World-Ecological Literature and the Animal Question

2019

This thesis starts from the proposition that the ethical meat discourse that is, the discourse recognizing that factory farming is unacceptable while maintaining that it is possible to produce meat in an acceptable way-has not been thoroughly analyzed. Indeed, both the partisans of this idea and the animal rights literature provide oversimplified analyses of this relatively new phenomenon. Considering I like to think that this thesis is original, not based on its content, but for the fact that from the start, it has been a personal project more than a professional one. Considering this distinctive characteristic, I did not have the all-important motivating factor of needing a piece of paper with "Ph.D." written on it to become a professor or a researcher. Looking back, this was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing since because I did not need to write this thesis, I had to find good reasons to want to do it. All along, the most important reasons were a fascinating subject and a strong desire to do my part to help the animals. The fact that I was lucky enough to get scholarships from both the governments of Quebec and of Ontario also made this much easier. This situation was also a curse because in hard times, I could not tell myself that I "needed" this piece of paper for a clear and distinct objective. For these moments, I was very lucky to be surrounded by supportive and caring people. The first person to thank is without hesitation Matthew without whom this thesis would certainly not exist. If I remember correctly, he is the one that initially asked me why I was doing a Ph.D. and accepted without questions my naive answer that it was "for fun." Despite this, he gave more time than I would have ever hoped and somehow found a way to push me intellectually to do more without discouraging me. I remember, when he announced to me that he was moving to Manchester, telling some friends that if for some reason he could no longer be my supervisor, that I would quit. I meant it because I could not imagine a better supervisor. I am proud of having the chance to work with him and will forever be grateful for his work, support, and inestimable help. CHAPTER ONE: Introduction Factory farming 1 is an abomination. There is no gentle way to put it. It is not just vegans-people who reject all forms of animal 2 exploitation-that say so. Even people that still support certain forms of animal exploitation are quick to recognize this reality. For example, author Jonathan Safran Foer writes: "More than any set of practices, factory farming is a mind-set: reduce production costs to the absolute minimum and systematically ignore or 'externalize' such costs as environmental degradation, human disease, and animal suffering. For thousands of years, farmers took their cues from natural processes. Factory farming considers nature an obstacle to be overcome." (2010, 34) In the same vein author and food activist Michael Pollan notes that "More than any other institution, the American industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism can look like in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint." (2002b) Considering the general disgust provoked by images and graphic descriptions of the horrors happening day and night in these factories, it is not surprising that the animal rights movement 3 has been using this reality as its main argument against 1 David Fraser presents factory farming in technical terms: "Until about 1950, farm animals in industrialized countries were raised by fairly traditional methods that relied on labour for routine tasks such as feeding and removal of manure and that generally involved keeping animals outdoors, at least part of the time, After the Second World War, there emerged a new generation of 'confinement' systems that generally kept animals in specialized indoor environments and used hardware and automation instead of labour for many routine tasks." (2005, 2) 2 The word "animal" will be used to describe "nonhuman sentient beings", except when it is important to highlight the fact that humans are also animals. For these specific cases, the expression "nonhuman animal" will be used. Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka clearly explain that "sentience" is the characteristic that "has a distinct moral significance because it enables a subjective experience of the world." (2011, 24) 3 In the literature and in the media, a wide variety of expressions are used to describe what is commonly understood as the "animal rights movement." For example, the expressions "animal liberation movement," "animal protection movement," and "animal advocacy movement" are often used in contradictory ways. Indeed, since there are intense debates within/between these

Literature for Nonhumans, 2015

Capital & Class

In the last three decades, the interchange between Marxism and critical human–animalism has gratifyingly picked up. Scholars use Marxist categories to analyse and criticise the exploitation and oppression of animals in capitalism. But the application of Marx’s original concepts often rests on fragile analogies and judgements. To conceptualise the exploitation of animals accurately and substantiate the common class struggle for humans and animals theoretically, the present article serves to get the terminology straight with respect to four interrelated topics. First, the common charge against Marx’s theory to build on a human–animal dualism is refuted by showing that he understands the relationship between humans and animals as a historical materialist, socio-practical and dialectical differentiation. Second, based on a relational understanding of the capitalist mode of production, I argue that animals are not wage labourers, slaves or super-exploited commodities. Rather, as nature i...

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2016

The paper would attempt to dwell into the wider philosophical and ontological implications of vegetarianism and in the process offer a deconstructive critique of the more physicalist currency of vegetarianism advocated by many animal rights activists, philosophers and writers like J.M. Coetzee. Taking up Jacques Derrida's notion of Anthropocentric "Carno-Phallogocentrism" , the paper would argue how any parochial notion of vegetarianism (including those by J.M. Coetzee in Elizabeth Costello) actually reserves the kernel of a certain anthropomorphic Enlightenment humanism and thus partakes in a kind of epistemic violence upon the animal "other" even while it poses to speak on behalf of them. The trajectory of this paper would take up post-humanist thinkers like Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas to trace the kernel of anthropocentric humanism even in the positing of the post-cartesian subject and attempt to locate an etymological anthropocentric inheritance of the same in the differential humanism of animal philosophers like J.M. Coetzee.

Sociologia Ruralis, 2003

Agriculture and Human Values, 2018

The past decades’ substantial growth in globalized meat consumption continues to shape the international political economy of food and agriculture. This political economy of meat composes a site of contention; in Brazil, where livestock production is particularly thriving, large agri-food corporations are being challenged by alternative food networks. This article analyzes experiential and experimental accounts of such an actor—a collectivized pork cooperative tied to Brazil’s Landless Movement—which seeks to navigate the political economy of meat. The ethnographic case study documents these livestock farmers’ ambiguity towards complying with the capitalist commodification process, required by the intensifying meat market. Moreover, undertaking an intersectional approach, the article theorizes how animal-into-food commodification in turn depends on the speciesist logic, a normative human/non-human divide that endorses the meat commodity. Hence the article demonstrates how alternative food networks at once navigate confines of capitalist commodification and the speciesist logic that impels the political economy of meat.

2018

As Kirsten Guest explains in the introduction to Eating Their Words, cannibalism has often been used as a limiting factor in colonial discourse, providing a method of delineating the civilized “us” from the savage “them,” as well as an excuse for devastating native or marginalized populations. The practice of anthropophagy meant savagery, which in turn meant being closer to the animal than to the human. But what happens in a world where there are no non-human animals? How do we define the self? And, perhaps more pressingly, what do we eat? Don LePan’s Animals and Joseph D’Lacey’s MEAT are both speculative fiction novels set after great extinctions, and each features a society that goes to great lengths to refashion cannibalism as an “ethical” foodway. In each novel, colonial discourse is flipped; the un-human Other is no longer the cannibal, but rather that which the cannibal eats. MEAT creates this Other by elevating a class of people to sacred status, requiring the consumption of their flesh for religious reasons. Animals adopts an ableist agenda, restricting the definition of “human” to exclude the disabled, who become pets or meat. This paper will examine the sociopolitical and economic framework mobilized in each novel to support a narrative of “ethical” cannibalism. It will interrogate the methods of social control used in these novels, looking specifically at the influence of faith, pop science, and the capitalistic drive in the creation and maintenance of foodways that in contemporary society would likely be considered unethical. It will conclude that, while the Eucharist-ad-absurdum society in MEAT is ultimately undermined by its use of faith as a method of social control, the society in Animals prevails due to its appeal to “scientific” experts. Finally, it will ask, what do these conclusions about societal control and the manipulation of “ethical” frameworks say about society’s current foodways?

Capital & Class, 2021