A law professor at the University of Victoria, Maneesha Deckha has always been interested in questions of justice and nonviolence from an intersectional, postcolonial perspective and credits feminist theory for catalyzing her thinking about human–animal relations. Deckha discusses her strategies for integrating animal studies into her legal pedagogy and why she sees teaching as a potential vehicle for social change. She also shares her experiences as a vegan parent of a vegan child and the deeply affective commiseration she feels when contemplating the routine separation of baby animals from their mothers for milk and meat production. We interviewed Deckha by Skype on October 28, 2016.
VICTORIA MILLIOUS: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
MANEESHA DECKHA: I moved to Canada when I was two. So that whole new-immigrant experience—my family is originally from India— was I would say very central to my formation. We lived in a new-immigrant enclave in Toronto, so I grew up in a public school system that was very multicultural and multiracial at least for that time—the ’70s in Canada. And so I feel like I had a hybrid upbringing in terms of a hybrid identity, being South Asian, Canadian, Indian-Canadian. Also my cultural-religious background is Hindu, so we also had that aspect growing up. Hinduism is so diverse and allows all different kinds of manifestations of adherence, in fact it doesn’t even require adherence, so not in those terms, not like going to a temple or mandir, but just the sense in the home, especially with my mother in terms of celebrations, like Diwali, which we’re celebrating now, things like that. So that was very formative up until high school.
I encountered early experiences of overt racism, obviously there was covert racism that perhaps as a child didn’t really appear to me consciously, but I definitely remember the overt experiences from growing up in Toronto. They were just shocking. But really I developed a racialized consciousness when I switched schools because we moved north of the city at that time to Richmond Hill, which now is very East Asian, but at that time in the late ’80s it was very white still for a Toronto suburb, or not even a suburb, it was a lot of farm lands then, so really, really different than it is today. And so I went to a school there that was really different from the North York community I had come from in that the racial composition was really white; it was also really Anglo and really affluent too.
So you know, that really changed my whole identity. I would say I was really extroverted before, a real leader in all my classes and schools. I was co-valedictorian in my junior high and then I came to high school and I just quickly wanted to blend into the back of the wall and not be noticed and it took a few days to realize what was different about the school. At the same time, I always received academic accolades and that continued at the high school level, but I really tried everything to fit in with my peers. And so the first two years were like starting from scratch, building up networks and friendships. My last years of school were socially enjoyable. I didn’t have one of those alienated high school experiences, but really my personality had changed and I was just not a leader except performing academically and on an individual basis.
And then I went to university, to McGill, for undergrad and I stayed out of university housing for a variety of reasons, so I was not in that student environment. And it was there, through social justice clubs, through courses in humanities, and through an arts undergraduate degree, that I came back to myself as I was as a child before that really white high school experience. This was 1991 to 1995, and the mood in social science and humanities in the critically oriented courses I was taking was very deconstructive and that’s where I took on a feminist identity and also started learning a lot about postcolonial theory, queer theory, Marxist theory, all the range of critical social theories. And I was also away from my parents, though I was near my brother who was at that time a big influence on me. We lived together, but I was away from that high school environment and able to stake out an adult identity that was definitely more politicized and aware. Academically I always enjoyed school, and university even more so because it was self-directed. And I had early ideas that I wanted to be an academic; I wanted to be a professor. I would often pause in my undergrad and think, “What do I want to do with my life? What really motivates me? What can I imagine spending hours and hours at work doing?” And it was really the questions about social justice, especially around race and gender, that were empowering for me and so I started to think about what type of career I could have. At McGill at that time there wasn’t a major in women’s studies, and I worked with the Centre for Research on Teaching Women to petition the Dean of Arts for an ad hoc honors program that I could take, that I could create it. I had the full support of the chair of the center, but I remember that being denied by the Dean of Arts, the reason being that if the faculty was going to allow an ad hoc program, it was admitting that it doesn’t have a complete program. And it didn’t. And then a few years later they did start offering a major or honors in women’s studies. But anyway, I went ahead through the existing flexibility of an interdisciplinary joint honors designation and ended up doing a joint honors in anthropology and political science, focusing on cultural anthropology and political theory with what was then available for women’s studies, which was a minor.
