The Animal Turn

S8E3: Rhetoric and Supremacy with S. Marek Muller, David Rooney, and Lauren Corman

• Claudia Hirtenfelder • Season 8 • Episode 3

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In this episode we discuss how rhetorical constructions of animality, and humanity are mobilized to serve specific power structures, including white supremacy and colonialism. Lauren Corman, David Rooney, and S. Marek Muller come on the show to talk about some of the complex networks of media influence and consumption that shape such thought. 

 Date Recorded: 19 February 2025

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School of Modern Language, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, School of Literature, Media, & Commun

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Lauren Corman:

This is another iRaw podcast.

S Marek Muller:

Yeah, and just to echo that, but so also fascinating in like the worst kind of ways, the extent to which indigeneity is somewhat flattened and in some cases whitened, to the extent that it becomes a product that can be consumed for the purposes of reclaiming some sort of indigeneity that has been lost through techno-modernity but that doesn't necessarily have to be refound through large systemic changes in global practices.

S Marek Muller:

I think largely of Liber King. He has these nine ancestral tenets of how you reclaim your manhood, and a lot of it has to do with being outside, and that's why you see all these videos of him, literally, you know, going out nose to tail, having an animal that is literally killed by hand in the way you might. He names the cree peoples as the baddest dudes on the planet, but then where he's making his money is powdered versions of those products. It's okay, if you don't actually want to reclaim this indigeneity, take it in this big pharma way, but I am selling it to you. So indigeneity, or some idea of indigeneity that reflects very little about what it unquote, be indigenous, since that's not a singular experience. It becomes a product, but the purpose of that product is almost a medicine to cure masculine downfall.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Welcome back to the Animal Town everyone. This is episode three of season eight, where we're focused on animals and media, but where we have the added ambition of thinking about that in relationship to other notions of difference, primarily race. The season is slightly different to normal seasons of the Animal Turn in that each episode is a panel discussion instead of a one-on-one interview and brings together scholars who are both in and outside of animal studies to think about the intersections of animals, media and race. This is part of a broader project which included a symposium and a special issue on this topic, and is headed by Natalie Cazal, Tobias Linner and Ellen Gusevsky. We started today's discussion with the intention of talking about supremacy and media, and we ended up talking a great deal about rhetoric and the ways in which it shapes controversies, identities and so much more. At times, this conversation is incredibly theoretically dense, but all three guests were very generous with examples that helped to make their points clearer and more tangible. We speak about the liver king, who has been in the news even more than usual lately, and we also talk a lot about the kind of tension between animals and animality. My one concern with this episode is perhaps that we focused on animality and meat, with not enough attention afforded to what the conceptual, material implications of these types of rhetorics means for animals themselves. I mean, it was really interesting and I learned so much in the kind of tensions with how language and rhetoric and ideas of supremacy function are just so, so, so fascinating. So I'm not too sure if that's a fair critique of our conversation, but I'll let you decide if that was the case. But I'll maybe introduce my guests.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Lauren Corman she's been on the show before is an environmental sociologist who teaches in the areas of environmental thoughts, contemporary social theory and critical animal studies, where research centralizes anti-racist, anti-colonial, queer and feminist understandings of social relations in the more-than-human world. She is interested in coalition building across social environmental justice movements and links their work to larger anti-capitalist analyses and struggles. David Rooney is currently a doctoral candidate at Moody School of Communication the University of Texas, Austin, and is focused on rhetoric, language and political communication. Their research intersects with environmental communication, animal studies, critical cultural studies and political communication. Their research intersects with environments of communication, animal studies, critical cultural studies and digital rhetoric. In particular, some recent works examine how hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality are reproduced through Western norms of appropriate human-animal and, by extension, human-nature relations.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Marek Muller is an associate professor of communication studies at Texas State University. They received their PhD in communication from the University of Utah and previously worked at Florida Athletic University. Marek's research is at the intersection of rhetorical studies, environmental communication and critical animal studies. Specifically, they're interested in the humanity animality dialectic and how human supremacy manifests in inter and cross species communication conflicts. Their first book, impersonating animals rhetoric, ecofeminism and animal rights was published by michigan state university in 2020, and their current research projects looks at alternative food movements in the us and political rhetoric some of what we speak about in today's episode. So you can see why, even though we're focused on supremacy, we gravitated quite a bit towards thinking about rhetoric.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

And yeah, I just think it's so interesting and fascinating and our conversation went in many different routes. It went many different routes, and this particularly towards the end. You can hear me trying to grapple with some of the ways in which animals are mobile and there's metaphors in these different rhetorical strategies. I still struggle to talk about them. Overall, it was a really interesting conversation and I learned a great deal from my three guests, and I hope you do too. It's great to have you back on the show. Lauren, you were one of my first guests way back when, so thank you. Thank you so much for joining us on the show, and Marek and David, welcome to the Animal Turn. It's lovely to have you. Perhaps, as we get started here, each of you could tell me a little bit about yourselves and what your research in animals is and, if it's not too much, maybe a glimpse of what your contribution has been to the upcoming symposium and special issue.

S Marek Muller:

Sure, my name is Merrick Muller. I am an assistant professor of communication studies at Texas State University, I suppose broadly I am a rhetorician, which means I look at argumentation and persuasion, and my focus has largely been on argumentation and persuasion regarding animal rights, welfare and ethics, especially as those arguments intersect with broader movements or issues of human oppression or liberation. So I suppose my contribution has largely come in those areas. Recently I've been moving into food studies as well, particularly issues of food identity and culture, especially where identities come into clash with new innovations in food technologies, especially alternative animal products such as plant-based dairy.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

I mean food is obviously a big part of our identities and how we understand ourselves. So are you primarily interested in how human identity and food, like how food shapes human identity and how animals are implicated in that, or are you starting with animals and saying how are they used in kind of rhetoric and arguments for or against different diets?

