Keynote Addresses and Workshops

While everyone is welcome to attend these workshops, space is limited; therefore, we ask that you sign up in advance. To participate, e-mail jaime.j.s.denike@queensu.ca and indicate which workshop(s) you would like to attend. Each workshop convener will select a reading that will be distributed to the workshop participants prior to the conference.

Keynote Speaker: Carol J. Adams
Keynote Title: The Sexual Politics of Meat

Abstract:

Based on the pathbreaking book-length study The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory (1990), independent scholar Carol J. Adams's keynote address will provide an ecofeminist analysis of ways in which sexism, racism, and speciesism operate as interconnected oppressions. For Adams, behind every meal of meat there is an absence: "the death of the animal whose place the meat takes." The absent referent serves to separate the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the meat or end product. Positing that "a structure of overlapping but absent referents links violence against women and animals" and that "through the structure of the absent referent, patriarchal values become institutionalized" (42), Adams' talk will explore the concept of the absent referent and how it functions. Using visuals drawn from contemporary media, the talk will further consider the animalizing of women in contemporary cultural images and the sexualizing of animals used for food. Connecting the eating of meat with women's subjugation, Adams will discuss the equation of vegetarianism with emasculation and femininity, and meat eating with virile maleness. As she explains in The Sexual Politics of Meat, her work endeavors to "make ... covert associations overt by explaining how our patriarchal culture authorizes the eating of animals and in this to identify the cross-mapping between feminism and vegetarianism." Through an exploration of how persons might literally become "pieces of meat," Adams will argue that a trinity of interrelated forces—objectification, fragmentation, and consumption—impacts our cultural understanding of women and animals. Her presentation will also suggest activist forms of resistance against the construction of individuals, human or non-human, as "meat."

Biography:

Carol J. Adams is a feminist-vegan advocate and activist whose written work explores a cultural logic that oppresses both women and animals. Through an analysis of philosophical attitudes, historical examples, and contemporary images culled from various media and advertising sources, Adams' books The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (1990), Neither Man Nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals (1994), and The Pornography of Meat (2003) theorize interconnected ways in which women and animals are subjugated and sexualized. She is also the co-editor (with Josephine Donovan) of Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (1995) and The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics (2007), and has written extensively on vegetarianism and veganism. Ms. Adams has served as the Executive Director of the Chautauqua County Rural Ministry in Dunkirk, New York, an advocacy and service not-for-profit agency addressing issues of poverty, racism, and sexism, as Chairperson of the Housing Committee of the New York Governor's Commission on Domestic Violence, and as a visiting lecturer on pastoral care issues at Perkins School of Theology. She has lectured at over 100 colleges and universities.

Keynote Speaker: David Clark
Keynote Title: Animal Witness, Animal Testament; or, Who was 'the last Kantian in Nazi Germany?'

Abstract:

Professor David L. Clark's keynote address will explore the question of human understandings of and obligations towards non-human life. What is an "animal"? Can an animal speak ... or be heard? In his later work, Jacques Derrida asks what it means to be addressed by an animal, and to fall under its gaze. How is philosophy unnerved and unseated in the presence of animal others? Professor Clark's lecture begins with this irrepressible question, but shifts the focus from the animal gaze to the complex roles that animals play and are made to play as witness—in particular, as witness to atrocity. In the wake of atrocities, how do animals act as testamentary remnants, speaking transitively of unregarded deaths and useless suffering? How does an animal testament make irrefutable demands on the present and on the future? In order to pose these questions, Professor Clark's divides his remarks into two movements. After Derrida, he sketches out a project that explores the animal "gaze" in philosophical modernity, briefly evoking a series of telling examples from Descartes to Kant to Cixous. He then discusses two extraordinary instances of the animal testament, each set in the awful shadow of the Holocaust. Professor Clark returns to Emmanuel Levinas's autobiographical account of his incarceration in a slave labour camp, where he encounters "Bobby," the little dog he describes as "the last Kantian in Nazi Germany." How is Levinas's ambivalence regarding the animal symptomatic of the complexities swirling around the once and future witness? Characterizing Levinas's account as an incomplete work of mourning, Professor Clark then turns to rare film footage of the murder of Latvian Jews at the hands of the SS Einsatzgruppen. A little dog who dashes across the frame of this dreadful archival record from 1941 raises difficult questions about the animal witness and the animal testament. How do these animals tell a story whose history we have not yet exhausted?

Biography:

David L. Clark is Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies and an Associate Member of the Health Studies Program at McMaster University, where he teaches courses on topics ranging from "the question of the animal" to critical theory to the history of HIV/AIDS activism. He has published work on a wide variety of subjects, including: the rhetoric of "drugs" and "addiction" in Heidegger, Kant, De Quincey, and Schelling; the representations of the surgical separation of conjoined twins; the meanings of queer theory after the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; and the legacies of the life and work of Jacques Derrida. He is co-editor (with Henry A. Giroux) of The Review of Education, Pedagogy, & Cultural Studies, and was recently Visiting Fellow at the Center for Humanities at Washington University, St. Louis, where he shared work on Kant and the problem of peace, and on the animal who haunts the writings of Emmanuel Levinas. Forthcoming publications include: Bodies and Pleasures in Late Kant (Stanford UP) and Animals ... In Theory, and a special edited issue of New Centennial Review. Professor Clark is currently completing two projects: Mourning Schelling: On the Remains of Idealism, and The Philosopher's Familiar: Towards a Prehistory of the Postanimal.

