Beyond the anthropological machine : a biopolitical reading of the intersection between woman and animal

Abstract

Historically, the construction of the normative subject has perpetuated Cartesian dualism, establishing a framework where the "Other" is subjected to structural oppression under anthropocentric, patriarchal, speciesist, and capitalist hegemony. Stripped of subjectivity and reduced to objecthood, marginalized bodies are rendered violable, exploitable, and "killable," revealing violence as a systematic form of governance. Women and animals serve as the primary sites of this biopolitical administration.

Sovereign power employs a discursive violence — specifically, a two-way metaphorical transitivity — to legitimize this control: the animalization of women and the feminization of animals. Through this transitivity, both groups are abstracted from "rights-bearing subject" and drawn into the "bare life" field of biopolitical power. The body is thus reduced to an object, valued strictly for its productive capacity. The convergence of medical and industrial practices forms a biopolitical nexus between fertility and productivity. Andro-anthropocentrism codes these bodies as 'reproductive machines,' defining femininity exclusively through motherhood. This discourse frames "infertile" or trans women as ontologically "deficient."

A similar situation occurs in the dairy and meat industry through the female animal body. Within this capitalist system, where animals' right to life is contingent upon productivity, cows that lose their fertility or milk yield ("infertile") and "breeding" bulls deemed "dysfunctional" because they cannot perform "masculinity" are reclassified as disposable and are discarded. The intersectional oppression of women's and animals' bodies represents the most naked manifestation of power's authority to make live and kill over bodies. While women's bodies are rendered socially invisible, animals' bodies are physically destroyed. To this end, employing an ecofeminist animal studies perspective and critical discourse analysis, this study examines the categorization practices of sovereign power, presenting a conceptual framework that deconstructs the anthropocentric hierarchy.