Finding Vegan Poetics In Literature For Nonhumans

In the ever-expanding realm of scholarship discussing nonhuman animals, the question of the animal is experiencing shifts to integrate ethics of care. To explore an extension of ecofeminist writing—vegan poetics—my paper enters the debate among eco-writing regarding the eating of nonhuman animals. Currently, there is a small subgroup of authors openly including their politicized abstaining from using nonhuman animal as objects in their diets, as well as in their writing. Through a close reading of Literature for Nonhumans by vegan scholar Gabriel Gudding, this paper follows the motif of rejecting the erasure of factory farm animals from discussions and writings regarding anthropogenic and environmental issues. Literature for Nonhumans encourages future scholarship to both uncover and create more texts embodying elements of vegan poetics, such as confronting human exceptionalism found among the ethical considerations of dominant Western culture. Critically entering Literature for Nonhumans exposes a call for both poetics and scholarship to reassess the consequences of mass consuming nonhuman animals and viewing them as edible objects: “When you eat the muscles of animals / your anus is a tunnel to the slaughterhouse”—“We really are ethical misers when it comes / to other beings” (Gudding 27-9).