In the 11th edition of our Expert Series, RAC member, Dr Corey Wrenn explores the concept of disability within a vegan and animal rights context.
What do you think? Are meat-eaters sick? Are animal abusers psychopaths? Do you think people who love some animals but eat other animals are morally schizophrenic? There is an awful lot of ableist claimsmaking taking place in the American Nonhuman Animal rights movement. In my article, “The Medicalization of Nonhuman Animal Rights,” published with the leading journal in disabilities studies, Disability & Society, I explored this issue quantitatively.
In addition to coding mainstream newspapers for comparison (as consistent with earlier studies (Cole and Morgan 2011, Monro 2005), anti-speciesism activists were mostly portrayed negatively), I also coded 50 leading vegan and Nonhuman Animal rights blogs from across the spectrum.
Overall, about one fourth of the blogs in the study were using ableism enough to be coded as ableist or very ableist. The most frequently surfacing words among nonvegan newspapers were “crazy,” “problem” (in the context of, say, ‘this activist has a problem’), “loony,” “nuts,” “different” and “freak.”
And activists? A greater variety of disability stereotypes were used in addition to “crazy” and “different,” such as “dumb,” “depressed,” “insane,” “psycho,” “sad,” capable of “violence,” and “schizophrenic.”
It turned out that food blogs and non-profit blogs were less likely to frame speciesism as a symptom of mental illness, but theory-based blogs not associated with any organization were the real sites of ableist rabble-rousing. In fact, Gary Francione’s Abolitionist Approach blog was the outlier in the study, averaging more than one ableist term for each essay included in the sample (in total, 319 hits were attributed to this blog, mostly the term “schizophrenic”).
The problem is that using disability as a pejorative in a social movement framework to villainize or shame the audience into accepting the movement’s claim actually banks on social inequality as a point of resonance. This should be problematic for any social movement that has egalitarianism as an end goal.
Unfortunately, the study has some limits. Some words like “problem” and “violent,” that were included as disability stereotypes (I used list of terms used by disability researchers in another study) (Rose et al. 2007) can muddy interpretation, as speciesism necessarily entails violence and any social movement is likely to frame its target as having a “problem.” Coders were instructed to mark these terms as present only when a person or humans were specifically targeted, rather than abstract ideas (“Meat-eaters engage in violence” would be flagged, for instance, while, “Speciesism entails violence” would not). Some disability pejoratives like “stupid” or “idiotic” were not included, though these words are highly likely to have surfaced. Finally, I used VeganFeed to select the blog sample, as it provided a good variety of blog types. Unfortunately, it excluded some prominent non-profit organizations such as PETA. Additional studies could expand on these findings.
Cole, M., and K. Morgan. 2011. “Veganphobia: Derogatory Discourses of Veganism and the Reproduction of Speciesism in UK National Newspapers.” The British Journal of Sociology 62 (1): 134–153.
Munro, L. 2005. Confronting Cruelty: Moral Orthodoxy and the Challenge of the Animal Rights Movement. Leiden, NL: Brill Academic Pub.
Rose, D., G. Thornicroft, V. Pinfold, and A. Kassam. 2007. “250 Labels Used to Stigmatise People with Mental Illness.” BMC Health Services Research 7 (97). http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6963/7/97.
Wrenn, C. L., J. Clark, M. Judge, K. Gilchrist, D. Woodlock, K. Dotson, R. Spanos, and J. Wrenn. 2015. “The Medicalization of Nonhuman Animal Rights: Frame Contestation and the Exploitation of Disability.” Disability & Society 30 (9): 1307-1327.
The views expressed by our Research News contributors are not necessarily the views of The Vegan Society.
