Animal Advocacy, Feminism and Intersectionality

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Animal Advocacy, Feminism and Intersectionality

by

Maneesha Deckha *

Abstract: The gendered and intersectional dimensions of the animal advocacy movement provide an important reason for “the animal question” to be embraced as a feminist issue and, concomitantly, for feminists to consider animal identity and human privilege as acceptable elements of an intersectional analysis. I argue that the animal advocacy movement should be regarded as a women’s movement as it gives rise to gendered, class, and racialised practices that impact the lives and experiences of its disproportionately female membership. Accordingly, the animal advocacy movement, including its central attention to species difference, should be of feminist and intersectional concern. Thus, the goals that the movement aims to advance should be understood as feminist issues not just because of the links between the oppression of marginalized humans and animals that existing animal theory has already demonstrated, but also because the majority of animal advocates are women whose experiences with animal advocacy is adversely inflected by gendering and other differentiating dynamics and processes. After arguing for this association of the animal advocacy movement as a women’s movement, I revisit some of the current internal debates within intersectional theory about is proper parameters. I do so to explain why concerns advanced in these debates do not foreclose the consideration of species difference as one of the sites/axes/grounds of difference to which intersectionalists should attend.
Introduction

Intersectionality is a theory and methodology that instructs its adherents to examine the mutually generative and integrative nature of social identities as well as the power relations and the structures and hierarchies of difference to which they give rise. It signals a commitment to integrative analyses that assume that social forces that construct difference come into being through each other and it resists unidimensional analyses that study identities and difference-based oppressions in isolation or to the exclusion of each other (Hancock 2007). Sirma Bilge (2010) notes how intersectionality as academics have practised it thus far operates on two * Maneesha Deckha is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Victoria. Her research interests include critical animal studies, postcolonial feminist theory, health law and bioethics. Her work has
appeared in the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, Ethics & the Environment, the Harvard Journal of Gender and Law, the Journal for Critical Animal Studies, the Medical Law Review, and

Sexualities among other publications. She has received grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. In 2008 she held the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Law and Society at New York University.

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ISSN 1824 – 4483

levels: the macrosociological level regarding multiple systems of power and oppression and the microsociological level regarding the effects on individual lives. Although some scholars have criticised intersectionality literature as too focused on one of the levels at the expense of the other, the theory in general has enjoyed widespread support. Most scholars working in the area of feminist studies embrace the notion of intersectionality in the area of feminist studies as important to understanding gendering processes and the lives of women (Yuval-Davis 2006, Bedolla 2007). As a concept, intersectionality currently enjoys a global and interdisciplinary academic reach (Nash 2011, Choo 2012). Indeed, some suggest that intersectionality has now attained the status of a “buzzword” for scholars to use to indicate a stance that involves recognizing multiple and intersecting markers of identity, as opposed to an additive approach, while leaving space for what this recognition entails (Davis 2008, p. 68, 75, 77-79).

Intersectionality’s open-endedness also generates breadth in the theory’s attention to differences. Some scholars suggest that intersectionality does not have to focus on particular modalities of difference, but rather can be broadly applied to understand society (Hancock 2007, Dhamoon 2010). Where the dynamics of specific differences are the focus, breadth is also apparent in the selection of differences that have been analyzed. Although the analytical focus tends to coalesce on the “race-class-gender trinity (Hancock 2004, p. 234)” studies have also included other categories such as sexual identity and nationality by focussing on transgendered identities and migrants (Hines 2010, Bürkner 2011). As Paul Scheibelhofer and Vince Marotta (2012, p.8) discuss, some scholars have defended this trinity as especially important while others argue that these three categories should operate as a baseline into which other markers of difference should be integrated given the particular project at issue.

This internal discussion on which differences should constitute the theory’s focus demonstrate its maturity as a theory. It is now sufficiently secure in its academic stature and expansive reach that theorists committed to it are comfortable identifying flaws and engaging in debates about its shortcomings. Other debates also circulate and concern further issues about how to conceptualize intersectionality and define its parameters; they address the scope of the theory and its methodology as well as the ways in which scholarship on intersectionality is or should be mobilized for political purposes (Bilge 2010; Dhamoon 2010; Walby, Armstrong and Strid 2012). These debates reflect a difference in comfort level with intersectionality’s conceptual open-endededness (Davis 2008). Some argue that it is this very ambiguity that has led intersectionality to be successful and embraced as a central component of feminist scholarship (Choo and Ferree 2010). While intersectionality’s unspecified boundaries may be one o