The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory

The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory explores a relationship between patriarchal values and meat eating by interweaving the insights of feminism, vegetarianism, animal defense, and literary theory. A pioneering book, it is now available Tenth Anniversary Edition. When it first appeared in 1990, Library Journal called The Sexual Politics of Meat "an important and provocative work" and predicted it would "inspire and enrage readers across the political spectrum." True to Library Journal's prediction, the book was hailed by CHOICE as a "’bible' for feminist and progressive animal rights activists" and equally reviled by conservative commentators, including Rush Limbaugh, John Leo, and Cal Thomas as an example of political correctness taken to excess.

The appearance of The Sexual Politics of Meat triggered dramatic international media coverage of the book. Polity Press in the United Kingdom immediately issued a British Edition. Full page articles appeared in Australian and Dutch newspapers; reviews appeared in Italy and Norway as well as in Great Britain and the United States. The Kirkus Review concluded that it was "an intelligent polemic...Adams's observations are telling, most are seductively sprung...the argument is both thoughtful and thought-provoking." Publisher's Weekly observed that "Carol J. Adams's original, provocative book makes a major contribution to the debate on animal rights."

The Sexual Politics of Meat has been translated into Japanese, Korean, and German. It is published by Continuum International.

In response to the ideas in The Sexual Politics of Meat, readers from all over the continent sent Adams examples that they felt proved her point. She has culled from these menus, advertisements, pictures of billboards, matchcovers, t-shirts to create a Sexual Politics of Meat slide show. Some of these images are reproduced in the Tenth Anniversary Edition, which also features a new preface from Carol explaining how the book came about, and how the sexual politics of meat is at work at the turn of the millenium.

Reviews of The Sexual Politics of Meat

A clearheaded scholar joins the ideas of two movements--vegetarianism and feminism--and turns them into a single coherent and moral theory. Her argument is rational and persuasive....New ground--whole acres of it--is broken by Adams.

  --Washington Post Book World

An important and provocative work...the author provides a compelling case for inextricably linking feminist and vegetarian theory. This book is likely to both inspire and enrage readers across the political spectrum.

 --Library Journal

An intelligent polemic...Adams's observations are telling, most are seductively sprung...the argument is both thoughtful and thought-provoking.

 -- The Kirkus Reviews

Carol J. Adams's original, provocative book makes a major contribution to the debate on animal rights.

--Publisher's Weekly

The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams examines the historical, gender, race, and class implications of meat culture, and makes the links between the practice of butchering/eating animals and the maintenance of male dominance. Read this powerful new book and you may well become a vegetarian.

--Ms. Magazine

Depiction of animal exploitation as one manifestation of a brutal patriarchal culture has been explored in two books by Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat and Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals. Adams argues that factory farming is part of a whole culture of oppression and institutionalized violence. The treatment of animals as objects is parallel to and associated with patriarchal society's objectification of women, blacks and other minorities in order to routinely exploit them. Adams excels in constructing unexpected juxtapositions by using the language of one kind of relationship to illuminate another. Employing poetic rather than rhetorical techniques, Adams makes powerful connections that encourage readers to draw their own conclusions.

 --Choice

With this bold and provocative book, a powerful champion of animal rights has entered the lists, challenging the patriarchal domination of the Western world's eating habits.

 --National Women's Studies Association Journal

The Sexual Politics of Meat couldn't be more timely, or more disturbing.

 --Environmental Ethics

Carol Adams’s (1990) provocative analysis of the masculinist privileging of meat eating, and of feminist interventions to destabilize Western patriarchal (animal) consumption, is a classic.

Echoing through the debates about animals are unmistakable invocations of familiar racist and sexist ideologies about ‘natural affinities,’ categories authorized by nature, destinies inscribed in biology, and ‘scientific proofs’ of the limited capacities of the ‘other’  that have rumbled through the centuries to justify slavery, the oppression of women, and ethnically and racially based holocausts and genocides. Two early feminist works remain unsurpassed trenchant analyses of these parallels: Marjorie Spiegel’s comparison between animal and human slavery, The Dreaded Comparison (1988) and Carol Adams’s treatise on the Sexual Politics of Meat (1990).

--Joni Seager, “Rachel Carson Died of Breast Cancer: The Coming Age of Feminist Environmentalism”  Signs 28, no. 1 (Spring 2003), pp. 445-72.

How refreshing it was the first time I read your book The Sexual Politics of Meat. I actually heard the 'Consolidated' song first. My thinking seems to match yours on numerous issues and since finding your books when I was a young teenager till now (I am now 26) you are genuinely one person I have to thank for solidifying my beliefs. It is always a sigh of relief when there is someone else on the earth that concurs with your way of thoughts (especially in your early female teens).

