This book contributes to developing feminist perspectives on multispecies relations with a focus on food, food systems, and eating practices. The term “critical feminist animal and multispecies studies” reflects the areas of scholarship that we primarily draw on: critical animal studies, feminist studies, and multispecies studies. “Multispecies” refers to attending to the ways in which “[a]ll living beings emerge from and make their lives within multispecies communities” which are variably layered with “[h]istories of gender and race, of political economy and colonization” (van Dooren et al. 2016, 2, 15). “Critical,” for us, entails a variety of approaches that question the ways in which people, other animals, and ecological systems become exploited within current food systems, in particular as a result of capitalist, colonialist, extractivist, and anthropocentric endeavours, including unequal social relations. The book focuses on developing such critical feminist multispecies studies. The chapters draw on several broad, overlapping, and many-faceted strands of feminist thought, including ecofeminisms, feminist science studies, and new materialist, decolonial, race-critical, and Indigenous feminisms.
While on the one hand, we are inspired by contemporary feminist work, on the other hand, we draw inspiration from critical animal studies. Since its conception, critical animal studies, largely inspired by ecofeminist work, has attempted to be sensitive to feminist concerns and intersectional justice (Best et al. 2007; on intersectionality in critical animal studies, see also Matsuoka and Sorenson 2018, 4). From a critical animal studies perspective, tackling the exploitation of other animals on a mass scale and the grave consequences of this for nonhuman animals, human individuals, groups, and communities (in particular, those that are marginalised and vulnerable), as well as for the planet’s ecosystems, urgently requires a critical and engaged inquiry. Yet, not all contemporary work in critical animal studies has explicitly feminist and intersectional orientations or theoretical bases, despite the field’s original commitments to seeing and challenging oppressions as interlinked (Best et al. 2007).
A central goal of this book is to draw ecofeminism and current mainstream feminist theorisation closer to each other. Ecofeminism and other critical perspectives of Western animal agriculture and other animal exploitation have
Important sources of inspiration for the feminist animal and multispecies studies we promote, therefore, consist of queer and trans studies scholarship. For the animal and multispecies feminist studies we would like to see in the future, it is important to conduct research and activism in ways that are sensitive to the many-faceted phenomena related to sexuality and gender. This includes conducting studies in trans-inclusive ways,2 as well as integrating Indigenous and decolonial critiques of the settler colonial imposition of binary gender systems, heterosexual norms, and nuclear families and connecting these issues to the privatisation and ownership of land (Miranda 2010; Rifkin 2011; TallBear 2020). One of the aims of this book is to highlight the richness of approaches and perspectives within feminist studies and feminist activism which can inspire critical feminist takes on animal studies, veganism, and activism. By introducing these perspectives, we seek to broaden the conceptual base of critical animal studies and animal activism, which have typically relied on rather narrow and masculinised understandings of activism.
The fields of study we are inspired by in developing critical feminist animal and multispecies studies include elements that are in tension with one another. Scholarly work in multispecies studies, environmental humanities, and feminist science studies, on which multispecies studies builds, typically focuses on the interaction or co-constitution of various species (for example, humans, other animals, and other life forms, including plants and fungi) and
1 Interconnections, Co-Constitution, and Critical Relationality
Critical feminist animal and multispecies studies incorporates the insight from feminist theory that categories such as gender, race, and species are open to change, even though they seem extremely persistent. As sociologist Joanna Latimer (2013) has noted, inspired by, for example, the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, dominant Euro-American metaphysical thought that includes a particular mode of comparison has produced the idea of human exceptionalism. This comparison works by producing hierarchies and a negative or denigrated view of the Other. Seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes, and countless thinkers after him, have attempted to identify the part of “human” that would separate humans from other animals. In
Feminist and other scholars have accounted for this Euro-American mode of thinking in various ways, and continue to theorise and make visible the tasks at stake in the present for reworking this dominant perspective. For example, new materialist feminists have attempted to transform the ways in which difference is understood in dominant Euro-American traditions, from a hierarchical, negative difference towards a more “positive” focus on a myriad of differences (e.g., Braidotti 2002, Grosz 2011). Indigenous scholars have, however, reminded new materialists and science studies scholars of Indigenous worldviews that all along have provided alternatives to Euro-American settler colonial metaphysics and the hierarchical differentiation of “humans” from nature and “animals” (TallBear 2017; Todd 2015).
Relationality and co-constitution can be regarded as conditions of existence, for example, via the notion of companion species (Haraway 2008). As Donna Haraway notes, a majority of cells in human bodies “are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all, and some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of me, of us, no harm,” and in this sense, we “become … adult human being[s] in company with these tiny messmates. To be one is always to become with many” (Haraway 2008, 3–4, emphasis in original). In this sense, “humans” are not ontologically distinct beings but material living processes that become
Within the feminist animal and multispecies studies we promote, a focus on this co-constitution includes a critical analysis of what more-than-human relationality means in an ethical sense (see also Pedersen 2011; Weisberg 2009). In line with the key tenets of critical animal studies and ecofeminisms, theorising multispecies relations or relational ontologies, for us, does not only involve the intellectual work of discussing interesting relationalities and co-constitutions but also the practical goal of improving the lives of people and other animals and more-than-human life through our scholarship. In line with epistemological and ethical commitments in feminist and critical animal studies work, this means that we support the dual position of scholar-activist/activist-scholar. Thus, though relationality is our ontological condition on a very bodily level, it is still relevant to critically discuss the ways in which relations are actively built and maintained, as well as to assess the violence involved in these relations.
