Corey Lee Wrenn's Blog, page 2

Men, Meat, Milk, and Toxic Masculinity

Vegan feminism is not only a critique of women’s experiences, the feminization of protest, the sexual and sexist exploitation of animals, or the patriarchy in the abstract. To be fit for purpose, vegan feminism must also contend with the male experience. Anthroparchy, a social system of human and male rule, is a conflict-based, hierarchical arrangement of power that is especially detrimental to women and other animals, but it is also detrimental to boys and men.

Vegan feminism examines sociological, psychological, and social work research on the relationship between masculinity, speciesism, and wellbeing. Research increasingly demonstrates that men’s aggressive or demeaning attitudes toward nonhuman animals are linked to similar attitudes toward women and other marginalized groups, but masculinity itself is quite fragile, requiring its adherents to constantly navigate a hierarchy of worth that regularly threatens to degrade the status of boys and men at the hint of any weakness.

Because masculinity is primarily enacted and demonstrated through power over others, boys and men who lack access to this power (such as those from the lower classes, communities of colour, or the global majority) will be at a disadvantage. All men, regardless of background, are expected to participate in this conflict-based social system and may be punished for deviating. This is certainly the case for vegan men who must balance their compassion for other animals with the societal pressure to appear tough and dominant.

Ultimately, the anthroparchy facilitates a type of toxic masculinity by enforcing violent, dominant, anti-social attitudes in boys and men. The considerable expectation that boys and men consume animal products, for that matter, creates--quite literally--a culture of toxic masculinity, as they will experience higher rates of fatal and chronic diet-related diseases resulting from their embodiment of masculine gender norms through food.

Lastly, vegan feminism acknowledges masculine norms as they persist in the animal rights movement. With compassion for other animals and plant-based eating considered feminizing traits, male-identifying activists sometimes work to protect their fragile masculinity with aggressive, confrontational, and even violent tactics and macho claimsmaking. Ultimately, it is argued that the protection of masculinity in anti-speciesist efforts only buttresses the problematic anthroparchal social system that the animal rights movement hopes to dismantle.

Dr. Wrenn is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.

She is the author of A Rational Approach to Animal Rights: Extensions in Abolitionist Theory (Palgrave MacMillan 2016), Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits (University of Michigan Press 2019), and Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain's First Colony (State University of New York Press 2021).

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Vegan Campout...for Men?

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Vegan Camp Out is a British vegan festival held every uly that gathers thousands of attendees for a weekend of vegan talks, activities, and socialising. With tickets starting at £85 pounds, Vegan Camp Out is hardly an accessible event. Folks who rely on mobility devices would also find the campground difficult to access. Women, too, it seems are having issues with accessibility. Year after year, "the world’s largest vegan camping festival" features a nearly all-male lineup. 

In 2023, Vegan Camp Out highlights 20 speakers and performers on its promotional flyer. Only 6 of them appear to present as women.

In 2022, it highlighted Earthling Ed, Evanna Lynch, Simon Amstell, Lucy Watson, JME, Gaz Oakley, Bimini Bon-Boulash "and many others."

In 2021, it celebrated its "incredible line-up" of Russell Brand, BOSH!, Chris Packham, Joey Carbstrong, Benjamin Zephaniah, P Money, Cosmic Skeptic "and more!"

In 2019, it cheered its "impressive line-up" of Earthling Ed, Matt Pritchard, Shikari Sound System, Akala "and many more."

In 2018, it touted its "fantastic line-up" consisting of Simon Amstell, JME, Macka B, Neal Barnard, Melanie Joy, Heather Mills "and many more!"

The above highlights pulled from the Vegan Camp Out "Previous Years" website (as of April 23, 2023) include 28 speakers and artists. Only four of them present as women (in addition to Bon Boulash who is openly non-binary). The other female speakers, we are left to assume, must be counted among the "many more."

The fantasy that Vegan Camp Out nurtures, whether intentionally or not, is a vegan movement by men for men. Too often in social movements, women are not deemed worthy of political thought or organizational contribution beyond making coffee and copies or serving as groupies. In the animal rights movement, which is comprised of a female majority (approximately 4 out of 5 vegan activists are women), the invisibilization of women exemplifies institutionalized sexism. It misrepresents, devalues, and erases women's contributions while platforming men as more interesting, intelligent, and appropriate for leadership.

When challenged on this misrepresentation, Vegan Camp Out responded to me via Facebook on April 20, 2023, noting that their mostly male approach is acceptable because "the number of high profile acts/activists is [not] always proportionate" and "we book our line-up by listening to who our audience wants us to see, rather than us specifically."

