In un articolo pubblicato su Lux Magazine e riproposto in italiano anche su Internazionale (dietro paywall), Astra e Sunaura Taylor tentano un collegamento fra femminismo socialista e movimento animalista, a partire dal discorso di ringraziamento tenuto da Joaquin Phoenix durante la cerimonia degli Oscar 2020.

We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources,” Phoenix said in his halting, earnest style. His next statement was the one to put the room on edge: “We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and when she gives birth we steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable. And then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal.” Phoenix’s incrimination of beloved breakfast foods was met with bemused silence. The media, however, could not contain itself. “Joaquin Phoenix’s Heart Is in the Right Place, but That Speech Was Unhinged,” read a Vice headline. Vox called it a “sprawling sociopolitical epic.” USA Today declared his remarks “emotional, empowering, and batty.”

Nonostante la recente popolarità, vegetarianismo e veganesimo hanno una lunga storia che si intreccia, nel mondo americano, col movimento femminista, pacifista, e dei diritti civili.

 In the English-speaking world, many women abolitionists, suffragettes, and pacifists advocated for vegetarianism and made connections across movements and causes long before Singer (or Phoenix, for that matter) came on the scene, including the courageous abolitionist sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké, who rejected meat in part because they thought it would hasten the “emancipation of woman from the toil of the kitchen.”Singer rode roughshod over these intellectual antecedents by distinguishing his supposedly rational arguments from all the emotional — that is, feminine — advocacy that came before it. In the 1800s, there was even a diagnosis, zoophilpsychosis, for the affliction of being overly concerned for animals, from which women were believed to disproportionately suffer.

La similitudine fra la condizione femminile odierna e quella degli animali da allevamento sarebbe esemplificata in Gunda, un documentario del 2021 del regista russo Viktor Kossakovsky e prodotto da Phoenix stesso. Il docuentario segue la vita di una scrofa

The opening scene shows a mother pig, Gunda, giving birth to a litter of piglets in a straw-filled barn. We witness their growth, while briefly encountering other creatures of the farm—a herd of cows eager to be let out to pasture, a flock of chickens exploring the yard. We watch Gunda as she watches her offspring, and see how much effort and patience is required to nurse and nurture them. She snuggles, sniffs, and suckles her young and they become stronger and more playful. Toward the end, the inevitable happens. A truck drives up and her babies, loaded into a crate, suddenly disappear.

[…]

The genteel phrase “animal husbandry” is thus surprisingly apt when one recognizes the sexual, reproductive, and economic exploitation animals are forced to endure. Marriage, after all, emerged as both a patriarchal system and a way of transferring property — land, livestock, wealth, and women. A “husband” was a “master” who had a right to do with his possessions what he willed, a power dynamic that still holds when a husband’s partners and property are unconsenting creatures.

[…]

As socialist feminists like Federici have shown, capitalism developed by encouraging, and coercing, women to accept their role as selfless nurturers as natural, inevitable, and eternal. Over the centuries people rose up and demanded a different set of possibilities and expectations for those designated as female — something more than a lifetime of dishes, diapers, and intercourse on demand. Women have insisted on having control of how and if we choose to engage in sex, pregnancy, abortion, birth, and lactation. Yet capitalism has persuaded us to lower the expectations we have for our fellow creatures. A socialist feminist perspective urges us to ask how it is that we have come to see the violent mechanization and profit-driven control of other animals’ uteruses, breasts, and reproductive capacities — and the vast inequity and devastation it enables — as par for the course.