stevendedalus 's review for:

The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory by Carol J. Adams

3.0

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An interesting, easily readable text that suffers from an elision of major issues (race, non-Western and Indigenous understandings, privilege) and an overreliance on the same texts and overreaching on a few links to make a stronger thesis. But it's a short text that argues carefully and provides a good basis for further development.

Adams comes from a strong white feminist background that never quite reaches third wave. She has a hard time reaching beyond her own experience, capable of arguing against the white patriarchy but less able to subvert her non-patriarchal Western assumptions for why other cultures not absorbed by capitalist factory farming may have different relationships with meat and a less objectified relationship with nature, like say the Inuit.

The "absent referent" does a lot of heavy lifting, but the parallels between the treatment of women and animals as objectified outsiders is real, if never completely linked as equal (Adams recognizes that would be a much longer task.)

You can see why the clear prose has endured with its anchors in the Western canon, and it does its introduction well, if not at all completely.