sex, work, meat: the feminist politics of veganism

Since the late twentieth century, Carol J. Adams has developed an influential body of writing on the relationship between feminism, animal welfare and vegetarianism/veganism. Her research combines ecofeminism and radical feminism in the tradition of Mary Daly (Adams, 2000, p. 12)³ with an approach to animal welfare based on an ethics of care. Her first book, The Sexual Politics of Meat (2000 [1990]) develops the thesis that in the West there is a historical and cultural connection between meat eating and male power over women. Although not the only author to demonstrate a link between meat and masculinity (see Twigg, 1983), Adams’ originality consists in extending theories of objectification and male violence against women to human violence against animals, claiming that these processes connect to and reinforce one another.

Adams’ work was important in uncovering the misogynist underpinnings of meat marketing and the derision of vegetarianism as ‘feminine’. Her argument that masculinity in Anglo-American society is constructed both in relation to an undervalued femininity and in violent opposition to animal others remains relevant in an age when popular culture continues to represent meat eating and aggression towards animals and women as integral to male masculinity (Parry, 2010; Cadwalladr, 2016). But Adams’ work itself is stuck in a binary model of gender. In her schema, men are consumers of flesh—literal and representational—while women and animals are objectified and consumed.

In and out of the ‘sex wars’, and often in direct challenge to the anti-pornography theories most famously defended by MacKinnon (for example, 1989) and Dworkin (for example, 1981), grew an important body of feminist and queer scholarship offering innovative analyses of gender, sexuality and visual culture. This work recognised sexuality as a relation of power, but refused the dyadic ‘man-masculinity-violent/woman-femininity-victim’ that underpinned anti-pornography feminism. It contested the idea that the gaze was uniquely masculine, or that women’s position in visual culture could best be understood through the thesis of objectification. Adams’ work does not acknowledge or reference any of this research. Moreover, as suggested above, her understanding of gender and its relation to other categories, is limited. By treating ‘men’ and ‘women’ as universal categories (i.e. not historically or culturally grounded), Adams (2000, p. 55) underplays power relations of class and race, undermining claims to intersectional, anti-racist analysis elsewhere in her work. Furthermore, her framework is inadequate for an analysis of the specificity of animal experience across different species and under different conditions. All in all, Adams’ work obscures the divergent ways in which different groups of women and animals, in diverse historical and cultural contexts, experience male and other forms of violence. A few examples help to demonstrate this.

In Neither Man Nor Beast (Adams, 1994), a chapter entitled ‘The arrogant eye and animal experimentation’, compares pornography to animal testing, quoting a journalist’s account of a video stolen from a research centre by animal rights activists:

This is an astonishing assertion: a woman participating in animal experimentation is classed as a silenced object of the violent male gaze. In fact, Adams is complicit in silencing the woman in the film: the only women quoted directly in this chapter are feminist theorists and those who identify with animal suffering. Women who appear in films or photographs are described by others.

A later chapter in this same book opens with a letter to a newspaper from a distressed reader, recounting an incident in which a chimpanzee appeared as a stripper at a birthday party. Adams (ibid., p. 132) cites the letter to illustrate that ‘one way in which animals are oppressed is by associating them with women’s lesser status, and vice versa’, implying that certain types of performed femininity are indicative of ‘women’s lesser status’. But the political questions raised by the stripping chimpanzee cannot be restricted to issues of gender and sexuality; modern Western representations of primates, whether in art, entertainment or science, are always also implicated in discourses of race and colonialism (Haraway, 1989). From an animal advocacy perspective, the ethical question raised by the stripping chimpanzee is not why is the animal stripping, but why has an animal been trained to imitate a human being for human entertainment? Adams (2006, pp. 124–125) recognises this problem elsewhere. But by taking the stripping chimpanzee as an example of the common exploitation of women and animals, she misses an opportunity to explore how a consideration of animals as workers/performers might help us rethink questions of human agency and labour as well. I return to these issues at the end of this article.

