Journal for Critical Animal Studies Volume 11 Issue 1 2013 ISSN: 1948-352X Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2013 (ISSN 1948-352X) Journal for Critical Animal Studies Editorial Executive Board Editor Dr. John Sorenson [email protected] Brock University Associate Editors Larry Butz [email protected] Rice University Dr. Lindgren Johnson [email protected] Independent Scholar Kirby Pringle [email protected] University of Southern California Dr. Vasile Stanescu [email protected] Stanford University Dr. Susan Thomas [email protected] Hollins University Media Editor Dr. Carol Glasser [email protected] University of California, Irvine Managing Editor Drew Winter [email protected] Institute for Critical Animal Studies Editorial Board For a complete list of the members of the Editorial Board please see the JCAS link on the Institute for Critical Animal Studies website: http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/?page_id=393 Cover Art: Photograph from We Animals (www.weanimals.org) by Jo-Anne MacArthur, with permission. Special thanks to Dr. Cory Shaman for technical support with layout and design of this issue. 1 Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2013 (ISSN 1948-352X) JCAS Volume 11, Issue 1, 2013 Issue Editors Dr. Lindgren Johnson [email protected] Dr. Susan Thomas [email protected] TABLE OF CONTENTS ISSUE INTRODUCTION ..………………………………………………………………… 5-7 ESSAYS The Voice of Animals: A Response to Recent French Care Theory in Animal Ethics Josephine Donovan .………………………………………………………………………… 8-23 Feminism and Husbandry: Drawing the Fine Line between Mine and Bovine Carmen Cusack .……………………………………………………………………………. 24-45 Unpatients: The Structural Violence of Animals in Medical Education Jeff Thomas ………………………………………………………………………………… 46-62 Back to the Flesh: On Devaluation and Appreciation of Animal Being in Ecological Socialism Kris Forkasiewicz ..…………………………..…………………………………………...… 63-88 “The Paragon of Animals”? Animal Morality and Wroblewski’s Subversion of Human Exceptionalism in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle Annette Krizanich ..….……………………..…………………………………………...…. 89-107 2 Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2013 (ISSN 1948-352X) INTERVIEW Interview with Carol J. Adams Lindgren Johnson and Susan Thomas ...…..……………………………………………... 108-132 CREATIVE WORK Allegory of the Alien Invasion Lisa Kretz ..…......……………………………………………………………………...… 133-135 Guide Human Isobel Wood …..………………………………………………………………………………. 136 BOOK REVIEWS Experiencing Animal Minds: An Anthology of Animal-Human Encounters (Julie A. Smith and Robert W. Mitchell) Karen Davis …...……..…………………………………………………………………... 137-142 Understanding Animal Abuse: A Sociological Analysis (Clifton Flynn) Jamie J. Hagen …………………………………………………………………………… 143-149 The Costs and Benefits of Animal Experiments (Andre Knight) Frances M. C. Robinson ..………………………………………………………………... 150-158 Animal Sensibility and Inclusive Justice in the Age of Bernard Shaw (Rod Preece) Will Boisseau ……….……………………………………………………………………. 159-161 FILM REVIEWS Peaceable Kingdom: The Journey Home (2010) Adam Weitzenfeld ….……………………………………………………………….…… 162-169 3 Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2013 (ISSN 1948-352X) If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front (2011) Ian Smith ……………..………………………………………………………………...… 170-173 JCAS: SUBMISSION GUIDELINES ..……………………………………………...… 174-175 4 Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2013 (ISSN 1948-352X) Issue Introduction Lindgren Johnson & Susan Thomas (issue editors) Work on this issue, for the two of us, began last summer when we started drafting questions for our interview of Carol Adams. In the midst of rereading Adams’ work and tossing around what we might ask her, Chick-fil-A famously made various public announcements promoting the “traditional family” and condemning non-heteronormativity. People took, as you might expect, to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to register their support or disdain for such a platform, “liking” their chosen side. But they also took, in the midst of a heat wave, to the hot asphalt parking lots of Chick-fil-As across the country to demonstrate. Hitting the pavement, questions of alterity—both human and animal—intersected and coincided, as chickens became the (unrecognized) bodies through which humans, however they might determine their sexual or gender identification, waged their campaigns. We revisit the events of last summer not only to introduce our interview of Carol Adams, in which she talks at length about the Chick-fil-A campaign—in addition to many other issues, including the place of direct action and the rise of the locavore movement—but to provide a frame of some sort to the essays that follow. This is not a special topics issue, so we cannot claim any intentionally consistent thread running through the contents; nonetheless, much of what follows does speak, in some sense, to the ease with which animals—whether it be their bodies, their suffering, their morality, their lives—so easily get lost. This loss is one that occurs not only in the ways they become, to coin Adams’ famous concept, absent referents, but in the ways, even when they are being seen and their voices ostensibly heard, they still face annihilation. Of course, CAS is all about demonstrating the infrastructures and ideologies that hide animals from our awareness, from any possibility of our attentiveness, so such a focus on these various losses is really nothing new; yet these essays, ranging from literary and legal analyses to an exposure of animal abuse in medical school training, also speak to and move toward the ways that animals can be seen and heard, cared for, and learned from. The issue begins with Josephine Donovan’s “The Voice of Animals: A Response to Recent French Care Theory in Animal Ethics.” Donovan examines new work in French animal care theory that builds on its American counterpart, as articulated in The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics (2007), co-edited by Donovan herself and Carol Adams. Deriving largely from 5 Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2013 (ISSN 1948-352X) Carol Gilligan’s groundbreaking In a Different Voice (in which Gilligan explores the “different voice” of adolescent girls and, additionally, a corresponding “different ethic”—what Donovan and Adams define as an “ethic-of-care”), American animal care theory seeks to apply this feminist care-ethic by way of hearing and paying attention to animals’ own “different voice.” Working with texts that have not yet been translated into English, Donovan focuses, in particular, on the ways French care theory so often falls short of true “care” in its allowance of meat eating. As Donovan argues, care theory demands that, unlike Temple Grandin or Aldo Leopold, we not only “see animals in distress,” but we pay attention to that communication so that it registers as “sufficiently significant,” morally and politically. To truly “care,” we must hear and heed “the different voice” of animals, one that, she insists, can easily be discerned. Carmen Cusack, in “Feminism and Husbandry: Drawing the Fine Line between Mine and Bovine,” continues to explore, in her focus on the relevance of feminist approaches to animal suffering, many of the central concerns of Donovan. Cusack examines “the sexual oppression of female cows, which is unavoidable in the dairy industry,” and why it ought to be a feminist issue. Yet she also explores—and what makes her article unique—is its consideration of the interconnections of the legal terminology of rape, husbandry, and bestiality, terminology “through which feminist resistance to dairy can begin.” The next essay, “Unpatients: The Structural Violence of Animals in Medical Education,” written by Jeff Thomas, illuminates the institutionalization of violence against animals in medical school. Revealing his experience with a live dissection lab at Tulane, Thomas shows, first hand, the ironies of medical school’s insistence on harm against animals, a harm that has become so naturalized as not to warrant attention. Thomas also reveals the ways that the law might serve as the means toward the beginnings of animal justice in medical school, as he traces the process he went through in becoming a whistle blower. Following these two essays written by members of both the legal and medical communities, Kris Forkasiewicz’s “Back to the Flesh: On Devaluation and Appreciation of Animal Being in Ecological Socialism” takes us decidedly into the political realm. Forkasiewicz believes that “ecosocialists have arguably made the most headway in providing us with a framework” for exposing “capital's inherent anti-ecological tendencies.” Yet, he insists, “something crucial is missing from contemporary ecosocialist theory” in its dismissal of the somatic and bodied being of human and nonhuman animals, asserting further that the 6 Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2013 (ISSN 1948-352X) “socioecological crisis is in fact a symptom of our deep-seated alienation from animality and from the somatic dimension of our existence.” While the essay acknowledges that it does not offer solutions, it nonetheless points, through an engagement with the work of Merleau-Ponty, Marx, Ralph Acampora, Joel Kovel, David Pepper, and Sajay Samuel (to name a few), the necessity of ecosocialism’s acknowledgement of its role in alienating the human animal and the concomitant acknowledgement of that human animal as “part of a broader community of earthlings.” The final essay is Annette Krizanich’s “The Paragon of Animals’? Animal Morality and Wroblewski’s Subversion of Human Exceptionalism in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.’ Krizanich examines the ways Edgar Sawtelle asserts canine morality, as she not only approaches the text through its loose adaptation of Hamlet’s plot, but also demonstrates the relevance of recent studies in neuroscience asserting animal morality and empathy to the novel. Pulling back and taking a much broader view, the essay then compares and contrasts the politics of early twentieth-century evolutionary theory, as represented in Jack London’s Call of the Wild, with those of Edgar Sawtelle, placing both within their own contemporary cultural and scientific contexts—ones which offer very different views on the question of evolution, canine and human morality, and human exceptionalism. 