S Marek Muller:

Sort of a both and, depending on the project, I find it's really hard to sort of disentangle those concepts because a lot of what we eat is only what we eat, because we forget about the who we eat. And so when we're looking at issues of, for example, is almond milk really milk, we have to start dealing with the deconstruction of well, is milk milk? And why is one milk more normal than the other milk, and who gets to have what milk and why, and the overarching arguments that justify each one.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Oh, my god, and milk studies is just it's. It's literally a black hole like once you start to look up milk, it's so interesting and and really fascinating. I didn't know that almond milk it's one of the oldest. I mean, how do you say that? One of the oldest? I mean, how do you say that One of the oldest milks? That's a weird thing to say, depending on how you're looking at and thinking about milk. Really interesting stuff here. With regards to thinking through the connections between animals, food and power, I guess how did you come to initially think about animal questions in your work? Did you start there or did you start with kind of communication studies?

S Marek Muller:

Well, I originally thought I was going to just be a writing teacher.

S Marek Muller:

Things sort of started to change for me when I was Grand Hill Fulbright scholarship to go and teach in Ulaanbaatar, mongolia.

S Marek Muller:

The relationship in Mongolia with animals is extremely different than the relationship that I was used to in the United States of America, and just experiencing pastoral, nomadic ideas of human relationships to the more than human world and how industrialization was changing those relations, it made me just a lot more interested in really trying to dissect why we think of animals certain ways, why we think of food certain ways according to our cultural context and how different contextual factors can change those overarching arguments. So I sort of made a deal with myself I was going to apply for PhD programs in communication while I was in Mongolia and if I got in I was going to dedicate my whole life to those arguments. And if I got in I was going to dedicate my whole life to those arguments. And if I didn't I was going to be a writing teacher. And I got into a program and I'm not going to say it was the best decision I ever made in my life.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Well, congratulations. And how long were you in Mongolia for?

S Marek Muller:

I was in Mongolia for a year, from 2014 to 2015.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Wow, wow, yeah, and the reason I say what a city. I cycled through sections of Mongolia, and Mongolia is just an incredible country. Ulaanbaatar is a surprising city in many ways. I've never seen as many Priuses as I've seen in Ulaanbaatar. Like this is a go, look it up folks if you're listening. Ulaanbaatar, like this is a go, look it up folks if you're listening.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Ulaanbaatar is home to just dozens and dozens and dozens of Priuses that are secondhand and sent over from Japan and they've all got dents in the roof because they're stacked two to three on top of one another and shipped over as secondhand cars because they're no longer environmentally enough in Japan. And yeah, they are everywhere. They're kind of zooting through the city but also going over the Mongolian steppe. It's all Priuses everywhere. And then you couple that with the fact that Ulaanbaatar is thought of and understood to be one of the most polluted cities in the world. It's just an interesting, interesting city and then a stone throw out and it's the Mongolian steppe, these wide open expanses. Amazing that you got to spend so much time there, and what an interesting story, david. How about you? What's your backstory?

David Rooney:

Well, I think it's a little similar to Merrick. I'm interested very similarly in how animals relate to food and then the constitution of human identity. I'm also a rhetorician in a communication studies PhD program, but my work more recently has to do a little less with food. I'm working on my dissertation right now and more on how ideas about the animal intersect with other entities, particularly race I've been focused on, but also artificial intelligence, and I think there's a common history there throughout Western philosophy that hasn't been explored as much. So hopefully that will be the second book.

David Rooney:

I didn't go to Mongolia. What happened for me is that I wanted to be a law student. I wanted to get a law degree. I met someone who was vegan. I read Peter Singer's book, who maybe, looking back, I cringed a little bit that that was my entryway, but I told myself I have to stop eating meat for a little bit until I can come up with a counter argument. I did not, and I thought very differently then about the world, and I also, sort of inadvertently, I was taking classes I thought would help me in my application to law school, and I took Jonathan Kohler's class on Derrida and I read the Animal that Therefore I Am, which sort of changed my life and, like Merrick, sort of dedicated. Everything was changed after reading that book and how it made me think about the importance of the animal for a host of ethical, political, legal questions. So then I decided to do a PhD, and here I am.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

And how do you feel about that choice of switching from law to PhD? How is that sitting with you at the moment?

David Rooney:

Well, my lawyer friends in DC are also in an unfortunate position. So the future of higher ed and the future of, you know, public facing law seems equally precarious. So maybe it's not as bad as the alternative would have been, but maybe less profitable.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

You were supposed to say absolutely delighted this was the best decision of your life. Undertaking a PhD is totally stress-free and glorious and living your best life. No, I joke, really, a PhD is a tough, tough time but it's also, I think, super rewarding. And for us in animal studies, while it's really difficult content often I find it incredibly myself I speak for myself here really really rewarding and rejuvenating and just intellectually interesting, but also ethically important. And yeah, I really love both of your kind of stories. Now, lauren, you are a well-known name. I think people already know you. I know folks from the podcast love your episode that we previously spoke about with regards to interspecies subjectivity. Could you tell us, remind listeners, who you are, what your interests are in animal studies?

