Two reviews of the book I mentioned. www.bn.com
From Bettyann Kevles - Women's Review of Books
A faculty member at the Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, Texas, Adams lectures on feminism, vegetarianism and literature. Her major contributionsin this book are a fresh discussion of Frankenstein, a literary icon, and therescue of old, even classic, vegetarian texts from oblivion. Unfortunately these contributions are embedded in a disappointing collection of disconnected examples, non sequiturs, historical and anthropological errors, and leaps of logic that left this reader breathless. . . . The raising and consumption of meat can be criticized on environmental, economic and medical grounds. However,I am not convinced that feminist arguments are useful to vegetarians. To form sisterly bonds with cows and chickens who are 'exploited' for their milk andeggs strikes me as ludicrous. Should we not pity the poor calf, castrated atan early age into a steer?
From Rosalind Coward - New Statesman & Society
{Carol Adams's book is} a very good idea. As she herself points out, notonly does meat have in our culture powerful connotations of virility and sexuality, but ever since the first world war, certain feminists have been drawn to vegetarianism. Unfortunately, she treats both these points skimpily and spends far more time on elaborating what can only be described as a bizarre (to be polite) 'reading' of the 'meat text' and 'the vegetarian body'. . . . There is a fascinating book to be written on this subject. But it would have to be a book which explored political links between feminism, ethics and the food supply, rather than simply asserting that feminism and vegetarianism are built on women's caring connectedness with nature.
FROM THE BOOK
Table of Contents
Illustrations 10
Preface to the Tenth Anniversary Edition 11
Preface 23
Acknowledgments 29
Part 1 The Patriarchal Texts of Meat
1. The Sexual Politics of Meat 35
2. The Rape of Animals, the Butchering of Women 50
3. Masked Violence, Muted Voices 74
4. The Word Made Flesh 94
Part 2 From the Belly of Zeus
5. Dismembered Texts, Dismembered Animals 109
6. Frankenstein's Vegetarian Monster 120
7. Feminism, the Great War, and Modern Vegetarianism 132
Part 3 Eat Rice Have Faith in Women
8. The Distortion of the Vegetarian Body 157
9. For a Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory 178
Epilogue: Destabilizing Patriarchal Consumption 198
Notes 203
Select Bibliography 243
Tenth Anniversary Bibliography 259
Index 263
Maybe these two books are better at avoiding "cultural radical feminist essentialism". _Animal Rights: History and Scope of a Radical Social Movement_ Harold D. Guither
_Defending Animal Rights _ Tom Regan
Tom Regan is the C.S. Pierce scholar no? My high school English teacher in my Sr. year is his brother. He was the only teacher in my high school to wear a suit with one of those chains with a watch attached. He gave me A's on all those essays including one where I quoted a Carl Oglesby piece from Liberation in 1970 ("Notes For A Decade Ready For The Dustbin, " reprinted in the indispensible anthology edited by Mitchell Goodman, "The Movement Towards A New America, " circa 1971 or so) where he said, and I agreed to my Mother's raised eyebrows that like it or not, Marxism-Leninism was the only coherent revolutionary ideology out there... Michael Pugliese
Michael Pugliese