Dan Abitz ABSTRACT

“Women’s Utopian Literature and the Vegan Politics of the Future”

Dan Abitz, Emory University, USA

 

In this project, I explore different vegan futures in women’s utopian literature from the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, I examine the meat-less diets in Annie Denton Cridge’s Man’s Rights (1870), Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1880), Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’s New Amazonia (1889), Rokeya Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” (1905), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915). Rather than treat veganism as a mere aspect of each author’s utopian plan, I argue that veganism is the central facet of each author’s feminist utopian politics. As Maureen O’Connor (2013) notes, “Vegetarianism was often asserted in the nineteenth century beginning with the Romantic period, as a form of rebellion against the dominant culture, a critique masculinity [and] the sequestering logic of imperialism” (29). However, I want to complicate this view by reading each text’s veganism against a glaring omission from its ecological model: animals.

 

My project begins with an overview of the intertwined histories of women’s rights and animal rights movements in the nineteenth century. In this introduction, I also review the concomitant connection between veganism and utopianism. From there, I consider the particular vegetarian diets, mechanical inventions, and food innovations in each of these novels in the context of worlds with either no animals or a very few (mistreated) ones. While these authors explicitly understood veganism as an anti-masculinist and anti-colonialist political practice, they could not imagine a cruelty-free world that also included non-human animals. While we would be right to question the “utopianism” of such futures, I ultimately argue that these novels proffer a foreboding look into a future vegan politics in our world of rapidly accelerating climate catastrophe. That is, what difficult questions about our own twenty-first-century veganism are reflected by these failed futures?

 

Keywords: veganism, feminist utopianism, Victorian literature, vivisection, animals