Abstract
“Beyond Diet: Veganism as Liberatory Praxis” posits veganism as part of a comprehensive social justice praxis that includes non-human animals alongside human beings. The chapter explores some of the ways in which the animal agriculture industry routinely harms humans and the environments in which they live as it confines, tortures, kills, and dismembers billions of non-human animals a year. It explores the work of vegans who challenge “single issue” approaches to animal rights and instead make connections among human and non-human liberation projects. Rather than configuring veganism as an individualist, consumerist dietary choice, it advocates for a radical and inclusive approach to dismantling the systems that underlie speciesism.
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Notes
- 1.
Thus, for example, the context in which the term “pig” might be inappropriately used to describe a human man who brags about “moving on” a woman “like a bitch.”
- 2.
Many vegans have also pointed out the limitations of “animal welfare” approaches in which the “animal” category is also left intact, but through which humans seek “better conditions” for the nonhuman animals designed to be slaughtered for food and held captive in zoos and laboratories.
- 3.
A judge later dismissed the charges.
- 4.
One of the numerous advertisements she analyzes in The Sexual Politics of Meat reads: “Putting Together A BBQ: +374 Man Points. Cooking Tofu Sausages On It: -417 Man Points” (2014, 186).
- 5.
Hall’s response, in turn, was criticized by vegan activists such as Mc Jetters, who wrote in a blog post called “In Response to Harriet Hall: The White Savior is You, Not Joaquin Phoenix” that “Phoenix merely recognized bovine animals as marginalized persons themselves. It is only insulting to the bigoted imagination that someone should even consider bovine animals to be marginalized persons at all […] I lose nothing by expanding the scope of my justice to include other animals.”
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Roeder, T. (2021). Beyond Diet: Veganism as Liberatory Praxis. In: Hanganu-Bresch, C., Kondrlik, K. (eds) Veg(etari)an Arguments in Culture, History, and Practice. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53280-2_12
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