Review by: Steve Baker
University of Central Lancashire, United Kingdom

Carol J. Adams
Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals
New York: Continuum, 1994. 271 pp. $24.95.

Lynda Birke
Feminism, Animals and Science: The Naming of the Shrew
Philadelphia: Open University, 1994. viii, 167 pp. $23.00 paper.

Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan, Eds.
Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations
Durham: Duke University, 1995. ix, 374 pp. $16.95.

The brief I was given for this review essay was to explore the significance of postmodern thought for animal studies. I have chosen to do so by focusing on three volumes of feminist writing on animals. In the 1990s feminist theory has made a crucial contribution to the development of animal advocacy, and it has also been one of the few areas of writing on animals to begin to acknowledge the impact of postmodernism in contemporary thought. I therefore think it important that the emerging discipline of animal studies, with which Society and Animals concerns itself, should look seriously at the issues raised in these writings.

The Absence of a Postmodern Perspective

A recent editorial in the campaigning magazine The Animals' Agenda noted that despite 20 years of activism and philosophical debate, the contemporary animal rights movement (usually dated from the 1975 publication of Singer's Animal Liberation ) has still "not established animal rights as an accepted discipline in the academic catalog, as women and African-Americans have done for their respective histories and concerns" (Stallwood, 1994, p. 44). Journals such as Society and Animals are, of course, now helping to achieve that academic acceptance, partly by identifying animal studies as the academic "parallel" of the animal rights movement (Shapiro, 1993a, p. 2).

However, when the disciplines of Women's Studies and of Race and Ethnic Studies (the titles currently used in my own university) began to find a place in the academy, they did so in part by quickly engaging with the cutting edges of contemporary theory, especially continental theory. Their concern with the stark realities of social injustice did not make them shy away from difficult and seemingly abstract questions, such as what feminism might learn from (or dispute in) Lacanian psychoanalysis, or how critiques of colonialism might profitably borrow from Derrida's account of deconstruction.

Until very recently, these kinds of questions have been largely absent from debates about animals. Their relevance has not been perceived. A rare exception was an early S&A editorial proposing that the debate "between modernism and postmodernism" may indeed be relevant to animal studies (Shapiro, 1993b, p. 109). It will be my contention in this essay that most of the relevant work on postmodernism and animals is currently being undertaken, implicitly or explicitly, in the kinds of feminist writings under review here.

Toward some Provisional Definitions

In recent times, popular references to postmodernism have often taken it to be a blanket term for all theoretical perspectives on our current condition. These would include poststructuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, various feminisms, and postmodernism itself. This entirely glosses over deconstructionist and feminist denouncements of specific aspects of postmodernism, but the growing acceptance of this broader use of the term means that these distinctions may soon be regarded as academic wrangling of only specialized interest. Postmodernism has become a useful label. An appropriate comparison might be with the way in which the term "animal rights" has until very recently served (in what Singer calls "a concession to popular rhetoric") as a label for all those interests that go beyond the scope of animal "welfare," without necessarily involving an engagement with precise philosophical definitions of the contentious notion of rights (Singer, 1980, p. 327).

A further point here, to add to the confusion which some readers will doubtless find exasperating, is that both postmodernism and feminism are characterized by a frequent refusal of certainties and definitions. Postmodernism, it has been suggested, is best understood as " a way of thinking about history and representation that claims there can be no final understanding." The same author proposes that feminism "is perhaps the clearest instance of a force that has retained its political drive precisely through a refusal to be pinned down to certainties" (Elam, 1992, pp. 10, 22). This openness, I hope to show, is actually productive for any radical rethinking of questions about animals which is undertaken on behalf of animals.

