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 31st 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).
[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.