Pointing to the problems of studying “relationalities” or “entanglements” without a critical perspective in Western contexts, critical animal studies scholar Helena Pedersen (2019, 8) has aptly noted that animals’ “‘entanglement’ with us usually means more dependence, more oppression, and more exposure to human-induced violence.” Attending to these problematics, it has been suggested that human-animal relations, even those that seem politically acceptable to the majority, are sometimes based on constitutive exclusions that need to be recognised and politicised (Giraud 2019, 171–82). Constitutive exclusions mean, on the one hand, questions related to who is excluded from or included in ethical considerations or political deliberation. For example, critical animal studies scholars who have engaged with political theory have criticised the constitutive exclusion of nonhuman animals from the sphere of the political because of their assumed inability to speak. Simultaneously, they have argued that, in fact, nonhuman animals do speak if their species-specific ways of communication are accounted for, and thus, nonhuman animals can
Thinking through relationality, critical animal scholars have also emphasised the ethical potential of refraining from relations with other animals (MacCormack 2012; Pedersen 2019). For such purposes, relationality has been explored as not having to be tangible or proximal but “being alongside” (Latimer 2013). Relationality has also been theorised as attention that refrains from interference (Aaltola 2019) and that recognises the vulnerability of living bodies across species (Pick 2011). Scholars have also explored ethical ways of handling situations in which particular relations are unwanted from the human side. Franklin Ginn (2014), for example, provides an example of constructive intervention in a situation in which gardeners, slugs, and plants cannot thrive in the same location. Ginn found that instead of killing slugs, gardeners were willing to find other ways of keeping slugs at bay. As Eva Giraud concludes: “Ethical connection with slugs […] was negotiated not through attachment but through finding alternative ways to detach slugs from gardens. […] The desire for nonrelation […] elucidates the inevitability of exclusion, then, but also its ethical potential” (2019, 10). Animal philosopher Elisa Aaltola, in turn, has found inspiration in the work of Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch and argues for the importance of letting go as a method of building ethical relations. This includes “forsaking of the subject–object distinction, within which we name ourselves as subjects and the surrounding world as objects to be utilized, and which thereby rests on the assumption that others are instruments for our own benefit” (Aaltola 2019, 199). Instead, Aaltola inspires feminist animal and multispecies studies by developing the notion of “letting be” that is “significant, as we are to leave others as they are, without agendas, expectations or demands” (2019, 199).
It is not possible to wholly detach oneself from being “in relation” within more-than-human worlds, as all societal life-enabling practices, including eating, housing, traffic, and energy use, have, in one way or another, effects on animal habitats and more-than-human life. However, alongside other critical scholars, we believe that various alternatives exist for approaching relationality
2 Intersectional and Contextually Sensitive Approaches
Postcolonial and critical race studies scholars have analysed the connections between animalisation and racialisation in defining the boundaries of the “human” (e.g., Chen 2012; Jackson 2013, 2020). Because of these connections, an analysis of the difference-making and relationality between humans and other animals must assess the co-constitution of race, gender, and species. The many-faceted ways in which animalisation, racialisation, gendering, and sexualisation intersect with the maintenance of animal/human hierarchies also pertains to the ways in which intersectionality is understood. Although this book argues for a serious assessment and critique of animal exploitation and a rethinking of multispecies relations, the question of intersectionality does not, for us, only indicate “bringing animals—or other species—in” as yet additional categories of analysis. While intersectionality is a key element of the critical feminist animal and multispecies studies we promote, we acknowledge the complexities and dilemmas involved in its definition and application, as conceptualisations of intersectionality differ and can be at odds with one another. For example, debates include whether uses of intersectionality should follow the idea, developed by Black feminist and critical race scholars in the US (Crenshaw 1989, see also Collins and Bilge 2020), in which the focus is on marginalisation through categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality and which fundamentally includes anti-racist politics in the analysis, or whether intersectionality could be a tool to analyse the intersections of any power relations, including those of privileged positions (Lykke 2003; Nash 2016). It has been suggested that the approach that focuses on any “intersections” can easily become apolitical and problematic, as it may, for example, silence the critique of racism.7
Contextual sensitivity is an important aspect of what we understand as intersectionally relevant analysis. From a critical feminist animal and multispecies perspective, it is crucial to always examine human-animal relations in context (Gibson 2019, 1; Gruen and Weil 2012, 493). This means both building theoretical approaches in relation to various geographical and societal contexts and
Contextual sensitivity entails, for example, drawing from feminist decolonial and race-critical approaches in the analysis of animal exploitation and nature conservation (Deckha 2012; Kim 2015). A contextual assessment needs to account for the ways in which state policies, international politics, and economic actors, such as settler-colonial governmentality or multinational corporations, may have violently contributed to the conditions which call attention to animal exploitation. Proper assessment of the context at hand calls for attendance to struggles related to people’s livelihoods and cultural existence, which may already be distorted by colonialism. Nature conservation or animal advocacy efforts may otherwise become enacted in accordance with the historical baggage of colonialist endeavours, an enactment of coloniality in the present rather than successful conservation practices.8 Contextual sensitivity, in other words, calls for combining animal advocacy and nature conservation with anti-racist and decolonial struggles.
Likewise, integrating an intersectional approach entails a critical analysis of how colonial and racialised thought is imbued in what is culturally recognised as “cruelty” towards animals (Deckha 2012). For example, White Western commentators problematising eating dogs in other countries as cruel but eating pigs in their own country indicates a problematic, racialised definition of “cruelty.” It is also important to note that imposing a food system based on intensive animal agriculture has been a constitutive aspect of colonialism. When focusing on food, this has been specifically called dietary colonialism or Western food imperialism, which needs to be questioned as part of the critique of Western intensive animal agriculture (Chu 2019; Deckha 2012). Crucially, nonhuman animal oppression cannot be properly contested without critical resistance to the capitalist and colonial systems of power, as these structural relations of violence support and reinforce one another (Belcourt 2020; Chang 2020).
