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Notes on Vegan Camp

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2021

Emelia Quinn
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Abstract

By examining a kitsch piece of nineteenth-century scrimshaw on display at the Hull Maritime Museum, Lady Gaga's infamous meat dress, and a range of mock meat products, this essay expands the scope of camp representation to theorize how vegans can, and do, draw both sustenance and pleasure from what has previously only caused pain. Appropriating products of exploitation as “vegan camp” constitutes a refusal to experience horror or disgust and instead to enjoy a surface performance of human exceptionalism, an enjoyment that parodies earnestness and exposes the desperate drive to assert human dominance over the nonhuman animal to farce. Vegan camp thus provides a mode of reading that broadens vegan-oriented scholarship beyond its current associations with the serious and sincere.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 135 , Issue 5 , October 2020 , pp. 914 - 930
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 Emelia Quinn

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