Month: March 2023

This week I read an argument from scholars Kari Norgaard and Richard York titled “Gender Quality and State Environmentalism.” Within the piece, the pair evidenced how “nations with higher proportions of women in Parliament are more prone to ratify environmental treaties” (506) with a cross-national data analysis that emphasized the correlation between “the percentage of Parliament composed of women and national support for a selection of key international environmental treaties” (506-507). Norgaard and York analyze gender roles through an ecofeminist lens that acknowledges the reciprocal reinforcement of sexism and environmental degradation. 

They clearly and accessibly lay out how “in an unequal society, the impacts of environmental degradation fall disproportionately on the least powerful. Gendered divisions of labor, land, and other resources have meant that women have been uniquely and disproportionately affected by ecological destruction” (507). Because of women’s isolated and unique perpetuated connection to nature and the environment, they are the ones who are most affected by its decay and most equipped to speak on and for it. 

Knorgaard and York draw from “a generation of feminist theorists [who have] argued that the state is both capitalist and patriarchal….[and how] gender is a category of social regulation in state policy” (507). Furthermore, “sexism and environmental degradation are interconnected processes…[in which] values, ideologies, institutions, and economic systems… shape human-environmental relationships [and] are themselves gendered…[it’s through] both gender discrimination and environmental degradation to a common hierarchical social structure…[that] both women and nature… [are] devalu[ed]” (508) in mutually reinforcing ways. 

We see this every day, with women’s bodies being the subject of legislature and beholden to the whim of (often male) policymakers. And the unfair treatment doesn’t end there; a gendered division of labor and gendered structure of power is more prevalent than ever (508). Payscale reports that the gender pay gap may be closing over time but at a glacial speed. Men are consistently paid more than women and given higher positions of power for fewer qualifications and work experience. 

Yet Knorgaard and York emphasize another gender gap—that of environmental concern, values, and perceptions of environmental risks. They write, “women are more likely than men to express support for environmental protection and that women consider a variety of environmental risks…to be more serious than do men” (508). And logically, it would follow that “if women tend to be more environmentally progressive, the inclusion of women as equal members of society—as voters, citizens, policy makers, and social movement participants—should positively influence state behavior” (508). Knorgaard and York evidence this argument by pointing to how women perceive hazards as riskier than men do, and they are less willing than men to impose risks on others (509), especially when examined in correlation to mens’ common underlying ideology—the “logic of domination” (509) which exemplifies how men justify domination and oppression of others through their entitled and privileged seats in the patriarchal hierarchy. 

Scholar Karen Bell confirms the gender gap correlation in her article “Bread and Roses: A Gender Perspective on Environmental Justice and Public Health.” She analyzes and evidences how “women tend to experience inequitable environmental burdens and are less likely than men to have control over environmental decisions…[She] argue[s] that these injustices occur because women generally have lower incomes than men and are perceived as having less social status than their male counterparts as a result of entwined and entrenched capitalist and patriarchal processes.” It’s the very same concept that Knorgaard and York wielded as substantiated evidence of their interconnected women and state thesis. It’s women’s unique, perpetuated connection to nature and their placement in a capitalistic patriarchal system that makes them uniquely receptive and wary of environmental degradation, enough so to make the necessary changes to prevent further oppression and domination. 

So if “women have more pro-environmental values, are more risk averse, and participate more frequently in environmental movements than do men” (Knorgaard 514), then it only makes sense that placing more women in positions of power will positively impact our relationships and effect on the environment. But first, it must be acknowledged that “sexism and environmental degradation are interconnected processes, stemming from common structural elements, and are mutually reinforcing” (Knorgaard 514). Lindsey Jean Shueman, a writer and producer for One Earth, agrees with Knorgaard and York’s assertion in her piece “Why Women Are Key To Solving The Climate Crisis.” She postulates that by also “acknowledging the benefits women bring to the table, we can start to close these gaps and acceleration action to solve the climate crisis.”

Schueman highlights 8 evidence-backed reasons why women as climate leaders would play a key role in alleviating the climate crisis and limiting global warming. 

