4 - Veganism and Animals

Summary

Introduction

What can a vegan literary studies approach do for nonhuman animals? What do vegan literary studies approaches to animals look like? How can vegan readings contribute to our experience of textual animals? It seems obvious that to approach reading nonhuman animals through a vegan lens is bound to lean on the work done in literary animal studies to reclaim nonhuman animals as serious subject matter for literary studies. Surely, a vegan reading will, as John Simons puts it in Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation (2002), “stress the ways in which animals appear in texts, are represented and figured, in and for themselves and not as displaced metaphors for the human” (6). In other words, when it comes to animals (and, indeed, a number of other subjects), the overlap between vegan literary studies and literary animal studies is bound to be significant. Yet, as I argue in what follows, reading through a vegan lens also has something particular to offer.

There are surely a multitude of ways in which answers to the questions I pose above might be approached, not least depending on how one attempts to define veganism in the first place. Insofar as the essence of veganism is an ethical stance against the objectification and exploitation of animals, nonhuman animals and our relations to them will always be close to the center of any vegan reading in one way or another. Yet, as Emelia Quinn and Benjamin Westwood have suggested, veganism should not be reduced to a mere practice (such as, for instance, refusing to eat animals). As they argue, “Veganism is messier and further reaching than that; an entanglement of identity, practice, and ethics that refuses to sanction the carnivorous subject” (Quinn and Westwood 5). Quinn and Westwood instead suggest that there is a “useful ambiguity” to veganism (5), a resistance to being defined as an end goal or a concrete practice, which instead allows, in Quinn’s words, for a veganism that remains always “fragmentary and hybrid” and which “is attended by contradictions and inconsistencies that keep the line between real and symbolic sacrifice open to scrutiny” (150, 151).