VM: Was this also the time when you began thinking about human– animal relations, or did that come later?
MD: No, it was actually through feminist theory courses that I began thinking about that. There were a lot of critical theory courses and then, as we were questioning all these classical intellectual traditions, I thought, well, why don’t we think about the human as a social construction? Nobody’s really talking about that, extending that, thinking of species as a social construction and then thinking of the human–animal divide. And I was motivated to think about that because of what was going on personally in my life. I did not grow up being a vegetarian in my family. We didn’t eat cows, but I grew up eating other things. And, like I said, at that time I was very close with my brother and he had gone away to university and had come back after his first year being a vegetarian and that really influenced me. To explain why, he showed me some animal rights pamphlets and I read about a mother–child narrative of a cow and her calf in transport and that was it. I just thought “Oh my god! I had no idea.” I felt an amazing passion for what was going on so I became a lacto-ovo vegetarian then. That was in high school, and then by the time I went to university myself and was feeding myself out of residence and cooking, that’s when I transitioned to eat vegan. And then in my classes I had these questions about well, what about the social construction of the human and the animal? And then again in courses where you had control over what your term paper was, or other less major assignments, I took on these questions, whether it was a literary course or political theory or anthropology. So I was able to nurture that as an undergrad even though there was no specific course that I was aware of on human–animal relations at all in social science humanities, or that looked critically at this as a major theme of the course.
So then, thinking about careers, I gravitated toward law. Like many students coming in, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, but at least I knew a law degree would provide some type of legitimacy, credibility, and security for a future career. And so I set my sights on law school and I ended up going to the University of Toronto after my undergraduate degree. Again, that was a bit of a homogenizing experience because in the first year the curriculum was all set and there was very little critical theory, at least as it was taught by the professors that I had at the time. And the University of Toronto Law School was very much a high school environment because all your needs and courses were in one building, and you moved through all your classes with the same 80 students. So I felt I had been kind of catapulted from the critical theory, activist echelons at McGill, back to a very affluent, mostly white community at the University of Toronto, where it was a very liberal humanist paradigm in the classroom. So in the first year, being committed to it was a struggle. I was committed to my degree and education, but really liking the courses was a struggle, and fitting in was a struggle. I also lived at home then with my parents, so I wasn’t able to immerse myself socially as much as if I had lived with others. And the nature of law school is that, even though the second year is officially elective, you feel that some courses are mandatory, because you can’t make sense of all the core courses you have without taking certain others. So again I was taking these courses I felt I needed to take to be a good lawyer, to pass the bar, to get articling positions. It was really in the third year that I finally felt I had room in my schedule for the seminar theoretical courses I wanted to take. And when I did that, I came back to thinking about being an academic. I must also say, the first year of law school is a very sobering experience. Almost all of the students at the University of Toronto are used to straight-A averages and high achievement—and all of a sudden you are graded on a curve, and only 10 percent of the class is scoring above B+. So it totally deflated my confidence about being a law professor and I didn’t think that I was going to go into legal academia. But when I came into the third year and started taking the courses I really loved, then I saw my grades go back to the level I was used to. It was also a smaller environment and there were seminar, writing-based courses rather than the 100 percent exams which dominate first and second year. You get to know your professors, and I had very encouraging professors. I have to credit Jennifer Nedelsky, a very prominent relational feminist theorist then at the University of Toronto, for giving me the confidence to think about grad school because she basically told me to do it. I confessed my fears about my transcript to her and she put my grades into context, that these seminar-based courses were much closer to what grad school requires than the exam-based courses.
