"I think people are afraid to learn about what is happening to animals because they are afraid of the grief they will feel."

An interview with Carol J. Adams as "The Sexual Politics of Meat" turns 35

I first read The Sexual Politics of Meat as a college student, newbie feminist, and not-so-new animal advocate. Like many girls, sympathy and love for animals were animating emotions of my young life. My first attempt at organizing was getting my fellow fourth graders to write letters to Johnson & Johnson demanding they cease testing their products on animals. I stopped eating meat when I was ten and didn’t start again until I was in my 20s, and only then because I felt rude refusing food while traveling and staying with host families (the first meat I ate as an adult was horse, and I felt awful about it).

At the time I read The Sexual Politics of Meat, I was 20 and had been a pescatarian for roughly a decade, but still wasn’t convinced that the struggle for women’s rights tied in with advocacy for animals. The Sexual Politics of Meat didn’t turn me into a vegan, but it did change how I think about the way I eat, and how I think about animals and our relationship to them. And it did present a fascinating and challenging framework for understanding how power, dominance, and patriarchy aren’t confined only to relationships between men and women, but infiltrate many other aspects of our lives as well — and especially how we relate to the non-human animals that humans dominate and mistreat on industrial scales.

When I got an email from Carol Adams, the author of The Sexual Politics of Meat, about her book turning 35, I jumped at the chance to ask her some of the questions that I’ve been thinking about for (no joke) the last 20 years. Below is a Q&A we conducted over email. I hope you find it as enlightening and fascinating as I did. And if you haven’t read The Sexual Politics of Meat, its 35th birthday is a great time to pick it up.

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Jill: First, congrats on The Sexual Politics of Meat turning 35! What a milestone. What was the original genesis of the book? What inspired it?

Carol: Thanks! Phew. 35 years! It’s one of many examples—though who needed any more of them?—that we feminists are in this for the long run. We have to be. The idea for the book came fifty years ago this past October. I moved to Cambridge, Mass and become a vegetarian in the midst of a vibrant Boston feminist community, even finding my roommates by searching the bulletin board of the Cambridge Women’s Center for feminist households looking for vegetarians. I was taking courses on feminist ethics and women’s history, and one, at Harvard Divinity School on feminist metahistory. I was reading manuscripts at The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Radcliffe. That was the setting, one month into my vegetarianism, as, one day, I walked toward Harvard Square.

My mind constantly turns over ideas I encounter, holding diverse content in tension. Fifty years ago, because of all I was reading, I began to hold the ideas of feminism and vegetarianism in tension (suffragists who were vegetarian, literary works that tied together these two issues, etc.) and so as I walked, I asked myself, “what’s going on?” If dialectical thinking involves asking dialectical questions, the result sometimes is an epiphany, which happened to me between the Erewhon Store on Massachusetts Avenue and the Harvard Coop. The answer to my question, I realized, was that there was a connection between meat eating and male dominance, between feminism and vegetarianism, and with that insight, I felt myself levitating off the sidewalk.

Then came the years of figuring out how to say this. Early attempts were published in 1970s feminist publications, and a small press invited me to write a book on the subject. That forthcoming book was mentioned in the mid 19780s edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves, but I withdrew it. I figured I would have only one chance to make my point, and that version wasn’t it.

I remember friends saying, “but what if someone else beats you to it?” And I shrugged, “It’s okay. If someone else can figure this out, great!”

During ten years of being a rural activist in Western New York against poverty, racism in housing, and domestic violence, I kept reading, feeling the idea pulsing within, k noting new connections. I thought my mid-1980s manuscript was better and obtained an agent, but it was soundly rejected by major New York publishers.

