Carol Adams Presentation on The Sexual Politics of Meat
This Thursday, March 22nd from 3:30 to 5 PM in St. Vincent’s Hall room 407, Niagara University is honored to host vegan-feminist-activist-scholar-author Carol J. Adams who will speak on oppression and domination in contemporary culture through her Sexual Politics of Meat Slide Show (see the attached flyer). Following the presentation there will be a vegan reception and book signing. Classes, groups, individuals, and the general public are welcome! Please share with and invite others!
For a brief explanation of how Carol became a vegan, how she came to write The Sexual Politics of Meat, and how her ideas on feminism and veganism have evolved, please check out the following animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCi9sFY42K4. It will also give you an idea of how creative, moving, and artistic her presentation will be! For a summary of her life and work, please go to: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/04/more-than-just-meat/.
The Sexual Politics of Meat Slide Show is an evolving 1 hour dynamic and challenging presentation that draws upon images of women and animals in contemporary popular culture to discuss oppressive attitudes. It develops and expands ideas found in her books, 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 shows how visual consumption imitates and echoes literal consumption. 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.
The Slide Show provides an ecofeminist analysis of the interconnected oppressions of misogyny, white supremacy, and speciesism by exploring the way popular culture draws on dominant Western philosophical viewpoints regarding race, gender, and species that further objectification. 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. It also analyzes how animal agriculture draws on conventional dominant discourse to foster oppression, especially the ways in which animal agriculture normalizes sexual exploitation, control of female reproduction, and reifies rape culture in its depictions of “consent” by animals to be impregnated and consumed.
This presentation is very proudly co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, the Women’s Studies Program, and NU CARES.
Queries can be directed to Dave Reilly at dreilly@niagara.edu. We look forward to seeing you there!