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mike: Ashley has worked in the movement to end gendered violence for well over a decade and
is currently employed at a state *** assault coalition where she primarily conducts national
*** and domestic violence prevention work. A preventionist at heart, Ms. Maier has managed
state *** prevention and education programs and grantees and coordinated pediatric residency
training programs in community health and family violence, served as an advocate and
support group therapist for women experiencing ***
and domestic violence and has worked as a psychology faculty and more.
Ashley: Great. So, as my presentation opens up I will thank you again for all of the great
contributions to this conference and for putting on a conference that allows a space like this
to be here. I think it is something that is definitely needed.
I'm going to talk about violence against women and animal rights and making what I call the
highly unpopular connection and, of course, I have to give a big trigger warning: this
is about violence against women (VAW). I have done my best not to use pictures that portray
a lot of VAW but there are some and, of course, what we will be discussing inherently has
to do with violence and could be triggering. Why am I calling this highly unpopular? That
is something that is important to talk about. I've been all over, this is really an applied
presentation because I have done applied work. So this is from the perspective of someone
doing the work in the United States in a number of different states, and I now work for a
statewide *** assault coalition doing national prevention work and I have to be very clear
that I am not in any way speaking on behalf of my organization in which I am employed.
I'm speaking on my own behalf here. What is interesting is we talk so much in
the prevention world about going beyond brochures and that is exactly what really made me aware
of and make these connections. The "Why vegan?" brochure from Vegan Outreach turned me into
a defiant daughter. So you may be aware, you may not, of this book Defiant Daughters: 21
women on art, activism, animals and the *** politics of meat" that is really about how
Carol J. Adams' *** Politics of Meat really impacted our lives and our work. I talk about
this transition and I was doing work against violence and when I became vegan I saw the
connections and I faced a lot of resistance. Things maybe a lot of us have heard and been
told this is a very elitist position to be able to be a vegan. Really unfortunate that
there are more shelters for animals than there are for women and things like that. There
really is a lot of resistance. Before we get into that, let's talk about what VAW, what
I am talking about talking about when we talk about VAW and the movement. I will keep talking
about the movement against VAW. You talk about many behaviors and labels and
a big point is that they really go beyond just physical, we tend to think and see a
lot of images of physical violence when talking about violence against women, but definitely
psychological, emotional, there is a lot. We use a lot of different terms and is important
that we focus on the fact that violence against women, which I often refer to as gendered
violence to get a little bit to a challenge gender binary and we can tend to use. I may
be using both terms in this presentation. When talking about gendered violence or violence
against women, we also are talking about things like street harassment, we're talking about
state violence against women and we have to recognize that while we recognize that women
are disproportionately affected by things like intimate partner violence and ***
violence and stalking, there is no one monolithic group of women. Our intersecting identities
really impact our experiences with violence. And just so you know that our latest statistic
here in the United States that we have are from the Centre for Disease Control from Prevention,
the national intimate partner and *** violence survey.
Oppression, it is what we refer to most in the movement against VAW agree that oppression
is a root cause of gendered violence and VAW and that is where we will see a connection
between animal rights and anti-VAW work. I really want us to look at expanding our
notion of gendered violence and I have done some work about this. We have already had
great presentations by Carol J Adams and Daniel talking about this as well but many of us
who are on right now, we can look at things like cartons of eggs at a grocery store and
we can see and know that product is itself gendered. We can also know that it is a product
of and really replicates gendered violence. We have female chickens, or hens, who really
if you go back to the very beginning have been completely manipulated so they have been
bred to have these reproductive systems that never were supposed to be producing the way
they are. But also they are in these battery cages. They are extremely physically malnourished
and they cannot move. They experience all sorts of physical negative consequences that
of course, also lead to psychological negative consequences. This is gendered violence.
For me something that was really powerful and had me making the connections, when I
was doing, I was serving as an advocate for women who experience domestic violence in
a hospital-based setting, was when I learned about dairy. Those of us who are on this web
conference we can probably look at this picture of what it is supposed to be a gallon of cow's
milk and we can see that is a gendered product. It is based on manipulation of reproductive
systems. So as Carol J Adams says it is a feminized protein. We know that when we look
at it even further in how it is produced, and this is something that my colleagues are
often shocked to learn about and I often say how can any industry that uses something called
a *** rack to forcibly impregnate the animals that are producing the commodity, how can
that not be gendered violence? With things that are a little bit more obvious,
we definitely see gendered violence behind them and inherent in them. This is a contraption
used to breed dogs and so female dogs are put in this contraption, they are physically
confined and then impregnated and on the site where I found this picture it said "don't
wait till she's in heat to try to order". That is gendered violence.
