The Sexual Politics of Scholarship

On May 3, I gave a reading from my contribution to Defiant Daughters: 21 Women on Art, Activism, Animals, and The Sexual Politics of Meat, a book, edited by Kara Davis and Wendy Lee and published by Lantern Books, that pays homage to Carol J. Adams’s foundational ecofeminist animal studies work The Sexual Politics of Meat, first published in 1990 and in print ever since.  I read my entry at a local bookstore packed to the rafters with friends and strangers alike, all of whom hung on my every word.  At the end of the reading, people hugged me.  They bought the book and asked me to sign it.  In my professional life, I have never given such a reading and, as a result, I have never experienced anything that felt quite as rewarding as what I experienced that evening.

On May 18, Adams posted on Facebook that “in reader reviews for a literary criticism article, the scholar who wrote the article is told that her paper ‘relies too heavily on Carol Adams (a non-academic animal rights writer) for its theorization of animals, women, and oppression.’”  Further, the writer is instructed to incorporate more scholarly animal studies sources, like the work of Derrida, for example.

I want to talk about what’s going on with the dismissal of Adams’s work in terms of what such dismissal says about women’s invention of new ways of knowing in the realm of the academy, and I want to do so because as an academic woman, the omission of Adams’s work from scholarly consideration raises very real and problematic gender-based issues with regard to how we within the academy police and are policed in terms of our scholarly production.  I’m using Adams as my example, because she’s the one I know best, and I think that her case offers real historical parallels to the disappearance of women’s writing more broadly.

Consider, for example, Eliza Haywood, who, during her life (1693?-1756) published over 70 works.  Have you heard of her?  No, you haven't, so don't try to act like you have.

Adams holds a divinity degree from Yale University and has published dozens of books with both academic and popular presses; she publishes in scholarly journals and in mainstream media, and she speaks regularly on college campuses across the country.  She is prolific, productive, philosophical and, yes, accessible.  She is a public intellectual of the first order, an “independent scholar” of the finest magnitude, and she’s been doing work on animal studies, ecocriticism, women’s studies, and literary analysis (to name a few of her areas of intellectual interest) since the 1970s. 

In the realm of animal studies and ecocriticism, there has some attempt to address the way that the recognized “legitimate” scholarly discourse has essentially written certain foundational female theoreticians right out of existence, as male scholars, one after another, appear to tell us, as if for the first time, what these modes of inquiry mean.  For example, in the first edition Ecocriticism: The New Critical Idiom, Greg Garrard failed to include Adams’s concept of the absent referent in his chapter on animals – an error he corrected in the book’s second edition in 2011, but only after Adams herself made him aware of his oversight.  In his emailed response, he apologized, noting he was, in his own words, “pretty new to the field” when he wrote the book in 2004. 

Garrard.  Still cute, though.

Greta Gaard takes up the omission of female writers like Adams in a 2010 article in Isle in which she advocates for a more feminist ecocriticism, one that addresses the ecocritical revisionism – by such writers as Garrard and Lawrence Buell – that has rendered a feminist perspective largely absent.  She notes that omissions of foundational ecofeminist texts in

ecocritical scholarship are not merely a bibliographic matter of failing to cite feminist scholarship, but signify a more profound conceptual failure to grapple with the issues being raised by that scholarship as feminist, a failure made more egregious when the same ideas are later celebrated when presented via nonfeminist sources. (3)

And in a 2012 essay in Critical Inquiry, Susan Fraiman tracks gender in animal studies, and notes that

In 1975, Peter Singer galvanized the modern animal rights movement with Animal Liberation, a work that would be heralded as one of its founding texts. That same year, The Lesbian Reader included an article by Carol Adams entitled “The Sexual Politics of Meat,” inspiration for a book eventually published in 1990. Her scholarship contributed to a growing body of ecofeminist work, emergent in the early 1980s, on women, animals, and the environment. (89)

Unlike Adams, who has written consistently over a period of nearly five decades on the subject of animals, Derrida, on the other hand, had only the slightest interest in animal studies, with a singular sustained commentary “L’Animal que donc je suis (a` suivre),” a lecture given in 1997 and published in 2002 as “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” in Critical Inquiry.  Fraiman’s work is concerned with the revisionist history that places Derrida at the fore as the father of legitimate animal studies and erases from that discourse the voices of pioneering women – like Adams.  What Derrida did was to remove the gendered component from the analysis, to take animal studies away from its linkages with women’s studies.

