Outrage isn’t the right word for the change I have undergone since [the class began]. The readings and discussions over the past couple of months have provoked within me a need to acknowledge my own complicity in the consumerism and capitalism that leads to the slaughter of millions of animals each year. I have been forced to reckon with my personal philosophy built on the foundations of Western thinking for centuries and fed to me in my education, secular and religious. And finally, I have come to question how my own choices impact animals and humans I will never meet, and if I am doing enough.
Excerpt from a student reflection paper
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Liberatory educators must create spaces where students can reflect both critically and compassionately on their relationship to nonhuman animals.1 Yet, as Kahn (2014) notes, the academy is mired in “epistemologies of ignorance” (Tuana 2004) when it comes to animal consumption; this remains true even in otherwise radical educational spaces. How do we break through such ignorance and foster instead epistemologies of interconnection, care, and agency?
The field of critical pedagogy, inspired by Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed ([1970] 2017), has foregrounded questions of power and domination in higher education for decades. Feminist pedagogy has added a focus on gender, identity, and interrogation of the personal realm (Shrewsbury 1987; hooks 1994; Fisher 2001; Crabtree 2009; Light, Nicholas, and Bondy 2015). However,
My chapter contributes to this growing discourse by offering insights rooted in an integral feminist pedagogy, a framework that integrates the intellectual, political, affective, and spiritual dimensions of teaching and learning (Arora 2017). The integral tradition (Esbjörn-Hargens, Reams, and Gunnlaugson 2010; Dea 2010) highlights the importance of addressing students’ inner worlds—their emotions, intuitions, and spiritual perspectives—while the feminist tradition emphasises how our personal experiences are rooted in socio-political realities. I contend that bringing these two traditions together when teaching vegan concepts can help educators better support students as they navigate the personal and political ramifications of such content. The integral feminist vegan framework that I offer in this chapter builds upon the political insights of critical animal pedagogy and ecofeminist pedagogy while bringing a deeper focus on the embodied, affective, and spiritual2 concerns that arise in the classroom when animal exploitation is examined.
An integral feminist vegan pedagogy (IFVP) begins by destabilising taken-for-granted assumptions about our relationship to animals and food. I refer to this questioning as “waking up to speciesism,” inviting students into reflective inquiry about their daily relationship to the animals they interact with or consume. Second, this pedagogy draws upon a post-essentialist feminist care ethic (Tronto 1993) to affirm students’ emotional bonds with animals. An integral, care-based approach also requires that educators attend to the emotional impact on students of learning about the enormity of animal oppression.
Third, IFVP offers specific strategies that educators can use to advance critical animal studies’ “holistic understanding of the commonality of oppressions” (Best et al. 2007, 5), which is the hallmark of critical animal studies. Such strategies include surfacing and deconstructing associations of veganism with
Finally, an integral feminist vegan perspective recognises that the politics of whose bodies we eat is intimately tied to the politics of how we experience and perceive our own bodies. Given the pervasiveness of body image anxiety and eating struggles among students, discussions of veganism can become fraught. Therefore, educators must find ways to sensitively frame discussions in ways that resist fatphobia and that centre ethical agency over bodily discipline.
In the sections that follow, I explore each of the above five themes in greater detail and offer specific pedagogical strategies that vegan educators can use or adapt to their own educational contexts. Many of these strategies are based on what I have found useful when introducing vegan perspectives to students. Other strategies were inspired by reflections on what I could have done more effectively in the past; I have turned to the literature in these latter cases to develop new ideas and teaching tools.
1 Standpoint and Context
I have been a feminist educator at the university level for over twenty years, but it is only in the past few years that I have more fully incorporated a vegan and animal liberation lens into my teaching and research. I had been an ethical vegetarian since childhood, influenced both by my Hindu upbringing and by an awareness of the terrible plight of factory-farmed animals.3
However, for many years, I kept my concern for animals separate from my other social justice commitments, rarely if ever raising the issue in the feminist communities of which I was a part. It was not until coming across ecofeminist and critical animal studies scholarship that I began to see how deeply imbricated speciesism is with every other social and ecological justice issue.4 This
My own veganism is motivated by a deep sense of the sacred interconnection of all life and has been influenced by my study of the ethical principles of myriad spiritual and religious traditions.5 I teach at the California Institute of Integral Studies, an institution which is unique in its integration of secular and non-hegemonic spiritual worldviews.6 My graduate program integrates the fields of women’s and gender studies, ethnic studies, philosophy, and religion.7 Most of our students identify as women and have an interest in progressive spiritualities that affirm gender and racial justice. This context has shaped my development of an integral feminist vegan pedagogy, particularly its focus on examining the teachings of religious and spiritual traditions vis a vis animals.
However, I believe that the inclusion of a spiritual dimension may nonetheless be of value to educators who teach in more traditional, secular institutions. A study conducted in 2004 of students in U.S. universities revealed that eighty percent expressed interest in spirituality, which was defined to include ideas such as transcendence as well as compassion, connection, service, and broad-mindedness (Astin, Astin, and Lindholm 2011). A global study from 2013 found that only 16% of adults in the U.S. were found to have no spiritual or religious affiliation, and that percentage is expected to trend downward in the coming decades (Pew Research Center 2015). Given the pervasive influence of spiritual and religious beliefs in most people’s lives, particularly in nations with strong religious cultures, it becomes necessary to interrogate assumptions that animal domination is divinely sanctioned (Luke 2007, Farians 2011).
