Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation [Hardcover]

2018 American Book Award Winner

A beautifully written, deeply provocative inquiry into the intersection of animal and disability liberation—and the debut of an important new social critic

How much of what we understand of ourselves as “human” depends on our physical and mental abilities—how we move (or cannot move) in and interact with the world? And how much of our definition of “human” depends on its difference from “animal”?

Drawing on her own experiences as a disabled person, a disability activist, and an animal advocate, author Sunaura Taylor persuades us to think deeply, and sometimes uncomfortably, about what divides the human from the animal, the disabled from the nondisabled—and what it might mean to break down those divisions, to claim the animal and the vulnerable in ourselves, in a process she calls “cripping animal ethics.”

Beasts of Burdensuggests that issues of disability and animal justice—which have heretofore primarily been presented in opposition—are in fact deeply entangled. Fusing philosophy, memoir, science, and the radical truths these disciplines can bring—whether about factory farming, disability oppression, or our assumptions of human superiority over animals—Taylor draws attention to new worlds of experience and empathy that can open up important avenues of solidarity across species and ability.Beasts of Burdenis a wonderfully engaging and elegantly written work, both philosophical and personal, by a brilliant new voice.

Praise forBeasts of Burden:
2018 American Book Award Winner

Judith Butler meets St. Francis of Assisi.
—The New Yorker

I am not the same animal I was before I read this book.
—Alison Kafer, author ofFeminist, Queer, Crip

Finally, finally someone has come along to undol£§