3
A paradox exists in the tradition of Western scientific thought: The category “animal” includes “humans” as animals, in the category of “primates,” while Western science has also put a considerable amount of energy toward trying to distinguish its particular construction of “the human”—that has first and foremost included affluent Western White men—as exceptional and fundamentally different from “the animal.” The category of “animal,” in turn, has historically included black(ened) people (Jackson 2020). We recognise that because of this, various terms used in this book, such as “human-animal relations,” “animals,” “nonhuman animals,” or “other animals,” understood as other-than-humans, are all problematic in the sense that they all perpetuate the assumptions of the exceptionality of “humans” as a species in contrast to all other animals, while not being able to capture the dehumanising and animalising practices and meaning-making that historically constitute the very category of “human.” The term “more-than-human” does not do much better, as it centres the “human” while all other animals, plants, matters, and agents appear as if mere additions to humanity, “more-than” effacing differences between, for example, sentient animals and non-sentient matters. As a number of feminist, critical race studies, disability studies, and other scholars have pointed out, “the human” is not an innocent or merely descriptive category of a “species,” but constructions of animality and humanity are saturated by meanings related to race, gender, sexuality, and ability (see, for example, Bryld and Lykke 2000, 33; Chen 2012; Haraway, 1989; Hayward and Weinstein 2015; Jackson 2013, 2020; Ko and Ko 2017; Taylor 2017; Deckha 2012). This means that when discussing or analysing “human-animal relations” or “multispecies” relations, it is important to not take the category “human” for granted but to critically examine it, as this category is already racialised, gendered, animalised, and imbued with other categories of difference and oppression. When we use any of these terms in the book, lacking non-problematic alternatives, we attempt to be sensitive to the question of who counts as “human” and who is animalised and dehumanised, and to what hierarchies, exploitative practices, and power relations these distinctions perpetuate. When analysing multispecies or “human-animal” relations, central questions to ask include which humans and in what contexts relate to which animals, which power relations are at work in these contexts, and how do these power relations define the very categories of human and animal?9
4
Drawing from ecofeminisms, critical animal and multispecies studies includes a feminist commitment to cultivate an ethics of care towards nonhuman others, to develop interspecies care and solidarity (Fraser and Taylor 2018), and adhere to “reflexivity, responsibility, and engagement with the experiences of other animals” (Gruen and Weil 2012, 493). Care has long occupied feminist scholars from numerous perspectives and is considered one of the prominent key concepts of feminist research and theory (see, for example, Hughes 2002, 106–29, as well as Donovan 2006; Gilligan 2003/1982; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). Feminist approaches to care offer fruitful opportunities for analysing relations with nonhuman animals. The conceptualisation of care that feminist animal and multispecies studies strives to pursue is informed by contextual and intersectional considerations of complex caring practices. Donna Haraway’s (2016) suggestion to “stay with the trouble” aptly captures the impossibility of universal moral truths and attests to the imperative of ongoing and infinite redefinitions of care in the process of advocating for more liveable futures for various life forms10 on Earth.
Crucially, the focus on care that ecofeminisms have advocated for differs from rights theories and rule-based principles that accentuate the role of rationality and dismiss the relevance of emotions such as empathy. In line with feminist and critical interventions to such philosophies, critical feminist animal and multispecies studies takes seriously the role of the cultural politics of emotion in negotiations and constructions of care (see, for example, Aaltola 2018; Ahmed 2014/2004; Giraud 2019). In fact, in a time of self-centred neoliberal capitalism and environmental degradation, care entails radical potential for political resistance, mutual aid, and solidarity.
However, as disability scholar Sunaura Taylor points out, “feminist theory has devoted much attention to what it means to care, [but] less has been said about what it means to be cared for” (Taylor 2017, 205). A disability perspective assists in articulating the power imbalances inherent in caring relations and the potential to—deliberately or unintentionally—overstep boundaries and abuse one’s position of power. This concerns any caring relations across ability, species, and other axes of power.11 However, a focus on disability is also helpful
5 Critically Assessing Assumptions Related to the Social, the Biological, and the Natural
Within feminist, sociological, and other kinds of scholarship, critical attention has been paid to how the very sphere of “the social” has been defined and separated from “the biological.” For example, critical animal scholar and sociologist Salla Tuomivaara (2019) has explored how the social came to be defined in the formation of sociology as a discipline by excluding other animals from the sphere of the social (see also Khazaal 2021, 25–6). Rethinking the social has implications for perspectives that discuss social constructionism and that assume that the social is malleable, while the sphere of the biological or material remains deterministic and stable.
As an alternative to the understanding of matter as stable and static, feminists inspired by various theoretical approaches, such as quantum physics or philosophy by Gilles Deleuze or Baruch Spinoza, focus on ontology by questioning the stability of biological and other matter, instead approaching matter as “intra-active” (Barad 2007) or “vibrant” (Bennett 2010). Feminists have also challenged the biological/social distinction, which was imbued in the sex/gender distinction for several decades. This problematisation has included, for example, philosophical and science studies work that has made redundant the sex/gender distinction by questioning the ways in which bodies are materialised by culturally assigning “sex” to particular organs and molecules and how
Yet another way to critically approach the biological/social distinction is to question the assumption of the malleability of (only) the social, instead acknowledging other animals as social actors. For example, bringing the analysis towards critical study of animals, biologist Lynda Birke has noted critically that the “flexibility implied by social constructionism extends only to human behavior,” while other animals are assumed to be “hard-wired” and “instinctively adapted to their environment” (2002, 430–1). Birke has also suggested that “animals learn to perform a role emerging from their relationships with people,” such as the role of a “companion animal” (Birke 2002, 431–2).
With queer theoretical insight, regarding other animals as active agents includes questioning heteronormative scientific accounts that tend to define “sex” through the normative lens of heterosexuality and reproduction. One example consists of a discussion about unreproductive sex in other animals’ behaviour.13 Such observations problematise the ways in which normative accounts of gender and sexuality have affected existing science. These observations are also attempts to account for the variable ways in which “sex,” “gender,” and “sexuality” can be assessed in nature and animal behaviour (e.g., Ah-King 2013; Alaimo 2010; Hird 2013; Roughgarden 2005). In addition, these approaches complicate the human-animal distinction from the perspective of the agency of other animals (including sexual agency), whereby the understanding of “animality explodes the universalizing category of nature as homogeneous and predictable” (Grebowicz and Merrick 2013, 39).
