Spécisme, sexisme et racisme. Idéologie naturaliste et mécanismes discriminatoires

Abstract

The study presented in this article tries to make the link between the radical criticism of social relations in a materialist feminist perspective and the question of our relationships with animals. It investigates the extension of the egalitarian paradigm to the animal category. Building on an exploratory questionnaire survey carried out in 2009, the research aims to understand whether discrimination based on the species criteria, called speciesism, is connected with forms of inter-human discrimination, in this case sexism and racism. The results of this statistical analysis show that speciesism is a social construction that works as a system in interaction with the categories of sex and race and based on the same ideological foundations, especially the naturalization of categories. The analysis also demonstrates that speciesism occupies an essential place within discriminatory mechanisms in general.