Poster of Sexual Politics of Meat Slide Show (102k)

Feminist and Vegetarian Author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory

Program Title - The Sexual Politics of Meat

Carol J. Adams is the author of the ground-breaking book The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory and the recently released, The Pornography of Meat. Adams’ lecture includes a dynamic and challenging slide show presentation that uses images of women and animals in contemporary popular culture to illustrate the concepts of the animalization of women and how animals used for food are sexualized by the media. A recent overview in the leading feminist academic journal, Signs, concludes that “As a genre, feminist animal rights theorizing thus emerges as one of the sharpest cutting edges of contemporary philosophical and environmental work.” Adams’s slide show dynamically exemplifies such theorizing by providing an ecofeminist analysis of the interconnected oppressions of sexism, racism, and speciesism. Using menus, t-shirts, advertisements, matchbook covers, and other ephemera of popular culture, the slide show identifies how images of race, gender, and the other species further oppressive attitudes.

Carol Adams has been a speaker at various colleges and universities including Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Columbia, CalTech, the University of Pittsburgh, University of Cincinnati, Smith College, University of Michigan, Skidmore College, Ohio University, Kent State University, Denison College, Southern Methodist University, Oberlin College, Cornell University, Kent State, and Virginia Tech. She has shown the slide show at more than 50 colleges, universities, and law schools.

Adams's work is widely cited, anthologized and used as a text in college courses in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Choice says of her work, "Adams's thinking is brilliant and original." Her work is featured in an award-winning documentary, A Cow at My Table. A rock group, Consolidated, devoted one track of their CD Friendly Fascism to The Sexual Politics of Meat.

Carol J. Adams has been an activist on antiviolence issues since the 1970s. After receiving her Master of Divinity from Yale University Divinity School in 1976, she and her partner started a Hotline for Battered Women in Chautauqua County, New York, housing it in their home for the first year and a half of its existence. During that time Carol was the Executive Director of the Chautauqua County Rural Ministry, Inc., in Dunkirk, New York, an advocacy and service not-for-profit agency addressing issues of poverty, racism, and sexism. During the next decade, among other things, she served as Chairperson of the Housing Committee of the New York Governor's Commission on Domestic Violence (1984-87); coordinated a challenge to a local radio station license because of its racism, misrepresentation, and disregard of FCC rules (this resulted in the first revocation of a radio station license brought about by a community group during the Reagan years), co-ordinated a suit against a city for racism in its housing practices, and began writing what became The Sexual Politics of Meat.

Since 1987, Carol has lived in the Dallas area. Periodically she teaches a course on "Sexual and Domestic Violence: Theological and Pastoral Concerns" at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University. Carol has published close to 100 articles in journals, books, and magazines on the issues of vegetarianism, animal advocacy, domestic violence and sexual abuse. In addition, she has contributed entries on "vegetarianism" for numerous academic encyclopedias and dictionaries. She is particularly interested in the interconnections among forms of violence against human and nonhuman animals, writing, for instance, about why woman-batterers harm animals and the implications of this. Her article, "Bringing Peace Home: A Feminist Philosophical Perspective on the Abuse of Women, Children, and Pet Animals," represents her approach to these interconnections. (It's in her book Neither Man nor Beast). Carol has worked to bring back into print Howard Williams's nineteenth-century classic text on vegetarianism, The Ethics of Diet (University of Illinois Press). Recently she received awards from The Greater Dallas Coalition for Reproductive Freedom and Planned Parenthood of Dallas and North Texas, "for her help in understanding the psychology of the radical right, for her commitment to women and for her brave stance against the tyranny of Operation Rescue."

Carol is a dynamic and provocative speaker, providing keynote addresses on topics such as "Violence Against Women, Children, and Animals: Understanding the Connections," "An Ecofeminist Analysis of Violence in the Home," and her extremely popular Sexual Politics of Meat Slide Show.