It was actually at the University of Toronto Law School where I did a directed reading about animals as property in the law with Professor Craig Scott. I also had a variety of courses where I was able to explore feminist issues and feminist animal issues, so I really enjoyed that time. And then I had this law degree and the whole mass thinking from the students is, “Of course you’re going to article, of course you’re going to practice,” so I felt caught up in that. I also wanted to practice for a little while and see what that was like, and get called to the bar. So I did that, but I kept in contact with my professors, who became my referees for graduate school. I got called to the bar in 2000, worked as a lawyer until August 2001, and then went to graduate school. I did my LLM at Columbia between 2001 and 2002. There I took a lot of theoretical courses. I also did a directed reading program called an LLM thesis with two prominent feminist theorists: Katherine Franke, who is at Columbia, and Reva Siegal from Yale University Law School, who was visiting that year. I didn’t do an animal project because I felt, based on their interests, it wouldn’t be their first choice of what to supervise. So I did a project looking at the cultural defense in law, about a series of papers that constituted a literature by then, that had come out among feminists about how courts should deal with cultural claims, largely (but not purely) by males accused, in cases involving domestic violence. The perpetrators argued that their culture should be taken into account when they are being assessed for whether or not they’re guilty of something. It’s usually seen as an excuse for what they’ve done. I looked at some of the feminist writings on that, which I saw as very divergent approaches, to assess them and suggest a path forward. So that was my LLM thesis.
Again, at that time I was suffering—as many women do—from lack of self-confidence as to actual abilities. I didn’t think I was in a position to start applying for academic positions. I felt like I didn’t have any real publications; I just had one student publication; I was still in an LLM program, maybe I should be in a doctorate . . . a host of reasons were in my head. But then I saw these other Canadian students applying to Canadian positions, and I began comparing myself with them. One thing the University of Toronto Law School does subtly impart, for good or for bad, is that it is “the best law school in Canada and any other law school doesn’t compare.” So I saw students from other law schools applying and I was like, “Well, maybe I should, because I did go to the University of Toronto. . . .” That gave me some motivation and confidence to go, “Okay, let me just apply and see what happens.” It’s a good thing I did, because I ended up with two interviews and very fortunately with two job offers—both of which were based on job talks about animal rights. Because with the interview process, I basically got these interview offers and then I had to travel from New York for an interview in Victoria, and then an interview in Ottawa within two weeks. And that was just totally traumatizing because I was so scared of doing a job talk in front of faculty members, and I also knew going back to Canada to talk about American law, which is what I was immersed in at that time, was not going to be popular. So I had to think, What could I create a job talk on that I knew like the back of my hand, and that would not be rehearsed or heard to death by these scholars? So I settled on animal rights—against some advice that it was actually a death knell to do this. I talked about animals, and a critical reading of intersectionality as a theory, and why it didn’t apply to animals at that point; I talked about species difference as something that should be factored into an intersectional approach. That’s how I got my job offers and how my academic life started.
VM: What do you see as the primary purpose of your work, and why do you do what you do?
MD: To make a social impact; to make a social difference; to actually bring about some type of change. I’m really motivated by my personal sense of what compassion and justice entail, and that has always influenced my intellectual interests, even before they fully enveloped the question of animals. As an academic, I realize that most people reading my writings are just other academics; the audience is very limited. But I try to think about teaching to students as well, those who aren’t ever going to read my research publications, through my core courses in the law school. I feel that part of my work is to contribute to a field that is trying to make social change and trying to challenge intellectual inquiry. And in the scope of those inquiries to affect other academics, and academia as well. But also to reach students who are presumably going forward with legal careers, who are going to have some type of position of influence, as legally trained people usually do compared to the rest of the population. I’m hoping to influence them as well to think critically about human–animal relations and bring that into their lives. I really became an adherent of intersectional theory, and when I realized it was so human focused I really wanted to think critically about why that was as it seemed so obvious to me that its tenets should critique anthropocentrism and make visible the connections of human-based oppressions with species hierarchies.
VM: I like what you mentioned about teaching. Could you describe how your work resonates with your students, or does it? What experiences have you had teaching your material, and what kind of reception do you typically get?
MD: When I first started it was in a core first-year course, which typically had a small cohort that was outwardly hostile to critical theory and critical thinking. I used to teach a famous American article in critical race theory when I taught property law. So property law is a mandatory first-year course which I taught for my first six years, and for many of those years I taught this article called Whiteness as Property by Cheryl Harris—an article that tries to explain why we can understand the racial identity of being white, at least in the United States, by focusing on property. And one of the first things you teach in property in the common law tradition is that property is a right, not a thing. We tend to think of property as “things,” but we what we learn in law school is that property is a right. And it’s intangible; it’s a conceptual way of thinking of things. This is what the article about whiteness is talking about. And that class always incited a lot of student resistance. I’m laughing about it now, but teaching it as a young junior professor was not fun. I did it really out of a commitment to critical race tenets, a feeling that it should be taught. And I never thought there was going to be something that would enrage students more, but when I started talking about animals, I was like, “Oh! Yes, here’s a topic that is more difficult to teach.”
