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122 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Against the Use of Knowledge Gained from Animal Experimentation

by Rebecca Tuvel

Societies 2015, 5(1), 220-244; https://doi.org/10.3390/soc5010220 - 23 Mar 2015

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 11405

While there exists considerable protest against the use of animals in experimentation, less protest is voiced against the use of knowledge gained from animal experimentation. Pulling from arguments against the use of Nazi data, I suggest that using knowledge gained from animal experimentation [...] Read more.

While there exists considerable protest against the use of animals in experimentation, less protest is voiced against the use of knowledge gained from animal experimentation. Pulling from arguments against the use of Nazi data, I suggest that using knowledge gained from animal experimentation both disrespects animal victims and sustains the practice. It is thus pro tanto morally wrong. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Alimentary Relations, Animal Relations)

694 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Eating Serial: Beatrice Lindsay, Vegetarianism, and the Tactics of Everyday Life in the Late Nineteenth Century

by Liam Young

Societies 2015, 5(1), 65-88; https://doi.org/10.3390/soc5010065 - 22 Jan 2015

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 7160

Abstract

This paper derives from research I conducted in the archives of the Vegetarian Society, in Manchester, in October 2011 on the figure of Beatrice Lindsay, a graduate from Girton College, Cambridge, who, in 1885, became the first female editor of the Society’s journal, [...] Read more.

This paper derives from research I conducted in the archives of the Vegetarian Society, in Manchester, in October 2011 on the figure of Beatrice Lindsay, a graduate from Girton College, Cambridge, who, in 1885, became the first female editor of the Society’s journal, the Dietetic Reformer and Vegetarian Messenger. In addition to her position as editor, Lindsay contributed a monthly column on “New Foods” in which she displayed her fluency with scientific terminology not simply to advocate the vegetarian diet, but to make the diet practicable for readers. I argue that her column uses the serial form of the periodical, which presents novel content within a regular structure, to shape inchoate vegetarianism: she gradually constituted the emerging diets, habits, and bodies of vegetarians by, each month, introducing readers to novel content (“new foods”) within a recurrent form. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Alimentary Relations, Animal Relations)

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94 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects: (Re)Locating Animality in Decolonial Thought

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Societies 2015, 5(1), 1-11; https://doi.org/10.3390/soc5010001 - 24 Dec 2014

Cited by 83 | Viewed by 21734

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that animal domestication, speciesism, and other modern human-animal interactions in North America are possible because of and through the erasure of Indigenous bodies and the emptying of Indigenous lands for settler-colonial expansion. That is, we cannot address animal [...] Read more.

In this paper, I argue that animal domestication, speciesism, and other modern human-animal interactions in North America are possible because of and through the erasure of Indigenous bodies and the emptying of Indigenous lands for settler-colonial expansion. That is, we cannot address animal oppression or talk about animal liberation without naming and subsequently dismantling settler colonialism and white supremacy as political machinations that require the simultaneous exploitation and/or erasure of animal and Indigenous bodies. I begin by re-framing animality as a politics of space to suggest that animal bodies are made intelligible in the settler imagination on stolen, colonized, and re-settled Indigenous lands. Thinking through Andrea Smith’s logics of white supremacy, I then re-center anthropocentrism as a racialized and speciesist site of settler coloniality to re-orient decolonial thought toward animality. To critique the ways in which Indigenous bodies and epistemologies are at stake in neoliberal re-figurings of animals as settler citizens, I reject the colonial politics of recognition developed in Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s recent monograph, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford University Press 2011) because it militarizes settler-colonial infrastructures of subjecthood and governmentality. I then propose a decolonized animal ethic that finds legitimacy in Indigenous cosmologies to argue that decolonization can only be reified through a totalizing disruption of those power apparatuses (i.e., settler colonialism, anthropocentrism, white supremacy, and neoliberal pluralism) that lend the settler state sovereignty, normalcy, and futurity insofar as animality is a settler-colonial particularity. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Alimentary Relations, Animal Relations)

213 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Eating Animals to Build Rapport: Conducting Research as Vegans or Vegetarians

by Katie MacDonald and Kelly Struthers Montford

Societies 2014, 4(4), 737-752; https://doi.org/10.3390/soc4040737 - 10 Dec 2014

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 6212

Abstract

Notions of hospitality, community, and the fostering of rapport and connection are foundational concerns for conducting research across difference. Drawing on methodological literature, this paper considers how access to various communities and “good” data is structured by the notion that in order to [...] Read more.

