Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the forty-second installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I’m conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and personal prejudice in philosophy, in particular, and in academia, more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.
I acknowledge that the land on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional territory of the Haudensaunee and Anishnaabeg, covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and directly adjacent to Haldiman Treaty territory. I offer these interviews with respect and in the spirit of reconciliation.
My guest today is Lori Gruen. Lori is the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where she also coordinates Wesleyan Animal Studies. These days, when she isn’t thinking about disabled animals, mass incarceration, and problems of captivity and possibilities of sanctuary, Lori hangs out with her companions, Taz and Zinnia, kayaks, cooks vegan food, worries about climate change, and wishes that she had better luck gardening.
Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Lori! You are a leading feminist philosopher who has taken a somewhat circuitous and unconventional path in your career. Please tell us about your background and how it led to your current position in the discipline and profession.
Thanks so much for inviting me to be interviewed for your fantastic series, Shelley. I have found your interviews insightful and inspiring. I really appreciate the important interventions that you have urged to highlight what is overlooked in our profession. Occlusions and exclusions have been very motivating for me and my work, but they have also caused me to question my place in the profession.
I went through both my undergraduate years and my first stint in graduate school without having the opportunity to take any courses taught by a woman. While I really like to argue (as my friends point out a bit too often) and that kept me going in philosophy for a period of time, I grew frustrated with the abstraction and distance from real problems in the world. I imagine that might have been different if I had at least one class in feminist philosophy. Fortunately, in one of my undergraduate classes, I was introduced to animal ethics and, in graduate school, I became involved in animal activism.
I organized a protest against experiments on greyhounds at the Medical School at the University of Arizona, where I had a graduate fellowship, and a picture of me being carried away by police appeared on the front page of the campus paper.
[Description of image below: A newspaper clipping about Lori's arrest and removal. In the photo of the clipping, two armed police officers are carrying Lori, one on each side of her, each with a hand under one of her knees and the other hand behind her back. Text under the photo describes the events.]
I got the sense that the faculty of the Philosophy Department weren’t happy about this. Keith Lehrer, who at the time was chair of the department, called me into his office and told me that I should really decide whether I wanted to study philosophy or try to change the world. Having read Marx, I had hoped that doing philosophy could change the world—and still believe it can—but left graduate school and moved to the Washington, D.C. area to try to make a difference.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was just getting started, and I was invited to move into a house with the founders of the organization, Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco, to help mount campaigns to reveal the horrible conditions that billions of animals have to endure in laboratories and factory farms. Those early years in the animal rights movement were pretty exciting.
But, as that organization grew, my interests and their interests increasingly grew apart. I was working on a campaign that brought me in contact with members of the blind community, many of whom use seeing eye dogs, which raised really interesting and challenging questions for me about animal use. There were some uncomfortable discussions around that at PETA and eventually some decisions were made with which I didn’t agree. So, I left to start doing what we now would call more “intersectional” activism—still focused on our relationships with animals, but also on homelessness, racism, and sexism.
After several years, I began missing philosophy and decided to return to graduate school to study feminist philosophy. Alison Jaggar had just moved to University of Colorado at Boulder, so I moved to Colorado to work with her there. I also worked with Dale Jamieson, who originally introduced me to animal ethics.
I feel very fortunate that I have been employed and able to teach and write about topics that I care about in practical ethics and political philosophy, topics that include animals, of course, but I have also been able to work on ecofeminist philosophy, some philosophy of science and technology, and also philosophy of race and racism. Over the last decade or so, I have helped to develop the field of Animal Studies, that, contrary to my early experience in graduate school, recognizes, even celebrates, the value of activism to scholarship and scholarship to activism.
In recent years, disability scholars, such as Sunaura Taylor, and feminist philosophers, such as Chloë Taylor, have drawn connections between the oppression of disabled people and the oppression of nonhuman animals. Some of your current work revolves around disabled animals. Tell us about this work, how it relates (if at all) to the sort of work that Sunaura and Chloë have done, and how it extends your previous work on ethics and animals.
