Even as a young child, Sunaura Taylor, now an artist, activist, and disability and animal studies scholar, understood that humans, animals, and the environment are intensely interconnected. Taylor’s ecological orientation is not simply an intellectual focus but rather a set of political beliefs she endeavors to embody in her everyday life, though she admits that doing so is rarely easy. Taylor’s work demands that audiences rethink the worthiness of vulnerability, of dependency, and of interdependency, particularly as these concepts speak to shared experiences among all living organisms in times of environmental turmoil and fragility. We discuss humane meat, vegan parenting, and the behavioral shifts that can occur when emotional knowledges synchronize with cognitive truths. We interviewed Taylor by Skype on February 16, 2017.
SUNAURA TAYLOR: Could you tell me a bit about the project, just to refresh?
SAMANTHA KING: Sure. The project emerged from several different directions, but in part it was inspired by an interview with Donna Haraway, where she describes her complex relationship to eating meat. We were intrigued by her response and began thinking about other scholars who primarily write about multispecies relationships but who have not explicitly addressed questions of food in their work. We felt there was a gap in that literature. But we also ended up speaking with a small number of people like yourself, who have written about or addressed those questions. And we wanted to give scholars who address eating animals in concert with questions of colonialism, race, disability, sexuality, and so on a chance to talk about those connections and to address the normativity of multispecies ethics.
ST: That’s exciting! It is fascinating to me how the ways in which we consume animals on a daily basis—whether through clothing or through food or whatever—is often absent within animal studies. So I love that you all are asking people to grapple with it more. I think that’s great.
SK: Well, thank you. At some point you will get to read each other’s interviews. It would also be cool to bring the contributors together in order to have that conversation. So stay tuned!
VICTORIA MILLIOUS: So we’ll start at the beginning. Could you talk about when and where you were born and raised and your formative, cultural, intellectual, political experiences?
ST: I was born in Tucson, Arizona, and, no doubt the most obvious formative experience is that I was born disabled. From a very young age I had an understanding that my disability was caused by water contamination in Tucson. Specifically, it was military pollution that affected largely Latinx communities on the Southside and also a portion of Tohono O’odham land. So from a really early age that knowledge, combined with the fact that my parents were and are very creative, unconventional, and progressive people, created an environment where thinking about political and social justice issues was just part of our daily lives. Also, my mom had been vegetarian for a large part of her life, so thanks to her, including animals in our broader understandings of justice always made sense to our family. I just had this sense as a child that my body was the way it was because of how poorly people treat each other and the environment. That was the understanding I had as a young kid, which sort of gave me this identity as an activist. I felt this responsibility as a kid and I think on one level it also gave me meaning, gave me a way to understand being disabled.
The other really formative thing is that my parents unschooled my siblings and me, which is basically a radical form of homeschooling. At this point I was probably six or seven, and we had moved from Arizona to Athens, Georgia. My mom and dad really felt that a lot of the educational options available to kids were stifling to a kid’s natural curiosity. So they unschooled us, which is the philosophy that kids have an innate desire to learn and that if you give them a supportive and enriching environment, they will go out and learn things, because that’s what kids do—they’re curious. That’s how my parents raised us. I have three siblings: my older sister, Astra, who’s two years older; my brother, Alex, who is two years younger; and my sister Nye, who is ten years younger. They were also, of course, extremely formative. Astra started a magazine, Kids for Animal Rights and the Environment, when she was about ten. Which was amazing! She edited it and sold it at the local health food store and through other venues. All the siblings and all of our homeschooling friends, we all wrote articles for it. So we definitely fed into each other’s political thinking too.
SK: As someone who lived in Tucson briefly, I’m having one of those “How did I not know this?” moments about military pollution and the Tohono O’odham land. Were the pollution and its effects on people recognized publicly and addressed politically?
ST: Yeah, it’s surprisingly not that well known outside Tucson, despite its being an important early environmental justice case. Affected residents eventually brought a major lawsuit against the responsible parties, and at the time the out-of-court settlement was the largest for any such case. Basically, from about the 1950s until the 1980s, Hughes Missile Company [now Raytheon] and other defense and electronics industries were burying their toxic waste in unlined pits in the ground. And they knew at a certain point that it was seeping into the aquifer and thus the drinking water, but neither they nor the city of Tucson informed the communities. In fact, at least some city representatives denied the problem by suggesting terribly racist reasons for why people were getting sick—suggesting they were just eating too many beans, for instance. Just horrible stuff. I’m currently researching this site for my dissertation, actually.