In 1987, we—Bruce, my spouse, I, and our 2 1/2 year old son—drove from Western New York to Dallas, Texas. Bruce was going to pursue a ministry with the homeless and I would devote myself to completing my manuscript. On our second night on the road, we stayed in Arkansas. Reading Margaret Homans’s Bearing the Word before going to bed, I encountered the literary concept of the absent referent. I thought, “Isn’t this what animals are when they are killed and eaten?” I must have continued to engage with this idea in my sleep, because I woke up thinking, “And that’s what women are too, absent referents in a culture structured to deny and thwart our subject status.” And then, “Isn’t that what links the oppression of women and animals in a patriarchal culture, that they are overlapping and interconnected absent referents?” That’s when I felt everything I had been working on for fifteen years come together.

I remember reading The Sexual Politics of Meat as a college-age vegetarian, and finding it both fascinating and quite provocative. What was the response when it came out? How did feminists respond to it? How did non-feminists?

Well, you probably won’t be surprised that the word “provocative” attached to it immediately! Publishers Weekly called it an “original, provocative book” and Library Journal said it was “an important and provocative work.” The usual suspects (conservative media) found the idea laughable. The tabloid London Sunday Express called it “Dotty title of the year.” Rush Limbaugh had just entered the talk radio world, and he used my book as part of his shtick to arouse the anger of his rightwing followers against “political correctness.”

The book debuted at the 1990 Modern Language Association meeting. In the Exhibits Hall, publishers hung posters announcing new books above their booths. My publisher and the behemoth publisher Harper Collins were next to each other at the main entrance. Dominating the space above the booth was a large reproduction of the cover of The Sexual Politics of Meat. Several years later, I met a HarperCollins editor who had been there. She told me that in her years exhibiting books at the MLA she had never seen anything like the excitement she witnessed that year as conference attendees entered the hall, beheld the book cover, and swamped the booth.

A few feminist booksellers told me animal rights activists bought the book in hardcover but heard feminists saying they were going to wait for the paperback. (I think I can understand that— animal rights theory in 1990s was like feminist theory in the early 1970s—each new book introduced wildly exciting ideas, and you didn’t want to wait to read them.)

When I applied the concept of the absent referent to the status of animals and women and explained its function in creating overlapping or interwoven connections, I offered a new theoretical vocabulary. Throughout the 1980s, the majority of books addressing the status of animals were philosophical in approach and focused solely on non-human animals. But, The Sexual Politics of Meat offered a different framework, arguing we could not understand the status of animals, especially those who are consumed by humans, without looking at the patriarchal culture in which this exploitation occurred. Graduate students wrote to say it liberated them to claim the topics they wanted to write about for their doctoral theses.

I found one comment, laughingly ironic. A feminist English professor told another she didn’t want to read the book because she might have to become a vegetarian. When I heard this, I thought, “But isn’t that why we read feminist theory?” Ms. Magazine seemed to agree in their mention of it. “Read this powerful new book and you may well become a vegetarian.”

It was briefly stopped at the Canadian border for having a supposed pornographic cover.

Completely unexpected was the amount of mail I received. Readers began to send me examples they found of the sexual politics of meat, like photographs of billboards and menus. Animal rights activists who monitored animal agriculture publications sent me advertisements found there, saying “It is so good to have someone to send this to who gets it.” It’s one reason I say that my readers showed me my work wasn’t done. I’d look at these images and think “yuck” and then “oh”—from repulsion to insight; look what they are saying about animals and women here!

A rock band reached out wanting to create a track of the sexual politics of meat for their next CD. (You can listen to it here.)

And my mail, though it is now email, not snail mail, continues to arrive.

You write about patriarchal attitudes toward women, and how those play out in the attitudes toward and treatment of animals. Can you expand a bit on that? (I realize this is the thesis of the whole book, but for people who haven't read it, give us the highlights!).

The Sexual Politics of Meat identifies the patriarchal context for the Western world’s commitment to meat eating, and dairy and egg consumption. It proposes that women’s oppression and animals’ exploitation are overlapping and interconnected.

