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Rheya Linden
Department of Political Science, University of Melbourne

'Feminism, Pornography and the Sexual (Ab)use of Non-human Animals'

My paper explores the challenge to contemporary feminist discourse presented by the pornographic objectification and sexual abuse of non-human animals.

Although anecdotal evidence suggests that human-to-animal sexual encounters have been a perennial form of animal abuse this paper's main focus is the increasingly alarming tendency by the contemporary sex and pornography industry to overtly commodify and commercially promote the sexual exploitation of non-human animals as a legitimate part of its repertoire.

Deriving material from American and Australian police files, animal pornography chat sites and case studies presented by animal welfare bodies, notably the Humane Society of the U.S.A., my paper argues that the 'psychic violence in pornography is unbearable in and of itself' acting 'like a bludgeon until one's sensibility is pummelled flat' (Andrea Dworkin, [1978] 'Pornography and Grief' in Letters From a War Zone, 1988: 23). The 'pummelling' is contrived through the salacious dialogue of the animal pornographer that has personal, cultural and political effects beyond the identity or fate of his animal victim. It is a wake -up call to Feminist Pornography Theory.

The Ecofeminist position of Carol Adams and others makes a strong case for the connection between sexual violation of women and the culturally-sanitised violence against non-human animals by identifying 'a structure of overlapping but absent referents' linking 'violence against women and animals.' through which 'patriarchal values become institutionalised'(Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, 1990: 42). In 'images of animal slaughter, erotic overtones suggest that women are the absent referent. If animals are the absent referent in the phrase 'the butchering of women', women are the absent referent in the phrase 'the rape of animals' (Adams, 43).

Aligned with Carol Adams' position my paper contends that we are discomforted, as women and feminists, because we cannot but empathise with the debasement, objectification and non-consensual violation that characterises the sexual abuse of animals:. In so far as through ' the structure of the absent referent, a dialectic of absence and presence of oppressed groups occurs' contemporary feminism is challenged to encompass advocacy for animal victims of sexual abuse.

My paper finally argues that contemporary feminists cannot sidestep a more disturbing challenge: that where the victims of sexual violence are non-human animals most of us are in collusion with dominant patriarchal culture. Whilst the animal persists as a metaphor for masking aberrant masculinity's desire for the consumption of women's flesh, in as much as we all partake of the traffic in animal flesh, skins and body parts, the sexual use and abuse of animals becomes a mere detail of the landscape of normalised violence: 'feminists, among others, appropriate the metaphor of butchering without acknowledging the originating oppression of animals that generates the power of the metaphor.' (Adams, 43) Without resolving this apparent collusion with patriarchy, contemporary feminism risks remaining flawed by femocentric speciesism.

Bio: Born in Cyprus I was wrenched from the time-honoured familiarity of village life to land on Australia's shores in the mid 1950s, blinking with culture shock.
After a gruelling sea voyage, most of which I spent delirious in the ship's hospital suffering the aftermath of whooping cough, I felt temporarily defeated by illness and the conflicting emotions of migratory experience, I had my mother, father and younger sister but grieved the loss of the extended family that not only included my entire village but neighbouring villages and towns. The Cypriot cultural experience is grounded upon who is blood related to whom.
Swiftly after our arrival I found myself in hospital again for a tonsilectomy. This experience, worsened by my total lack of English and tragically compounding my new-found loneliness, also unexpectedly became instrumental in demonstrating to me the political power of direct action. My parents arrived to visit me immediately after the operation only to be told by hospital staff that they must return at normal visiting hours. They heard, or thought they heard me sobbing as they stood baffled in the corridors of the small hospital. My parents, with their characteristically peasant pragmatism circumnavigated the rooms at the hospital until they found an open window, climbed in and made their way to my bedside. Eventually they were discovered but not, to my relief, ejected. Direct action based on the unassailable ethic of care thus became the central motif of my life. It is the one important lesson I have imparted to my three, now adult, daughters.
Throughout my schooling and tertiary education social movements identified with direct action strategy became my means of developing a political consciousness based on activism. I became involved in the anti-war movement, People for Nuclear Disarmament, feminism, Greenpeace and, finally, animal liberation. From 1995 to 2001 I served as campaign director for Animal Liberation Victoria until founding Animal Active: The Australian Animal Rights Network, a nation direct-action based advocacy group. I am currently Animal Active's campaign director. These days I balance practice with theory by researching towards a PhD in the Political Science Department at Melbourne University. My research focus is an emerging feminist ethic of care within the Australian animal liberation movement.

<rlinden@unimelb.edu.au>