Gendering Animal Exploitation

Particularly concerned with women's rights and representations, I found Dunayer's essay compelling as he compares the implications of sexism to Speciesism. Many "Feminists have been acutely aware of connotation, arguing that many terms denoting women come, over time, to take on negative connotations, especially sexual"(Gibbon 25). Dunayer explains that these types of metaphors impose a negative image of both women and nonhuman animals. Similar to Dunayer's views, author Carol J. Adams explains the patriarchal culture's authorization of eating animals. The oppression of women and other animals are overtly interdependent and meat has become a symbol for the patriarchal control of animals. 

Pop singer Lady Gaga justifies her outfit as a criticism against patriarchal
stereotypes claiming she is "not a piece of meat". 

I'll admit, like most people I thought this criticism of patriarchal language was rather trivial. However, every instance of this linguistic practice brings us one step closer to an oppressive state. As long as specisism has existed, patriarchy has similarly been entrenched in society. Early practices of both ideologies enforced human supremacy and patriarchal lifestyles. As men have become more politically dominant, it has become difficult for women to exercise political power over the language and discourse of today's society. The reasoning behind such language suggests that "Patriarchal men would not have linguistically appropriated humanness unless it represented superiority and privilege to their speciesist minds" (591). Apart from language, patriarchy and speciesism have also been applied in the utilitarian framework. Man's excuse for animal dominance is that the exploitation is key for the survival of the greater good of humanity. But "however one interprets it, whatever practical, technical, scientific, juridical, ethical, or political consequence one draws from it, no one can deny this event any more, no one can deny the unprecedented proportions of this subjection of the animal" (599). At an early period of human civilization, meat has been a valuable economic commodity; those who controlled this commodity achieved power. Affluent families hunted and dined with massive amounts of meat, whereas poorer or lesser off communities would rely on vegetables for sustenance. Our conquest of meat and "This reduction of the animals, which has a theoretical as well as economic history is part of the same process as that by which men have been reduced to isolated productive and consuming units" (606). Feminist could argue that to remove meat is to threaten the structure of the larger patriarchal culture.

Gibbon 1999 (Margaret, Professor at the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies, Dublin City University, “Feminist Perspectives on Language, Pg. 25-26)