The fact that there is no single postmodernism, just as there is no single feminism, does not prevent us from identifying some common areas of concern. Shapiro characterizes postmodernism thus:

Postmodernism assumes that reality as we know it is necessarily a social construction and directs the investigator to develop methods that reflect on, "deconstruct" and, generally, interpret that construction. The Enlightenment project of finding an ultimate truth is abandoned...for the more limited project of understanding the world as we are continually constructing it....(1993b, p. 109)

In Neither Man Nor Beast , Adams similarly proposes that "feminism does not solely address relationships between women and men, but is an analytic tool that helps to expose the social construction of reality" (p. 14). This is hardly sufficient common ground, however, since in itself it takes us little further than Berger and Luckmann's classic 1960s text on The Social Construction of Reality , which did not claim to be either feminist or postmodernist.

More detailed comparisons take us immediately into fairly complex theoretical territory. It has been proposed, for example, that both feminism and postmodernism share a commitment "to the project of deconstructing both the subject and the `master narratives' of history" (Waugh, 1989,

p. 16). This short but dense phrase calls for careful unpacking, but it identifies two of the three major themes or characteristics of postmodernism which will concern us here, each of which finds urgent and politicized expression in feminist writing on animal issues.

Three Important Themes

The first of these is the critique of the "subject," the term here signifying the individual or the self as it has generally been understood within the heritage of Enlightenment thought: an autonomous individual, self-contained, self-possessed and self-certain. The second theme, a skepticism concerning "the `master narratives' of history," applies to any systems of thought which seek to account for the entire range of human experience, examples of which may be as varied as Marxism and Christianity. The third theme to be added to these is a thoroughgoing mistrust of the Western tradition of dualistic thought which can certainly be traced back as far as Aristotle, but which has posed particular problems for animal advocates in its Cartesian formulation. I will deal with the recent history of these themes in a little more detail before considering their direct relevance to animal studies.

The Subject

In 1969 Foucault influentially argued for what he called the "decentering" of the human subject in the contemporary world: "the researches of psychoanalysis, of linguistics, of anthropology have `decentered' the subject in relation to the laws of its desire, the forms of its language, the rules of its actions, or the play of its mythical and imaginative discourse" (quoted in Culler, 1981, p. 33). This was a refinement of the picture he had offered in 1966 at the conclusion of The Order of Things , in which he envisaged the possibility of circumstances arising in which "man's mode of being as constituted in modern thought" might "crumble," so that--in his famous phrase--"man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea" (Foucault, 1970, pp. 344, 387). These ideas were of great significance for the development of poststructuralist thought in the 1970s, as was Barthes' 1968 essay on "The death of the author," which explored similar territory (Barthes, 1977). For Foucault, too, the notion of the god-like "author" represented "the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas" (1979, p. 141). These matters will be important when we consider the postmodern consequences of calls for animals to be treated as "individuals," and as "subjects" rather than objects.

Master Narratives

One of the best-known definitions of postmodernism is Lyotard's assertion that it is characterized by an "incredulity toward metanarratives" (1985, xxiv). The danger of these master or grand or meta narratives is that they tend to prescribe what will count as legitimate knowledge, whether in the fields of science, the law, religion, history or whatever, and that in doing so they defend the status quo. An "incredulity" toward them is not exclusively postmodern: recent work on the "linguistic turn" in history, for example, has charted a wide variety of more provisional and combative forms of history-writing in recent decades (Samuel, 1991, 1992). Nevertheless, these narratives have managed to retain much of their traditional persuasiveness, based on an air of objectivity and reliability. I have myself argued that any reassessment of our historical understanding of animals will depend in part on a willingness to challenge "the unique explanatory force that history is able to claim for itself" (Baker, 1993, p. 9). This is because one of the effects of grand narratives is to legitimate the pervasive "systems of domination" which both Adams and Birke identify as continuing to oppress women, animals, and others.