Some of its main themes include:

* The association of meat eating and masculinity: entire cultures were deemed “virile” because of the large amount of animal flesh consumed. This is tied to racist colonial attitudes, too. I argue that “Racism is perpetuated each time meat is thought to be the best protein source.” I suggest that meat eating functions as a marker that legitimates the gender binary system and the gender binary system uses the sexual politics of meat to define who men should be: “real men,” not “sissies,” not “effeminate.” Men are expected to keep participating in the construction of manhood by eating animals. Otherwise, they face being abjected and feminized.

* Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. This is the absent referent; it separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. Once the existence of flesh is disconnected from the existence of a nonhuman animal who was killed to become that product, “meat” becomes unanchored by its original referent (the nonhuman animal), becoming instead a free-floating image, a metaphor, unbloodied by suffering. In this way, feeling like a piece of meat functions as a metaphor for women’s experience.

* Women, too, become absent referents in a misogynistic world, visually fragmented and consumed. The consumed object is experienced without a past, without a history, without a biography, without individuality. And so we see how the women are animalized and animals feminized and sexualized. (Find examples here.) The result is interrelated yet not equivalent oppressions in the treatment of women and the treatment of animals.

* It offers a feminist analysis of the politics of language and shows how a dominant culture mutes the radical analysis that challenges it, whether feminist or vegetarian/vegan.

* It proposes the term feminized protein to name precisely the exploitation of the reproductive processes of female animals in the production of mammalian milk and eggs. I wanted a term that, I hoped, would unsettle the sexual commodification of female animals.

* It explores examples of historical, contemporary, and fictional resistance to meat eating and argues that food decisions are coded forms of feminist resistance, and that feminist theory logically contains a vegan critique.

In the 35 ensuing years, what has changed in terms of the cultural conversation around feminism, vegetarianism/veganism, and the intersection of the two? What about the book still feels resonant? Are there parts that you feel we've made progress on?

Lord! It is exhausting being the author of a book I wish were no longer relevant!

Yes, there is some progress: the word “vegan” is more widely known. Progress, too, in the embrace of the flavors of vegetables, found in restaurants like Dirt Candy, Vedge, and Plant, and interest in vegan meals by mainstream chefs. Major newspapers feature vegan recipes. Certainly, there are more articles about the link between masculinity and meat eating, but often the discussion contains an air of mystification, a mainstream media that says, “gosh, what could be going on here?”

I’m excited by the reclamation of the food heritage of pre-Conquest peoples, led by vegans of color, like the AfroVegan Society and Food Empowerment Project. Diverse, vibrant, incisive voices advance our understanding: Breeze Harper, the Ko sisters (Aph and Syl), Claire Jean Kim, Maneesha Deckkha, Bénédicte Boisseron, and Margaret Robinson are among the authors addressing white supremacy, colonialism, and animal oppression.

There’s progress in the fact that the gender binary has been exposed to be a cultural construction. But as we know there is a huge reactionary pushback. In the binary world of the sexual politics of meat, there is no gender fluidity, no exception to what “real” men eat. Even if they don’t mean to, vegetarian and vegan men illustrate how unsettled ideas of “manhood” are.

Add to that, white supremacists began to claim meat and dairy as part of white power. I see this as a reaction to the election of Barack Obama. (There’s an extra coding about whiteness here because it is mainly white people who are able to drink cow’s milk because they have the enzyme that digests milk.)

Certainly, for feminist issues, the loss of Roe in 2022 continues to be devastating; it let loose a pernicious misogyny costing women’s lives, our ability to make decisions about our bodies, curtailing free speech, emptying some red states of gynecologists and obstetricians. In the abortion debate, women are the absent referents. And, surprise! livestock imagery appeared immediately after the terribly dishonest Dobbs decision in 2022 was announced. That day, protesters headed to the Supreme Court. As they gathered, a postcard was distributed with a photo of a pregnant cow, with the words “There’s a term for creatures not permitted to control their reproduction. That term is LIVESTOCK.” And that is the absent referent. Are animals only metaphors for our oppression?

