Animals-Becoming-Meat: Embracing a Disturbing Education

• In Event: Roundtable Session 117
  In Roundtable Session: Thinking Across/Through the Species Divide: Nonhuman Animals in Educational Theory and Research

Abstract

In dominant consumerist societies, eating animals has become one of the most hegemonic and atrocious of all human-nonhuman relationships. In 2008, for example, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) documented cases of rampant animal cruelty in an investigation that resulted in the largest meat recall in the history of the United States (Brown, 2008). This specific case of animal abuse, which was not only morally reprehensible but posed a serious danger to human health, occurred in a slaughterhouse that provided meat to Westland Meat Co., the 2004-2005 “supplier of the year,” serving schools in 36 states as part of the National School Lunch Program (HSUS, ¶ 7). In this paper, I want to show how meat eating is a forceful educational issue that warrants critical analysis. I argue that understanding, and especially watching, animals-becoming-meat—that is, the processes through which animals are subjugated, confined, and killed in order to become edible food—is necessary to become aware of the animal AND human exploitation and violence implicated in the practices of industrial animal agriculture and slaughtering. I locate the educative significance of animals-becoming-meat within a pedagogy of visual disturbance. Given the great extent that corporate agriculture goes to conceal the brutality behind its walls, I believe we must be unsettled with disturbing visuals of animals-becoming-meat in order to begin to think critically. We ought to see, for ourselves, how whole animal bodies become consumable “pieces of meat.” Ultimately, this paper aims to question and resist power structures of animal exploitation as part of larger social justice projects intending to address human over animal as well as human over human forms of oppression. In challenging the cultural forces (I will detail these forces in the full paper) that promote animal oppression, educators help foster the critical energy, space, and courage necessary for understanding and for change.

Author

• Bradley D. Rowe, The Ohio State University