Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

by Sunaura Taylor

Science historian Londa Schiebinger explains in her book Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science that naturalists of the time were generally more sympathetic in their description of the apes than they were in describing Africans, “highlighting the human character of apes while emphasizing the purported simian qualities of Africans.”4

In the sixth century Saint Isidore of Seville echoed such thinking, writing that “the human stands erect and looks toward heaven so as to seek God, rather than look at the earth, as do the beasts that nature has made bent over and attentive to their bellies.”6

God makes Adam in his likeness, and commands him to “Subject the fish of the sea, the flying creatures of the heavens, every living thing that crawls on the earth.” God then lets Adam (before Eve is created or named) name the animals. Thus man in Genesis is already set apart from the beasts (and, tellingly, apart from woman), and naming is itself integral to this separation.11

As Schiebinger has shown, the term mammals linked humans to animals through a distinctly female characteristic: the breast, which was also highly racialized (it was argued by naturalists that breast shape and size corresponded to and legitimized racial hierarchies),16 whereas Linnaeus’s term Homo sapiens, meaning “man of wisdom,” was meant to distinguish humans from animals through a characteristic assigned almost exclusively to white males: reason.17

Pastrana’s story reminds me just how much my ability and desire to celebrate my own animal comparisons is a sign of my whiteness and class privilege. People with disabilities have not been animalized equally or in the same way. For some people animal comparisons are not simply insulting—they risk a loss of personhood.

We can see this in the “ugly laws” legislation that existed from the 1860s to the 1970s across the United States, which made it illegal for “unsightly” or “disgusting” people to be in certain public spaces. These laws were often intended to get rid of beggars, and at times overlapped with laws designed to clean the streets of stray animals. In her book The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public, Susan Schweik,

Animals make powerful insults precisely because we have imagined them as devoid of subjective and emotional lives that would obligate us to have responsibilities toward them. Animals are a category of beings that in the Western tradition we have decided that we rarely, if ever, have duties toward—we can buy them, sell them, and discard them like objects.

Consider contemporary sideshow performer Mat Fraser. A charming and provocative white man from Britain, Fraser was a thalidomide baby—he has, as he describes them, “flippers” instead of arms. He is a musician, an actor, a performance artist, and a burlesque performer. He is also the self-proclaimed “Sealboy.” Disability scholar and artist Petra Kuppers writes that “in the creation of ‘Sealboy,’ Fraser was searching for his historic role model, his roots, his heritage.” By doing so he was “designating the disability experience not as an individual or singular fate, but as a cultural minority experience.” By naming himself Sealboy, Fraser claims “freak” and the disability history that goes along with it, including the animalization.6

As disability studies scholar Rachel Adams reminds us in her book Sideshow U.S.A: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination, “In some cases, to live as a freak means to be accepted into a community unified on the basis of marginality. To be another kind of freak . . . however, means, by definition, exclusion from the community of civilized persons.”7 Perhaps something similar could be said of animal comparisons.

One particularly exciting example is the eco-ability movement, a growing group of disability advocates and scholars who are making powerful connections between the oppression of animals, disabled people, and nature.

When I use my mouth instead of my hands in public I realize I am transgressing boundaries, not only of able-bodied etiquette, but of the ways in which one is supposed to inhabit a human body. We use the mouth for language and for eating, yet it is deeply private, an orifice containing germs and breath and slobber. The mouth is sexual. The mouth is animal. Hands, however, are human. Humans are supposed to have opposable thumbs and dexterous fingers. Like walking upright on two legs, human hands have been said to represent our big brains—as hands make and use tools, they opened the door for human culture to emerge. Hands represent our physical agility and separateness from other species. I feel animal in my embodiment, and this feeling is one of connection, not shame. Recognizing my animality has in fact been a way of claiming the dignity in the way my body and other non-normative and vulnerable bodies move, look, and experience the world around them. It is a claiming of my animalized parts and movements, an assertion that my animality is integral to my humanity. It’s an assertion that animality is integral to humanity.

Singer then poses a question: “‘Let’s assume we can prove, absolutely, that [an] individual is totally unconscious and that we can know, absolutely, that the individual will never regain consciousness. Assuming all that, don’t you think continuing to take care of that individual would be a bit—weird?’ Johnson replies, ‘No. Done right, it could be profoundly beautiful.’”16

It is better to acknowledge such uncomfortable spaces—ones that may remain open indefinitely—than to limit our moral understanding simply in order to satisfy some need for hierarchies of values.

to be forced to pit the values of different lives against one another is to take a philosophy of hierarchy for granted.

I would rather ask how we can begin to create a world in which choosing between the lives of animals and the lives of humans (whether disabled or able-bodied) is understood as a false dichotomy.

does he think there are any possible positive effects disability can have on society and on individuals?

