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

Arcari, Paula

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9811395845 ISBN 13: 9789811395840

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

From the Back Cover

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. It identifies what contributes to the persistent edibility of ‘food’ animals, even as this edibility is increasingly critiqued. Beginning with the question of how animals 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 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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9811395845
• ISBN 13: 9789811395840
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 375