1. Women are the most impacted by climate change. 
   • Just as Knorgaard, York, and Bell illustrate, the gendered roles under patriarchal hegemony are interconnected with the predominant logic of domination that oppresses both women and the environment in mutually reinforcing ways. As a result, women are at a unique disadvantage when it comes to the effects and stress of environmental degradation.
2. Women are better leaders in times of crisis.
   • Schueman evidences how “when empowered to actively participate in disaster planning and emergency response, women showcase a unique knowledge and skillset that allows communities to recover more quickly and more effectively.” She reports how “Research has also shown that women adopt innovative and preventative measures at a faster rate than men. In a review of 17 studies from around the world, the presence of women in conservation and natural resource management resulted in stricter and more sustainable extraction rules, greater compliance, more transparency and accountability, and better conflict resolution.”
3. Women are powerful organizers.
   • Schueman points to influential women like Rachel Carson, Jane Goodall, and Sylvia Earle to illustrate the transformative effects that women and women’s ecological ideas can have on preserving the environment. 
4. Women have the solutions.
   • “Studies show that worldwide, when women are uplifted, there are immense benefits to communities and societies overall. Sustainable and local economies grow, populations stabilize, and children’s health and education levels improve – all of which are foundations for a sustainable economy of the future” (Schueman).
5. Women turn knowledge into action.
   • Schueman highlights Vandana Shiva, Indian environmental activist who created one of the first community seed banks to preserve and further earth’s natural biodiversity and future. You can dive deeper into Shiva’s Eastern lens of ecofeminism in my earlier blog post, “Comparing Western & Eastern Ecofeminst Perspectives.”
6. Women are economic dynamos.
   • Schueman writes, “Increasing employment and leadership opportunities for women greatly benefit companies and the economy writ large. It is estimated that businesses with three or more women in senior management positions score higher on all dimensions of organizational performance. Female-founded companies in a major VC portfolio outperformed companies founded by men by 63%, delivering significantly higher revenue.” And then, she connects these statistics to the fact that “women in North America start 70% of new businesses and now control over half of the wealth. It is also estimated that women make 70-80% of all consumer purchases. This potential can be leveraged to transition more rapidly to a sustainable, clean energy economy.”
7. The world needs equality. 
8. The women are the visionaries.
   • For both of Schuemans points #7&8, it’s apparent from Knorgaard and York’s data that there is a direct correlation between women in Parliament and environmental treaties. Women need equal power and respect to be able to institute these positive environmental policies, and then we wouldn’t be in the dire straits we are now.

“Making up 51% of the Earth’s population, women and girls in every society are responding more effectively in times of crisis and actively working towards the creation of a more just and sustainable world” (Schueman).

Obviously, if we can eliminate the gender gap and afford equal opportunity to women. As a result, the sexist interconnectedness with environmental degradation will also alleviate. And with powerful, risk-averse, influential, intelligent, visionary, climate-conscious women at the helm, our ratification of environmental treaties will only increase, and thus our damaged relationship with the earth can begin to heal.

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Works Cited

Bell, Karen. “Bread and Roses: A Gender Perspective on Environmental Justice and Public Health.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 12 Oct. 2016, ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5086744/.

Norgaard, Kari, and Richard York. “Gender equality and state environmentalism.” Gender & Society 19.4 (2005): 506-522.

Schueman, Lindsey Jean. “Why Women Are Key to Solving the Climate Crisis.” One Earth, One Earth, oneearth.org/why-women-are-key-to-solving-the-climate-crisis/. 

Carol J. Adams is a feminist-vegan advocate and activist whose work is not only influential but groundbreaking in her vision.

Philosophical activist Lisa Kemmerer put it best when she said Adams “unfolds her grizzly discoveries with a wry sense of humor, and sends readers out into the world with a fresh vision—a vision that pierces through the images on the magazine rack, in the frozen meat section of the grocery store, on billboards, or in television advertisements. Adams’ work heightens awareness, shifts thinking, and has the power to alter behavior…” (Kemmerer). 