The Pornography of Meat (Adams, 2003) takes the argument about the structural link between violence against animals/women and the sex industry as its central thesis: ‘Pornography uses butchery to say something about women’s status as mass terms: women are as meat; not only that, women deserve to be treated as meat—butchered and consumed’ (ibid., p. 25). This is a book heavy on images from American advertising, and light on theory and references. In a chapter entitled ‘Hookers’ (ibid., pp. 97–102), which uses the unconvincing metaphor of the hook to compare sex workers to fish in popular culture, Adams (ibid., p. 100) claims that ‘Prostituted women have to dissemble involvement and interest in men’, but cites no evidence for this. In effect, sex workers become the ‘absent referents’ of The Pornography of Meat.

Notwithstanding its title, the book has little to say about the representations of women and animals in actual pornography. But Margret Grebowicz (2010), in her research on bestiality in online porn, has argued that the two groups are treated in notably different ways. In an important rejoinder to Adams and MacKinnon, Grebowicz (ibid., p. 10) argues that their understanding of power as synonymous with subjugation is of limited value for an analysis of the dynamics of power, desire and subjectivity in contemporary pornography. Although Grebowicz does not engage sufficiently with the political implications of the anti-pornography argument for both animals and women (her work is more concerned with the subject formation of porn viewers than actors), hers is an example of how a consideration of animal performance and representation complicates anthropocentric debates around sex, consent, pleasure, violence and representation.

I close the current section by returning to Neither Man Nor Beast (Adams, 1994). In the chapter ‘The feminist traffic in animals’, Adams writes:

I support Adams’ call for feminists to be critical of where our food comes from, as well as her expanded definition of the ‘traffic in animals’ that not only includes the illegal market in wildlife animals and products, but also the legal trade in farmed animals. The problem arises with her use of the term ‘traffic’ to ‘imply that similarities in the treatment of “disposable” or “usable” bodies exist’ (ibid., p. 111). Adams adopts, and adapts, the term ‘traffic in animals’ from two classic feminist texts by Emma Goldman (1998 [1910]) and Gayle Rubin (1975). Anyone familiar with Goldman’s anarchist politics and Rubin’s long-standing and vociferous opposition to anti-pornography feminism, will be surprised to see them cited in a book that adopts an avowedly anti-pornography position. Goldman’s text (1998) was written as a commentary on the moral panic about the ‘white slave traffic’ in early twentieth century United States and Europe. Locating the roots of women’s oppression in capitalism and its attendant sexual double standard, Goldman’s is an important early text arguing that prostitution is fundamentally a labour issue. Rubin’s (1975) article ‘The traffic in women’—which also borrowed its title from Goldman’s text—does not address the issue of human trafficking; however, a quarter century later, Rubin (2011b, p. 66) makes her position clear: ‘I do not embrace the pervasive contemporary confusions between trafficking and prostitution, and in fact oppose them’.

In contrast, Adams does seem to confuse human trafficking and prostitution. In an article published in 2010, she reflected that in the twenty years since the publication of The Sexual Politics of Meat, images in meat advertising had become ‘more sexist, more misogynist, more exploitative’ (Adams, 2010, p. 310). Citing Sheila Jeffreys (2008), one of the most prolific anti-prostitution feminists of the early twenty-first century, (Adams, 2010, p. 310) identifies the reason for this shift: ‘during this time, selling women, through pornography and the sex trade, has moved more into the mainstream’. Adams (ibid.) claims, ‘The sex industry […] provides an enduring metaphor and image for other consumable bodies, in which women become the absent referents’.

While a study of advertising may help us to understand the sexual politics of American meat consumption, it sheds little light on the operations of the sex industry, the migration—forced and otherwise—of people, or the traffic in animals. While all are part of the contemporary globalised economy, they operate within vastly different legal and economic frameworks. In a well-developed body of work,⁵ critical migration scholars, alongside postcolonial and feminist theorists, have detailed the multiple dangers resultant in conflating all forms of human ‘trafficking’ with the ‘globalization of the sex industry’ à la Jeffreys (2008, pp. 5–6). Strict anti-trafficking laws implemented in response to public panics about ‘sex slavery’ actually facilitate the irregular migration channels that they aim to eradicate (Andrijasevic, 2014, p. 359), putting vulnerable migrants at increased risk of violence and exploitation. Moreover, the image of the innocent sex-trafficking victim as the prototypical migrant woman denies the agency of migrant women, whether sex workers or not (ibid.; Agustin, 2007).

