Volume 19, Issue 2, 2016
Spaces of Control: Confronting Austerity and Repression
Suzanne Hamilton Risley
Pages 381-407
If We Were Really Being Deceived
The Spaces of Animal Oppression in the US, Bad Faith, and the Engaged Exposé
Current struggles over laws prohibiting and criminalizing the public disclosure of violence in the spaces of animal use in the US have underscored the centrality of exposés to animal activism. This article complicates the activist belief in the power of exposure—“If slaughterhouses had glass walls . . .”—by drawing on the insights of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir concerning the prevalence of bad faith in systems of oppression and exploitation. I describe four forms of bad faith common to these systems, and offer suggestions for exposés of the animal enterprise modeled on Sartre’s and de Beauvoir’s “engaged exposés.”