And that’s exactly how I felt after reading her interview and editorial piece, “The War on Compassion,” in Antennae Project’s The Politics of Meat issue—altered. Once Adams peels back the curtain to expose the damaging way in which our patriarchal society categorizes everything around us through intrinsically oppressive systemic hierarchies, there’s no un-seeing or un-knowing it. 

Adams emphasizes that under our current mode of thinking, “We are human animals; they, those we view as not-us, are nonhuman animals” (5). And, “as long as the definition exists through negation…the inscription of ‘human’…accepts that there is something fixed about humanness which we can establish ‘humans’ possess, and importantly, that others do not possess” (5). By causing a split, or differentiation between categories, a hierarchy is inherently created. We’ve seen it all before—dehumanizing racism and genocide. But what about those who aren’t deemed ‘human’ to begin with? 

That’s when we’re left with speciesism. “Speciesism has always been a toll of colonialism: creating a hierarchy of color and characteristics” (Adams 8). Under speciesism, instead of genocide, it’s meat-eating and hunting. Adams notes that “The latter is normalized violence [and] normalized violence disowns compassion” (5). 

Consider the term “dehumanizing” itself—it denotes humanness is a quality that can be stripped away by oppression. And what’s left in the absence of humanness? Animal. Why do we relegate lesser value to the term “animal”? Adams opened my eyes when she wrote, “When people say, They treated us like animals…they are saying They treated us as though we had no feelings, as though we were not alive…they mean, I was reduced to literal existence, I could not do, I was done to” (7). Why would we ever subject another living being to that kind of violence?

Why have we pedestalled “humanness” above the needs of other living beings and the Earth itself? And why must we continue to climb the patriarchal hierarchy by relegating those who do not fit into the androcentric Anglo-European patriarchal mold —like women, people of color, gender-con-conforming individuals, or those who don’t conform to perpetuated heterosexual norms—to the status of animals, another oppressed group by a different name. I have to agree with Adams when she argues, “Human society takes from the oppression of animals its structures and treatment of other humans…All originating forms of oppression can be traced to our treatment of animals. Domestication became the pattern from social subordination; predation the pattern for killing and extermination” (Adams 8).

Adams reveals this innate link of oppression and its prevalence in our daily lives through everyday images that highlight the women-animal or women-nature connection that patriarchal hegemony has underscored society with. The following images are ones Adams has collected on her website. 

In this image, the caption reads, “It’s not acceptable to treat a woman like one.” It’s not a false statement, but why are we ignoring the big picture here? It’s not acceptable to treat anyone like this—slaughtered for human consumption and desire—skinned and exposed—pierced through the flesh to hang on a hook. The ad cannot even bear to identify “the animal” by name. Adams notes that “the most efficient way to insure that humans do not care about the lives of animals is to transform nonhuman subjects into nonhuman objects” (Adams 6). Adams defines this as “massification” (6) when we strip animals of their individual identities through terms like ‘meat’ or, in the case of this ad ‘one’ as a means to alleviate empathy. “When nonhuman living beings are converted conceptually into false mass terms to enable their conversion into products, we come to believe that their deaths do not matter to themselves. Animals are killed because they are false mass terms, but they die as individuals. They die as a cow, not beef, as a pig, not pork. Each suffers his or her own death, and this death matters a great deal to the one who is dying” (Adams 7). Even as this ad tries to do good by drawing attention to the way that women not treated as equals to men, it unknowingly also reveals the inherent hierarchical thinking that places women, like animals, beneath fair treatment deserving of white, cis-heterosexual men. 

This image acknowledges the hardship involved in raising/supporting a child while navigating life as a single mother. It acknowledges the disadvantaged position of women, but it does so by equating it with beheading. The usual phrase, “I’m running around like a chicken with its head cut off,” is a much more violent and disturbing image that we use colloquially every day. Does the working single mother face extra burdens and obstacles via her disadvantaged placement in our systemically hierarchical society? Yes, undoubtedly. Is that as extreme as a beheading? Look at the parallels between women and the hen, women, and animals. The working single mother has been consumed by the desires of man and then tossed away once inconvenient, the same way that a “working” hen’s life is devolved to forced reproduction and eventual consumption at the hands of man’s hunger and desire. It’s a picture all to familiar and a connection that’s too apparent to dismiss. 

