Where does veganism intersect queerness and disability, and what do these intersections mean for vegan theorizing, vegan literary studies, and everyday vegan practice? Though veganism is, like queerness and disability, often treated as nothing more than a siloed and commodifiable identity, how might foregrounding their intersection(s) invite broader shifts in our critical thought? I’m thinking about the way veganism may be intimately entangled with our personal histories, identities, and quotidian activities. I’m thinking also about Robert McRuer’s notion of compulsory able-bodiedness, and the way normativity of many stripes is enforced through rhetorics of health, nutrition, and the "proper" body. And I’m thinking as well about the care webs described by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and how veganism might be part of the care work we perform. In a word, what shapes does veganism take as an intersectional foodway, one inextricable from—and so capable of shedding critical light on— gender, race, nation, sexuality, dis/ability, and class?

To help open the conversation and provide food for thought (sorry), I’d like to suggest a few essays/interviews from the book Messy Eating: Conversations on Animals as Food (2019). If you have time, I recommend reading the “Introduction: Messy Eating” by King et al., as well as the chapters “Being in Relation: Kim Tallbear,” “Disability and Interdependence: Sunaura Taylor,” and “Coda: Thinking Paradoxically: Billy-Ray Belcourt.”