FEMINIST BECOMINGS

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. More so than The Post-modern Condition, which has received much attention from feminists (Lyotard 1999 Lyotard , Jean Françoise . 1999 . The post-modern condition: A report on knowledge . Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi . Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press . [Google Scholar]). 2. While beyond the scope of this article, a detailed critique of Deleuze and Guattari's use of the animal in the becoming(s)-animal of A Thousand Plateaus is seriously fetishistic and arguably more so than woman as they both speak for that which cannot speak but also homogenise all that is not human. While they are explicit that it is the category of the human which becomings negotiate, the categorisation of animals remains deeply problematic. 3. Plastmatics’ singer Wendy O. Williams committed suicide when her effectiveness as an animal rights activist was overshadowed by the popular focus on her ‘obscenity’ and image. 4. In animal rights collectives groups advocate for those incapable of human speech. So animal rights activism is inter-kingdom in that the activists ‘belong’ to the group of ‘everything but’ the human. I find the incapacity to belong to a group which cannot speak for itself, and which is simply everything other than the great transcendental category of the Human, is both frustrating and allows the indifference to self as activist to work more effectively. I find it infuriating that there is so much focus placed on the identity of the activist over activism, to the extent that the animal itself becomes like a woman for exchange, an object that acts as a symbol between two humans. This discursive compulsion in the news media, in everyday rights and in animal rights philosophy is, ironically, better served by Lyotard's work on the differend which does not directly address (but does mention the rights of) animals than by Peter Singer's work on the liberation of primates or Cary Wolfe on species discourse. Carol Adams, in relation to her conflagration between feminism and animal rights, represents one of the few theorists who directly demand activism with philosophy.