The secularization and modernization of society have created opportunities for broad interpretations of fundamental questions of life. The Animal Rights Movement (ARM) challenges Judeo-Christian cosmology and offers an alternative. ARM redefines the distinctions between humans and animals and gives them a new meaning within the generalized environmental other. As an emerging cosmology, it functions to give believers a means of dealing with questions of order and chaos, suffering, good and evil, and justice. It also creates a community of people who (...) seek redemption through saving animals. The Animal Rights Movement goes beyond moral protest and takes on the role of a religious cosmology. (shrink)

Since its original publication in 1975, this groundbreaking work has awakened millions of concerned men and women to the shocking abuse of animals everywhere--inspiring a worldwide movement to eliminate much of the cruel and unnecessary laboratory animal experimentation of years past. In this newly revised and expanded edition, author Peter Singer exposes the chilling realities of today's "factory farms" and product-testing procedures--offering sound, humane solutions to what has become a profound environmental and social as well as moral issue. An important (...) and persuasive appeal to conscience, fairness, decency and justice, Animal Liberation is essential reading for the supporter and the skeptic alike.--From publisher description. (shrink)

This paper profiles the animal activism of the late American animal activist Henry Spira, whose campaign strategies and tactics suggest a number of links with the nineteenth century pioneers of animal protection as well as with approaches favored by contemporary animal activists. However, the article argues that Spira's style of animal advocacy differed from conventional approaches in the mainstream animal movement in that he preferred to work with, rather than against, animal user industries. To this end, he pioneered the use (...) of "reintegrative shaming" in animal protection, an accommodation strategy that relied on moralizing with opponents as opposed to the more common approach in animal advocacy of adversarial vilification, and hence, disintegrative shaming. The article describes the framing of some of Spira's best-known anti-cruelty campaigns and his use of reintegrative shaming to induce animal users to change their ways. (shrink)

The history of the vivisection debate is a case study in the use of vilification not unlike its rhetorical use by adversaries in the pro-life/pro-choice controversy. According to Vanderford, vilification in that debate serves a number of functions: to identify adversaries as ; to cast opponents in an exclusively negative light; to attribute diabolical motives to one's adversaries; and to magnify the opposition's power as an enemy capable of doing great evil. In the vivisection debate, both sides have attempted to (...) delegitimize each other by one or more of these means. On the antivivisection side, Samuel Johnson in 1758 produced the fiercest attack up to that time on and When the antivivisectionist movement peaked in England in the 1870s, the animal experimentalists began to organize in earnest to fend off the charge that vivisection was both cruel and useless. By the turn of the century an American neurologist, Charles Loomis Dana, identified a way to discredit the mainly female antiscience in the antivivisection movement by inventing the disease to describe one of the diseases affecting mainly women who, having no children or a useful occupation, joined animal protection societies and campaigned against vivisection. Zoophil-psychosis, it was claimed, was a form of mental illness, an incurable insanity that afflicted the hysterical opponents of vivisection. (shrink)

This article examines two disputes within sex and gender movements, using them to think through inclusion/exclusion processes, the place of such explosions in the construction of collective identity, and the gendered nature of social movements. Literatures on collective identity emphasize the ways boundary negotiation reinforces the solidarity necessary for collective action and note benefits of solid boundaries, yet downplay the role of internal conflict in the making of collective identities. The cases examined here both involved the explicit expulsion of some (...) “members”: the North American Man/boy Love Association from the International Lesbian and Gay Association, and transsexuals from the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. An incongruence between practical participation and symbolic exclusion suggests that internal movement debates are best understood as public communications, depending heavily on the communicative environment. Finally, these stories raise questions about the gendered nature of collective identity construction in social movements more generally. (shrink)