In this interview, sociologist Lauren Corman reflects on her profound interest in exclusions and the potential for both activism and scholarship to acknowledge new and more complex subjectivities. On the subject of teaching in critical animal studies (CAS), Corman addresses the need to develop novel approaches for novel content and her desire to teach her students critical reflection and thinking without provoking defensiveness. She also shares her insights on the growing discipline of CAS and stresses the significance of intersectionality to both its present and future iterations. We interviewed Lauren Corman by Skype on December 16, 2015.
SAMANTHA KING: Since we are interested in the mutual constitution of personal and academic interests, we begin with biography and wonder if you could talk about when and where you were born and raised; your formative cultural, intellectual, or political experiences; how you became an academic; and how you came into the field in which you now work.
LAUREN CORMAN: That’s such a great question; it’s really layered and difficult to distill. I guess I’ll start by saying I was born in the United States but we moved to Canada when I was three. I grew up in a beautiful area of rural Manitoba but a very strange little town. It was dominated by nuclear research. Most people’s fathers, in particular, were nuclear physicists or nuclear researchers of different kinds. My family wasn’t, but it meant that my primary, elementary, and high school years were taught from a very scientific point of view. There was a real emphasis on the natural sciences, and the humanities and the social sciences were considered not particularly valuable. As somebody who is interested in the humanities and the social sciences, I railed against that position, and I fought that throughout my childhood. As well, I had an abusive father, and although my mom is very supportive and wonderful, my childhood experiences were my beginnings of thinking about injustice and oppression.
In combination with that, I’ve had a longstanding interest in animals. My mom says that I was always an animal activist, in the sense that I didn’t want to go to the zoo, and I didn’t want to go to the circus because my feeling was that the animals were sad. Some of those feelings about animals didn’t become academic and activist interests until the end of my undergraduate degree. Yet those seeds were long planted; I always felt a connection with my cats growing up and that kind of thing. I thought that I would end up doing English in my undergrad, after I graduated from high school. I had been writing terrible poetry all the way through high school [laughs]. When I began my undergrad, I thought I would end up being a novelist—I’d always loved English. I did well throughout my undergraduate degree. It was affirming to me, given that that town had been quite dismissive of the arts, to see that I could excel within university and be rewarded for doing humanities work. I was just a number. In some ways that was great because I had the anonymity, and then I received the validation that I could write. Strangely enough—even though I’ve ended up in sociology—I wound up dropping my undergraduate sociology course. I was quite a dedicated student early on, but I dropped sociology. I didn’t really understand the professor, I didn’t think I would get a good grade, so I was encouraged by my partner at the time, and my mom, to take gender studies.
That was the beginning of my politicization. I embraced gender studies, and I think I became a force to be reckoned with at the University of Manitoba, where I was doing my undergrad. I started learning about issues of oppression, which both opened my eyes and also gave me a language to describe my own experience, and also the experiences of people around me. I really threw myself into it. This was the mid-1990s. Issues of intersectionality were at the forefront of gender studies, and there was a lot of interest accounting for the kinds of exclusions occurring within the women’s movement. That’s how I arrived in politics, thinking about how issues of race, gender, sexuality, and ability, and those sorts of dynamics have been excluded from Western feminism.
Adjacently, I also got involved in the punk scene in Winnipeg. Within the scene, there was a dovetailing between the political work I was doing on campus and the theoretical ideas I was learning, and my interest in punk. It was a very progressive scene that was doing deeply intersectional work, although we might not have called it that. It was through the punk scene that I was first introduced to animal issues and exposed to issues such as vivisection at a punk show, by a local band named Propagandhi. They had a bunch of different local groups provide information at their show. There was a group called People Acting for Animal Liberation (PAAL); they were playing a video of a monkey being vivisected. That was a crushing moment, and it was really terrifying too. There was this monkey who was screaming, and I guess that was the moment of connection between the animals I eat and this particular animal who was clearly suffering. I went vegetarian that night, and then pretty quickly vegan after that. I was interested and I started learning about industrial forms of animal use.
