LAURA WRIGHT

Introducing Vegan Studies

Introducing Vegan Studies

According to a Memorandum of Association of the Vegan Society, to
be vegan is to ascribe to a
philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—
as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploi-
tation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or
any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the de-
velopment and use of animal-free alternatives for the
benefit of humans, animals and the environment. In die-
tary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all
products derived wholly or partly from animals.
A 2006 estimate placed the number of vegans in the United States
somewhere around 1.7 million, and with “vegan movement organiza-
tions counting their membership in the tens of thousands, there are ar-
guably more practicing vegans in the USA than there are members of
vegan organizations” (Cherry 156). Furthermore, since 2006, the num-
ber of vegans in the UK rose by 360 percent (Quinn). As an identity cat-
egory and a lifestyle, veganism constitutes a subject position that
allows for environmentally responsible consumer choices that are
viewed, particularly in the west, as oppositional to and disruptive of a
capitalist system that is largely dependent upon big agriculture.
Furthermore, veganism has become increasingly visible via celebrity
endorsements and universally acknowledged health benefits, and veg-
anism and vegan characters (as well as tacit vegan politics1) are in-
creasingly present in works of art and literature in ways that insist
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 24.4 (Autumn 2017), pp. 727–736
Advance Access publication January 9, 2018 doi:10.1093/isle/isx070
C The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the
V
Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please email: [email protected]

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 728 I S L E

upon their recognition as worthy of ecocritical inquiry. To that end, this

special cluster on Vegan Studies offers four essays that theorize vegans
and veganism within the context of environmental literature and film.
There are many reasons why people choose to become vegan, and
there are reasons why others choose not to be—and there certainly so-
cioeconomic and structural hindrances that keep veganism from being
a viable option for many others. Veganism continues to be a largely
white, upper-middle class identity; it is often depicted as an elitist en-
deavor, and it is gendered as a female undertaking and, therefore, often
dismissed as naively emotionally motived—or characterized as disor-
dered consumption.2 Despite the existence of the Vegan Society, which
was founded in England in 1944, vegans tend not to constitute a unified
group in possession of a cohesive ideological mandate; they tend not to
be joiners, but they do have “a propensity towards alternativism in
other areas of life . . . and eschewing the use of all animal products rep-
resents a change that necessarily involves all areas of life” (McDonald 2).
While veganism does not constitute a unified social movement, as an
ideology, it is marked by conscious individual actions that nonetheless
stand in stark opposition to the consumer mandate of capitalism, and
for this reason, the actions of individual vegans pose a substantial—if
symbolic—threat to such a paradigm. Whether one is vegan for ethical
reasons, for health benefits, or because of religious mandates, adopting
a vegan diet constitutes environmental activism, whether or not the
vegan intends such activism. In the study “Analysis and Valuation of
the Health and Climate Change Cobenefits of Dietary Change,” pub-
lished in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal in 2016,
the authors conclude that
transitioning toward more plant-based diets that are in
line with standard dietary guidelines could reduce
global mortality by 6–10 percent and food-related green-
house gas emissions by 29–70 percent compared with a
reference scenario in 2050. We find that the monetized
value of the improvements in health would be compara-
ble with, or exceed, the value of the environmental bene-
fits although the exact valuation method used
considerably affects the estimated amounts.
(Springmann et al.)
Because of these findings, as well as because of the obvious linkages be-
tween veganism and animal welfare/rights, lived and literary represen-
tations of veganism are deserving of rigorous theoretical analyses as
necessarily a characteristic of ecocritical readings.

