Vegan

Carol J Adams - The Absent Referent

In The Sexual Politics of Meat, I took a literary concept, “the absent referent,” and politicized it by applying it to the overlapping oppressions of women and animals. I explained it this way:

“Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The absent referent is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our ‘meat’ separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal, to keep the ‘moo;’ or ‘cluck’ or ‘baa’ away from the meat, to keep something from being seen as having been someone. Once the existence of meat is disconnected from the existence of an animal who was killed to become that ‘meat,’ meat becomes unanchored by its original referent (the animal), becoming instead a free-floating image, used often to reflect women’s status as well as animals’. Animals are the absent referents in the act of meat eating; they also become the absent referent in images of women butchered, fragmented, or consumable.”

“There are actually three ways by which animals become absent referents. One is literally: as I have just argued, through meat eating they are literally absent because they are dead. Another is definitional: when we eat animals we change the way we talk about them, for instance, we no longer talk about baby animals but about veal or lamb. As we will see even more clearly in the next chapter, which examines language about eating animals, the word meat has an absent referent, the dead animals. The third way is metaphorical. Animals become metaphors for describing people’s experiences. In this metaphorical sense, the meaning of the absent referent derives from its application or reference to something else.”

I’m not a vegan, but I upvoted this because it seems logical to me that removing the stigma caused by an adjective addendum to the “normal” word would be beneficial in normalizing vegan choices as comparable to animal products.

As another poster pointed out, adding the name of the animal to the name of the product (ex: cow burger) un-does some of the deception and erasure of animal life done by changing the name.

However, I can see this post is getting downvoted. Is it the vegan community that disagrees with this, or is it the general population stumbling upon a vegan post and downvoting it?

Based take. I already use these in daily conversation and don't even think about adding vegan before it. It does help that most people know that I'm vegan though. I'll make sure to add "cow", "chicken", whatever, where applicable moving forward