Continuing the conversation around Veganism, Queerness, and Disability  introduced by Anna James, in this session we will focus on the spectral presence of Donna Haraway that haunts so many of the chapters in Messy Eating: Conversations on Animals as Food (2019) by reading Haraway and considering critiques of her work, specifically the following:

• Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. https://xenopraxis.net/readings/haraway_companion.pdf

• Zipporah Weisberg, "The Broken Promises of Monsters: Haraway, Animals and the Humanist Legacy." Journal for Critical Animal Studies  VII. II (2009): 22-62. https://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Zipporah-Wesiberg-pg.-22-62.pdf

• Poornima Rajeshwar and Naisargi Davé, "On ‘Indifference’: A Conversation with Naisargi Davé." Member Voices, Fieldsights (16 September 2025): n.pag. https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/interview-naisargi-n-dav%C3%A9-on-conceptualizing-and-writing-indifference-winner-of-the-2024-gregory-bateson-book-prize

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?