We can look at things like hormones. At least in the United States, something like Premarin
is an example of what we can use that's again predicated on the control of female animal's
reproductive systems and forced impregnation and physical constraint and lack of bodily
autonomy to collect and in this case urine in a very negative and uncomfortable way where
mares, female horses, are restricted from having enough water, they're kept dehydrated
so their urine can be even more concentrated to produce this hormone pill.
This is a picture of a faux fur coat, so I just want to be clear with that, but even
when we look at things like fur, we can see again the whole industry is predicated on
reproduction and we can really make connections about, in this case, there is *** and vaginal
electrocution to create this product and that is often sold in a very sexualized way, which
I'll talk about in a little bit. There are so many more and I really do want to encourage
you, it seems like there are people on this conference who do have a lot of expertise
and experience around gendered violence so I want to be encourage you to use the text
chat to add to what I am saying because we can talk about this for weeks and weeks. Please
do if you have any comments or additions go ahead and use the text chat to add that in.
We have tended to do is we've made links but they are pretty limited. So what I have seen,
I don't want to do a false academy here, I both celebrate it and I want us to go further,
is that we have made a connection to things like pet abuse. We have since I have begun
this work, way back in the late '90s, we have started focusing on the fact that people who
abuse pets or abuse animals tend to become abusers of people, too. We have started doing
things like really fighting for legislation and have passed legislation that includes
pets but are usually listed as property in orders of protection for people who have experienced
of domestic violence. We have done a lot of work around the fact
that pets are abused. We have done the work around human-animal bond, but something I
would like us to do is go further and look at how we can go further. When doing this
prevention work there is a lot of concepts or connections. One of those has already been
talked about a few times here so whether we are looking at one of the original books,Transforming
a *** Culture here, that really specifically looks at *** culture or a newer book, the
Macho Paradox, when talking about *** culture, these books tend to define them as cultures
that glorify and sexualize male power and dominance.
Jaclyn Friedman, who is well known in the United States at least for this work against
VAW, she runs Women, Action and the Media or WAM, as they call it, and she calls ***
culture a culture that gives license to rapists. A lot of us tend to just refer to it as a
culture that allows for *** or we can extend it to VAW. It allows for and promotes VAW.
It creates conditions in which violence against women can occur.
Carol, I think, did a wonderful job talking about *** culture and illustrating the connections
in the *** politics of meat. I want to look at it from the way in this prevention
work and what I am doing now, in the field, the movement or whatever you want to call
it, and how we are talking about this. One of the things we may do is we tend to
look at what's the foundation.
So, we talk about a lot of times what's at the core, and so we might look at a house
and say an industry promotes norms that are left in unspoken standards of behavior that
lead to those behaviors, and we may look at something like music industry and say certain
types of music promotes entitlement of women and that perpetuates *** violence.
The culture we're talking about here is ful of these houses. So, *** culture is full
of the industries and the norms that are perpetuating and allowing VAW to occur, but I really encourage
us to look at what other "houses" are there. There are a lot of ways we can make the connections
by looking further and taking a deeper look at norms and the Prevention Institute offers
size norms that they say they have found contributes to violence against women. And the culture
that allows violence against women to occur. I'm not sure if anyone can see the screen
but I I will read those. One is limited roles for women and there is
traditional masculinity, violence, silence, and power. If we think about animal industries
whether entertainment or agriculture we can really see how, we've seen already, limited
roles for women, while female animals as the reproductive conduit to get what we need and
traditional masculinity. We can look beyond that to some of the jobs in these industries
and how they promote hegemonic and traditional aggressive masculinity. Violence of course,
and silence I don't have to say anything more than "Ag-gag" and power to me is really important
because, and I am not sure if you can see the screen, but for the domestic violence
we talk about power and control being at the core of the behaviour and to me that translates
into this idea of entitlement which we see everywhere -- might makes right, I can because
I have the power. We see that in both sides, in how we treat animals and how we treat women.
And power is one that is really, really important and it's powerful. When we talk about these
connections. This is the power and control chart and those of you who do this work, you
know this has been changed and modified and there are many versions. I just put the original
one up to show. When we talk about domestic violence in particular, or intimate partner
violence, we a lot of different terms, we really talk about the core being power and
control and to me that lends itself well to the idea of entitlement which in my work we
talk about all the time. We talk about it like, we use the term, might makes right,
and this idea of who has a right to use in power and how do they use power and what is
socially sanctioned and what is not socially sanctioned?
