Abstract
Jessica Ison’s Queer and Animal Provocations: Homonormativity, Animal Exploitation and Sexual Violence is an engaging read, and, indeed, a provocative one. The book explores how homonormativity—the assimilation of queer people into dominant (heterosexual, capitalist, white, colonizing) cultures—contributes to violence against animals. Written from an uncompromising position against factory farming, meat eating, animal testing, and other forms of animal exploitation and abuse, this book will likely challenge readers who have not yet engaged critically with these topics; and certainly, that is part of the point.
Queer and Animal Provocations starts off with an emotional bang, offering vivid depictions of corporations using queer events such as Pride and the passing of a same-sex marriage referendum to advertise industrial farming in the form of “dead animal flesh” (p. 13). The book describes advertisements featuring BLTs, sausages, and lamb meat surrounded by rainbow flags and fonts. Ison follows this imagery by pointing to the brutality within industrial farming, including routine sexual exploitation of animals, and in chapter 1, breaks down the gap between the fields of queer studies and animal studies, making the case that scholars should be combining these fields to argue for collective liberation. The book goes on to do just that.
Chapter 2 discusses European and Australian histories of buggery law (comprised of sodomy—predominantly enforced in instances occurring between two men and therefore considered law against queer sex—and bestiality, generally defined as humans engaging in sex acts with non-human animals). Ison compares the decriminalization of queer sex, particularly as a strategy “to allow gays and lesbians to become good citizens and consumers” (p. 43), to the ways in which capitalism shaped laws pertaining to bestiality. Ison contends that through capitalism, bestiality has been made illegal only in circumstances in which the human perpetrator is engaging in sex acts with an animal for the human’s sexual pleasure. This excludes the majority of sex acts humans engage in with animals; the most common of which, Ison explains, is forcibly inseminating an animal for the purpose of factory farming. Through this exclusion, the author reveals that these laws do not intend to protect animals from physical or sexual harm and instead protect big business.
The third chapter of Queer and Animal Provocations expands on the above ideas by analyzing the perspectives of people who have engaged in bestiality, including their claims of an inherent link between bestiality and queerness. Ison critically situates those perspectives within patriarchal, white supremacist, and capitalist contexts, arguing against bestiality as queer. Ultimately, Ison emphasizes that the criminalization of bestiality serves a purpose under capitalism: as a foil that distracts the public from the daily sexual violence of factory farming. As Ison notes, “One can feel okay with what happens in a factory farm because what is officially classified as bestiality is reserved for the perverted, mentally unwell criminal” (p. 74). Importantly, in critiquing statutes criminalizing bestiality, the author takes care not to justify individual acts of sexual violence against animals; instead, Ison pointedly, prudently, and repeatedly problematizes such acts.
While Ison staunchly opposes cruelty to animals, in chapter 4, she cautions readers against animal abuse registries (AARs), databases of people who have been convicted of animal abuse. Modeled after sex offender registries (SORs), AARs are only used in an official capacity in a small number of localities worldwide. But unofficial AARs operate online, and some animal rights activists advocate for their official expansion. To demonstrate the potential pitfalls in expanding AARs, the chapter discusses the harms of SORs, especially for queer populations and other marginalized communities, adopting an abolitionist position that critiques AARs for using the same mechanism as bestiality legislation to obscure industrial sexual violence against animals. Finally, chapter 5 issues a call to action that ties in the histories of liberatory queer and animal activism as models for calling attention to violence against animals without invoking the criminal legal system.
Queer and Animal Provocations presents convincing arguments against rainbow capitalism and for collective work between queer and animal activists. Beyond the strength of its main points, I was struck by the frank and refreshing ways in which Ison grapples with uncertainty and talks through her choices and thought processes. The book also makes masterful use of chapter hooks and closings, which provide evocative illustrations of the chapters’ themes. The introduction to chapter 2, for instance, provides a description of a documentary scene featuring urban queer men visiting a rural farm in Australia and being encouraged to manually penetrate a cow, which in the film is played for laughs. While these illustrations could be disturbing at times, they set up Ison’s arguments about the use of homonormativity as a tool for animal subjugation to great effect.
The themes of this book are controversial, requiring a strong voice throughout, and Ison was up to the task. However, the author’s language felt overstated at times: in chapter 1, Ison heavily critiques specific works of prior queer scholarship for their lack of discussion about animal liberation when I would argue that was simply beyond the scope of the works. In another example, the author casually accused a scholar of expressing “joy over jellyfish torture.” As jellyfish have neither brains nor a central nervous system, the term “torture” felt heavy-handed to me, especially without further explanation to contextualize it. Some of the book’s arguments were weakened by other questionable word choice as well. For instance, the text sometimes erroneously uses the terms zoophilia and pedophilia interchangeably with sexual offending. While there is overlap between people with zoophilia or pedophilia and people who engage in harmful sexual activity, many people with pedophilia or zoophilia never act on their attractions. Using these terms interchangeably conflates attraction with violent behavior, which can unintentionally lead to harmful misunderstandings around all of these groups and can downplay people’s ability to control their own behavior toward those they are attracted to. These critiques aside, Ison’s bold perspective consistently shone through.
Overall, the argument at the core of Queer and Animal Provocations—that homonormativity and animal exploitation are intertwined and require collective resistance—is persuasively constructed and difficult to dismiss. Despite some lapses in precision, the work succeeds in what it sets out to do: unsettle comfortable assumptions and challenge readers to think more critically about the ways in which liberation movements can reproduce and resist structures of harm. It will be of particular value to scholars studying within queer, green, abolitionist, and other critical criminology disciplines; as well as those in the field of critical animal studies. This book is a daring and thought-provoking contribution to both queer and animal studies, and Ison makes a compelling case that these fields are stronger together than apart.