VM: That’s really interesting, thank you. And we both look forward to reading your dissertation.
ST: I look forward to knowing exactly what the hell my dissertation is going to be!
VM: I can so relate to that! It took me many years. You’ve already addressed this a bit, but if you could move us a little forward in time, how did you become an artist, writer, and activist?
ST: My mom and dad are both artists: My dad is a scientist, but also a composer and musician. And my mom is a writer and painter, and she currently runs a small animal sanctuary called Dharma Farm. So art was something that was always in my home. I started drawing when I was super young, I don’t even know when; I was always interested in drawing. And then when I was around eleven, we all got my mom a bunch of paints for her birthday and she started painting a lot, after a few years of not doing so much just because of how busy she was raising us. And of course, we were nerdy unschoolers, so we all wanted to hang out in the same room together and paint too! I just fell in love with it, and because I was an unschooler I was able to just spend all my time doing that. It wasn’t like I had to go to school and then come back and I could draw for an hour; I could literally spend six to eight hours in the studio just messing around. That’s how the painting thing emerged for me, I really just fell in love with it. Eventually I got an MFA at Berkeley in their department of Art Practice—which was such a great program. I graduated from there in 2008. While there I really started getting obsessed with veganism and animal issues. I had been a vegetarian since I was six, but this was . . . there is a cliché when people, especially vegetarians, suddenly realize that they really should be vegan, they just become obsessed, which was totally true for me. It completely consumed my life, to such a degree that I was basically like, “I have to make art about this! I have to write about this! I have to research it! I have to learn everything I can about it!” So I started doing all that, and that eventually led to my making these connections with disability studies—which I had been studying and writing about for many years already—and then writing my book, and then getting a PhD. It was this moment of being so overwhelmed by what is happening to animals on a daily level, and that I was contributing to that—that it really transformed my life trajectory, from being really committed to painting and drawing, to being more of an interdisciplinary artist/scholar.
VM: The paintings featured in Beasts of Burden, and other places, were those done during your MFA or afterward?
ST: Yeah, so I think the paintings of animals in factory farms that I did at Berkeley are largely to blame for this obsession that took over my life. Those paintings and my siblings, actually. I guess first, my siblings and I all became vegetarian around the time that I was six—basically we came across some sort of table for animal rights, and we all had this epiphany that meat was animals. It was one of those life-altering kid things where it was like “What! My world is turned upside-down!” So then we basically just said, “We’re not going to eat meat anymore, Mom and Dad. You guys have to deal with it.” My mom was into it because she had been vegetarian on and off for a long time, and my dad soon supported it too. They’ve both been vegan for years now. My siblings each became vegan when they were kids. But I didn’t. And we constantly had arguments about it, and for some reason it just wasn’t getting into my head. I understood rationally, but it didn’t really hit me. And then, skip forward many years and I’m in this art program at Berkeley, and I had decided before I left that I really wanted to paint a chicken truck. Where I grew up in Georgia, you would see them all the time because there are so many chicken factories there. My siblings and I had this tradition that whenever we were driving in the car, we would hold our breath when we saw one. I think it started because it’s such a horrible smell: the 100-degree heat of a Georgia summer combined with dying birds. But then it morphed into this morbid way of experiencing the intensity and awfulness of what was happening beside us. So I had this sort of emotional attachment to these chicken trucks and decided that I wanted to paint one. I ended up doing a painting that was about eight feet by ten-and-a-half feet. It took me a year, so it was basically what I did while I was at my MFA, and . . . if you spend a year looking at animals you learn a lot. I learned they were egg-laying hens, I learned about the industry, I learned that those hens, like all chickens used in industrial animal facilities, were disabled. And that sort of meditation that goes into focusing on something like that and doing the research for it was completely . . . I was just like, “Oh my God, I can’t eat eggs anymore! My siblings were right all along!” I always joke that I had to write a book about this stuff because I had such extreme guilt that I was the last sibling to get it!
