A clearheaded scholar joins the ideas of two movements--vegetarianism and feminism--and turns them into a single coherent and moral theory. Her argument is rational and persuasive....New ground--whole acres of it-- is broken by Adams.
– Washington Post Book World
“An intelligent polemic...Adams’s observations are telling, most are seductively sprung...the argument is both thoughtful and thought- provoking.”
“Carol J. Adams’s original, provocative book makes a major contribution to the debate on animal rights.”
An important and provocative work...the author provides a compelling case for inextricably linking feminist and vegetarian theory. This book is likely to both inspire and enrage readers across the political spectrum.
– Library Journal
The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams examines the historical, gender, race, and class implications of meat culture, and makes the links between the practice of butchering/eating animals and the maintenance of male dominance. Read this powerful new book and you may well become a vegetarian.
– Ms. Magazine
“Depiction of animal exploitation as one manifestation of a brutal patriarchal culture has been explored in two books by Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat and Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals. Adams argues that factory farming is part of a whole culture of oppression and institutionalized violence. The treatment of animals as objects is parallel to and associated with patriarchal society’s objectification of women, blacks and other minorities in order to routinely exploit them. Adams excels in constructing unexpected juxtapositions by using the language of one kind of relationship to illuminate another. Employing poetic rather than rhetorical techniques, Adams makes powerful connections that encourage readers to draw their own conclusions.”
With this bold and provocative book, a powerful champion of animal rights has entered the lists, challenging the patriarchal domination of the Western world's eating habits.
– National Women's Studies Association Journal
The Sexual Politics of Meat couldn't be more timely, or more disturbing.
– Environmental Ethics
Carol Adams’s (1990) provocative analysis of the masculinist privileging of meat eating, and of feminist interventions to destabilize Western patriarchal (animal) consumption, is a classic.
Echoing through the debates about animals are unmistakable invocations of familiar racist and sexist ideologies about ‘natural affinities,’ categories authorized by nature, destinies inscribed in biology, and ‘scientific proofs’ of the limited capacities of the ‘other’ that have rumbled through the centuries to justify slavery, the oppression of women, and ethnically and racially based holocausts and genocides. Two early feminist works remain unsurpassed trenchant analyses of these parallels: Marjorie Spiegel’s comparison between animal and human slavery, The Dreaded Comparison (1988) and Carol Adams’s treatise on the Sexual Politics of Meat (1990).
– Joni Seager, “Rachel Carson Died of Breast Cancer: The Coming Age of Feminist Environmentalism”
Signs 28, no. 1 (Spring 2003), pp. 445-72.
Adams’s best-known book is a bold critique of the discursive basis for our violence against animals (especially those killed for food), and in this it would seem to anticipate Derrida or Wolfe more than it does Smuts.
As we know, she also breaks new ground in showing that gender codes are used to denigrate animals, species codes to denigrate women, and that normative masculinity rests on an instrumental relation to both. Adams further examines how racialized groups are animalized and, conversely, how meat-eating—as the nutritional prerogative and status marker of “civilized” peoples—is raced as well as gendered.
– Susan Fraiman, “Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals”
How refreshing it was the first time I read your book The Sexual Politics of Meat.
I actually heard the 'Consolidated' song first. My thinking seems to match yours on numerous issues and since finding your books when I was a young teenager till now (I am now 26) you are genuinely one person I have to thank for solidifying my beliefs. It is always a sigh of relief when there is someone else on the earth that concurs with your way of thoughts (especially in your early female teens).
– a reader in Australia