Audio of talk: https://archive.org/details/NickPETA For more information about this talk and the conference it was given at, see the link above.

1. Intersectionality, Integrationist
Social Change and PETA’s
Animal Advocacy
Nick Pendergrast, University of Melbourne
Development for Species: Animals in society, animals as society:
Challenge the ‘anthropocentric focus of traditional scholarship
in both development and sociology’.

2. Content Warnings
 Fat shaming.
 Eating disorders.
 Violence – women.
 Sexual assault.

3. PETA’s Integrationist Social Change

4. Gender and Integrationist Social Change
 PETA use women who… vs the women taking part in its campaigns.
 Sexualisation of women: more people interested in seeing women
than men naked (Dan Matthews, PETA VP).
 Ingrid Newkirk (PETA President): ‘harmless antics’.
 PETA uses female nudity much like it is used to sell any commodity in
the advertising world (Torres).
 Objectification of women in advertising – culture that views women
as sexualised objects – linked to violence against women (Kilbourne).
 Socially constructed “ideal” or “perfect” body type = very ‘thin and
fragile’ which ‘is unattainable to most women, even if they starve
themselves’ and only approximately the thinnest 5% of women reach
this ideal (Kilbourne).
 Constant use of this female body type in advertising – women hating
their bodies and hating themselves + ‘feelings of inferiority, anxiety,
insecurity, and depression’ + increased prevalence of eating
disorders (Kilbourne).

5. Fat Shaming in PETA’s Campaigns
 PETA President Ingrid Newkirk:
 ‘America's obesity epidemic’.
 Lack of focus on health: ‘looking good in
a bikini’, achieving ‘a hot “beach bod”.’
 ‘The majority of fat people need to have
some discipline’.
 Structural issues that contribute to obesity
eg class and ethnicity.
 Widespread public outrage – PETA took
down the billboard and replaced it with
one that read: ‘GONE: Just like all the
pounds lost by people who go
vegetarian’.

6. Why do these campaigns?
 Media attention: ‘having activists “bare skin rather than wear skin”—consistently
grab headlines’ – can ‘initiate discussion, debate, and, of course, action’ and its
‘goal is to make the public think about the issues’. (Fruno, Senior campaigner, PETA
Asia – interview).
 Explicit Super Bowl advertisement ‘Vegetarians have Better Sex’, which was banned
– covered on FHM.
 Descriptions of women taken from the most popular men’s magazines (including
FHM) are indistinguishable from comments about women made by men convicted
of sexual assault (Horvarth and Hegarty).
 Content of the article in FHM and the comments after it focused on whether PETA’s
advertisement should have been banned or not.

7. Problems with these Campaigns
 Strong link between concern for other people and support for the idea of non-
human animals having some rights (Nibert).
 PETA’s use of sexism also reinforces speciesism, as both forms of oppression are
built on a similar logic – intersectionality: ‘all oppressions are interlocking and when
any oppression is embraced all oppressions are strengthened’ (Glasser).
 Recent study: Sexualised advertising reduced people’s intention to support PETA
and to make changes to their behaviours that would be beneficial to animals –
both in a study just of young men and a mixed-gender community sample
(Bongiorno, Bain and Haslam).

8. Organisational Implications
 PETA: ‘our campaigns have proved extremely successful. In the three decades since
PETA was founded, it has grown into the largest animal rights group in the world, with
more than 2 million members and supporters worldwide’.
 Organisational factors eg donor base is merely one way to measure success in social
movements – larger, more professionalised organisations.
 NPIC = increasingly narrow focus, greater desire for funding (Smith).
 Organisations focused on just one particular issue tend to ‘develop a larger base of
supporters’ and are also more likely to attract resources, funds and political allies
(Glasser).
 INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence offered a half year grant of $100,000 from the
Ford Foundation. Ford reversed the decision because they found out that INCITE
supported the Palestinian struggle against occupation (Smith).
 Taking on more causes can shrink the donor base = grassroots activism has greater
capacity to be intersectional.

9. Summing Up
 Organisational considerations are another barrier to putting intersectionality into
practice beyond academia.
 Other barriers eg social/political content:
 Esther Alloun. 2017, ‘Fur Peta’s Sake! The Politics of Animals in the Zionist State’ in
Animal Liberation Currents.
 Institute for Critical Animal Studies (Oceania):
 Facebook: search ‘Institute for Critical Animal Studies, Oceania’
 Twitter: @icasoceania
 My work: Google ‘nick pendergrast the conversation’.
 nicholas.pendergrast@unimelb.edu.au