Making Sense of ‘Food’ Animals A Critical Exploration of the Persistence of ‘Meat’

This book addresses the persistence of meat consumption and the use of animals as food in spite of significant challenges to their environmental and ethical legitimacy. Drawing on Foucault’s regime of power/knowledge/pleasure, and theorizations of the gaze, it identifies what contributes to the persistent edibility of ‘food’ animals even, and particularly, as this edibility is increasingly critiqued. Beginning with the question of how animals, and their bodies, are variously mapped by humans according to their use value, it gradually unpacks the roots of our domination of ‘food’ animals – a domination distinguished by the literal embodiment of the ‘other’. The logics of this embodied domination are approached in three inter-related parts that explore, respectively, how knowledge, sensory and emotional associations, and visibility work together to render animal’s bodies as edible flesh. The book concludes by exploring how to more effectively challenge the ‘entitled gaze’ that maintains ‘food’ animals as persistently edible.

Part I.- 1. Introduction.- Part II: Background.- 2. The Problem with ‘food’ animals.- 3. Theoretical Framwork: Advancing and Enacting a Critical Posthumanism.- Part III: Categories and Boundaries.- 4. Animal Categories and the Maintenance of Order.- 5. Negotiating Edibility.- Part IV: The (Dis)Pleasure of Knowing (about Animals & Meat).- 6. Sensory Connections and Emotional Knowledge.- 7. Feelings of Meat.- Part V: The Power of Transparency.- 8. Entitlement.- 9. Visibility: Inviting an Untroubled Gaze.- Part VI: Conclusion.- 10. Undoing Cartographies of Meat.

Paula Arcari is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow hosted by Edge Hill University in Lancashire, UK. Seeking to understand the human-animal binary and challenge habitual ways of thinking and acting involving animals, Paula’s current research focuses on the visual consumption of spectacularised animals at zoos, racing events, and agricultural shows.