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The Rape of Animals, the Butchering of Women
One could not stand and watch [the slaughtering] without beginning to de
in symbols and similes, to hear the hog-squeal of the universe. He handled my breast as if he were making a meatball.
A healthy sexual being poses near her drink: she wears bikini panties only and luxuriates on a large chair with her head rested seductively on an elegant lace doily. Her inviting drink with a twist of lemon awaits on the table. Her eyes are closed; her facial expression beams pleasure, relaxation, enticement. She is touching her crotch in an attentive, masturbatory action. Anatomy of seduction: sex object, drink, inviting room, sexual activity. The formula is complete. But a woman does not beckon. A pig does. "Ursula Hamdress" appeared in Playboar, a magazine described by critics as "the pig farmer's Playboy". How does one explain the substitution of a nonhuman animal for a woman in this pornographic representation? Is she inviting someone to rape her or to eat her?
I described Ursula Hamdress on a panel titled "Sexual Violence: Representation and Reality" at Princeton's Graduate Women's Studies Conference, "Feminism and its Translations," last March. In the same month, less than sixty miles away, three women were found chained in the basement of Gary Heidnick's house in Philadelphia. In the kitchen body parts were discovered in the oven, in a stewpot on the stove, and in the refrigerator. These diverse arms and legs indicated that more than one woman had been butchered by Heidnick. One of the survivors reported that during the time she was chained, Heidnick repeatedly raper her. At times, he forced her butchered flesh of other women upon his victims.
This essay holds that Ursula Hamdress and the women raped, butchered and eaten by Heidnick are linked by an overlap of cultural images of sexual violence against women and the fragmentation and dismemberment of nature and the body in Western culture. Of special concern will be cultural representations of the butchering of animals. In order to discuss the consequences of these overlapping images, I will expand the concept of the "absent referent" defined by Margaret Homans in Bearing the Word. Homans argues that the alliance of women, nature and matter occurs in...