This wearable highlights the poultry industry and the cruelties that occur behind closed doors. Made up of a variety of accessories, a bodice, and bloomers to reference the feminist movement known as the 1851 bloomer craze. Men belittled and scrutinized women for wanting everyday wear that allows for comfort and free movement, creating satire and banning their bloomers for elegant wear. Men actively pushed women back into restrictive dresses until women entered the workforce during the two World Wars. 

The bloomers are made up of plastic feathers with a bodice to match. The bodice resembles the raw skin of chickens with traces of feathers that were molted off through a forced starvation and dehydration as hens are restricted to no resources for seven to twenty-eight days. This forceful process of molting is used to make the hens produce upwards of three hundred eggs a year when their natural birth rates are ten eggs a year. The bodice is embellished with sculpted chicken feet brooches that resemble the deformed feet of hens due to hormonal imbalances and unnatural weight gain that does not allow the chicken to move on its own or support healthy organ functions. The final piece of this wearable includes cage heeled shoes that mimic the enclosures hens are prisoners in for their lives that have been drastically shortened at the hands of man. The cage for each hen is roughly the same size as a sheet of printer paper and is generally covered in their feces, blood, and other bodily fluids. Due to these small enclosures, the hens have been de-beaked to prevent fighting within the cages – done when the hens are only hours old and without anesthesia and causing chronic pain for these creatures. 

Rather than providing these creatures with care and dignity as exchange for their lives we expoilt for human indulgence, such as more space to roam and exhibit instinctual behavior which would naturally get rid of aggression within the cages, they are forced to endure painful cosmetic procedures as cheap shortcuts in their maintenance – only providing the bare minimum to keep then alive and laying eggs. 

Simultaneously highlighting the perception of women as nothing more than products, child bearing devices, exploited in order to maintain production of offspring – just as the nonhuman female animals in factory farms who make up close to all animal-based protein humans consume.

For nonhuman female animals, they are forced to give birth from the moment their body is capable of supporting the development of a fetus till their body can no longer function due to the physical and emotional distress of having to create a domestic supply of infants.

Do we see the repeated dialogue and treatment towards all capable of childbearing, taken from a CDC report in 2008?

Hens are constantly starved, dehydrated, and mutilated to expedite molting and egg laying, far beyond what their bodies can naturally produce. The male offsprings are killed off as they have nothing to be exploited for, tragic regardless but much more merciful. The female offsprings await the same fate as their mother, exploited for the entirety of their lives and beyond.

It’s safe to say that these comparisons between the treatment of women in America and the treatment of nonhuman animals in factory farms are only aligning more and more. Just recently, 50 years after the ruling of Roe v. Wade, my rights and ability to choose were stripped away from me and every other individual with a uterus in the United States. We have the same level of reproduction freedom as the female cows and hens standing in their own blood and feces, forced to produce profit till their body can no longer sustain itself or fulfill the expectations of human, male greed.