It is a Catch-22. Vegan Camp Out defers to audience polls to determine who will be approached as a speaker. Yet, with perpetual all-male lineups across the animal rights movement, how could the average activist be expected to know of any speakers who are not male? Women aren't granted platform and this, in turn, ensures they will not be granted platform into perpetuity.

For that matter, the reality is that our society is sexist and male-favoring. Women, too, are socialized by patriarchy. The point is that movement leaders like Vegan Camp Out are in an important and influential position to develop the movement rather than replicate its weaknesses. Rather than recognize this responsibility, leaders too often dismiss anti-sexist critiques with gaslighting.

Vegan Camp Out furthers:

We don't just book other people that our audience aren't interested in seeing just to increase the number for that demographic, as we don't book people based on their race or gender as that would be discriminatory and something we don't agree with.

Vegan Camp Out bills itself as "The UK's Best Vegan Festival." This means it is in a unique position of professional obligation. When feminists and anti-racism activists raise attention to inequality and demand intervention, a common liberal response is to charge them with "reverse sexism" and "reverse racism." This kind of response is an effective means to resist meaningful diversity efforts and maintain systems of inequality. It is effectively anti-affirmative action to the effect of maintaining white male supremacy. As a social movement, we have a duty to challenge inequality, not make excuses for it. Particularly for community leaders like Vegan Camp Out, it is vital that platforms are used to promote the world we want to see rather than replicate inequality and marginalization. 

The vegan feminist community calls on organizations and individuals to do better. Organizations should actively ensure a diversity of contributors (and accessibility for a diverse audience). Men should boycott events that do not have some semblance of diversity in representation. Everyone can nominate more women, trans women and men, non-binary people, people of color, people with disabilities, and other folks from marginalized groups who, despite their marginalization, have important things to say. Everyone can read more of their work, reference them more, and make space for their ideas and experiences that might differ from the middle-class white male Western experience.

This is not just a matter of equality for our movement, but it is of vital importance for creating a robust and effective movement. Western white men created many of these problems, we should hesitate in deferring to Western white men to fix them. Their expertise should be integrated into a multifaceted repertoire of tactical knowledge and theories of change, not rise to the top of that repertoire and crowd out the rest. This is not a matter of divisiveness; it is a matter of consistency in the anti-oppression work we engage in anti-speciesist spaces. To achieve total liberation for all species, vegan activists must also examine their own participation in inequality. If we, as a movement, cannot take seriously gender discrimination, this renders dubious our challenge to species discrimination. Why? Because oppressions share similar roots and mechanisms; sexism and speciesism are intimately entangled. 

Contact Vegan Camp Out and ask that they step up as movement leaders and ensure a more diverse program:

Twitter: @VeganCampOut
Facebook: @VeganCampOut
Instagram: @VeganCampOut

Read more about this issue in my 2017 essay, "Uh Oh… Your Vegan Panel is All White or Male."

Learn more about challenging vegan sexism from our "Tips for Male Allies"

Dr. Wrenn is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.

She is the author of A Rational Approach to Animal Rights: Extensions in Abolitionist Theory (Palgrave MacMillan 2016), Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits (University of Michigan Press 2019), and Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain's First Colony (State University of New York Press 2021).

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Veganism and the Problem of Cultural Diversity

As institutions here in the UK increasingly consider a transition to plant-based food, cultural diversity is often raised as a concern. As a sociologist, I can appreciate the importance of respecting cultural diversity, as no just transition is truly just without proper inclusion and mindfulness of difference. In the case of veganism, however, cultural diversity is a far more complex issue than may be evident to most activists, policymakers, and institutional leaders.

My argument is thus: Plant-based diets are the diets of the global majority. The encroachment of animal products beyond the West was facilitated by colonialism. Indeed, colonialism was often predicated on expanding animal agriculture, accessing the copious resources needed to sustain animal agriculture, and expanding markets to consume the output of that animal agriculture. Colonized peoples were even denigrated for their plant-based cuisines, and this was used as further rationale for their subjugation.

Indigenous foodways have been quickly and devastatingly decimated by the Westernization of the global food system with disastrous consequences for community health, cultural integrity, and environmental wellbeing. It is for this reason, for instance, that African Americans are the fastest growing vegan demographic in the United States; veganism is recognized as congruent with traditional African cuisines and a return to veganism serves as a means of reclaiming culture, combatting diet-related disease, and resisting oppressive European colonizer traditions.