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 Introducing Vegan Studies 729

My most recent monograph, The Vegan Studies Project: Food,

Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror, looks at the formation and dis-
semination of the current contradictory, laudatory, and alternately
scathingly negative social discourse surrounding vegan identity, par-
ticularly as that identity has shifted historically to be constituted in spe-
cific ways in the twenty-first-century United States. Further, my book
works to expose the reasons for this discourse and to reconcile such
presentations with those positive, healing, and personally productive
aspects of vegan identity that were, during the first decade of the
twenty-first century, cast in shadow in the glare of what constituted a
marked backlash against such an identity position that began taking
shape in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United
States. As a postcolonial ecocritic, writing such a text was, in many
ways, radically divergent from anything else I’ve ever written; as a cul-
tural studies analysis of the ways that veganism and vegans have taken
up discursive real estate in the post-9/11 United States, this work
appears to be a marked departure from postcolonial studies, my pri-
mary area of specialization. But it is rather a work that constitutes a cul-
mination of my scholarly and pedagogical foci on enmeshed
oppressions. In fact, my first monograph, Writing Out of All the Camps:
J.M. Coetzee’s Narratives of Displacement (2006), constituted a sustained
analysis of the post-apartheid political climate and the oppression of
black South African men and women, white South African women,
and nonhuman animals as depicted in South African Nobel Prize win-
ning author J. M. Coetzee’s oeuvre. Coetzee’s work The Lives of Animals
(1999) and his own personal animal rights position further shaped my
scholarly trajectory as a postcolonialist increasingly aware of and inter-
ested in examining the ways that oppressions—of peoples, of nature,
of animals—are enmeshed and reinforcing. This most recent book,
therefore, was my attempt to articulate a theoretical stance that sought
to understand these various threads as articulated through the dis-
course of ethical veganism and to read and deconstruct vegan identity
as it appears in a variety of literary works, as well as in films, television
shows, advertising, and in mainstream print and online media in order
to envision, define, and theorize a field that I named vegan studies.
In The Vegan Studies Project, I worked to posit this field as a product
of the discourse of vegan representation as it is situated within and out-
side of extant conceptions of animal studies, animal welfare/rights/lib-
eration, and ecofeminism—the best theoretical model that I know for
addressing enmeshed oppressions that include the oppression of non-
human animals and the environment. I worked to unpack the tension
between the dietary practice of veganism and the manifestation, con-
struction, and representation of vegan identity as created by vegans

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and simultaneously interpreted and, therefore, reconstituted by and

within contemporary media and art, specifically in the United States.
In suggesting a field of vegan studies, I worked to situate it as at once
informed by and divergent from the multifaceted field of animal stud-
ies, which, in its current incarnation, consists of critical animal studies,
human–animal studies, and posthumanism. And I worked to show
how vegan studies and vegan theory provide a new lens for ecocritical
textual analysis. Therefore, I won’t replicate that work here, as my
hope at this point is to move that previous work forward into the cur-
rent moment, even as I reflect on the journey, which began in the 1990s
with the so-called “animal turn” in literary studies that shaped and has
continued to inform my own theoretical trajectory as a vegan theorist
as well as productively altering the contemporary nature of the field of
English and of the humanities more generally.
With regard to vegan studies, my position as an ecofeminist
requires some nuanced consideration, particularly as feminism as a so-
cial movement and a theoretical practice currently finds itself at the ex-
tremely productive moment of intersectionality—even as
intersectional praxis has largely resisted inclusion of nonhuman ani-
mals within its mapping. Carbin and Edenheim suggest that since the
early 2000s, use of the concept of intersectionality has “practically ex-
ploded in European and North American gender research” (233) and
despite discussion of whether “intersectionality” should be considered
a theory, framework, or a political position, they assert that the field
has been growing without overt signs of internal discord. They see
intersectionality as a “consensus-creating signifier” (234) that has
allowed white and non-white feminisms to find common ground. I
concur with these assessments, even as I recognize that intersectional-
ity has shied away—with legitimate and extremely understandable
reasons—from considering the relationships between the subjection of
women and the subjection of nonhuman animals. Richard Twine
explores the “intersectional disgust” that marks the exclusion of non-
human animals from discussions of intersectionality and posits that if
one’s reaction is “how dare you compare animal and human suffer-
ing?” (399) when one is asked to consider the ways that specific groups
human beings are rhetorically treated as nonhuman animals as a
means of denying that group specific rights, “one risks complicity with
the disgust mechanism practiced against Jewish people and partly fa-
cilitated by their animalization during Nazism” (399). Additionally,
under the Manichaean dualistic paradigm that privileges all things
coded masculine, nature and animals are coded as feminine—and eco-
feminists are often inaccurately accused of supporting such
essentialism.3

