Vegan feminism
The relationship between veganism and feminism
Vegan feminism: Carol J. Adams
Carol J. Adams is a scholar and activist who has studied the relationship between feminism and veganism for decades since the 1970s. According to Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat refers to the attitude and practice of animalizing women and feminizing animals. The sexual politics of meat is also the belief that men need meat, have the right to eat meat, and that meat-eating is a masculine activity connected to male virility. This belief system and its practices are closely related to patriarchal society and to the power that this society grants selectively and discriminatorily only to men.
The notion of viewing the flesh of animals as food contains a patriarchal attitude. This includes the justification of means by ends, the belief that objectifying other beings is an essential element of life, and the belief that violence can be hidden and ought to be hidden.
The ideology of violent domination: Melanie Joy
In Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows, Melanie Joy calls the belief system that says “eating meat is morally justified and unproblematic” carnism and says that it is a kind of violent ideology. She also points out that all other violent ideologies of domination, including patriarchy, make use of the same mechanism. Therefore, understanding the principles by which carnism operates will also be helpful when resisting patriarchy.
Some of the features of how violent ideology operates, as introduced by Melanie Joy, are as follows.
- Making the system itself “invisible,” so that it remains everywhere yet cannot be recognized (invisibilization)
- Viewing other beings as objects (objectification)
- Not recognizing other beings as individuals and instead treating them by grouping them into categories (de-individualization)
- Distinguishing between us and them and creating psychological distance so that they can be more easily blamed and exploited (dichotomization)
Utilitarianism: Peter Singer
Peter Singer’s animal liberation movement is grounded in utilitarianism, and as is well known, utilitarians have traditionally argued for the expansion of women’s rights.
- Jeremy Bentham, known as the father of utilitarianism, argued for complete gender equality.
- The Subjection of Women by Bentham’s student John Stuart Mill is regarded as one of the notable early feminist works and at the same time as a work that captures Mill’s utilitarian thought especially well.
- In Animal Liberation, Peter Singer logically derives that animal liberation is likewise justified on the basis of the reasons why women’s liberation is justified.
Historical exchanges
Traditionally, the leaders of the animal movement, the women’s movement, and the Black civil rights movement often overlapped, and there were various exchanges among the respective social movements.
In The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol J. Adams focuses on analyzing the numerous exchanges among vegetarianism, veganism, and feminism since the 18th century.
Peter Singer also introduces some of these exchanges in chapter 6 of Animal Liberation.
- RSPCA founders W. Wilberforce and F. Buxton fought together for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.
- The feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, famous for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, also wrote texts on animal rights. Her spouse William Godwin was an ethical vegetarian, and their daughter Mary Shelley wrote the novel Frankenstein, which contains messages of vegetarianism and feminism.
- Early American feminists such as L. Stone, A. Bloomer, S. B. Anthony, and E. C. Stanton joined the vegetarian movement. Together with the abolitionist H. Greeley, they also cried out for “women’s rights and vegetarianism.”
The misunderstanding that vegan feminism considers only female animals
I occasionally encounter the misunderstanding that vegan feminism considers only female animals, and I think this claim arises from mistaking intersectionality for the mathematical notion of intersection. According to legal scholar K. W. Crenshaw, who coined the term intersectionality, intersectionality is not another kind of identity politics that mixes together multiple oppressed identities to produce an intersection.
… Some people often think of intersectionality as merely being about multiple identities. “I have three identities,” “you have six,” and so on. (middle omitted) At least, I do not think of intersectionality that way. Intersectionality is primarily about not identity itself, but the way social structures make certain identities into vehicles of vulnerability. –-from On Intersectionality
Regarding this kind of misunderstanding about Black feminism or intersectional feminism, Black feminist movement pioneer Barbara Smith and Crenshaw once had a conversation like this.
Barbara Smith: We are not saying that we should ignore the realities of others. … Nor are we arguing that it is enough merely to ask whether someone has a particular identity. Black feminism is about practice. (rest omitted)
Kimberlé Crenshaw: I often think that there has been a deliberate misreading of the (Combahee) statement. The same is true of Black feminism, and I think there has been a deliberate misreading of everything derived from Black feminism, including intersectionality. There are people who think along the lines of, “If it’s something Black feminism talks about, I already know it all, and if it’s related to Black feminism, it’s perfectly fine to ignore it completely.” (rest omitted)
The claim that the intersection of veganism and feminism simply means creating an intersection between the identity of being an animal and the identity of being a woman, and therefore advocating only for a movement concerning female animals, is a distortion of intersectionality.
As I understand it, the intersectionality of vegan feminism includes the meaning that we should pay attention to the similarities between the mechanisms of women’s oppression by men and the mechanisms of animals’ oppression by humans. Intersectional feminism is not an exclusionary theory that creates intersections of overlapping identities and narrows its object more and more. Rather, it is an inclusive theory that reveals the connections and structures among obscured mechanisms of oppression and links together the experiences of oppressed groups that have been kept separate from one another.
Adams has emphasized the oppression experienced by female animals in a short piece titled Why Vegan Feminism?, and while the exploitation of female animals that occurs in carnist society is clearly also an important subject, it is also clear that Adams’s analysis of the feminism-veganism connection contained in The Sexual Politics of Meat does not stop at a superficial intersection of identities or only the issue of female animals.