A estrutura do referente ausente como ferramenta do especismo e outras opressões

Abstract

The concept of absent referent thought up by Carol Adams refers to actions aimed at making non-human animals and the entire range of violence and exploitation suffered by them invisible. Such attitudes consolidate the consumption of animalized and feminized proteins without humans realizing the contradiction between their moral values and the habit of eating meat. In this way, the processes of meat denaturation, fragmentation and shredding contribute to the absent referent, as they remove the idea of the sentient animal, and its suffering, from the piece of meat, which no longer has a history or even a name. Therefore, the use of language is also established, in structural terms, which renames these beings and their parts, this being another mechanism of distancing formatted by carnism. Briefly, the absent referent permeates the history of humanity, in the sense that humans, enclosed in their anthropocentrism, behave as superiors in the face of nature, as if they did not belong to it, acting tyrannically against those considered inferior. In this sense, it can be stated that speciesism, racism, sexism, and other oppressions are operated through the same structure, the same belief system, which presents only one way of being and living (that of the male, white, straight, cis, virile and meat-eater) and prevents human beings from seeing beyond this normalized ideology. Ultimately, assuming the principle of non-violence requires a vegetarian way of life, which contests the objectification and domination of bodies, as well as rejects a culture based on killing and violence.