Migrant sex workers can and do exercise varying degrees of agency depending on their situation; however, animals bred on industrial farms for human consumption do not (Cudworth, 2011, p. 76). Furthermore, while migrant workers are increasingly criminalised by draconian laws designed to halt cross-border migration, the transport of live animals is authorised by trade laws designed to facilitate the exportation/importation of consumer products within and between nation-states. Migrant rights activists call for relaxed migration laws in order to facilitate the free and safe movement of people across borders. In contrast, animal advocates demand dramatic reductions in the transportation of animals within and between countries before slaughter, arguing that this is a particularly cruel form of exploitation. Even farm welfare activists who do not advocate vegetarianism or veganism support the end of long-distance live animal transport (Appleby et al., 2008). If we wish to understand the relationship between the movement of different human and animal bodies around the world, we need to begin not with an assumption of shared experiences of commodification, but with the specific economic and legal contexts in which those movements take place.

Notwithstanding the lack of evidence behind Carol J. Adams’ argument about a structural link between violence against women and animals, her work continues to serve as a major reference point in the growing field of animal studies. Yet, few scholars who cite her on ‘the sexual politics of meat’ engage in detail with her work as a whole. These observations are based on a reading of a number of works published in English since the release of the Sexual Politics of Meat (Adams, 2000 [1990]) in 1990. Without claiming to be exhaustive, my research has led me to, and through, some of the major texts in which feminism, animal studies and/or posthumanism cross paths. My aim in this section is to show how certain citation practices and forms of critique work across a series of texts to construct a particular and partial story about the relationship between veganism and feminism. I must stress that my objective is not to finger-point individual authors for failing to detail every argument of every scholar they cite (something of which we are all surely guilty), but to uncover the cumulative effect of citing Adams as the authority on veganism and feminism, while largely ignoring the wider meanings of her work. I am inspired in this endeavour by Clare Hemmings’s (2011) innovative method of tracing the citation tactics of Western feminist theory. While the methodology I adopt here is necessarily more limited, my conclusions are similar to hers: an attention to citation practices reveals ‘aspects of […] stories which are presumed to be held in common’ (ibid., p. 16) and therefore require no further explanation or detail. This creates the impression of a ‘common sense’ (ibid., p. 20) view shared across a variety of texts that may otherwise tell more complicated tales and even disagree on other issues (ibid., pp. 16–23).

Not surprisingly, the authors most likely to embrace and affirm Adams’ central tenets are the writers with whom she regularly collaborates, most notably in a series of edited volumes on ecofeminism,⁶ women and animals (Gaard, 1993; Adams and Donavan, 1995; Donovan and Adams, 1996; Donavan and Adams, 2007; Adams and Gruen, 2014b). While these editions show the fruits of collective feminist labour, they largely reiterate and reinforce—rather than revisit and challenge—certain central claims that then take on a kind of orthodoxy. Authors quote one another (and themselves) across chapters, and Adams is the most frequently cited author.⁷ But Adams’ status as feminist-vegan spokesperson extends beyond her immediate circle to edited books in animal studies (Sanbonmatsu, 2011), posthumanism and ‘ahumanism’ (MacCormack, 2014), where the (re)printing and citation of her work helps to establish her as representative of feminist animal studies, even where the overarching frameworks of such volumes are at odds with the particular feminist position espoused in her work. Similarly, Adams gets a cameo appearance as an admired vegan feminist in the writing of Rosi Braidotti (2013, p. 77) and Donna Haraway (2008),⁸ prominent feminist theorists hardly associated with anti-pornography theory.