In our postcolonial world, the high consumption of animal products is now related to aggressive Western marketing, heavily subsidized animal agriculture in Western countries that gluts global markets, exploitative and often violently enforced use of land and resources outside of the West (as has been the case with the Amazon rainforest cleared for beef production), forced removal of Indigenous communities, predatory lending and capitalist ventures led by global financial entities such as the World Bank, and increased consumer power made possible by globalization. Diets heavy in animal products are not culturally diverse; they are products of Western imperialism. The global majority cannot digest lactose (dairy) beyond the age of weaning (a normal process among mammals), and, as animal flesh is expensive to produce or shunned in certain spiritual practices, traditional diets of the world have been based in fruits, vegetables, legumes, and pulses. Plant-based diets are more cost-efficient, sustainable, and healthful, accounting for their foundational and ubiquitous presence across most of the world’s cultures.

Although global tastes have been moving toward more animal products since the turn of the 21st century, it is not the case that culture and taste trump practical realities around human health and climate sustainability. Like the Black community in the US, other cultures and nations are recognizing the systemic violence and high risk associated with animal-based foodways. China, for instance, one of the world’s largest producers and consumers of meat and dairy, has committed to cutting its consumption of meat in half by 2050. Cultural diversity does not and should not equate with turning away from the environment or human well-being. Too often, cultural diversity rhetoric is weaponized by Westerners and whites to sustain dangerous practices, effectively invisibilizing, silencing, or even infantilizing non-Western and non-white stakeholders.

People of the global majority are not ignorant of the impacts Westernization and globalization have had on traditional practices. Plant-based foods are necessary for everyone to thrive—indeed, many previously colonized communities and other marginalized groups (such as disabled persons, women, children, poor persons, and persons of color) are especially vulnerable to the social, health, and environmental costs of animal-based food. It is imperative that Westerners collaborate in the fight against dietary tyranny by providing culturally appropriate, nutritionally sound, and affordable alternatives to the disaster that is meat and dairy. Plant-based transition campaigns are not mandating a vegan world, they are only asking for institutions to uphold their local and global commitments to food justice and make good on the sustainability claimsmaking that is all too often vacuous. Transitioning institutional facilities to plant-based fare is an important step in that direction.

 

Readers can learn more about the sociology of veganism in my 2016 publication, A Rational Approach to Animal Rights.

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Why Vegan Sociology

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons

My central aim as a social science researcher is to challenge and advance the field of sociology. In the past twenty years, the subfield of Animals & Society has steadily grown, expanding into a number of monographs, professional associations, and university courses. However, in an effort to gather momentum and maintain influence as a vulnerable new sociological discipline, it has been open to a wide variety of perspectives and positions regarding Nonhuman Animals, not all of which are in line with sociology’s ethical commitment to the dignity and rights of its constituency.

From this motley discourse, a community of radical sociologists has emerged to champion a contemporary vegan perspective, one that aligns with the core values of sociology but pushes the field to reconsider long-withstanding discriminatory practices in theory, teaching, and research. Vegan sociology argues that Nonhuman Animals are persons in their own right, their oppression is worthy of academic (and activist) attention, and their oppression deeply intersects with the oppression of other marginalized groups such as women, people of color, and lower-class persons.

To define this new field of vegan sociology, I am developing a flagship text for use in teaching and scholarly research, Vegan Sociology. I coordinate a number of networking, outreach, and engagement activities in support of this project as well. For instance, I co-founded the International Association of Vegan Sociologists and launched its associated website in 2020. I am pleased to host our annual online conference each October. I also serve as the editor-in-chief of our annually produced peer-reviewed journal, Student Journal of Vegan Sociology, which spotlights the work of undergraduate and graduate students, while providing valuable professional development opportunities for student editorial team members and authors alike.

Vegan sociology examines intersectional feminism, Critical Animal Studies, and sociological theory to advance veganism and anti-speciesism as an ethical imperative in the discipline. It aims to increase the visibility and legitimacy of nonhuman experiences and remodel sociological practice to accommodate a multispecies society. Vegan sociology is essential for analyzing the horrors of speciesist pasts and presents, but it is vital, too, in its imagination for change. It is not merely a disheartening theory of oppression; it is an inspiring theory of total liberation as well.

 

Readers can learn more about the sociology of veganism in my 2016 publication, A Rational Approach to Animal Rights.

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Period Politics: Why Menstruation Matters for Women and Other Animals

Photo credit: Vulvani, Wiki Commons

Menstruation, although generally absent from vegan feminist theory, is central to both gender and species boundary maintenance. Menstruation has historically served as a potent symbol of female animality and has been used as justification for ostracization, segregation, and subjugation. It is seen as the root of female irrationality. It is a marker of uncleanliness and even moral failing. Meanwhile, women who cannot menstruate--such as menopausal, intersex, or trans women--are framed as alien or burdensome and are pushed to the margins. The stigmatization of menstruation is so powerful that this very important marker of vegan feminist intersectionality—the shedding of blood—is practically unexamined.

When we think of menstruation, we primarily think of female humans, but many mammals menstruate. Menstruation is only discussed in the anti-speciesism discourse, however, in a sterile manner. Activists generally do not even acknowledge its role. Billions of chickens the world over are exploited each year for their menstrual capabilities. Cows and other female domesticates in the agricultural system and companion animal industry, furthermore, are labeled "spent" and sent to slaughter or are euthanized when they menstruate and "fail" to become pregnant. Women, too, are vulnerable should they "fail" in this regard. Period politics are also integral to the derogation of transgender women, nonbinary and intersex persons, women with certain disabilities, older women, and other feminized groups who no longer mensturate or never did in the first place. 

Period politics, furthermore, feed measures of sexual control that are couched in animality. Menstruation or “moon time” has been linked, for instance, to misogynistic and ableist stereotypes about women’s mental stability. Women were literally believed to be under the lunar influence, exhibiting lunacy when they bled. Because rationality is considered one of the key demarcations of humanity from other animals, women’s ability to menstruate and the associated lapse of rationality essentially categorized women as less than human, more animal-like, lacking in agency, guided by instinct, and uncivilized.

Even today, premenstrual syndrome (PMS) is wielded to dismiss or denigrate women: “It must be that time of the month.” Although PMS is a relatively common “disorder” (if a natural bodily response to changing hormones can be considered “disorderly”), it is weilded against menstruating people as further evidence to their irrational animality. Women who are too loud, too aggressive, too emotional, or too anything by patriarchal standards are believed to be unaccountable for their actions, governed as they are by biology and nature. 

For Nonhuman Animals, the regulation and consumption of their periods underscores their animality more profoundly. Although few consumers are conscious of the fact they are eating a menstrual product and have close to no understanding of farmed animals’ reproductive cycles (including those used for companionship), “breeders” and “farmers” have made an intimate knowledge of their ovulation their business as this knowledge is profitable. In the case of chickens, their ovulation is  genetically manipulated to produce grotesque amounts of eggs. Almost all hens used for menstrual purposes are kept in cages to facilitate full human control over their bodies and behaviors. By withholding food, water, and lighting, humans can force chickens to molt between egg-laying cycles. Without this intervention, chickens will not produce eggs so as to allow their bodies time to recover. Forced molting, which can entail starvation for as much as two weeks, means that this critical healing time is not allowed and egg production can continue.

Some consumers will also be intimately familiar with the products of fish menstruation in the form of caviar. Modern caviar production does not involve the natural passing of eggs. Female fishes (often sturgeons) are electrocuted or are given cesarean sections to manually remove eggs. Although this “stripping” process is widespread, some industries use physical manipulation of the fish's body to encourage the release of eggs without killing her. This menstrual product is considered a highly-prized culinary delicacy in many cultures of the world.

The menstruation of a variety of female species is manipulated in order to encourage reproduction, growth, lactation, or some other bodily process or product that can be monetized. The highly sensitive eye stalks of female shrimps, for instance, are crushed or removed to encourage them to reproduce (a procedure euphemistically referred to as "eyestalk ablation"). Doing so is thought to alter her hormonal system for peak exploitation. Her blindness creates permanently dark conditions which trigger her body to ovulate. This mutilation is particularly important in stressful, unhealthy factory farm conditions where most sentient beings instinctively resist reproduction or are otherwise too sick to reproduce. “Eyestalk ablation” became standard practice with the industrialization of shrimp farming in the later half of the 20th century.

Human women, too, have been subject to all manner of forced sterilization, forced or coerced contraception, and even genital mutiliation to control their menstruation. The connections are many and the root of this oppression can be found in the social derision of animality. One of the final frontiers of feminist progress is the normalization of menstruation and the elimination of period stigma. Although nearly half of the human population menstruates for a portion of their life, the cultural silence surrounding menstruation suggests that it is anything but a natural human process. Psychologists have noted that menstrual stigma contributes to the lower status of women and deteriorates their psychological and physical well-being (Johnston-Robledo and Chrisler 2013).

This silence obviously reflects norms set by patriarchy as most men will never menstruate, but more than this, menstruation signals something more insidious about the cultural regard for the female experience. The passing of blood is a monthly reminder of women’s association with the natural world. It also serves as a reminder that humans, like other animals, are products of basic reproduction. This is a link to the evolutionary and biological reality of humanity that centuries of religious and human supremacist doctrine have worked to obscure. Hiding periods (and childbirth, for that matter) works to differentiate humans as something above other animals, something more divinely designed.

The destigmatization of menstruation will need to be couched in the destigmatization of animality. Acknowledging the basic animal process of shedding uterine lining as something that is just as normal and natural as urination, defecation, shedding skin and hair, growing nails, running noses, tearing eyes, and waxing ears can challenge the patriarchal notion that some bodily functions are deviant, shameful, and should be hidden. Bringing basic reproductive functions to normalcy could demystify human sexuality, but it could more fundamentally illustrate the similarities between humans and other animals as biological beings with comparable biological processes. Advancing the status of women will necessitate the advancement of other animals in tandem.

Dr. Wrenn is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.

She is the author of A Rational Approach to Animal Rights: Extensions in Abolitionist Theory (Palgrave MacMillan 2016), Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits (University of Michigan Press 2019), and Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain's First Colony (State University of New York Press 2021).

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International Women’s Day is a Vegan Feminist Issue, not a PETA Campaign

Each March 8th, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (the world's largest Nonhuman Animal rights organization) appropriates International Women's Day to spotlight its sexist campaigning. Given persistent issues with gender inequality in the animal rights movement, this appropriation is not just disappointing, but dangerous.

Figure 1

Consider one 2013 blog post that encourages readers to "Celebrate International Women’s Day With the Strong, Powerful Women of PETA." The blog author must have bent over backward to identify the few PETA print campaigns that do not sexualize women activists. While the effort is admirable, the blog post nonetheless diminishes its selected activists as "brazen beauties" and also spotlights a number of PETA's pornographic celebrity campaigns. One chosen image depicts Pamela Anderson, an icon of the sex industry, in a promiscuous position and sexualized expression (Figure 1). Another depicts talk show host Wendy Williams completely nude in a similarly sexualized position (Figure 2). PETA seems to suggest that "strong" and "powerful" women are those who are sexually available and objectified for the male gaze.

It's "Girl power!" PETA exclaims.

Figure 2

Ten years later, some things have changed, but many remain the same. On the positive side, PETA celebrated International Women's Day in 2023 by actually featuring international women (as opposed to mostly white American women as it has in the past). As another consequence of this internationalization, PETA has decreased its reliance on naked campaigning in some regions (such as the UK) where the public and media have been less accommodating to sexist images. But sexism is still sustained in PETA's appropriation of feminism in the US. The image chosen to represent one featured female activist appears to be pulled from a pornographic magazine (Figure 3).

Figure 3

This is not to say that PETA's female activists have no agency and are uninvolved in their participation and presentation. Sexuality can be empowering for women in a society that has historically controlled and demonized women's desires. Women's bodies should, of course, be celebrated. But on International Women's Day, a day of solidarity against patriarchy and gender inequality, the emphasis should not be on pimping pornography in the name of animal rights. International Women's Day might be better celebrated by challenging pay inequality in the animal charity sector, confronting men's sexual harassment and abuse of female activists, and rejecting objectifying, sexually exploitative imagery of our women activists which feeds this inequality and violence.

Rebranding sexism as feminism is a clever, but nefarious tactic. Feminists outside of the animal rights movement have flagged this trend as a consequence of capitalist co-optation. Sex and sexism are used to sell all sorts of goods in the marketplace; using language of "empowerment" can mask continued inequalities, silence criticism about that inequality, weaken social justice efforts, and can even be used to sell sexist products to women! Feminist scholars have noted, "IWD suffers from corporate capture by all types of organisations...which make empty claims for reputational gain." "We are daunted by the showbowing and the lack of concrete systemic changes," they further.

Feminists have also specifically called out PETA on its contribution to this for-profit culture of misogyny. Not only does PETA's denigration of International Women's Day sour gender relations within the animal rights movement, but it also renders impossible a meaningful alliance with the feminist movement. And solidarity in the face of injustice is the entire point of the celebration.

Dr. Wrenn is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.

Society Writings: Veganism Made Real in Print

In my chapter, “Society Writings" in The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies (Wright and Quinn 2022) published with the University of Edinburgh Press, I examine early vegan and vegetarian organizational literature, arguing its importance for creating, legitimizing, and sustaining the fledgling vegan movement.

Newsletters, magazines, and cookbooks were spaces in which what it meant to be vegan could be explored and defined. Sometimes this was a rather democratic process, as was the case with The Vegan Society which enlisted the feedback of members and other readers. Although they were relatively collaborative endeavors, these publications were often operated by a very small team or even just one individual. Donald Watson single-handedly wrote, produced, and distributed many of the first issues of The Vegan.

These publications were important for bringing new organizations and ideas into the material realm. The Vegan Society, for instance, having split from the British Vegetarian Society in the early 20th century, became "real" so to speak with the launching of its journal. Veganism was alive in print, and veganism as a movement became alive in its representation of a collective and its distribution across membership. Indeed, these early publications were pivotal for creating a "we" in addition to establishing movement goals, values, and tactics. Editorial boards also viewed them as tactical in and of themselves. Members were encouraged to become subscribers to help the organizations stay afloat financially and continue to produce future publications. They were also encouraged to distribute them to the wider public as a form of advocacy.

With the rise of professionalization which had dramatically reduced the radical movement building and theoretical development that once transpired in these publications, many activists would take advantage of new social media technology to bring these processes to a new, more accessible platform. Publications such as The Vegan diminished in size, reach, and depth in the wake of blogs, Facebook groups, and Instagram influencers.

Largely toothless today, publications of The Vegan Society, the Vegetarian Society, and other Nonhuman Animal rights organizations function primarily to promote green commerce, encourage paid membership, and spotlight activities as might be of interest to grant applications. Although literary productions in vegetarian and vegan societies today primarily serve capitalist interests, the legacy of print activism should be celebrated. The prior impact of magazines, journals, and newsletters demonstrates the power that can be welded by just a few committed activists. By pen or typewriter, early vegans created, shaped, and nourished a movement. Professionalization may have undermined that power in official channels, but grassroots activists carry on the tradition in an ever-expanding repertoire of digital media.

Readers can learn more about the social movement politics of Nonhuman Animal rights and veganism in my 2019 publication, Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits. The beautiful cover art for this text was created by vegan artist Lynda Bell and prints are available on her website, artbylyndabell.com.

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Third-Wave Vegan Feminism and Feminist Animal Studies

In my chapter for Feminist Animal Studies (Routledge 2023) edited by Erika Cudworth, Ruth E. McKie and Di Turgoose, I argue that vegan feminist activism has entered a millennial third wave. This wave, I argue, is distinguished by three key developments.

First, as a reflection of the larger Nonhuman Animal rights movement, vegan feminist activism must now mobilize in a largely professionalized social justice space. Having cemented by the 21st century, professionalization ensures a bureaucratic hierarchical, corporate-like organizational structure. Most collectives become registered charities and begin to prioritize fundraising over intervention and racial social change. Feminist activism, which characteristically favors democratic and non-hierarchical movement organization styles, is left at a disadvantage. Androcentric politics are subsequently free to proliferate.

Second, the internet has emerged to improve accessibility in the activism community. It has also opened up channels of communication from on-the-ground activists to large, otherwise impervious nonprofits. As has been the case for many social movements, social media technology has had a democratizing effect with regard to recruitment, strategy deliberation, and theoretical development.

Third, this new digital platform has allowed for the introduction of new and provocative ideas from traditionally marginalized groups such as women, but especially women of color, women with disabilities, queer and trans women, and women of the global majority. Subsequently, in the past decade, these emerging voices from the margins have begun to have an impact on the movement discourse. Large, historically male-dominated white- and Euro-centric professional organizations are gradually moving to adopt 21st-century feminist strategies. This has included hiring more staff from marginalized backgrounds, tailoring outreach to diverse communities, and creating their own platforms for underrepresented groups.

There is still much work to be accomplished. Women are still underrecognized for their efforts, and feminism is still met with derision in many pockets of the community. Many privileged, higher-profile feminists often fail to offer solidarity and support for more vulnerable activists. Diversity rhetoric can often ring hollow as important adjustments to unequal power structures are avoided.

Third-wave vegan feminism may subsequently benefit from a return to first-wave tactics. Activists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries strategically entangled their anti-speciesist activism with their campaigning against colonialism, war, penal punishment, sexism, racism, slavery, and more. Today's third-wave vegan feminism may find additional strength in this type of intermovement solidarity. It will not only be useful for gaining membership and other resources, but also for advancing an anti-oppression worldview that resists inequality wherever it is found...even if that inequality is within the activist community itself.

Readers can learn more about the social movement politics of Nonhuman Animal rights and veganism in my 2019 publication, Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits. The beautiful cover art for this text was created by vegan artist Lynda Bell and prints are available on her website, artbylyndabell.com.

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Eating Vegan vs. Being Vegan: The Vegan Society and Depoliticized Capitalist Campaigning

In 2013, The Vegan Society launched its "Love Vegan" campaign adopting the reducetarian logic now popular among professionalized Nonhuman Animal rights organizations. Although the campaign has since been retired, it offers an important case study in modern vegan politics.

Once framed by the society as a key political protest, veganism is now framed as a pleasurable means of consumption: 

Already, people have been getting in touch with us to say how much they love to eat vegan food and wear vegan lipstick, and (this is the best bit) how they’ll be thinking more about their shopping choices as a result of this campaign. Ka-ching! That’s what we like to hear.

The Vegan Society campaign announcement, since removed.

On the announcement of the new campaign, the society implored its readers to connect with a wider audience by sharing its associated "You don't have to be vegan" posters on social media sites. Readers were also asked to donate or to become a paid member. The vegan labeling scheme, so important for assisting vegans in navigating a speciesist world and alerting nonvegans to problematic ingredients, is now a standard labeling scheme that creates added value and encourages sales.

Of course, The Vegan Society, like any nonprofit, has associated costs to account for, but fundraising all too easily compromises anti-speciesist claimsmaking. This phenomenon is, in fact, rather typical of other nonprofits in the Nonhuman Animal rights movement (and organizations from other movements as well). Activist collectives are typically pressured to enter the nonprofit system as a matter of survival, predictability, and risk reduction. This is bolstered by the capitalist notion that "bigger" is "better" and increasing bureaucracy will increase effectiveness. The caveat, however, is that the fixation on organizational growth and a dependence on financial support necessitates the degeneration of social change goals. Radical vegan claimsmaking is not consistent with fundraising from wealthy and conservative donors and foundations.

Veganism is a threatening concept for those monied institutions which benefit from exploitation and support the third sector. "You don't have to be vegan" is a means of depoliticizing veganism while also positioning it as congruent with consumerism favorable to capitalism.  

Of course, veganism is unique as a corporatized protest because it is, ultimately, about what we consume. That much is unavoidable. However, framing veganism primarily as a fun and tasty consumer lifestyle detracts from its political and social justice foundations. The Vegan Society was formed to encourage the world to do right by other animals. Although early members did invest quite a bit of effort in devising vegan alternatives in an era in which plant-based milk and non-"leather" shoes were difficult to find, the goal was not to become peddlers of expensive vegan products.

Veganism began as a movement to end speciesism, but it is quickly devolving into marketing label scheme to increase sales and sustain nonprofits in the highly competitive third sector. The movement's audience is no longer expected to transition to veganism or activism, but consumption instead. 

Readers can learn more about the social movement politics of Nonhuman Animal rights and veganism in my 2019 publication, Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits. The beautiful cover art for this text was created by vegan artist Lynda Bell and prints are available on her website, artbylyndabell.com.

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The Only Vegan in the Department: Science, Anti-Veganism, and the Illusion of Objectivity

 

Founding scholars in sociology advocated an objective use of the scientific method for the most reliable, valid, and useful results from research. Some of these scholars, however, were wary that this objectivity is ultimately elusive and that the fantasy of pure objectivity could be used for political purposes to the overall disadvantage of society. Max Weber, for instance, emphasized that science-respecting, rationally-minded individuals may present themselves (and believe themselves) to be exempt from irrationality and bias, often with the effect of upholding unequal and oppressive power structures. Science, as with ideology, culture, attitude, and belief, is socially constructed. People engaging in science are not absconded from the influences of social construction; they live, breathe, query, and analyze within a socially constructed reality.

Although sociology students learn about the perils of "value-free" science, the incredible privilege that most academics in higher education are granted disables them from recognizing how their class, gender, nationality, and species can shape their attitudes, behaviors, and research. This was a latent lesson for me in graduate school. I earned my PhD at Colorado State University in the late 2000s and early 2010s, a time when academia had finally come to terms with the crisis of planetary destruction. I chose CSU in particular because the university (and the sociology program in particular) specialized in understanding and solving environmental problems. Naturally, most of my colleagues and professors were environmentally savvy folks who rode their bicycles to campus, recycled (at a time when recycling was much more cumbersome), and supported whole and local food production. Curiously, however, I was the only vegan in the department. And, when I began teaching, I was also the only instructor in the faculty who taught and researched Critical Animal Studies and vegan politics.

To this day, the department's obfuscation continues to baffle me. Nonhuman Animal consumption is a leading, if not the leading, contributor to greenhouse gasses (between 17% and 51% depending on the variables included in the calculation). It is also a prime cause of habitat destruction (including rainforests, which are cleared for Nonhuman Animal feed), desertification, and the pollution of air, land, and water. Surely, this should be a core topic of study in any environmental sociology program.

Yet the vast majority of my interactions with colleagues on this topic ended with flippancy, excuses (more than one faculty member insisted they “had” to eat flesh for one reason or another), and downright rudeness (consider the coworker who wore a “PETA: People Eating Tasty Animals” t-shirt once a week). One student in my cohort even openly laughed at me when I mentioned the term “speciesism” in a class discussion.

This was not specific to my department at CSU, either. As a master's student at Virginia Tech, my involvement with the student animal rights club effectively ostracized me from my cohort. I found myself no longer invited to graduate student social events, and those students who did not outright ignore me would brazenly laugh about me or insult me with regard to my veganism when they thought I was out of hearing range.

As a student then and a professional now, I have found it exceedingly frustrating that my fellow scientists, who have been trained for years in critical thinking and rational evaluation, stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the plight of our society’s most victimized and exploited group: Nonhuman Animals. For those completely uninterested in examining their human privilege and involvement with speciesism (understandable given the strength of prevailing ideologies), I am still amazed that none recognize the importance of veganism in reducing environmental destruction and human suffering. My colleagues publish copiously on topics of environmental sustainability and food justice, but no one seems to be willing to consider that Nonhuman Animal use itself is problematic.

Scientific training does not guarantee objectivity—it does not even guarantee an appreciation for evidence. Scientists are human, and humans are influenced by the society in which they live. Fortunately, the scientific community does value (to some extent) a diversity of expertise and perspective. Dialogue may yet provide the opportunity for social advancement in the case of Nonhuman Animals.

But the problem is pervasive. As a former blogger for Skepchick (an organization run by Rebecca Watson that is "dedicated to promoting skepticism and critical thinking among women around the world"), I was disturbed to find that writing about veganism and animal rights triggered outright dismissal by the readership and a blatant refusal to seriously consider the arguments. In fact, I wrote a blog piece similar in argument to this essay on the illusion of objectivity in rationality circles and Watson's team deleted it before it was ever published.

In more professional circles, the American Sociological Association resisted the incorporation of Society and Animals as an official section for some years before it was finally approved. Membership continues to be low, though interdisciplinary fields are beginning to legitimize its need. During my time as chair, we were routinely shut out from collaborative activities. For instance, when I wrote to the ASA on the relationship between speciesism, COVID, and environmental problems for a collaborative publication for which all sections were invited to contribute, our section was stonewalled (although the British Sociological Association later picked it up as a blog piece).

Like many social movements and scientific progressions, it is likely that change will not happen until the given social problem reaches a crisis level and a critical mass of activists popularize their demands. Academics and scientists may not be able to look past their human privilege to recognize the importance of Nonhuman Animal liberation, but they will not be able to ignore the crises of climate change and diet-related diseases and death.

Until then, the frustration in the Critical Animal Studies community is palpable. Surely, as thought leaders and policy influencers with years of rigorous training in the principles of the scientific method, researchers should be able to recognize the personhood of other animals as well as the role of Nonhuman Animal agriculture in exacerbating global warming and human sickness. Surely, researchers will be aware of science's historical complacency with enslavement, colonization, genocide, and extinction. Surely, they do not believe that the misuse of science ended in the 20th century when science must now plod through an era of late-stage capitalism and pervasive exploitation.

Critical thinking can be used to liberate, but the pretense of critical thinking has also been used to shut down liberatory discourses, dismiss the claims of marginalized groups, and maintain an unequal status quo. Weber reminds us that reality is more than the material--it is also found in shared subjective meanings. Objectivity, knowledge, facts, and truth are subsequently vulnerable to political maneuvering. If no science is value-free, what values will we apply? Values of violence or values of justice?

 
 

Readers can learn more about the sociology of veganism in my 2016 publication, A Rational Approach to Animal Rights.
 
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