaughter) in which six or seven girls
     sexually service 80 to 120 customers a night (p. 43).  Adams
     lists the bondage equipment of pornography -- chains, whips,
     cattle prods, nooses, dog collars, and ropes.  Some animals,
     such as pigs, are forcibly impregnated in devices that
     suppliers jocularly call "rape racks."  "THE HUSTLER, prior
     to its incarnation as a pornographic magazine, was a
     Cleveland restaurant whose menus presented a woman's
     buttocks on the cover and proclaimed, `We serve the best
     meat in town!'"  Chicken magnate Frank Perdue asked in a
     recent advertisement: "Are you a breast man or a leg man?"
     And, of course, we have the Cattle Queen (p. 43).
     
     Objectification, dismemberment, and consumption are the
     infrastructure of violence.  They are the ways in which
     animals and women are made absent:
     
          Objectification permits the oppressor to view another
          being as an object.  The oppressor then violates this
          being by object-like treatment, e.g., the rape of woman
          that denies women freedom by saying 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. . . Consumption is the fulfillment
          of oppression, the annihilation of will, of separate
          identity. (p. 47)
          
    [...] 
     
     Part two of the book chronicles the silencing of the
     "vegetarian word," various forms of vegetarian protest, by
     dominant culture and even by some otherwise astute social
     critics, including feminists.  Texts themselves can be
     objectified, dismembered, and consumed.
     
     [...]
 
     Mary Shelly's FRANKENSTEIN is a case in point.  FRANKENSTEIN
     has received an enormous amount of critical attention over
     the past two decades from feminists and other critics, all
     of whom have neglected to explore the vegetarian themes in
     the novel.  Frankenstein's creature is a vegetarian.  Adams
     says: "The Creature's vegetarianism not only confirms its
     inherent, original benevolence, but conveys Mary Shelley's
     precise rendering of themes articulated by a group of her
     contemporaries whom I call `Romantic vegetarians'" (p. 109).
     The story "bears the vegetarian word," as Adams puts it, in
     a variety of ways: by alluding to the literal words of
     famous, historical vegetarians; by allowing fictional
     characters to allude to famous vegetarians; by translating
     vegetarian texts; by using language which reveals the
     function of the absent referent.  Shelley grew up in an
     intellectual environment in which vegetarianism was much
     discussed and often adopted by such writers and activists as
     John Frank Newton, Joseph Ritson, and her father, William
     Godwin.  Shelley's husband, Percy, authored two vegetarian
     texts, A VINDICATION OF NATURAL DIET and QUEEN MAB, and the
     Romantics with whom they kept company viewed radical
     politics and other unorthodox notions such as Republicanism
     as going hand-in-glove with their vegetarianism (p. 111).
     
     Adams claims that feminist literary critics and historians
     have failed to explore the associations that Shelley and a
     number of nineteenth and twentieth-century pacifists, such
     as Olive Shriener and Anna Kingsford, made between flesh
     eating, domestic violence, and war.  These woman saw the
     elimination of violence on the dinner table as a first and
     necessary step toward eliminating violence on the domestic
     "front," and ultimately between nations.  As Adams rightly
     puts it:
     
          We cannot tell the truth about women's lives if we do
          not take seriously their dietary choices which were at
          odds with dominant culture.  Vegetarianism spoke to
          woman; they would not have adopted it, maintained it,
          proselytized for it, if vegetarianism were not a
          positive influence in their lives.  This is an
          historical fact that needs to be accepted and then
          responded to by scholars studying woman's lives and
          texts. (p. 184)
          
     I would add that to omit vegetarianism from accounts of
     women's texts is not only to misrepresent their words and
     lives significantly, but to miss desperately needed insights
     into the interrelated and mutually reinforcing attitudes and
     patterns of violence that claim the lives of women and
     domestic animals, wild populations, species, and entire
     ecosystems.  Thus, feminists and environmentalists who
     continue to subscribe to the dominant culture's view of
     vegetarianism as faddish, sentimental, or neurotic might
     consider the very complicated role that flesh eating plays
     in dominant culture and the very real possibility that their
     complicity in flesh eating is counterproductive to all
     efforts to achieve inter- and intraspecies justice.  The
     third and final section of the book insists on this point.
     
     [...]
 
     Adams wants to convince us that neither women nor animals
     are "meat" -- and that the Cattle Queen is a product of a
     DOUBLE lie, on that accounts for the epidemic of violence
     against women in this country and the U.S. slaughter of
     7000,000 animals each HOUR and 11,500 each MINUTE for human
     consumption  The SEXUAL POLITICS OF MEAT couldn't be more
     timely, nor more disturbing.
                                          by Dr. Deborah Slicer


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