If we look beyond the repeated citing of Adams, we find that contemporary animal studies, including in its feminist inflection, draws on a range of critical theories, including psychoanalysis, queer and gender studies, postcolonialism and affect theory. Two recent special issues on animals in the feminist journals Feminism & Psychology (Potts, 2010b) and Hypatia (Gruen and Weil, 2012a) are indicative of this intellectual multiplicity,⁹ demonstrating more scope for disagreement and debate across their pages than the ecofeminist volumes noted above. Yet, here too Adams’ work is accorded a special place. In the introduction to each issue, her writing is celebrated as ‘pioneer(ing)’ (Potts, 2010b, p. 296; Gruen and Weil, 2012b, p. 477), and in the contributions that follow, we detect the by-now familiar pattern whereby Adams is cited frequently but fleetingly.¹⁰

Although Adams’ anti-pornography/anti-prostitution framework is rarely tackled head-on, her relationship to ‘theory’ has met with some criticism. In the opening symposium of the Hypatia issue, Carrie Rohman (2012, p. 511) pays homage to Adams for ‘point(ing) out’ the ‘interlocking structures of oppression’ among women and animals, but then rebukes her for articulating an anti-theory position. There is a problem in this move. Although Adams (2006, p. 123, 2012) repeatedly reminds her readers that she is first and foremost an activist and not an academic, we should recall that The Sexual Politics of Meat carries the subtitle A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. By portraying the difference between Adams and other scholars as a disagreement over the relevance of ‘theory’ to animal studies, politics gets offloaded onto activism, leaving open the question of the political meanings of different theoretical paradigms.

Maneesha Deckha’s (2012) article in the same Hypatia issue does recognise the political limitations of Adams’ critical theory. While acknowledging the contribution of Adams and other ‘vegetarian ecofeminists’ to the development of animal studies, Deckha (ibid.) condemns the privileging of gender in this tradition, and the relative absence of culture and race as categories of analysis. Deckha’s (2007) research is significant for developing a postcolonial posthumanist theory; however, by accepting the terms of anti-pornography feminism, Deckha (2006) limits her critique of the cultural feminist paradigm.¹¹

Nevertheless, Deckha's work as a whole points towards other genealogies of feminist animal advocacy. The whiteness of animal studies is also put under the spotlight and challenged in a special issue on women of colour in the Journal for Critical Animal Studies (Yarbrough et al., 2010). Here, in contrast to the Feminism & Psychology (Potts, 2010b) and Hypatia issues (Gruen and Weil, 2012a) cited above, the work of Adams is not singled out for special attention nor mentioned as a central influence. Most notably, the opening article by vegan feminist activist, blogger and author Amie Breeze Harper (2010a) does not reference Adams once; instead, Harper’s analysis of the lack of attention to cultural difference in mainstream American vegan campaigns draws on feminism of colour and critical race theory. Harper is one of a growing number of writers developing vegetarian/vegan theories inspired by queer and feminist traditions beyond ecofeminism (see also Bailey, 2007; Harper, 2010b; Taylor, 2010; Jenkins, 2012; MacCormack, 2012, 2014; Pick, 2012).

But the richness of contemporary feminist vegan/vegetarian theory is barely represented in wider animal studies, where Adams’ name continues to crop up, even in the work of those whose intellectual trajectory is at odds with her own.¹² A notable example is Cary Wolfe (2003). In his introduction to Animal Rites, often cited as a formative text in animal studies and posthumanist theory, Wolfe (ibid., p. 8) acknowledges The Sexual Politics of Meat as contributing to understandings of the ‘transcoding’ of discourses of domination between animals and different groups of human beings, even ‘despite its problems’ (my emphasis). A later chapter elaborates on these: in their analysis of the film The Silence of the Lambs, Wolfe and Jonathan Elmer (2003, p. 105) supplement Adams’ argument about the shared objectification of women and animals with Judith Butler’s notion of ‘discursive asymmetry’. I am in sympathy with the chapter’s conclusion that Adams’ work cannot explain the complex of class–race–gender–species relations in Jonathan Demme’s film. But because Wolfe and Elmer (2003) portray the discrepancy between the two thinkers as a theoretical one (to put it bluntly: Adams’ simplicity versus Butler’s complexity), the fundamental political divergence between them is ignored. Just as Adams’ theory of the symmetry of animal–woman objectification is inseparable from her anti-pornography politics, Butler’s theory of the ‘asymmetry between discourses’ (ibid, p. 99; Butler 1993, p. 18) is grounded in her groundbreaking theory of gender and sexuality, which is emphatically at odds with the radical feminism of Adams. Anxious to move away from ‘(m)ost treatments of the film’ that see it ‘as part of Hollywood’s confused response to shifting norms of gender and sexuality’, Wolfe and Elmer (2003, p. 97) bypass key debates in feminist theory around gender, sexuality and representation. In so doing, they imply that Adams’ unsophisticated analysis is fine as far as women go, but is not adequate to an analysis of ‘the most far-reaching and powerful discourse in the film: the discourse of species’ (ibid., p. 99). Butler is an odd choice of ally for such a move.