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 Introducing Vegan Studies 731

While Twine argues correctly that ecofeminists like Carol J. Adams,

Val Plumwood, and Greta Gaard, among others, have long been posit-
ing “an intersection between the co-positioning of ‘women’ and
‘nature’” (399), there continues to be resistance to the inclusion of non-
human animals (in particular female animals4) within theorizations
and applications of intersectionality. Because of this resistance—and
also out of respect for the work that intersectionality has done with re-
gard to consensus building and increased inclusivity within
feminism—I will refrain from using “intersectional” to describe the
role of nonhuman animals in vegan studies, preferring instead a dis-
cussion of “enmeshed subjections,” which implies a necessary need for
what I am choosing to call tactical, categorical unravelling.5 Within this
framework, the relationships between vegan humans and nonhuman
animals constitute physically enmeshed entanglements of a kind char-
acterized by Donna Haraway:
I love the fact that human genomes can be found in only
about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane
space that I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells
are filled with genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and
such . . . . I am vastly outnumbered by my tiny compan-
ions . . . . To be one is always to become with many. (3–4)
Enmeshment is messy, and in the way that I am employing it, enmesh-
ment is physical. To be enmeshed with someone is to be woven into the
fabric of that being’s life in ways that are reciprocal yet also challeng-
ing, difficult to disentangle, and, often, problematic. In psychological
(nonphysical) terms, enmeshed relationships are considered
unhealthy—but that categorization only applies to relationships be-
tween humans. As Haraway argues, both in When Species Meet and in
her Companion Species Manifesto (2003), our very DNA is mixed up with
that of nonhuman animals; we are bodily enmeshed with nonhuman
others in ways that should require us to consider the embodied nature
of our relationships to them.
Interest in putting forth a body of scholarship that utilizes
vegan theoretical perspectives is abundant. In May of 2016, I was
invited to give the keynote address at the first Towards a Vegan
Theory conference at Oxford University. The organizers, Emelia
Quinn and Benjamin Westwood, put forth a call for papers that
read, in part, “this conference will seek to ask what kind of place
veganism and/or ‘the vegan’ should occupy in our theorizations of
human-animal relations, animal studies, and the humanities in gen-
eral.” Further,

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by challenging the foundations upon which notions of

human identity have long been based it provides a
framework for rethinking how we relate animal studies
to broader postcolonial, feminist, queer and ecocritical
theory. Thus, the conference looks to consider how en-
gaging with veganism not just as a diet or lifestyle, but
as a set of cognitive co-ordinates, might change current
critical-theoretical practices.
And scholars have been engaging with vegan and vegetarian textual
analyses for some time, from Carol J. Adams’s foundational 1991 text
The Sexual Politics of Meat (in which she reads Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein’s monster as vegan), to the humorously titled “Love at
First Beet: Vegetarian Critical Theory Meats Dracula,” a 1996 piece by J.
E. D. Stavick, to Traci Warkentin’s 2012 essay “Must Every Animal
Studies Scholar be Vegan?” in which she notes an increasing tendency
for animal studies conferences to be vegan affairs. Popular culture and
the arts are likewise awash with representations of vegetarian and
vegan characters. As Alan Siegel explains in a 2015 Slate article, The
Simpsons established Lisa Simpson as vegetarian in 1995, making her
the longest running vegetarian character on television and offering
viewers a new conception of vegetarianism, one that provided “a con-
version story, told from the point of view of the person becoming a veg-
etarian . . . . Her agonizing journey mirrors the one experienced by
many in real life.” In addition to Coetzee’s previously mentioned Lives
of Animals, Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy Orxy and Crake,
The Year of the Flood, and Maddaddam (2004, 2010, and 2014) gave us the
God’s Gardeners, the vegan sect that survives the apocalypse. Finally,
South Korean author Han Kang’s 2016 novel The Vegetarian links
gender-specific violence to the violence done to animals via slaughter
and consumption.
The essays that follow provide a variety of forays into vegan stud-
ies, and I hope that they might serve as models for scholars with inter-
est in this emergent field of inquiry. Natalie Joelle’s essay “Gleaning
Lean Culture” offers a vegan reading of the way that the term “lean” is
used as a moniker of efficiency with regard to production models.
Joelle provides a rhetorical analysis of the way that “lean,” as a term
describing the reduction of excess waste, comes to characterize culture
at large. Joelle maintains that sustained discussions of the meaning and
origin of our use of “lean” as a term for productive exigency is lacking,
and she follows what she calls a “gleanological method” in order to
posit “a genealogy of global lean technologies and their roots in the
packing of lean meat.” Her work provides a theoretical framework for

