Suchergebnisse

This chapter explores how the rule of law can support
emergent legislative proposals in a handful of jurisdictions
around the world to curtail intensive animal farming. Part
1 reviews the global emergence of these legislative
proposals to date and identifies their common features or
themes, as well as their limited success. Part 2 then
discusses the pliability of the rule of law to serve as an
agent of social change in general as well as in the realm of
intensive farming. It explains how the rule of law can be a
persuasive discursive legal tool in generating actual legal
regulation to address social problems such as intensive
farming and connects the analysis to broader questions
regarding norm development in international law. Drawing
on posthuman feminist theory, the chapter contributes to
the growing field of global animal law that explores animal
law issues through international law and transnational law
frameworks, by highlighting the potential of the rule of law
to challenge the legitimacy of at least some forms or
portion of animal-based food systems. The chapter seeks to
add to the developing conversation as to how to supplant
existing anthropocentric legal norms through innovative
deployment of new legal arguments in favor of animals.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part I – Beyond Property and Personhood: Contesting Legal Objectification and Humanization -- 1 No Escape: Anti-cruelty Laws' Property Foundations -- 2 What's Wrong with Personhood? The Humanizing Impact of Anthropos -- 3 Toward a Post-Anthropocentric Legal Ontology -- Part II – Animals as Beings: In Pursuit of a New Post-Anthropocentric Legal Order -- 4 Beingness: A New Legal Subjectivity for Animals -- 5 Liberal Humanism Repackaged? -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

The sameness logic inherent in many legal quests for equal treatment is objectionable for the differences that it suppresses. Scholars working in various critical orientations (such as queer, feminist, and critical race theories) have discussed how various equality-based campaigns for disadvantaged groups operate according to their own exclusionary premises. While this critique of equality advocacy's adverse effects on other Others is diverse and important, it leaves unexamined how non-humans are Othered by anthropocentric equality claims. Arguments about why animals matter typically measure animals against human metrics of ethical worth such as whether or not they possess a sufficient capacity to reason, suffer, emote, use language, make tools, or exhibit some other trait presumed to define what it means to be human. Post-humanist critiques can thus fortify, similar to the human equality discourses above, the very norms they seek to destabilize and displace. To properly impugn legal and other inequalities, equality campaigns on both sides of the human–non-human divide must abandon their visions of conventional humanity and the sameness logic that sustains them. I argue that vulnerability discourse is a better alternative to equality discourse to advance animals' interests in the law because it does not rely on the concept of equality to stake its claim. Vulnerability discourse, which focuses on the dependence that embodiment engenders, thus has a better chance of respecting difference and avoiding the problematic sameness logic and other anthropocentric premises that block juridical attention from seeing full interests and experiences of injustice that animals can have.

Posthumanist feminist theory has been instrumental in demonstrating the salience of gender and sexism in structuring human–animal relationships and in revealing the connections between the oppression of women and of nonhuman animals. Despite the richness of feminist posthumanist theorizations it has been suggested that their influence in contemporary animal ethics has been muted. This marginalization of feminist work—here, in its posthumanist version—is a systemic issue within theory and needs to be remedied. At the same time, the limits of posthumanist feminist theory must also be addressed. Although posthumanist feminist theory has generated a sophisticated body of work analyzing how gendered and sexist discourses and practices subordinate women and animals alike, its imprint in producing intersectional analyses of animal issues is considerably weaker. This leaves theorists vulnerable to charges of essentialism, ethnocentrism, and elitism despite best intentions to avoid such effects and despite commitments to uproot all forms of oppression. Gender‐focused accounts also preclude understanding of the importance of race and culture in structuring species‐based oppression. To counter these undesirable pragmatic and conceptual developments, posthumanist feminist theory needs to engender feminist accounts that centralize the structural axes of race and culture.

This article analyzes the competing influences on the federal government's policy and eventual legislative action regarding embryo research in Canada. Beginning with the events surrounding the establishment of the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, the article traces the diminishing importance of feminist rationales to the ultimate legislation regulating embryo research, the Assisted Human Reproduction Act. The article reveals the steady rise of pro-life discourse that has helped to displace feminist concerns about the threats to women's bodies posed by new reproductive technologies in general and, instead, made the embryo the focus of legislative debates. As legal debates around abortion are relatively settled in Canada, the authors conclude that pro-life arguments are enjoying a level of respect in the embryo research context and a political and legal voice that has been denied in the abortion arena. The article ends by briefly raising questions regarding the discursive impact of this resurgence on attitudes towards abortion.

This article in scrapbook form represents the endeavour of the eight authors to document a recent, collective, academic journey. The project was one embarked upon as a means to explore tensions between the ideas of embodiment that connected our work, and the rigidities of academic convention. Using various media, this article strives, in substance and form, to provoke, challenge and confront its audience into dialogue, while simultaneously asking questions about the limits of our own legal imaginations.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: Messy Eating -- 1. Turning Toward and Away -- 2. Subjectivities and Intersections -- 3. Being in Relation -- 4. The Tyranny of Consistency -- 5. Justice and Nonviolence -- 6. Doing What You Can -- 7. Waking Up -- 8. Entangled -- 9. Disability and Interdependence -- 10. Asking Hard Questions -- 11. Interspecies Intersectionalities -- 12. Living Philosophically -- 13. Taking Things Back, Piece by Piece -- Coda: Toward an Analytic of Agricultural Power -- Coda: Thinking Paradoxically -- Acknowledgments -- Recommended Reading -- List of Contributors -- Index