An examination of the animal-industrial complex through a biopolitical framework

In my thesis, I integrate Michel Foucault’s theory of biopower and biopolitics to analyse the systems of power that enable the animal-industrial complex, inclusive of the slaughterhouse, factory farm, and “humane” farm. First termed by Noske (1989), the animal-industrial complex is defined by normalising the institutionalised exploitation of animals as commodities. Specifically, I present the slaughterhouse as a modern representation of the Panopticon, a polyvalent disciplinary apparatus in the form of a prison designed by Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century. The panoptic metaphor is useful to illustrate how the concealment of violence through spatial and labour divisions, racialized employee selection, and hierarchized roles of authority and surveillance work to support animal-based agriculture in Canada. Additionally, I detail the ways that the animal-industrial complex is sustained by Canadian constitutional law. I analyse Canadian Ag-gag legislation, federal laws that arguably silence whistleblowers from exposing industrialised animal cruelty, to emphasize the linked repercussions in the areas of food safety standards, public health, and the ethical irresponsibility of killing animals for human gain. To support this argument, I scrutinise the animals-as-property model, which, according to Canadian anti-cruelty laws under the Criminal Code, allows humans to use animals as long as they do not inflict unnecessary suffering on the animal. The exploitation of animals within the animal-industrial complex is linked to a myriad of consequences that are aggravating a worldwide environmental crisis fueled by climate change, pollution, and species extinction. In the midst of a zoonotic pandemic and the Anthropocene, the implications of my thesis are of critical concern in the contemporary moment—to say nothing of concern for the growing, unfathomable number of animals confined, dominated, and slaughtered each year in the animal-industrial complex for the sole purpose of human gain.Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)Graduat