Here I was in gender studies being radicalized and coming to a greater political consciousness, but I was really frustrated that animals couldn’t be part of the conversation; that for all of the exclusions we were speaking about and all this emphasis on intersectionality, nonetheless, where was speciesism? We didn’t have a language for talking about it. I felt like the women’s movement and feminism, by its reluctance to take up the question of the animal, was reproducing similar kinds of exclusions that it had been so diligently trying to address in the 1990s. I reluctantly left gender studies to pursue my master’s and then my PhD in environmental studies, because at least in those fields I felt there was room to talk about the nonhuman. That’s how I ended up going to York University and doing my master’s and my PhD in environmental studies. There wasn’t a critical animal studies focus at the time; there was a little bit of animal studies—human–animal studies—but it wasn’t an area that you’d get a degree in. Actually I thought it would be funny to do a degree in animal studies because people would ask me why I was doing environmental studies, and I would say, “Well what am I going to do, ‘animal studies’?” This was laughable at the time.
I felt like I did two concurrent degrees because I was interested in animals, but they didn’t really fit within many environmental studies frameworks, which are really informed by a kind of interest in species and endangered animals, and a particular understanding about animals that isn’t about individuals. Certainly there wasn’t much room for domestic animals. That’s starting to change. In fact, domestic animals are kind of the shadow side of wild animals, who are prized within environmental studies. They’ve become the new “other,” or a kind of continuation of that othering that we see in Western societies. That’s why I did the radio show, in part, because I was quite desperate to have conversations with other scholars and activists who are doing animal work. I did that show from 2001 to 2009, until I got my job at Brock University, and a bit into 2010. I was specifically hired at Brock in 2009 to teach critical animal studies, and I believe part of the reason why I was hired was that I do intersectional work. I bring a feminist consciousness forward, which is dedicated to intersectionality, and I think that made sense to the sociology department. A lot of people do that work in my department. I also had about 300 interviews under my belt at that time through the radio show. I had a pretty good understanding of the scholarly and activist landscape at the time. It’s a big question, but that’s my attempt at answering.
SK: Could you tell us about the primary purpose of your academic work, and your motivations for engaging in it?
LC: It’s shifting a little bit, but primarily I would say that I’m interested in questions of human and nonhuman animal subjectivity. That’s partially because of my interest in social justice movements, and then locating the animal movements within that framework. You can see these interests unfold through my dissertation research, the radio show, and the work that I did on my master’s in which I was interviewing slaughterhouse workers and interested in the exclusion of slaughterhouse workers’ voices within labor histories and within the animal movements as well. I became interested in, or I became aware that many social justice movements in the West—and I think that the animal movements also mirror this—begin with an interest in moving those who are oppressed from a category of object to a category of subject. That’s true for the women’s movement and it also rings true for various queer movements. We see it as well, in Canada, in regards to the Indigenous movements. There is a desire to bring into the public sphere richer versions of subjectivity for those who’ve been oppressed, as a movement against the objectification and dehumanization of these groups. The animal movements are also engaged in that work, and I’m centrally interested in that work.
But it’s not just about subjectivity; it’s also about subjectivity in relationship to intersectional analyses. My beginning in terms of my political consciousness, and my theoretical work, was an attempt to think about issues through an intersectional lens, and that intersectional feminist perspective still informs all of my work. I want to talk about marginalized groups and, in particular, emphasize their subjectivity, but do it from an intersectional perspective. I’m interested in this trend toward talking about marginalized groups and figuring out how to do that work without reproducing victim discourses, or a kind of reductionism in their subjectivity where they’re just reduced to suffering beings. We can see that the emphasis on agency and resistance, and all these other aspects of subjectivity beyond suffering, has been incredibly important for various different Western social justice movements. The animal movements are lagging behind in that regard, but that’s beginning to change. So that’s part of the intervention of my work—that is, to emphasize those more complex versions of subjectivity that animals and other oppressed groups possess. That’s part of the reason why, over my time at Brock, since 2009, I’ve brought in much more cognitive ethology—the study of animal minds and behavior—than I had anticipated. This was percolating when I was doing the radio show in an effort to figure out who is talking about animals themselves, outside of just victim discourses. I started to interview more people who work at sanctuaries, and more people such as Marc Bekoff. I did an interview with Barbara Smuts right at the end of my time with the radio show. They could talk about animals outside of a purely victim paradigm. I completely understand why the animal movements have emphasized suffering and victimhood; it’s a crucial corrective to the ways that animal suffering is often not seen, not discussed, and intentionally obscured. There’s a lot of distancing that happens regarding animal practices, and then people’s consumption practices. I do understand why. I think it’s important and obviously there’s tremendous suffering, but I don’t want us to stay there.