There has been some exciting recent work exploring connections between animality and disability. Chloë Taylor, Kelly Struthers Montford, and Stephanie Jenkins have a book forthcoming from Brill Publishers entitled Cripping Critical Animal Studies and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey and I have an edited volume coming out soon entitled Animaladies: Gender, Animals, and Madness. Both books originated with conferences that brought together scholars, activists, and artists to raise challenging questions about animals and ableism that have spurred on more scholarship.
Animaladies is a term that Fiona coined to highlight the pathological relationships that we are in with animals and it allows us to identify a host of maladies, including the ways that accusations of madness—think “crazy cat lady”—enter the critique of those who try to improve our relationships with other animals. In our book, which is interdisciplinary, many of the authors draw on the deep feminist archive on madness to explore a range of issues that arise in thinking through cognitive disability and its connections to animal issues.
This is a fraught topic, given the long-standing tension between some animal ethicists, most notably Peter Singer, and disability scholars, such as Eva Kittay, over the cringe-worthy “argument from marginal cases.” That argument, as you know, bases the case for including animals within the moral sphere on the fact that “cognitively compromised” humans are regarded as rightful subjects of moral consideration. Since these humans are no more cognitively capable and, in some instances, less capable than some animals, to recognize these cognitively disabled humans as worthy of moral consideration, while not also granting moral consideration to animals, is thought to be speciesist. Kittay and other disability scholars have taken offence at being compared to animals or having their family members compared with animals. Alice Crary’s chapter in Animaladies beautifully addresses the complexities of this particular debate.
I disagree with Singer’s view that cognitive capacities can be readily compared across species (and probably disagree with his particular conceptions of these capacities); but, I also disagree with Kittay’s view that only humans can count as members of our families and, thus, that only these sorts of relationships with humans are genuinely morally worthy relationships. In my book, Ethics and Animals: An Introduction, I take issue with Kittay, who says that she finds it “revolting” to think that her love for her daughter is in any way comparable to her love for her dog and that to even suggest such a comparison is dehumanizing. I write that there are many people, including families that include disabled children and animals, sometimes disabled animals, who find that living with nonhuman family members enhances the love shared by all. And many people make family with nonhumans and no children.
Philosopher George Pitcher and his partner, for example, lived with two adopted dogs and wrote “We loved them with all our hearts ... and they loved us, too, completely, no holds barred. Such love is perhaps the best thing life has to offer, and we shall always be grateful for having had such an abundance of it to receive and to give for so long a time. ... They were our surrogate children”. Some people may see this as a distortion or perversion of love, perhaps even a disability, akin to the “mental illness” that, in 1909, Charles Dana dubbed “zoophilpsychosis,” an alleged condition produced by “fine feelings gone wrong” and “overgrown sentimentality.” But, this would be an ableist conclusion to draw. Fiona and I discuss Dana’s work in Animaladies.
[Description of coloured photo below: A thoughtful Lori looks at us questioningly, her head tilted slightly to her right. She is wearing glasses with multi-coloured frames and has long wavy silver hair. Leaves and shrubbery form the background of the shot.]
The problems associated with linking ableism and speciesism were brilliantly identified in artist, activist, and scholar Sunny Taylor’s book Beasts of Burden. There, Taylor clearly illustrates what is wrong with accepting the value dualism that is at the heart of the ideology of human supremacy, to which the idea that human family members are qualitatively different than animal members owes its power. As someone who, from a very early age, was compared to animals in a negative way, Sunny Taylor opted to embrace the comparison rather than allow it to diminish her and other disabled people. She sees this embrace as a way to confront the violence of both speciesism and ableism, convincingly arguing that these entangled supremacist notions are mutually reinforcing.
Inspired by Sunny Taylor’s discussion of disabled animals, I’ve been working with Carol Adams and Lynda Birke, exploring various philosophical, ethical, political, and social issues that arise in thinking about disabled animals. We are just at the start of our work, but I have been delighted to meet a number of disabled animals.