In fact, the belief that others can make decisions about someone else’s pregnancy is at the heart of animal agriculture, hidden in plain sight. Controlling female reproduction is the key to profits. And the images that accompany these discussions often qre of sexualized female animals who “want” to be pregnant, who “want” to give the man one extra piglet a year. Here, women were the absent referents. Like many representations promoting the consumption of dead animals, where we encounter sexy pigs, sexy cows, sexy chickens begging to be consumed, another being appears in place of “woman,” yet the fact of sexualized dominance is still present.

In our culture, today, the patriarchal cultural commitment to consuming animals and feminized protein remains dominant. Not only our loss of the protection of the right to abortion but the alignment of Christian nationalism with Trump strengthens patriarchal attempts to control women. It seems women have become more of an absent referent now then when the book was published. And so, I keep updating the book and my publisher remains committed to bringing out new editions.

You've changed the subtitle from "A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory" to "A Feminist-Vegan Critical Theory." Why?

The title clarifies its theoretical commitments. The word vegetarian had become more opaque in this regard. Dairy: yes or no? Eggs: yes or no? In the 1980s, the term “complete vegetarian” meant vegan in terms of food choice and it reflected a radical commitment. As the word “vegan” became more widely known, vegetarianism became associated with consumption of dairy and eggs, and the earlier subtitle was now retrograde, unreflective of the theory inside the book.

It’s an example of how I try to keep the book updated. With any new development, the question I try to answer is: Does this new development illustrate something I have already discussed, extend, or complicate a part of my theory? It’s not about examples accumulating (and wow have they!), but does the conceptual framework I offered 35 years ago continue to help understand the cultural dynamics in the 2020s? And sadly, yes.

Do you think the response to the book would be different today?

Yes and no. Yes, terms that were unfamiliar as I finished the book in 1989 like “intersectional” or “vegan” are now more familiar. In addition, ecofeminism is more widely accepted now as an activist and academic approach. Back in the early 1990s it was viewed suspiciously by some feminists as being “essentialist,” that is, that we reinforced gender stereotypes. It was a case of the analysis being mistaken for what we were analyzing—a culture teeming with gender stereotypes that spilled over and informed attitudes toward the Earth and animals.

The book itself influences how we receive it now by having helped to create the intellectual climate for discussing the connections between oppression of humans and the other animals. Still, many feminists and progressives respond to my approach saying, “We have to solve human problems first before we consider animals.” What if how we view and treat animals influences how we treat humans? I am uneasy with the popular feminist slogan “Feminism is the radical notion that women are human” because it accepts the belief that concept of “human” is settled and inclusive. But the concept of “human” is neither of those things; racist, patriarchal, and rationalist attitudes are embedded in our concepts of “human.” Similarly, disempowered groups of people are made more vulnerable by being animalized. This happens not just with women, but people of color. Think of the Republican view of undocumented immigrants (J.D. Vance and Trump claiming “they” were eating the cats). In addition, animal agriculture causes human crises. A third of global greenhouse gas emissions associated with climate change are emitted by cattle and sheep. Why else were all the big meat companies at the recent Cop29 Climate Summit? And don’t get me started on pandemics and their relationship to use of animals! Right now, human cases of bird flu (H5N1) (which replicates in the udders of cows) have been identified.

