Elliott, Review of Quinn When Vegans Are Monstrous Alba Elliott Review of: Emelia Quinn, Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan, 1818 to Present. Oxford English Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. ix, 188 pp. £65.00 (hb). Alba Elliott is a PhD candidate in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Email: albaelliott@g.harvard.edu Book Review mailto:albaelliott@g.harvard.edu To many audiences the figure of the vegan stands as a mor- alizing, absolute, and ethically narrow-minded individ- ual seeking to impose a doctrine on society writ large. In Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan, 1818 to Present, Emelia Quinn delves into this abhorrence for veganism, analysing representations of what she terms the “monstrous vegan” in liter- ature. Quinn’s task is to recuperate these monsters. Taking Frank- enstein’s monster as the prototype, she theorizes monstrous ve- ganism as imperfect, campy, and generative. Working with a corpus of Anglophone texts from 1818 to the present, Quinn explores four key characteristics embodied by monstrous ve- gan characters. The monstrous vegans she identifies do not eat an- imals, “an abstinence that generates a seemingly inexplicable anx- iety in those who encounter them” (3). They are hybrid creatures made of both human and nonhuman parts, “destabilizing species boundaries” (3). They come into existence outside of heterosex- ual reproduction, “the product of male acts of creation” (3). Finally, they are “intimately connected to acts of writing and literary connec- tion” (3). Despite this schematization this is not an exhaustive study. Quinn’s goal is rather to trace the many connections between liter- ature’s monstrous vegan characters, and she does so with a flexi- bility that enacts her own self-conscious refusal of vegan ethical ri- gidity. Against a vision of veganism as a logically and morally sound personal commitment, Quinn conceptualizes it as “a state of strate- gic insufficiency that aspires towards a pragmatic model of utopian thought” (8). She embraces monstrosity and failure in order to create space for the imperfection of vegan identities. Indeed, Quinn avoids exclusively focusing on vegans and vegetarian characters that are favourably written. Refusing to oversimplify, Quinn engages in close readings that deconstruct the myth of the perfect, abstinent vegan. Although Reading Veganism is positioned primarily within the field of vegan theory, Quinn connects this emergent field with animal stud- ies, food studies, queer theory, ecocriticism, and postcolonialism, an engagement that she mirrors by deftly manoeuvring between di- verse theoretical thinkers. These range from Carol J. Adams’s work Copyright © 2023 Alba Elliott This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Humanimalia 13, no. 2 (2023): 223–229. Doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.12319 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.12319 Elliott, Review of Quinn | 225 Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) on the feminist-vegan in her field-defining The Sexual Politics of Meat to Jacques Derrida’s posthumous The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008), from which Quinn derives the idea that vegetarianism is im- perfect, “failing to escape […] sacrificial structures” (15). Yet Quinn also challenges Derrida’s argument that vegetarianism (and by ex- tension veganism as a utopian vision of vegetarianism) creates an “illusory sense of freedom from complicity” that masks ongoing par- ticipation in the oppression of women and non-human animals (15). She argues instead that “veganism is messier and further reaching than that; an entanglement of identity, practice, and ethics that re- fuses to sanction the carnivorous human subject” (5). Quinn argues that neither vegan nor carnist identities can be un- derstood as stable or secure. To do so, she builds on Judith Butler’s work on terms such as “queer” that refuse substantive and rigid defi- nition, as well as adapting Susan Sontag’s theory of camp to intro- duce the re-invigorating potential of vegan camp. Quinn’s reference to “entanglement” above also recalls philosopher Lori Gruen’s Entan- gled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for our Relationships with Animals (2015). According to Gruen, we need to recognize our existing entan- glements with the nonhuman world and respond with empathy in order to reach more ethical decisions and practices. As Quinn ar- gues, the construction of vegan identities that are purportedly ethi- cally superior conceals the implicit failures in veganism and provokes anxiety at points where these failures are exposed. It is important to note, though, that Quinn’s recognition of veganism’s imperfections — its entanglement with and inextricable relation to multiple forms of animal exploitation — does not ultimately capitulate to a quietist fu- tility. Quinn wishes to emphasize that veganism does not escape or transcend ethical dilemmas, that ethics is always encountered in the enactment and performance of vegan choices. Reading Veganism is structured in two parts. The first part iden- tifies the prototype of the monstrous vegan and its implications, and the second part offers ways of engaging with monstrous vegan figures in a reparative manner. The first chapter of the book takes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as the origin of the monstrous Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 226 | Elliott, Review of Quinn vegan, arguing that the creature “reflects the ambivalence, contra- dictions and anxieties that cluster around vegan modes of being” (40). The creature displays an inconsistent morality that oscillates from a self-reported diet of nuts, roots, and berries that avoids an- imal exploitation, to the murders that he commits and his “inabil- ity to see the cow as a fellow sentient being” (41–42). The creature’s rejection of meat is therefore ambivalent at best, characterized by “murderous actions and pacifist words” (59) that fail to live up to any ideal of moral purity — a failure that is crucial to Quinn’s theo- rizing of vegan identity. In chapter two, Quinn explores the relationship between sexual and alimentary desire in relation to monstrous futurity in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The Time Machine (1895), in which veganism is an “ethical abstraction” that “is seen to result in a failure to acknowledge the reality of human desires” (61). Indeed, the monstrosity of Wells’s vegetarian characters is “engendered by the failures and inconsistencies of their meat-free diets” (63). In The Island of Doctor Moreau, these characters evoke both “anxiety and utopian aspiration” (63). Wells’s monstrous vegan figures are “situ- ated between the present and the future, as a looming spectre of evolutionary transformation” (88). The inconsistencies and repres- sion associated with Wells’s vegan and vegetarian characters con- tribute to their monstrosity, as he posits the failure of both a discur- sively imposed and a genetically bred veganism that constitute a “degeneration” (81). In the third chapter, Quinn argues that Margaret Atwood’s MaddAdam trilogy (2003–2013) aligns with Derrida’s “cri- tique of vegetarianism as promoting only an illusion of ‘good con- science’” (170). Quinn argues that vegan monsters in Atwood’s work are “overdetermined literary constructions [that] signal the impossi- bility of connecting to a ‘pure’ or inherent vegan identity” (89), ren- dering veganism “a monstrous pretence of innocence that seeks to absent itself from late-capitalist structures” (115). It is precisely this purported distance from late capitalist exploitative structures of gender, race, and species that Quinn reframes, noting that entangle- ment and complicity are inescapable in spite of vegans’ best efforts. Elliott, Review of Quinn | 227 Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) In the second part of her book, Quinn responds to the impossibil- ity of a “pure” vegan identity. Arguing that veganism must be “frag- mentary and hybrid” (90), she frames it as a performative practice in much the same manner as meat-eating is. She argues: “Vegan performativity [is] a mode of species trouble that challenges the supposed naturalness of omnivorous appetite” (119). Quinn follows this line of argument in chapter four, where she turns her focus to- wards J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003). Much has been written about Coetzee’s animal ethics and Elizabeth Costello’s vegetarian thematics; Quinn’s reading centres the titular character as a per- formative enactment of the monstrous vegan trope. She reads the novel as parodying attempts to assert a stable ethical identity. For Quinn, Costello addresses the difficulty of rendering animal suffering visible while also avoiding fetishizing violence as spectacle. Costel- lo’s monstrous veganism thus becomes something of a model for Quinn’s own approach: by focusing on literary scenes not of vio- lence against animals but in which monstrous vegans speak about violence against animals, Quinn practices a form of literary criticism that refuses the spectacle of industrialized farming. In chapter five, Quinn enters the realm of pleasure, reading Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) and The Sparsholt Affair (2017) through the lens of vegan camp. Vegan camp, she says, is an “aesthetic lens and mode of reading that seeks pleasure from the spectacle of human exceptionalism” (26). This pleasure is