Interview with Carol Adams

[Guest guest]

Carol Adams has been working within the fields of violence against women and

children and vegetarianism and animal advocacy for over twenty years. She is

the author of a number of books, most notably The Sexual Politics of Meat: A

Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory and Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the

Defense of Animals. With Josephine Donovan, she has edited two volumes on

feminism and animal issues, reviewed in this edition. She lives outside of

Dallas, Texas.

 

Q: To start with the obvious question. How do you live among meateaters?

 

A: I think one way I handle living among meateaters is that I now ask them about

it. On the plane last night I sat next to a child psychologist and we talked

about the fact that I had had a vegetarian meal and he had eaten dead chicken.

It was very fascinating because, when you say you're writing about it, then

you can say to them: " So tell me. You've said that you know it's ethically

wrong; so what happens when you sit down to eat meat? " Instead of me being seen

as someone saying, " Look, you're doing something wrong; why do you keep doing

this? " I get to ask a question which prompts them to reflect on what is the

process that's cutting them off from their own ethical awareness. He talked

about having a hole in his conscience and I said, " Yes, but I don't think so.

Because our whole culture says it's okay. " " Well, " he said, " We've got a

collective hole in our conscience. "

 

Q: Do you feel angry?

 

A: When the New York Times devotes an entire article about the growth of factory

farms and the effect of that on the environment and people, and it

completely ignores animals, I feel very angry. But I take that anger and use it

interpretatively: what does this represent? What's going on here? So,

theoretically, I can engage it even more; because I want to try and understand

it and how we change it. Personally, I realized I needed to begin negotiating

with people about what they were going to order at a restaurant, and giving

myself permission to say what I want to say.

 

Sometimes what meateaters do is so blatantly open to analysis that it leaves me

dumbstruck. So I guess what I've done is I've taken that ongoing maddening

frustration and anger and I've finally moved that so it doesn't paralyze or

immobilize me and I continue to see this whole thing as a process. After all, I

used to be a meateater; I'm living among people who haven't completed the

process that vegetarians go through.

 

Q: Do you find it always useful to go back into that mindset, and think, " Well,

how did I go about denying this? " And how do we negotiate with our families?

 

A: I think one way we have personally handled this is we exiled ourselves. My

whole family's in the north, I'm in Dallas. I don't go home for most of the

important rituals I would usually have to sit through. So I can exercise that

kind of control. I did successfully negotiate a vegetarian barbecue, where the

only thing barbecued were Notdogs and Boca Burgers. And it was a big success,

but I had to negotiate that in advance. Some of the family members are very

interested in vegetarianism; and some of my family members are very gourmet,

controlling.... So we don't talk about it.

 

After all, meateaters live among meateaters, too. Everything they do is mirrored

back to them as okay. Another way I handle that is through a feminist

understanding of social process. For me it's becoming more and more profound

that the way pornography mirrors back a message about who women are is

the way a meateating culture mirrors back a message about what -- not who --

animals are. So, trying to reconfigure our conceptualization is very important.

 

Q: Do you think we should talk back, as it were?

 

A: I think it is important sometimes to talk back. First of all, I do think that

vegetarians think more literally than others, because you are restoring the

" absent referent. " We are not seeing food; we're seeing a corpse, we're seeing

dead animals. Because we think literally as well as metaphorically, our attempt

to move the literal issue will arouse a certain degree of hostility and distress

because our culture in general wants to move away from the literal. It wants to

disengage. For instance, we don't want to know where our clothes come from. We

don't want to know that the clothing is being made by children or women in

terrible situations. We don't want to restore that absent referent; we don't

want the literal truth of what and how our culture produces " products " for us to

consume to be known.

 

Secondly, I always say that vegetarians should not engage the issue of

vegetarianism if there is a dead animal present and being eaten. Because there's

just

too much tension. The meateater is going to further need to justify what they're

doing; even if they're not conscious of it. Because they're consuming at the

moment.

 

Q: Do you agree with Karen Davis that we should stop apologizing?

 

A: I love that. We do need to stop apologizing. Now I think Karen would operate

differently about all this. She is adamant about the ethical stance: that we

don't look away, that we don't refuse to engage. And I agree; and I'm not

talking about apology. I'm not saying that we need a rhetoric of apology: " Oh,

I'm so

sorry I got you upset. " But what I'm trying to do is push and say, " What makes

you feel upset? " I think the process is not for us to say why we're vegetarians

so much, because we're on the other side of that process. The process is to

figure out what is catalytic for that person. Instead of me defending

vegetarianism while people eat meat; I say, " How is it that you can keep eating

meat when you know that it's cruel? " I don't think we have to defend our diet. I

think we need neither apology nor defensiveness.

 

I remember the movie Babe. In a sense, to avoid consumption, Babe has to

establish his individuality and thus his irreplaceability. He succeeds in being

seen as a body with a biography, an individuality, and thus he succeeds in

staying alive. But there's also a duck trying to establish his irreplaceability.

And it's much harder for the duck to prove his irreplaceability because ducks

are seen as collective. They're collectivized, seen as mass terms even when

alive. But a duck is killed and the corpse is eaten at Christmas. At the end of

the movie, when the credits were rolling, it said that there was no cruelty

against animals in this film. So my six year old asked, " Does that mean they ate

fake meat? " Which I felt was so profound, because we do not in our culture think

it is cruel to eat animals. I mean a six year old vegetarian can just wipe away

the whole culture of apology.

 

What we need to do is create a wedge, and this guy last night on the plane said

that something innovative takes quite a while to be accepted. He predicted

that 200 years from now people wouldn't eat animals. And I said, " I don't want

to wait 200 years. That's a lot of animals. "

 

Q: I don't know we have 200 years to wait.

