TY - CHAP

T1 - THE POLITICS OF SMELL AND THE MORALITY OF SIGHT

T2 - Challenging “Slaughterhouses with Glass Walls” in Animal Advocacy

AU - Stefanoni, Chiara

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2025 selection and editorial matter, Gwen Hunnicutt, Richard Twine and Kenneth Mentor; individual chapters, the contributors.

PY - 2024/11/12

Y1 - 2024/11/12

N2 - The conceptual pair of “visibility/concealment” is foundational to the field of animal studies and the animal advocacy movement, substantiating the idea that uncovering violence against non-human animals in factory farms and slaughterhouses can lead to its eradication. This perspective and consequent activist strategies fall under the scopes of “the politics of sight”. This chapter, first, challenges on a theoretical level the equation between vision and truth underpinning the politics of sight by succinctly outlining a materialist approach for the critique of violence in which the Foucauldian notion of apparatus (dispositif), as a network of practices and knowledges, plays a crucial role. Second, the relevance of sight is further challenged on a historical basis. Analysing the knowledges involved in the rise of the modern industrial slaughterhouse in the nineteenth-century West, this chapter shows the primacy of miasmatic theory and, thus, smell. On the other side, sight emerges as a main element in the moralizing, utilitarian, anthropocentric and classist, narrative of the early animal advocacy associations. Finally, the chapter briefly examines as a case-study the slaughterhouse tours both in nineteenth century and contemporary settings (e.g., transparency campaign by meat industry) in which the equation between violence and visibility/concealment stand in a highly problematic level.

AB - The conceptual pair of “visibility/concealment” is foundational to the field of animal studies and the animal advocacy movement, substantiating the idea that uncovering violence against non-human animals in factory farms and slaughterhouses can lead to its eradication. This perspective and consequent activist strategies fall under the scopes of “the politics of sight”. This chapter, first, challenges on a theoretical level the equation between vision and truth underpinning the politics of sight by succinctly outlining a materialist approach for the critique of violence in which the Foucauldian notion of apparatus (dispositif), as a network of practices and knowledges, plays a crucial role. Second, the relevance of sight is further challenged on a historical basis. Analysing the knowledges involved in the rise of the modern industrial slaughterhouse in the nineteenth-century West, this chapter shows the primacy of miasmatic theory and, thus, smell. On the other side, sight emerges as a main element in the moralizing, utilitarian, anthropocentric and classist, narrative of the early animal advocacy associations. Finally, the chapter briefly examines as a case-study the slaughterhouse tours both in nineteenth century and contemporary settings (e.g., transparency campaign by meat industry) in which the equation between violence and visibility/concealment stand in a highly problematic level.

KW - Cultural studies

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85208856835&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.4324/9781003441908-7

DO - 10.4324/9781003441908-7

M3 - Chapter

AN - SCOPUS:85208856835

SN - 9781032579771

SP - 71

EP - 83

BT - Violence and Harm in the Animal Industrial Complex

A2 - Hunnicutt, Gwen

A2 - Twine, Richard

A2 - Mentor, Kenneth

PB - Taylor and Francis Inc.

ER -