Dualism

In the 1950s and 1960s, in the heyday of French structuralism, the binary oppositions which structure much of our language and culture were not usually seen as being particularly problematic; they were described by one commentator as "the common denominator of all thought." By the 1970s, however, it was very widely understood that oppositional or dualistic thought was never value-free; in any pair of terms (good/bad, active/passive, light/dark), one would be culturally privileged over the other. The move from structuralism to poststructuralism has in fact been quite usefully summarized as a shift from an emphasis on opposition to a concern with difference . Part of this impetus came from French feminist thought: Cixous's writings in the mid-1970s, for example, include a trenchant critique of dualism's role in the grand narratives of patriarchal thought (Cixous & Clément, 1986).

Animal advocates and animal studies academics are of course already well aware of the effects of Cartesian dualism, with its emphasis on mind versus body, human versus animal, and reason versus emotion. The distinctive contribution made by feminist and postmodern perspectives, I would suggest, which is very evident in the books reviewed here, is the insistence that all three of the themes discussed here must be taken together, deconstructed together: they cannot be dismantled bit by bit.

Feminism, Postmodernism and Animals

Adams' Neither Man Nor Beast and Birke's Feminism, Animals and Science both address, directly if only rather briefly, the relation of postmodernism to their own feminist strategies on behalf of animals. Quoting another writer's observation that "to see animals differently would require human beings to see themselves differently also," Adams asks "upon what theoretical ground" feminists who defend animals should stake their non-dualistic and non-hierarchical "envisioning" of the relation of animals and humans (p. 12). She aptly describes the complexity of her dilemma:

On the one hand, malestream [ sic ] animal rights and liberation theory appears to place itself squarely within an Enlightenment epistemology of autonomous subjects, a liberal paradigm riddled with...contradictions....On the other hand, just when feminist grand narratives presuming a unitary "subject," a universal "woman,"...come tumbling down, some of us appear to be urging yet another grand narrative--"animals." Such an anachronism seems to marginalize our theoretical contributions. (p. 12)

Acknowledging that "the tumbling away of a unitary subject opens up space for discussing other-than-human subjects" (p. 12), she generously refers to my own work as an example of a specific attempt to extend the concerns of "postmodern" theory "to encompass animals" (p. 208).

Adams recognizes the irony of continuing to argue that animals be granted the status of "individuals" and "subjects" (rather than objects) at a time when these terms are falling into postmodern disrepute. Notwithstanding the fact that in the language of psychoanalysis, which has influenced postmodern thought, the term "object" carries no negative connotations when applied to a living being. Adams is as aware as anyone of the desirability of undoing the subject/object opposition. The important thing is the idea to which she holds of seeing selves differently (whether human or animal), and that is entirely consistent with the priorities of much postmodern politics.

Birke names postmodernism as one of the strands of feminist criticism of science by which she has been influenced, and she summarizes it thus: "Here, an important concern is to question any universalizing claim (or `master narrative' such as positivist science), and to deconstruct boundaries (such as subject/object...)" (p. 144). She cites Haraway's recent work as an important example here. Birke, however, has "reservations about wholeheartedly taking postmodernism on board." Two of these reservations seem especially pertinent. The first is a concern that postmodernism's preoccupation with texts, discourses, and an apparently endless chain of representations and simulacra risks losing sight of the realities of human cruelty and animal pain. The second is a concern that postmodernism's celebration of the "death of the subject" in fact celebrates the death of a privileged white male human subjectivity, and in doing so often complacently overlooks the fact that both animals and women have, Birke argues, traditionally "been denied subjectivity" (p. 146).

These objections are not to be dismissed lightly. Contemporary theoretical perspectives, postmodern or otherwise, will be of no use to animal advocates unless they can be framed in a way which acknowledges the lived experience of both animals and humans, and which refuses to set artificial boundaries as to who will count as the subject of one of the "different selves" envisaged by Adams.

Earlier Uses of Continental Theory

It is easy to forget that Haraway's work on a feminist primatology showed the influence of poststructuralist and postmodern thought from at least the mid-1980s. It included references to such writers as Foucault, Baudrillard, and Jameson, and to the idea of categories of identity (such as "woman") as social constructions with little conceptual stability (Haraway, 1986, p. 94). Only rather more recently, however, have these influences been felt in texts explicitly concerning themselves with the question of animal rights.

