Sexism in animal activism: The Foie Gras Campaigns

Foie gras (which translates to “fat liver” in French) consists of liver taken from force-fed and force-fattened ducks and, to a lesser extent, gooses1 (gooses being more expensive and time intensive to exploit). While foie gras has been in production for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, its industrialization in the 1960s dramatically increased the number of animals impacted.2 Approximately 40 million individuals each year are currently used, abused, and killed for this specialty product, the majority of whom live and die in southwest France.3 Adams4 has argued that nonhuman animal agriculture is a deeply gendered industry, whereby nonhuman animals are routinely feminized in order to facilitate their objectification, butchering, and consumption. An analysis of foie gras production expands this observation by underscoring the gendered and institutional elements of nonhuman animal agriculture beyond biological sex, as the vast majority of foie gras victims are male. This twist further proves itself particularly relevant to understanding efforts to resist foie gras. As of this writing, foie gras production (and, in some cases, its importation and sale) is banned in many European countries, parts of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Argentina, India, and elsewhere. It remains one of the longest-pursued campaigns in the modern nonhuman animal rights movement. It also provides a revealing case study in the gender politics of anti-speciesism, notably the persistent inability of the movement to transgress sexist scripts in its effort to challenge speciesist cultural constructions. Foie gras comes from male ducks, yet nonhuman animal rights mobilization, specifically that associated with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), maintains tactics that both villainize and victimize women. Using vegan feminist theory, this chapter critically analyzes PETA’s anti-foie gras campaigning (predominantly that which transpires in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe) and its cultural implications for understanding both gender and species relations in the wider public and within activist spaces. Foie gras production aligns with gendered roles of male domination and female subservience, and anti-speciesism activists have attempted to accentuate this relationship using female activists as foie gras victims. However, they are also known to target women as perpetrators. Anti-foie gras campaigns, furthermore, tend to rely on sexist (and often violent) imagery and ideas about women. This is a tendency, I argue, that is deeply problematic in a society that is as patriarchal as it is human 563 DOI: 10.4324/9781003273400-48 Corey Wrenn supremacist. Gender scripting in anti-speciesism campaigning must be carefully employed (if employed at all) to avoid intersectional failure when drawing comparisons between sexism and speciesism.