ABSTRACT
This chapter advances the idea of nonhumans in law as parallel to discourses about women as represented in British jurisprudence's legal structures. I will be arguing in this section that both animals and women are entangled in what Kimberlé Crenshaw calls intersectional oppressions. This means the binding together of several systems of subjection, in this case, the structural interrelationship between animals and women through the confines of legal discourses, and policies that are not directly associated with either agent. In this sense, I am arguing that the legal systems in place are very much organised and based on principles of hierarchy that subordinate some groups to others, namely, animals over humans and women over men. In this instance, I argue that women are not human in the eyes of the law. I theorise this relationship using my own tentative concept of the power–pain nexus. The power–pain nexus is the historical conceptualisation of a body experiencing pain, forged by various powerful institutions in society. Institutions that exercise this power–knowledge collude in regulating bodies, subjectifying some bodies (male) whilst desubjectifying others (nonhuman and women). This creates relations and hierarchies of power between groups of living beings.