Sacre bleu!  How can he not be foundational?  He's holding a cat forchrissakes.

So my defense of Adams is not really new, but what’s troubling is that despite such attention to the importance of Adams’s work, she continues to be dismissed over and over again as “non-academic,” and I don’t think that this omission is simply about the fact that she doesn’t work in the academy per se.  It’s more about what she’s saying and the way that she says it; it’s more about her unruly feminism and her position that there are linkages with regard to various oppressions – between animals, women, and colonized peoples.  It’s about our tendency to cast feminism as a series of “waves” (first, second, and maybe third), and then decide that if feminist thought occurred during a previous wave, it’s now obsolete.  And it’s about her impatience with patriarchy and with patriarchal dictates that determine not only what constitutes oppression but also how it is appropriate to discuss oppression and patriarchy. 

***

If this piece feels that it’s about praising Carol Adams, that’s because it is, but it’s also about the stakes more broadly.  Earlier this year, Pat McCrory, Governor of North Carolina, the state in which I live and the state in whose university system I work, commented in a radio interview with Bill Bennett that our system offered courses that offer "no chances of getting people jobs."  He said, “If you want to take gender studies that's fine. Go to a private school, and take it, but I don't want to subsidize that if that's not going to get someone a job" (Frank). 

This is Pat McCrory (R), Governor of NC.  You've probably forgotten our last governor.  She was a woman and kinda liked education.

At my own university, as the result of an extensive program prioritization process, Women’s Studies has been recommended for discontinuation, marginalized, as it has been, out of relevant existence.  I don’t know that this is necessarily a bad thing, as I’d like to see women’s studies more elided with the fields that such a moniker indicates: philosophy, anthropology, and English, but I’m also troubled by the fact that women’s voices, as always when they assert themselves in the service of women, fail to be heard, maintained, and championed.

I’m an academic, an English professor who has published a fair number of academic texts, articles in scholarly journals, books with scholarly presses.  I’ve played the game as is appropriate, writing about things that I love only to have them read by very few people because I have chosen, again, as is appropriate, to place my writing in venues that would ensure tenure and promotion even as by and large I’ve relegated my words to inconsequence.  I have presented papers at academic conferences numerous times over the years, but I have never had an audience as large or as interested as the one that I had on May 3, and I don’t know that I ever felt truly heard before then. 

My work has shifted over the course of my career from a focus on postcolonial literature – particularly South African literature and, even more particularly, the novels of J. M. Coetzee – to postcolonial environmentalism, to animal studies, to cultural studies explorations of veganism in mainstream media.  But in all of my scholarly endeavors as well as in my lived experience as an ethical vegan, Carol Adams’s work has proven foundational.  Without Adams, there would likely be no ecofeminism, no real focus on animal studies with regard to literature; her work has found its way into pretty much everything I’ve ever written, so I was honored to be asked to contribute to Defiant Daughters, in order to speak about my lived academic and activist experience as someone who writes about and practices an animal advocacy informed by both philosophy and lived experience. 

Adams sent me an email after learning for the umpteenth time that she’s not scholarly enough and that Derrida invented the field of animal studies.  She said “since the point of [The Sexual Politics of Meat] is its interstitial nature (I guess, not sure that is quite the adjective I want), I know it will always receive criticism. On the other hand, about once a day I get an email or twitter post or Facebook message etc. that says ‘your book changed my life.’ So I prefer the interstitial!” 

In terms of my own scholarship, I want to be influential, to hear that perhaps I’ve changed someone’s life or scholarly focus.  But if I publish in the wrong place or if I publish about the wrong subject (or if I publish about the right subject but in the wrong way), then I will be locked out, or forgotten, or called not scholarly or serious enough to warrant consideration.  And the more I consider the equation of what is scholarly and what is not, maybe the less such a designation matters and the more I’m inclined to want to publish with a press like Lantern, whose activist nature drives its mission.  But regardless of what I do or don’t do, if those of us in the academy continue to perpetuate an elitism that limits or forgets women’s voices, we are doomed to be duped into believing that men’s narratives are the originary myths of our profession, our passion, and our scholarship.  And it’s high time we stopped doing that.

Works Cited

Adams, Carol.  The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory.  New York: Continuum, 1990.  Print.

Fraiman, Susan.  “Pussy Panic and Liking Animals: Tracking Gender in Animal Studies.”  Critical Inquiry 39.1 (2012): 89-115.  Print.

