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“Hard, Fast, Masc: Vegan Masculinities on Instagram” explores representations of vegan masculinities on the social media site Instagram. While vegan masculinities on Instagram are fighting the good fight in their pursuit of justice for animals, we remain mesmerized by how a particular form of oppressive masculinity surfaces in pursuit of this project. We thus review the xenophobic, racist, heterosexist, ableist, transphobic, and fatphobic discourse that surfaces in vegan masculinity conversations on Instagram, including in public discussion threads. Drawing on recent feminist work on social media, feminist work on vegan masculinity, and an intersectional analysis, we consider the ways in which masculinity is co-constructed alongside veganism, race, sexuality, body size, and ability through the use of images and text on the fast-moving, visually complex platform. We argue that Instagram vegan masculinity is part of the larger project of rebranding veganism as a masculine pursuit and that it is performed as a site of whiteness, cisness, power, ablebodiedness, and heteronormativity through the conflation of veganism with health and strength lifestyle narratives. We ask: how is masculinity negotiated in relation to veganism? In examining the “hard fast hegemonic vegan masc” we undertake a queer reading that sees masculinity as a set of discourses and practices that is plural and performed rather than an inherent property of the body. Our paper will begin with an exploration of how hegemonic hetero masculinities are tied up in a politics of meat eating (Adams 1990; Greenebaum and Dexter 2017, Potts and Parry 2010) that are then challenged by vegan mascs online. We will argue that vegan mascs online deploy their bodies and words to perform hegemonic hard, fast, healthy, and saviour masculinity as a way to argue against the implied lack of virility associated with a non-meat eating lifestyle and body, over-performing hard masc as a way to ward off vegan hatred. Hegemonic vegan mascs stretch the gamut of body builders, MMA fighters, and football players, as well as a hipster kind of vegan masculinity (often white and cis and not necessarily bulked up). We examine how even these “softer” vegan mascs tend to appeal to the traditional male role of being a “protector” and “saviour” to legitimize their veganism, relying on discourses of strength and self-control. Next, we will outline how despite challenging ideas around the virility of meat, Instagram vegan mascs rely on an oppressive politics that attaches veganism to a newly virile hegemonic masculinity entwined with whiteness, ablebodieness, cisness, ideals of health, fatphobia, and heterosexuality. Drawing on queer and feminist masculinity studies, queer and feminist literatures on veganism, critical race studies, and feminist new media studies, “Hard, Fast, Masc: Vegan Masculinities on Instagram” strives to envision softer, queerer, more intersectionally-grounded, and anti-oppressive vegan masculinities on and offline. Ela Przybylo(Illinois State University) Comments are closed.
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