Literature on the ethics and politics of food and that on human-animal relationships have infrequently converged. Representing an initial step toward bridging this divide, Messy Eating features interviews with thirteen prominent and emerging scholars about the connections between their academic work and their approach to consuming animals as food. The collection explores how authors working across a range of perspectives-postcolonial, Indigenous, black, queer, trans, feminist, disability, poststructuralist, posthumanist, and multispecies-weave their theoretical and political orientations with daily, intimate, and visceral practices of food consumption, preparation, and ingestion. Each chapter introduces a scholar for whom the tangled, contradictory character of human-animal relations raises difficult questions about what they eat. Representing a departure from canonical animal rights literature, most authors featured in the collection do not make their food politics or identities explicit in their published work. While some interviewees practice vegetarianism or veganism, and almost all decry the role of industrialized animal agriculture in the environmental crisis, the contributors tend to reject a priori ethical codes and politics grounded in purity, surety, or simplicity. Remarkably free of proscriptions, but attentive to the Eurocentric tendencies of posthumanist animal studies, Messy Eating reveals how dietary habits are unpredictable and dynamic, shaped but not determined by life histories, educational trajectories, disciplinary homes, activist experiences, and intimate relationships. These accessible and engaging conversations offer rare and often surprising insights into pressing social issues through a focus on the mundane-and messy- interactions that constitute the professional, the political, and the personal. Contributors: Neel Ahuja, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Matthew Calarco, Lauren Corman, Naisargi Dave, Maneesha Deckha, Maria Elena Garcia, Sharon Holland, Kelly Struthers Montford, H. Peter Steeves, Kim TallBear, Sunaura Taylor, Harlan Weaver, Kari Weil, Cary Wolfe

New and cutting-edge work in animality studies, human-animal studies, and posthumanism Representations of animality continue to proliferate in various kinds of literary and cultural texts. This pioneering volume explores the critical interface between animal and animality studies, marking out the terrain in relation to twentieth-century literature and film. The range of texts considered here is intentionally broad, answering questions like, how do contemporary writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Terry Tempest Williams, and Indra Sinha help us to think about not only animals but also humans as animals? What kinds of creatures are being constructed by contemporary artists such as Patricia Piccinini, Alexis Rockman, and Michael Pestel? How do 'animalities' animate such diverse texts as the poetry of two women publishing under the name of 'Michael Field', or an early film by Thomas Edison depicting the electrocution of a circus elephant named Topsy? Connecting these issues to fields as diverse as environmental studies and ecocriticism, queer theory, gender studies, feminist theory, illness and disability studies, postcolonial theory, and biopolitics, the volume also raises further questions about disciplinarity itself, while hoping to inspire further work 'beyond the human' in future interdisciplinary scholarship.

Through an absorbing investigation into recent, high-profile scandals involving one of the largest kosher slaughterhouses in the world, located unexpectedly in Postville, Iowa, Aaron S. Gross makes a powerful case for elevating the category of the animal in the study of religion. Major theorists have almost without exception approached religion as a phenomenon that radically marks humans off from other animals, but Gross rejects this paradigm, instead matching religion more closely with the life sciences to better theorize human nature. Gross begins with a detailed account of the scandals at Agriprocessors and their significance for the American and international Jewish community. He argues that without a proper theorization of "animals and religion," we cannot fully understand religiously and ethically motivated diets and how and why the events at Agriprocessors took place. Subsequent chapters recognize the significance of animals to the study of religion in the work of Ernst Cassirer, Emile Durkheim, Mircea Eliade, Jonathan Z. Smith, and Jacques Derrida and the value of indigenous peoples' understanding of animals to the study of religion in our daily lives. Gross concludes by extending the Agribusiness scandal to the activities at slaughterhouses of all kinds, calling attention to the religiosity informing the regulation of "secular" slaughterhouses and its implications for our relationship with and self-imagination through animals.

Edited by Mylan Engel Jr. and Gary Lynn Comstock, this book employs different ethical lenses, including classical deontology, libertarianism, commonsense morality, virtue ethics, utilitarianism, and the capabilities approach, to explore the philosophical basis for the strong animal rights view, which holds that animals have moral rights equal in strength to the rights of humans, while also addressing what are undoubtedly the most serious challenges to the strong animal rights stance, including the challenges posed by rights nihilism, the "kind" argument against animal rights, the problem of predation, and the comparative value of lives. In addition, contributors explore the practical import of animal rights both from a social policy standpoint and from the standpoint of personal ethical decisions concerning what to eat and whether to hunt animals. Unlike other volumes on animal rights, which focus primarily on the legal rights of animals, and unlike other anthologies on animal ethics, which tend to cover a wide variety of topics but only devote a few articles to each topic, this volume focuses exclusively on the question of whether animals have moral rights and the practical import of such rights. The Moral Rights of Animals will be an indispensable resource for scholars, teachers, and students in the fields of animal ethics, applied ethics, ethical theory, and human-animal studies, as well as animal rights advocates and policy makers interested in improving the treatment of animals.