VM: Siblings have a way of calling some truths.
ST: Yes, they really do.
SK: Jonathan Safran Foer talks about that in Eating Animals. He says that we all know at some level that factory farming is horrific and that it doesn’t somehow stop at meat, that it extends to dairy and eggs and all of that. But there’s something about being ready to hear or feel that horror fully; it’s not just about getting the logic of the argument but being open to it and affected by it.
ST: Yeah. And I had wanted to be vegan for years. I think it was my New Year’s resolution probably five years in a row, to be vegan. But somehow I just hadn’t gotten to that place where it became so obvious to me on a visceral level that it was easy for me to do—which it was at a certain point. I think it was also doing my own research. It’s one thing to have other people tell you logical things, but I remember, for example, I was convinced that surely in the Bay Area I could find humane cheese and humane eggs. I was just like, “Okay, if they exist, I’m going to be able to find them here.” Because I had always had this idea that “Well, but maybe this cheese doesn’t come from a factory farm. You don’t have to kill the animal to get this.” There were all these little loopholes or something in my mind. Then once I started doing my own research I was forced to acknowledge that “No. Actually.” Any way you cut it, that is a fantasy land. There simply are not female animals happily lining up to offer up their reproductive labor to human beings, which of course is what eggs and milk are. Humans always coerce it from them. But I had to come to those conclusions on my own. And for me, it was also realizing the connections between animal oppression and disability oppression that really forced me to start thinking about veganism differently. I understood disability oppression on such an emotional and structural level that once I was able to make those connections, then I could no longer not make them.
VM: So what do you see as the primary purpose of your work? Here we mean your artistic work, activist work, academic work.
ST: I don’t think I could really say what my primary purpose is. But I can say some things that are sort of constant themes or values in my work. I think broadly I want to open up alternative ways for people to think about and experience disability, as well as their understandings of and relationships to the nonhuman world—and I see these two processes as entangled. There are also certain concepts that are really central to me— vulnerability, interdependence, dependency—even as I’m still trying to figure out what they mean exactly. These concepts, which are so central to disability studies, seem especially important to bring forward right now in terms of climate change and mass extinction, and so part of my work is to expose these central disability themes as vital to thinking across species. But it doesn’t just go in one direction, and so it is also a matter of showing the importance of thinking ecologically and across species to creating new and generative ways of understanding disability. Ultimately, of course, I’d say that I’m interested in imagining what liberation across species could look like, and I hope my work is working toward that.
SK: I think you probably already answered our question about how you came to be interested in animals and animal ethics, but is there anything you want to add?
ST: I would just emphasize that it was so many different factors that brought me to the point I’m at now. Meeting disabled people who were themselves vegan and animal advocates was also this significant moment . . . because it’s so hard for me to cook; it’s so hard for me to do that sort of work. So I always had an excuse that was also very valid: “Well, I already have such a hard time eating” and “I have other people help me cook and stuff, so this is going to be more work for them.” That was also part of the narrative in my head. So meeting other disabled people who were making those choices despite similar challenges, I think was also a major motivation for me to become vegan.
SK: What kinds of things made that possible? Was it just a matter of asking the people who helped you to do different kinds of things? What did that look like in practice?
ST: In practice there were quite a few things. I talk about this in my book: that becoming vegan was perfectly aligned with coming to terms with the fact that I needed help, and that I needed to hire someone to help me. So in that way I felt that the coming into realization of veganism and coming into a political awareness of disability, and not feeling ashamed that I needed help, was actually about figuring out a practice of interdependence. I think there’s a reason those things happened at the same time. So pretty soon after I became vegan I started hiring someone to cook for me twice a week. In California you can get funding for in-home care, which unfortunately in a lot of places you can’t. I was also extremely lucky because I have a partner who became vegan very quickly; it was probably only a few months after me that he became vegan. And my family is vegan, so I was already in this very privileged position where it was pretty easy for me in terms of my social network to do that. I’m also not someone who has a difficult time digesting certain foods; I don’t have a lot of allergies. I think a lot of disabled people often have more complications in terms of eating and in terms of who is helping them. Are they in institutions? Do they have any choice about who is helping them? All those factors are really important to consider, in terms of disabled people and their choice—and sometimes lack thereof—of being vegan.