Frank, John.  “McCrory wants to revamp higher ed funding -- takes aim at UNC-Chapel Hill.”  News and Observer 29 Jan. 2013.  Web. 18 May 2013.

 

Gaard, Greta.  “New Directions for Ecofeminism: Toward a More Feminist Ecocriticism.”  Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 17.4 (2010): 1-23.  Print.

Garrard, Greg.  Ecocriticism: The New Critical Idiom.  New York: Routledge, 2004 and 2011.  Print.

Disordered Pronouns, Disordered Eating, and Absented Women: A Journey to The Sexual Politics of Meat

This is an excerpt from a longer piece appearing in Defiant Daughters, soon to be released by Lantern Books.

Back Story

I have to situate myself: I am a middle class white woman from North Carolina, a state that on May 8, 2012 became the 31^st to pass an amendment making same sex marriage constitutionally illegal.  According to a New York Times article about North Carolina that appeared three days after the passage of Amendment One, the ambiguous and broad text of which reads that “marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State,” “Social and religious conservatism and economic populism have historically gone hand-in-hand in a state that, for many decades, consisted largely of small farms and mill towns. Thus in a state that became known for first-rate universities, it was illegal to buy a cocktail for most of the 20th century.”

In other words, I exist – and have existed for the majority of my life – in a state (literal and in many ways figurative) of problematic socially ascribed contradictions, a place that, despite its many forward thinking actions, enacts codified and tacit rules that disenfranchise members of its populace.  I have lived elsewhere, in Massachusetts and New York, and I could argue, I suppose, that things were clearer and less muddled there.  But I’ve come back to North Carolina, and it is from within that literal state and its engagement with these various states of being that I continually seek to enact a vegan feminist social activism informed by Carol J. Adam’s The Sexual Politics of Meat, a text I happened upon quite by accident in 2001.

But first things first.

1. I have an early memory of asking my mother why “he” was the universal pronoun.  I didn’t use the phrase “universal pronoun,” but I was conscious at about age five of the fact that “he” was used to mean male or female.  Things have changed since then; I am neither young nor exceptionally old, but old enough to remember being a child prior to “they” entering the mainstream lexicon as both singular and gender neutral;[1] at one point, we were all “he.” 

2. When I was 13, my class took a field trip to a fellow classmate’s father’s sausage processing plant.  I never ate sausage again. 

3.  At the age of 19, I stopped eating just about everything.

4.  A graduate school colleague of mine was beaten within an inch of her life by her ex-spouse, a man against whom she had a restraining order.  The day before he broke into her house and savaged her, he came to her house and killed her dog.  This was the second incident of which I was aware where the mistreatment of a companion animal preceded violence against a woman.  The first happened several years earlier, in 1991.  My parents’ friends’ daughter, Nan Schiffman, was brutally murdered by two men who had worked on a paint crew at her house.  One of the men had done something to her dog, and she had complained to the men’s employers. The men abducted, raped, and murdered Nan, burying her body at an abandoned farm. [2]

How do I link these experiences in this backwards-glancing exercise?  To my mind, they are all about arbitrary and contradictory rules that are gender specific, about consumption, and about violent control.  They are all, as well – and this is something I can only see now, in retrospect – about restoring the absent referent, Carol J. Adams’s term for the way that language is used to remove actual bodies from discussions of the brutalization and consumption of bodies.  In Adams’s formulation, tricks of language are used to characterize “meat” as distinct from “animals”: “through butchering, animals become absent referents.  Animals in name and body are made absent as animals for meat to exist” (40).

But as I lived these early experiences, I hadn’t yet found and read The Sexual Politics of Meat.  So to reiterate and expound: I come from contradictory circumstances, a state both liberal and conservative, a family both permissive and dictatorial, the daughter to a father who treated me, in many ways, like the son he likely wished I was, but who always came up against his beliefs that girls and women should occupy certain confining spaces.  So here’s the rub: as a teenager, I could drive a tractor and I knew a lot about cars, but if I swore or stayed out late, I’d get in trouble.  I was expected to be smart and pretty, and that was for me an impossible balance, to be cognizant of all the reasons why being pretty was a trap, to be able to articulate those reasons, and to be held to those expectations nonetheless.  To hold myself to them and to punish myself for not adhering to either piece of the equation of beauty and brains.  Hegemony is, after all, rule by consent.  Oh, and I was expected to eat meat.