Additionally, these discussions relate to problematising a range of arguments about “the natural.” For example, they challenge pick-and-choose descriptions of certain nonhuman animal behaviours in order to define
Moreover, critical multispecies feminist analysis attends critically to the ways in which the notion of the “natural” has been separated from “technology” and then utilised in trans hostile argumentation (for a critical assessment, see Hird 2008; Stone 2014; Irni, Chapter 7 in this book). Such argumentation is problematic not only for its trans hostility but also because it simplifies the nature/technology nexus and assumes that technology is the “property” of humans. This kind of thinking ignores the variable ways in which some advanced technologies were first at work in nature, which then inspired human technological advancements (Hird 2008; see also Barad 2014). The critical feminist multispecies analysis we wish to develop, in other words, recognises and critically assesses the many-faceted politics related to the intertwining of gender, sexuality, and race in defining, researching, and invoking the social and the biological, animals, nature, and technology.
6 Critical Perspectives on Food Production within Capitalism
This volume focuses on food and eating because by far the largest number of nonhuman animal individuals are exploited and killed for human food. Around 75 billion land animals are killed for human food annually (Chemnitz and Becheva 2021).14 Eating nonhuman animals remains one of the most normalised everyday practices, particularly in Western countries, and thus is one of the most difficult aspects of nonhuman animal use to challenge.15
Capitalist consumption of other animals is endorsed by social institutions and enforced through governments, as well as by the medical, health, and dietary establishment, including via the national dietary guidelines of many countries (Aavik 2017; Bertron, Barnard, and Mills 1999, 201; Stănescu 2018). Links between eating animals and constructions of Western masculinity, in particular, have been widely theorised and empirically established: eating meat remains culturally coded in the West as a masculine practice, with meat-eating men perceived as more masculine than vegetarian (Ruby and Heine 2011) and vegan men (Thomas 2016).
Ecofeminists have been critical not only of the killing of animals for food but also of the ways in which other animals’ reproductive capacities, such as childbirth and lactation, have been exploited in the food industry (Adams 1990; Cudworth 2011). Simultaneously, the practices of parenting of nonhuman animals have been erased (Wrenn 2017, 213). However, the ecofeminist focus on defining “female” or “women’s” bodies through reproduction can be seen as essentialist. Alternative, trans-inclusive approaches to ecofeminist milk studies and accounts of reproduction that do not maintain the women-female-reproduction-pregnancy nexus as an essentialist truth have, however, also been developed (e.g., see Karhu, Chapter 8 in this book; Lehikoinen 2020). Approaches drawing from multispecies perspectives and postcapitalist
7 A Contextually Sensitive Endorsement of Veganism
A central aim of the approach to multispecies analysis that this book promotes is to contribute through research to the flourishing of nonhuman lives and nonexploitative multispecies relationships. This involves challenging the status of other animals as objects of human consumption. Thus, veganism is an important subject matter for our analysis, particularly for scholarship that is concerned with food and eating, such as that featured in this book. From a feminist perspective, however, a critical approach to capitalism should also be applied to veganism, which can become a niche form of capitalist consumption. If veganism is endorsed first and foremost as a form of consumption, such endorsement can contribute to greenwashing capitalism and, in this way, can support rather than challenge inequalities (Fegitz and Pirani 2018). Multispecies feminist scholarship needs to take a critical stance towards the racism, maintenance of White privilege, and support of the colonial food system involved in activism that promotes veganism (e.g., Harper 2010b; Polish 2016; Rosendo, Oliveira, and Kuhnen, Chapter 11 in this book). Importantly, promoting veganism or plant-based eating should not be understood as a universal and decontextualised aim. We draw on ecofeminist, critical race, Indigenous, and other critical perspectives calling for veganism that is contextually sensitive.17 In advocating for a nonspeciesist decolonial food ontology, Struthers Montford and Taylor (2020), however, argue against a fundamental distinction between contextual veganism (advocated by, for example, Curtin 2005; Plumwood 2000), and ontological veganism, suggesting that all ontologies are political and contextual.18 They call for an alternative food ontology
One of the most frequently used definitions of veganism is that provided by the Vegan Society, which conceptualises veganism as “a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose” (The Vegan Society, n.d.). Scholarly discourses and activist practices from a variety of perspectives have, however, complicated this seemingly straightforward definition, and debates on ways to understand veganism continue (for a discussion on definitions of veganism, see, for example, Linzey and Linzey 2018, 1–4). For instance, veganism has been understood as an identity (Greenebaum 2015; Stephens Griffin 2017), as a form of ethical consumerism (Beck and Ladwig 2021), as a practice that challenges exploitative human-animal relations, and as a form of political protest (Taylor and Twine 2014). In some recent discussions, veganism has been studied in relation to environmental issues, in particular as a strategy to combat climate change (Kemmerer 2014; Kupsala et al. 2021; von Mossner 2021). Debates are ongoing regarding what elements should be included in definitions of veganism and how widely the concept should be expanded. Dutkiewicz and Dickstein (2021) argue for a more basic, practice-based definition of veganism, meaning the practice of abstaining from the use of animal products in one’s daily life, and the exclusion of political and ethical elements from the definition. These multiple ways of examining veganism challenge thinking of veganism in one unambiguous way and in a decontextualised manner.
