Feminism and Animal Liberation
I’ll be lecturing on feminism and animal liberation at NYU on 01 November, which happens to be my birthday. The event starts at 8:30PM in Room 406 of the Kimmel Center at 60 Washington Square South.
I’ll be covering some of the ideas from my chapter “Mothers with monkeywrenches: Feminist perspectives on animal liberation” in Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? (in which I spell out the justifications for animal liberation from the perspectives of radical feminism, ecofeminism, anarcha-feminism, and feminist ethics) and my chapter “Stomping with the elephants: Feminist principles for radical solidarity” in Igniting a Revolution (in which I offer a feminist justification for radical environmentalism as well as a feminist analysis of property as violence), but I’ll also be sharing some unpublished reflections about topics such as the social construction of gender via animals and the role of speciesism in homophobia.
All of that sounds really abstract, I know, but I’ll try to do it as accessibly as possible with lots of chicken and duck stories as illustrations. Please do come if you’re in NYC that night. If not… well, I’ll try to type up and post the talk but, since I’m still working on typing up my AR2007 talks, not to mention my April talk at the Anarchist Bookfair, I can’t make any promises time-wise.
Speaking of accessibility, I need some input on a decision I’ve been trying to make. I’ve been working — again, slowly — on putting the full text of my articles on my website. I’m pretty excited about that because I’ve published a bunch of stuff in now-defunct print-only publications and it’s been kind of fun to go back and see what I had to say about things like the whole “condom queen” controversy that erupted when Clinton appointed Jocelyn Elders as Surgeon General.
My dilemma is this: Ought I to post the full text of the two chapters I just mentioned? On the “pro” side, I believe in free access to ideas and information. On the “con” side, both of those chapters are lengthy and a bit, um, dense for online reading. More importantly, I want to support Lantern Books (ToFF) and AK Press (IaR) for taking the risk to publish such incendiary anthologies. So maybe I ought to just post excerpts along with links to the books? I just can’t decide. What do you think? Really, I need advice.
Finally, speaking of birthdays, Kevin Jonas has one coming up on 31 October, so now might be a good time to write to him in prison if you’ve not yet done so. Coming back to the topic of this post, Kevin took a minor in Women’s Studies when he was in college. I remember having a sleepy conversation about that with him very late one night. I’m really sorry he’s locked up. He, Josh, and Andy all have figured out how to be all about the animals without forgetting about the connections among speciesm, racism, sexism, economic exploitation, environmental despoliation and other forms of injustice. Even though I didn’t see any of them all that often, I miss them so much.
I’m gonna go crazy or cry if I keep on typing this. Time to get back to work…
October 24th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Is that NYU event open to the public? I know some of their events are, but sometimes I’ve heard they get a little fussy about requesting NYU IDs or whatever.
October 24th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
I like the idea of just putting the excerpts and a link to the site to buy to books, maybe at least until the books are a few years old?
Happy Early Birthday! Are you speaking anywhere on Nov 9-11th near Brooklyn? I will be visiting friends for the weekend.
October 24th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
Johanna, the event is open to the public. Angie, I’ll be in Amhert for the Smash the State, Crush the Cage conference that weekend.
October 29th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
About publishing old articles, here are my thoughts:
a) Don’t worry about it being too dense. People who want to read it will handle it. Lots of people have printers and can print long articles out.
b) Do you have permission? I mean, do you retain enough copyright to do that?
c) It will get stolen. You can try to protect stuff online, but it only goes so far. People scrape content where ever they can. Lots of sites translate articles and republish without citation. So, if you put it online, just know there are people who will steal it.
d) Excerpts are great, especially if they’re well chosen.
Just my thoughts…