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Earlier this month, a three-minute video culled from reporters’ coverage of Donald Trump’s rallies appeared on the home page of the New York Times. The video begins with a warning: “This video includes vulgarities and racial and ethnic slurs.”
IMAGINE YOU ARE in the Netherlands and find yourself driving behind a transport truck for pigs. For most pigs in transport, this is their first time outside.
In 1968, at the famous feminist protest against the Miss America Contest, two posters were held up next to each other. The first was a photo of a woman’s backside, shown cut up like a piece of meat, labeled “rump,” “round,” “loin,” “rib,” etc.
The Animal Legal Defense Fund invited me to write a guest commentary on the caging and exhibiting of pregnant sows, a subject truly deserving of feminist inquiry and resistance!
This constant recapitulation of the visually consumable woman layered upon the literally consumable dead pig is a feminist issue. And so is the fetishism of the consumption of (and competition over preparing) a dead body whose defeat is inscribed throughout the event.
I examine a wine ad that illustrates the cycle of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption that is a central part of patriarchal culture's commitment to the sexual politics of meat.
Since The Sexual Politics of Meat was published, I have noticed that many popular culture appeals to men (especially white, heterosexual men), seem to be rebuilding what feminism and veganism have threatened. In terms of the sexual politics of meat, we see several recuperative responses that seek to reinstate manhood, meat eating, and both interactively.
The attitudes that animalize women and feminize and sexualize animals, supporting the view of them as consumable continue to be expressed through advertisements and DIY signs.