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mike: Sunaura Taylor is an artist, writer and activist, with artwork having been exhibited
at venues across the country.
She is the recipient of numerous awards, including
a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant and an Animals and Culture Grant.
Sunaura has worked with philosopher Judith Butler on Astra Taylor's film "Examined Life" and Sunaura holds an MFA
which explores the intersections of animal ethics and disability studies, is forthcoming from the Feminist Press.
Sunaura is currently a PhD student in American Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU.
Sunaura: So firstly, I just want to thank
everybody so much for putting this together and especially michael. This is really a pretty amazing forum
and I am honored and excited to be a part of it.
So I wanted to begin with this painting, which I did a year after I graduated from my MFA program
and I wanted to begin with this painting because it really sort of helped form and propel a
lot of my work in terms of looking at the intersections between disability activism
and disability studies and animal ethics. This is a painting that is a self portrait
of me with three other animals who also have my disability. So I am going to give a brief visual
description of it, in case anyone needs it. Here is the visual description: Four figures
stand or lie on a gray floor with an off white wall behind them. There are large yellow medical
arrows pointing to the abnormal parts of their body. They are in a row. An adult pig stands,
a black calf lies collapsed on the floor, a human, a self portrait, stands nude and
bent staring out at the viewer. A piglet lies curled on the floor staring back as well.
Basically, the more I looked the more I found the disabled body is really everywhere in animal
industries and I also found that the animal body is everywhere in disability history and in my
work in disability studies. I wanted to kind of have this up there to represent some of
the things in a visual format that I will be talking about in my presentation.
I am going to read a paper that I wrote that is a section of my book and it recently came out
in American Quarterly in a special issue that Carla Fitzgerald and Clair Jean Kim put together
on race, species and sex. So I will just go ahead and start reading and if I read too quickly
or speak too quickly please someone type in and let me know.
In September 2010 I agreed to take part in an art event at the Headlands Center for the
Arts in Marin County, California. The Feral Share, as the event was named, was one part
local and organic feast, one part art fund-raising, and one part philosophical exercise. I was
invited to be part of the philosophical entertainment for the evening: I was to be the vegan representative
in a debate over the ethics of eating meat. I was debating Nicolette Hahn Niman, an environmental
lawyer, cattle rancher, and author of "Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food beyond
Factory Farms". My partner, David, and I got to the event
on time, but spent the first forty minutes or so sitting by ourselves downstairs while
everyone else participated in the art event, which took place on an inaccessible floor
of the building. Our only company was a few chefs busily putting the finishing touches
on the evening's meal—a choice of either grass-fed beef or cheese ravioli.
David and I had been warned prior to the event about the lack of access, but as we sat there waiting
we began to feel increasingly uncomfortable. The disability activist in me felt guilty
that I had agreed to partake in an event that I could not participate in fully. My innocuous
presence, as I quietly sat downstairs in my wheelchair waiting, somehow made me feel as
if I were condoning the discrimination that was built into the event and the art center
itself. As if my presence were saying, "It's OK, I don't need to be accommodated—after
all, being disabled is my own personal struggle." David's and my alienation was heightened soon
after when we were given our meal—as the only two vegans in the room we were made a
special dish by the chefs (some of whom were from Alice Waters's famous Berkeley restaurant
Chez Panisse). The dish was largely roasted vegetables. As I was about to expound to a
room full of omnivores on the reasons for choosing veganism, I felt keenly aware of
how this food would be read—as isolating and different, as creating more work for the
chefs, and as unfilling in comparison with the other dishes. I entered into the debate
with a keen sense of being alone in that room, not only because I was the only visibly disabled
individual, but because, besides David, I knew I was the only one with no animal products
on my plate. Michael Pollan writes in "The Omnivore's Dilemma"
that the thing that troubled him the most about being a vegetarian was "the subtle way
it alienate(d) me from other people." People who write about food often spend a surprising
amount of energy deciphering how much feeling of social alienation they are willing to face
for their ethical beliefs. Countless articles in popular magazines and newspapers on the
"challenges" of becoming a vegetarian or vegan focus on the social stigma one will face if
they "go veg"—the eye rolling, the teasing comments, the weird looks. Jonathan Safran
Foer writes that we "have a strong impulse to do what others around us are doing, especially
when it comes to food." It is difficult to ascertain what role these
articles themselves play in marginalizing the vegetarian experience. There are many
pressing issues that face individuals who would perhaps otherwise choose to try to become
vegetarian or vegan, such as the reality of food deserts in low-income, and often largely
people of color neighborhoods, and a government that subsidizes and promotes animal-and fat-heavy
diets versus ones with vegetables and fruits. However, rather than focus on these serious
structural barriers, many articles often present the challenge of avoiding meat and animal
products as a challenge to one's very own normalcy and acceptability.
