Abstract
This book offers a critical historical analysis of animal experimentation for the purposes of medical science and of warfare in Britain since 1945, approaching areas like law, medicine, and the military-industrial complex through a gendered perspective. It fundamentally questions knowledge production in these areas, claiming that the latter has been historically based on the use of nonhuman animals, propounded and legitimated by masculinist epistemologies and methodologies. These, in turn, are the direct result of patriarchy, which has created hegemonic political-economic systems (not only in Britain, although that is the focus of this volume) that position both nonhuman animals and women as subjects or objects to be exploited, regulated, and dominated by (male) scientists, lawmakers, politicians, and other figures of authority.
Central to Duxbury’s work is the analysis of processes of (de-)subjectification of nonhuman animals in the laboratory. These processes work insidiously to both include and exclude animals as subjects or agents as it fits the purposes of those who control and exploit them. For instance, concepts like ‘care’ and ‘welfare’ have been appropriated by lawmakers and scientists to legitimise and further promote animal-dependent research, mixing the torture of animals with apparent humanitarian concerns for their well-being. Building upon Foucault’s work on biopolitics and governmentalities, and on the work of Critical Animal Studies scholars such as Dinesh Wadiwel, Duxbury argues that animal welfare considerations or the acknowledgement of animals’ sentience and agency have been deployed as strategies pursued by (predominantly male) figures of scientific and political authority to guarantee that the domination and use of nonhuman animals can continue, following growing market demands and sanctioned by the British liberal state (and EU legislation).
Duxbury argues that granting animals sentient status is ‘intrinsically linked to the logic of a capitalist market system’ (p. 18). Accordingly, ‘welfare helps to mediate between animals-as-objects (property) and animals-as-sentient-beings (how they feel and experience pain). By presenting a veneer of respectability between law and animal experimentation, welfare contributes to a perpetuation of a logic of rationality’ (p. 19). This logic of rationality is underpinned by Cartesian binaries (culture/nature, human/animal, man/woman) and by other masculinist norms of objectification and commodification, domination, and exploitation of subjects deemed inferior or actively portrayed as objects to be dissected, vivisected, and so on. Importantly, Duxbury establishes a powerful parallelism between these processes concerning the regulation of nonhuman animals’ bodies and that of women’s bodies too. She relies on the work of (eco)feminist scholars such as Carol J. Adams, Elizabeth Grosz, Lori Gruen, and others to do this, aiming to establish clear connections between feminist and animal rights issues. Duxbury’s analysis of British liberalism poignantly supports her argument that the integration of ‘liberal ideologies into law and institutions in a society profoundly affects nonhumans’ and women’s bodies’, for it keeps them ‘at the receiving end of many a violent relationship, be that interpersonally, institutionally, or culturally’ (p. 4).
The book extensively showcases concrete examples of these violent modes of relationship, making for a challenging but important read. It is divided into three sections, which are devoted to: the legal regulation of animal-dependent research in Britain and how it relates to legal jurisprudence regarding women’s rights; the materiality of animal experimentation in laboratories, building a bridge with mechanisms of objectification and control of women’s bodies too; and concluding remarks. In section 1, the first two chapters present a historical analysis of animal experimentation in Britain from 1945 to present time, including Brexit. The third chapter of the section focuses on women’s rights and jurisprudence, looking at how systemic violence and the liberal state intersect both women and nonhuman animals as subjects-objects who are forcefully placed at the lower end of relations of power determined and enforced by male leaders.
Section 2 begins with a chapter on military research conducted in the 1950s at Britain’s foremost top-secret military establishment. This case study demonstrates how the military-industrial complex (especially the production of weapons of mass destruction), which serves a fundamentally masculinist project of warfare, heavily relied/s upon animal experimentation. In the fifth chapter, Duxbury analyses the historical development of laboratories where animal experiments take place, using feminist psychoanalytical theory to do so. She argues that ‘containment [a constitutive element of the laboratory space] is a metaphor for the female body and simultaneously, (. . .) an exercise of patriarchal power and symbolic exploitation of the female’ (p. 7). In chapter 6, Duxbury establishes what is perhaps the starkest link between stress and mental health research applied to nonhuman animals and to women. Section 3 brings us back to the present time and to the fact that – for the most part – animal experimentation and its gender(ed) underpinnings continue, following business as usual as sanctioned by the neoliberal British state. It is also here, in chapter 7, that Duxbury calls for the reinvigoration of non-violent direct action and for more serious collaboration and solidarity between social justice and animal rights or environmental justice movements.