I have to say at that time, and also today, the University of Victoria Law School is quite a white community. It’s quite a progressive school, but it’s also quite a white community. In my courses I used to do modules toward the end of the year about thinking really critically about what it is we say is property. Because in the common law, the law basically divides us into two things: You’re either a person or you’re property. So I would do modules inspired by feminist theory about, What do we say absolutely falls into the category of personhood and can’t be commodified? This was inspired by theories about commodification of eggs and sperm in the human body, and whether women should be able to sell certain things in their bodies. Following that module I would then flip the question to say, Well, what is it that we normalize as property? What do we always already think of as property but maybe should think of as being in the personhood realm? And then I would introduce the topic about nonhuman animals as persons. The first time I did this, you could hear laughs by some of the students in the classroom, like how could this possibly . . . ? And to use the term nonhuman animal at that time, not animals, elicited all kinds of guffaws and laughs and snickering. So then I had to come back into class and be quite mainstream about it and just arm myself with these big names from big American law schools who talk about these issues, and bring in the books and talk about their theories. But it was very dispiriting to do year in, year out—so I didn’t do it year in and year out. Or I would enlist the support of respected white male colleagues also teaching about property in other sections, to have the same syllabi and for them to include some material on animals. That was a strategy about how to get things across. It’s a continual strategy, not just on animal issues but at law schools in general, I would say, about how to introduce critical thinking in the first year without eliciting backlash from students who just want to be lawyers and tell you that if they wanted to critically think they would have gone to grad school and not law school. It’s a common refrain you hear from students. And it’s a total pressure-cooker situation in the first year with hundred percent finals and so much riding on transcripts, that the anxiety spreads when you hear grumblings from a small cohort about what’s being taught and what’s not being taught. Yeah, it’s usually hostile. But then, my first seminar I started in the law school was called Animals, Culture, and the Law. And with students in seminars, who are self-motivated to be there, it’s always been a very positive, great teaching experience. And really one of the highlights of teaching for me.
VM: Sammi and I are sharing looks while you’re speaking because as sociocultural theorists and teachers in a kinesiology department we have a somewhat similar challenge in that many of the students come here because they want to practice in medicine or sports therapy. So trying to introduce the critical theory and the sociology courses to persons who really don’t have an interest in that and don’t want to cultivate an interest in that can be a challenge.
SAMANTHA KING: Is there a key concept that guides your thinking about animals and your other areas of interest?
MD: I would say, in terms of interests and personal motivation, the whole idea of justice has always motivated me—to go to law school, and to think about making law reform and change. In terms of intellectual analysis and writing, I would say it’s probably the concept of nonviolence— what is violence, what does it look like, what would nonviolent, peaceful interspecies relations look like. This whole idea of nonviolence informs all of my interest in theory, and how to live nonviolently and be free from violence.
SK: Can you discuss what you see as the potential for postcolonial, posthumanist feminist theory in approaching questions related to nonhuman animals? We’re asking here, in part, about what you see as the particular contribution of your work and the lens that you bring to it—both within law and outside, since your work is read far beyond the legal field.
MD: Thank you. The strand in eco-feminist theory that is variously called “vegetarian eco-feminist theory” or the “feminist animal care tradition,” and which is epitomized by scholars like Carol Adams, Josephine Donovan, Marti Kheel, Greta Gaard, and Lori Gruen, for example, was very much an intellectual home for me when I first started thinking about feminist theory and animals, because here you have feminists talking about individual animals and why they matter. As much as I align myself with that theory—and obviously the intersectional critique of it—I always felt that contrary to anti-essentialist critiques that I also worked rigorously with in the 1990s and early 2000s, that this strand of eco-feminist theory was more rooted in the cultural feminist/ radical feminist realm. So while these feminists were talking about racial oppression and class issues, these issues weren’t central to the analysis, as gender was. And through anti-essentialist critiques my worldview has always been that gender is always already informed by other vectors of difference.
