The ventriloquist's burden? Animals, voice, and politics

Voice is a significant metaphor within national and international animal rights and liberation movements, including in their associated literatures. Phrases such as the "voice of the voiceless," for example, are ubiquitous. Despite heavy reliance on the trope, however, little scholarship exists about the meanings of voice within the movements. Concurrently, critics charge activists with arrogantly representing nonhuman animals while remaining woefully detached from their material lives. Such condemnation is well summarized by Richard Horwitz who accuses animal rights activists of adopting the "ventriloquist's burden," a phrase that invokes Rudyard Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden," which helped frame U.S. imperialism as a noble pursuit. While some within the movements challenge those who claim to be animals' voices and to speak for "those who cannot speak for themselves," there is a dearth of sustained and rigorous discussion about these suppositions. Drawing primarily on feminist, animal rights, and posthumanist theory, I employ critical discourse analysis to explore metaphorical uses of voice within a larger investigation of the politics of representation, particularly in relation to the question of "speaking for" animals. I centrally posit that a nuanced analysis of voice is necessary to more adeptly navigate the difficult terrain of animal representation.;First, I show the failure of identity politics to address the problems of voice and representation within the animal movements. Second, I trace the development of voice within feminist theory and critical pedagogy, two major sets of discourses that have profoundly shaped the voice metaphor, in order to detail contemporary meanings of political voice. I conclude that the dynamics of political voice (including subjectivity, relationality, experiential knowledge, and resistance) are all deeply informed by humanism. Third, in relation, I examine the ways in which Western understandings of both politics and voice are crucially defined by interpenetrating ideas about humanity and animality. I then investigate how anthropocentric understandings of voice are both reproduced and challenged by the animal movements. Last, alongside a critique of Donna Haraway's work on "companion species," I consider how certain activists disentangle the dynamics of political voice from legacies of humanism in order to foreground animal voices.