Women and Animals: Looking Back and Forward (a Legacy Digital Salon)
Edited by Emma Thiébaut (Université Paris Cité)
For its next digital Salon, Legacy invites short, reflective, or creative pieces of no more than 1,000 words on the past and future of the political alliance between women* and animals* (the asterisk, borrowed from Eva Hayward and Jami Weinstein, is meant to indicate that those two categories are to be approached with much interpretive freedom!) Close-readings of quotes by women writers, critical rewritings of emblematic texts, imagined discussions between two writers, musings on particular activists, short zoographies—all are welcome. The accepted pieces will be published on the Legacy website. Images are allowed, but you will need to obtain permission for them before publication. Send your propositions to emmathiebaut@outlook.fr and legacyeditor@wm.edu before August 1st.
In what feels like both a moment and an eternity ago (i.e. in 1995), Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan published Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations. Building on the sustained involvement of women’s rights activists in animal welfarism, they sought to prove that the liberation of one group required the liberation of the other. In 2025, their revolution is still pending. Once again in the circuitous history of our bruised world, white supremacy and patriarchy is trying to define the human species as white, and the white as uniquely human—and women, of course, are envisioned as mere wombs in a war of procreation. Animals themselves, meanwhile, continue to bear the brunt of exploitation and extinction.
Today, in order to counter the increasingly narrow conceptions of humanity enforced to our detriment, we propose a return to Adams and Donovan’s proposition: embrace animality and rekindle the nineteenth-century alliance of women and animals. What if we imagined, once more, the abolition of industrial breeding, posthuman utopias, and legal systems not based on the very discriminatory notions of property and personhood?
Of course, based as it so often was in Christian doctrines, nineteenth-century animal welfarism also allowed white men and women to position themselves as Adam-like shepherds to all the weak and vulnerable creatures of this Earth. As a result, the movement yielded its fair share of controversial concepts, and we need to re-evaluate the political valence it bestowed upon sympathy, the idea of a subjecthood indexed on suffering, and the ventriloquism activists often engaged in “on behalf” of animals.
Critical perspectives to consider might include those developed by Black studies scholars (among them Sylvia Wynter, Monique Allewaert, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Bénédicte Boisseron, and Alexander Weheliye), who identify a conspicuous absence in the history of political alliances between women rights’ activists and animal welfarists: consideration of the centrality of Black and queer women in the racist and speciesist processes by which the categories of human and animal are constituted. If we do not center Black and queer women in our conception of these alliances, they point out, we are waging a losing and destructive battle.
We might also turn to specialists in trans-animal studies (including Nicole Seymour, Eva Hayward, and Jami Weinstein), who lament the emergence of “trans-exclusionary feminism” – very much a supremacist wolf in sheep’s clothing. Such restrictions on who does and does not count as a “woman” reinscribe the rationalizing logics used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to produce the pseudo-natural categories of species and race that bind us today. They must be called out and defied, lest we give up on the liberating potential of difference and metamorphosis, and succumb to yet another panic about furries and “litterboxes in schools.”
We hope that, by musing critically, dialectically, and imaginatively on the past, we might stumble upon a posthuman way forward.