2 Waking up to Speciesism
One of the central tasks of a liberatory educator is to call into question the oppressive social relations that are generally taken for granted as the natural order of things; we must help students ‘unlearn’ as much as they learn (Freire
The integral feminist vegan framework I use begins by inviting students’ awareness of the ways in which they relate to—and consume—animals in their daily lives. When beginning a class or public presentation on animal ethics, I often begin by leading the audience in a reflective exercise where they bring to mind a typical morning. I ask them to picture themselves waking up in the morning, getting dressed, eating breakfast, and going through their normal routines. Next, I ask “What role do nonhuman animals play in your morning?” I typically get two types of responses: the first type mentions a beloved companion animal, usually a cat or dog, whom they feed or play with in the morning. The second most common response is “I don’t have any pets, so animals don’t play a role in my mornings.” Even when the title of my presentation is clearly on animal ethics, it is rare for participants to mention their feather down comforter, the bacon they had for breakfast, or the cream they put in their coffee as a relationship they had with an animal.
When I follow-up by asking students to consider the animal products they may have used in the morning, they are then more likely to recall the animals they may have eaten or worn. The discrepancy in their responses to these two questions underscores Carol Adams’ argument that animals become absent referents via our consumption: “the reminder that the animal was a full being, living a life, disappears” (2015; also see Adams 1990). In debriefing these questions with students, I discuss Adams’s concept of ‘absent referent’ and add the concept of ‘absent relationship,’ pointing out that consumption is a form of relationship, albeit a dysfunctional one (Gruen 2015) that is “asymmetrically imbued with power” (Dinker and Pedersen 2016, 415). This activity helps highlight how, in modern industrial societies, we literally wake up daily to a speciesist culture, or more particularly, a carnist culture. Melanie Joy (2011) coined the term “carnism” to describe the subset of speciesism that “dichotomizes nonhuman animals into ‘edible’ and ‘inedible’ categorizations” (21). It is the ideology that allows people to view dogs as part of their family and pigs as part of dinner. Through the “waking up” exercise, students come to a greater realisation that “the perpetual, intimate, and deeply symbolic act of eating animals in
When I have an opportunity to work with students for an entire semester, such as in my Animal Ethics course, I bookend the course with opportunities for students to reflect on their connections to animals. The course begins and ends with students responding to the following prompts:
- –Where do nonhuman animals fit into your philosophy or worldview? What messages have you received about animals as a child, through your religion, schooling, etc.?
- –If you have animals in your life (e.g., companion animals, visitors to your garden, etc), how would you describe your relationship to them?
- –How would you describe your relationship to the animals that you use or consume? (e.g., for food, clothing, entertainment, medical testing, etc.).
- –If you have never considered such questions before, why do you think that might be the case?
By and large, students note that their upbringing led them to believe that eating animals was “normal, natural, and necessary” (Joy 2011, 96). The simple act of reflecting on the messages they received via their families, schools, and religious institutions enables students to call into question the animal domination which otherwise goes unnoticed. This sets the foundation for a deeper dive into the complex ideological, political, and social forces that sustain animal oppression.
3 Centring Care
3.1 Caring for Animals
The feminist care tradition in animal ethics asserts that emotion must be integrated with reason in our approach to animals. Against the dominant Western animal rights tradition which emphasises rationality and autonomy (exemplified by the work of Peter Singer ([1975] 2009) and Tom Regan (1983, care ethicists note that care is the foundation of any effort to change our relationship with animals. Josephine Donovan and Carol Adams (2007) note that feminist care theorists question the “rationalist roots” of animal rights theory, which “requires an assumption of similarity between humans and animals, eliding the differences” (5). Moreover, traditional rights theory denies the reality of interdependence among animals (human and nonhuman), is “abstract and formalistic” and “devalues, suppresses, or denies the emotions” (Donovan and Adams 2007, 6). A care approach, by contrast, affirms the role of emotions in human-animal relations, allows for a contextual response to animal
An integral feminist vegan pedagogy adapts feminist animal care ethics for the higher education classroom. The animal ethicists cited above who espouse a feminist care approach have focused on human-animal relationships, not teacher-student relationships. Conversely, the literature on the pedagogy of care ethics focuses either solely on the human realm (Mortari 2016; Monchinski 2010; Owens and Ennis 2005; Beauboeuf-Lafontant 2002; Noddings 1988), or, in some cases, an undifferentiated “environment” (Goralnik et al 2012; Li 2013 [2007]), eliding ethical consideration of animals. The integral perspective offered in this chapter addresses this gap. First, it affirms and normalises students’ care for animals while challenging gendered assumptions about such care. Second, it brings a mindful and trauma-informed lens to care for students as they grapple with the mental and emotional impact of learning about the immensity of animal suffering.
