Writing the Cow: Poetry, Activism, and the Texts of Meat

Activist-scholar Carol J. Adams introduced the notion of “texts of meat” in The Sexual Politics of Meat: “By speaking of the texts of meat we situate the production of meat’s meaning within a political-cultural context. Given life writing’s connection to memory, experience, and personal testimony, texts of meat stand in direct opposition to life-writing genres, including poetry; through their normalized categorization of animal subjects, texts of meat seek to erase, to abstract, and to de-characterize. Texts of meat perform the opposite of life writing. While the vegan reverberations of The Cow may seem radical to the everyday reader (and the everyday meat-eater), Ariana Reines’ effort to displace and disarm texts of meat through poetry instigates the most basic of reparations. One could feasibly choose to read every mention of “cow” in Reines’ collection as a metaphorical stand-in for “woman”. Poetry constitutes a form of activism, by which the author mean it actively strives against the ongoing erasure of oppressed bodies.