A previous issue of S&A listed Tester's book Animals and Society and my Picturing the Beast as examples of "post-structuralist studies of animal issues." In tracing a history of the idea of animal rights, Tester's contention is that "animal rights is a social construction and exclusively a social practice," and that in appearing to deny its historical contingency the contemporary animal rights movement is "fetishistically upholding obligations which are made and not found" (1991, pp. 194-95). In place of this alleged disregard of history, Tester offers the model of a history of that which was "thinkable" (p. 77) about animals in any given period. This draws fairly heavily on the work of Foucault, and sees "history as the discontinuity of the classifications which make us and our world" (p. 71). Tester's concern is with the status of animals in different eras of knowledge, which Foucault called epistemes . Tester describes the shift from the "Classical" episteme which encompassed both Enlightenment natural history and the "unthinkable" cat massacre famously described by Darnton (1985), to the modern episteme which allowed the emergence of today's animal rights theory (which he persuasively contends would itself have been unthinkable in an earlier time).

Tester's is a study in historical sociology; it is important because it remains the most sustained application of Foucault's ideas to animal studies, but it is open to criticism on a number of grounds. In an incisive sociological critique of the book, Benton calls Tester's pretended non-commitment on the question of the moral status of animals "just a posture," questions the consistency of his reading of Foucault, and notes his questionable reliance on dualistic thinking (Benton, 1992). I do not wish to rehearse here my own criticisms of Tester (Baker, 1993, pp. 21-22, 212-17), but in Picturing the Beast I tried briefly to indicate how the work of continental theorists, Foucault and Derrida in particular, could make a positive contribution to the exploration of animal issues in a range of academic disciplines. Both these theorists, as it happens, would want to insist on the scope for using their work as a basis for constructing ethically responsible positions, and not just--more fashionably--for "deconstructing" them.

I must also make brief reference here to a marvelous unpublished paper by Wood, an authority on Derrida. Called "Comment ne pas Manger" ("How not to eat"), in response to Derrida's "Bien Manger" ("Eating Well"), it is the only detailed analysis I am aware of that shows just how useful deconstruction could be in the continuing development of a responsible writing on animal issues. Its stated intention was to persuade Derrida that his own critique of "carnophallogocentrism" should itself lead him to adopt a vegetarian diet (Wood, 1993; Derrida, 1991). Wood writes, following Derrida, of how deconstruction envisages "a responsibility that exceeds all calculation." It is the very opposite of the self-interested "spirit of calculation" which mars the utilitarian theories which have sometimes been invoked on behalf of animals. The question of "the other animal," writes Wood, is an exemplary case of our excessive, unlimited responsibility, "because once we have seen through our self-serving anthropocentric thinking about other animals, we are and should be left wholly disarmed, ill-equipped to calculate our proper response ."

The feminist texts I am reviewing in this essay mark an advance on the positions outlined by Tester, Wood and myself. Tester's work may well have made a useful contribution to animal studies, but it is important to understand that he sees contemporary animal advocacy as nothing more than a curious social practice with which he has no sympathy. His perspective could not be further from the "animal rights viewpoint" which Stallwood calls for in the academy (1994, p. 44). Both Wood and I make some moves in the direction of such a viewpoint, but not as decisively as these feminist texts. They appear consistently to follow the advice Haraway gave a decade ago on how anthropocentrism might best be undermined: "Destabilizing an origin story is perhaps more powerful in the deconstruction of the history of man than replacing it with a more progressive successor" (1986, p. 85).

Writing off "Rights"

One of the casualties of this deconstruction of the history of "man" is the notion of rights . I have been surprised, in reviewing these books, by the vehemence and unanimity with which they dismiss the "rights" language of what until so very recently we unself-consciously called the animal rights movement.

