The Vegan Studies Project

Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror

Laura Wright

• Editorial: University of Georgia Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780820348544
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This inescapably controversial study envisions, defines, and theorizes an area that Laura Wright calls vegan studies. We have an abundance of texts on vegans and veganism including works of advocacy, literary and popular fiction, film and television, and cookbooks, yet until now, there has been no study that examines the social and cultural discourses shaping our perceptions of veganism as an identity category and social practice.

Ranging widely across contemporary American society and culture, Wright unpacks the loaded category of vegan identity. She examines the mainstream discourse surrounding and connecting animal rights to (or omitting animal rights from) veganism. Her specific focus is on the construction and depiction of the vegan body—both male and female—as a contested site manifest in contemporary works of literature, popular cultural representations, advertising, and new media. At the same time, Wright looks at critical animal studies, human-animal studies, posthumanism, and ecofeminism as theoretical frameworks that inform vegan studies (even as they differ from it).

The vegan body, says Wright, threatens the status quo in terms of what we eat, wear, and purchase—and also in how vegans choose not to participate in many aspects of the mechanisms undergirding mainstream culture. These threats are acutely felt in light of post-9/11 anxieties over American strength and virility. A discourse has emerged that seeks, among other things, to bully veganism out of existence as it is poised to alter the dominant cultural mindset or, conversely, to constitute the vegan body as an idealized paragon of health, beauty, and strength. What better serves veganism is exemplified by Wright's study: openness, debate, inquiry, and analysis.

CHAPTER 1

Tracing the Discourse of Veganism in Post-9/11 U.S. Culture

Summer in the year 2001 is inextricably connected, in my mind, with two major events: my decision to become vegan and the day that the planes flew into the towers in Manhattan. I had decided to become vegan, but now, in the retrospect clouded by the plumes of billowing smoke, the screams and melting metal, the people, desperate for escape and air, hurling themselves from hundreds of windows, I don’t remember the exact date. I remember that I sold my leather Fluevogs and my Doc Martens on eBay. I cried to my husband, Jason; this felt like a kind of baptism, a kind of secular salvation for me, a woman who had been vegetarian since 1989 and had been volunteering at the Dakin Animal Shelter since moving to Massachusetts. I got rid of wool. I went into a major sulk over the loss of fresh mozzarella pizza at Pizza Paradiso in Northampton. It must have been summer. It was still warm; my windows were down, and I was driving, speaking through tears to Jason about this decision to, as I said at the time, “make my life consistent.” And it was an important decision, made on a day that I should certainly remember, but the particulars of it are lost to me now, enveloped in what must have come immediately afterward, the attack, the video images played on a constant unending loop, the deaths.

Everyone keeps saying that there’s no way to forget that day. And while I can’t forget it, I don’t necessarily remember it either. That day, that beautiful, blue, warm, and peaceful day, I woke up and, I suppose—because this is what I always do—I had coffee. Maybe I went running, but it must have been early, because I remember moving my car from one side of South Street to the other so that repairs could be made on the asphalt near my apartment. And I remember that the radio was on in my car as I moved it, as always, tuned to NPR, and I knew, at that moment, that a plane had flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Here’s where memory fades, at least with regard to time. I know that I watched the news with my downstairs neighbor Jamie. I know that I talked to Jason, but I don’t remember the content of that conversation. And I don’t remember how time unfolded for the rest of the day.

I know that I tried to call Stacy, my friend from Staten Island who lived in New Jersey and who was turning thirty-two on September 11, 2001. I suppose that if one lives long enough in a world of mass murder, one’s birthday will, inevitably, coincide with something like this. For me, all there was, at least for a long time, was the coincidence of my birthday with the death date of Aphra Behn in 1689. But then there was the shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007. And my birthday, like Stacy’s, became forever associated with evil and the mortality of my species. I tried to call Stacy that day. The lines were blocked. The world just stopped. What I remember next is all out of sequence: Driving to school. Driving away from school; UMASS closed at 1:00 p.m. Sitting down in the office of Stephen Clingman, my dissertation director, and trying not to cry. He told me that it was okay. I said that it most certainly wasn’t. It was the only day during the five years that I was in Massachusetts, five years marked by impossible blizzards, feet-deep snows, ice, extreme cold, that the university shut its doors and let its charges wander without cause. The planes had flown from Logan. We were free, and we were implicated. I left the campus. The gates at the parking garage were open; no one had to pay. I went home and ran a 5k at the hospital grounds at Smith College. It was Tuesday. We raced weekly, but this day my heart nearly exploded because I felt that I had to run for everyone who had died, everyone who had never run before, everyone who had called out that morning only to die just a bit later.

And that’s all I remember.