Within the humanities and social sciences, courses on animal ethics are usually electives, and thus students who choose such courses usually enter the classroom with some interest in and care about animal issues. However, their care is sometimes unreflective and extends primarily to companion animals, endangered species, or animals that are rendered “cute” in the media. Many students also come in with a certain self-consciousness about their care, having internalised the dominant culture’s view that rational adults should not care too deeply about animals. As Luke (2007) notes, most people are naturally inclined to care about animals, but the animal exploitation industries have indoctrinated us to “overcome” this care by convincing us that humans cannot survive or thrive without exploitation. As part of this indoctrination, I would argue, we are taught that it is “childlike” to care deeply about animals; coming into adulthood means accepting the inevitability of domination.8
Caring about animals is feminised as well as infantilised; indeed, feminists have long critiqued the ways in which ‘feminine’ traits have been considered more childlike than ‘masculine’ ones (Laing 2021). Marti Kheel (2007), citing a history of the American Humane Society (Coleman 1924), notes how the dismissal of feminine traits affected the U.S. animal liberation movements of the early 20th century; the mostly female members of these movements “were often labeled ‘animal lovers’ or ‘sentimentalists’ in an attempt to belittle their concerns” (Kheel 2007, 45). Such attitudes persisted for decades, and thus
In order to help students affirm the dignity of caring about animals, I highlight the work of feminist care ethicists such as Lori Gruen (2015), whose concept of entangled empathy captures the way that affective and intellectual processes support each other. I have them read personal narratives, such as Ayesha Akhtar’s Our Symphony with Animals (2019), which chronicles both Akhtar’s personal experiences of bonding with companion animals and her research into the connection between human and animal healing, abuse, and advocacy. Students also read accounts of animal emotion and culture (as interpreted by ethologists and animal advocates) such as Carl Safina’s Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (2016) and Marc Bekoff’s The Emotional Lives of Animals (2008). Such readings deepen students’ capacity for the entangled empathy that Gruen describes.
I have also found that it is critically important to give students classroom time to talk openly about their emotional experiences with animals, both positive and painful, and reflect on how such experiences have shaped their ethics. The following are examples of discussion prompts that can encourage students to integrate affective and intellectual reflection:
- –Reflect on a time that an encounter with a nonhuman animal brought you particular joy, comfort, or other positive emotional experience.
- –Has an encounter with an animal ever elicited fear, anger, and/or a desire to inflict harm?
- –Reflect on a time when you’ve felt grief, sadness, or other negative emotion in response to animal suffering.
- –How have each of these experiences affected your understanding of the appropriate ethical and moral responsibility that you have toward non human animals?
Further, I invite students to reflect on how their attitudes toward animals and animal-based foods may be gendered. Questions such as the following help initiate group dialogue:
- –If you identify as male or masculine, what societal messages have you received about the relationship between men and animals?
- –If you identify as female or feminine, what societal messages have you received about the relationship between women and animals?
- –If you identify as non-binary, are there any ways in which you’ve been influenced by gendered ideas about human-animal relationships?
Several animal advocacy men have told me that they spent years insisting they did not care for animals, because they did not feel caring was an appropriate response. They needed to appear rational, ‘in control,’ distanced from animals. With the appearance of ecofeminist writings on animals, they felt such relief because they now had a language that legitimated the idea that one might care for animals and that this was an appropriate motivation for activism.
Here, Adams highlights the necessity of destigmatising care in order to respect the true reasons that animal activists engage in the work they do. Her words here also hint at the complex emotional terrain that animal advocates must navigate, terrain that is similar to what students may encounter when learning about animal oppression. Thus, I turn my attention now to how an integral feminist vegan pedagogy tends to student needs.
3.2 Caring for Students
We must care for students as we support them in caring about animals. When people wake up to the extent of the suffering that animals experience at human hands, they often experience a range of emotional impacts, such denial, grief, rage (Corman and Vandrovcová 2014), and even existential despair (Mann 2018). Texts that are used to educate people about animal oppression are often distressing, depicting images of animals whose experiences include the following:
Deprivation of basic comforts, rearing animals in crowded confinement stalls and pins; veal crates, gestation crates, and battery cages; tail docking and beak clipping; hormones and antibiotics; broken limbs and dysfunctional organs; transporting animals and meat over states and continents; and a disassembly line that never stops mutilating and killing—these are the standard practices of industrial meat production (Rowe 2011, 12–13)9
Julie Andrzejewski’s reflection on her teaching practice (2003) and Lauren Corman and Tereza Vandrovcova’s (2014) “holistic critical animal pedagogy” (2014) begin to address this gap. While noting that graphic images of animal suffering may help students grasp such violence viscerally and not just abstractly, Corman and Vandrovcova warn that such imagery may also negatively affect students’ mental well-being. Providing students with too much information or intense images can backfire, leading to desensitisation and avoidance. Educators must therefore titrate the use of graphic material and “provide emotional and intellectual guidance as students struggle with the information” (145). In their classrooms, Corman and Vandrovcova do this by emphasising agency, noting the gains that have been made for animals via activism, and inspiring hope for future shifts in human-animal relations.
