Messy Eating
Conversations on Animals as Food
Published by: Fordham University Press
Edited by Samantha King, R. Scott Carey, Isabel Macquarrie, Victoria Niva Millious and Elaine M. Power
Contributions by Neel Ahuja, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Matthew R. Calarco, R. Scott Carey, Lauren Corman, Naisargi N. Davé, Maneesha Deckha, Maria Elena García, Sharon P. Holland, Samantha King, Isabel Macquarrie, Victoria Niva Millious, Elaine M. Power, H. Peter Steeves, Kelly Struthers Montford, Kim TallBear, Sunaura Taylor, Harlan Weaver, Kari Weil and Cary Wolfe
Published by: Fordham University Press
Literature on the ethics and politics of food and that on human–animal relationships have infrequently converged. Representing an initial step toward bridging this divide, Messy Eating features interviews with thirteen prominent and emerging scholars about the connections between their academic work and their approach to consuming animals as food. The collection explores how authors working across a range of perspectives—postcolonial, Indigenous, black, queer, trans, feminist, disability, poststructuralist, posthumanist, and multispecies—weave their theoretical and political orientations with daily, intimate, and visceral practices of food consumption, preparation, and ingestion.
Each chapter introduces a scholar for whom the tangled, contradictory character of human–animal relations raises difficult questions about what they eat. Representing a departure from canonical animal rights literature, most authors featured in the collection do not make their food politics or identities explicit in their published work. While some interviewees practice vegetarianism or veganism, and almost all decry the role of industrialized animal agriculture in the environmental crisis, the contributors tend to reject a priori ethical codes and politics grounded in purity, surety, or simplicity. Remarkably free of proscriptions, but attentive to the Eurocentric tendencies of posthumanist animal studies, Messy Eating reveals how dietary habits are unpredictable and dynamic, shaped but not determined by life histories, educational trajectories, disciplinary homes, activist experiences, and intimate relationships.
These accessible and engaging conversations offer rare and often surprising insights into pressing social issues through a focus on the mundane—and messy— interactions that constitute the professional, the political, and the personal.
Contributors: Neel Ahuja, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Matthew Calarco, Lauren Corman, Naisargi Dave, Maneesha Deckha, María Elena García, Sharon Holland, Kelly Struthers Montford, H. Peter Steeves, Kim TallBear, Sunaura Taylor, Harlan Weaver, Kari Weil, Cary Wolfe
Introduction: Messy Eating
Samantha King, R. Scott Carey, Isabel Macquarrie,
Victoria N. Millious, and Elaine M. Power | 1
1. Turning Toward and Away
Cary Wolfe | 19
2. Subjectivities and Intersections
Lauren Corman | 36
3. Being in Relation
Kim Tallbear | 54
4. The Tyranny of Consistency
Naisargi Dave | 68
5. Justice and Nonviolence
Maneesha Deckha | 84
6. Doing What You Can
Kari Weil | 99
7. Waking Up
H. Peter Steeves | 112
8. Entangled
María Elena García | 128
9. Disability and Interdependence
Sunaura Taylor | 143
10. Asking Hard Questions
Neel Ahuja | 157
11. Interspecies Intersectionalities
Harlan Weaver | 172
12. Living Philosophically
Matthew Calarco | 188
13. Taking Things Back, Piece by Piece
Sharon Holland | 204
Coda: Toward an Analytic of Agricultural Power
Kelly Struthers Montford | 223
Coda: Thinking Paradoxically
Billy-Ray Belcourt | 233
Acknowledgments | 243
Recommended Reading | 245
List of Contributors | 255
Index | 259
R. Scott Carey is a grant writer with a PhD in Kinesiology and Health Studies from Queen’s University.
Isabel MacQuarrie is a Juris Doctor candidate at Harvard Law School with an MA in sociology from Queen’s University.
Victoria N. Millious is a PhD candidate in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies, Queen’s University.
Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is Canada’s first First Nations Rhodes Scholar. This Wound Is a World was awarded the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2018 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize, and a 2018 Indigenous Voices Award. His second book, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, will be published in fall 2019.
Matthew R. Calarco is Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Fullerton. He is the author of Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (Columbia University Press, 2008) and Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction (Stanford University Press, 2015).
Lauren Corman is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Brock University. She is the editor of a special issue of UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies, co-editor of Animal Subjects 2.0 (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016), and the founder and former producer of the radio program Animal Voices.
Naisargi N. Davé is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and author of Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics, also published by Duke University Press.
Maneesha Deckha is a professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at the University of Victoria.
María Elena García is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College.
Sharon P. Holland is the Townsend Ludington Term Distinguished Endowed Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is author of Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Duke University Press, 2000) and The Erotic Life of Racism (Duke University Press, 2012). She blogs at http:// theprofessorstable.wordpress.com / and is currently working on an investigation of the human–animal distinction, and the place of discourse on blackness within that discussion.
Kelly Struthers Montford is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Punishment, Law and Social Theory at the University of Toronto. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of Alberta in 2017. Her work has appeared in the New Criminal Law Review, PhiloSophia, and the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, among other venues.
Kim TallBear is associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.
Sunaura Taylor is an artist and writer based in New York City and the author of Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (The New Press, 2017). She has written for AlterNet, American Quarterly, BOMB, the Monthly Review, Qui Parle, and Yes! magazine and has contributed to the books Ecofeminism, Defiant Daughters, Occupy!; Stay Solid; and Infinite City.
Harlan Weaver is assistant professor of gender, women, and sexuality studies at Kansas State University.
Kari Weil is University Professor of Letters at Wesleyan University. She is the co-editor of a special issue of Hypatia entitled “Animal Others” (Gruen & Weil, 2012) and author of Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now (Columbia University Press, 2012). Her book Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France: Mobility, Magnetism, Meat is forthcoming.
Cary Wolfe is Dunleive Professor of English at Rice University. He is author of Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside” and What Is Posthumanism? and editor of Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, all from Minnesota. He edits the Posthumanities series for Minnesota.
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