Overview
- Extends beyond individual, rational behaviour-based analyses to look at social constitutions of meat and ‘food’ animals, and the practices they are part of.
- Offers a unique consideration for the role of the senses and the emotions in (re)constituting practices involving meat and ‘food’ animals.
- Addresses the increasing visibility of meat production practices, including slaughter, and how these are incorporated into an ethical narrative.
- Comprehensively addresses the fundamental question of why and how the use of animals as ‘food’ and the consumption of their flesh continues to be understood as normal and natural.
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About this book
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.
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Keywords
Table of contents (10 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Background
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Front Matter
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Part II
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Front Matter
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Part III
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Front Matter
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Part IV
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Front Matter
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Conclusion
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“This is a fascinating and important work that stretches the field of Critical Animal Studies in new ways, takes existing scholarship forward in its synthesis of ideas within Foucauldian approaches to studying humans and animals. Original interviews with consumers and producers are handled with exemplary ethical standards by Dr Arcari, making this a timely book for students and scholars to support their own explorations of the ways in which humans currently treat animals within food production systems.” (Dr. Alex Lockwood, Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries, University of Sunderland, UK)
“This is an excellent book which is beautifully written and genuinely a pleasure to read. Paula Arcari presents us with a highly original and significant contribution to a number of fields: sociological understandings of food and eating practices, thinking about ‘food animals’ in sociological and cultural animal studies, and ultimately, the persistence of "meaty practices" despite public concern and welfarist moves. It is an important contribution to Foucauldian scholarship and stretches Foucauldian insights in innovative ways for critical posthumanist theory.” (Erika Calvo, University of East London, UK)
“Making Sense of “Food” Animals is the first systematic investigation of its kind…a rigorous, substantial, original and significant contribution to knowledge, with implications for how we understand discourses surrounding animal-based food consumption, and the role of narratives of self in relation to social change. This wonderfully clear and accessible book is a valuable tool for understanding the kinds of knowledge constructions which support continued animal product consumption, despite the mounting ethical, health and environmental evidence which suggests that this consumption is pernicious and not sustainable.” (Dinesh Wadiwel, University of Sydney, Australia)
Authors and Affiliations
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Making Sense of ‘Food’ Animals
Book Subtitle: A Critical Exploration of the Persistence of ‘Meat’
Authors: Paula Arcari
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9585-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Singapore
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-13-9584-0Published: 19 September 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-981-13-9587-1Published: 19 September 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-981-13-9585-7Published: 04 September 2019
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIX, 356
Number of Illustrations: 4 b/w illustrations
Topics: Human Geography, Cultural Studies, Social Theory