SK: Could you tell us more about how and when you started to think about the connections between the oppression of animals and the oppression of disabled people? Perhaps you could also discuss your forthcoming book, and what animal studies and disability studies have to learn from one another.
ST: The first entryway into making these connections for me was actually with the painting I was doing of the hens on the chicken truck. The more research I did, the more I realized that animals in factory farms are disabled. They become disabled because it’s such an extremely brutal environment, but they are also bred to be disabled—it is what makes them profitable. The more I read the more I realized that disabling animals is not incidental to animal industries. It is essential for the work they do and the profit they create. Virtually all animals used in food production are in fact manufactured to be disabled, with bodies that have been bred to produce so much product that the animals are impaired. A similar pattern of what I would call “profitable disablement” can be seen across a wide variety of animal industries, from fur farms, and animal research labs, to zoos and circuses. The very thing that makes an animal profitable is disabling.
Thinking about exploited animals as disabled led me to start considering how ableism as a system of oppression affects nonhumans. And in many ways that is actually really what my book is about. It is really a way of looking at ableism expansively, demonstrating that ableism oppresses everyone, including nonhuman animals. I do this by considering how intellectual and physical capacities are used to justify exclusion—right? Animals can’t do this or that so we are justified in demeaning them—but also by delving into the concepts I mentioned above, such as dependency, which is fraught with negative connotations and is often associated with both disabled people and domesticated animals. Ableism forms our worlds in all sorts of different ways. But what I’m looking at particularly in this book is how ableism, at least within Western worldviews, affects the ways in which we understand and think about animals as lacking, as physically and intellectually inferior in all these different ways.
And finally, the book also really tries to investigate histories of dehumanization and attempts to expose shared genealogies of disability and animal oppression. I try to grapple with histories of demeaning animal comparisons while also making room for the importance of acknowledging that we are all animals. I am interested in the spaces that can open up when we recognize that we are animals. I have a few moments throughout the book where I write about the way my body moves in ways that are very animalistic. I don’t use my hands; I often use my mouth to do things. The ways in which I feel animal in my body and the ways in which that doesn’t have to be a negative experience—that it in fact can be a moment of recognizing shared experiences with other species, and also shared vulnerabilities.
At the same time, I am careful to recognize that part of why I can go there is that I’m white, I’m not intellectually disabled, I don’t have a communication impairment. Right? There are multiple ways in which identifying as or claiming animal is just far too dangerous for some people—people who historically have been animalized as a way of justifying their exploitation or murder. I am very careful in the book to recognize that as much as I want us to think about how we are all animals, and the radical importance of doing so, I also want us to simultaneously hold onto the fact, as philosopher Licia Carlson does, that for some people the most radical thing is to claim their humanity. Because that is something that has been denied to a lot of people.
SK: The talk you gave in Alberta has been so helpful for my thinking and teaching—to think about shared histories and how notions of dependency “travel.” Have you had any pushback on these ideas? While you are careful to recognize histories of dehumanization and ongoing dehumanization, it’s also important to you to acknowledge that we’re all animals. How do people respond to those claims?
ST: My book hasn’t come out yet, so I really can’t say, but I’m assuming I might.
Animal rights and disability rights have very often been presented as at odds, or at least in conflict. There are many reasons for this: the troubling and ableist ways that disability has been used in some popular animal rights arguments—Peter Singer’s work for example; the mainstream animal rights movement’s obsession with health and physical fitness; and of course because of the ways disabled people have been dehumanized historically. My book is really trying to show how unfortunate, problematic, and unhelpful this framing is, but it’s a pretty powerful one, and so I’m sure there will be people who push back against even the idea of linking animal and disability justice. Of course, my hope is that I am thoughtful and careful in my writing, but there’s no doubt that bringing animal and disability studies together has risks. There’s no doubt that asking people to be open to the fact that they are animals has risks. So I’m sure I will get pushback. But I don’t think I have a sense of what that will be like, or even from what angle it’ll be pushing. I may just get a lot of pushback for the fact that my book is very much arguing for veganism as an embodied political praxis. Who knows, I may get pushback that it isn’t vegan enough! So I have no idea, but if I do I’m lucky! That means people are at least reading it, which is great!