For example, at Woodstock Sanctuary, there is a goat named Albie who had a terrible infection in his hoof when he was found wandering in Brooklyn not far from a slaughterhouse. When he was brought to the sanctuary, they figured that his legs might have been tied together before he escaped which injured his hoof and led to infection. Despite their best efforts to treat the infection, it spread and his front leg needed to be amputated. Contrary to the idea that four-legged animals will not be able to live good lives without one of their legs, a notion based on an essentialist, and in many ways, anthropocentric and ableist understanding of happiness or well-being, Albie seems to have a great life and is even a leader of his flock.
I know another disabled animal named Domino. Domino is a neuro-atypical alpaca at VINE Sanctuary. The humans there, some of whom themselves are neuro-atypical, believe that his neuro-atypicality is connected to his capacity to extend friendship and care to sanctuary residents of other species, including a previously lonely pig called Val and a young ewe named Shadow.
There is another disabled animal that I know at the Center for Great Apes, Knuckles, a chimpanzee who has cognitive and motor control issues, probably due to cerebral palsy, and has been living a wonderful life. Although he requires extra care and lives in a specially designed enclosure, he’s able to interact with other chimpanzees who treat him more gently than they might treat a nondisabled chimpanzee. These interactions seem to enrich Knuckles who, over time, has learned to feed himself, climb up and down steps, and pull himself up on swings to hang upside down and laugh and play.
What connections do you think can be made between your work on disabled animals and other work done in philosophy of disability?
We are just starting this particular work and there is still a lot for me to learn. Your work has been super important, both on this blog and your other scholarship. Like you, and many feminist philosophers, I tend to think that the problems of exclusion can be traced back to faulty ideological commitments, like commitments to neutrality, objectivity, abstraction, and individuality/independence, as well as situated institutional practices that are rewarded or punished.
Work in animal ethics wasn’t always viewed as favorably as I imagine (I hope rightly) that it is today. Work in the philosophy of disability is also, it seems, starting to become more central to discussions, not just in ethics and political philosophy, but in other areas of philosophy too.
Unfortunately, I don’t see as much interdisciplinary acceptance as I would have hoped. For example, for decades, feminists have been raising important criticisms within animal ethics, but still men dominate and ignore (or downplay) the contributions of feminist philosophers. Though it is great to see more classes taught on animal ethics, I’m always disheartened when I see that there are only token inclusions of women on the syllabi of these classes, especially given that women, and feminists, have been important interlocutors for decades.
Feminist theorists are a little better at including animal issues, but not by much. Most work within feminist, gender, and queer studies ignores questions about our relationships with animals. Even new materialist feminists tend to jump over other animals to talk about bacteria, fungus, and ecological systems. Feminist theorists are a bit better on disability and, as I suggested, animal studies scholars are a little better too.
But to more directly answer your question, one of the centrally important ideas that has developed in both animal studies and in philosophy of disability, as well as critical philosophy of race, is that the notion of the “human” is constructed as a marker to include and exclude, a value marker that often hides under the cover of biology or evolution. Of course, this idea isn’t new, but it is exciting for me to notice that it is being discussed more frequently, even sometimes in more mainstream philosophical work. Perhaps that is due to the slowly growing recognition of the philosophical importance of work on animals and on disability. I’d like it if my new work on disabled animals sped up this recognition.
Please tell us how your writing on animals in captivity informs, led you to, and is an outcome of, your work with people who are incarcerated.
This is a long story and I’ll try to make it short. My work in animal ethics, animal minds, and animal studies more generally led me to spend time with a special group of chimpanzees at the Ohio State University Chimpanzee Cognition Center, which was under the direction of Dr. Sally Boysen. In 2006, the University abruptly decided to close the Center and send the chimpanzees to an inadequate animal refuge where they started dying. It was a horrible time and I was focusing as much energy as I could on trying to save the group. Fortunately, the remaining chimpanzees were transferred to Chimp Haven in Louisiana, where they have been for over ten years. I’ve written about this incident in Ethics and Animals and about some of these chimps in Entangled Empathy.
