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 AnimalLiberation, 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.

ASLE, Animals, Contextual Moral Vegetarianism, and Me

Part 1:

On Saturday, I flew back from Bloomington, Indiana, where I had presented a paper at the ASLE convention – the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.  On the plane beside me sat a Bosnian guy who looked exactly like Morrissey circa 1987; he talked to me about living in the U.S., about his brother who’s still in Bosnia and likes to hunt.  He’d never heard of Morrissey. 

He didn't look like this version of Morrissey, but I freaking love this photo.

But I digress…

ASLE: the focus this year was “Species, Space, and the Imagination of the Global.”

I presented a paper called “The Politics of Eating Postcolonial Animals: Contextual Moral Vegetarianism and Life of Pi,” which is an excerpt from a chapter titled “Safari, Zoo, and Dog Pound: The Place of Animals in the Postcolonial Environment” in my book. 

Yes, I know.  Shameless.  But, hey, buy my book.

OK, so before I go into further details about that presentation, there are things about the conference in general and about my inability to successfully or appropriately participate in an academic conference that need explication.  And, perhaps, I can come to terms with certain aspects of my personality that make me a bad academic, at least in this aspect of my professional life.  First, a bit about ASLE.  This organization has been in existence since the mid-1990s, and is the preeminent scholarly organization for folks who explore environmental issues in literature and, more often than not, in life.  The conference strives to make as small a footprint as possible, implementing such measures as “creating a vegetarian banquet with several interesting menu choices featuring local and/or organic foods as much as possible, including local beers and wines,” and “minimizing décor for the banquet and using artificial, reusable planters, linens, and other reusable décor items.” (This info courtesy of the conference website) 

This year’s conference actually featured two panels about veganism, called “The Vegan Challenge to Posthumanism” (parts 1 and 2), and animal studies in general was a primary focus of much of the work that was presented.  However, despite the seemingly obvious fact that the conference theme indicated a more global focus – and, indeed, there were panels, like mine, that examined the environment from a postcolonial perspective – the “global” was not really a major part of the agenda.  The overarching and traditional discourse of ecocriticism as a theoretical perspective – and ASLE is the entity that codified that discourse into scholarly legitimacy – has been and remains entrenched in American literature written by white (often male) authors, and such was certainly the case this year in Bloomington.

The big names in the field were all there, and, by and large, the big names focus on Western writing.  American literary scholar and godfather of ecocriticism Lawrence Buell was honored for his foundational work (and my friends and co-presenters Colin Christopher and Ali Brox got to eat lunch with him -- and he is, by all accounts, a seriously nice dude), but South African author Zakes Mda was a plenary speaker, as was Helen Tiffin, a prominent postcolonial scholar whose most recent work is Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment.  And Cheryll Glotfelty, who co-edited the foundational Ecocriticism Reader with Harold Fromm (remember him from an earlier entry?  He’s the guy who, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, trashed vegans) shook my hand: her book was sitting right beside mine on the University of Georgia Press table.  So the paradigm is shifting, albeit slowly.  At the author’s reception, I was situated in a corner near the back of the room (Colin said, “nobody puts Baby in a corner…”), and there was much joking about my marginalization.  But it’s all ok.  It’s fine. 

And good things happened for me, so I’ll toot my own horn for a bit: Byron Caminero-Santangelo, who moderated my panel, introduced me as “the preeminent Coetzee scholar working in the U.S.,” which made me feel really good – even if I’m not sure his assessment is 100% accurate.  Still, it made my day.  People bought my book and asked me to sign it; the University of Georgia Press representative told me that she sold out of it, which may or may not be impressive, as I think she only brought about five copies with her.  But, hey, selling any academic books counts as a success.  And I met people like Dan Wylie and the aforementioned Cheryll Glotfelty as well as a bunch of really cool folks from the University of Kansas and elsewhere.  And a woman approached me after my presentation to tell me that Carol J. Adams had included my video in her famous Sexual Politics of Meat slideshow.

I really liked Bloomington; it’s such a real college town, with all kinds of neat little shops and an overwhelming number of places where a vegan can eat.  I ate at Roots on the Square twice and at a Vietnamese fusion place called Basil Leaf Bistro.  After my presentation, a group of us went to a place called Scotty’s Brewhouse, a sports bar with a menu the size of a short novel, in which there appeared such items as burgers with peanut butter, deep fried pickle chips, and lots and lots of items buried beneath cheese and bacon.  But, of course, there was a veggie burger, so that’s what I had, as did the one other vegan in the bunch.  He and I had been betting on what our options would be, noting that in the case of such places, it’s either a veggie burger or some sort of Portobello concoction. And with the check at the end of the meal, we got little boxes of Red Hots, which, sadly, aren't vegan.  They contain beeswax.  Who knew?

But I am bad at conferences.  And all the good things that happened at this one don't really counter that fact.

I get nervous and weird, afraid to mix and mingle, intimidated by all sorts of things.  And I’ve presented, at this point in my career, at zillions of the damn things.  More often than not, my strategy is to attend my panel and maybe one other and then to hide out in my hotel room the rest of the time.  ASLE was particularly tough on me: this is a conference that started off small but has exploded over the past several years, so in terms of sheer numbers, it’s scary for someone like me who much prefers smaller venues – like the postcolonial studies conference that I attend nearly every year in Savannah, Georgia. 

Despite the fact that I don’t really feel overly intimidated by the academic rock stars that attend and present at these venues, the sheer number of those foundational figures present at this conference gave me pause.  Oh, and the fact that Greg Garrard has groupies – and that I think I might be one – is also problematic.  

Greg Garrard. I know, right?

The concept of “academic rock star” has always seemed both impossible and hilarious to me – we are all English professors or graduate students – but in my limited world, the way that certain of us achieve the role of public intellectual feels very powerful, and it’s both a heady and intimidating experience to encounter such beings.  And we all aspire to be like them.

But perhaps what was more difficult was – and always is for me – the tension that I feel between a lived ethic or a lived activism and a theoretical presentation about how environmental or vegetarian or vegan issues are presented in works of fiction.  And that tension seems to be even more pronounced at a conference like ASLE, which is, at least in theory, all about the environment but which, in reality, is all about talking about fictional representations of the environment. And, more often than not, such talk is of a very specific environment at that, one that is accessible to those of us able to participate in the fiction that what is meant by “environment” is a pristine and untouched wilderness available to us as an object for privileged consumption.

OK, perhaps I’m not being entirely fair.  I’ll say more in part two, about my paper, about contextual moral vegetarianism/veganism, and about Lauren Spierer, a young Indiana University student who has been missing for over three weeks and whose image, on posters, billboards, and fliers was absolutely everywhere in Bloomington.  And I’ll say more about this bumper sticker, seen in a movie theater parking lot:

Yeah, after presenting my paper, I went to see Bad Teacher.  Like I said, I'm bad at conferences.