The Parallel Lives of Women and Cows Meat Markets [Hardcover]

Weaving together a social history of the American beef industry with her own account of growing up in the shadow of her grandfather's cattle business, Halley juxtaposes the two worlds and creates a link between the meat industry and her own experience of the formation of gender and sexuality through family violence.Where the Cows Came From Where the Irish, Where my Family Came From The Early American Cattle Business Women's Lives The Lives of Cows Slaughterhouses and the Death of a Cow Sexual Violence and Gender in My Childhood Eating Meat, Making Money

When we say that a woman is treated like a 'piece of meat,' what do we really mean? Jean Halley explores the intersection between violence against women and violence against animals. First, Halley ruminates on the myriad ways that cruelty and trauma permeate the lives of women and girls, using her own story as a living example. She shares aching, shocking personal memories of growing up white and, for a time, poor in a rural town where violence was not only tolerated, it was expected and alternately ignored or covered over. Second, Halley provides an overview of the American meat industry, offering an unusual history and analysis of a form of violence that is invisible to most of us, even while we are complicit in its perpetuation. This book is a brilliant meditation on the normalization of violence in American life. - Leora Tanenbaum, author of Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation

'This book is a tour de force combining high theory, experimental writing, feminist materialism, biopower, the meat industry, family stories, trauma, love, pain, the loss of innocence, and betrayal in a tarnished and violent postmodern west that has lost its way. Performative social science moves into uncharted spaces with this brilliant work, a new starting place for all of us!' - Norman K. Denzin, College of Communications Scholar, University of Illinois at Urbana-Illinois

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