Some of the work in cognitive ethology I find especially promising for bringing animals more into the picture, attempting to complement an understanding of their suffering with a larger understanding of their lives in regard to their emotional capabilities, their sociality, their capacity at times for culture, these kinds of things. A lot of those conversations are happening within cognitive ethology and research that bridges the natural sciences and the social sciences. In part, that’s where some of my work is going. Again, it’s carrying forward that central idea of subjectivity, putting it in conversation with intersectionality, and always being accountable to the multiple ways in which animal oppression is entangled with other forms of oppression. They can’t be separated. Then, as part of that mix, bringing in cognitive ethology to further open and deepen our understanding of who animals are outside of these very peaked moments of suffering, or these extended periods of suffering in their lives.
As I say in the chapter I co-authored about critical animal studies and pedagogy: This is not just a purely theoretical idea. It has real political and practical benefit, because I’ve really seen it in my own teaching. When I talk with students about animal suffering in the absence of talking about their emotional lives or their social capability, it doesn’t land in the same way. Whereas if I talk about animals in a much fuller way, when I show them graphic imagery, or I discuss some of the violent ways that they’re commodified, that combination of discussing animal emotionality with descriptions of suffering is much more potent. It means a lot more to the students; it seems to elicit much more of an empathetic response, and it just seems much more motivating. It’s also just not the regular kind of onslaught of relentless suffering that sometimes the animal movements portray. Again, I say all of this as somebody who is part of a wave; I don’t feel like I created this work. They’re ideas I picked up on, issues I was trying to intervene in myself, and then build on through scholars such as Barbara Smuts and Karen Davis, and others who have been engaged in this work for a long time.
SK: I don’t know if you identify as a sociologist with your interdisciplinary background, but could you talk about what it’s like to study animals in a sociology department?
LC: Yes, I feel like I slipped in under some kind of wire, actually. It’s strange. In some ways, though, people weren’t surprised that I ended up in sociology because, at least at Brock, the kind of sociology that’s done here is largely engaged with feminist theory, labor theory, and postcolonial and critical race theory. That’s all of my work too; it’s just in conversation with animal issues. It’s actually quite an interdisciplinary program in the sense of people’s theoretical backgrounds; we don’t strictly house faculty with degrees in sociology. But it did occur to me the other day—I was asking a friend, “Am I a sociologist?” I wasn’t really sure: I teach full time in the sociology department, I’m now a tenured professor in sociology, so am I a sociologist? One of the ways I identify as a sociologist is that I’ve always been compelled by questions of society and social relationships. As my research is more greatly informed by cognitive ethology, I’m really interested in nonhuman animals’ social relationships. To me, it seems like a really good fit for sociology in some ways; it’s an extension of, and a kind of disruption of, some of the paradigms within sociology. Like anthropology, sociology has tended to assume that some of its main concepts such as society and culture are exclusively human. Not only strictly human, but also defining the human. But then what makes us human? These concepts of society and culture are really ripe for deconstruction. So in some ways I feel well positioned within the academy right now, although I consider myself more of a cultural studies person. Interest in social relationships and inequality helps define my department, which is, I would argue, a critical sociology department. I continue to bring forward my intersectional analysis, and it feels like a good match with the department.
Where I bump up against some heads, I suppose, is in that questioning of what constitutes society. I developed and have been teaching a course since 2009 called Animals and Human Society, where even the name of the course has been the subject of debate. There’s an enduring assumption that society is humanity, or the domain of the human, and that only humans have the capacity for social relationships and what we might call society. Scholars such as David Nibert have been working diligently to deconstruct the kind of humanism that shoots through a lot of sociology, and I feel like I’m also engaged in that work. It feels like a good home for me, but at the same time, some of its fundamental ideas are quite steeped in a humanist position that I find problematic and try to challenge.
SK: Could you elaborate on what critical animal studies pedagogy means in your mind, and why you see this as an important undertaking?