Wolfe’s rather cautious and partial critique of Adams is also noteworthy because he is sometimes positioned as a high-theory rival to her, in a gendered version of the theorist/activist antagonism. For Rohman (2012, p. 512), Adams’ avowed anti-theoretical position is ‘disappointing’, while Wolfe’s use of a ‘wide range of recent continental theory’ represents a more helpful and hopeful model for the future of animal studies. In the same Hypatia symposium, Greta Gaard (2012, p. 523) contrastingly argues that animal studies’ arrival as an ‘academically respectable field’ in the early twenty-first century with publications by Wolfe, Haraway and Jacques Derrida, silenced and came at the expense of a longer history of ecofeminist scholarship (see also Gaard, 2011). Far from trailing behind in the animal theory stakes, according to Gaard (2012, p. 523), Adams ‘helpfully augments’ the work of Wolfe.

These competing views on the relationship between a particular school of ecofeminism, on one hand, and a range of continental theories often gathered under the umbrella of ‘posthumanism’, on the other, form part of a wider contest over the genealogy of contemporary animal studies in the United States. Here, as in the case of feminism, stories matter (Hemmings, 2011). Susan Fraiman (2012) has expressed concern that the coming of age of animal studies in the American academy owes itself to Derrida’s belated, and relatively brief, intervention on the animal question, and its subsequent taking-up by the likes of Wolfe. ‘If Derridean animal studies seems poised to corner the contemporary market’, Fraiman (ibid., p. 92) writes, ‘I am troubled in part by its revisionary history’, and specifically the way it appears to have ‘eclipse(d)’ the longer history of women’s and second-wave feminist engagement with animals. In Fraiman’s (ibid., p. 103) version of events, Wolfe is culpable of co-opting the ideas of ecofeminists, including Adams, and re-presenting them in a Derridean guise. In a reversal of Rohman, Fraiman (ibid, p. 107) offers up Adams—an emotionally intelligent intersectional activist—as an antidote to Wolfe’s theoretical pretensions.

While remaining agnostic on the role played by Derrida, I share Fraiman’s worry that certain versions of the history of animal studies threaten to unfasten it from its wider political constituency—a concern also shared by some critical animal scholars (Nocella et al., 2014). Fraiman is certainly not the first to draw attention to the unequal treatment of female, and especially feminist, scholars in contrast to certain male theorists. In another context, Sara Ahmed (2008, p. 30) has identified ‘an uneven distribution of the work of critique’, with white male writers ‘engaged with closely, while feminist writers are not’. Indeed, in addition to Fraiman’s complaint that Derrida takes up a bit too much space in contemporary animal studies, one might ask why a scholar like Wolfe, so thoroughly dedicated to the close reading associated with deconstruction, performs such a limited reading of the work of Carol J. Adams.

But Fraiman (2012) herself performs a limited reading of Adams, exalting the latter’s activist roots while bypassing the implications of her anti-pornography politics. We may note here that hidden histories run their own risks of revisionism. In a recent historical overview of American ecofeminism since the 1970s, Adams and Lori Gruen (2014a) pinpoint some debates among ecofeminists. They have this to say about the 1980s ‘sex wars’: while some feminists were keen to embrace the ‘“pleasures and dangers” of non-normative sexual expression […] the small study group that led to the formation of Feminists for Animal Rights [FAR] viewed sex work as oppressive’ (ibid., pp. 16–17). This account is a parody of the important political critique of feminist anti-pornography politics as outlined above,¹³ and moreover reasserts the assumption of a natural link between animal rights and anti-pornography feminism. Adams and Gruen (ibid, p. 23) also defend FAR’s controversial ‘woman-born-woman membership rule’. Instead of engaging with transgender theory, or with transgender animal activists, they imply that the problem lies with the ‘painful’ binary logic of transgenderism.¹⁴ Later they complain that ecofeminism continues to be unfairly labelled ‘essentialist’, implying, along with Fraiman (2012), that it has been unjustly written out of history (Adams and Gruen, 2014, pp. 30–31). It is true that too much feminist theory of the past three decades has engaged, to its detriment, insufficiently with ecofeminism and issues of the environment and animals generally. One of the aims of this article is to challenge this feminist anthropocentrism; but, as this section has shown, animal studies in the early twenty-first century has largely embraced the ecofeminist version of history, writing sex workers, transgender people and sex radical feminists out of the feminist story of veganism.