When I told Singer that disability is creative, I was thinking about disabled dancer, artist, and poet Neil Marcus, who has said, “Disability is not a ‘brave struggle’ or ‘courage in the face of adversity’ . . . disability is an art. It’s an ingenious way to live.”23

As shocking and extreme as Singer’s ideas may seem to some, they are rooted in widely held beliefs that disability is an inherently negative state that should be avoided.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to separate any of these experiences’ inherent negativity from the negative cultural and social symbols they have become. Is needing help to wipe your ass inherently horrible?

As someone who did need this sort of help as a child and who has countless friends who continue to navigate that need with dignity and humor as adults, I don’t think so.

In my own experience, it began to be uncomfortable for me only when I realized other people found it embarrassing, when it felt like this help was becoming burdensome to those providing it, and when I (wrongly) assumed it meant I could never be independent, move away from home, or have a partner. As in my case, it is the stigma around being a burden and needing help that is so often the issue, rather than the help itself. Given the power to choose who provides one’s care, and when one is assur...

Best writes, “If in describing the suffering of animals Singer calls for their liberation, not their euthanasia, why then, Triano wonders, does he advocate killing infants sure to experience suffering in their lives rather than advocate social changes that might minimize their pain?”31

Yet Singer is not obligated to prove that our lives are less satisfying, because he has an ingrained culture of ableism, and what numerous disability scholars have called a system of compulsory able-bodiedness, on his side.

Kafer argues that it is compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness that is of concern, not “individual sick and disabled people’s relationships to particular medical interventions,” and that “a desire for a cure is not necessarily an anti-crip or anti-disability rights and justice position.” She clarifies that she is not talking about cures but “speaking here of a curative imaginary, an understanding of disability that not only expects and assumes intervention but also cannot imagine or comprehend anything other than intervention.”33 The fact that many individuals desire cures, do not want to be disabled, or suffer a great deal from disability is not the issue. What needs to be challenged is the ingrained and ubiquitous assumption that these things mean that disability is objectively undesirable and that such feelings are the only reasonable response to disability.

Disabled author and poet Eli Clare writes, “On good days I can separate the anger I turn inward at my body from the anger that needs to be turned outward, directed at the daily ableist shit, but there is nothing simple or neat about kindling the latter while transforming the other.”35

How would my notions of how a couple is “supposed” to interact differ if he and I had grown up in a culture where images of disabled or interabled couples were abundant, if we had seen people strolling together the way we do, with him leaning his elbow or hand on my shoulder and me leaning my head on his arm in return? Would I have felt the same loss, or would I have felt more confident that the way my body expresses affection is a valid one?

We all suffer, but suffering does not negate our other experiences.

It must be pointed out however, that as much as an overemphasis on suffering is clearly problematic, so too is a denial of suffering. The capacity to suffer is one shared across human difference and species. Suffering can be a place of empathy, of recognizing another’s struggles. To deny someone’s capacity to suffer is an act of extreme violence that humans have too often enacted on humans and on other animals.

An emphasis on suffering can perpetuate pity and stereotypes, but it can also inspire empathy and ignite this sort of passion for solidarity.

The late historian and disability studies scholar Paul Longmore described the value systems that have emerged from disability communities: “Beyond proclamations of pride, deaf and disabled people have been uncovering or formulating sets of alternative values derived from within the deaf and disabled experience. . . . They declare that they prize not self-sufficiency but self-determination, not independence but interdependence, not functional separateness but personal connection, not physical autonomy but human community.”37

But again, the marginalization of those who care about animals is nothing new. Diane Beers writes in her book For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States that “several late nineteenth-century physicians concocted a diagnosable form of mental illness to explain such bizarre behavior. Sadly, they pronounced, these misguided souls suffered from ‘zoophilpsychosis.’” As Beers describes, zoophilpsychosis (an excessive concern for animals) was more likely to be diagnosed in women, who were understood to be “particularly susceptible to the malady.”6 As the early animal advocacy movement in Britain and the United States was largely made up of women, such charges worked to uphold the subjugation both of women and of nonhuman animals.

In 2012 the scholars Carol J. Adams, Lori Gruen, and A. Breeze Harper were driven to write an open letter of complaint to the New York Times for forming a panel that consisted solely of five white men to judge a contest for the best arguments defending meat eating.

Pollan feels “uncomfortable” that he now has to be “accommodated.” It is a telling sign of his privilege that this is a new experience for him.

Safran Foer asks a simple question in his book Eating Animals: “How much do I value creating a socially comfortable situation, and how much do I value acting socially responsible?”9

steers are served for dinner and disabled people wait downstairs.

