• My friend Eric takes students affairs to task for not adopting technology quickly enough and pushing the envelope.

• The Atlantic discusses Stuff White People Like in Intolerant Chic, which concludes:

When everything is “political,” of course, nothing is. Moreover, this way of thinking is hardly a formula for the “change” so much in vogue and for the coalition-building required of a mass politics of the progressive or any other variety. Yes, yes, we’ve reached the highest stage of capitalism, and with it the personal choice and diversity so beloved of White People. But those who strive for truly radical—that is, class-based—political change must long for the days of a crude and relatively undifferentiated popular and consumer culture, when stuff was just … stuff.

• How does discourse around food and veganism circulate and construct meat eating as normal? Today’s “Living on Earth” on NPR, in which host interviews Dr. David Pimentel, professor at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University, about the fuel consumption around eating food. From that interview:

GELLERMAN: Do I have to become a vegan, you know a granola eating, you know, lettuce chopping….

[LAUGHING]

PIMENTEL: No. We don’t have to give up eating.

Veganism = not eating, obviously.

Wandering through the city of the Internets, considering various interests of my own, I stumbled upon a band I used to listen to occasionally: Propagandhi (wikipedia), a Canadian punk bad that espouses anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobia, anti-capitalist, pro-animal rights values. They fucking rock.

This song could have come out of John Stoltenberg’s work, as well as other academic feminist and queer theory (not that I’m claiming it did or even needs to):

I’m not going to try to tell you that I’m different from all the rest. I’ve been subject to the same de-structure of desire and I’ve felt the same effects; I’m a hetero-sexist tragedy. And potential rapists all are we. But don’t tell me this is natural. This is nurturing. And there’s a difference between sexism and sexuality. I had different desires prior to my role-remodelling. And at six years of age you don’t challenge their claims. You become the same. (Or withdraw from the game and hang your head in shame). I think that’s exactly what I did.
I tried to sever the connections between me and them. I fought against their further attempts to convince a kid that birthright can bestow the power to yield the subordination of women and do you know what patricentricity means? I found out just a couple of days/months/years/minutes ago. It means male values uber alles and hey! Whaddaya know… sex has been distorted and vilified. I’m scared of my attraction to body types. If everything desired is objectified then maybe eroticism needs to be redefined. And I refuse to be a man.

Delahoyde, Michael, and Susan C. Despenich. “Creating Meat-Eaters: The Child as Advertising Target.” Journal of Popular Culture 28.1 (Summer 1994): 135-149.

Heinz, Bettina, and Ronald Lee. “Getting Down to the Meat: The Symbolic Construction of Meat Consumption.” Communication Studies 49.1 (Spring 1998): 86-99.

In “Of Mice and Men: A Feminist Fragment on Animal Rights,” Catharine A. MacKinnon argues that our dominant discourse about animal rights “misses animals on their own terms, just as the same tradition has missed women on theirs. If this is right, seeking animal rights on a ‘like-us’ model of sameness may be misconceived, unpersuasive, and counterproductive” (264). She notes that dominance of animals is sentimentalized, that we can use the “like-us” model to experiment on animals, yet the “different” model to justify the experimentation model as well.

She writes that “The question is (with apologies for echoing Freud’s infamous question of women), what they want from us, if anything other than to be let alone, and what it will take to learn the answer. Instead of asking this question, people tend to remain fixated on what we want from them, to project human projects onto animals, to look for and find or not find ourselves in them” (270). Focusing on suffering might be a better model than rights, she argues, but it is also problematic, for the focus on suffering, on pain and emotion, has been used to stigmatize women and animals. “Fundamentally, why is just existing, being alive, not enough? Why do you have to hurt? Men as such never had to hurt or to suffer to have their existence validated and their harms be seen as real. It is because they are seen as valid and real to begin with that their suffering registers and they have rights against its harm” (270). It seems that men’s validity came before the acknowledgment of their suffering, whereas for animals, we have to claim their ability to suffer to validate them.

MacKinnon, Catherine A. “Of Mice and Men: A Feminist Fragment on Animal Rights.” Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions. Ed. Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. 263-276.

In some respects we all acknowledge the sexual politics of meat. When we think that men, especially male athletes, need meat, or when wives report that they could give up meat but they fix it for their husbands, the overt association between meat eating and virile maleness is enacted. It is the covert associations that are more elusive to pinpoint as they are so deeply embedded within our culture.

[...]

By speaking of the texts of meat we situate the productions of meat’s meaning within a political-cultural context. None of us chooses the meanings that constitute the texts of meat, we adhere to them. Because of the personal meaning meat eating has for those who consume it, we generally fail to see the social meanings that have actually predetermined the personal meaning. Recognizing the texts of meat is the first step in identifying the sexual politics of meat. (Adams 13,14)

Adams, Carol. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum, 1990.

This last spring, a few grad student friends of mine were taking Contemporary Moral Philosophies, and toward the end of the course, they began talking about vegetarian ethics. I had some lively discussions with them outside of their class about the concept of “compulsory meat eating.” This morning I saw this CFP for the NeMLA: “Queer Ecocriticism and Theory.” Immediately, I thought of compulsory meat eating, so I googled it.

According to the Appendix of The Nature of Homosexuality (Google Books), the concept isn’t new: there was a paper delivered at the 1998 University of California Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Annual Conference and Assembly in Santa Cruz titled “Compulsory Meat Eating and the Lesbian/Vegetarian Connection” (which the Christian Observer refers to in the passage above). Marti Kheel, PhD, also uses the term in her paper for the Pacific Division of the Society for Women In Philosophy, “Toppling Patriarchy with a Fork: The Feminist Debate Over Meat” (doc file), in which she writes:

Rather than attempting to answer the question of why someone should choose to become vegetarian, I ask the deeper question, Why do people eat meat? And why do they resist change? I do not attempt to “defend” vegetarianism as a universal norm to be imposed on all people as a moral imperative; nor do I rely on the model of autonomy, which presumes that people freely choose their diets. Rather, I ask, What are the factors that support meat eating as a dietary norm?

[...]

Meat dominance and male dominance are intimately intertwined as ideologies, practices, and norms; those who resist either form of domination therefore encounter similar obstacles. When people become vegetarians they are typically asked to explain their dietary choice. But no one thinks to ask meat eaters why they became meat eaters. An analogy with the institution of heterosexuality helps to shed light on this phenomenon.

Interesting stuff. A quick perusal of various journal databases didn’t reveal anything further.

EDIT 25 June 2008: EGADS! I just realized that The Nature of Homosexuality is some conservative book meant to explain what causes homosexuality. I started reading some of it on Google Books and it’s atrocious! The author got the title of the conference paper from the Campus Report, published by Accuracy in Academia, an anti-liberal, anti-leftist non-profit. Two of the three references to compulsory meat eating I found are anti-queer!