Although still a marginal topic in most mainstream feminist academic work, the philosophy and practice of veganism has been a key topic of discussion in vegan ecofeminist work (see, for example, Adams 1990; Adams and Gruen 2014) and in critical animal studies rooted in ecofeminism (see Taylor and Twine 2014; Nocella et al. 2014). In these critical fields, it has been examined from different angles as part of a larger project of challenging animal
Particularly in recent years, food consumption, food systems, eating nonhuman animals, and veganism have received attention from scholars who have examined these structures and processes from race-critical, decolonial, and Indigenous perspectives (for example, Bailey 2007; Chu 2019; Deckha 2020; Giraud 2013; Harper 2010a, 2010b, 2011, 2012; Ko and Ko 2017; Polish 2016; Robinson 2013, 2018; Wright 2015). This work views the consumption of other animals and people’s ability to challenge it as interlinked with various oppressions within human societies. It questions White privilege and racism in contemporary vegan and animal advocacy movements, critically examines implicitly White middle-class vegan subjectivities and identities, and analyses questions related to food justice in colonial settings (e.g., Harper 2010b, Polish 2016). Race-critical and decolonial perspectives also point out that control of a nation’s food supply by corporations constitutes a neocolonial imperial power (Chu 2019). Western diets high in meat are naturalised as the most appropriate diet for humans, “thus reinforcing a particular, historically white Western model of the ‘human’” (Twine 2022, 234). Imposing such a food system on racialised people is one form of colonial violence, termed dietary colonialism (Chu 2019, 189). The farming of nonhuman animals on a massive scale is a central element of the contemporary imperial food system (Chu 2019, 187). In this context, racism, colonialism, capitalism, classism, speciesism, and male supremacy intersect, as working-class people of colour are disproportionately affected by food injustice and factory farming; access to nutritious plant-based foods can be limited, as food deserts and environmental racism attest (Bower et al. 2014; Mirabelli et al. 2006).
Decolonial food justice movements resist colonial legacies on a structural level, addressing entangled inequalities in access to food, exploitation of workers, racism, and environmental issues (Chu 2019). From this perspective, veganism has the potential to play a role in processes of decolonisation rather than only contributing to maintaining White privilege. Whether such a re-orientation of Western vegan practices and politics away from the promotion of consumerism and White middle-class lifestyles is successful is dependent on the ways in which veganism and scholarship that promotes veganism are able to critically approach the structural inequalities produced by colonialism and capitalism. Twine (2022, 237) argues that veganism offers potential for intersectional coalitions, as “both animal advocates and discriminated
An alternative definition of veganism that recognises the injustices produced by capitalism and colonialism might be more fitting for critical animal and multispecies studies than definitions centred on consumption and individual lifestyles. For example, Eva Giraud argues that veganism can be seen as an intervention into biopolitics, “the subtle mechanisms through which power is exerted over life itself—particularly within the agricultural-industrial complex, where both human and animal life is carefully regulated to maximise its productivity” (2013a, 51).20 In this approach, the point of veganism is not first and foremost about an individual’s consumption or vegan identity, but veganism is understood as an activist practice which consists of “a complex
8 Linking a Focus on Exploitation to Environmental and Climate Struggles
It is now established that human consumption of other animals on a massive scale is one of the main causes of climate change (Arias et al. 2021; GRAIN and The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy 2018; Steinfeld et al. 2006). Despite the urgency of the crises in multispecies relations and climate, mainstream humanities and social science scholarship have largely failed to consider other animals and multispecies relations. This concerns even some fields that specifically deal with the social and cultural aspects of climate change, such as sociology of climate change and environmental sociology, as Twine (2020) notes. This omission is also evident in mainstream Western feminist scholarship. Twine (2020, 2) argues that “this exclusion could constitute an uncritical ontological framing which has a detrimental effect upon the ability to properly grasp the phenomenon of climate change.”
Intensive animal farming produces urgent ecological, ethical, social, and public health challenges in which gender and intersectional considerations are central. Gender, ethnicity, class, and their intersections shape patterns of food consumption (for an overview, see Modlinska et al. 2020), multispecies relations, global food justice, and climate sustainability. The current food system originated in European colonisation, in which the colonial powers radically altered ecosystems, including human-animal relations, in colonised territories (Lightfoot et al. 2013) and imposed a capitalist food system which relies on the mass production of animal flesh (Chu 2019 189). Privileged White Western middle- and upper-class men and hegemonic ideals of masculinity modelled according to their lives and practices remain the most harmful to the environment. Such men have historically been the key drivers of climate change, for example, as owners and managers of extractive industries (Hultman and Pulé 2018). The overall ecological footprint of men, particularly privileged men in the Global North, is on average much higher than that of women (see, for
Climate scholars have established that climate change is most acutely experienced by the most vulnerable nations, groups, and communities, predominantly in the Global South (Parks and Roberts 2006)—those who are the least responsible for causing climate change. Marginalised women in the Global South are most severely impacted by the effects of climate change (Roy 2018). Importantly, a perspective on veganism which focuses on an intersectional critique of capitalism and colonialism must also consider how plant-based products are implicated in the injustices of the global food system and environmental degradation (Caro et al. 2021; Harper 2010b; Howard and Forin 2019). These insights attest to how human, animal, and environmental flourishing are inseparable in a globalised world. Therefore, climate change and environmental justice should be important perspectives to integrate into critical feminist analyses of multispecies relations.
