Serial Girls: From Barbie to Pussy Riot by Martine Delvaux

Author:Martine Delvaux
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Between the Lines

Animals also seem unaware of nakedness. Neither naked nor clothed, when we fit them with an article of clothing, they look ridiculous. Their skin is their coat, and it is hard to imagine an animal experiencing shame or shyness. Yet there is one image of animals, in my view, that must be taken into account within the context of serial girls: the image of animal carcasses hanging in a slaughterhouse. An image not unlike that of a RealDoll factory in California, where headless silicone bodies are suspended by hooks and metal chains to allow them to dry after being moulded.

In Rome’s Testaccio neighbourhood, the old nineteenth-century mattatoio (slaughterhouse) has been transformed into a museum – the MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome) Future – where fashion shows are sometimes held. The architects of the MACRO Future preserved much of the original buildings, considered the most important surviving example of Roman industrial architecture, as well as a number of instruments that were integrated into the museum’s design – including the pens, bathtubs, and ceilings where carcasses were hung.

The link between feminism and animal rights is well known, ever since the suffragettes’ opposition to vivisection: in the image of the Brown Dog tied up and dissected without anaesthesia, they recognized the image of suffragettes force-fed during a hunger strike, of a hysteric who was sterilized, of a woman lying with legs spread open on a gynecologist’s table…. Current eco-feminists, such as Carol J. Adams, Josephine Donovan, and Lisa Kemmerer, spotlight the close connection between what is done to women and what is done to animals, the place they are assigned within our thought patterns. In The Pornography of Meat,5 Carol J. Adams describes the binary organization in the following way. On the one hand, there is category “A,” consisting of men, whites, culture, civilization, capital, human beings. On the other, there is category “non-A”: women, nonwhites, nature, bodies, Aboriginal people, work, and, of course, nonhuman animals. The critique of binary thinking is at the core of feminism, be it from a materialist or a deconstructionist perspective, for in any case, this way of organizing thought is the cornerstone of women’s oppression. Moreover, binary thinking is at the heart of oppression in general, which, in view of that, must be read from an intersectional view-point (that is, factoring in gender in addition to social class, ethnicity, sexual preference, and ultimately species) in order to be sensitive to how different forms of oppression intersect, play against each other in the intensification of multiple forms of power and of dominations.

According to this logic, women are animals like all others. Besides, we must recognize that not only the animals most consumed (chickens and their eggs, turkeys, cows as minced beef and their milk) but also those found at the core of the meat industry, used as reproduction machines, are female animals (sows, for example). Many researchers have documented the suffering endured by animal mothers when their offspring are taken away from them too soon (as is the case for cows separated from their calves, for example).

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