Thus far, I have identified a lack of engagement among feminist and animal scholars with the main arguments underpinning Carol J. Adams’ vegan feminism. To conclude this section, I turn to a couple of exceptions. The late Val Plumwood (2000, 2004) offers a rare and valuable critique of Adams’ cultural feminism/ecofeminism. Plumwood’s (2000, p. 287) analysis of the ethnocentric, anti-ecological and even anthropocentric assumptions of what she labels Adams’ ‘ontological vegetarianism’ are well worth considering, and Plumwood’s work deserves more attention than I can accord it here (or, indeed, than it has received from most of the authors cited above). My primary objection is that in her eagerness to promote ‘ecological animalism’, Plumwood (2004) effectively reduces all veganism to its ‘onotological’ variety, failing to acknowledge alternative vegan traditions, including those within the food, environmental and social justice movements (see Harper, 2010a; Nocella et al., 2014). Moreover, Plumwood’s (2000, p. 292) argument that ‘ontological’ vegetarianism/veganism represents a form of asceticism and alienation from embodiment forecloses discussion of the different embodied experiences of vegans/vegetarians.

A related argument can be found in the work of Elspeth Probyn (2000, p. 54), who claims, based on sparse evidence, to detect a trend of young female vegans with histories of eating disorders. Probyn’s (ibid., pp. 51–55) insistence that ‘moral vegetarianism’ is synonymous with ‘moralism’ is all the more frustrating coming from one of the few scholars who recognises that the anti-pornography politics at the heart of Adams’ writing seriously undermines the latter’s thesis about ‘the sexual politics of meat’ (ibid., pp. 72–73). But instead of exploring other models, Probyn (ibid.), like Plumwood (2000, 2004), uses Adams’ theoretical and political weaknesses as an alibi for a rejection of veganism as antithetical to an embodied ethics of eating,¹⁵ thus making the task of representing vegans whose lives and work prove otherwise, all the more urgent.

In a series of interviews conducted from 2002 to 2003 (Lubiw, 2002; Heze, 2003; Vaughan, 2003), artist and activist Mirha-Soleil Ross explains the ideas behind her one-woman performance piece Yapping Out Loud: Contagious Thoughts of an Unrepentant Whore (2001–2004),¹⁶ ‘a sequence of performance monologues in which (she) brings together her concerns with sex-worker, animal and transsexual rights and reflects upon her 15 years as a prostitute and activist’ (Saleh, 2007, p. 64). These interviews, conducted by fellow activists, are simmering with political passion. They are polemical as well as pedagogical, calling upon listeners to question some of their communities’ truisms. Along with Ross’ video, live performance and other artistic work, these interview transcriptions make up a small but vital archive for the history of the sexual politics of animal rights and veganism. My intention is not to label Ross’ arguments as ‘feminist’—indeed, all three interviews take serious issue with certain forms of feminism—but to insist that those of us interested in the interface between feminism, gender, sexuality and animals would do well to listen to voices such as hers.

As Ross recounts, Yapping Out Loud grew out of her reflections on the name of one of the first sex workers’ rights organisations in North America: COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), founded in 1973. The acronym was originally picked by founder Margot Saint-James because the animal stood as a perfect metaphor for the way prostitutes were and continue to be viewed and treated in our culture, as threatening intruders, carriers of diseases, and as vermin to be eliminated (Ross in interview with Vaughn, 2003).