9 Critical and Creative Epistemologies and Methods
As the terms and conceptual approaches introduced above suggest, the theoretical basis of critical analyses of multispecies relations is interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary. This is also characteristic of the methodologies and
Broadly, critical feminist multispecies methodologies and methods are located within posthumanist, anti-speciesist, non-anthropocentric, and intersectional feminist commitments. They aim to contest multiple and intersecting oppressions of people and other animals and seek to identify and challenge intra-human hierarchies which sustain and are supported by animal exploitation. Such methodological approaches challenge various dualisms and hierarchies (human-animal, nature-culture, ability-disability, etc.), the theoretical and practical applications of which have long been particularly harmful to women/marginalised groups and nonhuman animals. Beyond theorising about nonhuman animals and marginalised people in relation to species and animality, critical multispecies scholars care about the material fates of these beings. Researchers must be accountable to their human and nonhuman research participants, meaning their ethical standards must include both the interests of the studied communities and a commitment to giving back to these communities and that “research must never construct those animals who are studied as objects, but as subjects” (Birke 2014, 81). Beyond avoiding causing harm to nonhuman animals and disadvantaged people in the course of the research, these beings and communities should (directly or indirectly) benefit from scholarly activities. In this sense, feminist multispecies research is
Conducting critical feminist multispecies inquiry requires rethinking the notion of the “human,” rejecting the autonomous, rational, and disembodied subject modelled according to Western White able-bodied masculine subjectivities. Drawing on posthumanist, feminist, Indigenous, critical race, and disability studies and other critical work mentioned above, the human subject is conceived as “embodied and relational,” vulnerable and enmeshed in relationships of care with human and nonhuman others (Weitzenfeld and Joy 2014, 13). This subject is positioned within social hierarchies and power relations in particular ways. This situatedness shapes people’s relationships to other animals and to the notion of animality (see also Weaver 2021). Broadly, then, research committed to these feminist perspectives is characterised by a simultaneous critical examination of species, gender, race, and other intersecting categories on various levels of society, including medical science as well as scientific examinations of animal behaviour and ecological questions. This critical examination includes attention to speciesist institutions and social structures in which human-animal interactions take place. Inspiration for this can be drawn from vegan sociology, where an important critical focus lies on institutions that use and endorse the use of nonhuman animals (see, for example, Cherry 2021).
At least some research in critical multispecies feminisms aligns well with more experimental methodologies (see Vannini 2015), drawing on theory and methodology which “seeks better to cope with our self-evidently more-than-human, more-than-textual, multisensual worlds” (Lorimer 2005, 83; see also Thrift 2008). These methodologies that draw, for example, from new materialist theorisation seek to move beyond representational methods and text as the primary medium of academic work and to capture elements of life such as events, relations, (embodied) action, affect, performances, material objects, the more-than-human, and their entanglements (Vannini 2015).
Feminist multispecies scholars employ a wide range of methods, the choice of which depends on the particular aims and foci of the research and on the disciplinary backgrounds and expertise of the researcher. Research that includes living animals requires a different research design and set of methods than do studies dealing with representations of animals. Scholars may employ both traditional and more novel and experimental methods. Some such emerging methods aim to include other animals directly in the research, such as multispecies ethnography (see, for example, Gillespie 2019; Hamilton and Taylor 2017; Kirskey and Heimreich 2010) and other techniques aimed at “listening to animals’ voices” and understanding “the role of the animal participant as the
Critical feminist animal and multispecies studies research involves a number of ethical and methodological dilemmas. For example, can other animals participate in our research in ways that do not exploit them? Major questions concern the agency of nonhuman animals. How can we conceptualise and consider animal agency in the research process (Birke 2014, 72)? Is it possible to obtain (informed) consent from nonhuman animals, and how should this be negotiated (see Birke 2014; Stephens Griffin 2014)? Given the methodological and ethical issues discussed above, feminist multispecies research assumes a high degree of researcher reflexivity throughout the research process, as in any other feminist research project, and an acceptance of messy, open-ended, and situated research relationships and an ongoing negotiation of research ethics.
10 Overview of the Book
The chapters in this book engage with the theme of food and eating in various ways, covering issues of food production and consumption, engaging with questions of food justice, and discussing eating practices in different social and geographical contexts, thereby expanding the scope of ecofeminist and critical animal studies scholarship, which is typically focused on Anglo-American contexts. Previous research from critical animal studies and other critical perspectives, as well as from many animal advocacy organisations, has extensively discussed and exposed the exploitation and suffering of nonhuman animals in industrial animal agriculture (see, for example, Potts 2016, 6–16). The chapters in this volume examine issues related to the use of nonhuman animals as food that have received less attention. In some chapters, the use of nonhuman animals for human food is more explicitly discussed (Chapter 5 by Alka Arora, Chapter 6 by Maneesha Deckha, and Chapter 9 by Kadri Aavik), whereas others focus on food produced for animal companions and their eating/feeding practices (Chapter 4 by Milla-Maria Joki and Chapter 10 by Kuura Irni). Some chapters discuss animals that are typically regarded as farmed “food
The book is organised into six sections, the first of which focuses on GEOGRAPHIES, BOUNDARIES, AND RELATIONALITY. The chapter “Naive Boars and Dummy Sows: Porcine Sex and the Politics of Purity,” by Marianna Szczygielska and Agata Kowalewska, discusses biosecurity and the attempts to control the outbreak of African Swine Fever in Poland. The chapter describes how, in an effort to protect the pork industry, biopolitical measures of purity, “culling,” and order were employed with the aim of keeping potentially contagious wild boars at bay from domesticated pigs bred for human consumption. Drawing from queer and feminist material perspectives, Szczygielska and Kowalewska explicate the arduous measures taken to impose control over porcine sex in an attempt to maximise and protect product value. However, due to porous intra- and interspecies boundaries and power relations, even the most extreme operations have struggled to keep the lethal virus in check. The chapter “Eating with a Cow: Feminist Multi-Species Ethnography in the Kitchens of the Black Sea High Pastures of Turkey,” by Ezgi Burgan Kıyak, puts forward a multispecies ethnography of women-cow encounters in the context of rural animal husbandry. Burgan Kıyak’s chapter is based on fieldwork conducted in the Black Sea high pastures of Turkey, during which the author visited households and participated in the daily chores of animal husbandry with women living and working as farmers in the area. Drawing from, among others, the work of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, Burgan Kıyak examines the relations between the cows and the women as well as the location of her study through the figures of cows’ kitchen and intraspecies kitchen with the purpose of disrupting the anthropocentricism of the notion of “kitchen.”