Workshop Convenor: Carol Adams
Workshop Title: Ethics and Activism: Living With and For Animals

Abstract:

Carol J. Adams' workshop will offer emerging animal studies scholars a comfortable and dialogic space in which to discuss how we might advocate for animal well-being and care in our professional and personal lives. Adams will bring over twenty years of experience as a vegan-feminist activist and public intellectual to the conversation. Topics might include: vegetarianism and/or veganism, animals and spirituality, animal/human politics, how we situate ourselves as individuals within our scholarship, and how we take care of ourselves and others as academics and activists.

Workshop Convenor: Dr. Myra J. Hird
Workshop Title: Animal, All Too Animal?

Abstract:

Current interest in human-animal relations continues a long tradition of scientific, philosophical, cultural and social scientific interest—from Aristotle to E.O. Wilson to Jurassic Park—in analyzing what we know, and what we might come to know, about being human. The aim of this workshop is to consider how we might challenge our current theoretical horizon by shifting our attention to the majority of life on earth. Rather than focus on what evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis calls organisms 'big like us', let us reflect upon how continued focus on human-animal relations eclipses the much more significant relations all animals enjoy with non-animal life—plants, fungi, slime molds, ciliates, microorganisms and the like—species and nonspecies that sustain the biosphere and life itself.

Biography:

Myra J. Hird is Professor, Queen's National Scholar and Graduate Studies Chair in Sociology, and cross-appointed in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Queen's University. She is Director of the Queen's University genera Research Group (gRG), an interdisciplinary collaboration of natural, social and humanities scholars that mobilizes research-generated knowledge. Dr. Hird currently holds a Distinguished Visiting Scholar position at the Oxford University Centre for the Environment (OUCE) and a Distinguished University Professorship at the Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University. Dr. Hird is the author of seven books, some fifty journal articles and book chapters, and conducts externally funded research in science studies, transdisciplinarity, and knowledge mobilization. She has supervised over thirty graduate students.

Workshop Convenor: Dr. Molly Wallace
Workshop Title: What's In a Breed? The Biopolitics of Breed-Specific Legislation

Abstract:

When Michel Foucault described the operations of "biopower" in The History of Sexuality—"a power whose highest function was perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through"—he was not explicitly talking about dog breeding. As scholars like Donna Haraway have recently argued, however, "dogs too [...] live in the domains of technobiopower." But if this is the case, it is, of course, complicated—the webs of "technobiopower" ensnaring human and canine are intertwined but also distinct. In this context, "breed" is an especially tricky category. Neither race nor species, it has a kind of reality, purportedly traceable in the mapped genome of the dog (or so the many websites promising to identify the biological inheritance of your pound puppy advertise), and yet is surprisingly opaque, at once "socially constructed" and "essential," binding behaviour and morphology in a way that many of us might reject were it couched in terms of human beings—even as we may feel perfectly comfortable opining on the intelligence of the Border Collie or the friendliness of the Golden Retriever.

Such dog essentialism might seem fairly benign, but what happens when the quality purported to be "intrinsic" to the breed is not a delight in water or an interest in fetching but "viciousness"? Taking the specific controversies surrounding "breed-specific legislation" (a component of dog law in Ontario and elsewhere) as a starting point, this workshop will track dogs through some recent work in cultural studies (likely including Donna Haraway, Vicki Hearne, and Marjorie Garber)—and examine a few case studies in breed politics (possibly including the Michael Vick dogs and/or Hearne's work with "Bandit")—in order to investigate the intersections of biology, behaviour, and morphology in the governing of human and canine. This workshop will ask: Is breed-specific legislation "dog racism," as some have suggested? Or is there indeed—as even the animal rights organization PETA has argued of the Pit Bull—something intrinsically "vicious" in a breed? Is "breed" a biologically identifiable category, and if so in what sense? And, turning a comparative eye to "species," "breed," and "race," we will ask: Do such questions have any purchase beyond the kennel?

Biography:

Professor Molly Wallace has made valuable contributions to the deepening considerations of literary ecology as it is represented in twentieth- and twenty-first-century US literature. Her research interests in literature and environment, science studies, theories of the animal and animality, cultural studies, and theories of globalization and the transnational, uniquely position her to bring an interdisciplinary perspective to this workshop. Her current project puts contemporary US fiction in conversation with UN reports, government documents, popular nonfiction, and film in order to trace the ways in which US culture has responded to the globalization of environmental risk (from atomic fall-out to the greenhouse effect).