LC: Completing my dissertation, I was primarily interested in questions of voice, animal voices, other marginalized voices, the humanism of the voice metaphor, and the centrality of the voice metaphor to social justice movements. These issues animated my work for so many years. But it’s been valuable to reassess and think about my direction post-tenure. I earned my PhD in 2012 and then I applied for tenure in 2014, so it was very fast. During my tenure application I had to look back at my career and my activism and note some themes. I needed to ask myself in a direct and comprehensive way, “What makes me unique as an academic?” Or, “Where do I see my career going?” At least one of those threads relates to pedagogy. The intervention of the radio show was a pedagogical enterprise in the sense that I wanted to bring animal issues into the public sphere and tried to curate better conversations about animal issues. I was motivated to bring complex theoretical ideas into a public forum, making them accessible, and handing them over to people. The radio show, and of course being a teaching assistant and those sorts of things, primed me for thinking about and engaging in pedagogy. But, significantly, prior to this, my undergraduate gender studies professors were graduates of OISE [the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education]; they put questions of pedagogy at the forefront when we came to class. That was great and kind of radical, to have a conversation about pedagogy as part of our curriculum, about how we were going to be taught, how we were going to learn, that pedagogy was something that you could step back from, evaluate, and critically engage.
There was a series of little moments that led up to this interest in critical animal studies pedagogy. Part of my developing interest in pedagogy came from noticing, when I began teaching in 2009, that there weren’t many models showing how someone would teach this area. It wasn’t like I had taken critical animal studies classes in my degrees and could draw on those approaches, or translate them, into this new context. When I designed courses, I sometimes felt I was starting from scratch. John Sorenson teaches in the department and had been teaching critical animal studies courses for a number of years, but in terms of being able to just teach it in this area, I didn’t have a whole bank of courses to consult. Moreover, I wanted to teach based on my own research interests, primarily intersectionality and subjectivity. In other words, I was in this amazing position, as scary as it’s been sometimes, in which I occasionally lacked models. Because I was uniquely hired to teach the critical animal studies courses, I spent five or six years just teaching critical animal studies. Last year was the first year that I taught contemporary social theory, which wasn’t an animal-focused class. The reason I’m giving you a bit of background is that pedagogy was an ongoing interest, but it was also borne out of necessity, to develop effective teaching.
I was also distinctly aware from my own master’s and PhD experiences that talking to people about animal issues is quite emotionally fraught at times and quite volatile, and so I wanted to develop methods for precluding some of the defensiveness that can be there. People will often ask me about my teaching, “Don’t you find that students get defensive?” For the most part, not that I’m a magician or anything, people don’t get defensive. I’ve tried to build into my pedagogy a series of ways of precluding that, for example by emphasizing larger systems of oppression and talking about economics, which helps to de-personalize some of the information about animals. People often take animal issues personally because everyone is participating in some ways in these systems, and people can sometimes feel guilty or they can feel upset about it and see it as a reflection of their being a bad person. I always try to put a bit of a wedge in there to encourage people not to see it as a matter of being bad individuals and instead emphasize a larger structural analysis. I’m building on preexisting pedagogical techniques in which people are talking about larger systems of oppression and systemic forms of inequality; I am extending those to show that issues of speciesism and anthropocentrism take similar, and also unique, forms. We can talk about issues of domination and oppression without saying people are evil or bad. It’s about larger systems we can name and critically interrogate. This is how I came to some of my pedagogical interventions and motivations.
SCOTT CAREY: In your forthcoming essay “The Ventriloquist’s Burden,” you offer a critique of exclusions performed by certain versions of posthumanism. Could you review that critique for us and describe how you locate your work in relation to posthumanism? Could you also give us some idea for what you see as the value of a posthumanist perspective for animal movements?
LC: All of these categories or these terms like animal rights or posthumanism are useful placeholders, but I think they’re also quite malleable and fluid. Part of my contention with Donna Haraway’s work, such as within her book When Species Meet, is that there’s a kind of strange rigidity to her notion of animal rights. I don’t want to present posthumanism as if it’s separate from animal rights and animal liberation philosophy, although I know some people do that. I think Donna Haraway ends up doing that as well, in order to define her own research. Considering I’ve done animal rights and liberation work for so long, I think that people do all sorts of work under these categories and use them in a diversity of ways. I just wanted to have that noted as an overall statement before I talk about the interventions or how I see myself contributing to posthumanism, because I’ve seen these as really messy categories. It makes answering the questions a little bit difficult.