Andrzejewski (2003, 23), meanwhile, cares for student responses to course material by regularly tracking the emotional pulse of her classroom. She asks students to reflect on their process via weekly responses to questions such as these:
- –What are the key things you learned this week?
- –What things, if any, did you find difficult or challenging this week? (Were you confused at any point? Did you have emotional reactions to any of the materials? How can you deal with these constructively?
- –What everyday actions can you take this week to decrease or eliminate animal suffering?
Such responses allow Andrzejewski to regularly assess student learning and affect; she also uses such responses to know if it is time to collectively process issues with the class.
An integral vegan feminist pedagogy builds on the strategies cited above by drawing from the growing literature on contemplative and trauma-informed
According to James Stanescu, people who mourn the atrocities that animals experience at human hands find that their grief is “socially unintelligible” (2012, 568):
Those of us who value the lives of other animals live in a strange, parallel world to that of other people. Every day we are reminded of the fact that we care for the existence of beings whom other people manage to ignore, to unsee and unhear as if the only traces of the beings’ lives are the parts of their bodies rendered into food: flesh transformed into meat. To tear up, or to have trouble functioning, to feel that moment of utter suffocation of being in a hall of death is something rendered completely socially unintelligible.
In a similar vein, Australian vegan psychologist Clare Mann argues that, as people wake up to the realities of human-caused animal suffering, everyday life becomes fraught with this new awareness; those who become vegan may experience vystopia, a type of existential crisis unique to vegans living in cultures where meat-eating is pervasive. This crisis is engendered by the fact that the majority of the population is unaware of and complicit in such suffering through their daily consumption patterns. The vegan thus feels isolated in their suffering and grief.
The task of an integral feminist vegan educator, therefore, must be to make such grief intelligible within the classroom community, while helping students make meaning out of their experience. This can be accomplished by consciously carving out time and space in the classroom for students to openly share the feelings and responses that are arising for them as they digest the course material. Students can also be given time to journal, write poetry, or make art centred on their evolving understanding of human-animal relationships. Rituals, such as lighting candles and honouring moments of silence, can help the classroom community grieve together.
Mindful dialogues can provide students another avenue for processing their responses to challenging material. Whereas classroom discussions help students learn new information and clarify their views, dialogues—as understood by integral educators—focus students on opening to new ideas, suspending
Earlier in the course, I have students engage in small-group dialogues about relatively comfortable topics, such as narratives about companion animals. This helps to build trust and ease among students. As the course progresses, students can be asked to speak about much more sensitive issues, such as their responses to viewing animals being harmed and their thoughts about the interconnections between human and animal oppressions. Toward the latter part of the course, small groups can give way to a fuller dialogue among the whole class about collective resources for dealing with the grief and trauma that the course material can evoke.
Educators are often given the advice to refer students to university counsellors when course materials bring up distressing feelings (Carello and Butler 2014). While this is generally sound advice, vegans and others who care deeply about animal suffering often find that non-vegan counsellors fail to understand—or, worse, pathologise—their distress (Mann 2018). Thus, vegan educators bear greater responsibility for attending to student responses to potentially traumatising material. Stanescu (2012, 567) has argued that grieving animal lives can be understood as a “political act that produces new communities”. By introducing dialogue and grief practices into the classroom, integral feminist vegan educators can help foster bonds that transform pain into action.
4 Reframing Vegan Discourse
Ecofeminist and critical animal studies scholars have extensively documented how human and animal oppressions are interrelated (Donovan and Adams 2007; Nocella et al. 2014). However, few students have been exposed to such literatures, even in programmes centred on feminism and social justice. In my own classrooms, I have noticed that my students enter the classroom with a deep sensitivity to oppression and privilege. Most of them are versed in the language of ‘intersectionality,’ even as they may not have a full grasp of its complexity. Yet, only a fraction of students have seriously considered speciesism, nor are they aware of the massive human injustices engendered by the animal industrial complex. As Steven Best (2009, 17) has noted, “nearly all histories,
In fact, some students will argue that veganism is itself oppressive, citing its association with whiteness, financial privilege, and thinness.10 These arguments often come from students of colour and white allies who have been engaged in anti-racist work. Breeze Harper examines these types of assumptions in Sistah Vegan (2010), a ground-breaking text that expresses the perspectives of diverse Black vegan women. Harper recalls how she herself held such a view prior to becoming a vegan advocate; as an undergraduate student, her perception of vegan activists was that they were “just bored overprivileged rich white kids who [did] not have real problems” (2010, 35). Other Black vegan women in Harper’s text describe being ostracised (Drew 2010) or cast as “self-righteous” (Santosa 2010, 73) by peers in their community; such experiences further illuminate why some students might resist the idea of veganism.