Lauren Corman:

Sure, Well, thanks for having me on and it's so nice to be part of a panel discussion and wonderful to be part of the podcast again. So I started really with intersectional feminism in the 1990s I was studying violence against women in my home province of Manitoba and I was really interested in challenging and being part of a challenge to white feminism and all the exclusions that had been done under that umbrella. And I was also pretty involved in the punk scene in Winnipeg and it was a really vibrant community and there was always an appreciation for animals within the punk scene as related to intersectional thought and greater issues of social justice, environmental justice. So that was a little bit of the cultural context that I was in. And then the province went through a pretty extreme hog boom in the 1990s. So there was the rise of factory farming and the decimation of community farming or small scale farming, and the intensification of agriculture was right there for us to witness and I was really disturbed by it. And because I was interested in intersectional thought and particularly how we might think about or apply intersectional thought to issues of violence against women, I think I just was animated by a concern around violence and then I was interested in whether or not intersectionality has a set of analyses, could help us make sense of the animal question. I really wanted to understand how something so extreme like factory farming happened. I turned a lot of my research to that question, really wanting to bring in an anti-colonial, anti-capitalist perspective that would think through the racialized and gendered dynamics, particularly of industrial slaughter, as a kind of site to think through the animal question as well as these broader issues of social justice. And I would say that still, my work is at the intersections of intersectional theory, critical race theory in particular, anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism.

Lauren Corman:

I did a radio show called Animal Voices for about a decade where I explored some of these issues really about the diversity of the animal movements internationally as well as nationally, how people understand the animal question in a variety of different cultural and geographic places as well, as I wanted to challenge some of the mainstream tendencies I saw in the movement. So it was like as a hopefully gentle insider trying to push back on some of the problematic tendencies I saw within the movement. I was hired in 2009 at Brock University to teach critical animal studies and part of my work then and the things that I hope I've contributed to this discussion are in part around pedagogy because I've been very fortunate to teach critical animal studies there, and increasingly I'm really interested in the frame of, or the theoretical, the collection of theoretical perspectives that people are calling multi-species justice, particularly because they forward indigenous thoughts, anti-colonial thinking and more of an ecological kind of relational frame or set of theories. I was somebody who really was kind of theoretically in dialogue with Donna Haraway's work, so thinking about relationality, relational ontologies, as like a, as a place of thinking through ethics, really makes a lot of sense to me. So I see a kind of home in multi-species justice which is exciting to me.

Lauren Corman:

So that would be a synopsis. I hope that's all right. That's amazing. So I see a kind of home in multi-species justice which is exciting to me. So that would be a synopsis. I hope that's all right.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

That's amazing. So I mean, all three of you have spoken in some way or form about intersections and intersections of oppression and violence and inequality, whether those are, I guess, species intersecting with gender relations or race relations. Or, david, as you mentioned, artificial intelligence, I know substratism is now becoming a kind of question as well, like how do we understand, I guess, equality and inequality, or violence and autonomy? How do we understand these kinds of really large questions about who can do stuff and who has the choice to decide what they do? But, of course, when we do this with regards to animals, we often get a lot of pushback right. Animals are framed as not being as important for whatever reason, depending on the animal and depending on the human that we're speaking about. So this is a tricky conversation I think we're going to try and grapple with today, talking about things like hierarchy and supremacy, but maybe we can start with just a basic, basic, basic definition of supremacy. When you hear the word supremacy, what do you think?

S Marek Muller:

I suppose. For me, when I think of supremacy, I think of this sort of idea about a rank ordering. There's something on the top, there's something on the bottom, and the assumption is that being on top affords you certain privileges by virtue of having a certain superiority in some way?

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Would this be supremacy, in that I view myself as being better than others, or is?

S Marek Muller:

it supremacy in that I am materially positioned better than others. I think the two tend to go together. It's very difficult to view yourself as at the top but then believe you should be entitled to less. And very often, once one gets to the top, they take steps to ensure that materially they will have the most. So power and material and social capital tend to sort of coalesce to make that supremacy seem more natural, normal and necessary.

David Rooney:

Yeah, I totally echo what Merrick was saying there. A word that I was thinking of in the start of this conversation is constitutive. I think supremacy is a constitutive violence. It creates these two opposing categories where one is defined almost in relation to the other. So in a weird way you need that subjugated person for your own sense of self. But at the same time I think that that relationship is plastic and it doesn't necessarily follow that every aspect of that subjugated being is understood intrinsically as lesser.

David Rooney:

And so I think this about animals in particular, because animals are. Often their privation is that they're too perfect, you know, they're not alienated from the environment or from language, they don't have the messiness of human life and in some way you see in a lot of works and rhetoricians are particularly guilty of this kind of longing for a simpler existence that animals had sort of analogous to romantic views towards indigenous people and pre-modern life. So I would say supremacy is constitutive, but it is plastic. It relies on both those negative valences of violence but also in a way like positive attributes it assigns to others as well.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

And I guess in some ways so you would have the idea of. I mean, I think oftentimes people have a pretty good idea of who has access to resources or the ability to speak freely versus those who don't, kind of in a general sense, in a given society. But this would also be quite context specific. So, having grown up in South Africa, for example, as a white woman growing up in a highly racialized context, I could recognize some situations where my gender could be an asset, for example, where I maybe kind of societally speaking, I might not have been afforded with as many opportunities as my male counterparts growing up, but there were opportunities where I could maybe mobilize my gender or recognize that I could use aspects of my sex to position me in a better light in that way. But then you intersect that with race, for example, and that might change If I'm now standing next to a black woman who's perhaps working as a domestic worker, one of the largest working groups in South Africa, with one of the largest unions and working groups, which is also a kind of lineage of South Africa's racial history.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Right, the reason domestic workers are so large is because of how South Africa separated different groups of people. The apartheid government separated different groups of people into doing different work In that context. Now gender becomes intersected with race and, depending on what is happening and where in South Africa, different dynamics come into play. Now I know I'm getting into the territory of intersectionality now here, lauren, and it can be a difficult concept to explain and to kind of unpack and unfurl. How is intersectionality and supremacy understood alongside one another? Am I kind of getting there or am I missing the mark entirely?

