Following the wisdom of the animal rights activist and performance artist Mirha-Soleil Ross, I argue that we should be wary of forcing connections and obsessively trying to bring everything together at the expense of being faithful to the specificity of each issue.1 While keen to see links where they exist, my storytelling technique in this chapter and the rest of the book is designed less to tie things up than to follow threads to see where they meet, all the while paying attention to webs of power and struggle. I understand veganism as inseparable from feminism and other struggles for justice among people because I believe these movements share a commitment to an ethics of non-violence and a recognition that we are all responsible for, as well as dependent upon, other animals, including people.2 Understanding the ways hierarchies, power structures and systems of exploitation operate against different bodies and groups is an important step towards challenging them. Although those systems are interlocking, extending an ethics of non-violence to all creatures does not depend upon demonstrating that people and other animals are exploited or violated in similar ways. On the contrary: it requires that we pay as much attention to difference as similarity. It also requires that we avoid pitting different forms of violence against one another by, for example, implying that one is more urgent than another. Finally, it requires that we be aware of what comparisons might obscure as much as they clarify.
Vegan feminist stories
My first regular contact with vegans and veganism was in London’s hodgepodge queer anarchist communities around the turn of the millennium. Preparing and sharing plant-based food was part of a wider social and political project that also incorporated a critique of neoliberal capitalism, migrant solidarity, campaigns for affordable safe housing, and alternative sexual relationships. Although not active in animal rights campaigns or practising veganism at that time, I recognised that there was an ethos in these communities that emphasised solidarity with people and other animals alongside what I would call a politics of pleasure. We were committed to struggles against different forms of violence without reducing our personal experiences or those of others to the status of victimhood.
When I started to investigate the relationship between feminism, sexuality and veganism I was surprised to find that much writing on the topic emphasised similarities in the ways animals — especially those raised for food — and female human beings were victimised. The main reference for this theory was The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory by Carol J. Adams, published in the United States in 1990. In this book Adams “examines the connections between male dominance and meat eating” and argues that “animals’ oppression and women’s oppression are linked together.”3 Although she was not the first to demonstrate a connection between meat-eating and masculinity, Adams made an original contribution by extending theories of objectification and male violence against women to human violence against other animals, claiming that these processes are related and reinforce one another.4 Adams’s book was important in uncovering the misogynist underpinnings of meat advertising in the U.S. and in showing how, in Anglo-American societies, dominant forms of masculinity are partly constructed in violent opposition to an undervalued femininity and to other animals. Although the contemporary U.S. is not representative of all omnivore societies, Adams’s thesis remains relevant to Western popular culture, in which meat-eating and aggression towards animals and women are often represented as part of a tough-guy masculinity.5
Adams explained the connection between violence against women and other animals with something called the “absent referent.” When live animals are butchered, wrapped up in plastic, sold and eaten by people, they are metaphorically as well as literally repackaged. The act of erasure involved in this process is particularly evident in the English language: cows become “beef,” sheep become “lamb,” pigs become “pork,” and so on. As a result, the living, breathing animals become absent to the people eating them. The theory of the absent referent stresses not only human beings’ capacity for violence, but also our ability to deny that violence and, along with it, the history of the other beings against whom we commit it. We don’t have to feel responsible towards the animals we are eating, because we have already erased them from our memories. Of course, not all meat-eaters try to forget that they are consuming what was once a living being; some actually promote this fact. In the most voraciously carnivorous corners of contemporary North America, for example, meat-eating is sometimes celebrated through the present referent. Kelly Struthers Montford demonstrates this in her analysis of beef advertising in the Canadian province of Alberta, which often features images of living animals.6
The theory of the absent referent explains some, but not all, the ways people relate to live and dead animals. It also rests on a simplistic understanding of human gender relations. The Sexual Politics of Meat divides people into two groups — men and women — and presents these in a fairly rigid power hierarchy. The book has little to say about the experiences of men who reject hegemonic forms of masculinity (for example, gay men or vegetarians), about transgender people, about how and why some women may take pleasure in eating animal products, or about cultural traditions in which masculinity is not associated with meat-eating. Adams’s work also overemphasises female biological reproductive capacity as a point of identification between women and female animals of other species. I do not think women have a particular identification with the suffering of cows and hens, or a special investment in avoiding milk and eggs because these are forms of “feminized protein.”7 Such claims reinforce the idea that womanhood is defined by motherhood and that females across species are united in victimhood. In Adams’s version of the world, men are consumers of flesh — literal and representational — while women and animals are objectified and consumed.
The absent referent is a valuable concept for helping us to understand the doublethink sometimes involved in consuming animal products. But the theory has too often been used as an overarching explanation for the interconnections between the oppressions of women and animals.8 In much writing on veganism and feminism published in English, the absent referent has taken on the status of common sense, as defined by the early twentieth-century Marxist Antonio Gramsci and further developed by the cultural critic Stuart Hall. Gramsci defined common sense as thinking that has the status of “traditional truth or wisdom of the ages” and is therefore taken for granted.9 Common-sense thinking is apparent anywhere an argument takes on the air of a universal explanation. When this happens the history of a particular idea — the context in which it was first formulated, why and under what circumstances — is forgotten or ignored. When certain explanations are repeated time and again they take on the power of timeless truths, resistant to evidence of changing circumstances. For this reason it is important to ask about where arguments come from, how they have been passed down, and what may have gotten lost in transit.
The Sexual Politics of Meat is a book of its time and of a very particular kind of feminism. The language and theory Adams uses to explain the relationships between violence against women and other animals draws substantially on feminist critiques of pornography as they were developed in the U.S. in the decade before the book was published. In the 1980s a number of American feminists — most famous among them Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon — argued that pornography was a main cause of women’s oppression. In their understanding, pornography was much more than a series of representations of certain sexual practices; it was in itself a form of violence that affected all women. Not only did anti-pornography feminists like Dworkin and MacKinnon call for the legal censorship of pornography; they implied that all forms of sexuality, especially penetrative sex, were violent, and that all women were potential victims of violence.10 Sex, in their account, was basically dangerous for women.
Anti–pornography feminism was challenged by many other feminist activists, in the U.S. and elsewhere.11 But the work