Against Vivisection
Summary of talk given for the Commonality of Oppression panel at AR2008.
What do strip mining and child sexual abuse have in common? Vivisection.
“Vivisection” means to cut into something that is alive. We’re all living with vivisection, from the dissociation of emotion within ourselves to the hole in the ozone layer that menaces our living biosphere. We slice up animals and chop off mountain tops, lobbing bombs at each other across the borders by which we have divided the planet into bits and pieces of private property.
All of this is founded in a way of thinking and being that ecofeminists like Marti Kheel and Greta Gaard sometimes call the “logic of domination.” It’s a logic founded in separation rather than connection, a logic in which sharp lines are drawn between culture and nature, people and animals, men and women, with one side of the equation considered superior.
What I’m especially interested in is the sexualization of the logic of domination, a sexualization that I believe to be rooted in the specific acts by which people gain control of the reproduction of animals, many of which are detailed in Charles Patterson’s remarkable book, Eternal Treblinka.
Until we — all of us, feminists, animal liberationists, anti-racist activists, environmentalists — confront that sexualization, speak about the sexualized violence that we tend to call “unspeakable,” think about how violence became sexy, then we’ll continue to live in a world where, despite decades of feminist activism, one in four girls here in the USA is sexually assaulted before the age of 18, one in three women worldwide is raped or battered by a male partner, and everyday women everywhere find thuggish men like Tony Soprano and Tupac Shakur sexy.
Sex and power. The confusion of sex with power. Reproductive control, whether it be exercised by farmers, husbands, or homophobes. This is the sexualization of violation. We must dare to see and speak about the sexualization and we must work to heal all the violations, the vivisections by which people divide themselves from each other, other animals, and the breathing biosphere that sustains us all.
In my book, Aftershock, I try to show that the steps by which we heal personal trauma — sanctuary, memory, connection, and making peace — are the same steps we need to take to heal our violent and violated communities and ecosystems. Making connections among issues — connecting the dots between rape on the dairy farm and rape at the frat house, between torture in the vivisection lab and torture at Abu Ghraib — is an essential element of that process.
September 6th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
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