Despite the growing literature by vegan activists and scholars of colour (Adewale 2021; Brueck 2017; Mwangi 2019; McJetters 2014; Robinson 2014, 2018; Deckha 2012, 2017; Ornelas 2011; Cordiero-Rodrigues 2021), the figure of the vegan as white (or white-identified), privileged, and racially insensitive persists in my classrooms over a decade after Harper’s text was published. To challenge these assumptions, vegan educators are tasked with reframing the discourse around veganism and expanding students’ ideas of who and what veganism is for. I have found it helpful to begin this process by first surfacing and deconstructing students’ common associations with veganism. For example, at a recent online workshop I facilitated that was geared specifically toward BIPOC11 individuals, I began by asking participants to free-associate responses to the question: “Who or what comes to mind when you think of the word ‘vegan’?” I received the following responses: “Bougie—extra money to buy avocados”, “Very, very thin”, “White, gentrifier, privileged”, “Obsessive about food”, “Difficult to communicate with – get mad easily”, “Combative, righteous”, “Difficult at restaurants”, “Weird”. Notably, several members of this small group were themselves vegans but shared these responses because they understood these to be the common discourse in their communities.
To emphasise this final point, an integral feminist vegan pedagogy centres the work of scholars and activists who offer complex and interconnected analyses of how racial, gender, and other oppressions connect with animal exploitation. From Aph Ko and Syl Ko (2017), for instance, students learn how racism and speciesism have been co-constitutive. Christopher Sebastian McJetters (2016) offers a framework that connects Black liberation, queer liberation, and animal liberation. Postcolonial vegans (García 2013, Mwangi 2019) challenge the globalisation of Western meat-centric diets and the human, animal, and ecological harms engendered by such diets. Other scholars analyse the links between speciesism and sexism (Adams 1990; Kemmerer 2011), homophobia and heterosexism (Simonsen 2012) and disability oppression (Taylor 2017).
Further, I note how many prominent U.S. activists of colour are or were either vegans or ethical vegetarians, such as Cesar Chavez, Coretta Scott King, and Angela Davis.12 Activist students are often surprised to hear this and question why these leaders’ commitment to ethical eating is rarely discussed within social justice movements. We explore how the anthropocentrism and speciesism endemic within such movements has led to such silence. As they learn from the lives and scholarship of BIPOC and allied scholars, activists, and movement leaders, students are better able to reframe their understandings of veganism and resist discourses that posit human and animal liberation as competing interests.
5 Examining Religious and Spiritual Worldviews
In Defining Critical Animal Studies: An Intersectional Social Justice Approach for Liberation, Anthony Nocella et al. (2014) map the history and contours of critical animal studies (CAS), focusing on the interplay of theory, pedagogy, and activism. In their introduction, they acknowledge that religious and philosophical traditions “played a major role in establishing the fundamentals of our ethics and morality, including questions of what we as humans owe to nonhuman animals” (Nocella et al. 2014, XXI). They credit the Indic religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism as well as ancient Western philosophers (such as Pythagoras) for providing “the philosophical, moral, and ethical foundations of animal advocacy” (Nocella et al. 2014, XXI).
After crediting such traditions, however, Nocella et al. (2014, XXI) quickly move to reject them, arguing that “religious thought is dominated by anthropocentric views that legitimize domination of other animals”. Nocella et al. rightly challenge the anthropocentrism of religions, noting, for instance, that even the vegetarian-leaning Indic religions lean so for the sake of human spiritual progress. Yet, they “throw out the baby with the bathwater” by moving
In contrast, the integral feminist vegan pedagogy I espouse gives religious and spiritual worldviews their proper place within animal studies: one in which they are seen as offering important wisdom that can guide our ethics while also having their own limitations and hierarchical biases. Feminist scholars of religion and spirituality have demonstrated that while religions have upheld women’s oppression, they have also provided women important resources for liberation14; I contend that a similar argument can be made for the relationship between spirituality and animal ethics. In her study of animal ethics across the world’s major religious traditions, Lisa Kemmerer (2012, 10) argues that all of them “offer a wealth of moral teachings and spiritual ideals that surpass animal welfare to align with animal rights and animal liberation“ [italics in original]. Across traditions, religious adherents can choose to focus on teachings that emphasise compassion and the sanctity of all beings, or they can emphasise teachings about human superiority to justify their use of animals (see e.g., Scully 2002; Labendz and Yanklowitz 2019; Ali 2015; The Vegan Muslim Initiative 2021).
As noted earlier, I teach in a program that emphasises the role of religion and spirituality in shaping our lives and politics. When students delve into their beliefs about human-animal relations, most reveal that their ideas have been formed largely by religious concepts that place humans at the apex of creation. While my students are more primed to consider religion as a factor in their attitudes than students in secular institutions, any culture that has a strong religious basis, as does the U.S., will likely generate similar responses. Vegan theologian Elizabeth Farians (2011, 103) argues:
Since over 75 percent of Americans profess Christianity, ethics classes, or even humane education classes … will not solve the problem of violence and cruelty to nonhuman animals. If you ask most Americans why
they think it is morally acceptable to eat meat, they will reply, “God gave humans dominion over animals and creation, and God made animals for humans to eat and use.” Most people do not know that the creation story in Genesis says that God gave all animals—including humans—the very same breath of life, nephesh chayah.
