Edited by Lori Gruen and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey
Bloomsburg Publishing PLC
05/28/2020, paperback
SKU: 9781501364143
Do depictions of crazy cat ladies obscure more sinister structural violence against animals hoarded in factory farms?
Highlighting the frequent pathologization of animal lovers and animal rights activists, this book examines how the "madness" of our relationships with animals intersects with the "madness" of taking animals seriously. The essays collected in this volume argue that "animaladies" are expressive of political and psychological discontent, and the characterization of animal advocacy as mad or "crazy" distracts attention from broader social unease regarding human exploitation of animal life.
While allusions to madness are both subtle and overt, they are also very often gendered, thought to be overly sentimental with an added sense that emotions are being directed at the wrong species. Animaladies are obstacles for the political uptake of interest in animal issues-as the intersections between this volume and established feminist scholarship show, the fear of being labeled unreasonable or mad still has political currency.
Afterword by Carol J. Adams
Reviews:
"Animaladies is a provocative, interdisciplinary volume linking the ways gender and animal rights activism are associated with sentiment and, often, insanity as a way of undermining its political aims. Sections address the affective labor of feminist animal rights, the linkages between disability and animal rights via understanding of 'madness,' and finally the entwined politics of resistance to exploitation and violence based on gender and species hierarchy. The opening essay from the editors provides a concise argument for the ways concern for the treatment of animals is pathologized through its linkage with 'mad women' and feminine emotional excess. At its strongest, the volume includes engaging discussions of the debates within disability studies about problematic attempts to inject 'reason' into animal rights through stigmatizing disability, rather than exploring the ways in which disability activism, feminism, and animal rights activism have all challenged the disembodied, reasoning subject... The breadth and novelty of the scholarship is worth engaging for feminist, animality studies, and disability studies scholars. Summing Up: Recommended." -- CHOICE Reviews, American Library Association
About the Contributors:
Lori Gruen is William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University, USA, where she is also a professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and coordinates Wesleyan Animal Studies. She is co-editor, with Carol J. Adams, of Ecofeminsim: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth (Bloomsbury, 2014).
Fiona Probyn-Rapsey is Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She is author of Made to Matter: White Fathers, Stolen Generations (2013) as well as co-editor of Animal Death (2013) and Animals in the Anthropocene: Critical Perspectives on Non-human Futures (2015).
Carol J. Adams is the author of numerous books, including The Sexual Politics of Meat, Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals and The Pornography of Meat. She is the co-editor of several pathbreaking anthologies, including most recently Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth (with Lori Gruen).