Lauren Corman:

So I think that you're on the right track for sure. I mean, when I think about supremacy it's been through the lens of thinking about who constitutes the subject, particularly under colonial capitalism, like Eurocentric, colonial capitalism, and it's the way that it perpetuates itself. So a lot of my work is informed by people who are thinking about who is counted as fully a subject. Authors that I use quite often and I know we've talked about this before Claudia is Claire Jean Kim's work, dangerous Crossings, where she talks about taxonomies of power, which gets at what Merrick is talking about with these rankings, these hierarchical rankings, and I really like that. This idea of taxonomies of power gives us a way of talking about the kind of interconstitution of different forms of oppression as well as the fluidity of them, and it kind of builds on intersectional thought and I find that very useful. And at the same time, another person who's been really important in my trajectory for thinking about some of these issues around supremacy and the human subject and how that relates to capitalism and colonialism is Billy Ray Belcourt, who's a Drift Pile Cree scholar and activist, amazing person, and he talks about the way that critical animal study has kind of appropriated intersectionality and has really failed to kind of take a more radical view of the way that, like colonialism is not just one intersection when we think about this hierarchical ranking, it's the broader frame that we have to understand these dynamics playing out within. And so to me intersectionality is sort of one set of evolving tools that we might bring to the conversation. But thinking about the interrelationship between capitalism and colonialism is to me also like a necessary part of this. That when you know, you have people like Taken Yang who talk about decolonization in the article, decolonization is not a metaphor, just the way that we don't want to just insert questions of like colonialism and indigeneity into a conversation about intersectionality. So I sort of hold both of those things simultaneously. They talk about an ethics of incommensurability, that we don't want to kind of reduce all issues to sort of an intersectional analysis, and then that fails to kind of think about these broader or like this within a different and important register around colonialism as not just one dynamic among many dynamics.

Lauren Corman:

So to take us back to the sort of central idea of the subject that I've been grappling with since the 1990s, I think about how the question of the animal and animality, which I think we're all interested in is mobilized in the production of difference in service of colonialism and capitalism.

Lauren Corman:

That's really been an important kind of part of how I think about not only how animals are treated, but how our ideas about animals within a capitalist, colonial framework let's say within North America, which has been my primary site of analysis, let's say within North America, which has been my primary site of analysis how ideas about animality and nature coming out of environmental studies for my master's and PhD, how those ideas are mobilized in the production of different kinds of difference for human beings as well as for the environment and animals more generally. So that's a big, long answer, but I think it's really hard to hold some of. I don't want to erase the kind of specificity around these intersectional analysis, but I don't want to collapse them into an anti-colonial critique and that's super important to me as well, and I've taken those articles very seriously and tried to think about how we hold them together. So, yes, that is my initial thought about that.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Well, I mean one of the reasons I asked and our focus for today is, of course, media and communication, and we're going to pick up that thread that you spoke there about with regards to adamality in a moment. But one of the reasons I asked is because in many ways I find intersectionality is one of these concepts that's got a very rich history, a rich, complicated history that's not necessarily agreed on within academia with regards to how it is used and how it is mobilized. And as academic concepts enter the popular realm, sometimes they take on a life of their own and it can be kind of tricky to understand what exactly is being spoken about at any given moment in time. But I want to pick up on that thread with regards to animality, because this is something we're going to talk about today.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

You wrote in the special issue now about QAnon and what was his name Jacob Chansley. Is that how you say it, jacob Chansley? And how he mobilized, in some ways, animality when they were storming in Washington. Could you walk us through this as a case study to kind of just start to bring into focus the connection between supremacy and media, like how is supremacy and media connected, and maybe to give us a tangible example here, like the one you used?

Lauren Corman:

Yeah, I mean, I think, like many animal maybe critical animal studies scholars and other people engaged in human animal relations, we were in the midst of really thick into the kind of importance of the animal question and our tragic ways that we interact with the non-human world, as manifesting now through these very virulent pathogens that were so disruptive, and that the story of the COVID-19 pandemic is so deeply entangled in these questions of animality, how we relate to the non-human, how we construct the non-human and then use those constructions in the mobilization, in the construction of other forms of difference as well and their inter-constitution, of course. So that was kind of the larger for me, that was kind of the larger moment that I was navigating, as we, as I think we all were, and then the the riot happens and we watch this unfolding in this sort of spectacular way and Jacob Chansley, who is referred, as you know, the QAnon shaman or the American shaman, these various different terms he arrives as this kind of spectacular figure that is representing this deeply amorphous, many-tendrilled QAnon conspiracy theory and then it's being actualized on our screens in different ways and this moment of violence against the US state in service of a Trumpian agenda, and it was so striking to me that he was laden with these animal furs and he was doing this kind of cosplaying that had something to do with the enactment of white supremacy as it relates to this alt-right, far-right, qanon conspiracy. He becomes the kind of mascot of the QAnon conspiracy and he becomes the symbol for many of the capital insurrection. And my brain was kind of blown by this moment. It's like how can we take this nugget of cultural density and begin to unpack it?

Lauren Corman:

And to me I was really interested in people who were trying to tease out the legacies of white supremacy and colonialism that were coming to that moment as being relevant for making sense of Jacob Chansley and his kind of iconography, in that kind of brazen playfulness in that moment where he could take on the kinds of tropes of the animal by wearing animal skin and kind of stepping out of and furs and these sorts of things and wearing a horned hat and stepping outside of the kind of paradigm of civilization, of what the west considers to be a fully civilized human subject. And so what was it about being able to play in this inter, in this in-between place? That was itself a reenactment. What does it mean to be able to step outside of the tropes of civilization and still maintain one's human status. That became a kind of curious question for me.

