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Neither Man Nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals

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in Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals, Adams appreciates how authors such as Tom Reagan and Peter Singer describe the suffering that animals endure as consumable commodities, however, she argues that their epistemologies around animals is filtered through a human male experience. She writes, "Do Reagan and Singer and other animal-defense theorists have the analysis correct- they understand and act upon the problem of animals' instrumentality- but incorrectly attempt to fit it within a framework delimited by its own human male bias?." Adams recognizes that epistemologies come from embodied experiences, and that this embodied experience is subjective and based on factors such as gender.

Adams argues that many feminist-vegan and feminist-vegetarian critical theorists are not comfortable with the use of "rights" within pro-vegan and pro-vegetarian animal liberation philosophies, simply because the logic of [human] rights comes from the white male class privileged embodied experience. She asks what animal ethics can look like if coming from women's embodied experience.

In Neither Man Nor Beast, Adams also gives the reader a small view into the potential of a critical whiteness analysis within animal ethics. Even though she is a white middle class woman with a graduate degree living in the privileged spaces of American modernity, Adams, to some degree, critically reflects on how unacknowledged white privilege potentially becomes a self-made barrier for the animal liberation movement. Adams writes in Chapter 4,

"[M]any people of color and some progressive whites eye the animal defense movement with suspicion. The animal defense movement is thought to result from and enact forms of race and class privilege, providing an opportunity for some whites to ignore issues of social oppression. Do white animal defenders put themselves in the place of the animals, thus allowing them not to deal with the privilege they have vis-a-vis other humans? Do white animal defenders identify with animal victims of human privilege because this is a privilege they are willing to foreswear, but not with victims of race and class privilege because these are privileges they wish to maintain?" (Adams 1994, 71-72).

Most of post-1980s scholarship on feminist-vegan/vegetarian critical theory tend to be concerned with 'patriarchy' and/or 'male-stream' thought within animal ethics, without looking into how race or whiteness also operates. This is indicative of a largely white middle-class feminist standpoint that has a history of engaging in feminism with the assumption that all feminists and women have a white middle-class First-world experience. Rarely, if ever, did this collectivity of feminist theorists reflect on how race and whiteness operate, or how their own racial and class privileges influence how they produce feminist scholarship.

Adams has substantial training in anti-racism and critical studies of racism and whiteness at not just the individual, but structural level in the USA, hence the content of her works shows this, drawing from black feminist epistemologies of bell hooks, Alice Walker, as well as critical race theories of Kimberlé Crenshaw. Though written 16 years ago, I really enjoyed this book and actually think it's a little 'deeper' than "Sexual Politics of Meat". I think it's great to read "Sexual Politics of Meat" first, and then Neither Man Nor Beast.

In spite of Carol Adams being in a little bit of a different wave of feminism, I always enjoy her intersectional approach to things, which always includes race, gender, class, animals, and so on. Many animal lib books, or intersectionality books, leave out women, or race, or animals. Carol Adams never fails to keep me interested. I always read her books quickly.