The change has been swift and dramatic. As recently as 1989, Magel was confidently able to write: "If a student interested in animal rights were to ask what to study, my advice would be: first, read all the works by Regan and Singer; then read all the responses to their works; and then read whatever you wish" (Magel, 1989, xiii). (The index to his bibliographic sourcebook, incidentally, gives no clue that there was any feminist writing on animals at that date.) The following year, of course, saw the publication both of Adams' The Sexual Politics of Meat , which broadly espoused the notion of animal rights, and of Donovan's ground-breaking article "Animal Rights and Feminist Theory," which treated the term more cautiously.

Donovan's was the first piece to draw the attention of many of us to an important contradiction in the work of Regan and Singer: that "in their reliance on theory that derives from the mechanistic premises of Enlightenment epistemology (natural rights in the case of Regan and utilitarian calculation in the case of Singer)" and in their suppression of "emotional knowledge," they were continuing to employ Cartesian attitudes "even while they condemn the scientific practices enabled by them" (1990, p. 365). Donovan did not doubt that both of these versions of what she collectively termed "animal rights theory" reflected a "rationalist, masculinist bias," and she called instead for the development of "an ethic of animal treatment" which also drew on cultural feminism. It is important to remember that in doing so she did not dismiss animal rights theory out of hand: she called Regan's work "impressive," and Singer's "admirable and courageous" (1990, pp. 353, 355).

Donovan's influence on the works reviewed here can hardly be overstated; her article is cited approvingly by Adams, by Birke, and throughout the Animals and Women collection. Adams sums up the new position of the mid-1990s in her own preface: "My starting point is not that of animal rights theory." She (p. 138) and Birke (p. 135) both explain their dissatisfaction with the whole idea of rights in terms of its association with the model of liberal individualism which both feminism and postmodernism have helped to discredit. This idea is explored further in important essays by Vance, Luke, and Kappeler in Animals and Women . These take an uncompromising (but arguably an ahistorical) line on the question of rights: unlike Donovan, they offer little acknowledgement of Singer's or Regan's importance in the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when moral philosophy was widely seen as the best tool available to argue the case for the ethical treatment of animals.

Challenging "Systems of Domination"

Rather than enlarging the sphere of traditional moral concerns to encompass animals as well as humans, thus promoting the idea that animals too have "rights" (however loosely defined), the approach taken in each of these three books is to insist that the oppression of animals must be understood as symptomatic of a wider problem. In Feminism, Animals and Science Birke writes that "the injustices that humans perpetrate against animals are themselves deeply embedded in the very same systems of domination that lead to injustices against humans" (p. 134). Adams' book gives much space to the idea of sexism, racism and the abuse of animals as intersecting forms of violence, and she too uses the phrase "interlocking systems of domination" (p. 79), which she credits to the writer bell hooks. Kappeler's essay in Animals and Women also describes "a formidable power pyramid, a megapower system of interlocking forms of oppression and exploitation, which requires our combined resistance if we really mean to dismantle it," and she points to a significant consequence of her analysis: "We must resist the embracing of single causes and challenge an identity politics that makes each struggle a single struggle and the responsibility of a particular `lobby'" (p. 324).

Here we see, perhaps more clearly than anywhere else, the distinctive contribution of a feminist analysis. It seeks openly to politicize philosophy, and in doing so it necessarily sweeps aside what now appears as the bogus neutrality of the language of rights. Feminism has politicized the theory of animal advocacy (the practice was always politicized, of course), potentially bringing theory and practice, or philosophy and activism, into a closer and more productive relation. In saying this, however, we must also remember that neither feminism nor postmodernism would want to sustain too sharp a distinction between philosophy and politics.

