Carol J. Adams

Carol J. Adams (born 1951) is an American feminist-vegan author, independent scholar, and activist whose 1990 book The Sexual Politics of Meat became a foundational text linking feminist theory to animal rights and veganism.

Work

Adams’s central contribution is the concept of the absent referent: the argument that the living animal is made absent — through language, butchery, and image — so that “meat” can be consumed without reference to the being it once was, and that the same structure operates in the objectification of women. She traces this through literature, advertising, and cookbook iconography from the nineteenth century forward.

The Sexual Politics of Meat (Continuum, 1990; 25th-anniversary edition Bloomsbury, 2015) has been continuously in print for more than three decades and is widely taught in gender studies, animal studies, and ethics courses. She expanded the visual argument in The Pornography of Meat (2003; revised 2020), a slideshow-turned-book cataloging how advertising feminizes animals and animalizes women.

Editing and collaboration

With Josephine Donovan, Adams co-edited Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (Duke University Press, 1995), a field-defining anthology of feminist animal studies. With Lori Gruen she co-edited Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth (Bloomsbury, 2014), consolidating a generation of ecofeminist scholarship.

Activism

Alongside her writing, Adams has worked for decades on domestic violence, homelessness, and racial justice in Dallas, Texas, and has spoken at hundreds of universities. She treats feminism, anti-racism, and animal advocacy as a single interlocking project rather than separate causes — a stance that has shaped the culture of contemporary vegan feminism.