Whatever progress has occurred, there’s a sense that factory farms are here to stay. Indeed, an intense reaction against my ideas persists that, ironically, often proves my argument. Now it’s not Rush Limbaugh inciting his followers to write universities where I am scheduled to speak, but right-wing blowhards like the Canadian academic, Jordan Peterson. (In October, Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau that Peterson, along with Tucker Carlson was funded by Russia.) Peterson discovered he had an opinion about my ideas after hearing me participate in a debate at the Oxford Union in November 2021, defending the motion “This House Holds It Should Move Beyond Meat.” I was one of three people, but my feminist-vegan argument disturbed Peterson, especially because I inserted a disparaging comment about his belief that men represent order and women chaos. Or it might have been that his daughter, who advocates a diet only of red muscle, argued against the motion. First Peterson appeared on Joe Rogan and described my “twisted” ideas. When the Oxford Union uploaded the videos from the debate to YouTube, Peterson linked to it on his twitter account, saying “When the left goes too far.” As he knew they would, his followers rushed to the YouTube site. Most of the 5,000 plus comments are not quite as polite as the take downs of the book by the likes of novelist Auberon Waugh in 1990, when he suggested my book had been written by an Eastern European male émigré, but they offer a researcher much proof on the persistence of the belief in the sexual politics of meat! It’s a worldview of misogyny and entitlement, unhappily challenged.

There are so many parts of this book that resonated with me, but the one I have often recalled in the decades since I first read the book was your criticisms of the actions of people who work in the meat industry -- the way the men who work in it treat animals, sometimes abusing them for sport, and how that desensitizes people to the abuse of human animals (and particularly women), too. There has been so much criticism of factory farming and the meat industry, but I have rarely seen that criticism take the approach you did. For people who haven't read the book, can you tell us a little bit about what you found / detailed in the book, and if you've seen any shifts in the past almost four decades? Or are things as cruel and misogynist as ever?

Are things as cruel and misogynist as ever? I’d say even more so. The sexual manipulation of all farmed animals is inherent to animal agriculture. There is a fascinating paper on how laws against bestiality need to make exceptions for contemporary farming practices in the statutes because, in other contexts they would be seen as sex with animals. (The author points out that the distinction is made not in relation to what animals experience but because this is what capital needs.) We know that farmed animals are sexually abused, described in Ted Genoways’ The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food and summarized here.

In terms of slaughterhouse workers, when you think about it, who chooses to slaughter animals on a fast moving dis-assembly line if they have other choices? It’s a job with a high turnover rate, and one of the highest injury rates. This is why so many undocumented workers are employed there. (If Trump succeeds in his cruel vision of expelling undocumented immigrants, the price of meat could sky rocket.) Children are working in slaughterhouses now, often as part of the clean up crew; clean up is equally dangerous, blood-covered floors are slippery; butchering implements are sharp.

The workers themselves become absent referents in the great cog of meat production. What I say in the book is: “the worker on the assembly line becomes treated as an inert, unthinking object, whose creative, bodily, emotional needs are ignored….They, more than anyone, must accept on a grand scale the double annihilation of self….They must view the living animal as the meat that everyone outside the slaughterhouse accepts it as, while the animal is still alive.” (See a discussion of slaughterhouse workers here.)

Researchers have found that, of all employees at a slaughterhouse, employees on the kill floor or handling the animals’ dead bodies evidenced the highest prevalence rates of aggression, anxiety, and depression. And some researchers have found a link between areas where there are slaughterhouses and interpersonal violence.

These are the workers who were sacrificed to die during the pandemic because of the collusion of meat companies with the Trump administration.

But because of the structure of the absent referent, consumers are desensitized to the costs to workers and their families of working at slaughterhouses. Did meat consumption drop when national newspapers reported about the collusion of the Trump administration and meat companies that led to the death of slaughterhouse workers? Did meat consumption drop with the reports of children working in slaughterhouses? Or of prisoners carted across state lines to work in slaughterhouses? Or of the sexual abuse of animals in factory farms? Consumers’ ongoing demand for cheap meat sustains the industry and every cruel, misogynistic act at its center.

One new wellness trend is colostrum in beauty products. I'm not a vegan, but the first time I saw this it stopped me in my tracks / broke my heart a little bit. Have you seen similar trends / products / dynamics since the book first published that have surprised or shocked you as well? If you were re-writing this book today, what would you add to it?

