ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I disrupt the figure of American slaughterhouse designer Temple Grandin, who enjoys frequent laudation as a uniquely qualified advocate for animals and autistic people in both lay and academic circles. Paradoxically, her overwhelmingly positive reputation dissuades criticism from vegan activists and animal studies scholars, who have strong grounds for finding fault with her career and claims. I contend that Grandin’s immense popular appeal in Western neoliberal societies derives from the absence of any meaningful challenges to ableism, speciesism, or the violent capitalist logic that legitimizes both forms of oppression in her published work. Instead, her fame for supposedly rendering industrial killing systems “humane,” alongside her endorsement of medicalizing humans labelled as “autistic,” further normalizes and entrenches the devaluation, silencing, and institutional repression of animals and autistic people. I demonstrate that her narratives both support the vast corporate enterprises aiming to churn out new “treatments” and “cures” for “autism” and perpetuate the mass production and consumption of animals via factory farming. In conclusion, I discuss my public confrontation of Grandin at the University of Guelph in 2015, during which I sought to disturb her narratives about animality and disability and the animal movement’s apathy toward opposing her actions. This chapter closes with a black–and-white reproduction of a painting by the author, The Stuff of Heaven.