derived from extravagant performances of vegan otherness and vegan fail- ure. Hollinghurst’s monstrous vegans are ostentatiously morally-wa- vering, anxiety-producing, repellent, or naïve. He uses humour to highlight the artificiality of veganism by representing his monstrous vegans as quasi-parodic extremists. To do so, Hollinghurst associ- ates carnivory with homosexuality, puns frequently with the dou- ble-entendre of “meat”, depicts vegetarianism as frustrated sexual desire, and writes undesirable — even repulsive — vegan characters. Vegetarian disgust at meat is seen, for instance, as a performance that has little to do with flesh itself, and rather is provoked by what meat signifies. This performative disgust “emphasizes the insecurity and unfixed nature of desire and abjection” (160). However, Quinn Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 228 | Elliott, Review of Quinn argues that the artificiality of veganism “turns the gaze back on om- nivores, forcing a confrontation with the limits and instabilities of the carnivorous appetites undergirding human desires” (165). In this way, vegan camp is employed as a humorous means of exposing the ar- tificiality of both veganism and carnism. Embracing monstrous ve- gans through vegan camp highlights “the difficulties [for vegans] of living and desiring in a non-vegan world” and refocuses critical at- tention onto carnists (165). Camp thereby offers an alternative to the “sincerity and despair” that characterize much vegan discourse, rec- onciling the failure of veganism’s practice with its pleasures and uto- pian aspirations (166). Readers reluctant to engage with a “preachy” vegan text may rest as- sured: Quinn casts aside moralizing in favour of nuance and the rec- ognition of the imperfections within veganism. By refusing the myth of a stable ethical identity, Quinn offers a more flexible veganism. In the absence of the expectation of perfection, vegans are afforded a degree of forgiveness: although they aspire to a minimization of harm, they are invariably imperfect, and the monstrous vegan trope becomes a tool for refiguring vegan identity. Alongside this, Read- ing Veganism suggests alternative ways of engaging with veganism outside of graphic and disturbing visual representations of animal suffering. Quinn foregrounds the pleasure, humour, and subversion accessed through vegan performativity and vegan camp. Where vegan theory conventionally dwells on the despair produced by mass nonhuman suffering, Quinn’s analysis in Reading Veganism suggests ways to exist in spite of, and within, a world of carnist vi- olence. In this way her book could be read alongside Jack Halber- stam’s The Queer Art of Failure, which sees moral perfection as a fan- tasy that can be productively queered. Moreover she argues that the fear and anxiety invoked by the monstrous vegan reflects gendered, sexual, imperial, and racial anxieties by their implied threat to white European patriarchy. Indeed, the monstrosity of these vegan figures is in many ways a reflection of human anxieties about certain ap- petites and behaviours, because they expose “unsettling questions about human needs and wants” (114). Elliott, Review of Quinn | 229 Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) Quinn’s depiction of veganism is complex: veganism “represents a composite of modes of relation to nonhuman animals; functions as a queer positioning that destabilizes previously fixed ideas of gender, race, class, and sexuality; and raises questions about what it means to be a ‘speciesed’ subject” (62). She posits vegan camp as a pro- ductive alternative to the more conventional approach in vegan the- ory that seeks to restore the animals that have been disappeared into absent referents (148). Although such an approach might be ac- cused of excessive detachment from interventionist discussions of animal exploitation, Quinn is not suggesting that an anthropocentric vegan camp is the only way to read veganism. Instead, she offers ve- gan camp as a new lens through which to engage with literary texts that are not ostensibly vegan, adding to the repertoire of vegan the- ory and expanding critical possibilities. One way that I would be in- terested in seeing Quinn’s theory applied would be in vegan camp readings of texts that engage with existing entanglements with non- human animals. The impact of Reading Veganism goes far beyond the works that Quinn studies, inviting further reparative vegan read- ings, and raising questions about the purported stability of human subjectivities. Quinn asks her readers to reckon with how they con- struct and enact identities of consumption; Reading Veganism offers new ways of recognizing and acknowledging the power dynamics in our entanglements with nonhuman animals.