The marketing of colostrum truly is a heartrending example of how human exceptionalism—the belief that we are better, smarter, significantly different from other animal in ways that matter ethically—and capitalism together permit the monetizing of anything from animals, no matter the consequences for the animals themselves. In this case, it’s the discovery that the first milk from a cow after giving birth can be marketed for “gut health” or “skin care.” Colostrum is the name for that nutrient-rich first milk which calves need to thrive. But any milk the calves suck from their mothers takes profit away from the farmer. In a world where the calf is but a byproduct of the dairy industry, the calf’s health is not the primary priority; nor that cows mourn for weeks after having their calf taken from them. (Which is why the industry is trying to genetically engineer cows to be less attached to their offspring to increase efficiency.) The cow’s forced pregnancy is necessary to bring her milk back in.

Calves may be auctioned off—sometimes just hours old, or carried by wheelbarrow to a hutch, to become a veal calf, destined for someone’s plate. Kathryn Gillespie’s The Cow with Ear Tag #1349 describers calves at an auction so young, the umbilical cords were still attached to them. It makes me think of Mary Oliver’s poem, “Lead,” which begins “Here is a story to break your heart” and she describes a loon dying, of how the loon “lifted its head and opened/ the elegant beak and cried out/ in the long, sweet savoring of its life/ which, if you have heard it,/ you know is a sacred thing.”

You ask about other trends that shock me. Well, the short list would include:

* The emergence of the locavore movement and its relationship to white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and misogyny identified by Vasile Stanescu here, and explained more fully in John Sanbonmatsu’s forthcoming book, The Omnivore’s Deception. Locavore farmers claim cows have “only one bad day”—the day they are shot in the head. Why, then, are there so many reports of “problematic” “stubborn” cows, like the ones who resist having their calves removed?

* The increasing popularity of gas chambers to kill poultry. (First used in the UK in 1996.) The use of carbon dioxide is painful to the birds. Or that some high schools sponsored chicken slaughter projects.

* The passing by many states of “Ag Gag Laws” outlawing the gathering of information about abuses of animals by undercover investigation, described by Will Potter in Green is the New Red.

* The rocketing to celebrity fame of Temple Grandin, who asserted that she could know that animals are not afraid when slaughtered and meat eaters happily accepted her essentializing of her autism in making that claim.

* Meanwhile, butchering has been claimed to be a “real” “honest” relationship with animals and taken up by women as a form of liberation, through which “meaning and purpose” are discovered. (And the way the New York Times, especially its style section, is fascinated by this trend.)

I write new introductions for new editions, to incorporate trends that relate to my thesis. All in all, it continues to do the work of raising consciousness I envisioned for it.

The sanctimonious vegan / vegetarian is a cultural trope. So is the sanctimonious feminist. In your many decades doing this work, what have you found to be most persuasive to people who may initially balk at vegan feminism?

I wish I had a perfect answer. I think philosopher Mary Midgley got it right when she described the gestalt shift that separates meat eaters and vegetarians, non vegans and vegans: they see life; we see death. Feminists and non-feminists? We see equality as a good; they see us as disruptive, threatening, disempowering. The beneficiaries of oppression experience it as pleasurable. Who wants to have their pleasure taken away?

The question becomes: how does consciousness change? The next line in Mary Oliver’s poem, “Lead,” after “Here is a story/to break your heart” Is “Are you willing?”

Language is at the heart of how the absent referent functions so that the victims disappear. We are not supposed to use language that is accurate because it’s treated as emotional. How do we explain what’s going on without falling into the normalized and naturalized language of meat and dairy and egg consumption? Phrases like “cow separated from calf,” “forced pregnancy,” “actively disabling animals,” come with heightened emotional registers even if they accurately describe what is happening. The patriarchal exaltation of reason—so central in Western philosophy and the sciences—was, and continues to be, a profound obstacle to making the world more just and compassionate.