But instead of performing the coyote metaphor on stage, Ross uses her act to highlight some of the problems of drawing connections between different forms of violence. ‘I think there is a link between how coyotes are treated and how prostitutes are treated and perceived’, she says, ‘But I have an issue when people appropriate another group’s oppression to make a statement about their own if they’re not going to also speak about that other group’s oppression’ (Lubiw, 2002). Ross warns repeatedly against what she calls the ‘gratuitous’ use of animals as metaphors for human experience (Heze, 2003).

There are both ethical and political issues at stake in these comparisons. In conversation with Ross, interviewer Claudette Vaughn (2003) observes that rapists sometimes exhibit behaviour that seems to be patterned on the mutilation of animals. Ross (ibid.) agrees that ‘there are some connections between cruelty to animals and violence towards some groups of humans, including women’; however, she warns of the risk in opposing animal abuse simply because it will lead to violence against human beings, even when there is evidence that it does so. Ross’ solidarity is based on a recognition of the singularity and specificity (Heze, 2003) of the other—in this case, the other species. She insists on the ethical obligation of the activist to highlight disparities between forms and scales of violence (ibid.).

Just as Ross questions COYOTE’s use of animals as a metaphor for violence against sex workers, she emphatically rejects Carol J. Adams’ premise that prostitution and pornography provide apt metaphors for the human exploitation of animals. For Ross, Adams’ thesis both literalises the metaphor of women as meat and minimises the horrors of the factory farm and the slaughterhouse (Lubiw, 2002). In response to Adams’ assumption that all prostitutes are victims of male violence, Ross claims that radical feminists are the ones who objectify sex workers, and the police and anti-prostitution residents’ associations the ones who treat them ‘like animals’ (ibid.). In one monologue in Yapping Out Loud, Ross lists the fears she lives with as a sex worker, including the ever-present danger of a police raid. As one critic writes, ‘rescued animals they live with may flee the apartment and die or be shot by the cops’ (Saleh, 2007). This example of a form of violence shared by animals and sex workers is not the universal violence of patriarchy, but rather the contextualised, specified violence of the state. Ross denounces Adams and others for ‘mak[ing] offensive and trivializing comparison[s] between consenting adult women working in the sex trade and non-consenting animals murdered by the meat industry’ (Vaughn, 2003). Recognising differing capacities for consent, like different degrees of agency, is central to an appreciation of the differences between the lives and situations of animals and sex workers.

In contrast to claims that veganism represents a form of asceticism and a denial of the body (Plumwood, 2000, 2004; Probyn, 2000), Ross’ commitment to animal rights is a situated and embodied politics. Denouncing the anti-prostitution politics of Adams and FAR, Ross insists, ‘ […] while they are theorizing about the so-called use and objectification and commodification of our bodies, we ARE those bodies. And we have a very different perception than theirs of what’s happening to us and what’s going on in the sex trade’ (Lubiw, 2002). In response to an observation made by Nadja Lubiw, presenter of the Toronto radio programme Animal Voices that ‘[a] lot of the theory that’s out there in terms of the animal rights community is very strongly anti-pornography and anti-prostitution’, Ross reminds their listeners that within the animal rights movement there are also feminist activists with very different perspectives, even if they do not get much publicity (ibid.).

Rather than rejecting all pornography as violence against women, Ross’ activist art uses alternative porn to explore the relationship between veganism and trans and queer sexualities (Vaughn, 2003). But while Ross recognises the challenges facing animal rights in terms of voicing a feminism that recognises the lives, work and voices of sex workers, she also stresses the difficulties of integrating animal issues into queer politics and dissident sexual communities (Heze, 2003; Vaughn, 2003). Hers is no rosy vision of a queer vegan utopia; it is a politics grounded in the messiness and struggles of everyday life and activism.