VM: Yeah, conflict at least means people are paying attention to some degree, which is an opportunity.
SK: Well, we’re excited to read your book.
VM: We know you’ve written about this in various articles, but can you talk about your views on humane meat?
ST: Oh yes! I got to the Bay Area right around when Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma came out, and I felt like there was this whole vegetarian backlash—a belief that vegans and vegetarians were naïve. For me as a vegetarian at the time, instead of pushing me to reconsider eating meat, I found the arguments for humane meat to be so troubling. Now I understand that I found them troubling because when you really get into the nitty-gritty of them they are quite ableist. Now I understand that, but at the time I just thought, “Why are these arguments for humane meat making me want to be a vegan?!” And sure enough, I would soon become one! In Beasts of Burden I spend quite a bit of time unearthing and analyzing the rhetoric around dependency that “conscientious omnivores” use to justify exploitation. In short, the argument is often that because domesticated animals have entered into a sort of evolutionary social contract with us, where they are ultimately dependent on us for their care, we are justified in using and slaughtering them. Disability studies has long examined how notions of dependency are used to excuse the oppression and marginalization of people, complicating our understandings of what dependency means and why it is so despised. So I use these tools to challenge the way arguments for humane meat often use rhetorics of care and interdependency. Ultimately, I argue that this whole framing effaces all sorts of power inequalities and oppressive structures that are—conveniently for humans—rendered as natural and outside of human social systems.
There are so many ways in which mainstream conversations around humane meat are just so misleading and frustrating—from an environmental perspective, it just allows people to ignore the unbelievably clear research which shows that animal farming is a major factor in driving climate change and in so many ways the current mass extinction crisis we are in. I will say, however, that thinking about humane meat through a lens of food sovereignty instead of through a liberal American “freedom to choose what kind of meat one has” perspective, does complicate these issues for me—not in a “Let’s eat meat now” way, but in a way which demands that environmental and animal issues be understood as absolutely imbricated with histories of racism, settler colonialism, imperialism, and class dynamics. Obviously different movements for food justice are working toward different things, and the community that I’m mostly pushing back against in my work is a more mainstream one.
VM: I’d say that’s how humane meat resonates in our locale, here in Kingston—also in terms of who can afford it, where is it available, and whom those types of stores cater to. We’d love to talk now about parenthood. Can you tell us about the relation between vegan politics and animal and disability questions, and your approach to feeding your children and parenthood more generally?
ST: I have a daughter who is almost two and I joke that she is going to write a book called Vegan Since Conception! I had a vegan pregnancy, which was great, and she’s two, she’s vegan, and she’s doing great. On one level all of the medicalization that happens around being a very visibly disabled woman who was pregnant totally took away from any concern people had about my being vegan. It was like my veganism was so low down on the list of what people were freaked out about that it really did not come up. Whereas I’ve heard from so many other parents that their doctors or midwives really pushed them on their veganism.
I’m very grateful that my brother, Alex, has kids and they’re quite a bit older than my daughter, so I’m already asking him, “How did you talk to your kids about veganism? When they’re at a party and their friends are eating nonvegan cookies, how do you do deal with it?” I still don’t really know how I’m going to deal with those things. I’m certainly never going to tell my daughter she has to be vegan. But I want her to be raised aware of disability oppression and of gender inequality, and of challenging white supremacy, so I feel like animal justice on one level is similar to those things. I’m vegan because I’m a feminist, because I’m anti-ableist, because I don’t believe in capitalism—so my hope is that veganism won’t be seen to her as being about food restrictions but will be understood as part of our family’s beliefs about justice and the kind of world we want to help make. That somehow it’s not just about food; it’s about her having an awareness of these larger social justice issues so that then she can make her own decisions.
VM: How do you inhabit veganism in the home and in your daily life? What does that look like?
