THE POLITICS OF SMELL AND THE MORALITY OF SIGHT: Challenging “Slaughterhouses with Glass Walls” in Animal Advocacy
Research output: Contributions to collected editions/works › Chapter › peer-review
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Violence and Harm in the Animal Industrial Complex: Human-Animal Entanglements. ed. / Gwen Hunnicutt; Richard Twine; Kenneth Mentor. Taylor and Francis Inc., 2024. p. 71-83.
Research output: Contributions to collected editions/works › Chapter › peer-review
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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 -