I think in some ways there’s more overlap than is recognized between animal rights and posthumanism, which are often pitted against one another. But one of the things that I find promising about posthumanism is that, for myself, coming out of gender studies and intersectional theory—and, in particular, poststructuralist and postmodern analyses— there’s been a great deal of useful emphasis on deconstructing what we think of as the liberal Western subject, all the different ways that that subject is constituted by a series of unmarked categories. Categories of whiteness or heterosexuality or able-bodiedness—all these different categories are tied up with how, in the West, people think about who is a subject. Many people who have been engaged in intersectional work and poststructuralist and postmodernist analyses have been doing such important work to note the unmarked ways that the subject functions to talk about race, class, gender, and sexuality, etc. To me, that has been very useful work. It informs intersectional theory and helps us attend, in better ways, to how various different groups have been marginalized and how that marginalization constructs the subject. It’s not just that different groups are excluded; it’s that those exclusions help mark and define who counts as a subject and who is not a subject.
Posthumanism, I think, arrives on the scene in that it helps contribute further to those discourses by asking us to also consider how the notion of the subject is marked by humanism. Humanism is also there within all of these other analyses, but people aren’t necessarily recognizing that species is another category that helps constitute who counts as a subject in society. I didn’t see the deconstructive work around the subject happening as much within animal liberation and animal rights ethics and philosophy. To me it seems absolutely crucial, and people such as Cary Wolfe show us in quite stark terms that some of the paradigms that people are writing under animal rights and animal liberation are actually predicated on humanist notions of the subject. We will always be mired in a kind of domination of the human if we’re not willing to unpack the assumption that what it means to be a subject is to be human. When you have various different groups within the animal rights movement trying to get animals into the category of rights, they’re often doing it based on a humanist understanding of who gets to have rights. It’s based on capacities such as language use, or rationality, or those sorts of criteria that Taimie Bryant calls the similarity argument or the similarity approach. While that is very useful work to show similarities between humans and other animals as a way to grant animals certain rights, the notion of rights is nonetheless based on a humanist exclusion of nonhuman animals. So we’re kind of in this paradoxical moment where the very category of human rights is predicated on not being an animal. So how do you get animals within that rights paradigm? Well, you try to say, “Look how animals are like existing rights holders—i.e., human beings.” To me, when I read that critique by Wolfe, that made so much sense and raised concerns about the work that the animal movements do.
SC: Could you discuss some of the problems with humans’ speaking on behalf of animals, and how you’ve tried to resolve that issue in your work?
LC: Looking back on my development as a scholar and as an activist, I see that coming out of the women’s movement in the 1990s; there was so much concern with questions of cultural appropriation and voice appropriation. It was understood that the white, Western women’s movement had engaged in a series of profound and damaging mistakes in terms of speaking on behalf of others: women in the Global South, women of color, etc. To think about and take seriously questions of appropriation marked the beginning of my development as a political actor. These were really questions and matters of colonialism and imperialism that continue to be significant. There was an ongoing set of debates, which persist, about the issues of power involved with speaking on behalf of someone else, and what it means to be an ally, or what it means to speak with somebody. I think in some ways, those questions were swirling around for me at the beginning of my emergence into political consciousness and theory. However, I was still largely engaged in the kinds of activities that the animal movements have historically done in the West, which involves a pretty intense feeling that we know what is wrong with what is happening to animals and see ourselves as speaking on their behalf—that is, positioning animals as voiceless, and animal activists as their voice.
