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Review Essay

CAROL J. ADAMS Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals New York: Continuum, 1994. 271 pp. $24.95.

LYNDA BIRKE Feminism, Animals and Science: The Naming of the Shrew Philadelphia: Open University, 1994. viii, 167 pp. $23.00 paper.

CAROL J. ADAMS AND JOSEPHINE DONOVAN, EDS. Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations Durham: Duke University, 1995. ix, 374 pp. $16.95.

Steve Baker1 UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL LANCASHIRE, UNITED KINGDOM

The brief I was given for this review essay was to explore the significance of postmodern thought for animal studies. I have chosen to do so by focusing on three volumes of feminist writing on animals. In the 1990s feminist theory has made a crucial contribution to the development of animal advocacy, and it has also been one of the few areas of writing on animals to begin to acknowledge the impact of postmodernism in contemporary thought. I therefore think it important that the emerging discipline of animal studies, with which Society and Animals concerns itself, should look seriously at the issues raised in these writings.

The Absence d a Postmodern Perspective

A recent editorial in the campaigning magazine The Animals' Agenda noted that despite 20 years of activism and philosophical debate, the contemporary animal rights movement (usually dated from the 1975 publication of Singer's Animal Liberation) has still "not established animal rights as an accepted discipline in the academic catalog, as women and African-Americans have done for their respective histories and concerns" (Stallwood, 1994, p. 44). Journals such as Society and Animals are, of course, now helping to achieve that academic acceptance, partly by identifying animal studies as the academic "parallel" of the animal rights move- ment (Shapiro, 1993a, p. 2). 76

However, when the disciplines of Women's Studies and of Race and Ethnic Studies (the titles currently used in my own university) began to find a place in the academy, they did so in part by quickly engaging with the cutting edges of contemporary theory, especially continental theory. Their concern with the stark realities of social injustice did not make them shy away from difficult and seemingly abstract questions, such as what feminism might learn from (or dispute in) Lacanian psychoanalysis, or how critiques of colonialism might profitably borrow from Derrida's account of deconstruction. Until very recently, these kinds of questions have been largely absent from debates about animals. Their relevance has not been perceived. A rare exception was an early S&A editorial proposing that the debate "between modernism and postmodernism" may indeed be relevant to animal studies (Shapiro, 1993b, p. 109). It will be my contention in this essay that most of the relevant work on postmodernism and animals is currently being undertaken, implicitly or explicitly, in the kinds of feminist writings under review here.

Toward some Provisional Definitions

In recent times, popular references to postmodernism have often taken it to be a blanket term for all theoretical perspectives on our current condition. These would include poststructuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, various feminisms, and postmodernism itself. This entirely glosses over deconstructionist and feminist denouncements of specific aspects of postmodernism, but the growing acceptance of this broader use of the term means that these distinctions may soon be regarded as academic wrangling of only specialized interest. Postmodernism has become a useful label. An appropriate comparison might be with the way in which the term "animal rights" has until very recently served (in what Singer calls "a concession to popular rhetoric") as a label for all those interests that go beyond the scope of animal "welfare," without necessarily involving an engagement with precise philosophical definitions of the contentious notion of rights (Singer, 1980, p. 327). A further point here, to add to the confusion which some readers will doubtless find exasperating, is that both postmodernism and feminism are characterized by a frequent refusal of certainties and definitions. Postmodernism, it has been suggested, is best understood as "a way of thinking about history and representation that claims there can be no final understanding." The same author proposes that feminism "is perhaps the clearest instance of a force that has retained its political drive precisely through a refusal to be pinned down to certainties" (Elam, 1992, pp.