Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Little attention has been given to animals' access to water in different cultural and legal contexts. The ‘right of thirst’ in Islamic law constitutes an important exception. In the first section of this paper I outline the doctrinal bases for the ‘right of thirst’, and clarify the sense in which it is a ‘right’ and is ‘Islamic’. In the second section of the paper I assess the relevance of Islamic water law in two geographic contexts, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the American West. Comparison of the two cases indicated that direct relevance for Pakistan is more complex than expected, and indirect relevance for the USA is less remote and more stimulating than might be expected.

This paper offers notes on the ways in which nonhuman animals have been treated within the texts of academic geography, principally human geography, The argument is that their inclusion here has always been a very partial one, conditioned by what has sometimes been termed a ‘human chauvinism’ leading them to be ignored altogether or only researched in the context of their utility to human beings. An alternative perspective is proposed in which animals are regarded as a marginal ‘social’ group discursively constituted and practically affected by human communities, and as a group which is thereby subjected to all manner of sociospatial inclusions and exclusions, The argument is that animals should be seen as enmeshed in complex power relations with human communities, and in the process enduring geographies which are imposed upon them ‘from without’ but which they may also inadvertently influence ‘from within’. The implications of adopting such a perspective require careful examination, but in the second part of this paper some possibilities are raised though substantive vignettes of animals as a social group included in or excluded from the city. Particular attention is paid to 19th-century debates about meat markets and slaughterhouses, wherein can be detected a will to exclude livestock animals from cities such as London and Chicago on a variety of grounds (medical and hygienic, organisational and moral).

A new wave of agro-industrialization has taken place in the US pork sector since the mid-1980s, Driven by changes in consumer demand and by restructuring in US meat-packing, agro-industrialization is centered around lean-meat production and involves alterations in genetics, feeding regimes, facilities construction, and management practices ‘down on the farm’, Two main expressions of intensive accumulation in US meat-packing are evident, but the lean-meat imperative is integral to both, There is a movement towards an increased scale and standardization of production as major meat-packing firms develop value-added meats for general consumption. Counter to this is the manufacture of boutique meats by firms that are poised to exploit health and food safety-related challenges to energy-intensive and capital-intensive ‘productivist’ agriculture, In this paper the current thrust of agro-industrialization in the US pork sector is examined in historical perspective, within the rise, decline, and recomposition of the postwar livestock–feed–meat complex. Attention is given to value-based marketing and pricing systems that many meat-packers have recently instituted to insure adequate supplies of lean hogs. In this paper it is argued that value-based pricing results in highly differentiated payments to producers, thus spurring demand by feeder-farmers for an array of new, commercial inputs—lean genetics, partitioning agents, medications—in hopes of refashioning the interior geography of the pig for profit.

There is much to be gained and little to be lost by understanding and articulating our thinking about who ‘we’ and ‘they’ are. In this regard, the usual pattern of labeling, judging, and acting nearly always leads to taxonomizing or classification of people or things—sometimes resulting in benefits for the classified ‘other’, sometimes just the opposite. In this paper, the representations of the wolf in the USA during the historical period of its near extinction at the hands of private citizens and government hunters are examined. From an ecofeminist position, it is argued that indulgence in the practices of representation in those particular forms exhibited during that historical period were not only devastating to the wolf and other animals but also the same practices that perpetuated racism and sadism in the treatment of other people who were purportedly below European-American males on the hierarchy of beings. The argument contained within this paper cautions us to beware of admonitions of ‘necessity’ that creep into our thinking about the way the world must be (that is, there is no way to coexist with ‘savagery’) and encourages the examination of both cultural and economic determination of human and nonhuman animal relations.

Contemporary urban theory is anthropocentric. In an effort to foreground a transspecies urban theory, we critically assess research on the impacts of urbanization on the natural environment, the range of human–animal interactions in the city, dimensions of urban wildlife ecology, and urban wildlife management and conservation practices. An heuristic device designed to guide the future development of transspecies urban theory is proposed, building upon recent social theoretic debates.

In this paper I focus on a particular subjectivity and a particular spatiality. The subjectivity is that of dominant Western masculinities. The spatiality is the specific organisation of space through which that subjectivity is constituted and through which it sees the world, a problematic described here as a space of self/knowledge. The importance of a particular organisation of space to this particular subjectivity is introduced through the work of Irigaray, and elaborated with reference to Mulvey's account of the Lacanian mirror stage. Both Mulvey and Irigaray emphasise the importance of a distancing, visualised space to dominant masculinities. However, Mulvey and Irigaray have both been criticised for conceptualising this dominant subjectivity and his visual space in ways which leave little possibility for feminist disruption. These criticisms have been made from a diverse range of theoretical-political positions. In this paper, however, I engage specifically with the visual space of phallocentric space/knowledge, and therefore only explore the critical possibilities offered by other, more recent feminist appropriations of Lacan because these have centred precisely on questions of visuality, spatiality, and subjectivity. In particular, interpretations of Lacan's distinction between a certain organisation of space and what Lacan calls ‘the gaze’ arc drawn upon here in order to theorise both the fragilities of dominant masculinities and the existence of other visualised spaces of self/knowledge. It is thus argued that certain psychoanalytic feminisms can offer a critical account of phallocentric self/knowledge, which is also a critical account of the production of visual spatialities.