Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-x5gtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-09T17:40:33.570Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Toward a Postcolonial, Posthumanist Feminist Theory: Centralizing Race and Culture in Feminist Work on Nonhuman Animals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Maneesha Deckha
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Posthumanist feminist theory has been instrumental in demonstrating the salience of gender and sexism in structuring human–animal relationships and in revealing the connections between the oppression of women and of nonhuman animals. Despite the richness of feminist posthumanist theorizations it has been suggested that their influence in contemporary animal ethics has been muted. This marginalization of feminist work—here, in its posthumanist version—is a systemic issue within theory and needs to be remedied. At the same time, the limits of posthumanist feminist theory must also be addressed. Although posthumanist feminist theory has generated a sophisticated body of work analyzing how gendered and sexist discourses and practices subordinate women and animals alike, its imprint in producing intersectional analyses of animal issues is considerably weaker. This leaves theorists vulnerable to charges of essentialism, ethnocentrism, and elitism despite best intentions to avoid such effects and despite commitments to uproot all forms of oppression. Gender‐focused accounts also preclude understanding of the importance of race and culture in structuring species‐based oppression. To counter these undesirable pragmatic and conceptual developments, posthumanist feminist theory needs to engender feminist accounts that centralize the structural axes of race and culture.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 27 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Animal Others , Summer 2012 , pp. 527 - 545
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adams, Carol. 1990. The sexual politics of meat: A feminist‐vegetarian critical theory. New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Adams, Carol. 1995. Comment on George's “Should Feminists Be Vegetarians”? Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 21 (1): 221–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Adams, Carol. 2007a. The war on compassion (2006). In The feminist care tradition in animal ethics, ed. Donovan, Josephine and Adams, Carol. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Adams, Carol. 2007b. Caring about suffering: A feminist exploration (1995). In The feminist care tradition in animal ethics, ed. Donovan, Josephine and Adams, Carol. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Adams, Carol, and Donovan, Josephine, eds. 1995. Animals & women: Feminist theoretical explorations. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Adams, Carol and Donovan, Josephine, eds.1996. Beyond animal rights: A feminist caring ethic for the treatment of animals. Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press.Google Scholar
Alcoff, Linda. 1998. Cultural feminism versus post‐structuralism: The identity crisis in feminist theory. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 13 (3): 405–36.Google Scholar
Anderson, Kay. 1998. Animals, science, and spectacle in the city. In Animal geographies: Place, politics, and identity in the nature–culture borderlands, ed. Wolch, Jennifer and Emel, Jody. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Anderson, Kay. 2007. Race and the crisis of humanism. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Anderson, Kay, and Perrin, Collin. 2007. The miserablest people in the world: Race, humanism and the Australian Aborigine. Australian Journal of Anthropology 18 (1): 18–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/la frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute.Google Scholar
Armstrong, Philip. 2002. The postcolonial animal. Society & Animals 10 (4): 413–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arrighi, Gillian. 2008. Political animals: Engagements with imperial and gender discourses in late‐colonial Australian circuses. Theatre Journal 60 (4): 609–29.Google Scholar
Bailey, Cathryn. 2007. We are what we eat: Feminist vegetarianism and the reproduction of racial identity. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 22 (2): 39–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Belasco, Warren. 2006. Meals to come: A history of the future of food. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Bittman, Mark. 2008. Rethinking the meat guzzler. The New York Times, January 27.Google Scholar
Brooks, David. 2009. The smoking vegetarian. Angelaki 14 (2): 129–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chan, Cheryl. 2011. Trouble brews over ancient soup; Seen as a status symbol, the Chinese delicacies are served at celebrations. The Province, July 10: A8.Google Scholar
Chen, Mel Y. 2010. Animals without genitals: Race and transsubstantiation. Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 20 (3): 285–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cole, Matthew, and Morgan, Karen. 2011. Vegaphobia: Derogatory discourses of veganism and the reproduction of speciesism in UK national newspapers. British Journal of Sociology 62 (1): 134–53.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Corbey, Raymond. 2005. The metaphysics of apes: Negotiating the animal–human boundary. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darian‐Smith, Eve. 2010. Religion, race, rights: Landmarks in the history of modern Anglo‐American law. Oxford, UK, and Portland, OR: Hart Publishing.Google Scholar
Deckha, Maneesha. 2004. Culture as taboo?: Feminism, intersectionality, and culture talk in law. Canadian Journal of Women and Law 16 (1): 14–53.Google Scholar
Deckha, Maneesha. 2007. Animal justice, cultural justice: A posthumanist response to cultural rights in animals. Journal of Animal Law and Ethics 2: 189–229.Google Scholar
Dell'Aversano, Carmen. 2010. The love whose name cannot be spoken: Queering the human–animal bond. Journal for Critical Animal Studies 8 (1/2): 73–125.Google Scholar
Dhamoon, Rita. 2011. Considerations for mainstreaming intersectionality. Political Research Quarterly 64 (1): 230–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Donovan, Josephine. 1995. Comment on George's “Should Feminists Be Vegetarians”? Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 21 (1): 226–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Donovan, Josephine, and Adams, Carol, eds. 2007. The feminist care tradition in animal ethics. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Dowd, Nancy, and Jacobs, Michelle S. 2003. Feminist legal theory: An anti‐essentialist reader. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Elder, Glen, Wolch, Jennifer R., and Emel, Jody. 1998. Le pratique sauvage: Race, place, and the human–animal divide. In Animal geographies: Place, politics and identity in the nature–culture borderlands, ed. Wolch, Jennifer and Emel, Jody. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Fox, Katrina. 2011. Racism versus speciesism: A moral battleground? The Scavenger, February 13. http://www.thescavenger.net/animals/racism-versus-speciesism-a-moral-battleground-575.html (accessed February 2, 2012).Google Scholar