Those who care about animals are often represented as abnormal in contemporary American culture.
Animal activists are represented as overly zealous, as human haters, even as terrorists,
while vegetarians and vegans are often presented as spacey, hysterical, sentimental, and neurotic
about food. Even vegetarian foods become "freaked," and alternatives to meats are often described
as lab or science experiments. Since many animal protein alternatives are not traditionally
American, the marginalization of these foods as somehow weird or unnatural works both to
solidify an American identity (what "real" Americans eat: real meat) and to exoticize
the other. However, the abnormality of those who do not eat animals is perhaps best exemplified
by the name of a popular vegan podcast and book: "Vegan Freaks". The title refers to how
many vegans feel that they are perceived by mainstream culture.
My point is not to say that there is no challenge to becoming a vegetarian or vegan, but rather
to point out that the media, including various authors, contribute to the "enfreakment" of
what is so often patronizingly referred to as the vegan or vegetarian "lifestyle."
Of course the marginalization of those who care about animals is nothing new. Diane Beers
writes in her book "For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States",
"that several late nineteenth-century physicians concocted a diagnosable form of
mental illness to explain such bizarre behavior. Sadly, they pronounced, these misguided souls
suffered from 'zoophilpsychosis.'" As Beers describes, zoophilpsychosis (an overconcern
for animals), was more likely to be used to diagnose women who were understood as "particularly
susceptible to the malady." As the early animal advocacy movement in the UK and the United
States was largely made up of women, such charges worked to uphold the subjugation both
of women and of nonhuman animals. As this history suggests, not so very long
ago Niman and I would not have been invited to speak with any sort of authority on these
topics because we are women. However, Niman and I are also both white, a fact that reflects
the reality that racism is largely still an underaddressed issue within animal-ethics
conversations. Although, historically, middle- and upper-class white women have made up the
bulk of the animal advocacy movement, it was not until the mid-1940s that they began to
achieve positions of leadership. People of color have been even less likely to be included
in these conversations, let alone be represented as leaders within mainstream animal advocacy
movements. It unfortunately comes as no surprise that this legacy of patriarchy and racism
still deeply affects conversations around animal ethics, sustainability, and food justice.
Just last year, the scholars Carol J. Adams, Lori Gruen, and A. Breeze Harper were driven
to write a letter of complaint to the New York Times for inviting a panel that consisted
solely of five white men to judge a contest seeking the best arguments for defending meat-eating.
Repeatedly those who are given space at conferences, publication opportunities,
and media attention on these topics are white and male. Adams, Gruen, and Harper write,
"The fact is that ethical discussions about eating animals are permeated with sexist and
racist perspectives that have operated as normative."
Disability and disabled people have also largely been left out of these conversations, and
ableism has similarly been rendered as normative and naturalized. The disability community
has had a challenging relationship to the animal rights community, as epitomized by
continued debates involving philosophers like Peter Singer, whose works has denied personhood
to certain groups of intellectually disabled individuals. But even in less extreme ways,
disabled individuals and the various issues that affect us have largely been left out
of the animal welfare and sustainability movements, whether because of the movements' obsession
with health and physical fitness or a lack of attention to who has access to different
kinds of educational and activist events. As I sat in that inaccessible space at the
Headlands, waiting downstairs for the debate to begin, feeling like a freak in both my
body and my food choices, I thought about Michael Pollan and the numerous other writers
who speak of "table fellowship," or the connection and bonds that can be made over food. Pollan
argues that this sense of fellowship is threatened if you are a vegetarian. Would I have felt
more like I belonged if I had eaten a part of the steer who was fed to the guests that
night? On his attempt at being a vegetarian, Pollan writes: "Other people now have to accommodate
me, and I find this uncomfortable: My new dietary restrictions throw a big wrench into
the basic host-guest relationship." Pollan feels "uncomfortable" that he now has
to be "accommodated." It is a telling privilege that this is a new experience for him.