Section II, NEGOTIATING DEPENDENCY AND CARE, explicates relations between humans and domesticated animals reliant on their care. The chapter “Care in a Time of Anthropogenic Problems: Experiences from Sanctuary-Making in Rural Denmark,” authored by Marie Leth-Espensen, discusses the embodied and situated practices of care in the context of two farmed animal sanctuaries in rural Denmark. Drawing from Marìa Puig de la Bellacasa’s notion of situated ethics, she analyses the complexities of care in a multispecies
Section III, REVISIONING THE POTENTIAL OF EDUCATION, examines ways to deconstruct speciesism and work towards a vegan future with pedagogical tools. In her chapter, “Pedagogy of the Consumed: An Integral Feminist Lens on Veganism in Higher Education,” Alka Arora attends to the dearth of attention paid to nonhuman animal exploitation in educational spaces and calls for the importance of pedagogical intervention in speciesist education. Arora draws on her experiences as a university educator and puts forth a vegan feminist pedagogical framework that not only works to increase student awareness of animal oppression but also pays heed to the emotional responses that “waking up to speciesism” and the sensitivity of food choices may stir up. Furthermore, Arora’s integral feminist pedagogy disrupts notions of veganism as a privileged activity of White, thin consumers and emphasises the versatility of the vegan movement by bringing the work of vegan and vegetarian activists of colour to the fore. Arora also draws from diverse spiritual and religious worldviews informing animal-human relationships as a method of troubling the notion of human exploitation of other animals as a universal order and providing her students with alternative ways of building ethical relations to the surrounding world. The chapter “Human Children, Nonhuman Animals, and a Plant-Based Vegan Future,” by Maneesha Deckha, discusses the urgency of the climate crisis and the possibility of transitioning towards a more sustainable vegan future by focusing on systemic childhood education before anthropocentric behaviours and ideologies have become entrenched. Deckha argues for critical animal pedagogies that not only disrupt othering narratives of nonhuman animals but also deconstruct gendered and colonial messages of human Others and of Earth as a resource for human exploitation. Dechka suggests cultivating empathy towards nonhuman beings and alternative
Section IV, TRANS-FORMATIONS IN ECOFEMINIST THEORY, assesses ecofeminist genealogies from the perspective of trans and queer theory. In the chapter “Revisiting Ecofeminist Genealogies: Towards Intersectional and Trans-Inclusive Ecofeminism,” Kuura Irni examines conceptual inheritances of vegan ecofeminism from radical feminism as well as the telling of ecofeminist pasts. Irni starts by discussing the conceptualisation of nature and binary gender in ecofeminism inherited from radical feminism, and, drawing on transfeminism and Donna Haraway’s notion of naturecultures, proposes a trans-inclusive approach that also recognises the violences involved in the entanglements of nature, bodies, and technologies. They continue by problematising a top-down hierarchical understanding of power and accounts of violence that inherit an anti-pornography and anti-sex work stance, suggesting a trans-inclusive and queer feminist approach that also enables more nuanced readings of the dynamics of race, class, and gender. They then discuss the ways in which intersectionality is invoked in the telling of ecofeminist pasts and presents, and end by pointing towards possibilities for developing feminist animal and multispecies scholarship where trans, queer, Indigenous, and race-critical analyses proliferate. In the chapter “An Ecofeminist Critique of the Milk Industry: From Mammal Mothers to Biocapitalist Bovines,” Sanna Karhu assesses ecofeminist critiques of the milk industry and problematises the frequent analogy made between women and cows as empathetic “mammal mothers” in theories of the industrial production of bovine milk. Drawing from queer and trans theorisations of nursing, Karhu argues that, despite the efforts of ecofeminist theory to oppose gender essentialism, such an analogy risks dismissing the diversity of lactation and the lives of gender non-conforming people participating in nursing practices. Instead of reinstalling the gender binary to its pedestal by assuming the relation between the lactating mother and the infant as a pivotal source of empathy towards other animals, Karhu suggests that a feminist critique of biocapitalism provides a more fruitful and inclusive basis for a critique of the milk industry.
Section V, VEGANISM AND POSSIBILITIES FOR RESISTANCE, analyses vegan politics and activism. Kadri Aavik’s chapter, “Men’s Veganism: A Pathway Towards More Egalitarian Masculinities?” examines the potential of vegan men to foster more egalitarian masculinities in a world where the actions of White privileged men and masculine values have seriously contributed to ecological destruction and the exploitation of other animals. Drawing from interviews with vegan men based in Estonia and Finland, Aavik argues that men who were relatively guarded by other privileging features (Whiteness, middle-class
Section VI, INTERSECTIONAL ANIMAL ACTIVISMS, includes interviews with intersectional feminist and animal activists. The interview with Panda Eriksson, titled “Toward Trans-Sensitive and Vegan Intersectional Feminisms,” describes their experiences as a Finnish Swede non-binary activist invested in topics such as trans issues and equality within the healthcare system in Finland and provides thoughts about how they began to make links between animal advocacy, veganism, and the wider context of social justice. Finally, the interview with Özge Özgüner, titled “The Future Is Queer and Vegan!” provides an overview of their involvement in various activist struggles in Turkey, such as the animal rights and vegan movements, feminist activism, and anti-militarism. Özgüner describes their inspiration for intersectional activism and their work—bringing together people from different backgrounds with the purpose of discussing how different forms of discrimination relate to each
Vegan ecofeminist scholars (e.g., Adams 1990; Adams and Gruen 2014, 2022; Donovan 1990; Donovan 2006; Gaard 2002) have proposed links between the analyses of gender and species. Later ecofeminist and other critical works have complicated and problematised these analyses by, for example, questioning the approaches to gender and nature used by some of these ecofeminist classics and integrating race into the analysis. For more on this, as well as on rethinking ecofeminist work from transfeminist perspectives, see, in particular, Chapters 7 and 8 by Irni and Karhu. For attending to queer analysis in ecofeminist work, see Gaard 1997.
See, for example, Giffney and Hird 2008; Irni 2020; Luciano and Chen 2015; Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010; Muñoz et al. 2015; Steinbock, Szczygielska, and Wagner 2021; TallBear 2018.
