Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of burden: animal and disability liberation, translated in French by Élisabeth Sancey and Cyrielle Ayakatsikas, Les Éditions du Portrait, 2019 [2017].
Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of burden: animal and disability liberation, translated in French by Élisabeth Sancey and Cyrielle Ayakatsikas, Les Éditions du Portrait, 2019 [2017].
“To what extent does our idea of being ‘human’ depend on our physical and mental capacities, on how we move (or don’t), and on how we interact with the world?”
In Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, a sharp, accessible, and often humorous narrative and philosophical essay, Sunaura Taylor connects her commitment to animal rights and anti-speciesism with the politicization of her experience as a disabled, crip, or non-normative person. Drawing on her situated experience and a wide range of references from different disciplines and perspectives, the book argues that ableism—or “capacity-based discrimination”—is the foundation of systems of oppression and socio-cultural mechanisms that devalue both disabled human lives and the lives of nonhuman animals.
Sunaura Taylor
Born in 1982 in Tucson, Arizona, Sunaura Taylor has arthrogryposis, a congenital condition that affects the joints. She contracted this illness, along with other children in her neighborhood, because her pregnant mother was exposed to toxic waste buried in the region’s soil by the U.S. military, which contaminated the tap water. Around the age of six, Sunaura Taylor became a vegetarian along with her siblings when she realized that “meat” meant “animal.” Her whole family then became involved in animal rights advocacy. Many years later, while painting chickens she had seen crammed into a truck on their way to slaughter, Taylor came to understand the importance of adopting an intersectional perspective when considering animals. All bodies experience ableism’s oppression: her activism for disabled people intersects with her work for animal rights.
Sunaura Taylor studied art and received the VSA Grand Prize for Emerging Artists with Disabilities in 2004. In 2008, she was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Prize. Her paintings have been exhibited throughout the United States, including at the Smithsonian. Taylor is also a prolific writer, contributing to various media outlets, including the widely noted essay Is It Possible to Be a Conscientious Meat Eater? Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation is her first published book and won the American Book Award in 2018. In Examined Life, a film by her sister Astra Taylor about several contemporary philosophers, she walks with Judith Butler through the streets of San Francisco discussing gender, the body, and policies of inclusion and exclusion regarding disabled people. The New Yorker described it as “Judith Butler meets Saint Francis of Assisi.” Sunaura Taylor currently lives in the United States. Her latest book, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert (2024), deepens her critical reflection on the intersections of disability, environmental justice, and the interdependent relationships between bodies and vulnerable ecosystems.
