In response to the ideas in The Sexual Politics of Meat, readers sent me examples that they felt proved her point. I culled from these menus, advertisements, pictures of billboards, matchcovers, newspaper articles, and t-shirts to create The Sexual Politics of Meat Slide Show.
The Sexual Politics of Meat Slide Show is an evolving one-hour dynamic and challenging presentation that uses images of women and animals in contemporary popular culture to discuss oppressive attitudes. It develops and expands ideas found in The Sexual Politics of Meat and The Pornography of Meat. It introduces the concept of the absent referent through autobiography and then systematically applies an analysis of how it functions to explain the animalizing of women in contemporary cultural images and the sexualizing of animals used for food. It draws upon images that have been sent from around the world and is constantly being updated as it tracks changes, regressions, and reiterations of the sexual politics of meat in popular culture. Sadly, I have many more examples than I can use in any one presentation.
The Slide Show provides an ecofeminist analysis of the interconnected oppressions of sexism, racism, and speciesism by exploring the way popular culture draws on dominant Western philosophical viewpoints regarding race, gender, and species. It identifies how meat has been a valued masculine-identified protein source and the ways that assumptions about meat eating reinforce a gender binary. It proposes that many meat advertisements are conduits for hate-speech against women and also that they offer ways to encode "whiteness" without being explicit.