Lauren Corman:

It was something about being able to flaunt that that gave me some insight into this particular moment, and so here I'm drawing on Andal Gosain's work and Claire Jean Kim and Sakaya Imam Jackson to think about how his subjectivity is never in question as a white man, and that there's something about being able to kind of consider, like the physical spaces of power as your playground, the kind of costuming that you would wear as a kind of playground, and that your humanity and validity as a subject goes unquestioned and in fact is reinforced. In stepping outside of this civilized frame, larger threads of racialization, colonialism and capitalism that were already coming to the foreground of really powerful, damaging, dramatic ways through the pandemic.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

So he kind of had the luxury of being absurd Because of American history. He had the luxury to kind of be absurd and strange, and without his humanity coming into question or without his civility coming to question.

Lauren Corman:

Yeah, and I would say that it's not just that he gets to be a joker or kind of a silly clown figure, it's that he gets to rely on tropes of animality, very intentionally so, in the construction of the human subject. Within Eurocentric capitalism, part of how those forms of power are enacted is to demand of people who are being colonized that they always prove themselves human this is Gosain's argument and that they always fail to do that. You will never produce that full human subjectivity because the colonial subject, the white human subject, needs that other in order to produce that subjectivity, that full humanity. So it's the fact that he can step over that borderland into the tropes of animality and, quote, act like an animal that allows him to reassert his whiteness and his full humanity as a full human subject. That was my argument.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

I mean it's a really interesting case study because, as you mentioned in the paper, he his imagery. He's kind of said, even even if people don't know the exact details of what happened, or you've seen a picture of him, you know where he was and what he was doing, and I mean the fact that this riots in the US happened and then was kind of also just swept under the carpets. It should have been something that was, uh, really received a lot more outrage. And someone like him flaunts. I mean, wasn't he also like growling and howling and doing all sorts of really outlandish things? But it's not just him, it's how he do you think.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Here's my question Do you think people like Jacob Chansley are using media to also help to portray this kind of animalized version of themselves? What's the relationship between him and media? Do you think in any way we just happened to get a picture of him or do you think this was, I guess, orchestrated to some extent, that they knew he would seem he would become an icon? Is there any basis to that, any ideas with regards to that? Or was this just chance? He just happened to be there, one of the rioters, and he was caught on camera and he captured people's imaginations?

Lauren Corman:

I want to ping it over to the other awesome guests because I think that Jacob chansley is continuous with other things that are happening in various on different cultural planes and spheres, um, that have to do with the manosphere, um, this sort of um, well, I'll, maybe, maybe, if I could, because I feel like I'm talking too much. I I really did use the work of these two scholars to make sense of what was going on because of these, why?

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

don't we jump into this idea of primal rhetoric networks, because this is kind of what I was edging towards here, because I do think he is mobilizing to some extent what you speak about in your paper. With regards to primal rhetoric networks, there's this idea of this primal man that's taken hold recently, and I know you've written about that. So, david, why don't we start with you? What are some of your thoughts there?

David Rooney:

Oh goodness. Well, in approaching this paper, which is part of a much larger project that Merrick and I are engaged in, which seeks to see how the meaning of meat as animals that are consumed takes on various forms in the digital age. But, like Carol Adams says, there's one static meaning of meat, which is that an animal has to die, and I think that that really is at the groundwork of how people are thinking of primal rhetoric. So how we define primal rhetoric is a trope in which consumption of non-human animals is seen as ingesting or taking on some sort of virility, a pre-modernity often clumsily associated with indigenous peoples.

David Rooney:

So, in a very similar way to what Lauren is talking about, you see these online networks of people who are dedicating themselves to eating raw meat, raw liver, raw eggs, blending that with explicitly racist ideas about how they are rewilding themselves or embracing a sort of animal existence that modernity has taken away from them as white men.

David Rooney:

And so you see I mean Merrick wrote quite a bit about the liver king, so I'm sure that they can get onto this but they will travel to tribes and say, you know, living, for example, I think, in Mexico and say they eat largely meat. Therefore, if I eat like largely meat, or if I don't wear shoes, I will be reverting to that type of wholesome, wonderful existence. Now, what this paper really focused on was the primal rhetorics and then started to get into the rhetorical networks, which is how all these online spaces feed onto each other and they accelerate the meanings of meat in these tightly knit communities. Online and part of the larger book project, we're looking at how this takes place in a variety of different ways online and part of the larger book project, we're looking at how this takes place in a variety of different ways. I think Merrick briefly mentioned earlier the recent bans on cellular meat in the United States as something that draws very directly from deeply online conspiracies about white men being forced to eat bugs as a way to enslave them or domesticate them.

S Marek Muller:

I think another thing that we really try to emphasize is the extent to which a lot of these narratives about primal masculinity, this primal rhetoric, is also drawing upon tropes we often associate with conspiracy, but a particular iteration of conspiracy that has been recently on a podcast in fact, and called conspirituality, this idea that you can almost reclaim some sort of spiritually supreme status by virtue of rejecting aspects of techno-modernity that have to some extent made man, specifically white, cisgender, well-to-do, perhaps Christian man, less virile, low testosterone or even poor mental health. I believe on one of Liver King's journeys he speaks to a shaman might not even have been a shaman, just somebody who was leading him to a shaman and asked do you have depression in your community? I'm not sure if linguistically the word especially transferred over, but the purpose was to get the man he was asking in this community to say, no, we don't have that here. People aren't sad here. Uh, liberking's purpose was to show that by reverting to this sort of primal, pre-technological, heavy on eating meat state of being, the sort of sadness of contemporary modernity could be eliminated.