In my dissertation research, which centrally revolves around this question, you can see that this kind of assumption is built into the animal movements historically and contemporaneously by rendering animals as unable to speak for themselves. I think there’s a whole bunch of reasons for that. In part, politically, people are largely correct that animals don’t have much of a political voice. That’s vital to correct by speaking on their behalf, because we recognize the relative powerlessness that animals have to represent their interests in terms of a public or political intervention. It’s not that I think people are being ridiculous for talking about themselves as the voice of the voiceless, which is the central trope of the animal movements. However, given that in a Western context the notion of voice is very tied to subjectivity, there’s also a way in which the animal movements render animals as nonsubjects at the same moment they try to be their voice and bring them into the public sphere. That is a problem. It’s something that we should be concerned about because it doesn’t necessarily imbue a sense of responsibility to try to figure out better ways, or at least to try to engage with the problematic of possibly bringing their voices into this larger conversation. If we are going to seriously grapple with some of these other debates about appropriation and the kinds of colonialist moves that can happen when you speak on behalf of someone else, then we need to build that kind of critical consciousness into animal movements, which are pretty brazen about being able to, or feeling able to, speak on behalf of others.
I did a radio show called Animal Voices for almost a decade, and this is the kind of language that’s out there in terms of the work that we do as activists: that we must be their representatives. In some ways we must be their representatives. There is a certain accountability to do that, but because we haven’t engaged in a more nuanced way to think about animal subjectivity and combine that with the idea that we are their voices, we are left with a kind of reductionism. There’s a way in which we continue to position animals as strictly victims, reduce their lives to images of suffering, and don’t do our homework around what animals can be outside of those contexts, how those contexts themselves are quite complicated, and how animals do attempt to resist. They do have forms of agency. Their lives outside of these contexts can be quite complex and interesting, and they seek out pleasure and all of these sorts of things. Again, the central trope that embodies a lot of animal movements is that humans must act as the voice of the voiceless. It is an understandable position, but it is also one that is worth thinking about more critically. I argue that the animal movements need to centralize animal subjectivities in such a way that is more layered, more honest, and more humble—not only to be fair to the animals but also because it has political import as well. If you engage with researchers who are attempting to know animals on their own terms—for example, people such as Marc Bekoff—then you see that this is in line with other social justice movements that increasingly refuse to reduce others to objects and suffering victims. I see this unproblematized notion of speaking on behalf of animals and being the voice of the voiceless as a potentially colonialist or appropriative way to think about others.
ISABEL MACQUARRIE: You make a concerted effort to bring the voices of activists into your scholarly work. Can you tell us why you do this and whether you’ve encountered any resistance from inside the academy?
LC: Part of the work that I’ve done fits well within some of the founding principles of critical animal studies—or, at least, some of the initial ideas that people used to define the field. One of the issues that were central to the folks defining critical animal studies was an appreciation that advocacy and the academy should be in conversation, bolster each other, and hold theory accountable to activism and on-the-ground work. There’s a kind of response to, or wanting to resist theory for theory’s sake, or abstractions to the point of being largely meaningless to the material conditions that animals face. There was also the idea within critical animal studies that we should value the work that animal liberationists and animal rights folks had been doing and not engage in the conventional scholarly practice of disregarding those voices. Engagement with activists’ work was seen as a kind of political move and theoretical move.
It was a political move in the sense of resisting a dismissal of activist perspectives—and it was theoretical in the sense that we stay open to what on-the-ground activists are saying. That should inform our theoretical work. That made a lot of sense to me coming out of the women’s movement and gender studies, in which the theories being developed were always being developed, or at least largely developed, out of the women’s movement’s direct engagement with fighting patriarchy and other issues of oppression. Again, critical animal studies was built on theoretical paradigms familiar to me through gender studies. Then, when I was doing the radio show I wanted to collect all of those voices together because I thought that doing so would give us a variety of perspectives, or a larger set of perspectives on animal issues. If you’re going to talk about something such as the Canadian commercial seal hunt, for example, you’ll want to speak to activists about the conditions that they’re seeing, their experiences, and some of the observations that they’re making. That would be vital to the conversation, but you would also want to include somebody who could talk about cognitive ethology and seals. You’d want to bring in somebody who could offer a labor perspective and have a labor theory background who could talk about working conditions on the ice, or what the conditions are in Newfoundland that precipitates people’s working in the industry. You would want to interview Indigenous people who profit from the hunt. It would be complementary to have these voices combine in terms of providing a more holistic understanding of any issue. Like I said, critical animal studies was trying to work against a kind of disembodied, theoretical trajectory that isn’t accountable to material conditions; that is something the animal movements and animal activists have been trying to ameliorate or stop for a long time. Activists can help keep people grounded in those material conditions and bring their lived experience and firsthand experience to the table. I also think it’s more compelling for students. Practically, in terms of my own teaching and my own writing, some of the stories that activists tell about their lived experience grab people much more. There is a kind of affect and passion that people bring to their activism and work on animal issues. It can help flesh out the theoretical perspectives that I’m talking about in class which can tend to be quite abstract when they refer to the animal in this kind of generalized way, without talking about particularities. Something that activists can do is talk about the individuals they’ve met if they’re talking about liberation, and this can be a helpful corrective against the abstraction of the category of the animal that some people engage in within the academy. Those are some of the reasons why activists’ voices have been key to my own work.