Refuse to be an accomplice, the great 20th century French mystic Simone Weil said. But that requires recognizing where we have become accomplices! What seemed a menu choice, is actually a pledge to the oppressors—we will continue to support you.

After helping my sisters and my father care for my mother after she developed Alzheimer’s disease, I find that the most important thing I can do is help people think about grief. I think people are afraid to learn about what is happening to animals because they are afraid of the grief they will feel. The hostile patriarchal rejection of emotion provides little modeling of living with grief; three days off for a funeral, etc. But for vegans, grief is a part of our lives. We cannot not know these things. Grief is a gift that we are given, and we learn to welcome it, “oh there you are grief, you are a reminder of why I care, but you, grief, won’t kill me.” This is not grief that goes nowhere and has nothing it can do about the problem. Grief is part of being an aware citizen in the world right now, and that grief can be mobilized for the good. It is fighting always against this patriarchal human-centered culture that says it gets to decide who matters.

Mary Oliver’s poem concludes: “I tell you this/ to break your heart,/ by which I mean only/ that it break open and never close again/ to the rest of the world.”

What if we said: “here you are grief, I welcome your return. You are a reminder of my connection to the world and to others. You exist within me because I have chosen to care.”

Other than picking up a copy of The Sexual Politics of Meat, what books would you recommend to readers?

There are so many brilliant younger feminist scholars working on these issues and important activist groups making clear the connections between social justice and attention to animals. I have referred to some already, but Chloë Taylor’s magisterial Gender and Animals, a 744-page long collection that came out in June brings together many of the writers. You can find the table of contents here. Meanwhile, The Unbound Project highlights the work of more than 150 women around the world at the forefront of animal advocacy.

There is Sunaura Taylor’s Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation. She and her sister Astra also did a thorough analysis of “The Socialist Feminist Case for Animal Liberation” for Lux.

Incredible feminist scholarship on dairy exists now: from Kathryn Gillespie’s beautifully-moving The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 who describes the complete sexual commodification of the dairy cow to Jessica Eisen’s powerful “Milked: Nature, Necessity, and American Law” on the dairy industry for the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice. Among the numerous insights she offers is how notions of privacy hide what is happening on the farm. And then there is Yamini Narayanan’s award-winning Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India.

In Animal Crisis: A New Critical Theory, feminist philosophers Alice Crary and Lori Gruen offer an exciting, accessible animal ethics that includes the argument that there can be no animal liberation without human emancipation.

Laura Wright’s The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror is a valuable feminist exploration of contemporary culture that considers how the vegan body is a contested site of meaning.

I’d recommend the poetry of Kathryn Kirkpatrick, whose forthcoming Creature is a powerful meditation on creaturely existence. I think also of poet and activist Gretchen Primack’s Kind which includes a poem, “Love This” that stops my heart every time I read it (and which is included in The Sexual Politics of Meat).

Your readers might be interested in the VINE Book Group. VINE, a LGBTQ-led farmed animal sanctuary, hosts a monthly book discussion, (VINE was the first to show roosters bred for cock fights could be rehabilitated and didn’t need to be killed. It’s a fascinating example of challenging human ideas about gender as they were imposed on these beautiful birds.

Check out “The Issues” at the Food Empowerment Project’s website, covering an exhaustive number of important topics associated with food production—from environmental racism to animal agriculture workers to colonization; the politics informing social justice veganism couldn’t be made clearer. And then, you can check out their Mexican, Filipino, Lao, or Chinese vegan recipes.

Finally, Protest Kitchen is a book that might help your readers incorporate more vegan meals (and perhaps veganism?) into their lives. Virginia Messina and I wrote it to make the progressive case for veganism. We envisioned it as The Anti-Trump Diet, but back in early 2017, publishers said, “he won’t be around that long.” (It’s the first time one of my books was rejected because of optimism!) During a time when we feel in the midst of a perpetual political emergency, veganism may be the antistress and antidepression diet we need now.