Fox, Marie. 2005. Reconfiguring the animal/human boundary: The impact of xenotechnologies. Liverpool Law Review 26 (2): 149–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fudge, Erica. 2010. Why it's easy being a vegetarian. Textual Practice 24 (1): 149–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaard, Greta. 1997. Toward a queer ecofeminism. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 12 (1): 114–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaard, Greta. 2002. Vegetarian ecofeminism. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 23 (3): 117–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaard, Greta. 2011. Ecofeminism revisited: Rejecting essentialism and re‐placing species in a material feminist environmentalism. Feminist Formations 23 (2): 26–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaard, Greta, and Gruen, Lori. 1995. Comment on George's “Should Feminists Be Vegetarians”? Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 21 (1): 230–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gandhi, Leela. 2006. Meat: A short cultural history of animal welfare at the fin‐de‐siècle. In Affective communities: Anticolonial thought, fin‐de‐siècle radicalism, and the politics of friendship. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
George, Kathryn Paxton. 1994. Should feminists be vegetarian? Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19 (2): 405–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Giffney, Noreen, and Hird, Myra, eds. 2008. Queering the non/human. London: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Gruen, Lori. 2001. Conflicting values in a conflicted world: Ecofeminism and multicultural environmental ethics. Women & Environments International 52/53: 16–18.Google Scholar
Gruen, Lori. 2007. Empathy and vegetarian commitments (2004). In The feminist care tradition in animal ethics, ed. Donovan, Josephine and Adams, Carol. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna. 1989. Primate visions: Gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Harper, Breeze. 2010. Whiteness and post‐racial vegan praxis. Journal of Critical Animal Studies 8 (3): 5–29.Google Scholar
Hird, Myra. 2006. Animal transex. Australian Feminist Studies 21 (49): 35–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
hooks, bell. 1984. From margin to center. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Kemmerer, Lisa. 2004. Hunting tradition: Treaties, law and subsistence killing. Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal 2 (2): 1–20.Google Scholar
Khandelwal, Meena. 2009. Arranging love: Interrogating the vantage point in cross‐border feminism. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 34 (3): 583–609.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kheel, Marti. 2008. Nature ethics: An ecofeminist perspective. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Kim, Claire Jean. 2007. Multiculturalism goes imperial: Immigrants, animals, and the suppression of moral dialogue. Du Bois Review: Social Science and Research on Race 4 (1): 233–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lorde, Audre. 1984. The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. In Sister Outsider. Trumansburg, N.Y.: The Crossing Press.Google Scholar
Lugones, Maria. 2007. Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 22 (1): 186–209.Google Scholar
Luke, Brian. 2007. Brutal: Manhood and the exploitation of animals. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Mavhunga, Clapperton Chakenetsa. 2011. Vermin beings: On pestiferous animals and human game. Social Text 29 (1): 151–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mohanty, Chandra T. 1991. Under Western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. In Third world women and the politics of feminism, ed. Mohanty, Chandra T., Torres, Lourdes, and Russo, Ann. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Narayan, Uma. 1997. Dislocating cultures: Identities, traditions, and third‐world feminism. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Pandian, Anand. 2008. Pastoral power in the postcolony: On the biopolitics of the criminal animal in South India. Cultural Anthropology 23 (1): 85–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pedersen, Helena. 2010. Animals in schools: Processes and strategies in human–animal education. West LaFayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press.Google Scholar
Philo, Chris. 1998. Animals, geography, and the city: Notes on inclusions and exclusions. In Animal geographies: Place, politics, and identity in the nature–culture borderlands, ed. Wolch, Jennifer and Emel, Jody. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the mastery of nature. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Plumwood, Val. 2000. Integrating ethical frameworks for animals, humans, and nature: A critical feminist eco‐socialist analysis. Ethics and the Environment 5 (2): 285–322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Price, Janet, and Shildrick, Margrit, eds. 1999. Feminist theory and the body: A reader. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Razack, Sherene. 1998. Looking white people in the eye: Gender, race, and culture in courtrooms and classrooms. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Regan, Tom. 1983. The case for animal rights. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Rider, David. 2011. Bid mounts to prohibit shark fins; Toronto councillors' crusade denounces “barbaric” soup, moves to ban from city. Toronto Star, June 14: GT1.Google Scholar
Ritvo, Harriet. 1987. The animal estate. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Rudy, Kathy. 2011. Loving animals: Toward a new animal advocacy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singer, Peter. 1975. Animal liberation. New York: Random House, Inc.Google Scholar
Sobal, Jeffery. 2005. Men, meat, and marriage: Models of masculinity. Food and Foodways 13 (1–2): 135–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spelman, Elizabeth V. 1988. Inessential woman: Problems of exclusion in feminist thought. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1985. Three women's texts and a critique of imperialism. Critical Inquiry 12 (1): 243–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stone, Dan. 2007. The holocaust and “the human”. In Hannah Arendt and the uses of history: Imperialism, nation, race, and genocide, ed. King, Richard H. and Stone, Dan. New York: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Valverde, Mariana. 2008. Local law and the negotiation of urban norms. Law and Social Inquiry 33 (4): 895–923.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warren, Karen. 2000. Ecofeminist philosophy: A western perspective on what it is and why it matters. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Warren, Karen. 2002. Response to my critics. Ethics & the Environment 7 (2): 39–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yarbrough, Anastasia, and Thomas, Susan. 2010. Guest editorial. Journal of Critical Animal Studies 8 (3): 3–4.Google Scholar