In this article, Bailey analyzes the relationship between ethical vegetarianism and white racism. This plays out in the dreaded comparison of animals with people of color and Jews as exemplified in the PETA campaign and the need for human identification with animals in ethical vegetarianism. To support the viability of ethical vegetarianism, Bailey resolves the dread of this comparison by locating ethical vegetarianism as a strategy of resistance to classist, racist, heterosexist, and colonialist systems of power that often rely on (...) the assumptions of speciesism to ground these axes of oppression. The author carries out this argument to contextualize African American responses to animal welfarism and ethical vegetarianism. (shrink)

Religious thinking, including among Muslims, connects food and sex, as well as women and animals; both food practices and gender norms are significant for communal identity and boundary construction. Female bodies and animal bodies serve as potent signifiers of Muslim identity, as patriarchal thought sustains the hierarchical cosmologies that affirm male dominance in family and society and allow humans to view animals as legitimately subject to human violence. I argue that Muslims in the industrialized West—especially those concerned with gender justice—ought (...) to be vegetarians and that feminist ethics provides underutilized resources for Muslim thinking about ethics generally and food ethics in particular. Much contemporary Muslim thought about meat is at least as concerned with demonstrating the primacy of “Islamic” identity as with general questions about the formation of virtuous subjects and the development of good societies. This defensive concern with religious authenticity poses a stumbling block to richer thinking. Engagement with non-Islamic ethics provides a model for productive dialogue and engagement among parties who disagree about basic presumptions but agree on desirable outcomes, including the development of individuals' ethical sensibilities and the construction of societies conducive to human flourishing. (shrink)

The U.S.-led military incursion in Iraq and the subsequent occupation has been filled with myriad examples of the Bush Administration using misleading statements in an effort to win the support of American citizens, and in a secondary sense, the international community and the Iraqis. This situation provides many opportunities to analyze the use of sophistry and linguistic sleight of hand. In this paper, I draw upon the insights offered by Hannah Arendt in the earlier context of her critiques of totalitarianism (...) during the 1930s and 1940s, and her later critique of the United States upon the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the midst of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Her insights regarding truth and lying in politics shed light on what is wrong with U.S. approaches today. Similar methods continue to be used today since people have continued to be gullible to these methods. (shrink)

Feminist and psychological literature has long established a link between women’s often conflicted relationship with food and social discourses that reinforce harmful notions of the ideal female body and the need for bodily self-surveillance. However, new cultures around food and eating have emerged which purport to offer different ways to connect with food. One feature of these gendered discourses is their use of feminist terminology and ideas of empowerment and emancipation. This thesis sets out to explore popular cultural discourses on (...) food and eating by examining recent, best-selling diet books and cookbooks written by women and the iconic feminist texts that have inadvertently helped shape them. The thesis will argue that together, these food and eating-related discourses reinforce and normalise body-policing gender norms and body-centric attitudes, despite their broader aims to challenge these ideas. By viewing these texts through a feminist post-structuralist lens, and employing methodological tools from critical discourse analysis, this thesis attempts to move beyond individualistic, body-centric approaches that dominate existing literature. It aims to fill a gap in this literature and in current debate by examining different cultural discourses for the ways body-surveillance messages are normalised and perpetuated. It advances the idea of ‘food femininities’ to describe the multiple means by which authors of diet books, cookbooks and iconic feminist texts instantiate and reproduce body-policing narratives. It concludes that these apparently new discourses on food and eating, like the discourses that preceded them, promote similarly harmful, self-objectifying attitudes in women. (shrink)

In their recent book, Sherry Colb and Michael Dorf defend the following ethical theses: sentience is sufficient for possessing the right not to be harmed and the right not to be killed; killing sentient animals for food is almost always seriously wrong; aborting pre-sentient fetuses raises no moral concerns at all; and aborting sentient fetuses is wrong absent a reason weighty enough to justify killing the fetus. They also discuss strategies and tactics for activists: They oppose the use of graphic (...) images by activists on tactical grounds, and they categorically oppose the use of violence by activists in either movement. In the present review article, I provide additional support for theses and ; I raise concerns for their defense of thesis ; and I argue that their discussion of thesis is incomplete in important ways. Finally, I defend the judicious use of graphic images and videos on epistemic, psychological, and pedagogical grounds. (shrink)