Generally speaking, I haven’t encountered resistance from inside the academy related to this because I’m fortunate to work in a department that values activism and tries to stay accountable and in conversation with activism in terms of people’s own research foci. Generally speaking, it fits with that critical sociology perspective. And, like I said, my students really seem to like it. I often feature radio interviews as part of my course materials, or I try to bring in activists’ voices on YouTube and things like that, because it gives people some stories and faces to help ground some of the theoretical ideas. Also, I hope it gives students the sense that these are ongoing, lived, and contemporary debates that are happening right now. I always say, “These issues are very much alive today!” to try to show them that this is something people are actively participating in through a variety of means. That makes it more exciting and also, hopefully, more relevant so that we’re not just talking about theory for theory’s sake. I think that kind of view instills the students with a sense of excitement. That’s part of the reason why I interviewed Will Potter with my class after we read his book Green Is the New Red for a course I taught this year. We read all of these theoretical perspectives on eco-terrorism and then we talked to a journalist and read his book. We got to interview him about his own personal experiences and his own understanding of activism, and he emphasized the voices of activists in the book. It took some of the more abstract theoretical ideas and helped ground them and make them seem more alive, contemporary, and exciting.
IM: What is your current perspective on consuming meat or other animal products? Have your thoughts and feelings changed over the course of your career on these matters? And if so, how?
LC: I know it’s continuous with the other things that I’m talking about, but it’s also a shift in register, because it’s about personal practice. Of course, veganism can be, and is for me, tied to these larger theoretical questions and these questions about activism and interventions about animals’ lives, but it’s something that’s very personal, which is part of the reason why I often talk about issues of veganism in a peripheral way with my students. It can be woven throughout some of the readings, but I don’t come out saying, “Veganism!” right away. Often the students will bring it up to me, and I see that as a teachable moment. I enter into a conversation in that way. It’s a highly personal thing and that’s part of the reason why some people are defensive about it too, because we are all implicated. Everyone is suddenly understood as making a choice, one way or the other, about whether to consume animals or not. It’s hard to position yourself as neutral.
I notice that I’m kind of shifting my register by not talking theoretically, because this is about personal practice, which is, like I said, attached to these larger theoretical ideas. I mentioned how I became vegan, and it’s part of a daily practice of eschewing the objectification and commodification of animals. I think it was Scott’s question about what are the major ideas or key concepts that I’m engaged with where I talked about the kind of work that many social justice movements do, which is to try to move a category of beings from objects into a category of subjects. That’s at least partially articulated through some of the liberationist critiques of animal industries, which really question the rendering of animals as property. A lot of the work that I’ve done in my teaching has been about legal issues and the law. The central categories of personhood and property that exist in the law get at the fundamental tension between objects and subjects.
Veganism, to me, is about a kind of direct challenge to the property status of animals and the notion that they can be rendered as objects. It’s a kind of daily personal boycott, a rich practice of eschewing the understanding of animals as objects or servants from the beginning of their lives to their deaths. Within an industrial context, everything about their lives is geared toward serving human beings. Their bodies are manipulated in various different ways and mutilated in different ways in order to serve the purpose of being objects. To not consume those products is a way of forwarding a practice and a political position, which is not to reinforce but instead challenge the property status of animals and their objectification. Increasingly, as I’ve learned more about animals’ social relationships, their emotionality, their psychological capacities, and at times even their cultural capacities, I’ve found my veganism and the practice of my veganism becoming a lot sadder, to be honest. I think that, like many people who are vegan or vegetarian, we’re aware of the physical suffering that animals experience within an industrial context; it is so extreme. The violence is just so extreme, and that hits a lot of people.
