VEGANISM, SEX AND POLITICS: TALES OF DANGER AND PLEASURE
© C. Lou Hamilton, 2019
The right of C. Lou Hamilton to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-910849-14-9
ISBN-10: 1910849149
Veganism, Sex and Politics: Tales of Danger and Pleasure/ C. Lou Hamilton
1. Veganism 2. Animal Rights 3. Consumerism 4. Environmentalism 5. Queer 6. Feminism
First published in 2019 by HammerOn Press
Bristol, England
https://www.hammeronpress.net
Cover design and typeset by Eva Megias
CONTENTS
Introduction: Veganism, sex and politics
Chapter 1: Dreaded comparisons and other stories
Chapter 2: Eating and being eaten
Interlude 1: Raw
Chapter 3: Slow violence and animal tales
Chapter 4: Caring through species
Chapter 5: Creatures we wear
Interlude 2: Carnage
Chapter 6: Dangers and pleasures
Conclusion: Doing veganism
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
In this beautifully written book, C. Lou Hamilton explores the politics of veganism through the lens of her own experience as a queer vegan. She uses science, philosophy, storytelling and more to examine the use of animals for food, clothing, medicine, sexuality and identity. Her approach is refreshingly open. There are no unambiguous heroes or villains in her story. She approaches all subjects, including herself, with the same critical yet generous perspective, which allows her to move beyond simplistic frames and arrive at a more complex, ambivalent set of truths. This book does what we need many more books to do: show what it looks like for a particular individual in a particular context to aspire to resist oppression in all its forms, while still living a life full of joy, individuality and community.
Jeff Sebo, New York University
Veganism, Sex and Politics is a wonderful and inspiring contribution to the ethics and politics of veganism as a practice. Hamilton has produced a gorgeously written, careful and sensitive text. This book deftly weaves sophisticated contemporary debates together, giving readers a wonderful opportunity to gain insight into the complexities of pro animal politics and veganism. Importantly, this unique volume offers visions for veganism as a non-normative ethical and political practice that goes well beyond individual ethics and move us towards large scale social and political transformation.
Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel, The University of Sydney
Sometime around midsummer 2014, a few months after I started practising veganism, I strolled home from a party in the wee hours, heels in one hand, bag thrown over the opposite shoulder. A hint of sunlight squeezed through the trees. In my head I was still dancing. As I reached the corner near my flat, a fox crossed the empty street and stopped on the pavement some fifty metres before me. She turned my way, looked me in the eyes, and slipped under a bush.
I’d had countless encounters with foxes before this one. London’s vulpine population is thriving, and the animals are second only to squirrels and pigeons for wildlife in my neighbourhood. But this meeting felt different. As I looked at the fox and fancied that she returned my gaze — intentionally, knowingly — I sensed a sudden connection that I intuitively attributed to the fact that I had stopped eating animals.
I am well versed in the concept of anthropomorphism, and in the magic born of dawn dreaming. I have long since abandoned the fantasy that a vegan diet means a human body free from the traces of dead animals, or non-complicity in the exploitation of animals. What I have not lost is that sense of curiosity about other creatures and my kinship with them. While I examine, in the pages that follow, some of the ways that veganism gets tangled up in politics — sexual politics in particular — and what those knots tell us about contemporary identities and other conflicts, I carry with me the memory of this and other trans-species encounters. I open this book with my crossing with the fox because, as I ask a series of sometimes difficult questions about what it means to practise veganism in the early twenty-first century, I want to keep alive this sense of wonder, my ongoing amazement at veganism’s always more-than-political powers.
Why veganism now?
Veganism is hot.
During the second decade of the twenty-first century, veganism in the West has gone from a political practice associated first and foremost with animal rights activism to an increasingly popular approach to eating and living. According to one survey from early 2018, in the United Kingdom 7% of the population now identifies as vegan, a substantial rise since 2016.1 A year later The Economist announced that 2019 would be “the year of the vegan.”2 While surveys and New Year’s predictions need to be taken with a grain of salt, it is clear that more and more people are implementing or considering a plant-based diet.
Veganism’s rising popularity can be attributed to a range of factors. In the first place, it is evidence of the success of animal rights and welfare activists in documenting, publicising and challenging the exploitation of animals raised for food, especially on modern industrial farms, since the second half of the twentieth century. In Western countries such as Britain and the United States, agriculture underwent a transition to greater intensification after World War Two. Technological developments, pesticides, new breeding techniques and the use of vitamins and antibiotics facilitated the rapid expansion of intensive animal agriculture.3 By the 1960s and 1970s, animal advocates were increasingly concerned about the conditions on what were soon dubbed “factory farms.” Ruth Harrison’s 1964 book Animal Machines and, a decade later, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, were instrumental in raising awareness of welfare issues related to industrial farming in Britain and the U.S.4 During the same period, scientific research increasingly demonstrated that the animals raised for food or used in scientific experimentation are intelligent and sentient beings who experience and express emotions and feel physical pain.5
By the early twenty-first century there is also increasing evidence that animal agriculture is dangerous for people’s health and for the very future of the planet. The survey cited above names the growing concern about climate change as the most significant factor in veganism’s newfound popularity.6