S Marek Muller:

And this does draw upon some larger conspiracy trokes, where we can understand conspiracy here as a genre to mean the idea that there are sort of a cabal of secret elites that are seeking to do something bad to the masses for the purpose of consolidating elite power. And contemporarily, on the far right, we see a lot of these conspiracy narratives, casting a lot of high technological figures, such as, for example, bill Gates, in this role, but also sort of these ideas about something contaminating the body, whether that's on purpose or by virtue of technology.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Well, something I think that was really quite fascinating that you guys drew on is the primal rhetoric is, on the one hand, kind of this enactment of anachronistic space, right, like you're trying to enact some sort of something that happened long ago, this romantic ideal type that it's an imagined ideal type that probably never existed, right, like you're trying to enact some sort of something that happened long ago, this romantic ideal type that it's an imagined ideal type that probably never existed, right. But, on the other hand, the network component of this I find really interesting, because you're using a media that's in no ways part of this kind of historical space. So it's a mobilization of a supposedly quote unquote like historically inaccurate idea, but like a historical primal self from way back when, while at the same time using the most contemporary media and networks to make this happen. Is there any sort of? You know, it's like that classic thing that's often used against vegans. You know, well, a lion eats meat and you're like, yeah, well, a lion is also not using an iPhone.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Or, you know, you selectively pick and choose what aspects of a discourse to take to make your argument of this kind of like selective mobilization. But to what end? What work is this doing? What work is this kind of primal rhetoric doing? Is this an exclusively North American thing? Yeah, there's a lot thrown at you there, but this is really fascinating stuff.

David Rooney:

I think the tension you point out between these highly online networks and these visions, these mythologized pasts, is not coincidental, and I think you have in these networks you have various players that do different things. You have the public facing spectacular images. This might be someone like the QAnon shaman or what we looked at, the liver king on TikTok Millions of followers, many, many people read his website and he eats raw liver, as per his name on TikTok. But then you also have popular people who push like the carnivore diet Joe Rogan, jordan Peterson. You have these alt influencers that intersect a little bit with more general suspicion of pharmaceutical industry, healthcare industry, sort of naturalist quasi-conspiracies. But then this leads in what we call a pipeline in these networks to a more radicalized perspective, and the example that we draw on is the raw egg nationalist, who is an explicitly white nationalist believer that raw meat and raw egg consumption will help rejuvenate the white race and establish white supremacy.

David Rooney:

And I would say, if we look at his writings closely which we do in the paper and much more in the bigger work we see that he also is a media philosopher in his own way and he thinks of these anonymous posters, these highly visible examples, all as connected, as a way to normalize and rationalize and make their views more tangible to the mainstream. And some people in communication studies have talked about how white nationalism masks this language. It's no longer racism, it's racial realism and in sort of an analogous way this is how these primal writers are engaging in. But at the same time one of the things the raw egg nationalist points to I think is very interesting is that he sort of sees these media networks as like a hive mind of their own. The media itself sort of functions animalistically in that perspective. It's like the brain of the crowd and it's not the traditional redder to the public speech to the audience. So in a way I don't think it's coincidental that they're tied together, those technologies and this vision of this past.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Could you unpack that racial rationalism for me? Is that what you said?

David Rooney:

Yes, so in white supremacists I'm thinking here of. There's a couple of works in communication studies that we draw on. One is by a person named Harso, another one is called Make America Meme, again by Hohner and Woods, and they talk about how the alt-right relies on the sort of concealing of their explicit intent, lies on the sort of concealing of their explicit intent. So you get the memetic part, you get the frame of the meme, but they don't have to defend the explicit parts. So rather than saying I believe in white supremacy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, they say well, I'm a racial realist.

David Rooney:

I think that there are things we need to question, we need to look at and this is something Merrick and I have looked at in some other projects that were going on which is how popular political figures can call upon these conspiracies that are explicitly racist or anti-Semitic or what have you, but in ways that allow them to avoid accountability for every aspect of it. They don't have to name and claim the more controversial parts, they can just invoke it in a generalized, vague sense. And the point people like the raw nationalist think, the point of that coded language and irony and all these other tools is to infiltrate and normalize those concepts into the mainstream, which then slowly radicalize over time after that.

Lauren Corman:

I just wanted to build on this by saying that I think that part of how I make sense of this moment is that we're in a series of crises. We might think of white masculinity as being in crisis, and has been for a long time, and this is this moment that I was theorizing around Jacob Chansley and the insurrection as being some kind of attempt to reassert power, and I think about these conspiracy theories as well as a kind of misdiagnosis around a set of crises. So we know that capitalism produces crises, different kinds of course, economic crises, but these are related to ecological crises, which was, of course, economic crises, but these are related to ecological crises, which was part of the way that COVID-19 played out. So there's a set of crises that, essentially, were immersed in globally as well as like locally, in different kinds of specific ways, and that people do not have the theoretical or not given. I would say intentionally, without making it sound like another conspiracy, if I were to talk about the conspiracy, perhaps it is capitalism, but we're not given the theoretical frameworks to make sense of why these crises are being produced, what drives them and then how might we address them, which would be a much deeper kind of restructuring of the economy. It would take like a shift away from individualism to a much more communal, socialist way of interacting with the environment, with each other.

Lauren Corman:

These are things that are an affront to the kind of global capitalist system that we have right now, and so I see those conspiracy theories as almost rushing in in the face of these crises, also through people in great positions of power for their own self-interest, helping to fuel misinformation about why we are in the midst of different crises and a kind of mislabeling of those crises which felt so profound in the pandemic that we know that it's deforestation and that we know that it's factory farming and these various different things that contribute to the rise of zoonotic disease.

Lauren Corman:

This, like you know, looking at about 75% of emerging diseases are zoonotic in origin, and instead of being able to have an incisive analysis of why we are in these crises and people turning towards sort of these health experts, is because it takes us away from having a clear indictment of a global capitalist order that has restructured and used nature and those that labels as nature or animal in service as objects to perpetuate capitalism and colonialism. That is not a good sell within these countries, so you have this kind of disintegration around any kind of coherent analysis of the system as it's operating, and then people feel disempowered in the midst of that. I'm not giving anyone a pass here for these people who are putting forward white nationalists and other perspectives, but I do think that people in this media landscape and set of cultural landscapes are looking for a way of making sense of a set of crises that we all are experiencing and observing and, of course, are disproportionately meted upon certain marginalized communities, animals, the environment more broadly really nicely said I.