For me, anyway, delving into the central idea of animal subjectivity, you realize the real complexity involved with the kinds of bonds that are broken, or the kinds of ways that social relationships and their emotionality are harmed through industrial practices. It really is quite devastating. So when people say to me, “Don’t you miss cheese?” or those sorts of products, at this point I really think about dairy as a disruption or a kind of mutilation or violence toward not only animals’ bodies but also the social relationships between calves and their mothers. There is a kind of anguish that cows and calves experience when they’re not allowed to engage with each other. When the mother is not able to mother her baby, that kind of pain certainly transcends any kind of physical—it’s not strictly a physical thing. I was already a dedicated vegan; I’ve been vegan since 1998 or 1997, but it’s gotten deeper and probably a bit more depressing as I’ve learned more about animal minds and behavior. This is somewhat complicated by living in the Niagara area, though, because there’s been a lot of significant debates unfolding over the past few years about a First Nations deer hunt that happens near St. Catharines in Short Hills provincial park. It’s a First Nations hunt and the animal movements here have been quite divided on the issue about whether or not to protest the hunt. Some people have, and some animal activists have also stood in solidarity with Indigenous people who are trying to support that hunt and enact their treaty rights. It’s been important to me—and I don’t feel like it is a contradiction—to think about how issues of hunting are different. Hunting for sustenance is different than talking about the kind of industrial commodification and capitalist rendering of animals as property. I don’t think those analyses are necessarily transferable to thinking about First Nations relationships with animals, and others who are hunting for sustenance and cultural purposes. But, it is interesting: There is someone I know who is an animal activist and went out in support of the First Nations hunters to stand in solidarity with them. In the end she ended up eating some of the deer meat that was offered to her from that deer hunt. It’s not something I would have necessarily done, although I don’t know. In that situation, she had a whole series of experiences that led up to her accepting that meat.
I do see meat eating and the consumption of animal products as complicated, and I’m cautious of language that’s used within critical animal studies related to this notion of “total liberation,” which I really don’t like. Even though that phrase is supposed to enact intersectional theory and address all sorts of forms of domination simultaneously, I don’t think we always know what that liberation would look like. Sometimes people assume as part of a total liberation approach or in their talk about veganism that these are paradigms that will work for everyone in every context. I feel equally annoyed by people who say that veganism is for everybody, as I do by people who swing the other way and say that “poor people can’t be vegan!”; that is the kind of reactivity around veganism that you also see. Well, there are a lot of poor people who practice a plant-based diet, or sometimes eating a plant-based diet can actually be more affordable to people. And, sometimes people are poor and are also animal activists and vegans.
Occasionally, people talk as though they can use these categories to fortify a particular political position. Sometimes it’s actually about erasing animal subjectivity, so I don’t want to go that way either. But I also want to recognize that sometimes there are very real material conditions that make it difficult for people to access vegan food, or that there are a whole set of cultural legacies that would lead people to want to consume animal products. It is understandable for white middle-class vegans to assume that everybody is going to want to, or should, engage in veganism, when those same people have difficulty fully engaging with issues of colonialism or developing a critical consciousness about colonialism and the importance of food procurement and consumption as cultural practices. But that’s not to say that those traditions, or those cultural practices, shouldn’t also be exposed to a critical perspective and that there’s somehow a truth that gets to exist outside of cultural critique. We would just want to bring that into the conversation about how people are talking about and thinking about the feasibility of veganism. Certainly, Margaret Robinson, who is a Mi’kmaq scholar in Toronto, sees continuity between her Mi’kmaq traditions, cultural understandings of animals, and her vegan practice. But, I’m also cautious to not create a false dichotomy between Indigenous understandings of animal practices and the sets of philosophies that underpin white vegan practices, because they’re not mutually exclusive. Certainly there’s been more people who are talking about human–animal relationships in ways that are based on mutual understanding and respect, non-object relationships, and non-objectified understandings of animals that come out of Indigenous philosophies and traditions. So, there seems to be a growing realization among non-Indigenous people that Indigenous thought offers a whole series of valuable insights that can help re-think the possibilities of better human–animal relationships. Those are some of my thoughts on veganism lately.