Cycle of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption

Proposed by Carol J. Adams in The Sexual Politics of Meat as an alternative theory linking the oppression of women and the oppression of animals.

Mechanism

1. Through objectification, the oppressor treats the oppressed as a thing, and because it is a thing, inflicts violence against its will.
2. Through this process, the oppressor fragments the oppressed,
3. and finally consumes them. Cases in which men literally eat women are rare, but all men consume women’s visual images. Consumption is the fulfillment of oppression.

Our language functions to complement the physical process of this cycle. After slaughter, the fragmented parts are given new names such as roast beef and steak. Meanwhile, because an object is merely a possession and cannot possess another object, it is referred to not as “chicken’s wings” but as “chicken wings.” Only after passing through such a process does consumption begin.

(It is surprising that various English expressions translate naturally into Korean. Might that not mean that the text of meat, the sexual politics of meat, is universal? —ak)

Damage to Vegetarian Literature

The Sexual Politics of Meat holds that distortion of vegetarian literature also follows the cycle of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption.

1. Objectification: Reducing a text to a few key elements and making it into something that can be closely examined and criticized
2. Fragmentation: Breaking the text into pieces and separating it from its context
3. Consumption: Interpreting it as containing nothing new and as incapable of damaging the existing meat culture

The Hidden Slaughterhouse - Hiding the Process of Fragmentation

What happens inside the slaughterhouse is hidden. Accordingly, it is as if consumption occurs immediately after objectification, with no fragmentation in between. Fragmentation is the process by which the once-living referent disappears and becomes the absent referent.

Melanie Joy also emphasizes in Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows that for the carnism that is a violent ideology to be maintained, its violence cannot but be concealed.

A Case in Racism

In Endangered/endangering: schematic racism and white paranoia, Judith Butler analyzes the process by which the video of Rodney King being beaten by police officers without fighting back was fragmented frame by frame in court, separated from its context, and distorted into a scene in which he was threatening the police officers.

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The defense attorneys broke the video down into “stills,” freezing the frame, so that the gesture, the raised hand, is torn from its temporal place in the visual narrative. The video is not only violently decontextualized, but violently recontextualized. (The defense attorneys broke the video down into “stills,” freezing the frame, so that the gesture, the raised hand, is torn from its temporal place in the visual narrative. The video is not only violently decontextualized, but violently recontextualized.)