To be pretty and smart in the south in the 1970s and 1980s, for me at least, was to disappear, to make myself absent.  To absent myself – my body – already rhetorically absent in the universalizing pronouncement of “he,” via an eating disorder that overtook my life for over a decade.

I.  Disordered Pronouns

I don’t remember my mother’s answer to the question about the universal pronoun, or maybe she didn’t have an answer, having always just accepted as truth the fact that femaleness, in the abstraction of generalization, simply ceased to exist, simply disappeared in the crush of overwhelming masculinity.[3]  But to this day I remember raising the question, knowing that there was some injustice in the negation, even as I grew more and more acquainted with what it meant to be negated. And that knowledge stuck.

When I went on that class trip to the sausage plant several years later, I’d already asked my poor parents a second question: where does meat came from?  Did the animals die naturally before we ate them, or were they killed?  Again, I don’t remember the answer, probably, this time, because whatever I was told proved woefully untrue in the blinding glare of the truths revealed to me that day in the processing plant.  Lessons learned and then discarded: “he” is the universal pronoun because it is.  Animals are violently killed and I eat them because I do.  And then I didn’t anymore, at least not those animals, at least not pigs, whose bodies I’d seen hung on hooks, gutted and waiting to be processed.  Never those animals.  Never again.  Sausage was pigs, real, once-living pigs, the bodies of which were bigger than I was, the eyes of which, on that day, stared at me out of dead sockets. 

I stared using “she” as my universal pronoun thereafter as well; I lost points on papers for doing so.  I was consistently corrected, all the way through my undergraduate studies.  I never stopped.[4]

II. Disordered Eating

When I went to college at Appalachian State University, I became a vegetarian, fully and completely, and I started running.  I lived in Boone, North Carolina a tiny town at the time, where nothing bad ever happened.  I ran on backcountry roads; I ran I night.  Running made me feel free.  I was able to eschew eating some meat – sausage, for example – while I lived with my parents, but I couldn’t make a case for not eating any meat without getting in trouble at home.  My life up until that point had been, at least from the time I was about 13 until I left at 18, a struggle to gain some semblance of control of my body and intellect from my parents who – with what I have no doubt were the best of intentions – continually wrested control away from me in their attempts to protect and care for me.  Such circumstances are not unusual; I was the elder of two daughters, the one upon whom they had experimented, as parents must, with how to parent.  They were by turns loving, demanding, and incredibly rigid; I, in turn, was perfectionistic, overachieving, and often profoundly angry. 

The power struggles between my parents and me were more often than not about my body: what I wore, how my hair looked, how far my stomach protruded and why I didn’t hold it in as was more appropriate for a girl of my upbringing.  Undoubtedly, then, food became for me, as it is for many girls like me, both an enemy and a weapon; food was by turns a catalyst for unseemly and inappropriate appetites that threatened to overwhelm me and alternately something that I could resist, the concrete substance through which I demonstrated my will and strength.  Not eating was a paradoxical act of control, one that enabled my first clear acts of defiance even as doing so undermined my health and sanity.  The problem, at least initially, is that I wasn’t sure what I was defying.    

But to be clear: becoming a vegetarian when I went to college and asserting that identity when I went home to visit my family was a manifestation of an awareness that fomented on that visit to the sausage plant years before, that animals that become meat suffer and die to feed us.  I became a vegetarian out of a desire not to participate in that suffering, but my vegetarianism also served as an assertion of my own identity and an affront to my parents who didn’t know what to do with or how to feed a vegetarian daughter and who took understandable offense at what they viewed as a rejection of their care, their nourishment, and their heritage.

I am well aware of the ways that women use vegetarianism as a so-called excuse to cut things out of their diets, and there is a significant body of research on this subject, as chronicled and detailed by my colleague and friend Hal Herzog on his blog at Psychology Today.  What some research would seem to indicate is that women cut meat out of their diets to lose weight; they claim to be vegetarian in order to make an excuse for not eating certain things.  In this light, being a “vegetarian” is divorced from its ethical implications and becomes a way to mask disordered eating. Hal notes an interview he conducted for his recent book Some we Love, Some we Hate, Some we Eat: Why it is so Hard to Think Straight about Animals, one woman claimed that “she became a vegetarian when she was a teenager. Then she dropped the bombshell: ‘My vegetarianism was tied up with my eating disorder.’” 