 

A: Well, yes. We don't. I can't say I have a blueprint for how to solve these

family things. Because I do think that whatever issue a family or couple has,

meateating and vegetarianism become vehicles for displacing those relationship

issues that haven't been dealt with. So that it gets even further confusing.

For a couple, for instance, the meateating/vegetarian issue will end up being

about control: what can be brought into a kitchen; what pots can be used. All of

those things become media of controlling behavior and for manipulating issues

about love and affection.

 

Q: Is that because meat is a locus of power? Is that part of the whole process

of thinking about meat?

 

A: Well, let's talk specifically about what is usually the make-up of this

couple: which is usually that it's the woman who is the vegetarian and the man

who is

the meateater. I was just reading Carol Pateman's The Sexual Contract. She's

talking about the wife and the status of wives. Before we ever had rights talk,

before this notion of " fraternity, equality, liberty, " before there was the

Social Contract that is foundational to Western philosophy, there was a Sexual

Contract guaranteeing sexual access to women. One of the things about sexual

access to women is that every man should have a wife; and one of the duties

of the wife is to serve the man.

 

I was thinking about this in terms of meat, because so many women say to me: " I

could be a vegetarian, but my husband can't. " So clearly they're also deciding

his moods are so important that they can't meet their own needs. It's so

classic. Meateating becomes another vehicle for self-denial by placing the

husband and the partner's needs first. And this goes back to the whole way in

which women become caretakers, and end up denying their own bodies and their own

needs.

 

I think there is the fear of men's anger about not having meat at a meal. I

don't mean battering: because when men batter and use meat as an excuse, that's

not what's really going on. They're battering to establish control, and the

absence of meat is just their most recent excuse. It can be vacuuming, it can be

anything. Yet, there must be a lot of women who are fearful of what the absence

of meat means to their husbands, and the kind of anger that that would

generate. We are talking about people without any feminist analysis. They just

know that not to offer meat would create anger, and perhaps require them to

examine the relationship; a relationship in which clearly they do not have as

much power. So, " meat as a locus of power " in terms of what I argue in The

Sexual Politics of Meat, must include this understanding of the whole Sexual

Contract and the expectation of duties for wives.

 

Q: How does an ecofeminist ethic of care think about animals?

 

A: People who eat animals are benefiting from a dominant/subordinate

relationship, but our culture encourages invisibility of the structures enabling

this, and invisibility of the animals hurt by this. Indeed, the animals are seen

as unified masses. There is a complete denial of their individuality, so that it

is not seen as subordination. We see meat as the ontological reason for animals'

existence, that they are there to be eaten. But when you talk about intervening

with an ecofeminist care-ethic, one of the things we need to say is, " What are

you going through? "

 

It's not that we must say this empathetically only to other beings who can speak

our language -- as a way of connecting -- but that we ask that of the " dairy "

cow, the cow being milked, the chicken in a laying factory, and any animal

slated to be killed: " What are you going through? " First of all, we need to see

the

legitimacy of that question, that animals are going through something, and

secondly, to get educated about what that experience is. And we need to trust

that

if we placed ourselves in situations to learn the answer to this question, the

animals will tell us, in ways other than words.

 

Q: What about meateaters who say, " I just love the taste of meat " ?

 

A: Meateaters are very happy eating vegetarian food, as long as they don't know

it. One time, I made walnut balls, and everybody was convinced it was meat.

They thought I had given in -- " Oh, Carol has given in. And aren't these the

most delicious. " And they just enjoyed it so much, thinking that I had served

them dead animals. It was so profound to me: because it was the symbol they were

holding on to. Their stomach didn't know the difference; but as long as their

minds were so lost, it didn't matter what was going into their stomachs. So I

realized it's the symbolism of meat that holds sway.

 

The child psychologist on the plane said that he knew it was ethically wrong and

he'd been going longer and longer without meat. But then, he said, he starts

craving meat. And I said, " Tell me what you crave. What is it about meat that

you're craving? " " I don't know, " he said. " It's a burger. " I said, " You might be

craving iron. " Often I think our bodies are trained to convert a craving for a

specific thing to how we've trained it: so that one vegetarian I know, when she

was craving steak, knew to translate that she was craving iron.

 

Q: So, how do we talk to meateaters?

 

A: The person with the least amount of information sets the level of discourse:

consequently, the meateater -- who usually has less information about

meateating than the vegetarian -- sets the level of the discourse. We are

brought down that level to begin with. The question is how one brings all the

vegetarian knowledge in, because of the ignorance that is determining our level

of engagement. I think that this is one of the things that's so frustrating for

vegetarians: we talk about creating a non-violent world, but there's so much

that's paralyzing us from maintaining that analysis because of the level of

ignorance at which the issue is engaged. What needs to be addressed is precisely

what is excluded by the level of discussion.

 

Q: What do you say when people say vegetarians have a hang-up about meat?

 

A: Because we live in a therapeutic culture right now, everything's going to be

seen as an individual hang up rather than as a political recognition and

engagement. My answer is that vegetarians don't have a hang up about meat. We

have a problem with what people are saying is food. We're stepping back a level.

Then people end up saying we're puritans, we're denying, we're ascetics: that we

have some hang up about pleasure -- the same charge leveled at

anti-pornography feminists. But there is no pleasure without privilege, the

privilege to be a member of the dominant culture that's dominating women, people

of color, and animals. We need to get the privilege acknowledged and the social

structures that create privilege, and the way the privilege is rewarded

through pleasure, a pleasure which actually arises from someone else's harm.

 

It all goes back in a sense to the privilege of controlling. To raise

vegetarianism as an ethical issue says to our culture's self-defined principles:

" What we claim is not what we're doing. "

--

 

 

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