“To Fuck Like Animals”— Race, animals, desire: what we can expect from vegan ecofeminism today

Other-than-human animals1 have always been used to justify just about any order of domination: from alpha males in chimpanzee societies to rapist ducks and hierarchical colonies of bees, the appeal to nature fallacy is one of the favourite reasoning modes of colonial, ableist, and patriarchal discourse.2 Recently, the supposedly universal sexual behaviour of animals (such as the imperative of reproduction, sexual dysmorphia, or monogamy) has been used as a foundation of sexual difference, gender binarity, and patriarchal domination; queer and trans bodies are therefore depicted as inherently ‘against nature.’

Virility, in this perspective, has been constantly reaffirmed and performed through the repeated staging of gender-based performances of animals by humans, such as cockfighting, dogfighting, and bullfighting. This allegiance to a ‘natural’ animal order is also evident in the resurgence of the term ‘alpha male’ in the discourses of self-proclaimed pack leaders in conservative/right-wing political spaces. What kind of straightening programme are we being offered here when animals are supposed to serve as an excuse for domination and hierarchical identities?3

Critical Animal Studies (CAS) is rooted in a more militant understanding of the animal cause, which its voices consider lost in the academic world to animal ethics. CAS claims anarchist, feminist, and anti-racist origins and does not perceive animal abuse as an issue separate from systems of human domination. Moreover, the anarchist, punk, feminist and straight-edge movements of the 1990s formed the activist and anti-speciesist ferment out of which veganism emerged as a subversive, anti-capitalist, and anti-authoritarian practice. Vegan ecofeminism10 is contemporary with all those movements and has increasingly theorised the links between sexism and speciesism: the way women were (and are) treated under patriarchy is interconnected with that of animals. Predation, rape culture, or the way animals and women exist under “the absent referent”, a term coined by Carol Adams – one of the most prominent voices of vegan ecofeminism – to help establish a solid vegan feminist theory.11 Under Western modernity, the adjective ‘animal’ acquired an ontological negativity, contaminating all subjects who have been placed on the wrong side of the human/animal dualism. In the late 1980s, vegan ecofeminism – seeking to engage in politics differently – steadfastly addressed that issue by reclaiming animality and redefining relationships to animals. Drawing on the experience of oppression common to women and animals, but also by harnessing the lessons of care ethics, vegan activists demonstrated that the forms of violence experienced by the two groups were a continuum. They also argued that any feminist struggle must aspire to a profound change in human mentalities, attitudes, and practices towards other-than-human animals. Vegan ecofeminism, just as ecofeminism in general, brought back the emotional discourse in the animal advocacy movement: vegan ecofeminists showed that the fight for animals is always embedded in a loving, empathetical understanding of the world that we share, and not only in logics or reason. This dualism (reason/emotion) was actually responsible for the current ecological catastrophe, therefore a new framework must embrace both, and reclaiming the “loving animals” argument that has been ridiculed by male animal ethicists in the academia,12 was essential.

In France and Europe, vegan ecofeminism has made little inroads (while ecofeminism is progressively spreading those last years);13 the recent translation in French of the founding texts of the Feminists for Animal Rights group (operating from 1983 to 2000) shows just how slow the dissemination of this literature is.14 But even within the original movement of vegan ecofeminism, there has been little intersection with matters of race. My own decolonial and anti-racist posture based on the study and reclaiming of our animality was possible because of, and against, vegan ecofeminism. Finnish researcher Kuura Irni notes that within Carol Adams work (one of the leading figures of the vegan ecofeminist movement), there is no real inquiry into the racial side of animalization. Vegan ecofeminism created a great theoretical base to understand the entanglements of sex, species, and race, but the main intersection that it really explored was the one between sexism and speciesism. However:

Animalisation and dehumanisation have been utilised, among other things, to justify violence against colonised peoples, land seizure, and eugenics, and in this sense drawing boundaries around the notions of ‘human’ and ‘animal’ is a profoundly racialised question (Deckha 2012, 539).15

It’s because the question of race has long been ignored for so long that we cannot argue that vegan ecofeminism is intersectional. Instead, it studied certain intersections, most often between sexism and speciesism, and the ways these two elements feed off each other under patriarchy, through discourses, power apparatuses, violence, and resistance. However, just like Kura Irni argues in her paper, it’s not because a large part of vegan ecofeminism has failed to take on the racial question that we should erase all the work provided by this movement and be forced to start from scratch. On the other hand, because of a poor intellectual background on the question (maybe a disinterest towards vegan ecofeminism or essentialism suspicion?), the recent rediscovery of the relationship between race and species seems to ignore the work of vegan ecofeminists completely and focus excessively on animalisation, fetishisation, and exoticisation, which are, for sure, well-known mechanisms of racism, but defintitely not enough to grasp the depth of the intrication of species and race. Indeed, restricting racism-speciesism to animalisation, or animalisation by racism-speciesism, is circular reasoning. Racialised individuals are animalised, and animalisation is seen as one of the most violent forms of ethical and ontological degradation since the animalised subject automatically becomes a lesser subject. However, even the denigrating gesture of animalisation may sometimes carry a positive connotation (a recent example is the online coining of the “golden retriever boyfriend”16). We need to find a theory that can hold racism and speciesism together, not as similar or even intertwined systems, but as unstable dynamics that allow us to reflect on race and species and the variations of humanity distributed through them – and not as entities per se. Queer theorist Mel Y. Chen proposes to move from speciesism /racism/sexism or any other “ism” to the concept of animacy, in order to break away from the framework of isolated entities (race/class/disability…) and touch on the variations of animated or de-animated subjectivities, building a theory along dynamic lines rather than fixed categories.

“To consider that categories of sexuality are not colorblind – as queer of color scholarship asserts – is to take intersectionality seriously, even when work seems to go far afield into the realm of the animal. Given the insistent racializations of animals, we can then study the tricky, multivalent contours of a communalism that includes both human animals and nonhuman animals, the border between which remains today intense, politically charged, and of material consequence, and run through and through with race, sometimes even in its most extreme manifestations.”17

Using animality as a lens to analyze colonial politics of sex and desire would help us take intersectionality seriously. Animals are not just a metaphor for ‘unbridled’ sexuality: they are sentient, desiring individuals towards whom we should be allowed to feel desire as much as empathy and closeness: such an act would eliminate ‘the human’ as the sole measure of value. However, the first thing that may haunt the mind when thinking of desire and animals is obviously the ghost of zoophilia, historically considered as one of the biggest human perversions.18 Yet etymologically ‘zoophilia’ means the love of animals; ‘zôon’ means both ‘animal’ but also ‘living’ in Greek, while ‘philia’ is love, a sense of camaraderie, and social belonging. In short, there shouldn’t be anything repulsive about these terms. As such, if zoophilia, now translated as ‘love of animals’, has become the greatest taboo of desire, how can we imagine any evolution in our relationships with animals beyond the scope of common violence shared with other minorities? If the ‘philia’ (love) in zoophilia appears repugnant, then how could we invest in ‘eros’? Reclaiming animal(ity) through desire will move us toward a new understanding of race and racism, that vegan ecofeminism, with its focus on emotions, relationality, and biophilia (another name for zoophilia), can carry.