In my undergrad years, I was very much informed by postcolonial theory—the whole critique of Western frames of viewing everything. And when I became vegetarian, that wasn’t an issue for my nonvegetarian parents, perhaps because of my upbringing in a more culturally Indian Hindu tradition where vegetarianism is more the norm. There was more of an issue with veganism because it is much less familiar, but vegetarianism was so normalized. So I always felt that these Western traditions about how to view animals in the Judeo-Christian ethic, that was a key problem, especially in Western societies, as to how animals are viewed. So I felt that a postcolonial reading of human–animal relations was central to a critique of animals. And I didn’t see that as centralized in the feminist care tradition. So in my writings I am influenced by the strand of eco-feminist theory, but I also very much feel that postcolonial analysis is necessary to properly contextualize issues; to understand how food issues, food politics, and other issues involving animals are not only gendered, as feminists in this tradition talk about, but also very racialized issues. You could probably have an intersectional analysis of what’s going on in terms of how humans treat animals and encode animals and constitute their own identities through animals and animality. I credit postcolonial theory with really bringing the concept of “otherness” into the Western intellectual sphere, so I invoke it for that reason as well. Through postcolonial study I am also mindful of the debates about not having universal positions, or universal positions being seen as anathema to postcolonial theory, looking at things in localized ways. Then that brings up the question, Well, what about marginalized cultures, human cultures, indigenous cultures that use animals for food, and how to think of that. I feel a postcolonial reading brings those issues more centrally to debates than readings which don’t bring in critiques of Western ways of knowing and seeing.
SK: We’re going to move now to the more food-oriented questions. You’ve talked a little bit about your transition to veganism, but maybe you could discuss your current relationship to consuming animals and to what extent has this been an issue or preoccupation to you. Have your thoughts or feelings changed over time?
MD: Yes, I am still a vegan. I can’t really say my thoughts have changed over time about that. It’s not really a preoccupation for me; I guess these days I’m more preoccupied with the judgment I receive for having my young child be vegan. I’ve become aware of the sensationalist media stories about vegan mothers being charged with neglecting care and things like that. With the baby, I have to say that I don’t go around announcing that he is a vegan. For myself, I’ll go to a medical practitioner and say I’m a vegan. But I won’t say that about the child just because I feel the biomedical profession is largely against my beliefs about parenting. There are so many areas of clashing that I don’t generally offer information, unless I feel it is relevant, about how I parent at home. I understand the pressure that mothers are under, in terms of getting scrutinized. I think now in the last five years there is more mainstream awareness about veganism. I wouldn’t say it’s mainstream at all in terms of support, even by nonvegans or vegetarians, but more people certainly know what it is. But maybe it’s just this heightened sense of protection toward my child. I do worry there could be some ridiculous claim brought about raising humans vegan that gets morphed into some huge legal issue for us. I think that’s what makes me really nervous about talking openly to authoritative figures in various professions about his veganism. To my friends, obviously from my principles they know what I am about, and when we socialize, the child is eating what I am eating. And as they do over dinner tables, these questions about vegetarianism and veganism come up endlessly, so it’s more known. But I don’t go to my GP and talk about my child being vegan.
SK: While we’re on dinner tables, I wonder if you could talk about your approach to buying or otherwise procuring food, and how that has changed or not, now that you’re a parent.
MD: Sure, yes. I try to be conscious of all my choices. When I moved to Victoria for my job in 2002 I quickly saw it was an organic capital of Canada. At that time I didn’t feel like the price disparity between conventional food and organic food was as significant as it was when I was a student in Toronto—by then I was earning. So I started eating organic; I don’t exclusively eat organic—I’m still price-conscious to a certain extent—but we do eat a lot of organic food. And in British Columbia I tried to buy local, from farmers’ markets in the summer. All those issues: trying to eat less processed, making things at home— mostly to control other factors like salt and so on. I would like to get into the realm of growing my own vegetables; I haven’t yet, but it’s an aspiration. But yes, we try to eat locally, organically vegan choices. And when it’s not prohibitively expensive, to buy certain commodities fair trade if they only come from international sources.