Farians asserts that emphasising animal-friendly interpretations of her tradition is necessary to unseat her students’ belief in human domination.
In a similar vein, I have found that introducing students to animal-friendly teachings across religious and spiritual traditions can help challenge implicit beliefs that human exploitation of animals is part of a divine order. Students are often surprised to learn that the root of the word ‘animal’ is anima, which means ‘breath’ or ‘spirit.’ The etymology of the word gives clues to the ways that, even in the West, animals were originally understood to be more than objects. Pre-modern peoples held a spiritual worldview in which all of nature was alive and interconnected. Carolyn Merchant (1980) has traced how the Western shift to a modern, mechanistic worldview destroyed all constraints on exploiting and extracting from Earth’s resources; the same argument can be made about human relationships with animals. To be sure, pre-modern peoples did consume and often exploit animals, but the scale and degree of animal oppression intensified greatly with the rise of capitalistic and mechanistic ideas that animals were nothing more than soulless machines (Nibert 2002).
Any discussion of religious animal ethics must of course include the Indic traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, in which human consumption or abstention from meat become defining concerns. Despite the significant differences among these traditions, they all hold that animals and humans possess the same fundamental life-force and that therefore one must practice non-violence, or ahimsa, towards all beings (Nelson 2006; Bryant 2006; Harris 2006; Chapple 2006; Walters and Portmess 2001; Sims 2016) Within all of these religions, vegetarianism is encouraged or mandated, to differing degrees;15 some contemporary practitioners have argued that given the scale of abuse of dairy cows in modern times, veganism is the correct response rather than vegetarianism (Vithlani 2021; Sims 2016; Narayanan 2018 Compassion Project 2019).
Students in my courses also learn about Indigenous worldviews that perceive all of life, including plants and animals, as imbued with the Divine. Margaret Robinson, an Indigenous vegan scholar, argues: “For the Mi’kmaq it means that humans and animals both experience our lives in the first-person, overcoming fears, having adventures, falling in love, raising families, vanquishing enemies, and having a relationship with Kisu’lk, the Creator” (2014, 674); human use of other life forms is permitted, but only if done in non-abusive, respectful, and reciprocal ways. Indigenous scholars Linda Fisher (2011), Rita Laws (2014), Jen Bell Rivera (Rivera and Vavilakolanu 2021) agree with Robinson that veganism is an appropriate adaptation of traditional Indigenous values to contemporary contexts, particularly in urban settings.
Despite the perspectives discussed above, it is rare for Indigenous people to identify as vegan, in part because critical animal studies and the term ‘veganism’ have become associated with settler societies (Robinson 2018; Koleszar-Green and Matsuoka 2018). However, as Koleszar-Green and Matsuoka (2018, 345) note, most Indigenous peoples would agree with vegans that animals should not be harmed or killed unless “necessary for subsistence”. Thus, they argue that Indigenous and critical animal perspectives could be reconciled to the extent that non-Indigenous vegans support Indigenous worldviews, land rights, and better food access in subsistence communities. Indeed, the integral vegan pedagogy forwarded in this chapter suggests that educators engage with Indigenous perspectives on animals, discuss the interconnection between animal rights and Indigenous land rights, and explore Indigenous religions with respect.
In this section, I have argued for the inclusion of religious and spiritual perspectives in vegan education. By exploring the diversity of spiritual and religious teachings on animals and highlighting teachings and traditions that emphasise compassion and reciprocity rather than domination, educators can help challenge the idea that we have “divine permission” (Luke 2007) to ignore
6 Challenging Diet Culture and Fatphobia
When I first began teaching about the relationships among animal ethics, veganism, and feminism, I did not consider the impact that such dialogues might have on students who were struggling with dieting and body image. Even though I had struggled with such issues myself, particularly in my youth, my own motivations for becoming vegan were strictly ethical, and I had firm distinction in my mind between food decisions made from aesthetic, health, or ethical concerns. However, upon realising how fraught any discussion about changing one’s diet is for some who struggle with disordered eating, I have rethought my approach.
Indeed, it has become increasingly clear to me that an integral feminist vegan pedagogy must address issues of diet culture, body image, and fatphobia. As Megan A. Dean (2014, 128) argues, in Western culture, “eating is problematized as a way to manage the body’s appearance, to bring it into conformity with feminine norms, and also as an ongoing opportunity to exercise the will over unruly bodily desires”. Given the pervasiveness of disordered eating and body image issues among diverse women, gender non-conforming people (and, increasingly, men), classroom discussions of veganism can trigger concerns around food restriction, body shaming, and racialised gender norms. Therefore, I suggest that vegan educators draw upon the lessons of fat pedagogy (Cameron 2015) to sensitively frame classroom discussions about food choices. We can also engage students in critical readings of mainstream vegan discourses and images that are fatphobic. Further, we are tasked with challenging anti-vegan media narratives that imply veganism is a form of disordered eating; instead, we can help students consider that veganism may be understood as a form of resistance to patriarchy (Wright 2015) and capitalism (Giraud 2013), rendering it a “practice of freedom” (Dean 2014,127).