Overall, the book brings an invaluable message about the intersectionality of oppression and domination in patriarchy. The acknowledgement of this multispecies intersectionality is still too often missing from feminist literature on gender and women’s studies, a trend that has been actively countered by ecofeminist scholars. Adding to this trend, Duxbury makes it clear that the struggles and injustices experienced by both women (and other socially oppressed groups) and nonhuman animals are brought about by the same system, produced by the same agents and norms. This justifies a critical intersectional analysis that helps both to understand such a system better, and to potentially build stronger and more unified resistance against the patriarchal, capitalist state. For example, not only are women directly targeted by systemic oppression and domination alongside nonhuman animals; they have also simultaneously and historically been instrumentalised to justify the continuation of animal experimentation (e.g. to develop hormonal ‘treatments’ for women’s menstruation).
Duxbury demonstrates how language associated with animal experiments is frequently and explicitly gendered. Her discussion of the topics of stress, mental ill health, and the development of the contraceptive pill is particularly striking in this regard. Both the language used to describe menstruating women – how hormones were meant to ‘tame’ women who would become ‘ravaging animals’ if they didn’t take the pill, or who are ‘driven wild by premenstrual tension every 20 days’ (p. 187), and the fact that these drugs were tested on animals, especially female animals, clearly emphasises the gendered dimension and the animalisation of both groups of subjects. Indeed, ‘(. . .) women and animals’ subjectivities became obsolete in the name of science. Their objectification in experiments accentuated their biological similarities. Their differences radically bifurcated from (human) males’ (p. 181). Duxbury’s intersectional critique is extremely important, quite in line with other books such as Carol J. Adams’ most recent work, The Pornography of Meat (2020).
At some points, the book is challenging to read. This is certainly due to the strong content of some sections (e.g. where the torture of animals is described). There are also multiple references to policies and legislation that make for a technical language or denser reading. Some ideas that are communicated in different chapters appear to be repetitive, although the author’s intention might be to emphasise them repeatedly so as to keep them present in the reader’s mind. The book also seems to lack a clear guiding thread from start to finish. Finally, in the conclusion, Duxbury dedicates only one paragraph to ‘what is to be done?’ (p. 209). Whereas it might be the book’s primary goal to highlight the intersections of oppression and exploitation, and not necessarily to suggest solutions or ways of overcoming such structural violence, it could strengthen and enrich this work to dedicate more space to it. Duxbury calls for ‘non-violent direct action reinvigoration’ in order to ‘fuck neoliberalism’, which will require ‘a greater collectivity of social movements that reach out to each other and participate in conjoined action and thinking’ (p. 209). This is certainly a necessary condition for the overcoming of patriarchy, for the sake of all living beings, but it is not by any means easy work, and it would feel relevant to know more about the author’s thoughts or ideas on how to potentially undergo such profound, systemic transformation by practising intersectional solidarity in our own (activist) movements. After all, as Duxbury herself notes by referring to the climate crisis and to the COVID-19 pandemic during which she wrote this book, these issues are both matters of justice and of actual survivability on Earth.
Ultimately, Duxbury does achieve what she sets out to do: to demonstrate that ‘particular living beings’ treatment is linked to liberal modes of violent domination both in its ideological and material practices’ (p. 4). She effectively shows how the social, political, and economic dimensions of these liberal modes of violence are more apparent in the realm of animal experimentation than in any other area. As she rightly argues, ‘animal experimentation and its legal implementation need to be mapped historically and from a perspective that recognises intersections of oppression’ (p. 4). Especially at a moment in time where gender violence, especially violence against women, has again become a topic of attention in the United Kingdom, with some agents of authority even calling for it to be acknowledged as a form of terrorism, the central question that readers might carry on with them is, indeed: ‘What then is to be done?’ (p. 4). How can we create stronger social movements that engage with these issues from a critical intersectional perspective, working together for the protection and liberation of all beings who are unjustly and forcefully placed at the lower end of hierarchies and relations of power and violence?