Disrupting social comfort and requesting accommodation are things disabled people confront all the
time. Do we go to the restaurant our friends want to visit even though it has steps and
we will have to be carried? Do we eat with a fork in our hands, versus the fork in our
mouth, or no fork at all, to make ourselves more acceptable at the table—to avoid eating
"like an animal"? Do we draw attention to the fact that the space we have been invited
to debate in is one of unacknowledged privilege and ableism? For many disabled individuals,
the importance of upholding a certain politeness at the dinner table is far overshadowed by
something else—upholding our right to be at the dinner table, even if we make others
uncomfortable. Pollan assumes you can make it to the table
in the first place. I looked around at the audience I was about to speak to and thought
about those who were not at the table: people whose disabilities, race, gender, or income
too often render them invisible in conversations around animal ethics and sustainability.
Safran Foer asks a simple question in his book "Eating Animals": "How much do I value
creating a socially comfortable situation, and how much do I value acting socially responsible?"
In many ways my debate with Niman was like many other conversations between vegans and
those who support humane meat: we debated the environmental consequences of both veganism
and sustainable omnivorism, discussed whether veganism was a "healthy" diet, and spent a
long time parsing out why animals may or may not have a right to live out their lives free
from slaughter by humans. Niman and I passionately agreed about the atrocities of factory farms,
and we both understood animals to be sentient, thinking, feeling beings, often with complex
emotions, abilities, and relationships. However, where Niman argued that it is possible to
kill and eat animals compassionately, I argued that in almost all cases it is not, and that
the justifications for such positions are not only speciesist but ableist.
As the debate was only an hour, I had previously decided that trying to talk about disability
as it relates to animal issues would not be possible. But after being in that inaccessible
space, I felt compelled to discuss it. I felt a responsibility to represent disability and
animal issues to the best of my ability—to represent a model of disability I politically
agreed with in hopes that some of the marginalization I had experienced would be considered.
Throughout the debate I tried to explain how my perspective as a disabled person and as
a disability scholar influenced my views on animals. I spoke about how the field of disability
studies raises questions that are important to the animal-ethics discussion. Questions
about normalcy and nature, value and efficiency, interdependence and vulnerability, as well
as more specific concerns about rights and autonomy, are central to the field. What is
the best way to protect the rights of those who may not be physically autonomous but are
vulnerable and interdependent? How can the rights of those who cannot protect their own,
or those who cannot understand the concept of a right, be protected?
I described how limited interpretations of what is natural and normal leads to the continued
oppression of both disabled people and animals. Of the tens of billions of animals killed
every year for human use, many are literally manufactured to be disabled. Industrialized
farm animals not only live in such cramped, filthy, and unnatural conditions that disabilities
become common but also are literally bred and violently altered to physically damaging
extremes, where udders produce too much milk for a cow's body to hold, where turkeys cannot
bear the weight of their own giant ***, and where chickens are left with amputated
beaks that make it difficult for them to eat. Even my own disability, arthrogryposis, is
found often enough on factory farms to have been the subject of Beef Magazine's December
2008 issue. I also spoke about how animals are continually
judged by ableist human traits and abilities. How we understand animals as inferior and
not valuable for many of the same reasons disabled people are viewed these ways—they
are seen as incapable, as lacking, and as different. Animals are clearly affected by
the privileging of the able-bodied human ideal, which is constantly put up as the standard
against which they are judged, justifying the cruelty we so often inflict on them. The
abled body that ableism perpetuates and privileges is always not only nondisabled but also nonanimal.
In the end I tried to share what I could about disability studies, how it offers new ways
of valuing human life that are not limited by specific physical or mental capabilities.
Disability studies scholars argue that it is not specifically our intelligence, our
rationality, our agility, our physical independence, or our bipedal posture that gives us dignity
and value. We argue that life is, and should be presumed to be, worth living, whether you
are a person with Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, quadriplegia, autism, or like me, arthrogryposis.
But, I asked, if disability advocates argue for the protection of the rights of those
of us who are disabled, those of us who are lacking certain highly valued abilities like
rationality and physical independence, then what are the consequences of these arguments
in regard to nonhuman animals? As the debate ended, I felt a sense of defeat
creep over me—not over animal issues but over disability issues. I had a strong feeling
that the disability politics I had represented would be misunderstood: instead of people
considering their own privilege as human and nondisabled, I would be seen as using my disability
to boost animal issues. The very first person who came up to speak
to me introduced herself as the mother of an intellectually disabled child. She was
both impressed with me (in a sort of supercrip way) and worried for me—like someone trying
to save my soul. "This doesn't help your cause." She kept saying,
"You don't have to compare yourself to an animal."