--a reader in Australia

Table of Contents: The Sexual Politics of Meat

Preface to the Tenth Anniversary Edition

Preface

Part One: The Patriarchal Texts of Meat  

1.      The Sexual Politics of Meat

2.       The Rape of Animals, the Butchering of Women

3.       Masked Violence, Muted Voices

4.       The Word Made Flesh

Part Two: From the Belly of Zeus

5.       Dismembered Texts, Dismembered Animals

6.       Frankenstein's Vegetarian Monster

7.       Feminism, the Great War, and Modern Vegetarianism

Part Three: Eat Rice Have Faith in Women

8.      The Distortion of the Vegetarian Body

9.       For a Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory

Epilogue: Destablizing Patriarchal Consumption

Subpages to Sexual Politics of Meat:

Carol explains the Absent referent

·  Neither Man nor Beast

·  Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Exploratoin

·  Beyond Animal Rights

Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals

 (Continuum, 1994)

Choice has said of this volume, "[Adams's] thinking is brilliant and original, and this volume belongs in every women's studies, theology, and environmental ethics collection."

Part 1: Examining the Arrogant Eye

1.   Eating Animals

2.  The Arrogant Eye and Animal Experimentation

3.     Abortion Rights and Animal Rights

4.  On Beastliness and a Politics of Solidarity

Part 2: "We Are One Lesson": Transforming Feminist Theory

1.     Ecofeminism and the Eating of Animals

2.  The Feminist Traffic in Animals

3.     Reflections on a Stripping Chimpanzee: On the Need to Integrate Feminism, Animal Defense, and Environmentalism

Part 3: From Misery to Grace

1.     Bringing Peace Home: A Feminist Philosophical Perspective on the Abuse of Women, Children, and Pet Animals

2.     Feeding on Grace: Institutional Violence, Feminist Ethics, and Vegetarianism

3.  Beastly Theology: When Epistemology Constructs Ontology

“The best of feminist animal rights theorizing … reimagines a human relationship to the nonhuman world by locating action and theory in the lived world and moral universe of women’s identity and on the basis of feminist political insights. As a genre, feminist animal rights theorizing thus emerges as one of the sharpest cutting edges of contemporary philosophical and environmental work. Four anthologies encompass the range of this work: a special issue of Hypatia edited by Karen Warren in 1991; Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, edited by Greta Gaard (1993); Carol Adams and Josephine Donovan’s anthology Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (Adams and Donovan 1995); and a second anthology by the same editors, Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals (Donovan and Adams 1996).”

--Joni Seager, “Rachel Carson Died of Breast Cancer: The Coming Age of Feminist Environmentalism”  Signs 28, no. 1 (Spring 2003), pp. 445-72.

Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations

Edited with Josephine Donovan (Duke University Press, 1995)

Table of Contents

Part 1: Sexism/Speciesism: Interlocking Oppression

•   Joan Dunayer: Sexist Words, Speciesist Roots

•    Lynda Birke :  Exploring the Boundaries: Feminism, Animals and Science

•    Carol J. Adams: Woman-Battering and Harm to Animals

•   Marti Kheel: An Ecofeminist Critique of Hunters' Discourse

•   Maria Comninou: Speech, Pornography, and Hunting

•   Gary L. Francione: Abortion and Animal Rights: Are They Comparable Issues?

Part 2: Alternative Stories

•   Linda Vance: Beyond Just-So Stories: Narrative, Animals, and Ethics

•   Karen Davis: Thinking Like a Chicken: Farm Animals and the Feminine Connection

•   Diane Antonio: Of Wolves and Women

•   Marian Scholtmeijer: The Power of Otherness: Animals in Women's Fiction

•    Reginald Abbott: Birds Don't Sing in Greek: Virginia Woolf and "The Plumage Bill"

•   Brian Luke: Taming Ourselves or Going Feral? Toward a Nonpatriarchal Metaethic of Animal Liberation

•    Susanne Kappeler: Speciesism, Racism, Nationalism... or the Power of Scientific Subjectivity

Bibliography of Feminist Approaches to Animal Issues

Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals

edited with Josephine Donovan (Continuum).

Table of Contents

•   The Liberation of Nature: A Circular Affair, By Marti Kheel

•    Animal Rights and Feminist Theory,  By Josephine Donovan

•    Toward an Ecological Ethic of Care,  By Deane Curtin

•    Justice, Caring, and Animal Liberation,  By Brian Luke

•    Caring forAnimals,  By Rita C. Manning

•    The Caring Sleuth: Portrait of an Animal Rights Activist,  By Kenneth Shapiro

•    Attention to Suffering: Sympathy as a Basis for Ethical Treatment of Animals,  By Josephine Donovan

•    Caring about Suffering: A Feminist Exploration,  By Carol J. Adams