#sunaura taylor

[closet-keys]

"Where or what is my natural body? At what point--if ever--did I have one? My disability was caused by U.S. military pollution in the town where I was born. Everything about my story is typical: the military and its industries secretly dumping toxic chemicals in unlined pits in the ground for decades; the poor, largely nonwhite neighborhoods that were affected; and the fact that the pollution was directly poisoning the lands of the Tohono O'Odham Nation. My body was formed with the help of toxic chemicals, heavy metals, airplane degreasers--the mundane detritus of militarization. It is hard for me to imagine my 'natural' body--I never had a 'natural' body to imagine. Because my mother unknowingly drank toxic waste from the faucet in our kitchen, as a fetus I was already being altered by society, by culture, by 'man-made' products. Does this make me altogether unnatural? […] I see my own body as inseparable from human intervention--but what body isn't? In a time when honeybees are disappearing and polar bears are drowning due to humans' impact on the environment, it's easy to appreciate how whole ecosystems are affected by human society. More to my point, however, is the reality that we can never see nature through lenses that are not our own; we can never separate something called 'nature' from our human perceptions of it. Even my perception that my imagined pre-surgery body would be more challenging than the one I live in post-surgery is entangled in deeply held assumptions about how a body should naturally look, move, and be in space. But what is this 'nature' on which my judgements have been based? And how have I defined it? The idea of a 'state of nature,' a nature before or without human culture, is a powerful one. It has informed our philosophical theories, our political systems, and our opinions about which bodies we deem livable and capable of pleasure, and which we deem exploitable, consumable, and edible. But is this thing we call nature actually justifying these judgements and distinctions, or are we?"

-Sunaura Taylor

[librarycards]

Nevertheless, the fact that some vegans can be annoying, misguided, or worse, is not a reason for people on the left to dismiss the question of animal liberation or to grant some of the world’s largest corporations a free pass. (If being annoying were the litmus test for leftists, we’d have a small cohort indeed.) In addition to relentlessly critiquing and combating objectionable business practices, we believe that feminists and anti-capitalists have a duty to ask an even more profound question: What grounds our species’ right to commodify and dispossess other sentient beings? What gives our species the right to violently exploit another animal’s sexual and reproductive capacities in the service of capital?

[...]

[W]e see veganism as “an act of the imagination,” a beginning and not an end in itself. It is an aspirational category, an acknowledgement of values that cannot be fully manifested in the world as it currently exists. Refusing to consume animal products is not an act of negation, but a proactive commitment to working to usher in a more emancipatory, egalitarian, and ecologically sustainable society. This process of structural transformation can be aided by a shift in self-understanding. Identifying with other creatures — recognizing Gunda and her piglets as fellow creatures not commodities — while still honoring our myriad differences, is one way to challenge capitalism’s perennial politics of divide and conquer.

Astra & Sunaura Taylor, Our Animals, Ourselves: The Socialist Feminist Case for Animal Liberation.

[coldalbion]

The body politics – a philosophical stroll with Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor | Aeon Videos

What being a body means in the world: a philosophical stroll through San Francisco with Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor

I'd not seen this before. Really nice.

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

3.2: Thinking About How We Think About Animals with Dr Chloë Taylor

Today’s episode is all about animal ethics—or do we mean critical animal studies? @arielkroon discusses this linguistic nuance and the differences between them (and much, much more!) with Dr Chloë Taylor, professor of women and gender studies at University of Alberta.

Today’s episode is all about animal ethics—or do we mean critical animal studies? Ariel discusses this linguistic nuance and the difference between them (and much, much more!) with Dr Chloë Taylor, professor of women and gender studies at the University of Alberta. Dr Taylor has been involved in a five-year-long project researching the “Intersections of Animality” and is a trained philosopher who works in gender studies, and sees a lot of intersections between the way that we think about and treat animals and the way that we think about and treat minoritized subjects. Come join us for a thought-provoking and highly educational discussion here!

Links

Dr Chloë Taylor’s profile at University of Alberta 

Peter Singer and Tom Regan

North American Association for Critical Animal Studies

Where Disability Rights and Animal Rights Meet: A Conversation with Sunaura Taylor

Making Kin: An Interview with Donna Haraway 

Auroch de-extinction and rewilding

Connect with Solarpunk Presents Podcast on Twitter, Mastodon, or at our blog.

Connect with Ariel at her blog, on Twitter at @arielletje, and on Mastodon.

Connect with Christina at her blog, on Twitter, and on Mastodon

Support the show on Patreon or make a one-time donation via PayPal.

