Interpreting Meat: Theorizing the Commodification and Consumption of Animals

Meat is the essential object dislodged in human-animal relations: in its commonplace, everyday ubiquity and distanced violence, it defies the innocuous or protective-paternalistic stance that we ordinarily take towards animals. Through looking at meat's status as a fundamental and visceral part of human-animal relations--particularly its commodification and consumption--this book exhibits how animals fit into human discursive practices and how this discursive position determines our perspective of animals and, subsequently, our treatment of them. By treating modernity as a distinct stage of meat production, this work examines the meat-commodity in all its contemporary specificity as an economic, linguistic, philosophical, psychoanalytic, and material object. Using theoretical prisms that have been largely overlooked in animal studies, such as Marxian analysis and Lacanian-Zizekian psychoanalysis, and rejecting popular approaches, such as analogical thinking and effacement of human-animal difference, this book offers new insights into the meat-commodity--and new ways to orient ourselves towards animal life and death.