Ross’ commentary on her art, especially Yapping Out Loud, raises compelling questions about the relationship between performance, work and agency across the human/animal divide. Similar concerns are evident in some recent research in labour history and performance studies. Historians such as Jason Hribal (2003) and Mary Murray (2011) have explored the role of animal workers in the development of European capitalism. The fact that animals are not waged, argues Hribal (2003, p. 436), does not mean that they are not workers, or that their labour has not proved enormously profitable and essential to the development of human societies. In the context of performance studies, Nicholas Ridout (2006) has also drawn parallels between human and animal labour, albeit with different emphasis. For Ridout, the presence of animals on the stage highlights a lack of attention to theatrical labour more generally, provoking audience anxiety over questions of consent and exploitation. ‘What these concerns actually illuminate rather valuably’, he writes, ‘is the reality of theatrical employment itself, irrespective of the status or ability of the employee, as involving a particular form of exploitation’ (ibid., p. 100). While Ridout’s preoccupation with the exploitative nature of all theatrical work tends to sideline the specific problem of animal work, his research, like Hribal’s, underscores the interrelationship of human and animal labour under capitalism. The implication of both authors’ research is that we cannot address the exploitation of human workers without considering the work of animals, and vice versa. This is not to say that animals labour under the same conditions as humans, or that they do not face particular issues of exploitation (and vice versa). But putting the lens on animals provides a different angle from which to view the question of what constitutes work for human beings.

Of particular relevance to this article, both Hribal (2003, p. 436) and Ridout (2006, p. 100) single out sexual labour by humans as a form of work that may have particular points in common with animal labour. Neither pursues this line of enquiry and, as a result, both scholars leave one with the impression that sex work (like slavery or child labour; Hribal, 2003, p. 436) should be considered apart from most other forms of human labour. But to do this would be to undermine a central point in their respective arguments: that capitalism creates the conditions for the invisibility of many forms of labour across species. Following this insight, I suggest that it is less urgent to decide how to categorise animal work in relation to categories of human labour (e.g. proletariat, free, slave) than to recognise their labour as such. What marks the commonality between animal labour and human sex work is not any fundamental similarity in the category of work performed, but rather the frequent denial of the labour itself. To define work as work does not preclude the recognition of exploitation; on the contrary, as Ridout (2006) demonstrates, it is a prerequisite for such recognition.

Mirha-Soleil Ross’ art ultimately goes beyond the question of work to engage more generally that of the ontological boundaries between ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’. The very title Yapping Out Loud signals a partial erasure of these boundaries. At the same time, Ross adamantly resists a total collapse of one category into the other through an over-identification of human beings with other animals at the expense of acknowledging the specificity of non-human species and of the human violence done to many of them. Some animal scholars have similarly hailed the posthumanist challenge to the human/animal binary, while warning against the temptation to celebrate the posthuman condition at the expense of a recognition of—and challenge to—the power that human beings continue to exercise over other species (Cudworth, 2011, p. 13). The danger to other species of a posthumanist celebration of trans-species identity without a firm commitment to animal welfare is particularly acute in relation to food—a risk, we might say, of wanting to have one’s animality and eat it too.

The writing of Carol J. Adams has been influential in explaining how live animals are turned into food for human consumption through the function of the ‘absent referent’. Her work is a forceful challenge to the silence of much feminist theory regarding this and other forms of violence against animals. But by defining women first and foremost as victims of male violence, and comparing our position to that of animals exploited by human beings, Adams’ research does not provide an adequate framework for understanding the range of violence done by human beings to other animals, including in one of its most widespread forms: the annual exploitation and slaughter in the billions of those animals destined to be turned into meat and other food products to be eaten by people.

Yet, Adams’ particular feminist framework, with its reliance on a binary model of gender and anti-pornography and anti-prostitution theory, has been accepted in a largely uncritical way by many scholars in animal studies and posthumanism. Major debates in feminism, and the groundbreaking contribution of feminist theory to understandings of gender and sexuality and their intersections with race, class and other categories, have been sidelined in this scholarship. Just as we should challenge animal scholars not to bypass the richness of feminist research and its relevance for animal studies, let us not allow the tendency to conflate vegan feminism with Adams’ anti-pornography position to provide an excuse for marginalising animals from feminist theory. As ecofeminism and aspects of feminist materialism make clear, feminist concerns to redefine the human in radical ways are not complete without an engagement with the other-than-human. Vegan feminism goes further, proposing that such engagement must endeavour as far as possible to preclude violence. It is this commitment to non-violence as the basis for an ethics of eating—and of living—and not an ill-conceived comparison between violence against women and violence against animals, that makes veganism a feminist issue.