Notions of hospitality, community, and the fostering of rapport and connection are foundational concerns for conducting research across difference. Drawing on methodological literature, this paper considers how access to various communities and “good” data is structured by the notion that in order to develop rapport researchers accept the “food”, specifically “meat” offered by their hosts. When researchers are vegetarians or vegans, this can entail a conflict in which questions of hospitality, relationships, and responsibility to ethical commitments come to the fore. As such, we analyze methodological literature in which the logic of nonhuman animal sacrifice is considered a means to the ends of research through the development of “rapport”—often coded as an ethical relationship of respect to the participant. We draw on experiences of veg*n researchers to explore how this assumption functions to position the consumption of meat as a necessary undertaking when conducting research, and in turn, denies nonhuman animal subjecthood. We interrogate the assumption that culture and communities are static inasmuch as this literature suggests ways to enter and exit spaces leaving minimal impact, and that posits participants will not trust researchers nor understand their decisions against eating nonhuman animals. We argue that because food consumption is figured as a private and individual choice, animals are not considered subjects in research. Thus, we articulate a means to consider vegan and/or vegetarians politics, not as a marker of difference, but as an attempt to engage in ethical relationships with nonhuman animals. In so doing, we call for the inclusion of nonhuman animals in relationships of hospitality, and thereby attempt to politicize the practice of food consumption while conducting research. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Alimentary Relations, Animal Relations)

119 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Vegan Killjoys at the Table—Contesting Happiness and Negotiating Relationships with Food Practices

by Richard Twine

Societies 2014, 4(4), 623-639; https://doi.org/10.3390/soc4040623 - 05 Nov 2014

Cited by 79 | Viewed by 29293

Abstract

This article reports upon research on vegan transition, which I bring into dialogue with Sara Ahmed’s figure of the killjoy. Ahmed’s work on affect and the feminist killjoy is found to be apt for considering contemporary vegans and their transgression of normative scripts [...] Read more.

This article reports upon research on vegan transition, which I bring into dialogue with Sara Ahmed’s figure of the killjoy. Ahmed’s work on affect and the feminist killjoy is found to be apt for considering contemporary vegans and their transgression of normative scripts of happiness and commensality in a dominant meat and dairy consuming culture. The decentring of joy and happiness is also found to be integral to the critical deconstructive work of the vegan killjoy. Ahmed’s ideas further complement the frame of practice theory that I draw upon to understand the process of transition especially in the sense of opposing the meanings of dominant practices. Although food and veganism are not commented upon by Ahmed, the vegan subject constitutes, I argue, a potent further example of what she terms an “affect alien” who must willfully struggle against a dominant affective order and community. Drawing upon interviews with 40 vegans based in the UK, I illustrate examples of contestation and negotiation by vegans and those close to them. The article finds in the figure of the killjoy not only a frame by which to partly understand the negotiation of relationships between vegans and non-vegans but also an opportunity for further intersectional labour between veganism and feminism. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Alimentary Relations, Animal Relations)

74 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Social Networks as a Coping Strategy for Food Insecurity and Hunger for Young Aboriginal and Canadian Children

by Benita Y. Tam, Leanne Findlay and Dafna Kohen

Societies 2014, 4(3), 463-476; https://doi.org/10.3390/soc4030463 - 11 Sep 2014

Cited by 16 | Viewed by 8606

Abstract

Traditional foods and food sharing are important components of Aboriginal culture, helping to create, maintain, and reinforce social bonds. However, limitations in food access and availability may have contributed to food insecurity among Aboriginal people. The present article takes a closer examination of [...] Read more.

Traditional foods and food sharing are important components of Aboriginal culture, helping to create, maintain, and reinforce social bonds. However, limitations in food access and availability may have contributed to food insecurity among Aboriginal people. The present article takes a closer examination of coping strategies among food insecure households in urban and rural settings in Canada. This includes a comparative analysis of the role of social networks, institutional resources, and diet modifications as strategies to compensate for parent-reported child hunger using national sources of data including the Aboriginal Children’s Survey and the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth. Descriptive statistical analyses revealed that a majority of food insecure urban and rural Inuit, Métis, and off-reserve First Nations children and rural Canadian children coped with hunger through social support, while a majority of urban food insecure Canadian children coped with hunger through a reduction in food consumption. Seeking institutional assistance was not a common means of dealing with child hunger, though there were significant urban-rural differences. Food sharing practices, in particular, may be a sustainable reported mechanism for coping with hunger as such practices tend to be rooted in cultural and social customs among Aboriginal and rural populations. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Alimentary Relations, Animal Relations)

