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.
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.
