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We Are What We Eat: Feminist Vegetarianism and the Reproduction of Racial Identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Cathryn Bailey
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Abstract

In this article, Bailey analyzes the relationship between ethical vegetarianism (or the claim that ethical vegetarianism is morally right for all people) and white racism (the claim that white solipsistic and possibly white privileged ethical claims are imperialistically or insensitively universalized over less privileged human lives). This plays out in the dreaded comparison of animals with people of color and Jews as exemplified in the PETA campaign and the need for human identification (or solidarity) with animals in ethical vegetarianism. To support the viability of ethical vegetarianism, Bailey resolves the dread of this comparison by locating ethical vegetarianism as a strategy of resistance to classist, racist, heterosexist, and colonialist systems of power that often rely on the assumptions of speciesism to ground these axes of oppression. The author carries out this argument to contextualize African American responses to animal welfarism and ethical vegetarianism.

Type
Resistance
Information
Hypatia , Volume 22 , Issue 2: Special Issue: The Reproduction of Whiteness: Race and the Regulation of the Gendered Body , Spring 2007 , pp. 39 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by Hypatia, Inc.

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