6 - Veganism, Gender, and Queerness

Summary

Introduction

This chapter translates to a literary context the theoretical findings of my previous work on queer veganism. In my 2012 essay “A Queer Vegan Manifesto,” I write that the fact that vegans concern themselves “with species other than the human directly expresses a desire to transverse not to say disrupt the boundaries that uphold and police the categories that separate the human from the nonhuman” (Simonsen 54). Carol J. Adams has noted that since ethical vegetarianism was embraced by the British Romantics in the late eighteenth century, abstaining from animal products has been considered deviant in the Western world (152). Building on Adams’s seminal work, I define queer veganism as a concept that “institutes a gap in the communal bond inherent to sharing and feasting on the flesh of nonhuman animals” (Simonsen, “Manifesto” 57). As Benjamin Westwood points out, negating “pleasure, nature, sociability, responsibility, pragmatics, empirical science, or capitalism (the list could go on), vegans are cast [in contemporary Western culture] as killjoys, ascetics, and masochists” (176). C. Lou Hamilton echoes this sentiment in her book Veganism, Sex, and Politics, but – pushing back against “the neoliberal truism that links enjoyment to excess and instant gratification” (194–95) – she asserts that “veganism allows us to rethink what we understand by pleasure and to reshape our identities” (195).

Veganism is inherently relational, and it thus intersects with the etymological definition of “queer” that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famously calls attention to in the foreword to Tendencies (1994): “the word ‘queer’ means across – it comes from the Indo-European root –twerkw, which also yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart” (viii). In this essay, I reignite the meaning of “queer” to activate the trans potentiality inherent to the word. In my previous work, I focus on the possibility of forming vegan community on the basis of deviancy; principally, I argue that, “It is by negating the idea of identity as teleology that we might learn how to share our ‘selves’ across species boundaries” (Simonsen, “Manifesto” 66). This line of inquiry can be extended to a trans sense of kinship that “crosses” multiple lines of belonging: biological, historical, sexual, ethical, dietary, and so on.

This essay employs Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 Frankissstein as a literary case study that explicitly demonstrates the possibilities and potentialities of a trans queer reading of veganism.