compulsory meat eating

Of course you can always count on secular colleges to promote absurdity. One recent workshop at the University of California Santa Cruz was entitled: Compulsory Meat-Eating and the Lesbian Vegetarian Connection. The thrust of the workshop was how eating meat is as horrible as being heterosexual!! (The Christian Observer 1998)

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!