In the years that have passed since September 11, since that singular September 11, I have closed my heart and my mind. I have been annoyed at the perpetual remembrances, the constant calling to the fore the faces of the lost. I know that there is worse evil in the world. This holds no candle to the Holocaust. I know about what’s happening in Congo. And then there is the moment, which is barely a moment. Even as it is, even as it leaves an impression that I still cannot shake, even this many years out. Since my country invaded Afghanistan in some misguided and ill-conceived attempt to right the wrongs of 9/11/2001, the statistics for just how many people have died are hard to find. But my sense is that we’ve killed—many, many times over—the number of U.S. citizens that died that day. In fact, according to a 2011 Brown University study, by 2011 the civilian death toll for our wars with Afghanistan and Iraq was somewhere in the neighborhood of 132,000 (Ackerman). My mind wants to continue to forget.

Back to veganism: I think about my country, about what we do, about the narrative that we spin. I watched a documentary about the phone calls that were made from people in the towers as the towers were about to go down. One mother said that she stopped listening to her son’s message, that she had created a message that he didn’t really say, because that message, the one that she’d invented, was more comforting to her than the real message. And that’s the way with history: Ernest Renan said, in a lecture he delivered in 1882, “forgetting . . . is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.” The narrative that we tell—even in spite of concrete images and saved final voice messages—is a narrative shaped by what we remember, certainly, but it’s also a narrative of invention, of justification, built just as much on what we choose, consciously or not, to forget. Nationalism “works to cushion what Walter Benjamin calls the experience of shock” (Redfield 4).

There are no voices to hear or meld or misremember when it comes to animals. Every day in the United States, the narrative that we imagine or excuse with regard to their lives and deaths is our own. I became a vegan in 2001 on a day that I should remember but don’t, because the reality of not being vegan was staring me squarely in the face. And then September 11 encroached, called me forth to see the evil that spurs us onward in a blind frenzy to win some impossible game. I know many truths from that impossible year: we are still at war, an invisible enemy is supposedly vanquished, and many, many more humans have had to die. And I am still a vegan, and this choice will continue to sustain me, will continue to bring me up against impossible murderous adversaries, real and imagined, remembered and forgotten, again, and again, and again.

I have chosen September 11, 2001, as the definitive moment in American history after which a vegan studies project could begin to take shape; it is a moment during which veganism became both visible and highly suspect in a period just after both vegetarianism and veganism had gained some cultural prominence and cachet. In that moment, American culture shifted in profound ways in terms of its relationship to its citizens and to the citizens of the rest of the world, and the binary rhetoric that characterized our national response in the wake of the events of 9/11 still resonates. It is a rhetoric that characterized a new national narrative that constituted an overt and explicit politics of fear, of profound bifurcation, and of xenophobic intolerance. It was a narrative that immediately and intractably divided the world into then-president George W. Bush’s “us” and “them”—the United States and the amorphous and illusive terrorists—and it allowed us to step into easy objectification of anyone and any practice that did not look “American.” As Marc Redfield asserts, “In so many ways, September 11, 2001 bisects history, altering the way people speak, think, and feel about the world around them” (3). Jeffrey Melnick characterizes that bisection in terms of the “official story” and the actual reality of 9/11: our “‘9/11 questions’ . . . all grow from a shaky and contingent yet powerful consensus that has developed in the years since 2001 about how closely the official narrative of 9/11 matches what actually happened that day” (1). The story that the nation told itself and the rest of the world after the attacks was a narrative that “ritually repeated . . . [the] same key words and phrases in an attempt to control the possible meanings” (2) of the tragedy, and the result was a paranoid nationalism dependent upon the administration’s binary worldview, which generated the rhetoric of a War on Terror that was a crusade, the resultant discourse of which positioned the United States as the agent of divinely supported goodness, a holy warrior ready to “locate and punish the evildoers” (Welch 8).¹

To quote Paul Bové in the chapter titled “Discourse” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, discourses “produce knowledge about humans and their society,” and an analysis of discourse aims to “describe the surface linkages between power, knowledge, institutions, intellectuals, the control of populations, and the modern state” as these intersect in systems of thought and as represented in texts (55–56). The current cultural discourse of veganism has been shaped in a post-9/11 moment to construct the vegan body as a contested, paradoxical, and contradictory site, at once a paragon of physical health and simultaneously compromised by such presumed physical shortcomings as the looming specter of B12 deficiency (as Tristam Stuart notes, “There’s little risk of B12 deficiency in a vegan diet . . . but the myth continues” [294]). As will become increasingly clear throughout this study, in its avoidance of meat, heavily coded as masculine food, the vegan body is therefore feminized, but if that body is female and becomes pregnant, it is policed as guilty of privation and denial, a danger to itself and its offspring both before and after birth. Because veganism is a feminizing identity category, men who choose to be vegan are viewed as simultaneously more virtuous but also less manly than their omnivorous counterparts (Ruby and Heine 448), and they must contend with such pseudoscientific claims as Jim Rutz’s that soy, often considered a staple of a vegan diet, “is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality.”