S Marek Muller:

I just want to echo what warren is saying and in fact, well, it would be very, very easy to just, you know, name people like raw egg nationalists or liver king as conspiracy brokers, people who peddle conspiracy, make money on conspiracy and then run away with the profits. Liver King his entire rationale for why he left dentistry to do what he does is based in men's mental health and acknowledgement that there is a very real crisis of mental health. He's pinpointing it in men, sort of implicitly. In white men there is a broader recognition that people are hurting, but for Liberkig it becomes a way to sell supplements and to romanticize indigeneity in a way that really elements this idea of the noble savage instead of an actual, coherent understanding of the multitudinous factors that are causing general crises in mental health. But I think, lauren, to your point, you're right on it there is a general recognition and whether it leads to productive conversation or exclusivity and Christian white nationalism, I mean, there is an analysis happening, but the analysis is not always happening in productive ways.

David Rooney:

Well, I also want to tackle that. I thought Lauren's comments were great and getting at something I'm thinking about in particular. What you call the misdiagnosis conspiracy is the misdiagnosis of these larger crises that are happening. And I have a paper that's coming out in Environmental Communication very soon about the Green New Deal. And there was major conspiracies about the Green New Deal by Republican politicians, including Donald Trump and dozens of senators, that it would take away our hamburgers. Now the response was that this was fake. Of course it's fake. It mentions nothing about hamburgers or meat or cows that you know, give some money to animal agriculture, in fact.

David Rooney:

But I think it's a problem to respond to those conspiracies because what Trump and these other people are getting at is, in a way, a coherent environmental worldview. They are correct in acknowledging that sustainability is incompatible with meat consumption. The science is very clear that we can avoid two degrees Celsius even if all other greenhouse gas emissions stopped if we continue to eat meat and dairy. But what they do in response to that conspiracy, or to spread that conspiracy, is to embrace the environmental harm. They say it's good to do the environmental harm because we need it for white masculinity, we need it to not be soy boys. And so I think, if you have a crisis, these conspiracies responding to these structural crises, that the response is a fact check or well, this is not quite the case.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

I think it misses the larger point, which is that they are, in a way, articulating a coherent environmental worldview, and maybe one that's a little bit more honest than the tweaks to the system that is in crisis men who are, in many ways, in a form of crisis, of crisis of identity, a crisis of not really knowing how they fit, perhaps in a new world order, or perhaps this is what they are saying, and this is why, you know, things like Jordan Peterson's 12-step plan have become so popular.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

There's a kind of I guess what's been said is, there's a lot of men that don't exactly know what to do, and then, on the other hand, you've got people coming forward with what seems like a very simple narrative We'll just be more of a man, be more of a man, eat more liver and things will turn out OK for you. And kind of caught in between these two, what I've made here very flippant kind of synopses. You've got actual animals being slaughtered and murdered and actual kind of environmental destruction that is happening as a result of increased and heightened consumption, and one group of people are saying, well, we have to do something and the only thing we can do, or one of the only things we can do, is stop consuming meat, and others saying that's bullshit, that's a conspiracy, there is no connection between climate change and meat consumption In very crude terms. Am I kind of capturing the milieu?

David Rooney:

I would have one slight modification to the end, which is that I think actually it's maybe not as appropriate to talk about climate denial when they talk about meat. I think they are embracing the climate harm and Claire Daggett has a very good piece on this on petro-masculinities. That drill, baby drill, is not climate denial. It's not a rejection of the climate science. Although it manifests that way, it's a pleasurable. I don't want to feel guilty anymore. I don't care if it hurts others. That's part of the appeal. Is the transgression the same as it is for the liver king? And I think that that's what we see with these performances of meat consumption. I don't think it's a strictly ignorance or denial, although again it masquerades like that. I think to some extent there's a relishing of the harm it does to the environment and animals.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

It sounds to me very different to the kind of portrayal of the hunter masculinity, right, someone who goes out and protects nature. The way to protect nature is to kill certain animals. This seems like a very different manifestation of masculinity then. Yeah, it's interesting to think about how these different both are consuming meat but with very different kinds of ideas of what's the appropriate way to consume meat and to create this masculine identity.

Lauren Corman:

There's something to hear about the way that indigeneity is thought of in terms of laying claim to a sense of an authenticity and a legitimacy to the land, as a way of grounding oneself in the midst of these crises.

Lauren Corman:

So Joseph Pierce, who I cite in my article, talks about how Jacob Chansley is part of this long trajectory of colonialism in which there is the genocide and dispossession of Indigenous people and then the assertion of white people, and white men in particular, as being the natural heirs to the land, in particular as being the natural heirs to the land. And I think that that piece around erasure and appropriation at the same time is really important to this discussion, because it's seen as the antidote to part of this. However, we want to think about these crises that I would say are, you know, in part perpetuated through industrial capital, the rise of industrial capitalism, the spread of global capitalism and its colonial machinations then that are, in which people then are, and men in particular, want to lay a kind of legitimate claim to the land that they have murdered people on and dislocated people from, as being the authentic heirs.

S Marek Muller:

In the kind of work that I think we're all talking about, there's an appeal to one's authenticity and validity as a way of grounding an identity that is in crisis and that is folded into a particular relationship with constructions of, and violent practices towards, indigenous peoples and animals just to echo that, but so also fascinating in like the worst kind of ways, the extent to which indigeneity is somewhat flattened and in some cases whitened, to the extent that it becomes a product that can be consumed for the purposes of reclaiming some sort of indigeneity that has been lost through techno modernity but that doesn't necessarily have to be refound through large systemic changes in global practices.

