Creative method event: Veganism and multi-species justice

Abstracts

In this event, three prominent academics and activists working on veganism will discuss intersections of their scholarship and activism with broader work on social justice, including racial, gender and LGBTQ perspectives. It will also involve a conversation between activism, sociology and literary studies.

Christopher Sebastian
‘Gay Panic at the Commie Vegan Disco’

This brief talk is excerpted from my thesis ‘White Meat: Animal Symbolism and U.S. American Political Discourse in the 21st Century’. It draws on the work of Carol Adams, Dr Corey Wrenn, Jeff Mannes and pattrice jones to explore how animals are exploited in U.S. society to make statements about political identity. This discussion will focus on the collective insecurities that straight, mostly white America project onto queer bodies and animal bodies, and how anxiety over gay sex actually presents a cover for heterosexual desires and male domination. Content Warning: Graphic language of a sexual nature.

Corey Wrenn
‘Love is Love: What Animal Rights Can Learn from the Gay Rights Movement’

The animal rights movement is fundamentally based on love for other animals and a radical recognition of human-nonhuman relationships as valid and important. In a world that has normalized wholescale violence against other animals, recognizing nonhuman animal personhood and expressing compassion for all kinds is a vital act of social justice. This talk examines social movement theories of liberation for other animals with specific reference to the gay rights movement as an adjacent project from which we might draw inspiration and wisdom.

Emelia Quinn
‘The Monstrous Vegan’

This talk considers the intersections between the emergent field of vegan theory and ongoing work in queer theory through a consideration of my recent work on vegan monsters. “The monstrous vegan” is a recurring trope that has appeared in various guises over the past 200 years of literary history and offers a way of re-conceptualizing veganism in the present moment. A monstrous conception of veganism is a way of thinking through the complex coming together of utopianism and insufficiency that inhere in vegan modes of being in the world. I end with a consideration of “vegan camp” as a reparative mode of vegan reading that provides one way of rehabilitating and embracing the monstrous vegan. Vegan camp offers a theorisation of the vegan joys and pleasures that often intersect in uncomfortable ways with mass violence.

Further readings:

• Wrenn, C. L. 2017. “Trump Veganism: A Political Survey of American Vegans in the Era of Identity Politics” Societies 7 (4): 32. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/soc7040032.
• Wrenn, C. L. and M. Lutz. 2016. “White Women Wanted? An Analysis of Gender Diversity in Social Justice Magazines” Societies 6 (2): 1-18. DOI: 10.3390/soc6020012.
• Quinn, E. 2020. “Notes on Vegan Camp” PMLA Publication of the Modern Language Association of America 135 (5): 914-930. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2020.135.5.914
• Quinn, E. 2020. Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan, 1818 to Present. Oxford University Press. DOI:10.1093/oso/9780192843494.001.0001