https://youtu.be/-mDToXSy7q8
Today a church musician in Ohio, Brian Luke is a former academic philosopher and author of Brutal, a seminal text on masculinity and animal rights that developed from his PhD dissertation. Although no longer in academia, he notes that this has freed him creatively: “The fun thing is that I get to write about whatever I want.” For instance, he and his partner Barbara Luke have launched a book series documenting the problems of the Trump presidencies.
Luke came to vegan feminism organically as an activist in the late 1980s and early 1990s across Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio: “Every meeting I’d walk into was mostly women, so, it’s like, in your face, the gender connection is right there.” He also observed these gender politics as impacting movement success, notably “fur” production and product testing on nonhuman animals, both of which are gendered institutions. Eating and hunting animals, he clarifies, more masculinized systems, were not progressing in the same way.
The ubiquitousness of gender, however, was not really commented on: “People didn’t really talk about gender at any of our meetings or any of our actions. All we wanted to do was help the animals.”
We were all just sort of worked up about the animal abuse and there wasn’t a lot of theorizing, politically or otherwise. And yet, it became clear to me that the sort of ideology of male domination, or even just norms of masculinity, were driving these institutions.
However, he did see clear gender division with the “I’d Rather Go Naked” campaigning introduced by PETA in the early 1990s. This campaign, which centers the naked bodies of young women, sparked considerable debate over its use of sexual objectification. Likewise, anti-hunting campaigns in the United States which characteristically pitted female activists against male hunters, also highlighted the gendered dynamic of speciesism and anti-speciesism.
Confronting these real-world examples of gender and species intersections certainly informed Luke’s vegan feminism, but so did his thinking and reading as a young scholar. Luke became a vegetarian in 1988 as a graduate student of philosophy and immersed himself in studies of politics and ethics, including feminist theory:
The theories that made the most sense to me were the radical political theories and radical feminism. And so, from an intersectional standpoint, I thought, well, let’s bring these together. […] there was a literature already of women figuring out how to apply feminist insights to these species issues, issues of human exploitation of animals. So, I read everything, I read everything I could find.
Given these findings and his own personal observations as an activist on the ground, Luke embarked on a journey to understand: “Why aren’t men joining this movement when it’s so obvious that these abuses are horrific and unnecessary?”
One exception to men’s absence in the movement, he notes, is the prevalence of men in animal ethics. “Why is that?” he considered, “Why are Tom Regan and Peter Singer considered the founders of the movement when, at least in my direct experience of the action, it was the women that were doing the work.” Academic discourse, he explains, is male dominated, and maleness offers “a legitimation” for a movement that aims to put a “good face” on animal rights. Adding to this, he does admit there is a level of sexism in this decision-making with regards to “who gets to present arguments, who gets to create legitimation.” Fundamentally, academia, especially philosophy, reflects and replicates patriarchal ideology. “What we were taught in academic philosophy,” he adds, “was to attack each other. […] The hierarchical system is not very pleasant and it’s not altogether cooperative.”
Nonetheless, Luke suggests that lessons may be learned from academia. For instance, academic research may assist activists in the negotiation of more equitable movement structures, and “understanding why some of these institutions continue” in such a way as to inform more effective strategies. For Luke, the animal rights movement has been incumbered by its lack of political engagement. This, of course, is complicated by a public audience that is also politically unengaged, particularly so in the United States. Activists of his generation, he adds, still have living memory of the important civil rights struggles of the mid-20th century which offered “positive memories.” He adds, “it was constantly in our rhetoric, in our tactics, we drew on it […] we were all so hopeful.”
These fading memories are certainly a loss to the movement, but, more accurately, Luke argues, the lack of progress is due to patriarchy and capitalism: “the system itself is always the biggest barrier.”
In capitalism, everything is seen as a resource. […] So that’s a huge barrier to animal rights actually working, is this machine we’ve created over the last however many years that is insatiable for continuing to build profit centers and extract money. So were still up against that. That’s the biggest barrier.
Patriarchy, meanwhile, is rooted in the history of agriculture, namely in systems of property ownership, class hierarchies to maintain food production, paternity and control of women’s sexuality, and domestication. Yet, Luke clarifies that patriarchy is in a “very different place” today. Modern patriarchy is reproduced ideologically: “Materially, […] the need for patriarchy is pretty much entirely gone. So, the question is, why does it continue, and I think the answer is, because men want it to. That’s it.” With these structural changes, he suggests, “there may be room to keep pushing against it and eventually surpassing it and making it obsolete.”
Having been in the movement for so many years, however, he does admit to feeling discouraged, particularly in light of the serious challenges to feminism over recent decades. Attention to these systemic issues is important, he reminds, as it is too easy to internalize critique within movements and absolve, if implicitly, larger forces at play: “I think we should all pile in and contribute whatever we can and keep the focus on the real barrier, which is capitalism and patriarchy.” Likewise, attention to theory may strengthen strategies and goals, including the identification of replacements for acts of speciesism that are fundamental to social relationships and institutions. “Most of the theoretical work is done,” he concludes, suggesting that there is hope and room for creating alternative futures.
By way of an example, Luke references the work of Carol Adams who leveraged vegan feminist theory to challenge PETA’s sexist campaigning. Because women are the backbone of the movement, this campaign threatened to undermine the movement, he recalls of her efforts. By way of another example, Luke looks to the work of Andrea Dworkin. Dworkin was especially critical of heterosexual relationships rooted in men’s violent domination and women’s sexualized submission. Her work also challenged sexual relations as well as gender essentialism, charging that sex and gender without violence was not only possible but preferable and more pleasurable. In this vein, Luke sees possibilities in reframing vegan masculinity and femininity: “We can build up other ways of being men and women.”
For Luke, vegan feminism “means hope”:
I look at the world and I look at the risks that we’re facing with capitalism and patriarchy both, that this sort of way that we’re like this headlong rush towards self-destruction. It’s really kind of incredible with the technological sophistication we have, the wealth that we have as a planet, and that we’re not fixing the two biggest problems which is nuclear war and environmental destruction. We have the means to take care of both of those and we’re not doing it. And the obvious answer to why we’re not is because these systems that we have in place don’t want to, they don’t want to fix it, patriarchy and capitalism. So, when I feel […] the discouragement of that and the fear of that, I’m like, well, what, what else is there? And then I think, well, there’s all these other models. And the vegan feminists, whether their activists or writers or whatever, are just presenting them. The work is going on, it’s ready to hand. You know, there are other ways that human beings can live.
Indeed, Luke emphasizes that vegan feminism is “the alternate model to capitalism and patriarchy”:
The men who developed patriarchy have proven themselves to have failed at that experiment,” he concludes, “we’re raising people now with the expectation that the world may end in their lifetimes. That means to me that system is a failure.
Luke is the author of Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals (University of Illinois Press 2007) and, more recently, the co-author of The Complete Crimes of Donald Trump: Part 1. Crimes of Race and Sex (Carriage House 2020).