When this chimpanzee drama unfolded, I was already working on a genealogical project uncovering details of the first chimpanzee colony at Yale headed by Robert M. Yerkes in the 1920s. I developed a website called the First 100 Chimpanzees that provides information about this colony and I began thinking harder about the wrongs of captivity. I was frustrated by the philosophical resources with which I was most familiar—traditional discussions of liberty, for example, or accounts of suffering or interest set-backs, went only so far. So, I turned to work on the history of slavery and the emergence of carceral institutions which turned out to be especially enlightening.
Interestingly, a couple years later, I got a call from a lawyer in New York who was helping a woman incarcerated in Connecticut (where I live) put together a curriculum to get her Master’s degree while incarcerated. This woman, Lauren Gazzola, was one of the first people convicted and imprisoned under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, a law that punishes animal activists who engage in property damage. I taught Lauren an “Advanced Political Philosophy” class which was really a challenge because you can’t bring books or papers into the visiting room of the prison—she was at Danbury Federal Prison when it was an all-women’s prison. Phone conversations get cut short, between 12-15 minutes, she couldn’t call back right away, and there are a limited number of calls that one can make in a month; so, calling to talk about school work would mean not talking to friends and family. She had no access to a computer, let alone the internet. She did finish the course, but it took many semesters.
The difficulties of teaching in this ad hoc way provoked me to want to help build a more organized program of teaching incarcerated people. Fortunately, Wesleyan students who had been tutoring in prison also had something more in mind. We sought advice from people who had developed prison education programs at other universities and, at the time, we got the tentative support of Wesleyan, which provided credits for courses, and the Center for Prison Education (CPE) began. I started teaching philosophy classes in the maximum-security men’s prison in 2010. This summer we held the first graduation, with some of the students receiving Associate’s Degrees from Middlesex Community College.
My edited volume, The Ethics of Captivity, was my first effort to spark, within philosophy classrooms, deeper conversations about captivity. Lauren Gazzola and some of my incarcerated (CPE) students have chapters in that book. Much of my current thinking these days explores what I think of as “carceral logics.” I’ve co-written a forthcoming paper on violence with two of the incarcerated men that I’ve worked with over the years and, at the moment, I’m writing and lecturing about dignity and disposability in the case of prisoners, both human and nonhuman.
I have to admit that I was a bit nervous at first about putting captive animals and incarcerated people together given how misunderstood these sorts of “comparisons” have been. You may remember that, several years ago, when Cecil the Lion was killed by the dentist from Minnesota and intense protests erupted, Roxanne Gay wrote that perhaps if she dressed in a lion’s costume, she would get more respect as a black woman. I understand this sort of thinking, but I am leery of the zero-sum idea behind it.
Despite my trepidation, I mustered the courage to analyze different forms of captivity together in order to unravel underlying logics that are mutually reinforcing. Killing the lion is not unconnected to the killing of black people in the U.S. or the general attitude of disposability about those who are disabled, incarcerated, not-white, or animals. Zero-sum thinking distracts from the ways that systems of power support each other and ultimately serves to embolden racist, humanist, colonialist structures that justify white men killing black men, women, disabled people, and animals. I was also nervous about telling my incarcerated students about my work on animals. As it turns out, they already knew about it and many have begun thinking about how to be in solidarity with other incarcerated creatures.
A vital part of your commitment to animal flourishing is your commitment to veganism. As a vegan myself, I know that many vegans hold uninformed views about the metaphysics of the apparatus of disability, often naturalizing disabling states of affairs by attributing them to meat consumption and biology or drawing equally stigmatizing assumptions about disability and lifestyle, where “lifestyle” is taken to include meat consumption. What are your thoughts in this regard?
