Vegan Studies and Queer Theory

This chapter establishes the points of intersection and interaction between vegan theory and queer theory. Aligning queerness and veganism might appear on the surface as a problematic conflation of two distinct notions of identity and histories of oppression. And yet, as scholars such as Carol J. Adams and Jacques Derrida have demonstrated respectively, heterosexual masculinity and human subjectivity rely on the assumption of compulsory carnivorism. Veganism is engaged in critiquing many of the same institutions as queer theory, challenging heteronormative ideas about what it means to be a sexed, gendered, and “speciesed” subject. This chapter forwards the idea that veganism offers an extension of the remit of queer theory to a consideration of nonhuman animals. I explore how the works of queer theorists such as Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lee Edelman, J. Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz provide important nourishment for vegan theoretical perspectives. Veganism’s resistance to a normative humanity responsible for systemic abuses of nonhuman animals is seen to require an acknowledgment of the co-existence of feelings of failure, inconsistency, and complicity, with hope and utopianism.