Carol Adams and "The Sexual Politics of Meat" — Feminist Animal Ethics
What it is
Carol J. Adams' The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (1990) introduced a framework for understanding the connection between the oppression of women and the oppression of animals that has been profoundly influential in feminist theory, animal ethics, and cultural studies. Adams argues that meat eating is not merely an environmental or animal welfare issue but a gendered political one — that the structures of domination that enable industrial animal agriculture are the same structures of domination that enable the subordination of women, and that these systems reinforce and rely upon each other.
History & domestication
Adams wrote The Sexual Politics of Meat while working as a domestic violence activist and community organizer in upstate New York. Her experience with domestic violence cases repeatedly brought her into contact with the connection between violence against women and violence against animals: abusers who harmed women often also harmed animals, and the language used to degrade women was often also the language used to make animals consumable (women objectified as "pieces of meat," etc.). Her book grew from these observations into a theoretical framework that she has continued to develop across multiple subsequent books and decades of scholarly work.
Cultural significance
Adams' work has been most influential in feminist and cultural studies contexts, but it has had significant broader impact on how food and gender are discussed. Her concept of the "absent referent" has become widely used in discussions of representation, media, and food marketing. Her analysis of the gendering of meat has shaped a generation of food scholars and advocates.
The specific responses
Critics from multiple directions have engaged with Adams' work. From within feminist theory, some have questioned whether the parallel between the oppression of women and the oppression of animals fully respects the specificities of each, or whether it risks trivializing one by comparing it to the other. From animal ethics, some have argued that grounding animal ethics in feminist theory limits its appeal to a smaller audience than more universalist approaches. From food culture, critics have questioned whether the connection Adams draws between patriarchy and meat eating is causal or merely correlational.
Adams has responded to these critiques at length across her subsequent work, refining and expanding the framework.
Ethical dimensions
Adams introduces two key concepts:
1. The absent referent: When we eat meat, the animal that was killed to produce it is made absent — physically (it is no longer recognizable as the animal it was) and conceptually (we do not typically think of the living, social, sentient being when we look at the product). Adams argues that this process of making the animal absent is structurally parallel to the process by which women are objectified: their subjectivity is denied, their personhood is erased, and they are reduced to their use value for others. The "absent referent" allows us to use without seeing; it is the mechanism that makes exploitation invisible.
2. The feminist-vegetarian tradition: Adams recovers a long history of feminist thinkers — from 19th-century suffragists to early 20th-century social reformers to contemporary feminists — who have connected their feminism to vegetarianism, seeing the liberation of women and the liberation of animals as related projects. This tradition includes Frances Willard, who led the Women's Christian Temperance Union and advocated vegetarianism; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the feminist utopian writer; and many less well-known figures.
Adams also argues that the marketing and cultural framing of meat eating is deeply gendered: meat is consistently associated with masculinity, strength, dominance, and power in Western culture, while plant-based eating is associated with femininity, weakness, and passivity. This gendering serves both to reinforce the cultural dominance of meat and to reinforce gender norms that constrain both women and men.
Adams' contribution to animal ethics is distinctive because it contextualizes the ethics of eating animals within a broader analysis of power, domination, and representation. This is different from Singer's focus on suffering and Regan's focus on rights: it asks not just "what do animals experience?" but "how is the system of animal exploitation structured, sustained, and made invisible?" This is a structural rather than individual analysis, and it generates different practical implications: change is needed not just at the level of individual food choices but at the level of culture, media, representation, and political economy.
The future
Adams continues to write and speak on these themes. Her work has been particularly influential in the intersectionality-focused wing of contemporary animal advocacy, which connects animal liberation to anti-racism, disability justice, and LGBTQ+ rights as related struggles against systems of domination. The theoretical framework she introduced has become a significant strand within animal ethics scholarship.
Reference notes
Cross-link to: Peter Singer and Animal Liberation, Tom Regan and Animal Rights, Factory Farming, Gender and Food Culture, Food Marketing and Representation, Ecofeminism. Tags: Philosophy > Feminist, Ethics > Structural, Key Texts.
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