OK, so my vegetarianism was likewise tied up with the eating disorder that fully manifested itself around 1989, but I think that for women who find themselves in such circumstances, the connections between these two things – vegetarianism and eating disorders – are much more complicated than simply one serving as an excuse for the other.  I know that in my case this reality is a profound truth.  Not eating meat made sense to me, and I was not eating meat for ethical reasons; I have never doubted that reality.  But along with not eating meat, I was left with a void with regard to how to eat thereafter; essentially, I was left without resources to enable one great leap in terms of my consciousness with regard to a kind of care for non-human animals – my vegetarianism – to translate into self-care that could nourish and sustain a position that felt so unfamiliar and, in many ways, unsafe to me. 

Think about it this way: if at 19 I was aware on some visceral level – and I was – of a kind of erasure of women and animals via tricks of language that render them absent, then I was not yet aware of the connections between such rhetorical violence and actual violence done to animals and women.  I had no roadmap for making those connections (The Sexual Politics of Meat was still a year from publication, and, as I’ve already noted, I didn’t discover it for another decade) or for knowing how to assert an alternate and independent female identity, no matter how much I wanted to do so.  In the space of being a vegetarian whose prior existence had been predicated on the eating of meat and of being a fledgling feminist whose prior attempts at self-assertion had been effectively quelled, deemed inappropriate, and that I had internalized as the source of doubt and guilt, I found myself shuttling between a positive sense of self-assertion (“eating animals is wrong”) and a negative internalization of learned helplessness (“so what do I do now?”).  I started, quite literally this time, to disappear.  And then women around me, women I knew, women who were independent and self-actualized, disappeared as well.

III.  A timeline

1989: I become a vegetarian.  And Jeni Gray is abducted from the same sidewalk where I run every day in Boone, North Carolina.  She is found raped and murdered two weeks later.  Daniel Brian Lee, the man who killed her, abducts another woman, Leigh Cooper Wallace[5] – a fellow college students and runner like me – again from my running loop and rapes her.  She escapes and identifies him.  He dies of a brain aneurysm in prison several years later.

1990: The Sexual Politics of Meat is published.

1991: Steven Bishop and Kenny Kaiser rape and murder Nan Schiffman after she complains to their employers about their treatment of her dog.

1992: I graduate from Appalachian State University with a BA in English and start graduate study at East Carolina University, where I write an MA thesis on Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, a novel about a young Shona woman named Tambu who goes to live with her English educated relatives.  At one point in the novel, Tambu’s mother lashes out at her “Englishness,” admonishing her “if you are so greedy you would betray your own mother for meat, then go to your [aunt] Maiguru.  She will give you meat.  I will survive on vegetables as we all used to do” (141).  

Tambu’s cousin, Maiguru’s daughter Nyasha, develops an eating disorder, caught as she is between her English upbringing and her Shona culture – one defined by a diet based on meat and the other on a diet based on vegetables – the weight of European and Shona patriarchal standards, and the conflicting expectations of her father that she be an “intelligent girl but . . . also develop into a good woman . . . not seeing any contradiction in this” (88).  When Nyasha’s parents take her to a psychiatrist, he negates her condition telling her family that “Africans did not suffer in the way that they had described.  She was making a scene” (201).

1993: My graduate school colleague’s ex-husband kills her dog and then returns the next day to brutally beat her.

The Impact

“Sexual violence and meat eating, which appear to be discrete forms of violence, find a point of intersection in the absent referent.  Cultural images of sexual violence, and actual sexual violence, often rely on our knowledge of how animals are butchered and eaten.”                                                                                  

                                                --- Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, p. 68

“When you have sex with someone strange – when you trap her, hold her down, get her under you, put all your weight on her – isn’t it a bit like killing?  Pushing the knife in; exiting afterwards, leaving the body behind covered in blood – doesn’t it feel like murder, like getting away with murder?”

                                                --- Lucy Lurie, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, p. 158

Yeah, I've just harshed your mellow, and I'm sorry bout that.  But to read the rest, buy the book.  I promise that the story gets better -- and so do I.  Proceeds to go Our Hen House.

---

[1] Actually, this statement is not remotely true: “for centuries the universal pronoun was they. Writers as far back as Chaucer used it for singular and plural, masculine and feminine” (O’Connor and Kellerman).

[2] The court transcript of the Schiffman murder case can be found here.

