Critical Animal Studies, Thinking About Animals

Critical Animal Studies, Thinking About Animals

In the spring of 2011, students, professors, and community members met at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario for the 10th Annual North American Conference for Critical Animal Studies (CAS). The conference, "Thinking About Animals," was co–hosted between the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS) and Brock's Department of Sociology. Conference participants covered a wide array of topics through panels and presentations that discussed the links between human and animal oppression/liberation, gender and meat consumption, postcolonial studies, animal liberation theory, abolitionist history, social attitudes and prejudice, veganism, and activist repression. There were also those which focused entirely on vivisection, farmed animals, ... Show more content on Helpwriting.net ...Within this conference space and CAS as a whole, I had finally found a home for my interests in the decolonial politics of transnational and postcolonial feminism, politics of race and culture, and narratives about animals' agency and resistance. My presentation, "A Transnational Feminist Critique of the U.S. Slaughterhouse System," discussed how both the animals killed in slaughterhouses and the undocumented workers employed there are exploited by animal agribusiness and relegated to the margins of society. Inspired by Sara Ahmed's concept of the "stranger," a paradoxical figure who is perceived as strange due to their race and otherness, I argued that human and nonhuman others are perceived as unlawful intruders due to both racism and speciesism. Thus, they are expelled from the "white, human, and civilized" community to maintain social hierarchies and private property. The presentation included a slide of a cow escaping from a slaughterhouse into an urban neighborhood. Showing the complexity of human–animal encounters, the cow, who was later named Molly, was both removed as an unlawful intruder from the community into which she fled, but also invoked public affection (a ballad honoring her can be found on youtube). A decolonial method of studying animal resistance attempts to read documents from the perspective of nonhuman animals such as Molly and recognizes the centrality of capitalist globalization and white human supremacy in oppressive social

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