In response to such emasculating assertions, the male vegan body is alternatively constituted in the media as “hegan,” hypermasculine and alpha male, in possession of some mix of characteristics—muscle mass, wealth, political prowess—that allows it to be manly and vegan at the same time. And with the notable exception of such celebrity vegans as Mike Tyson, the vegan body is positioned, represented, and constructed within contemporary U.S. discourse as white.² As A. Breeze Harper notes, the fact that 70 percent of U.S. vegans are white and female (“Going Beyond” 158) contributes to a critical omission of vegan experiences of people of color: “Popular media . . . only centralize white socio-spatial epistemologies of veganism, reflecting the collective history of white middle-class people’s privileged relationship to consumption, spaces of power, and production of what is ethical” (159). Since the turn of the twenty-first century, in the discourse surrounding the construction of the vegan body and our understanding of it as a polarizing and paradoxical entity, veganism signifies for much of the population as an identity category that is marked by whiteness and elitist social privilege, by profound utopian naïveté, and by judgmental fundamentalist zealotry. Simultaneously, in the post-9/11 moment, the choice to be vegan meant to step outside of the confines of what constituted an agreed-upon “American” identity.

Elizabeth Cherry reads veganism as “a new form of social movement that is not based on legislation or identity politics, but is based instead on everyday practices in one’s lifestyle” (156). In the United States, veganism is most often an individual action based primarily on one’s beliefs about animals; it is, therefore, often only secondarily about one’s diet. But as Matthew Cole and Karen Morgan assert, despite the fact that “veganism is understood by most vegans (though not necessarily in these terms) as an aspect of anti-speciesist practice,” the media’s tendency to focus on veganism as a dietary choice that is dependent upon restriction and privation “tends to perpetuate a veganism-as- deviance model that fosters academic misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the meaning of veganism for vegans” (135–36). While some people do choose a vegan diet for health reasons—and while this tendency appears to be increasing due to the current mainstream tendency to divorce veganism from animal advocacy and focus instead on the health benefits of such a lifestyle—the impetus that drives most people to eschew all animal products is a profound belief that animals can and do suffer and that to inflict suffering on them in order to render them into food and clothing (items that are necessary to humans but that do not necessarily need to come from animals) is inherently and unequivocally wrong.³ Furthermore, to live one’s life without consuming or wearing animal products, particularly in the United States, is such a major shift “from the normative practice and ideology of human dominance over nonhuman animals” (McDonald 1) that to choose such a lifestyle essentially is to place oneself perpetually on the extreme margins of society. It is to invite questions, criticism, alienation, suspicion, and misunderstanding. And at various points in history, it has been to be persecuted both implicitly and explicitly in the popular press, in literature, and in mainstream, academic, and scientific media as unnatural, unhealthy, and decidedly un-American. In what follows, I examine this history of vegan identity as it was established within U.S. cultural discourse with particular focus on the twenty or so years preceding the events of 9/11 in order to illustrate the ways that the perception of veganism and vegan identity shifted radically after 9/11.

To do this requires that we trace the trajectory of veganism’s current status and its various enmeshed cultural manifestations in order to situate veganism socially and historically within the larger, more codified, and less socially stigmatizing narrative of vegetarianism in the United States. While the term “vegetarian” was coined in the 1840s (Stuart xvii), according to Claire Suddath’s 2008 Time magazine article, “A Brief History of Veganism,” “the term [vegan] was termed in 1944 [by British woodworker Donald Watson],” even though “the concept of flesh-avoidance can be traced back to ancient India and eastern Mediterranean societies.” In the United States, “activism for animal rights started early. . . . Laws were passed to protect animals in the eighteenth century” (Iacobbo and Iacobbo 5), yet in the West there has always been resistance to a vegetarian ethic—historically based in large part on the Judeo-Christian religious belief that entitles “man” to “dominion” over animals, as stated in Genesis 1:26. By the time of Donald Watson’s death at age ninety-five in 2005, around two million people self-identified as vegan in the United States (Suddath), yet while “American vegetarianism has broken free of its philosophical and religious roots, becoming an accepted health choice . . . veganism is still tied to the animal rights movement and is out there on the fringe” (Suddath). In the first part of the twenty-first century, however, veganism has become increasingly visible in large part due to the media attention paid to so-called celebrity vegans, even as there has also ensued a backlash that situates veganism as a threat, in a very real sense, to American identity. The social crossroads that mark the tension between visibility and mainstream acceptance or rejection of veganism in the United States are situated at an historical moment during which the United States is emerging from the grip of George W. Bush’s rhetoric of the War on Terror—waged since 2001—and from a pronounced economic recession.