In her discussion of fat pedagogy, Erin Cameron (2015) cites “framing” as one of the primary pedagogical strategies that educators use to combat fatphobia.
With this framing in mind, students can be engaged in critically reading mainstream discourse on veganism, which often links veganism to dieting and the quest for thinness. Popular books like Skinny Bitch (Friedman and Barnouin 2005) promote the idea that a vegan diet is a surefire pathway to thinness and an idealised Eurocentric concept of femininity.16 Vegan celebrities who represent these idealised images may contribute to the association, even when their personal motivations for going vegan are primarily ethical rather than aesthetic. And, as explored earlier, the whiteness of the mainstream images of vegans adds to the popular perception of vegans as white and class privileged.
A critical reading of mainstream texts can also include showing and deconstructing vegan advertising. Constance Russell and Kari Semenko (2016, 216) suggest that educators can help challenge the ways that some popular vegan discourse, such as that by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), engages in fat shaming by portraying fat bodies with taglines such as “Save the Whales. Lose the Blubber: Go Vegetarian” ).17 Even Physicians for Responsible Medicine (PRM), usually a more even-keeled organisation than PETA, put out ads centring on a fat man’s belly and a woman’s thigh that said, “Your Abs on Cheese” and “Your Thighs on Cheese,” respectively (Maisto 2012). Students can be invited to notice and challenge the ways in which “animal bodies, fat bodies, and female bodies are considered abject” (Russell and Semenko 2016, 217) in everyday cultural discourse.
Given the pervasiveness of fatphobia in some popular vegan movements, it is unsurprising then that fat vegans find it difficult to discuss the ethical issues of meat within the fat acceptance movement (Russell and Semenko 2016) and
While not every course that discusses veganism may have the time to engage in an in-depth analysis of these studies, it can be useful for educators to have this information on hand if students raise concerns about orthorexia nervosa in their classrooms. Returning to Dean’s work cited above, she found that that veganism can provide some women a pathway out of disordered eating. By finding a connection to larger ethical and political issues outside of themselves, the vegan women in her study “claim[ed] that their practice of veganism helped them to relinquish disordered eating habits, temper the emotional and psychological turmoil that surrounded their eating practices, and mitigate antagonism toward their own bodies” (Dean 2014, 129).
To be sure, an integral feminist vegan pedagogy would not suggest that ethical veganism is a remedy for disordered eating, as Dean’s study is exploratory and cannot be overgeneralised. Rather, it would question the narrative of “dietary restriction, denial and privation” (Wright 2015, 91) that pervades mainstream attitudes about veganism. Instead, it would focus students on vegans’ agency and their resistance to the animal industrial complex that leads to much animal and human suffering.
Dominant discourse constructs a binary between thin white vegans who promote veganism as a weight-loss aid and concerned health professionals who see veganism as a cover for disordered eating. Both viewpoints foreclose the discussion of veganism as an ethical and political commitment to anti-speciesism. An integral vegan feminist perspective engages this discussion directly in the classroom. As it endeavours to liberate animal flesh from a speciesist system, it simultaneously seeks to liberate human flesh from the dictates of a sexist, racist, and sizeist culture.
7
Introducing vegan perspectives in the anthropocentric landscape of higher education can be rife with challenges. Resistance to veganism comes from both the mainstream media and from within many social justice communities. As educators, we are charged with sensitively addressing student preconceptions about veganism and offering more complex and nuanced understandings of its relationship to identity, ethics, and social justice.
Overall, I have found the strategies described above to work well in countering students’ perception that veganism is a movement only of the white, thin, and privileged. My students have also broadened their understanding of the complex relationship among religious and spiritual beliefs and the treatment of nonhuman animals. By and large, their final papers demonstrated that they had developed new understandings of the depth and scope of speciesism. As Kari,18 a middle-aged white woman, wrote,
I learned from my family and from the greater American culture around me that due to the hierarchy of the animal kingdom, with humans at the top, our dominance over all other animals is normal, okay, and need not be questioned. I realize now that this attitude of ‘dominion over’ […] allowed me and my family to accept that controlling, killing, and using non-human animals for our benefit is right and good and should not only be supported but celebrated.
Sonia, a biracial woman, noted that “re-membering” human-animal relationships “entails unpacking the ways I approach and participate in race and racialisation, capitalism and consumerism, gender, class, dis/ability, dependency, age, colonizing narratives, and the environment.” These are just a few examples of how students developed new understandings of the relationship between human and animal justice.
On the other hand, I have also experienced some missteps in my classrooms. During a course I taught in 2018, students were upset that a course on animal ethics was so heavily weighted toward veganism; they wanted to see more perspectives on “humane” farming and sustainable animal agriculture. Given this feedback, I have since decided to follow Andrzejewski’s (2003) lead. She writes that she begins her classes by stating “that I will not be presenting ‘both sides’ because I contend, and will demonstrate, that they already
In addition, I did not previously consider the depth of students’ emotional responses to course material. Students informally shared with me years later that this course was the most distressing of their coursework, even as compared to other courses in our program that addressed gender-based violence or institutionalised racism. It is because of this feedback that I have brought mindful and trauma-sensitive strategies more to the forefront of my teaching. While I wish for students to be productively challenged in order to transform their relationships with animals, my intention is that they also find more support for their affective process, both from myself and through mindful dialogue with peers.
