Veganism, Sex and Politics. C. Lou Hamilton
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relations.
I look at some of the controversies surrounding these comparisons in chapter 1. There I explain how my approach to the sexual politics of veganism differs from the theory of “the sexual politics of meat,” a term coined by the American ecofeminist Carol J. Adams in 1990. Adams’s understanding of the relationship between vegetarianism/veganism and feminism continues to hold considerable sway in Western writings on veganism.16 While “the sexual politics of meat” model of feminist veganism is useful for understanding how cultures of misogyny and meat-eating are entwined in the contemporary United States and other parts of the West, I find its understanding of gender relations and its reliance on anti-pornography feminism reductive and restrictive. The approaches I adopt in this book are critically queer and feminist. I have been influenced by older arguments about animal rights and more recent writings on veganism, especially by queer activists and feminists of colour.17 Recognising that violence — against women, gay men, transgender, non-binary people, among others — is an important element of power relations, the queer feminism I embrace does not take sexual and other forms of violence to be the main basis for feminist action. My subtitle — “Tales of Danger and Pleasure” — is a nod to a landmark feminist volume on sexual politics, Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, which challenged anti-pornography feminism’s interpretation of sex as dangerous for women.18 By adopting and adapting this title, I signal that although veganism is a site of potential danger — especially when it is misunderstood as being in competition with the interests of oppressed groups of people — it is also a source of pleasure.
My queer feminist veganism embraces transpecies kinship and relations, and is open to the powers of veganism to help us challenge and revise our sense of what it means to be human. But I do not claim that veganism is by definition feminist or queer. In his “Queer Vegan Manifesto” Rasmus Simonsen argues that veganism is queer because, in an overwhelmingly omnivore culture, it is deviant and non-normative.19 I am inspired by the utopian thrust of Simonsen’s text, but I am aware that most vegans do not identify as queer and vice versa. My approach to queer feminist veganism seeks to examine the points of encounter and mutual influences among different kinds of relationships rather than emphasise similarities. I broadly follow an intersectional approach that, in Jeff Sebo’s words, “there are respects in which different issues, identities, and oppressions interact so as to make the whole different from the sum of its parts.”20 When veganism comes into contact with other social and political issues it often becomes a flashpoint for debate. These flashpoints provide valuable opportunities for reflection on the multiple and sometimes conflicting meanings of veganism. The book combines an attention to vegan flashpoints — moments of crisis in the present — with an analysis of sticking points, ideas about veganism that recur, time and again, especially when it is seen in relation to other social and political movements, including feminism, queer politics, anti-racism and anti-colonialism. By exploring flashpoints and sticking points alongside a series of personal and other stories about veganism and sexuality, I aim to draw attention to ways of practising veganism that do not pit it against other personal and political priorities.
Veganism in a nutshell
This book is by and large about veganism as it has arisen in the West since the mid-twentieth century, and most of the material it discusses is drawn from Britain and North America. The bias towards English-language Western sources reflects the situation I live and write in. It is also important to grasp the historical context in which contemporary veganism has developed in order to understand the shapes it takes and why it continues to cause controversy. The book is not an examination of plant-based diets and animal ethics per se. Numerous traditions outside Europe have long histories of vegetarian/vegan diets and understandings of human–animal relations that differ substantially from those of Europe. At certain points in these pages I bring in examples from different cultures via stories of vegan activists from those traditions.
The term “vegan” — formed by the first three and the last two letters of the word “vegetarian” — was coined in the United Kingdom in 1944 by founders of the Vegan Society. These people wished to distinguish themselves from those who avoided the flesh of animals but might eat dairy and/or eggs.21 Both veganism and vegetarianism had longer histories. In Britain, the avoidance of meat and other animal products had been promoted, since at least the nineteenth century, by some supporters of campaigns against cruelty to animals as well as feminist, socialist, and alternative health and spiritual movements.22 By the 1960s and 1970s veganism was increasingly practised among activists of the postwar animal rights movement.23 In 1975 arguments in favour of veganism got a significant boost with the publication of Singer’s Animal Liberation.24 A philosopher in the utilitarian tradition, Singer compared the struggle against “speciesism” to civil rights and feminism.25 He argued that there was no rational reason why moral arguments in favour of equality among human beings should not be extended to other animals, so long as those animals could be proven to be sentient and capable of suffering pain. Much of Animal Liberation is dedicated to a detailed account and critique of the exploitation of animals in scientific experimentation and industrial agriculture, and the final chapter of the book is a defense of vegetarianism. Although in subsequent editions of Animal Liberation and other writing Singer shifted his position on where the line between sentient and non-sentient creatures should be drawn, his main argument was clear: the rearing and slaughtering of sentient animals for food and their use in scientific testing causes unnecessary suffering and is therefore unethical.26
Singer’s emphasis on evidence of suffering as the basis for including many animals in the moral community— drawn from the late eighteenth-century utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham— has been controversial. Most notoriously, it has led Singer to argue that some disabled human beings have less value than some sentient animals.27 A number of feminist animal advocates have criticised Singer for providing a rationalist basis for vegetarianism that ignores the emotional dimension of human-animal relations.28 These are serious problems with Singer’s framework. Yet it is difficult to overestimate the impact of Animal Liberation on the development of veganism and the animal rights movement over the past four decades. Published at a time when animal rights activism was on the rise in Britain and the United States, the book is probably the most widely-read argument in favour of vegetarianism/veganism in the contemporary West. For all its association with animal rights, however, Singer is not a rights philosopher and never advocated rights for animals as such. That argument was made by another philosopher, Tom Regan, in his 1983 book The Case for Animal Rights. Regan argued that the rights of animals are violated when they are raised for food and experimented upon and, in consequence, advocated “obligatory vegetarianism.”29 Singer’s and Regan’s books are cited time and again as the main contemporary philosophical defences of animals. They come up regularly in writings about veganism, their arguments sometimes used to represent the views of all vegans. The association of veganism with the work of Singer and Regan has helped to tie veganism to a very particular, and Eurocentric, tradition of rights, rationalism and moralism. This in turn helps to explain why veganism sometimes becomes a flashpoint in debates about animal ethics. Singer and Regan come out of a European humanist tradition that pays insufficient attention to differences among people. Their work has sometimes been used to make univeralist arguments about how all people should live with other animals, arguments that ignore the distinct cultural and economic contexts in which human-animal relations develop in practice.30
While their philosophical defences of animals have been important for the development of vegan ethics, the theories of Singer and Regan have by no means been the only factors. There is a history of vegetarianism and veganism in feminist activism and writing that does not rely on utilitarian or rights philosophy. Just as in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries vegetarianism was associated with a number of alternative political and social movements, in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries veganism has been practised in some anarchist, feminist and queer movements. The African-American civil rights activist Dick Gregory is sometimes cited as an influence for Black vegans, as is the Rastafarian tradition of Ital.31 Followers of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism have used predominantly plant-based diets for centuries, as did some of the Indigenous peoples