Intersectionality and Posthumanist Visions of Equality

I wanted to flag this interesting article in the Wisconsin Journal of Law, Gender, and Society, Intersectionality and Posthumanist Visions of Equality by Maneesha Deckha. The article lays out the case that speciesism should be included along with racism, sexism, homopohobia, ageism, and more when analyzing the implications of laws and legal theory. Here are a couple of points I find especially interesting:

* The degree to which the legal system (and mainstream society) is concerned with animal abuse is heavily contingent on purely cultural constructions of the "worth" of those animals. That is, (using Western society as a background) animals that have reputations as being "dirty" or "savage" (rats or coyotes, for example) are rarely going to be the subject of concern; animals culturally constructed as "loyal" or "noble" (dogs & horses, for example) will receive greater protection. Different cultures value different animals differently (cows in India are sacred; horsemeat or dogmeat is common in others).

* Along these lines (my own observation here), there's a strange dichotomy with the phenomenon that inflicting pain on a single animal is likely to be considered morally culpable, while inflicting pain on thousands or millions of animals as part of a larger project is considered blameless: slitting the throat of a chicken for animal sacrifice by members of Santeria can incur legal difficulties, but industrial food production involving chicken will escape scrutiny.

* There's also an interesting discussion of Cary Wolfe's arrangement of species on a sort of grid that reflects cultural conceptions of their worth. At the highest are "humanized humans"--that his, human beings whose worth is fully embraced. A step below are "animalized humans", human beings whose worth is considered lesser by racist theories labelling them as "savage" or "bestial" (ethnic cleansing campaigns often reflect this sort of thinking). A step lower are "humanized animals", animals to which we assign traits (intelligence, affection, loyalty, etc.) that we considered valuable: dolphins, chimpanzees, dogs, etc. And then lowest are "animalized animals", those animals who receive little or no value and are seen merely as sources of food, clothing, sport, or experimentation.