I’ve been reading a lot over the last month or so, but haven’t been blogging about it. I’d like to return this blog back to its roots a bit and start chronicling what I’m reading, including some summaries and responses. To return this blog to a “database,” a “repository” of knowledge, I suppose.
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.
