Role Models and Veganism

        by John Kinsella

 

I have been thinking a lot about possible correlatives between becoming a vegan in the mid-1980s and the difficulty for woman artists to find creative role models in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But further, I am thinking of how any oppressive system determines the manner in which information is passed on, how it’s taught. Reading the Roxana Robertson biography of Georgia O’Keeffe (Georgia O’Keeffe: A life, Bloomsbury, London, 2020) brings this particularly to mind, especially her citing of Gilbert and Gubar:

 

‘It was difficult for a woman at that time to become a painter: there was little precedent. In examining the difficulties women had in becoming writers, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have pointed out the importance of the role of the predecessor. ‘That writers assimilate then consciously or unconsciously affirm or deny the achievements of the predecessors is, of course, a central fact of literary history.’ The same can be said of painters.’ (p78)

 

So, I am interested in how one makes a radical departure from within the power structures one is embedded in and controlled by (especially schooling) when there are few precedents and predecessors for such a decision in one’s social milieu. This is an issue of role models (and Tracy has pointed me towards Albert Bandura’s social learning theory, which I will start working with, and also Dale Spender on foremothers). Feminist identifying and dismantling of patriarchal controls seem deeply relevant and generative to me; as diverse as feminism necessarily is, this basic drive to act outside the oppression, to act with personal and collective volition, is a vital model. Where and where I can’t intersect with that with regard to veganism is something I will consider further, always acknowledging the work of Carol J. Adams.

 

In my case, being an ‘outsider’ from much culture when I was young predisposed me towards different thinking and different behaviour, as it does for anyone alienated by mainstream acculturation. But though I rejected many of the social models around me, I was necessarily influenced by them and had to interact and respond to them in everything I did. Even being alone had consequences for re-interfacing with what one had stepped out of. This predisposition to act differently from social norms is one of necessity and choice, but choice is very limited when there’s no one to talk with about what you’re feeling and thinking.

 

Yes, there were vegetarians, and they encouraged me to become a vegetarian in the first place, especially given my political beliefs around patriarchy and oppressive systems of control. Choose to be different and to be ethical, was the argument. A further predisposition was enhanced by having been in India and come across Jains, and having been impressed with their dignity and commitment of belief. But I wasn’t ‘even’ vegetarian then. I didn’t know any Jain personally, and had no model to base my actions on.

 

In some ways, back in Australia, being around vegetarians in the communal situation I lived in was very antithetical to veganism, because they saw no reason for veganism. Their attitude to veganism was not intended as an oppression, but as a role model their lacto-ovo vegetarianism was limiting for me. Yet that was mild compared to the abreaction of the rest of the community! Six months after becoming vegetarian I became vegan (along with two others who did not remain so) while living in a house on a dairy farm. Understanding more than I had the anti-life cycle of a dairy cow (despite life-long connections with farms), really led to a sudden and abrupt change, one made without models or precedents in any real sense, just from shock and being affronted. Maybe the ability to continue being a committed vegan in the early days was reinforced by having two others who were also vegan around me, but I am sure it ultimately made no difference — it was a decision made because I felt no choice.

 

But what I am interested in is how, with very little if any ‘guidance’, one is empowered to break away from social norms. Yes, being alienated on many levels before such a decision will make such a decision ‘easier’, but that’s not it, really. And though we act alone, it’s not just a decision of the self because if you commit your life to a difference stance, it’s going to be noticed in many obvious and also subtle ways. Your decision is going to affect others, even by implication, and they are going to react in many ways. In 80s and 90s the reactions were frequently oppressive and sometimes threatening. Now, less so; much less so. In fact, there are so many models that veganism is familiarised even in wheat and sheep farming areas of Western Australia. It may be considered inimical, but it’s an accepted reality. It may be mocked, but it is acknowledged.

 

When I became vegan, I found the meat-eating norm highly oppressive. I found it difficult to understand why people harassed me for being vegan when I was not making incursions into their lives, their eating, their customs. Why was my stance a threat to them? It’s difficult to express the extent of the passive and overt aggression that I (and we) experienced in those ‘early days’. It made one search for precedents and models where there had been none. And that’s how I came across the history of The Vegan Society and its co-founder Donald Watson... founded in 1944 in Britain... in wartime Britain, which made me think a lot about animals and war, and then about pacifism in general.

 

The Vegan Society had nothing directly to do with my pacifism, but the fact that the society arose during the Second World War brought things into alignment for me. Veganism and pacifism seemed intrinsic to each other. Watson was a conscientious objector, though I didn’t know that when I first came across The Vegan Society. And though this was no role model, it was a comfort. Not discovering this ‘Western’ precedent within a colonial-capitalist matrix — from within the core of the colonial horror — would have made no difference to my continuing to be vegan, but it brought that sense of connectedness that helps sustain inner wellbeing: not reassurance, but less aloneness. And in this I have been very lucky with Tracy as a partner for twenty-eight years, and a family deeply understanding and connected with veganism. We are ongoing models to each other.

 

Anyway, these are incipient thoughts... notes towards a longer essay about systems of oppression and how we break out of them, with or without models. And if we lack overt models, how do we find traces of earlier resistance we might connect to, so as to sustain our mental wellbeing in a life of committed difference for an ethics we believe in?