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Vegan Aesthetics5/18/2021 Ethical concern for nonhuman animal suffering is addressed within the field of animal studies predominantly through narratives of exposure. In The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990), Carol J. Adams argues that by obscuring our knowledge of the nonhuman animals that act as “absent referents” within our patterns of consumption, definition, and metaphor, we ignore and institutionalise violence against both women and animals. Ethical awareness is gained through increased knowledge of, and an awakening to, the absent referent. Knowledge and visibility are central to this narrative, exemplified by the idiom “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian.” The prioritisation of this narrative over any other mode of looking or witnessing resembles that which has been critiqued by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a paranoid mode of critique. Such paranoia requires a constant confrontation with painful or intolerable knowledge and a seemingly “infinite reservoir of naiveté” in those to whom such knowledge is revealed. For many, the scale of mass slaughter often incites a paralysing and alienating encounter with structural violence. Furthermore, the necessity of exposure to trauma obfuscates the reality, nuance, and range of pleasures and desires that often intersect in uncomfortable ways with violence. Focusing on the pleasure and enjoyment that can be derived from animal products, my work proposes a re-orienting of perspective that considers the utopian longing and community identification that can co-exist alongside practices of renunciation and condemnation. I propose reparative modes of reading that demonstrate what a theorisation of the intermingling of complicity and joy, of failure and pleasure, can bring to ethical awareness and consider how irony, camp, and performance can displace sincerity and despair. Emelia Quinn(English Language and Culture group, Faculty of Humanities, University of Comments are closed.
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