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Animal husbandry as sexual slavery : human(e) dairy in speculative vegan fiction

Presentation date2026-01-19
Abstract

An enduring strategy in vegan campaigns is the publicizing of structural similarities between exploitative animal agriculture and human suffering under such conditions as chattel slavery, genocide, the Holocaust, torture, crimes against humanity, rape, sexual assault, and reproductive violence – parallels that have been applied to intensive dairy farming. The dairy industry, in which forced breeding and compulsory pregnancy – sexual slavery – are instrumentally linked, is paradigmatic of the androcentric, patriarchal, and heterosexual bias of animal husbandry. Thus, this essay explores the use of speculative fiction as an imaginative laboratory in which these parallels are tested in storyworlds where humans are meat-animals, dairy derives from breast milk, and the livestock industry is supplied by systematic rape. “In the Barn” by Piers Anthony uses the concept of “parallel worlds” to explore an economy of human dairy that exposes the bizarre normativity of exploiting other lactating mammals. Joseph D'Lacey's post-apocalyptic western, "Meat," exposes the sexual violence on which dairy is based and its centrality to the entire system of meat production. Sian Rose's Gothic splatterpunk novel "Farm" speculatively subjects female humans to the agricultural practices of rape, forced pregnancy, and brutal milking. This essay proposes that fiction writers like these use the affordances of literary narrative to create speculative worlds that expose the moral and ethical, capitalist, racial, speciesist, and gendered values that enable the sexual enslavement of sentient beings in the name of animal husbandry.

Keywords
  • Veganism
  • Ecofeminism
  • Speculative fiction
  • Animal agriculture
  • Dairy
  • Ethics
Citation (ISO format)
MADSEN, Deborah Lea. Animal husbandry as sexual slavery : human(e) dairy in speculative vegan fiction. In: (Re)Thinking agriculture from the margins : intersectional perspectives. 2026.
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  • PID : unige:193231
Additional URL for this publicationhttps://www.unige.ch/vls/publications
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