In an earlier blog (06/09/2013), I mentioned Carol Adams' Sexual Politics of Meat (1990, 2010) in which she argues that woman abuse, animal abuse and the exploitation of nature are part of the same spectrum of violence perpetrated by patriarchal and masculinist oppressive systems. Key to her theory is the concept of the "absent referent" which enables the ideology of meat and its related violence to be perpetuated. Below, I quote the key passage from her book: "Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The 'absent referent' is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our 'meat' separated from any idea that she or he once was an animal, to keep the 'moo' or 'cluck' or 'baa' away from the meat, to keep something from being seen as having been someone. Once the existence of meat is disconnected from the existence of an animal who was killed to become the 'meat,' meat becomes unanchored by its original referent (the animal), becoming instead a free-floating image, used often to reflect women's status as well as animals'. Animals are the absent referent in images of women butchered, fragmented, or consumable" (Adams 2010:13).
2 Comments
Ramon
4/7/2014 03:53:50 am
Very interesting! This thought is in all our modern minds, unstructured but present, even subconscious, though molded by culture and habit. I venture that in less modernized societies, or even poorer ones, the link between meat and animal is direct and clear. Why? Because nutrition is valued very differently, and the concept of food as "the" basic need, in any and all available forms, makes the man-animal relational subjectivity very different from the one we have today (in wealthier, modernized, society).
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Alan Northover
4/8/2014 05:40:47 pm
You're right, Ramon. Hunter-gatherers and early cultivators interacted directly with animals. This link has been severed in industrial and post-industrial societies where animals and their suffering have become invisible, and their bodies objectified and fragmented. Most people don't see the animal but only sanitised packs of dismembered "meat" on the market shelves.
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November 2017
AuthorI'm Alan (an anagram for "animal"), an ethical vegetarian. Our colour vision can be traced back to our distant relatives, the fruit-eating, tree-dwelling monkeys, who benefited from colour vision when looking for (ripe) fruit.
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