See, for example, Haraway 2015; Hustak and Myers 2012; Kirksey 2014; Stengers 2005; Tsing 2015; van Dooren et al. 2016.
For critical discussion on posthumanism from critical animal studies perspectives, see Donovan 2018; Giraud 2019; Pedersen 2011; Weisberg 2009.
For one attempt to approach these contradictory issues, see Chapter 10 by Irni on cat food in this book.
While the concepts of anthropocentrism and speciesism overlap in many ways, they also entail important differences. Anthropocentrism is a particular kind of speciesist bias in which human beings are regarded as superior to nonhuman animals, while speciesism could also involve assigning a higher value to some animals over others, for instance, to cats and dogs over pigs and rats (see Faria and Paez 2014; see also Sanbonmatsu 2014 for a discussion of speciesism).
See, for example, Bilge 2013; De los Reyes, Molina and Mulinari 2003; Nash 2016; see also reflections on her previous work by Lykke 2020.
For nature conservation efforts that failed to avoid becoming part of a colonial history and present, and resistance to these practices, see, for example, Kuokkanen 2020. For elaboration on the importance and practices of considering animal advocacy and nature conservation efforts together with critical analysis of race and decolonial analysis, see, for example, Agarwal 1992; Deckha 2012; Kim 2015; Sturgeon 1997; van Dooren 2019; Weaver 2021.
As Steinbock, Szczygielska and Wagner (2017, 4) ask: “Who can claim unproblematically their nearness to the animal, and who is positioned there? Who can theorize the non-human without mentioning the racializing and gendering assemblages at work?”
In addition to life forms, a sustainable vision for a multispecies future also advocates for organisms and environments such as ecosystems, oceans, habitats, and so forth.
For a discussion on links between disability and animality, see also Jenkins, Struthers Montford and Taylor 2020.
Such deprecation is demonstrated by, for example, ableist rationalisations that consider disability as something that should be eradicated or cured at all costs and the fetishisation of wild animals over domestic animals who are dependent of human care (see, e.g., Kafer 2013, 25–46; Taylor 2017, 212, 215).
For example, science studies scholar Donna Haraway notes, when observing two dogs play in a particular situation: “None of their sexual play has anything to do with remotely functional heterosexual mating behavior—no efforts of Willem to mount, no presenting of an attractive female backside, not much genital sniffing, no whining and pacing, none of all that “reproductive” stuff. No, here we have pure polymorphous perversity […]” (Haraway 2008, 193).
In comparison, 192.1 million animals were estimated to have been used for scientific purposes worldwide in 2015 (Taylor and Alvarez 2020).
The research project “Climate Sustainability in the Kitchen” attempted to challenge animal-based food practices at the individual and institutional levels in Finland. We created an open-access recipe bank consisting of plant-based, nutritious and climate-sustainable main course meals for local food services, available at ilmastoruoka.fi. In the Finnish context, such food services offer employee-supported workplace lunches, subsidised lunches for students in various educational institutions, and free meals at schools. As approximately one-third of Finns eat daily lunches produced by food services, providing practical tools for moving towards plant-based eating, in the form of recipe planning and campaigning for the inclusion of plant-based meals in food services offers potential for transforming the local meat-based food culture (Kupsala et al. 2021).
For more detail on the links between animal oppression and capitalism, see Nibert 2017; Sanbonmatsu 2017.
See, for example, Curtin 1991; Gaard 2011; for a discussion on vegan universalism, see Twine 2014.
Food ontologies refer to (taken-for-granted) ideas and assertions about humans, nonhuman animals, and food (Struthers Montford and Taylor 2020, 135). Drawing on the work of Foucauldian philosopher Johanna Oksala, Struthers Montford and Taylor (2020) argue that “ontologies are not given, but rather something we make and remake” (133). Thus, “[a]nimals, including human animals, are beings whom we may ontologize as edible, and this is an ethical and political decision, not an objective description of a fundamental reality” (Struthers Montford and Taylor 2020, 133).
Potential tensions between Indigenous peoples’ and nonhuman animal rights and the question of the compatibility of veganism with Indigenous worldviews continues to be a debated issue. However, several scholars writing from Indigenous, intersectional, feminist, postcolonial, and critical animal studies perspectives argue that veganism and Indigenous cosmologies and ways of life are not necessarily or in all contexts incompatible (Chu 2019; Deckha 2012; Kim 2020; Robinson 2013; Struthers Montford and Taylor 2020). On the one hand, it is argued that some Indigenous foodways and traditions rely on certain animals, and as Kathryn Gillespie notes, “recognizing people’s rights to such traditions is central to feminist decolonization of the diet” (2017, 159). In the context of Northern Europe, the practice of Sámi veganism (that consists of, for example, consuming reindeer and hunted animals only in the Sámi homeland while maintaining vegan practices in other areas) provides one example of efforts to combine cultural and Indigenous survival with efforts to advocate for more just and compassionate food practices and resisting the animal-industrial complex. The editors of this book are not currently aware of scholarly research on Sámi veganism, but a bachelor’s thesis (2019) by Máren-Elle Länsman has shed some light on this practice. We also thank Stina Aletta Aikio for informing us about Sámi veganism. On the other hand, and in other contexts, some Indigenous authors maintain that their indigeneity is compatible with veganism. As Margaret Robinson notes, “[w]hen veganism is constructed as white, Aboriginal people who eschew the use of animal products are depicted as sacrificing our cultural authenticity. This presents a challenge for those of us who view our veganism as ethically, spiritually and culturally compatible with our indigeneity” (Aboriginal 2013, 190). For more about Indigenous veganism from Maori perspectives, see Dunn 2019.
Giraud develops critically, among others, Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower in Cary Wolfe’s (2012) analyses of factory-farming and Donna Haraway’s (2008, 80) critique of making beings killable (Giraud 2013a, 2013b; see also Giraud 2019 and Giraud 2021 about veganism).
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