[3] Here’s the answer, as it appears in an 2009 New York Times editorial by Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman, authors Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language: “If any single person is responsible for this male-centric usage, it’s Anne Fisher, an 18th-century British schoolmistress and the first woman to write an English grammar book…. Fisher’s popular guide, A New Grammar (1745), ran to more than 30 editions, making it one of the most successful grammars of its time. More important, it’s believed to be the first to say that the pronoun he should apply to both sexes.”

[4] There is really no right solution to this universal pronoun business, but there are lots of ways to play with the reclamation of language and, therefore, of identity.  Using “they” is one way; alternating between “he” and “she” another.  Creating one’s own gender neutral pronoun – “shhe”? – is an option.  But I decided that I liked using “she” because doing so was jarring, a kind of Brechtian alienation effect.  Brecht claims that “a representation that alienates . . . allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar.  The classical and medieval theatre alienated its characters by making them wear human or animal masks” (192).  “She” masked the universalizing “he” in my lexicon; I used it in a way that was recognizable but unfamiliar.  Doing so called the “he” into account, and that was the idea.

[5] The transcript of Leigh Wallace Cooper’s 2010 Oxygen Channel interview about her abduction and rape can be found here.

Vegan Terrorist: The Rhetoric of Veganism and the Post-9/11 Backlash

On September 20, 2001, then President George W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress in response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that took place on September 11.  In a speech that constituted his declaration of war on terror, the President designated al Qaeda a terrorist organization distinct in its beliefs from the rest of the Muslim world and an organization capable of “evil and destruction.”  The rhetoric Bush employed in the speech established a clear divide between “America,” land of freedom, and terrorism, an ill-defined, looming menace comprised of anyone who would dare to attack us.  Bush outlined the cause of the attack as hatred, stating the that terrorists “hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other,” and he asked the rest of the world to choose a side: “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”

In creating what William D. Lutz terms a “rhetoric of permanent war and fear,” the Bush administration established a political and social environment that lasted throughout his tenure as President and that continues to impact public discourse up to the present moment.  A month after his speech, the subsequent passage of the Patriot Act, which allowed the government heretofore unheard of license with regard to surveillance and detention of suspected terrorists, established a general erosion of privacy and civil liberties that further placed on lockdown any attempt at dissention.  During his September 20 speech, Bush offered a mandate: “I ask you to uphold the values of America,” and in the wake of a changed world, we were left to posit continually and forcefully certain behavior as patriotic and American and to just as vociferously denounce anything that was not as aligned with terrorism.  You were, after all, either with us or with the terrorists.  You had to be an American with American values; you flew a flag, were Christian, and ate like an American.  And whatever you did, you did not question the government.

In the wake of the attacks, Americans turned to so-called comfort foods to feel better, and they shied away from expensive restaurants, many of which served ethnic cuisine.  According to Brian Gallagher, in the subsequent decade, “restaurants focusing on simple, familiar and hearty food – though often rendered in an upscaled and inventive way – would become the culinary zeitgeist.”  Gallagher notes the popularity of such items as fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and hamburgers in the decade that followed the attacks, and he notes that in terms of dining out, people “wanted places that felt, in terms of scale, much more like home.” 

While the desire for so-called comfort foods makes a kind of psychological sense, other shifts in terms of our culture’s relationship with food were clearly a product of the rhetoric of fear espoused by the Bush administration; for example, in an act of outright xenophobia that remained in tact until 2006, when France refused to support the U.S.’s 2003 invasion of Iraq – a direct result of the September 11 attacks – Republican lawmakers following the lead of North Carolina based restaurant Cubbies retaliated by renaming French fries “freedom fries” on cafeteria menus in three House office buildings (Loughlin) in a move that was followed by other restaurant owners in the private sector.  And in an article published as late as 2011, Michele Payn-Knoper discusses the potential dangers associated with the fact that the U.S. imports 40 percent of its food:

At a time that Americans are so sensitive about our national security, do we really want to rely on other countries for the majority of our food?  Consider what’s happened to oil and our gas prices; it makes no sense to have our food “held hostage.” Yet, the increasing regulations, lack of understanding about today’s modern farm and constant scrutiny of American agriculture is pushing more food production out of the U.S. and Canada.

Given such post-September 11 sentiment with regard to the sanctity and nature of “American” food, it should not seem odd or even outrageous to consider that our current understanding of veganism in the U.S. has been hugely impacted and shaped by the Bush administration’s rhetorical response to the attacks.

How embarrassing for us.