Slowfood USA’s “US Ark of Taste” program lists “over 200 delicious foods in danger of extinction,” many of which are heritage breeds.2

In many ways the “eat them to save them” logic of Slowfood USA is the pinnacle of consumer activism.

If a desire for meat is part of “human nature,” it must be remembered that it is also part of “human nature” to question the way we live, to think about justice, and to change our habits to reflect the development of our moral lives. This doesn’t make us better or more evolved than other animals—we all have different abilities, and one of those is the power to consider these sorts of ethical matters.

Yet Mill also missed an important part of the picture. Although it is undeniably true that “nature” does “kill” and “torture,” it is also cooperative, compassionate, and just.

Nature may be brutal, but it is also far more complex than a dog-eat-dog world. Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce write that the “consumption paradigm . . . has monopolized discussions of the evolution of social behavior. The predominance of this paradigm in ethology and evolutionary biology is both misleading and wrong, and momentum is building toward a paradigm shift in which ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ sits in balance with wild justice.”13

People often see certain values as the consequence of our “natures”: if we understand nature to be competitive and ruthless, then we would be denying our own natures to try to be otherwise.

These narratives suggest that we must overcome our naive and sentimental empathy for individual animals to grasp something greater: the cycle of life and death.

But as Woodstock Farm Sanctuary founder Jenny Brown so unappetizingly points out in her book The Lucky Ones, doing things “naturally” is often a far more complex task than many omnivores think. First a worker “milks” the semen out of a bull—meaning he or she masturbates him. Then, the dairy farmer who purchased that semen pushes his arm up a cow’s vagina to artificially inseminate her. A calf begins to grow, and eventually the cow’s body begins to manufacture a food suited perfectly to that calf. . . . But instead of having her calf’s mouth on them, the mother’s teats are fitted with synthetic-lined metal cups. Her milk is sucked through tubes into a large vat. Because her teats are clamped repeatedly by a machine . . . she endures painful chafing and mastitis—an infection in her udder—which often leads to pus draining into the milk. Meanwhile, the cow has most likely been administered hormones and genetically manipulated so that she will produce up to ten times the amount of milk she would produce naturally. As a result, her body is under constant stress, and she is at risk for numerous health problems, which causes the farmer to add antibiotics to this “natural” cocktail. Then, instead of nourishing a newborn, that milk is taken to factories where it is separated, analyzed for fat content, pasteurized to destroy enzymes and microorganisms, sucked into an electric churn via a plate heat exchanger, separated again, and churned again. . . . Viola! “Natural” but...

The interdependence theories of the new meat movement nonetheless still reward the independent at the expense of the dependent and the stronger at the expense of the more vulnerable. In contrast, disability communities have long recognized that interdependence is not a mutual-advantage calculation. Instead a disability perspective on interdependence recognizes that we are all vulnerable beings who will go in and out of dependency and who will give and receive care (more often than not doing both at once) over the course of our lives. What disability can bring to the humane meat conversation is a much-needed analysis of what it means to be accountable to beings who are vulnerable.

Kafer writes, “Visions of nature are often idealized and depoliticized fantasies, and disability plays an integral, if often unmarked, role in marking the limit of these fantasies.”26 Such visions of nature are evident in humane meat arguments, which betray a romanticization of a natural state of things that leaves out certain bodies and histories, including the disabled body. Narratives drawn from such essentialized visions of nature value strength, autonomy, productivity, and independence—the same patriarchal values that have historically fueled the oppression of more vulnerable bodies.

Journalist Emely Matcher writes in an article on gender dynamics within what she calls the “food movement” (and specifically Pollan’s work) that the “movement, with its insistence on how fun and fulfilling and morally correct cooking is, seems to have trouble imagining why women might not have wanted to spend all their time in front of the stove.”28

In another vein, at an event titled “Food, Justice and Sustainability,” food justice activist Nikki Henderson pointed out that although fast-food restaurants are clearly problematic, they have provided accessibly priced foods to countless low-income people and are some of the only public spaces that include playgrounds, which can be a lifesaver for an overworked parent.31 Both Henderson and Hall are extremely critical of industrialized agriculture and fast-food restaurants, as am I, but they also recognize that a radical change in our food system must not shame those who are on the front lines of food inequity.

The point is not to shield our current agricultural methods and unsustainable food system from critique, but rather to ask how we can develop a sustainability movement that includes more bodies and more radical value systems.

Safran Foer writes, “There isn’t enough nonfactory chicken produced in America to feed the population of Staten Island and not enough nonfactory pork to serve New York City, let alone the country.”19

Every year ten thousand to twenty thousand agricultural workers are diagnosed with “pesticide” poisoning, and the Food Empowerment Project reports that “long-term exposure to agricultural chemicals is associated with severe health effects such as cancer, neurological disorders including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer disease as well as infertility and reproductive complications.”23