'(Feminist) Animal rights without animal personhood?' by Maneesha Deckha in Feminist Animal Studies (Routledge, 2022) comments
This chapter takes up the pressing question of whether rights are compatible with animals’ status as legal beings. In Animals as Legal Beings in 2021, Deckha theorises a new animal-friendly legal subjectivity, which she calls “beingness”, as a better replacement for property, animals’ present abysmal legal status. Drawing upon feminist and other critical theory, the book argues that beingness can provide the protective shield against instrumental treatment that legal personhood is meant to provide, but unlike personhood, beingness does not demand that animals conform to paradigmatic human benchmarks to qualify for such protection. For many animal law scholars, the form that protection should take is rights. But it is not immediately clear to many how rights can exist without personhood. Given feminist arguments against recuperating personhood, a concept too anthropocentric in origin and design, this chapter asks whether the same fate must befall the concept of rights. Are they also unsalvageable as a liberatory tool for animals? The chapter reviews the hard-hitting critiques that feminist animal theorists have lodged against rights, but ultimately argues that rights as a legal tool may be retained and recuperated as part of a feminist revisioning of law for animals. ... This is not to say that rights are the ideal type of protection for animals, but simply that they are not foundationally limiting for animals as I have argued person- hood is. Part I of this chapter summarises my argument against personhood, which I developed in Animals as Legal Beings, as the replacement for property as animals’ legal status. It begins by considering an existing neo-Kantian account of why rights for animals are fine but personhood is not, to help differentiate the critical theory- informed reasons for why I say personhood is problematic. This background is necessary to understand why I say that personhood must be dispensed with but not rights, despite the limitations of rights, which I consider in the remainder of the analysis. Part II of the chapter reviews the critiques that feminist animal theorists have lodged against rights models given their liberal humanist tradition and replies to them.This part suggests that rights can be oriented away from this tradition, pointing to critical feminist and postcolonial scholarship that has advanced this position, in a way that personhood cannot be cementing the argument that rights and beingness are compatible. Part III then moves to consider whether rights are not only compatible with beingness, but actually might be productive in actualising this new legal outcome for animals.
Deckha's Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders (University of Toronto Press, 2021)
critically examines how Canadian law and, by extension, other legal orders around the world, participate in the social construction of the human-animal divide and the abject rendering of animals as property. Through a rigorous but cogent analysis, Deckha calls for replacing the exploitative property classification for animals with a new transformative legal status or subjectivity called "beingness." In developing a new legal subjectivity for animals, one oriented toward respecting animals for who they are rather than their proximity to idealized versions of humanness, [it] seeks to bring critical animal theorizations and animal law closer together. Throughout, Deckha draws upon the feminist animal care tradition, as well as feminist theories of embodiment and relationality, postcolonial theory, and critical animal studies. Her argument is critical of the liberal legal view of animals and directed at a legal subjectivity for animals attentive to their embodied vulnerability, and desirous of an animal-friendly cultural shift in the core foundations of anthropocentric legal systems.