In some ways I understood where the woman was coming from. Individuals with intellectual
disabilities have not been treated well by the branch of animal rights discourse promoted
by people like Singer. As the philosopher Licia Carlson writes, "If we take seriously
the potential for conceptual exploitation and the current marginalization of intellectual
disability in philosophy, we must critically consider the roles that the "intellectually
disabled" have been assigned to play in this discourse." I tried to explain that I was
not really meaning to compare myself to an animal, but was rather comparing our shared
oppressions. Disabled people and nonhuman animals, I told her, are often oppressed by
similar forces. I told her, though, that to me being compared to an animal does not have
to be negative—after all, we are all animals. She told me she did not want to compare her
disabled child's situation to an animal's situation, that they were not related. Her
child was not an animal. I was doing a disservice to myself and others by making these connections.
The woman never got mad at me, as I assume she would have at an able-bodied person saying
what I was saying. Instead she seemed sad for me, as if I lacked the disability pride
and confidence to think of myself as anything more than animal.
If I had demanded accommodation, instead of politely following social etiquette and making
others feel comfortable, would my confidence as a disabled human being have come through
differently? I wonder whether, if I had arrived at the event insisting on my body's right
to access, would the confidence I have in my embodiment have been so unmistakable that
even discussing my relationship to animals would have been recognized as a gesture of
my love for disability? Perhaps my behavior would have been seen as disruptive, perhaps
it would have made others uncomfortable, but by demanding accommodation I would have insisted
on a different kind of table fellowship. The inaccessibility of the space framed my
words that night and led me to focus on the ways in which animal oppression and disability
oppression are made invisible by being rendered as simply natural: steers are served for dinner
and disabled people wait downstairs. That's what I got for y'all.
Liz Ross asked if there is a video of the debate available or a script?
(Question asked if there is a video of the debate available) Sunaura: We actually have a video of it, my partner and I, and we've been meaning to edit it,
but we are just getting it in good format to make it accessible. But we have yet to do that.
So, no, there is nothing available right now but, but hopefully at some point
when we have time and we actually get it together to do that.
I was actually more - I don't hear vegans talk about that so much. What I was more talking about is
the way in which, for example, someone like Michael Pollan uses that as an argument.
I was really writing in relationship to the idea of table fellowship and how,
according to people like Pollan or certain other people, it is really the bond that we have over food
and over eating take precedence over someone's desire to be vegan, or something. His comment
basically is that it is socially alienating to be vegan. I was not saying that I hear
that from vegans, I was saying more that I hear that as an argument made against veganism,
is the fact that it is a block to this idea of table fellowship.
I think my larger argument in this particular section of my book was really not that veganism
is a disability, that's not what I'm arguing, I am arguing that veganism is freaked. That
basically people who are vegans are represented as freaks in the media. Again, I am dealing with
much more mainstream discourse in terms of writing about people like Michael Pollan and
Nyman, these people who are writing for really broad, general audiences. I don't know whether
that helps clarify what I was arguing about. This piece also, I was trying to use a personal
example of dealing with access and disability issues and the ways in which I felt like those
issues intersected with the stuff that I was actually invited to talk about which was animal
ethics. In this particular piece I didn't really get into too much the heart of why I think
disability studies or disability activism and animal ethics are connected, it was more
a narrative dealing with the more nuanced particular conversations about table fellowship
and access.
(Question asked if this work is available online) Sunaura: It is available online. You can get it through American Quarterly,
but you have to have University access,
or I put it up on academia.edu so you can also find it there, but I am also happy to
email a copy as well so if anyone has trouble finding it.
mike: Okay, and just a last question: Someone was asking where to find more of your artwork. I posted your website
sunaurataylor.org, but if your artwork is available anywhere else.
Sunaura: Right now that is probably the best place. They're all kind of scattered
across the country so. My website will be updated when I have exhibitions and such.
That is the best place and hopefully it will be updated what my book comes out as well.
mike: Thank you again Sunaura. Sunaura: Yeah, no thank you so much and I'm glad to participate