By tracing veganism’s history and representation in the United States prior to that moment, it becomes possible to see that our contemporary understanding of veganism is deeply enmeshed with and constructed by our conception of our former administration’s rhetorical presentation of its so-called War on Terror and the “visual traumas” inflicted on us after 9/11, which Marc Redfield argues have shaped our national narrative. Karen Iacobbo and Michael Iacobbo’s Vegetarian America: A History traces the way that vegetarianism has evolved and been shaped by various other social movements that have taken place in the United States; their work situates U.S. vegetarianism as having occurred in three distinct periods beginning in the eighteenth century, and they note that in the United States, the modern vegetarian movement was established by nineteenth-century Christians, “and even some evidence holds, that at least two Native American tribes practiced vegetarianism” (1). While the Vegetarian Society was founded in England in 1847, William Metcalf organized the American Vegetarian Convention in 1850, which resulted in the creation of the American Vegetarian Society (AVS) (71). The Iacobbos chronicle the lives of such foundational figures of the 1830s and 1840s as the “Father of Vegetarianism” (23), Sylvester Graham, and physician William Alcott, author of Vegetable Diet and cofounder, with Charles Lane, of Fruitlands, a short-lived “vegan community in Harvard, Massachusetts” (60). This work also links vegetarianism to other social movements, like abolition, noting that “unlike today, when social movements tend to stand apart from one another, during the Jacksonian era reformers of various causes were united in their views” (62). The authors connect American vegetarianism to American feminism, noting that AVS member and women’s rights advocate Anne Denton asserted that “an integral step in woman’s liberation . . . was to change her diet” (78) and not eat meat, not, however, because Denton saw an ecofeminist link between the oppression of animals and the oppression of women but because she believed that women were meant to be “benevolent, and that by cooking (and eating) meat they were lowering themselves” (79).

Other nineteenth-century U.S. women chronicled by the Iacobbos who factor predominantly in vegetarianism’s history are Seventh Day Adventist Ellen G. White, Clara Barton, founder of the Red Cross, and 1872 presidential contender Victoria Woodhull, whose platform included “women’s suffrage, dress reform, free love, [and] Grahamite principles, including vegetarianism” (112).⁴ A second wave of vegetarian growth took place in the United States between 1900 and 1930, initiated by the influence of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1905)—which caused many conversions to a vegetarian diet—on the passage of the Pure Food Act and the Meat Inspection Acts of 1906. The Iacobbos note that between 1902 and 1921, “the annual consumption of flesh food ha[d] fallen from 225 pounds . . . to 170 pounds . . . , a decline of 24 percent” (154). Nonetheless, with the advent of the Great Depression, “the golden era of vegetarianism was about to end” (155). The period from the Depression to the early 1960s was marked by attacks on vegetarianism by both the meat industry and the medical establishment, leading to a rise in the consumption of meat over the course of these decades.

Vegetarianism did not enjoy a prevalent place within American culture again until the 1960s and 1970s, when it became part of the counterculture movement of those decades. It is worth reiterating that “vegan” as an identity category did not exist until the middle of the twentieth century, even though what we now think of as veganism had been in practice since the beginning of recorded history. In the United States, the American Vegan Society, founded by H. Jay Dinshah, did not exist until 1960. Even as codifying “veganism” limited and homogenized it as a qualified identity position, distinguishing veganism by name did allow it to enter the discourse as something decidedly other than vegetarianism. Therefore, veganism did not really receive any real attention from the media until the third wave of U.S. vegetarianism, demarcated by the Iacobbos as having begun in the 1980s and leading up to 2003, the year before their book was published. And the creation of the Internet during th...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Framing Vegan Studies
• Chapter 1 Tracing the Discourse of Veganism in Post-9/11 U.S. Culture
• Chapter 2 Vegan Vampires: The Politics of Drinking Humans and Animals in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight, and True Blood
• Chapter 3 Vegan Zombies of the Apocalypse: McCarthy’s The Road and Atwood’s The Year of the Flood
• Chapter 4 Death by Veganism, Veganorexia, and Vegaphobia: Women, Choice, and the Politics of “Disordered” Eating
• Chapter 5 Men, Meat, and Hegan Identity: Veganism and the Discourse of Masculinity
• Chapter 6 The Celebrity Vegan Project: Pamela, Mac, Mike, Ellen, and Oprah
• Conclusion: National and Personal Narratives: Some Thoughts on the Future of Vegan Studies
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index