Beasts of Burden

A bold and beautifully written inquiry into the intertwined struggles for animal and disability justice--challenging what it means to be human In this provocative and original work, artist, activist, and scholar Sunaura Taylor, "Judith Butler meets St. Francis of Assisi" ( The New Yorker ), explores the profound connections between animal liberation and disability justice. With keen insight and lyrical prose, Beasts of Burden asks us to reconsider long-held assumptions about autonomy, dependence, and what defines a life worth valuing. Blending memoir, philosophy, and cultural critique, Taylor draws on her lived experience as a disabled person and lifelong animal advocate to examine how society marginalizes both disabled people and nonhuman animals--often through the same systems of power and exclusion. From the ethics of caregiving to the realities of factory farming, she invites readers to "crip" our understanding of animal ethics, opening the door to new forms of empathy and solidarity across difference. As Rebecca Solnit has written, "Sunaura Taylor will shake up your categories, turn your world inside out, and tell you a lot of fascinating and important things you didn't know yet, about your own body and the bodies of others, human and nonhuman, under an inhumane regime."

A bold and beautifully written inquiry into the intertwined struggles for animal and disability justice--challenging what it means to be human In this provocative and original work, artist, activist, and scholar Sunaura Taylor, "Judith Butler meets St. Francis of Assisi" ( The New Yorker ), explores the profound connections between animal liberation and disability justice. With keen insight and lyrical prose, Beasts of Burden asks us to reconsider long-held assumptions about autonomy, dependence, and what defines a life worth valuing. Blending memoir, philosophy, and cultural critique, Taylor draws on her lived experience as a disabled person and lifelong animal advocate to examine how society marginalizes both disabled people and nonhuman animals--often through the same systems of power and exclusion. From the ethics of caregiving to the realities of factory farming, she invites readers to "crip" our understanding of animal ethics, opening the door to new forms of empathy and solidarity across difference. As Rebecca Solnit has written, "Sunaura Taylor will shake up your categories, turn your world inside out, and tell you a lot of fascinating and important things you didn't know yet, about your own body and the bodies of others, human and nonhuman, under an inhumane regime."

A beautifully written, deeply provocative inquiry into the intersection of animal and disability liberation and the debut of an important new social critic How much of what we understand of ourselves as "human" depends on our physical and mental abilities how we move (or cannot move) in and interact with the world? And how much of our definition of "human" depends on its difference from "animal"? Drawing on her own experiences as a disabled person, a disability activist, and an animal advocate, author Sunaura Taylor persuades us to think deeply, and sometimes uncomfortably, about what divides the human from the animal, the disabled from the nondisabled and what it might mean to break down those divisions, to claim the animal and the vulnerable in ourselves, in a process she calls "cripping animal ethics." Beasts of Burden suggests that issues of disability and animal justice which have heretofore primarily been presented in opposition are in fact deeply entangled. Fusing philosophy, memoir, science, and the radical truths these disciplines can bring whether about factory farming, disability oppression, or our assumptions of human superiority over animals Taylor draws attention to new worlds of experience and empathy that can open up important avenues of solidarity across species and ability. Beasts of Burden is a wonderfully engaging and elegantly written work, both philosophical and personal, by a brilliant new voice.

A beautifully written, deeply provocative inquiry into the intersection of animal and disability liberation and the debut of an important new social critic How much of what we understand of ourselves as "human" depends on our physical and mental abilities how we move (or cannot move) in and interact with the world? And how much of our definition of "human" depends on its difference from "animal"? Drawing on her own experiences as a disabled person, a disability activist, and an animal advocate, author Sunaura Taylor persuades us to think deeply, and sometimes uncomfortably, about what divides the human from the animal, the disabled from the nondisabled and what it might mean to break down those divisions, to claim the animal and the vulnerable in ourselves, in a process she calls "cripping animal ethics." Beasts of Burden suggests that issues of disability and animal justice which have heretofore primarily been presented in opposition are in fact deeply entangled. Fusing philosophy, memoir, science, and the radical truths these disciplines can bring whether about factory farming, disability oppression, or our assumptions of human superiority over animals Taylor draws attention to new worlds of experience and empathy that can open up important avenues of solidarity across species and ability. Beasts of Burden is a wonderfully engaging and elegantly written work, both philosophical and personal, by a brilliant new voice.