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[christinareading]

“Many disabled people argue that disability is not simply a medical problem; it is a social justice one. This is not to say that disabled people don’t sometimes need doctors and medical contributions. Rather, it is to say that medicine is not the only, or even the best, framework for understanding disability. Disability activists and scholars have countered medicalization with other models of disability, the most established being ‘the social model of disability,’ which argues that disability is not caused by impairment, but by the way society is organized. [18]

Consider the simple example of our daily movements through our cities and towns, entering and exiting buildings, stepping over curbs, getting on buses. If someone cannot step up onto a curbside, is that marginalizing fact the fault of the person’s body? What about a bus that is equipped with stairs but not a ramp or lift? What about crossing lights that visually signal that it’s safe to move across the street but don’t beep or otherwise signal it through sound? Ableism encourages us to understand one technology as normal and another as specialized. We are so used to technologies and structures such as steps and staircases that they become almost natural to us. But curbs are no more natural than curb cuts, and blinking lights no more natural than beeping sounds.

Access is also a question of which cognitive characteristics are privileged and supported. Many simple things can give those with intellectual and psychological disabilities (as well as those with other kinds of disabilities, such as chronic illness) access to environments they would otherwise be left out of. In workplace and school environments things such as access to paraprofessional, assistive technologies, extra breaks, more flexible means of communication (such as e-mail, telephone, online chat, or in-person meetings), changes in lighting, and scent-free and chemical-free policies can make the difference between a completely inaccessible environment and one open to more people. [19]

None of this is to say that access is simple or easy—access needs are vast and various—but it bears remembering that our environments have been built based on assumptions about whose bodies will be participating in them. Legacies of oppression shape the way our social landscapes are structured.”

—Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (2018), Sunaura Taylor, pages 46–48

18. See Michael Oliver, The Politics of Disablement: A Sociological Approach (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990).

19. Margaret Price, Mad at School (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 134.

[crippleprophet]

“To crip something does not mean to break it but to radically and creatively invest it with disability history, politics, and pride while simultaneously questioning paradigms of independence, normalcy, and medicalization.”

—Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

[bvbuntin]

Book Review: Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation by Sunaura Taylor

Sunaura Taylor's Beasts of Burden dives deep into the intersectional oppressions of the disability community and animals. The human/animal binary that is so ingrained within us contributes to forms of human oppression alongside animal oppression. Taylor takes on big names like Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, and Temple Grandin, demonstrating how their arguments in support of animal exploitation (or even against it) draw from ideas about disability as a state of shame, dependency, and a lack of traits that lead to a loss in quality of life. Challenging these assumptions, Taylor asserts that a rethinking of what it means to be disabled can be a source of pride and interdependent flourishing. By embracing a system of vulnerability, care, and empathy, we can challenge systems that exploit and exclude and foster an appreciation for the existence and experience of so many ways of being in the world today.

Taylor tops off her well-developed arguments with her own experiences as a person with disability and her research into animal exploitation—an insightful breath of fresh air in a world which often favors apparent objectivity over subjectivity, closing off many avenues of meaning and identity. Taylor joins other ecofeminists in building an ethic of care to address the individual needs of all beings, regardless of ability or species.

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in challenging ableism or speciesism or pursuing a theory of intersectional activism. Taylor’s academic writing is entirely accessible to the casual reader and offers moments of heart-felt empathy and wry humor. This is an incredible book with strong potential in an age of exploitation and exclusion.

Add this book to your reading list!

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

To satisfy the increasing demand for cheap meat and eggs, chickens have been bred to grow twice as fast as they usually would, leaving them with bones and joints that cannot bear the weight of their massive forms. A battery hen, whose sole role is to lay eggs, produces around 250 eggs a year, far more than the sixty or so her body is meant to handle. The constant egg production combined with her complete inability to exercise make her prone to osteoporosis and broken bones. It is not only chickens who experience disabilities and illness on industrialized farms. At least 60 percent of dairy cows experience lameness, and 35 percent experience udder mastitis, a potentially fatal inflammation of the udder tissue. Cows used for milk production are kept either continuously pregnant or milking, their calves taken away within hours or days of birth. They are bred to produce far more milk than their calves would need. As the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) reports, “On average, a U.S. dairy cow produced 9.193 kg (20.267 lb) of milk in 2007, more than double the per-cow milk yield in 1967 and 47% more than the per-cow milk yield in 1987. [...] Even though the number of cows in the dairy industry declined from 1987 to 2007, the total production of milk increased by 30%.” As with battery hens, this overproduction leaves cows susceptible to limping, weak limbs, and broken bones, as they must walk with an unusual gait to carry such large and heavy udders. 

- Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation