Abstract
This introduction outlines the social, environmental, and intellectual contexts shaping the emergence of vegan theory. It establishes an understanding of veganism’s messy, contradictory aspects, which runs counter to contemporary conceptualizations of it as a faddish diet or punitive set of proscriptions. Quinn and Westwood argue that veganism is situated between two opposing, but necessary poles: utopianism and insufficiency, aligned respectively with the work of Carol J. Adams and Jacques Derrida. The importance of these coordinates derives from their opposition: veganism as a confluence of utopian impulses, and the acknowledgement of their inevitable insufficiency. This introduction shows how thinking through veganism—as a heuristic lens and topic in its own right—opens out onto a wide variety of issues and questions explored in the following essays.
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Notes
- 1.
Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. “vegan, n.2 and adj.2.”
- 2.
See Robert McKay’s essay in this collection.
- 3.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Around the Performative: Periperformative Vicinities in Nineteenth-Century Narrative,” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, 2003), pp. 71–72.
- 4.
See Richard Twine’s essay on the “intersectional disgust ” that he suggests has divorced the question of the animal from mainstream feminism (“Intersectional disgust ? Animals and (eco)feminism ,” Feminism & Psychology 20, no.3 (2010): 397–406). While we are reluctant to conflate homosexual oppression with the oppression of animals, we do not shy away from the recognition of important analogies that allow us to theorize human social and political structures in relation to the nonhuman. As Twine concludes “It would be a shame if disgust were to get in the way of conversation” (p. 402).
- 5.
As made clear by Carol J. Adams in Sexual Politics of Meat (London, 2015) and Annie Potts, “Exploring Vegansexuality: An Embodied Ethics of Intimacy” William Lynn: Ethics and Politics of Sustainability. 9 March 2008. http://www.williamlynn.net/exploring-vegansexuality-an-embodied-ethics-of-intimacy/
- 6.
See, for example, José Esteban Muñoz , Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York, 2009) and Judith Halberstam , The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, 2011).
- 7.
See Sara Salih’s essay in this collection.
- 8.
J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton, 2001), p. 67.
- 9.
See, for example, Martha Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton, 2004). Nussbaum condemns disgust as reliant on fears that are “typically unreasonable, embodying magical ideas of contamination, and impossible aspirations to purity, immortality, and nonanimality, that are just not in line with human life as we know it” (p. 23).
- 10.
Matthew Calarco, “Deconstruction is not vegetarianism: Humanism, subjectivity, and animal ethics,” Continental Philosophy Review 37, no. 2 (2004): 194.
- 11.
Ibid., pp. 195, emphasis added.
- 12.
United Nations, “World population projected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050” UN.org , 29 July 2015. http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/2015-report.html
- 13.
United Nations Environmental Programme, “Assessing the Environ-mental Impacts of Consumption and Production” UNEP.org , 2010. http://www.unep.fr/shared/publications/pdf/DTIx1262xPA-PriorityProductsAndMaterials_Report.pdf; London Economic, “Vegan Food Sales up by 1500% in Past Year” The London Economic, November 2016. https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/food-drink/vegan-food-sales-up-by-1500-in-past-year/01/11/; Vegan Life, “Veganism Booms By 350%” VeganLife Magazine, 18 May 2016. http://www.veganlifemag.com/veganism-booms/
- 14.
The UK National Health Service supports this, stating on its website that a well-planned vegan diet will provide all the nutrients the body needs. NHS, “The vegan diet,” nhs.uk. http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Vegetarianhealth/Pages/Vegandiets.aspx
- 15.
Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic, The ISLE Reader (Athens, 2003), p. xvi.
- 16.
See, for example, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism (Abingdon, 2010), Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan, Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (Durham, 1995), and Val Plumwood , Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London, 1993).
- 17.
For more on Deep Ecology, see George Session, Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century (Boston, 1995).
- 18.
Robert C. Jones, “Veganisms,” in Critical Perspectives on Veganism, eds. Jodey Castricano and Rasmus R. Simsonsen (London, 2016), pp. 15–39.
- 19.
Kara Jesella, “Vegans exhibiting an ever wilder side for their cause,” nytimes.com , The New York Times, 27 March 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27iht-vegan.1.11463224.html
- 20.
Best et al., “Introducing Critical Animal Studies,” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 5, no.1 (2007).
- 21.
Taylor and Twine, “Introduction. Locating the ‘Critical’ in Critical Animal Studies,” in The Rise of Critical Animal Studies, eds. Nik Taylor and Richard Twine (Abingdon, 2014), p. 2.
- 22.
Ibid., p. 6.
- 23.
Ibid.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 12.
- 25.
Pederson and Stanescu, “Future Directions for Critical Animal Studies,” in Critical Animal Studies, p. 262.
- 26.
Wright, The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror (Athens and London, 2015), p. 7.
- 27.
Joshua Schuster, “The Vegan and the Sovereign,” in Critical Perspectives, pp. 216, 210.
- 28.
Anat Pick, “Turning to Animals Between Love and Law,” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 76 (2012): 65–85.
- 29.
For more comprehensive surveys of the development of animal studies, see Linda Kalof (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies (Oxford, 2017); Garry Marvin and Susan McHugh (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies (Abingdon, 2014); Derek Ryan, Animal Theory: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh, 2015); and Kari Weil , Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? (New York, 2012).
- 30.
The French edition was published in 1999, with an extended version released in 2006. The work itself is based largely on the text of a series of lectures given by Derrida at the 1997 Cerisy-la-Salle conference on “The Autobiographical Animal.”
- 31.
Derrida, “‘Eating well’, or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Points…: Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, 1995), p. 280.
- 32.
Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York, 2008), p. 111.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 28.
- 34.
Adams, Sexual Politics of Meat, pp. xix; emphasis original.
- 35.
Ibid., p. 63.
- 36.
Ibid., p. 21.
- 37.
Erica Fudge, Animal (London, 2002), p. 45.
- 38.
Derrida, “Eating Well,” p. 282.
- 39.
Calarco, “Deconstruction is not vegetarianism,” p. 198.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 194.
- 41.
Gary Steiner, Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism (New York, 2013), p. 63.
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Quinn, E., Westwood, B. (2018). Introduction: Thinking Through Veganism. In: Quinn, E., Westwood, B. (eds) Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73380-7_1
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