I want to look briefly at the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, a period during which vegetarianism – and even veganism to an extent – experienced a kind of mainstream recognition and acceptance that was significantly diminished in the subsequent decade.  To begin, Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco founded People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in 1980, and that organization’s dissemination of graphic literature and images shocked the public and forced it to come face to face with the cruelty inherent in Western culture’s treatment of animals.  Newkirk believes that decades later, “the popularity of animal rights revived vegetarianism in America” (Iacobbo and Iacobbo 199), and PETA’s ability – controversial as it has been – to force people to recognize that their food once had a face was largely responsible for this shift. 

Also during the 1980s, even as sale of chicken products increased, “sales of beef slumped,” and “ethnic cuisine, traditionally prepared with vegetables or grains, and a much smaller portion of meat than Americans were typically accustomed to, or none at all, started to increase in demand” (Iacobbo and Iacobbo196).  This interest in non-Western cuisine marked a moment of culinary multiculturalism that allowed many Americans, for the first time, to consider dietary options other than those that were typically standard American.  Sushi was the rage on the West coast, and Japanese and Chinese food thrived in the U.S. during this period.  Furthermore, John Robbins published Diet for a New America in 1987, and this work linked meat consumption with environmental destruction in ways that allowed Americans to consider that meat eating, animal cruelty, and environmental devastation are inherently connected in ways that jeopardize human existence.

Yes, I went there.

If the 1980s was in many ways a good decade for vegetarianism, the 1990s were perhaps even better, ushered in by “a flood of scientific evidence supporting vegan diets” (Iacobbo and Iacobbo 209) as healthier than their omnivorous or even vegetarian counterparts.  The work of Caleb Johnson and Dean Ornish was influential and its impact long lasting.  In 1990, Carol J. Adams published The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, a work that examined the linkages between the exploitation of animals and the exploitation of women and advocated for veganism as a necessary feminist act.  In 1991, the basic four food groups, recommended by the United States Department of Agriculture since 1956, received an overhaul led by Neal Barnard, M.D., founder of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine; Barnard’s model relegated both “meat and dairy to optional status” (211).  This recommendation was made after decades of research by Barnard and other physicians, namely T. Colin Campbell, Oliver Alabaster, and Denis Burkitt that effectively proved both “the health benefits of vegan foods” (212) and the detrimental aspects of consuming meat. 

During this same period, veganism entered mainstream and popular culture in ways that depicted that lifestyle in a sympathetic light.  In 1995, Babe, directed by Chris Noonan and staring James Cromwell, who became outspokenly vegan while acting in that film, was released and, in its anthropomorphic depiction of farm animals, caused viewers across the country to stop eating them.  Howard Lyman, author of Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from a Cattle Rancher who Won’t Eat Meat, appeared on Oprah in 1996 and explained to America why and how he, a fourth generation cattle rancher, became vegan.  Lyman and Winfrey, who declared during the broadcast that she had eaten her last hamburger, were subsequently sued for libel by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association for anti-beef comments made during the broadcast.[i]  And in 2000, Rod Lurie’s film The Contender portrayed a female, vegan political contender for the office of Vice President of the United States as a heroic champion of American values.

Some good stuff from Lurie's The Contender

While awareness of vegetarianism and veganism has continued to rise in the U.S. since the 1990s, prompting even the most recalcitrant aspects of our culture to make some concessions and accommodations – even Burger King saw fit to start offering a veggie burger in 2002 – there has been a pronounced shift in the discourse of veganism since the beginning of the twenty-first century.  Even prior to the 2001 attacks, chef Anthony Bourdain aligned vegans with anti-American terrorism in his wildly successful 2000 exposé Kitchen Confidential:

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. . . . Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It’s healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I’ve worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. (70)

Bourdain is famous for his disdain of the non-omnivorous in general and of vegans in particular, and his incendiary claims about them are oft quoted.[ii]  Bourdain’s association of veganism with terrorism, however, constructed veganism (a decidedly pacifist ideology) as dangerously, violently radical, a behavior that posed a threat to any sane conceptions of diet.  Vegetarians and vegans, in this construction, are the “enemy” of the very “human spirit.”  After the advent of the so-called War on Terror, terms like “Jihad,” “al-Qaeda,” and the omnipresent and pervasive “terrorist” entered the mainstream U.S. vernacular, part and parcel of a political rhetoric that divided the world into the simplistic categories of good and evil, and Bourdain’s construction of vegans as terrorists held a different and more powerful sway. 

A search for "Anthony Bourdain douche" pulls up this.

