MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Feminists and post-colonial theorists (Adams, Agamben) help provide a context for the seamless way commodity politics produce without end the bodies necessary to maintain a colonial economy, irrespective of the body in question. This paper notes first that the boundaries of the human/ non human have already and always been a place of trouble. Like other binaries, the one term stabilizes only by the erasure, abjection, repudiation of the other. One reads this anxiety of collapse in the categorical slippage of animal - human across western fantasy, literature, and politics, commerce. In each discourse the beleagured human must always be separated out from the contagion of the other.

I take as my starting point, a “simultaneous exploitation and/or erasure of animal bodies” (Belcourt) that facilitates neo-colonial technologies of processing bodies for various economies of consumption, material as well as symbolic.

Two examples; Food and sex: The production of consumable bodies is a necessary economic perquisite to colonial politics. Friends with benefits? Long term Relations, NSA play? The marketing of erotocized bodies as objects, variously, of consumption across an exhaustive array of media, markets and merchandizing apps (TINDR, GRNDR) evokes the gendered, anthrocentric (man-centric) discourse of colonial privilege that undergirds western political global commerce. Feminist Carol Adams argues that the politics of meat operates so seamlessly to produce compliant [gendered, raced] subjectivities because of the long history of colonial discourse that abjectly frames embodiment as abject: Extending Adams’ insight: If western philosophy valorizes disembodiment, any creature linked by politic or by representation to embodiment is, to that degree, produced, factoried, rendered in a colonial semiotical machined as dismembering as the factory farm.