The Sexual Politics of Meat
Thursday’s Working for Change: The 20th anniversary edition of the enlightening, empowering, life-changing book The Sexual Politics of Meat is due out this month. I pre-ordered my copy, and can’t wait to read it — again. Written by feminist and veg activist Carol J. Adams, I first read this book as a college student when a hip, mysterious unusually empowered (compared to the other young women like myself that I knew at the time) college classmate recommended it to me when she found out I was a vegetarian.
Adams writes about herself that she is “particularly interested in the interconnections among forms of violence against human and nonhuman animals, writing, for instance, about why woman-batterers harm animals and the implications of this.”
I don’t remember everything I read in the book so many years ago, but I do remember that she illustrates her points with compelling examples about how women and animals used for meat and certain body parts of both are re-named to de-humanize and de-personalize, making it easier to objectify and harm them both. That one realization was enough to make me sit up and take notice that I may not always be aware of underlying issues going on in our world expressed through language.
Fascinating stuff… I highly recommend that you read the re-release of Adams book, and all her other work (others which are listed on the page for that link, and that I plan to read, too). The insights will anger, motivate and ground you in a commonality that’s usually not even recognized as existing between women and animals used for meat, perhaps intentionally: Motivate enough women to make a change, and change usually happens.