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273 KiB

Open AccessArticle

You Are How You Eat? Femininity, Normalization, and Veganism as an Ethical Practice of Freedom

by Megan A. Dean

Societies 2014, 4(2), 127-147; https://doi.org/10.3390/soc4020127 - 10 Apr 2014

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 12537

Abstract

In this paper I argue that the practice of veganism is, or can be, a Foucauldian ethical practice of freedom. I begin by sketching out the problematization of alimentary practices within a normalizing patriarchal framework, which some feminists argue is dominant within contemporary [...] Read more.

In this paper I argue that the practice of veganism is, or can be, a Foucauldian ethical practice of freedom. I begin by sketching out the problematization of alimentary practices within a normalizing patriarchal framework, which some feminists argue is dominant within contemporary North American society. Within this problematization, eating—for many women—is a way to manage the body’s appearance and bring it into conformity with feminine norms, and also an ongoing opportunity to exercise the will over unruly bodily desires. I then consider the narratives of women who claim that veganism helped them to relinquish disordered eating habits, temper the emotional and psychological turmoil that surrounded their alimentary practices, and mitigate antagonism toward their own bodies. In short, the practice of veganism appears to have reproblematized eating for these women. Thus, I suggest, veganism can be an ethical practice of freedom: it can loosen the tight grip of patriarchal normalization as constituted in and through disordered eating habits, and constitute subjects that are “a little less governed” by this form of power. I conclude by considering objections to this thesis, and in particular, the concern that veganism is linked to healthism, another worrying form of normalization. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Alimentary Relations, Animal Relations)

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106 KiB

Open AccessEssay

This Side of the Fence: Some Remarks on the Animal Liberation of the Anthropos

by Kris Forkasiewicz

Societies 2015, 5(2), 314-324; https://doi.org/10.3390/soc5020314 - 15 Apr 2015

Viewed by 3750

Abstract

Informed by body-phenomenology, pragmatism, and critical theory, this aphoristic essay comprises a consideration of some of the more dire consequences of human Empire-building among anthropic animals. The notion of human teleology, active beneath social class, gender, and other anthropic qualifiers, is theorized as [...] Read more.

Informed by body-phenomenology, pragmatism, and critical theory, this aphoristic essay comprises a consideration of some of the more dire consequences of human Empire-building among anthropic animals. The notion of human teleology, active beneath social class, gender, and other anthropic qualifiers, is theorized as a dead end, an abstraction translated into real power and propped up at the cost of actual bodyselves—fully corporeal living individuals—and attentiveness to their needs. In this context, animal liberation, usually referring to ending the domination of other animals at anthropic hands, is posited as pertinent to anthropic animality, especially under late modernity’s “desomatizing regime”. Animal liberation, it is held, speaks to each and every one of us, though in ways depending on the specificity of our lived situations, and unmasks the ultimate absurdity of attempts to overcome our animal condition, attempts historically coalescing precisely in human Empire. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Alimentary Relations, Animal Relations)

122 KiB

Open AccessDiscussion

Animal Personhood in Mi’kmaq Perspective

by Margaret Robinson

Societies 2014, 4(4), 672-688; https://doi.org/10.3390/soc4040672 - 03 Dec 2014

Cited by 26 | Viewed by 24817

Abstract

The Mi’kmaq are the First Nation people that traditionally inhabited the eastern coast of North America. This article explores the Mi’kmaq cultural view of non-human animals as siblings and persons, including elements shaping the Mi’kmaq relation with animals such as the belief that [...] Read more.

The Mi’kmaq are the First Nation people that traditionally inhabited the eastern coast of North America. This article explores the Mi’kmaq cultural view of non-human animals as siblings and persons, including elements shaping the Mi’kmaq relation with animals such as the belief that animals sacrifice themselves for food, that human and animal spirits are eternal, and a belief in reincarnation. The role of reciprocity in the animal–human relationship is examined through the concepts of respect and honor, and the Mi’kmaq value of avoiding scarcity (netukulimk) is expanded to include non-human animals. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Alimentary Relations, Animal Relations)

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