And Bourdain reiterated his point after the terrorist attacks.  While in Philadelphia on a book tour promoting his 2007 release No Reservations, Bourdain said that vegetarians “are the worst kind of terrorists. And they must be stopped” (qtd. in Valocchi), asserting again – and this time in a post-September 11 world – that not eating meat constitutes an act of terrorism.  In the years since that statement, the supposed connection between cruelty free diets and terrorism has played out in startling ways.  For example, a Village Voice article by Matt Snyders chronicles the FBI’s solicitation of informants to monitor protest groups during the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.  Snyders discusses the case of Paul Carroll,[iii] a student at the University of Minnesota, who was approached by the FBI.  According to Synders,

What they were looking for, Carroll says, was an informant – someone to show up at “vegan potlucks” throughout the Twin Cities and rub shoulders with RNC protestors, schmoozing his way into their inner circles, then reporting back to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership between multiple federal agencies and state and local law enforcement.

Snyder quotes attorney Jordan Kushner who notes that “the Joint Terrorism Task Force is another example of using the buzzword ‘terrorism’ as a basis to clamp down on people’s freedoms and push forward a more authoritarian government.”  Veganism, as a non-normative dietary choice, represents an ideology at odds with an increasingly authoritarian regime; in this case, it becomes associated with protest, dissent, and terrorism and must be covertly monitored.

Ha.

In 2009, police in the U.K. secretly investigated 47,000 suspicious travelers who booked flights into and out of Britain.  These travelers were red flagged “as potential terrorists [for such things as] ordering a vegetarian meal, asking for an over-wing seat and travelling with a foreign-born husband or wife” (Lewis).  Travelers were selected via a terrorist detector database that was introduced by Britain’s Labor Party, yet the system, which cost over a billion pounds to implement, “has never led to the arrest of a terrorist” (Lewis).  And also in 2009, the FBI for the first time placed an animal rights activist, Daniel Andreas San Diego, on its most wanted list.  San Diego, who is still at large and was the first domestic terrorist to appear on the list, is accused of bombing two corporate offices in California in 2003 – both of which were associated with animal testing – causing property damage but no loss of life. 

In the slew of media that followed his placement on the list, San Diego’s status as a “strict vegan” (Frieden) was highlighted.  The headline of a 2011 article in Boston magazine reads “Violent, Vegan Animal Rights Terrorist Suspected in Northampton,” and in a Fox News article, Joseph Abrams says “San Diego's bespectacled face masks a violent hate that authorities say turned him into an eco-terrorist, a vicious vegan with an ax to grind.”  To be clear, discussing the media’s coverage of San Diego’s veganism is in no way to advocate for his methods; San Diego’s actions are reprehensible, violent, and antithetical to the predominant ideology that, I would argue, influences most people who opt for a vegan lifestyle.  But in their coverage of the San Diego case, the FBI and the media have, like Bourdain, linked veganism to terrorism in ways that elide veganism with dangerous extremism.

As America has continued to fight its seemingly never ending War on Terror and as we have shifted from one administration to another, at least some of the paranoia and fear that gripped the nation in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks has abated.  But the rhetoric that the Bush administration employed immediately after those attacks established a pervasive and still extant need to clarify certain behavior as patriotic and American while denouncing anything that did not comfortably fit that model as not only un-American but anti-American, as behavior that might underscore and compliment a terrorist mentality, and as behavior that must be closely monitored, even if such monitoring violates basic civil liberties. 

Veganism, which had enjoyed a mild and even at times positive reception during the preceding two decades, became at the dawn of the twenty-first century suspect in its sudden associations with fundamentalism, radicalism, and anti-government protest; in its deviation from the Standard American Diet (SAD), it appeared alien and dangerously ethnic, influenced by the ideologies of the non-Western world.  To be vegan was to be un-American, to be with the terrorists and not, as Bush commanded, with the rest of “us.”

* I realize this blog is too long.  Sorry bout that.

* Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations airs its final episode tomorrow.  Buh-bye, ass clown.

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[i]   The case was dismissed in 1998.

[ii]  Bourdain has tended to focus on vegan and vegetarian arguments about the health supportive nature of those diets and on what he views as a kind of cultural elitism that keeps vegans from being able to travel to other cultures and eat their foods.  He has tended to stay away from the ethical arguments for veganism.

[iii] “Paul Carroll” is the alias of young man who wished to remain anonymous.