The analysis does have its problems. The wholesale dismantling of worldwide systems of domination, from a position of disadvantage, is a lot to demand. Adams is clear about her unquestionably utopian goal: a "radical resituating" of the players in the human/animal dualism, in and through which "`animals' will lose their otherness, and join human animals as a `we' rather than a `they' or a collective of `its'" (p. 78).

I have two reservations about this. The first is that, phrased in this way, it sounds like an attempt to reduce both animals and humans to a certain sameness, rather than a position from which one could celebrate the difference of animals instead of exploiting it. (The philosopher Irigaray has described the recognition of an unbridgeable degree of difference between individuals as a space for "wonder" (1993, p. 74), which strikes me as a wholly positive basis for rethinking the relation of animals and humans.) I think it is just a problem of Adams' phrasing in this important instance, however; the passage goes on more satisfactorily to argue for an acknowledgement of "the particularities of our lives."

My second reservation concerns the possibility, and I put it no more strongly than this, that the problem of this systematic domination is being overstated. As Cixous wrote over 20 years ago:

Everywhere I see the battle for mastery that rages between classes, peoples, etc., reproducing itself on an individual scale. Is the system flawless? Impossible to bypass? On the basis of my desire, I imagine that other desires like mine exist. If my desire is possible, it means the system is already letting something else through. (Cixous & Clément, 1986, p. 78)

Feminist animal advocates, imagining other desires like their own, are now also exploring tactics for disrupting this "battle for mastery."

In part, it is a matter of working with, and modifying, the tools which are already available. Adams' chapter on "Ecofeminism and the eating of animals" is a good example. Rather than condemning or dismissing ecofeminism on the grounds that "it fails to give consistent conceptual space to the domination of animals as a significant aspect of the domination of nature," she argues for transforming it because she regards "ecofeminism's theoretical potential" as being "clearly on the side of animals" (pp. 87-88). This kind of methodological generosity and inventiveness is exactly what is needed, I would suggest, for the advancement of both animal advocacy and animal studies.

Another tactic, strongly supported by Birke, and which for me is one of the most exciting developments offered in these books, is not of devising a single definitive non-oppressive history or theory for animals, but of telling stories about them.

Telling Stories in "French," in Animals' Voices

One of the major contributions of postmodernism thus far has been to challenge us to recognize that all human knowledge is essentially narrative, just story in the making. We do not so much discover the natural world as we construct it...We impose our cultural and descriptive narratives on the world like templates, text creating text. (Vance, 1995, pp. 165-66)

Without ever neglecting or denying the pressing reality of animal suffering, feminist writing on animals is rightly suspicious of anything so crude (on either side of the argument) as a simplistic appeal to "facts." Adams quotes another writer's proposal that feminist consciousness "turns a `fact' into a `contradiction'" (p. 14). Haraway proposes the sequence "facts are theory-laden; theories are value-laden; values are story-laden" (1986, p. 79). Birke argues against the notion of "rudimentary biological facts," and in favor of "open-ended possibility" in feminist theorizing (p. 107). It is only in the dualistic thinking which each of them challenges that facts must always be opposed to fiction .

To those working primarily in an empirical tradition in the social sciences, this may sound like the wilder shores of postmodern excess. It may be dismissed as being literally incomprehensible within that tradition. Adams has a good metaphor for this kind of difficulty. Comparing knowledge of the case for vegetarianism in a meat-eating culture to knowledge of a second language, she writes: "When former President Reagan (who did not know French) met François Mitterand (who knew both English and French) what language do you think they spoke? In the dominant culture, bilingual vegetarians must always speak English" (p. 26). She suggests, however, that they should insist on metaphorically using "French" in order to expand knowledge and create change. Who knows what sense "French" might make, or stories might make, if one could only learn to write them?