This is such an important topic. Before sharing my thoughts, I want to acknowledge that there are many different ways to think about veganism just as there are many different people who are vegan. Recent work on black veganism by Aph and Syl Ko, for example, highlights the Foucaultian apparatus at work, although not in those terms. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the construct of the human, they interrogate the colonial invention of “the animal” as a racial weapon used in the service of white supremacy against non-white people, as well as animals. Thinking of veganism as white and only focused on animal well-being tends to overshadow the existence of non-white vegans, as well as the work of vegans thinking about overlapping conceptual frames that structure oppression.
Having said that, it is true that a lot of vegans are white and identify their activism with vegan lifestyle choices. I think what you are alluding to here is the idea, often heard in these circles, that eating a vegan diet will promote health, where health is understood in a very particular way—I have an image in mind of a blond, slim, white, but tanned, fit, nondisabled person riding a bike or surfing or skiing, vegans who are active and smiling, while promoting a vegan lifestyle. Of course, there are all sorts of political, environmental, ethical, and some health reasons to forego the consumption of animal bodies and their excretions. But the notion of health that often gets linked to veganism can promote ableism and can lead to a type of shaming of people with chronic health conditions that have often been associated with diet and lifestyle, like diabetes and heart disease. This type of prejudice fails to account for the fact that these conditions, while manifested in one body, extend beyond the individual: they have histories and emerge more often in certain communities.
When Michael Gerger, a well-known vegan physician, wrote How Not To Die, some people laughed at the idea that a vegan diet could prevent death. But, as he points out in his foreword to the book Even Vegans Die, co-authored by Carol Adams, Pattie Breitman, and Virginia Messina, he did not title his book How to Not Die. Even Vegans Die is a small book that helps problematize the ableism that is often assumed in the promotion of veganism. I personally felt supported when I came across the discussion that “while vegan men have a lower risk for heart disease, vegan women don’t appear to enjoy the same protection.” They report that in interviewing vegans for the book they talked to people with “cancer, heart disease, hypertension, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, asthma, lupus, Crohn’s disease, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), arthritis, thyroid disease, depression, and osteoporosis." They then go on to discuss our interdependency. Indeed, that is a central theme of the book, which thereby challenges the flawed notion that certain conditions result from lifestyle “choices.” This work is an important start in helping vegans recognize their ableism.
Lori, would like to make some additional remarks about anything that we’ve discussed in this interview? Would you like to recommend any books, articles, videos, or other resources on the topics of disability, animals, or captivity?
I did want to make a quick plea for more thinking about abolition. In my forthcoming edited book, Critical Terms for Animal Studies, political theorist Claire Jean Kim, who wrote the chapter on “Abolition,” opens with a quote from Jared Sexton that reads: “Abolition is the interminable radicalization of every radical movement.” Within the animal movement, “abolition” has been criticized because it tends to be single-issue focused, ignoring the intersections that I’ve briefly touched on in this interview. It needs to be more radical. Prison abolition often gets criticized because it is thought to be too radical, but that is based on a failure to understand what I think is the target of abolition, namely, the carceral ideology that creates “criminals” both conceptually and literally. I think the work that you are doing, Shelley, and that other philosophers of disability can do, is helping to elevate abolition as a necessary response to the destructive apparatus of power that makes living so challenging for society’s “others.”
In addition to the books that I’ve mentioned throughout the interview, readers may be interested in the volume that Carol Adams and I co-edited: Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth. I also want to recommend Aph and Syl Ko’s book, Aphro-ism. Chloë Taylor has a couple of new books coming out that I’m excited about. One is a critique of carceral feminism; the other is an edited volume called Decolonizing Critical Animal Studies that emerged from the same conference as Cripping Critical Animal Studies, which I’ve mentioned. I’m also watching out for a new book by Alice Crary. I have learned so much from her thinking about animals, about humans, and about ableism.
Lori, thank you so much for the important recommendations that you have offered throughout this interview, as well as for your wonderful philosophical work and activism.
Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Lori Gruen’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are encouraged and preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.
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Please join me here again on Wednesday, October 17h at 8 a.m. EST for the forty-third installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at [email protected].
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