In sum, the integral feminist perspective offered in this chapter brings a care-based and expansive approach to critical animal studies pedagogy. It unites the affective, political, and spiritual elements of teaching and learning to address both students’ interior experiences and the external realities of the animal industrial complex. Ultimately, it aims to help students see veganism as a diverse and multi-vocal movement focused on the liberation of all sentient beings.
The term “nonhuman animals” helps to highlight how humans are also animals. However, for the sake of concision, I will use the term “animals” throughout the rest of this chapter to refer to animals other than humans.
By “spiritual”, I refer to a sense of a deeper meaning and mystery beyond what we can perceive through material means. Spiritual ideas have been codified and transmitted through the development of institutionalised religions, so any in-depth discussion of spirituality must address religion. However, in contemporary times, the “spiritual” is generally understood as more personal and less formalised than religion (Zinnbauer et al. 1997).
In my youth, I first gained awareness of animal suffering in industrial farming via pamphlets published by the vegetarian religious organisation ISKCON (www.iskcon.org) as well as by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) advertising (www.peta.org). More recent sources such as Nibert (2002), Singer (2009 [1975]), and Imhoff (2010) offer more scholarly rigour and analysis of the conditions of animal farming in modern times.
The first ecofeminist scholarship that inspired my thinking was Carol Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990); Lisa Kemmerer’s Sister Species (2011) was another early influence. Among the critical animal studies scholarship, David Nibert’s Animal Rights/Human Rights (2002) and A. Breeze Harper’s Sistah Vegan (2010) were significant influences.
Much of this study has been in my personal rather than academic life. As noted earlier, I was raised Hindu and raised to believe that animals and humans alike possess souls and must be treated nonviolently. Scholarly influences that have further shaped my thinking on religion, spirituality, and animals (across multiple traditions) include Ricard (2016), Waldau and Patton (2006), Kemmerer (2012), Pereira (2018), Tuttle (2005), and Robinson (2014).
See Solot and Arluke (1997) for an example of how mainstream science education socialises adolescent students in the U.S. into accepting human dissection of animals, despite their initial hesitancy.
Some of the texts that I use in my classrooms that include descriptions of intense animal suffering include Eternal Treblinka (Patterson 2002), which describes the parallels between the treatment of Holocaust victims and animals in factory farms; Sister Species (Kemmerer 2011), which includes stories of animals and humans suffering in various industries; and Peaceable Kingdom: The Journey Home (LaVeck 2012), a film that, among other things, depicts the pain of mother cows when their calves are taken from them.
I will return to the theme of thinness later in this chapter.
BIPOC stands for Black, Indigenous, and people of colour; in the U.S., this term is increasingly replacing the term ‘people of colour’ in order to more explicitly center Indigenous and African-American peoples, who have been the greatest targets of white supremacy in this nation (The Bipoc Project 2021), https://www.thebipocproject.org/about-us.
Cesar Chavez (1927–1993) was a labour leader and farmworker activist; Coretta Scott King (1927–2006) was a civil rights leader and wife of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.; Angela Davis is a long-time leader in movements for racial justice. All three are fairly well-known figures in the U.S., particularly among progressives and activists.
Of course, not all vegans of colour identify as spiritual. In fact, Wrenn’s (2019) study indicated that a majority of vegans identify as atheist or agnostic; however, a smaller percentage of participants of colour identified this way compared to Whites. Moreover, her study was comprised of nearly 80% white respondents, making her conclusions somewhat less applicable to people of colour. My own, admittedly informal, survey of the literature reveals that vegans of colour are more likely to discuss the spiritual roots of their veganism than White vegans; however, this merits further inquiry.
Some scholars in this field note a distinction between religious traditions that maintain sexism and individual spiritual experiences that offer women a glimpse of a reality “beyond the authority of man” (hooks 1993, 2; see also Lerner 1993). Others challenge androcentric interpretations of texts, using feminist hermeneutics to unearth more liberatory readings (Ruether 2002; Fiorenza 2002; Wadud 1999; Gross 1993). Yet others focus on Indigenous (Allen 1986; Talamantez 1991) or lesser-known traditions (Sered 1994) which are women-led. For a general overview of this literature, see Sharma (2002), McIntosh and Bagley (2016), and Arora (2018).
A full discussion of the differences within and between these traditions is beyond the scope of this chapter, but, generally speaking, vegetarianism is a religious ideal within Hinduism and Buddhism, but is not necessarily the majority practice (Phelps 2004; Donaldson 2016). Within Jainism, however, vegetarianism is strictly mandated (Sims 2016; Donaldson 2016).
Wright (2015) points out that the authors of Skinny Bitch rely upon diet/looks as a way to pull readers in, but their message is one based in ethics.
See Deckha (2008), Baran (2017), and Pendergrast (2018) for additional feminist analysis of PETA’s advertising strategies.
All student names here are pseudonyms.
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