SK: You’ve said that your perspective and practice of veganism has been pretty constant for a long time now; is there anything you’d like to add about the relationship between your writing and eating practices?
MD: When I became a mother, and I started breastfeeding, I started becoming more acquainted with the type of parenting I am following, which I guess would fall under the umbrella of attachment or natural parenting. At this time I became really aware of these issues: the importance of having your infant close to you, what they need in their first year in terms of responsiveness and connection and stimulation, this experience of affect attunement. I became vegan originally because I learned more about the dairy milk industry, because I realized a connection to the veal industry, but it was really because of this idea of drinking another mammal’s milk that resonated with me. Like, why would we do that? No other animals do that. And then seeing how dairy cows were treated. But it wasn’t until I became a mother that I really emotionally connected to the idea of: This is a mother whose baby is being taken away from her; this is a baby being ripped from the mother and being denied what is rightfully that baby’s, that’s their milk not a human child’s milk or a human adult’s milk. That is what the calf needs to live and she also needs to be with her mother to thrive. Even these words, I feel, don’t give justice to this sense of this deep compassion I feel for this infant child bond now that I’m in it, and I just can’t even look at the pictures of mother cows or pigs, such as pigs caught in gestation crates and away from their piglets. I think I posted one of those images on my Facebook account and commented, “If I wasn’t a vegetarian before becoming a mother I certainly would be now.” And it shows that separating moment and the trap moment of the mother that can’t get to her piglet, or the piglet that can’t get to his mom. I just find it devastating to think about what goes on for those animals now. It’s endless misery, pain, and violence that all stems from the exploitation of female mammals’ reproductive capacities. The emotional trauma for the mothers separated from their calves really became heightened for me, like my commitment to veganism—to not drinking dairy especially—has been fortified by this experience. That being said, it’s still in the day-to-day moments of eating with others at celebrations or worrying that my child should have enough solids when we’re out on the road and looking at the packages, like “Does this have whey in it, does it have this in it.” I wouldn’t absolutely rule out having something with a milk product in it, not something like milk or ice cream or cheese or anything like that, but if I felt really under pressure and that was what was available I might give him that. But then I also see that as a failing of my own commitment that I should really not, and I should have been better prepared by bringing something for the baby. I also feel tremendously guilty when that occurs since I immediately recall the images of mother-and-calf separation. I am also indelibly shaped in my compassion/empathy/guilt by Greta Gaard’s closing narrative in her 2013 article in the special issue of American Quarterly focusing on sex, race, and species where she seeks to develop a postcolonial feminist milk studies and tells the story of the mother cow who has twins and hides one away from the farm to try to save that baby. She knows from experience that the farmer will take away her calf and proceed to milk her and so she hides only one calf, knowing the farmer will take away the other baby, who is indeed, stolen from her. I will leave it to your readers to find out the heartbreaking end to the mother’s effort to save at least one of her calves. When I read that account I couldn’t stop crying. It is an image of violence, pain, and trauma that I can’t get out of my head even now and also really don’t want to completely because I feel it holds me accountable to do something for all the animals treated so heinously, who are ripped from their kin and denied their most desired loving and social relations. So, yes, I really do feel more intensified with my commitment to veganism on a very personal level. Now if I try to talk about veganism to a mother—if they brought it up; I don’t typically bring up these conversations socially myself—I would emphasize this relation, the mother–child issue inherent to the cow–calf relationship, in a way that I didn’t before.
SK: One of our other interviewees referred to his veganism as a limited tactic. He was trying to draw out the differences between veganism as a political tool versus a personal ethic. I’m wondering how you view your veganism in relation to your commitment to social justice and how you would think about it in terms of ethics or politics.
MD: I guess I would say it’s both. It’s important to my sense of identity, to who I am as a person even if I weren’t in academia or weren’t engaged in what I see as politics. But it’s also a very politicized identity because it’s such a minority position; you’re inviting at least challenge— if not ridicule and hostility—in social spheres that are not exclusively your friends. Or even among friendly people it can be a source of challenge in a way that other eating practices aren’t. I do want to do it for political reasons; I would be vegan even if the rest of the world was vegan. So I don’t only do it as a tactic to emulate change; it’s important to me in terms of my ideas of justice and violence, and what my ideas of animals are.