That all contributes to an underlying foundation allowing for animal exploitation or violence
against women. If we are wanting to end both of these, we need to get to the core and we
need to -- I tend to use the house analogy more, we talk a lot about pulling up trees
from the roots and I don't really like that. It's easier to talk about maybe knocking a
house down or something like that. We really need to look at those shared connections there
and the foundations that are allowing all of this to occur and how those manifestations
of oppression really feed each other. There is so much more -- this is where I,
on my website, ashleyjomaier.com, with the blog , I intentionally left out my last post
from January because I have an essay on there about comprehensive violence prevention that
goes through these terms and concepts that I currently use in my work and are very popular
right now in work to prevent violence against women and gendered violence and I ask questions
like we're talking about comprehensive prevention but what do we mean by comprehensive? What
we mean by society and community and who are we leaving out there? Bodily autonomy is something
I of course always link back to Carol J Adams' work and something we really value when we
are talking about creating healthy sexuality and having healthy relationships and promoting
what we are for and not just talking about what we are against. We're for bodily autonomy.
What other industries are promoting a lack of bodily autonomy? I think we often leave
that out. False dichotomies, either/or, human or animal, we really need to challenge those
and also these ideas of worth. These hierarchies of worth that I think we do accept and I will
say that and if a little scary but we accept it in the work to end gendered violence and
especially animal rights work, we accept these false dichotomies and these hierarchies of
worth. It is one of the most frustrating things for
me is we talk about intersectionality so often and there is no one monolithic to women. We
have all have intersecting different identities impacting experiences and we are so strong
about intersectionality but yet we stop. We limit ourselves and only go to a certain point
and then we stop and this is where I think those movements really need each other to
really expand our notions of what we're talking about when talking about gendered violence.
And then consent of course is something that, I do a lot of work against violence and about
promoting consent and there are all these new-ish ways of talking about it enthusiastic
consent, just a lot of ways to talk about it. When you look at any kind of animal exploitation
how clearly is there a lack of consent there. My friend and I who are both vegan and have
done work about violence, talk about sitting at a table at this conference is where there
is a speaker talking about some consent campaign when everyone around us is being served the
body of nonconsenting animal. The resistance, I'll go through this really
quickly, there is the obvious, the shaming of women's bodies, calling *** hair fur
and fur is not sexy, and that kind of stuff. There's using and commodifying women's bodies
to promote our agenda, exploiting women's bodies, and coopting, not only the language
of the VAW movement, and that is something I hear a lot, but I can tell you that campaigns,
and the recent campaign look just like this one except for it in the end, ends up it's
talking about the abuse of lab rats and their experience, are seen as being completely co-opted.
So this one that I have on screen right now is projectunbreakable.tumblr.com, and I think
it was started at a university and it's where women or people who have experienced ***
and *** violence, hold a sign saying what people said to them, what their *** said
to them and this campaign about lab rats that some of you might have seen, was seen as just
completely copying that. No matter how much we know there doesn't have
to be an either/or here, this is about the experience of lab rats and the experience
of women and people who have experienced *** violence are both horrific, they both have
value in addressing and trying to end. But campaigns like this face a lot of resistance
and make our work a lot harder because they are really seen truly as co-opting the work
of movement to end VAW. This comes from in my undergraduate campus
we had a lot of painted on sidewalks that say, a *** happened here. It would be on
there in red. Someone's saying they cannot hear anything.
Can anyone else hear something? I'm on the phone, so you should be able to hear. It looks
like people can hear. Hopefully we can figure out with that one person, what's going on
there. So, basically I think that when I'm at and
animal rights conference it's hard for me because, I just want to point out that I know
this is that stranger *** thing and we know that a lot of the *** violence occurs by
people who are known to the person experiencing it. It does happen in places like this,
on sidewalks and stuff too. So I think about it as we have an approach in animal rights like,
this does not happen here. Not in my town! I have a hard time going to conferences because
when people find out what I do, I am suddenly an advocate. I'm asked to be an advocate,
I'm hearing people stories their pointing out what happens, and that man over there
is stalking me and I need you to sit with me and be with me throughout the entire conference.
So just to point out, it's happening in our movement and we absolutely have to address
it. I've had a lot of conversations about that.