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 Introducing Vegan Studies 733

the essays that follow, offering to meet John Kinsella’s ecopoetical chal-
lenge to create a theoretical language of veganism in order to confront
heretofore unexamined discourses of thought. Sean McCorry’s “‘This
Disgusting Feast of Filth’: Meat Eating, Hospitality, and Violence in
Sarah Kane’s Blasted” examines the Kane’s 1995 play Blasted problemat-
izes distinctions between purity and filth, edible and inedible via its en-
gagement with cannibalism, war crimes, sexual violence, and meat
eating. McCorry posits that in the play, rituals of hospitality—
particularly with regard to the sharing of a meal—are implicated in a
politics of coercion and violence that is staged between two characters,
the hyper-masculine meat eating Ian and the vegetarian Cate. Despite
an abundance of extant scholarship about Blasted, McCorry notes an
absence of scholarly focus on the play’s engagement with nonhuman
suffering, and his essay asks that we consider the animal, “rendered as
meat . . . is figured as something that can be a token of exchange be-
tween humans, rather than someone who could assume a place in a re-
vised understanding of community.”
Similarly, Matthew Cole and Kate Stewart’s essay “Speciesism
Party: A Vegan Critique of Sausage Party” examines the absent animal
referent in the 2016 animate film Sausage Party. Cole and Stewart com-
pare the sentient food items (hot dogs, buns, taco shells, and a bagel, to
name a few) in the film to animal characters in other animated features,
including The Lion King and Chicken Run, in order to show how Sausage
Party “invisiblizes” real animals by anthropomorphizing products
made from the bodies of dead animals. Their work builds on a tradition
of analyzing anthropomorphized animals in animated films by
addressing the ways that Sausage Party borrows familiar tropes from
animated films that feature animal protagonists even as it removes ani-
mals from the narrative. Finally, Caitlin E. Stobie’s “The Good Wife?
Sibling Species in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian” provides an analysis of
Han Kang’s 2016 Man Booker Prize winning novel The Vegetarian that
examines the way that the novel engages with trauma, articulation,
and female control. Rather than read protagonist Yeong-hye’s plight as
the result of illogical mental illness, Stobie reads her character’s
actions—to eschew eating meat to the point of starvation, even when
members of her family try to force feed it to her—as a posthumanist
performance of vegan praxis dependent upon inarticulable trauma
and the desire for intersectional and interspecies connection. Her work
constitutes a vegan reading of a profoundly vegan text, a text, I would
argue, that is the first of its kind, even as it revisits a tradition of narra-
tives about starving artists that has been shaped by writers from Kafka
to Coetzee.