VM: Can you tell us about a time when your dietary practices have been the subject of awkwardness, celebration, or hostility? Do you have a particular story you wouldn’t mind sharing?
MD: I can’t say that there’s one that stands out for me, though there is a kind of redemption story. I was on exchange in California in my third year of undergrad, at San Francisco State University. I quickly found a group of friends and developed feelings for a boy, and when he heard about my veganism he totally ridiculed it in front of our other friends, basically calling me a cow—I didn’t mind that association, but I knew he meant it in a disparaging way—because “all I ate was grass,” and then we were still friends, and I still had a crush on him at that point. But then I saw him fourteen years later in 2008. We were both in New York, so we met up. He took one look at me and said something along the lines of, “Wow, you haven’t aged a bit—I guess veganism is the way to go!” That was the first thing he remembered about me and I was like, “Oh, if it takes fifteen years to change someone’s mind, it takes fifteen years.” I mean it’s common; that’s probably the most negative thing that anyone has ever said to me, that was an insult on a personal level in front of me. Obviously through the years there have been awkward moments at dining tables about, “Why are you vegan?”—things like that. But nothing I can recall was hostile. A moment of celebration was my vegan wedding, where one of my friends who spoke at the speeches really talked about that. And as much as I engaged in the whole wedding industry, I tried to make choices around food and other issues about consumption that were more in line with my politics. That was nice to hear because I’m sure there were guests who were wondering what they were going to eat at a vegan wedding. So it was nice to get that public moment to acknowledge me for it.
VM: Can you describe a key dilemma or question that haunts you?
MD: I don’t think it haunts me . . . but I find it odd and dispiriting that veganism is challenged as being racist or colonial. Maybe it’s my upbringing in the Indian South Asian tradition of nonviolence; hearing about Gandhi, learning about Ahimsa at an early age even though we weren’t vegetarian as a family, learning that in India the restaurants are called “veg” or “nonveg,” which shows you the framing of what is normative and what isn’t there. Vegetarian or nonvegetarian—it was just normalized; it’s kind of an ethnic identity to be vegetarian. So to hear critical intellectuals frame it as an exclusionary choice, I don’t think those critiques are well sustained when you take a global perspective and when you think about how the world eats and how different cultures eat. I understand the reasons for those arguments; I’m sympathetic to some of them, but it’s never resonated for me because I’ve always felt that vegetarianism was an Indian tradition or at least an Indian–Hindu tradition and the whole idea of nonviolence is really something I’ve learned about for a long time. While I admit veganism can be an exclusionary choice in certain contexts, I think that’s true of all practices. So always discussing and arguing about that critique, I find frustrating. Especially if you think about the levels of violence animals are facing, the immense difficulty of mobilizing humans to see such violence as violence, and what a minoritized position practicing veganism is, I feel that getting mired in that question is spending precious time on an issue that should be directed elsewhere. At the same time, I’m mindful of the critiques of feminist theorists who are not embracing anti-essentialist theory in the 1990s, saying, “There’s so much feminism has to do; why are we focusing on these debates within feminist theory about whether or not mainstream Western feminist theory is essentialist.” Of course I focused on those debates and I think it was important to do so. So it’s an important debate to have, but ultimately I feel it’s a dispiriting one. And my postcolonial teachings really motivate me to always leave my views open to critique and alteration; and the idea that universal propositions should be suspect, so I really try to grapple with that. So I’m trying to live by a nonviolent ethic, which for me means being vegan. I would like that to be promoted among everyone else, but then I have to think about whether that is a problem, given that not all people see violence in the way I do. And to constantly think about how I accommodate other positions, or grapple with them, or even offer a gesture of accommodation. Though I don’t like that line because it seems like a recognition of a hierarchical relationship. Basically, how to have a nonviolent ethic for all beings, people, animals, other nonhumans and still allow for exclusions or exceptions is an issue that I struggle with.