It seems in fact increasingly to be the case that writings on animal studies which take either a feminist or a postmodern perspective have intuitively recognized a gap within their "academic" language which can only be filled by more poetic texts. In recent years almost all of us have quoted from Walker's story "Am I Blue?" and often also from Le Guin's collection Buffalo Gals , especially from the final story in which Eve unnames the animals (Walker, 1988; Le Guin, 1990). It is almost as though something in those stories touches us (if that's not too loose a way of putting it), expressing something which academic discourses--even feminist ones--have not usually managed to articulate.

Birke is of course quite right to take the view that it's not only the supporters of animal advocacy who tell stories. The grand narratives of history and of science, which have so often served to disadvantage animals, can themselves be understood as well-disguised forms of story-telling. In her own telling phrase, it is only "the mice" who "don't write the stories" (p. 138).

The second half of Animals and Women has the general title "Alternative Stories." It includes some very challenging writing which I think, and which I hope, will help to shape the development of animal studies over the next few years. In particular, the essays by Luke and by Vance seem to offer new possibilities, or at least new priorities, for how we might think, act and write with regard to animals. Luke's detailed critique of what he calls "patriarchal animal liberation" leads him movingly to conclude that "our task is not to pass judgement on others' rationality, but to speak honestly of the loneliness and isolation of anthropocentric society" (p. 312). He is also the first writer I am aware of to describe his activism as a creative process: "animal liberation does not limit action through control of self and others....It is creative, not restrictive" (p. 315). This is a timely warning against animal advocacy's occasional tendency to slip into a defensive and decidedly uncreative political correctness.

Vance, similarly, writes of the importance of understanding "ethical behavior toward the nonhuman world" as "a kind of joyfulness, an embracing of possibility" (p. 181). This celebratory emphasis runs hand in hand with a theoretical rigor: "Just as theorizing is a form of storytelling, so is storytelling a form of theorizing" (p. 175). Her compelling and sophisticated exploration of animal narratives acknowledges that any worthwhile knowledge of animals' lives may "disappear as soon as I impose a narrative on them," and accepts the risk of ridicule when calling in all seriousness for an imaginative mythmaking which acknowledges that "in dreams, in fantasies, in visions, animals often speak to us" (pp. 165, 183).

Her more general point, that "a good narrative should give voice to those whose stories are being told," is imaginatively echoed in a proliferation of metaphors throughout these "Alternative Stories." Davis writes of "thinking like a chicken," Antonio of "reinventing the wolf," and Luke of "going feral." What Luke refers to here is the activist's experience of rejecting the comfortable domesticity of anthropocentric culture so that he or she comes to occupy "the position of feral animals, formerly domesticated but now occupying a semiwild state on the boundaries of hierarchical civilization" (p. 313).

I am tempted to call this new story-laden, metaphor-laden style a "wild" writing on animals. I have in mind here Vance's own use of that adjective as part of the chain of associations with which she characterizes a "wild" nature, praising "its wildness, its disobedience, its rowdiness, its resistance to the domination of men" (Vance, 1993, p. 141). Given Adams' insistence on metaphorically speaking "French," we might also call this an écriture animale . At present, Vance is probably its most innovative writer. She knows that animal narratives can offer their own indulgent, distinctly postmodern pleasures when the writing is allowed to drift , like the frog she describes: "The shiny brown frog drifted downstream a bit, basking in the sun, looking, perhaps, for a tree that needed her. Nice work if you can get it, I thought, better even than making theory" (1995, p. 186).

This kind of writing will certainly not satisfy those who expect new work in animal advocacy to have an obvious relevance to campaigning strategies, or new work in animal studies immediately to contribute to the sum of knowledge on human/animal interactions. These unfamiliar approaches should not be written off hastily, however. They may turn out to provide animal studies with new perspectives from which to understand the persistence of anthropocentric priorities in contemporary society.

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Waugh, P. (1989). Feminine fictions: Revisiting the postmodern . London: Routledge.

Wood, D. (1993, November). Comment ne pas manger: Deconstruction and humanism. Paper presented at the conference The death of the animal . Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature, University of Warwick, United Kingdom.

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