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Vegan studies constitute a lived and embodied ethic that impacts

one’s scholarly trajectory; for vegans in the academy, veganism finds
its way, via our theoretical musings, into the scholarship that we pro-
duce. Being vegan is a bodily action, dependent upon what one choo-
ses to put in and on one’s body, and coming to this realization as a
scholarly endeavor—for myself and the other vegan scholars that I
have met—has been a life-long journey. This field of inquiry is the place
toward which I began heading when I was thirteen and visited a sau-
sage plant on a class trip,6 so I have been living vegan theory for most
of my life, even if I didn’t realize that that’s what I was doing; for vegan
theorists, the world and all of its many texts have long be read through
the lens of the bodily choices that we make as vegans. I am now doing
vegan theory because my path to academia has shaped and has been
shaped by my identity as a vegan, and as a result of that identity, every-
thing else in my world—including my scholarship and my teaching—
has been influenced by my non-normative embodied status, so this
personal theoretical history, this establishing narrative, matters. That
said, my scholarship is primarily the scholarship of discovery that has,
over the course of my career, become increasingly interdisciplinary, fo-
cusing primarily on women’s narratives as well as narratives written
by and about colonized subjects and cultures. This focus on the politics,
consequences, and mechanizations of colonization and subjection has
led me to research and publish in the areas that explore and decon-
struct societal oppressions; these areas include gender studies, envi-
ronmental studies, and animal studies—all of which, I contend, are
interconnected and enmeshed. I hope that you enjoy these essays,
which reveal truths that perhaps you had not considered prior. And I
hope that vegan studies, as lived and theoretical practice, moves us
into a better environmental future.

NOTES

1. A very recent example of such tacit politics occurs in Kenneth

Lonergan’s 2016 film Manchester by the Sea. Patrick (Lucas Hedges) opens a
freezer to find something to eat, and frozen meat falls out. Patrick begins to
panic, picking up the meat and putting it back on the freezer only to have it
fall out again. His father Joe (Kyle Chandler) has recently died and because
his death occurred in the winter in New England, his body must be refriger-
ated until the spring thaw. In this scene, for the first time since his father’s
death, we see Patrick’s sublimated grief manifest in his identification of the
frozen meat with the refrigerated body of his father. Also notable are the
packages of Gardein products—vegan meat alternatives—that are positioned
in the freezer door, fully visible and secure, throughout the scene. Casey

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 Introducing Vegan Studies 735

Affleck, who stars as Patrick’s uncle Lee, is an outspoken ethical vegan, so the
placement of the vegan “meat” in juxtaposition to the frozen real meat is
clearly intentional, as is the linkage between the body of the man and the
body of the dead animal.
2. I have written extensively about the ways that veganism is problemat-
ized by race, gender, and socioeconomic status in The Vegan Studies Project, so
I will not replicate that work here except to point out that I am very aware of
the complexity and often impossibility of veganism.
3. For the ways that ecofeminists have challenged this inaccurate reading
of ecofeminism, see, for example, Greta Gaard’s “Ecofeminism Revisited:
Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist
Environmentalism” (2011), Kayleigh MacSwain’s “Dirty Words: Essentialism
& Eco-feminism” (2009).
4. See Carol Adams’s discussion of feminized protein in The Sexual Politics
of Meat.
5. For a great example of this kind of work, see black feminist blogger
Aph Ko’s response to Akilah’s YouTube video about intersectionality, which
utilizes pizza and burgers to make its point: “Your video demonstrates that
despite the fact that ‘intersectionality’ is one of the trendiest words in our gen-
eration, our social justice movements are still largely compartmentalized,
which makes it possible for really awesome anti-racist, intersectional feminists
to completely disregard non-human animal rights.” Ko writes, “My goal here
is to perhaps start a necessary conversation about the bodies we include in
our discussion about intersectionality, as well as the bodies that are routinely
excluded [that need to be included]” and, further, “Your video demonstrates
that despite the fact that ‘intersectionality’ is one of the trendiest words in our
generation, our social justice movements are still largely compartmentalized,
which makes it possible for really awesome anti-racist, intersectional feminists
to completely disregard non-human animal rights.”
6. I discuss that experience in detail in my chapter “Disordered Pronouns,
Disordered Eating” in Defiant Daughters.

W O R K S C I T E D

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———. The Year of the Flood. Doubleday, 2009.
———. Maddaddam. Anchor, 2014.
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Cherry, Elizaeth. “Veganism as a Cultural Movement: A Relational
Approach.” Social Movement Studies 5.2 (2006): 155–70.
Coetzee, J. M. The Lives of Animals. Ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton UP, 1999.

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