7 Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2013 (ISSN 1948-352X) The Voice of Animals: A Response to Recent French Care Theory in Animal Ethics Josephine Donovan* The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth. –Theodor Adorno1 Abstract Recent French theorists have expanded upon the American feminist care tradition in animal ethics. Some of these applications are, however, misconceived, allowing, for example, a qualified endorsement of meat-eating and the valorization of Temple Grandin and Aldo Leopold as exemplars of care theory. The French applications go awry, the author contends, because they fail to incorporate “the different voice” of animals in their ethical deliberations, which is at the heart of American animal care theory. Hearing that voice necessarily enjoins against meat-eating or killing animals for human use (both of which Grandin and Leopold endorse). In critiquing the French works the author expands upon, refines, and clarifies American care theory in animal ethics. Keywords: feminist care theory, vegetarianism, abattoirs Several recent works in French animal ethics develop, analyze, and expand upon American care theory, as articulated in The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics (2007), edited by Carol Adams and myself. The French works in question include Tous vulnérables? Le “care,” les animaux et l’environnement [All Vulnerable? Care, Animals, and the Environment] (2012), edited by Sandra Laugier, and selected articles in Carol Gilligan et l’éthique du “care” [Carol Gilligan and the Ethic of Care] (2010). * Donovan is emerita professor of English at the University of Maine and the author of several articles in animals ethics, including “Animal Rights and Feminist Theory” (1990), “Attention to Suffering” (1996), and “Feminism and the Treatment of Animals” (2006), all of which have been reprinted and the former two translated (into Greek, German, Swedish, and Chinese). She is also the co-editor with Carol J. Adams of Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (1995) and The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics (2007). She can be reached at [email protected]. 8 Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2013 (ISSN 1948-352X) While, in general, these articles enrich our discussion of care theory, certain authors move in directions and reach conclusions that I believe are inconsistent with–indeed incompatible with–the basic premises of care theory. In this article I provide a critique, therefore, of these French adaptations of care theory, hoping thereby in the process to clarify American feminist care theory in general. As none of the French articles have been translated into English, I provide my own translations. The American care theory in animal ethics derives from Carol Gilligan’s foundational In a Different Voice (1982), which was based on interviews with adolescent girls who were discovered to be expressing a dissident, indeed subversive, viewpoint that countered the then dominant theory of moral development (that of Lawrence Kohlberg). The girls’ mode of moral reasoning was more contextual, embodied, and relational, “concerned with the activity of care . . . responsibility and relationships” than the masculine model endorsed by Kohlberg, which was more concerned with “rights and rules,” often making ethical decisions seem like “a math problem with humans” (Gilligan 1982, pp. 19, 28). Feminist theorists applied this “ethic-of- care” approach to animal ethics (see Donovan & Adams 2007). While in its emphasis on particularistic situationism care theory risks being construed in relativistic, casuistical terms (which I contend the French theorists do), it necessarily encompasses certain ethical principles that constitute an ethical bottom-line. For care theory is at root a political intervention aimed at retrieving and articulating suppressed, marginalized voices (as Gilligan’s adolescents), whose viewpoint forms the basis for an ethical critique, and at disclosing, critiquing, and confronting the system doing the suppressing. In this respect, as I have argued elsewhere, care theory resembles Marxist standpoint theory in its original articulation by Georg Lukács, where the proletariat is posited as the repository of a suppressed perspective or standpoint on its oppression. As subjects being treated (reified) as objects, the workers were seen to evince a critical consciousness (knowing that they were not objects or things) (for further discussion see Donovan 2006, pp. 319-20). Similarly, Gilligan’s adolescent girls evinced a critical consciousness–a “negative critique” in Adorno’s dialectical conception–toward the system suppressing their dissident voices. The suppressed standpoint or voice is held under these theories to be privileged because it offers perspectives, unnoticed by the governing ideologies, on the suffering being inflicted. As these perspectives are rooted in the oppressed person’s or creature’s own situation, they are 9