And now, consider the “world’s manliest sandwich.” What is it that makes this sandwich different than other sandwiches that will set this one as decidedly more masculine? Obviously, it’s the lack of a bun. “Meat eating is associated with virility, masculinity” (Potts 13). In the bun’s place are two pieces of chicken. The entire sandwich is a picture of domination. And as we all (unfortunately) know, domination = manly. It’s a meat on meat on meat sandwich. Slaughted chicken for a bun. Slaughted pig for the filling. Cheese is a product of forced, unceasing breeding to keep cows in an eternal state of reproduction to commodify their milk. Down to the mayo that’s made of egg yolks. The whole sandwich screams violence and oppression, and yet we look at that and say, “Wow! That’s a manly sandwich!” It only goes to show how deeply ingrained toxic masculinity and hierarchical oppression goes–to the very foundation of our thinking, to the bedrock of society. 

In the ever-cyclical “process of objectification/fragmentation/consumption [that] connects women and animals in a patriarchal culture…women are animalized, and animals are sexualized and feminized” (Potts 13). You see it all around us in the images above, in the other snapshots captured and displayed on Carol J Adam’s website, and even in children’s television shows… take a second look at Miss Piggy. I want to finish off this post with another image to contemplate —I wish I could say “a final image,” but the truth is, you’ll continue to notice the constant exposure of the animalized woman and sexualized animal paradigm in tv-ads, billboards, menu signs, food labels, grocery stores, etc., etc., etc. around you. 

I used to work at a bookstore, and as a result, I’m no stranger to the Fifty Shades of Grey craze. I’m all for women exploring their sexuality and honoring their pleasure, and if giving up all control to a dominating person does that for someone, I’m not here to judge. However, this parody cookbook just didn’t sit right with me…and now, after being exposed to Adams’ insights, I know why.

“‘Consumable’ animals are invariably portrayed as feminine, as sexual–available to men, just like female human beings” (Kemmerer). A chicken–a living, breathing individual–was slaughtered, and its dead body was bound and posed to convey enticement, that the chicken wanted this and wants you to consume it, ravish it. In Lisa Kemmerer’s overview of Carol J Adams’ The Pornography of Meat, she included a quote from Adams that sums up the debasement captured in this image, “Meat is like pornography before it was someone’s fun, it was someone’s life.”

Here’s the trailer for the cookbook. An initial viewing might find it humorous, as parodies are meant to be. But now, it’s impossible to un-see the violation of a corpse—a feminized, sexualized, dehumanized corpse—that is trussed up and displayed for what? Privileged human desire. All-encompassing human consumption. 

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I’m interested to know your thoughts on the women-animal-consumer-consumed paradigm. Has Carol J. Adams altered your thinking? Do you notice similar images propagandized around us? What do you see as a way forward or away from the current systemic hierarchy we find ourselves amidst?

Works Cited

Adams, Carol J. “The War on Compassion.” Antennae, no. 14, 2010, pp. 5–11., static1.squarespace.com/static/54792ff7e4b0674c74cb719d/t/55dc8dace4b0ad76d7277cb7/1440517548517/ANTENNAE+ISSUE+14.pdf. Accessed 10 Mar. 2023. 

Kemmerer, Lisa. “The Pornography of Meat by Carol Adams.” Philosophy Now: A Magazine of Deas, Philosophy Now, 2006, philosophynow.org/issues/56/The_Pornography_of_Meat_by_Carol_Adams. 

Potts, Annie and Adams, Carol J. “The Politics of Carol J. Adams.” Antennae, no. 14, 2010, pp. 12–24., static1.squarespace.com/static/54792ff7e4b0674c74cb719d/t/55dc8dace4b0ad76d7277cb7/1440517548517/ANTENNAE+ISSUE+14.pdf. Accessed 10 Mar. 2023.