ST: One thing that became important to me as I was writing my book was thinking about veganism as an anti-ableist practice. I don’t think it’s helpful to frame veganism as a diet or lifestyle choice. It’s very much a part of the way in which I want to embody my political beliefs on a daily level. But part of that is also acknowledging how hard it is. For example, I talk about my relationship with my dog Bailey a lot in my book, and I challenge a certain strain of animal advocacy that has argued for the eventual extinction of domesticated animals. I push back against that a lot because I feel those arguments are often rooted in ableism and ableist narratives of dependency, and what it means to need help. So I think a lot in the book about what it would mean to have relationships with animals that are really interdependent and supportive: He needs me to care for him; he also cares for me on emotional levels, so how do I make that as non-exploitative as possible? How do we take seriously the idea that we can listen to animals and try, as impossible as it may be sometimes, to consider what they need and how we can help provide that, while also always remembering how much animals offer and give to us? It’s not a one-way street; we are totally entangled and interdependent—sometimes in really uncomfortable ways. But then at the same time I’m also a crip-mama to a toddler; I’m in a PhD program; I’m totally exhausted and so sometimes Bailey’s walks are just way too short and I realize, “This is not okay.” But at the same time, it’s what is happening right now, so I don’t know. I don’t think it’s something that I have remotely figured out how to do—how to really be in an ethical relationship to him; what does it actually mean to be interdependent with another species? And how do we care for animals that are reliant on us in ways that are as supportive and as non-exploitative as possible? It’s a really significant challenge on a daily level. And these questions haven’t really touched on other creatures that are less pleasant to us, right? But I think trying to consider what being in ethical relations across species means is an important thing to do.
VM: Can you tell us a story about a time when your dietary practices have been the subject of awkwardness, celebration, or hostility?
ST: It’s weird because I feel like on some level being disabled, first, already alters the normative routine on such an extreme level. So again veganism is almost always this secondary thing, where if I go out for dinner, or to someone’s house for dinner, people are far, far, far more concerned about the fact that they might have steps to their house, or am I going to be able to fit through the door, or just their own discomfort in dealing with the way that I eat, than they are with what I’m eating. So I think on one level, being disabled has shielded me a bit from a lot of the discomfort that many people feel—which isn’t necessarily a good thing, right? This often comes from ableism. I think sometimes people have so much anxiety about my disability that they don’t see my veganism, and other times people write it off, people are just like, “Oh, she’s a disabled girl and isn’t it sweet she loves animals!” There’s something that can be pretty condescending about it too. I also should say that I am in a really unique position in terms of the community I have around me: I have a vegan family, a vegan partner, and many—though of course not all— vegan friends, which I know is not a common experience for a lot of vegans.
VM: Can you describe a key dilemma or question that haunts you?
ST: I would say it relates to practicing these ideas on a daily level. So often people critique vegans because there’s this stereotype that we think we’re being cruelty-free, or that it’s this ideal that can’t be reached. I think vegans need to take that back and say, “No, veganism is not about being cruelty-free or practicing ideal nonviolence.” It’s actually a way of saying that it’s really incredibly hard to actually figure out how to live in ethical relationships, whether you’re trying to do that across human difference or whether you are trying to make a space that’s accessible and open to other sorts of species; the challenges are really real—but veganism is saying that it’s absolutely essential that we try.
It’s this difficult space of relating, of how to live with, that veganism embodies to me. I want my veganism to challenge a sort of “nonrelating” brand of animal rights activism that suggests humans just need to leave animals alone and not relate to them—because it’s impossible and also it’s not the world that I want to live in. But I also want my veganism to challenge a certain romanticization of human and animal relationships that can too easily ignore power inequalities and exploitation. I think Claire Jean Kim has a wonderful quote at the end of the Introduction to a special issue of American Quarterly that she and Carla Freccero edited. She says that it’s not enough to love animals. I think she’s referring to a sort of romanticization of having a relationship with an animal and loving that animal or loving the practices that are around those relationships with animals. I think what she’s saying is that when you do love something, it’s really important to also realize that love isn’t enough. It’s not enough for my dog Bailey that I love him; I also need to give him longer walks and think ethically about what would make his life better and try to really practice those things.
SK: It’s been really incredible talking to you, and you’ve made me think about some of the assumptions about disability that are built into our questions, so that was a great learning experience for me. Is there anything you want to add?
ST: Not at the moment, but I’m sure I will think of things. This has been really lovely; I appreciate it. And I really look forward to the book because it’s getting at some issues that are really hard to grapple with.