Revisiting the five norms from the Prevention Institute, let's look at how our own work
from animal rights perspective may be perpetually those norms. Which only undermines the wprk
that we are trying to do so I wrote in a blog for masculinities 101, which is from the State
University of New York, I think on Long Island, they have a centre for men and masculinities
and I wrote about this masculinities and showed that, unfortunately, one of the responses
that we have had has been we are going to say vegetarianism and veganism is manly as
well so we use the same norms to try to sell veganism and how we don't need to be saying
things like meat is for *** and how that is really perpetuating norms of traditional
masculinity and that is undermining the work we are trying do.
A lot of times we say if they only just knew about speciesism, then everything's going
to change, I can tell you through doing a lot of behaviour change work, research is
that a lot of times we see that awareness and knowledge does not translate into behaviour
changes and action. Speciesism, especially I have found that when I bring that up or
when I've see others bring it up it just gets laughter. It shouldn't and I don't think you
should, but it does. What I am hoping when we talk about moving forward and making the
connection between VAW and animal rights is that we really focus on intentionality and
acceptability. I sometimes don't even use what I train others to do, which is to get
to know your audience. I have had people say and people who have power over me say, those
people who feel like XY and Z about animals, so those people who think animals are just
like children, those people are insane. I have an immediate reaction of I am one of
those people and reaction I get back is well then you're insane.
I just really encourage thinking about who our audience is and the best ways that we
can really get people to listen and take us seriously. It is unfortunate that we may have
to be a little strategic but I think we will get further in the long run.
One of the ways I think it is easy when talking about violence against women and animal rights,
the VAW movement or movement against gendered violence really is a feminist movement and
is a place you can make those connections and I found this very easy to show and start
with how products, how animal products and feminized proteins are sexualized and how
much sexism exists just in the selling of these products. That gets people thinking
about the product differently and once that thinking begins it kind of continues on and
that has been a successful strategy for me. We have different areas of expertise and for
those of you who know about public health, if you are doing work on health equity you
will see there has been a lot of talk about food justice and food deserts and that is
the place where you can get people started thinking about animal agriculture and food
and environmental racism and things that I think both the vegan project and the Food
Empowerment Project, do very well in making those connections. When I tweet about food
empowerment project's ethical vegan chocolate list, that's what gets most retweeted by my
colleagues in working against violence against women.
Also let's recognize and pursue opportunities. For me, being so deeply enmeshed in the movement
to end gendered violence I have been able to slowly and intentionally start making some
of these connections and having these talks. This is from a workshop when I was working
in the Pacific Northwest in the Washington Coalition against *** assault programs
at their annual conference and with the experience I've had I was able to craft and present a
workshop that looked at some stuff we're talking about today, which is expanding our lens on
*** culture. I encourage everyone to think about where you can help make those connections
and where you would have the incredibility to get in there and start talking.
When I was in St. Louis, Missouri around the time the US started the Iraq war, we had
a lot of war in Iraq "not in my name" signs that were all over the place. I found that
to be very helpful to say I know that organization just put out a really problematic campaign
and guess what, there is a whole bunch of us who are not on board with that. To show
and to share things like the *** Politics of Meat, Sistah Vegan and everything else
that makes the connection let's show that other people get it too and this "not in my
name" mentality is helpful at times. Also just live it. I liken this to a longer
time ago that a national huge feminist conference there was one other vegan standing around
and we both decided when we were all being served pizza we asked for a nonviolent pizza.
It did not go over so well, years later I was in the car my boss was in the same car
telling my coworker, Ashley's a great vegan, she just listens, and does not try to shove
it down our throat, but it was helpful to hear because she then went vegan so I think
that is something to consider. Finally build our community. Spaces like this
are absolutely essential. Every time I find someone that makes connections, which is more
and more every day, and I am so thankful for it as the years progress. I know how lonely
this work is and I'm feeling less and less alone. Let's continue to build our community
and you can connect contact me at ashleyjomaier.com, I have a contact form, you can just click
on that and it will send me an email, and I will correspond with you. Thank you again.
I think that this is a terrific forum and I will see if there is any questions now.
I think there is definitely an issue, at least here in the United States that we have a lot
of issues with being respected as women. Even whether doing this work I think the same thing
happens in the animal rights movement that happens in the movement to end VAW, where
when men get into the work and I am writing a paper about this rights now for a second
Masters program that I'm in, but we find that men are often we have a glass elevator effect,
is what it has been called in the research, and I don't know if you have read that, where
men are respected more right away, they're moved into management positions and so actually
it has been easier for them to talk about this. In my experience that has been true
and I have often had many male allies and friends who have had to back me up on things.
All I can really speak to is my experience and some of the research I have seen that
really shows it is easier for men because they are seen more as experts, just in general
and in life in addition to about this issue as well.