By juxtaposing sexualized advertisements for meat with graphic images of slaughterhouses, Carol J. Adams’ slide show, “The Sexual Politics of Meat,” made a visual connection between meat-eating and violence toward women. Adams, a vegetarian-feminist author, presented her slide show to a standing-room only crown in PAC 001 last Thursday.
According to Adams, both animals and women are consumed: one literally, and the other visually. One slide showed “Rosie the Organic Chicken,” in pearls and high-heels.
“Why is this chicken female?” Adams said. “I call her ‘Rosie the Streetwalking Chicken’. [These images] are here today and gone, but they represent a worldview.”
Students had mixed reactions to Adams’ approach.
“I thought the slide show was illuminating,” said Kimberly Strovink ’08. “But I would have really liked to hear a survey or some hard science. It felt haphazard.”
The event was the culmination of a one and a half year effort by the leaders of CLAW (Animal Rights) to bring Adams to Wesleyan. With sponsorship from the Womens’ Studies and Philosophy departments, they raised the needed funds.
“It was vague at the end as to what we should do, besides being conscious of these oppressions,” said Brooke Richart ’08.
A question and answer session after the slide show led to slight conflict between Adams and some of the student attendees.
The issue of consent was repeatedly raised during this discussion.
“How can you have consent in an unequal society?” Adams asked. “My vision is of a world where a subject meets a subject. We don’t have that model in terms of eating and we don’t have that in terms of sexuality.”
Another student pressed the issue of consent, asking Adams if all sex is rape in a culture where true consent is impossible.
“I didn’t say women can’t consent,” she said, cautioning again that consent is the mark of an equal society.
Adams describes herself as a lifelong feminist, recalling telling her kindergarten boyfriend that when they married she would keep her name. Her interest in creating what she called an “ecofeminist consciousness,” however, began in her early twenties when her pet pony was killed, influencing her to give up meat.
Further influenced by Frances Moore Lappe’s “Diet for a Small Planet,” she started gathering evidence of what she perceived as the dangerous connection between meat and sexuality in our culture.
Adams explained how this connection is perpetuated by the creation of what she called an “absent referent,” allowing us to think of animals not as living creatures, but as objects for our consumption. When women are typified and dominated by men, they join this “object” category.
Even if you cannot be wealthy, you can own a woman and eat meat, according to Adams.
She published “The Sexual Politics of Meat” in 1989 and has since authored many more books, including “Living Among Meat Eaters” and “The Pornography of Meat,” a book version of her traveling slide show.
“I think things are getting worse,” Adams said.
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