S Marek Muller:

I think largely of Liber King. He has these nine ancestral tenets of how you reclaim your manhood, and a lot of it has to do with being outside, and that's why you see all these videos of him, literally, you know, going out nose to tail, having an animal that is literally killed by hand in the way you might. He names the Cree peoples as the baddest dudes on the planet, but then where he's making his money is powdered versions of those products. It's okay if you don't actually want to. You know, reclaim this indigeneity, take it in this big pharma way, but I am selling it to you. So indigeneity, or some idea of indigeneity that reflects very little about what it means to quote unquote be indigenous, since that's not the singular experience. It becomes a product, but the purpose of that product is almost a medicine. That's your masculine downfall wow, that's wow.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

You said that, so there were so many great ways which you phrase that, and I mean this comes again to what lauren was saying. I think consumption is hidden here, like we're thinking, right, on the one hand, about the consumption of the actual items, whether it's the vitamin pills or the meat that the liver king is consuming, but we're also thinking about the consumption of particular lifestyles, the consumption of media, right? So people trying to consume something. And this, I think, speaks to a much broader and bigger challenge where folks are struggling.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

I think, in many ways, people are struggling and media, especially social media, has fragmented us into these pockets where you can find someone who's got a similar niche, small interest, where you can fuel some of these conspiracy theories and you can have someone who backs you up and you can feel like you belong, without necessarily, maybe, crafting.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

You know, if you want to run a marathon, you have to actually get on the road and run a marathon, but here you can just consume something. You can buy a product and become X, and this is not, I think, for me, not just a problem with folks like Liver King, it's, you see it, with consumption of all sorts. If you just buy this particular handbag, you will be this person. If you just buy this, you will be this. And somehow consumption has been sold to us as the way to solve problems, as the way to solve these crises, and perhaps this conversation we're having here about your primal self through a pill is just another symptom of this idea that you can buy away your problems. You can just buy and consume yourself out of the parts of life that suck.

Lauren Corman:

To me that totally resonates.

Lauren Corman:

It's the kind of pill that global capitalism would offer, of course, and when I think about the kind of the way that various different Indigenous scholars and activists talk about the intimate relationships with the land and as the land, as Indigenous people, it seems like such a distorted, gross desecration, that furthering of a kind of colonial logic for this moment that so desperately needs a reorientation towards ecological webs, webs of interpersonal relationships where people are taking care of each other, all these sorts of things that would actually provide the sort of meaningful healing that is so desperately needed, is actually is so desperately needed, is actually obviously being furthered by the kinds of shallow cures that are kind of offered in this media landscape.

Lauren Corman:

And it just feels it's just so deeply gross that Indigenous people, which have forged for so long in a variety of contexts and, to Merrick's point, in very specific, unique ways, would have that homogenized, reduced and then sold back as some distorted version that's actually in service of the further destruction of the planet and the disproportionate ways that that impacts the marginalized people and non-human animals. It just seems super abjectly disgusting that that is the moment that we're in, to be frank, yeah, yeah, Consumption.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

I mean, we're talking also about the consumption and thinking about Dinesh Wadi's most recent book about capitalism, where he says there's also a problem of production. Right, On the one hand, we're speaking about how we're consuming and accessing media and the meat and the products and the pills. But that's only one side of this kind of critique of there's the production of these discourses and who does it serve? Right, To what end do these discourses and these rhetorical networks, who do they help? What are they in service of? And I know, Lauren, you had mentioned earlier in service of capitalism as well. But who owns media? Who owns these large media corporations? Who is making money, real money, off of the skyrocketing of someone like Liver King? You know it's advertisers. Those are the folks that are making money. The people that own these social networks are the ones who are making money. And I'm also sounding very conspiratorial. It almost seems hard to talk about global issues now without sounding conspiratorial. It always seems hard to talk about global issues now without sounding conspiratorial in some shape or form.

S Marek Muller:

Well, I think what's important to remember, though, about conspiracy is that you don't have to use the word in a pathologizing way. If conspiracy is a genre that talks about the idea that there are hidden agendas at play by people with large amounts of economic and social capital, conspiracy is a genre, and some conspiracies end up being true. But the problem of conspiracy studies is the best conspiracies are the ones that don't end up coming out as conspiracies.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

I actually wanted to ask you if you saw the one Birds Aren't Real, did you see like what a brilliant social experiment. So if you haven the one, uh, birds aren't real, did you? Did you see like what a brilliant social experiment. So if you haven't, if you haven't seen, um, birds aren't real. And I think he gives a ted talk about it there's a huge poster still up here in vienna about birds aren't real. Um, in a nutshell I don't even know his name, but he, he created this whole conspiracy that birds aren't real and there are little mini computers that are like watching us.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

And when have you ever seen? Just, it was absolutely outlandish, seems like there's no way it could be plausible or possible. And a whole bunch of people started following it. It gained traction. It was just more and more traction and folks really got behind him and eventually, after going to rallies and him becoming the kind of icon of the movement, he stood up and said no, this was all a social experiment. Just to show one that we all think that we can't get caught up in conspiracy theories. But we're fallible. We have our psychology sometimes work against us and if you frame things in just the right way at just the right moment to just the right crowd. You can really gain traction with ideas that seem completely out of tune with what reality is. Did you see this? Birds Aren't Real.

S Marek Muller:

Saw it. Yeah, Not really in depth, though I was more amused by it than anything else.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

I was just fascinated that people actually got on board with it, right. Or like things like Flat Earth you think at, at first you want to just laugh off oh ha ha, flat Earth, who's you know? How could anyone take that seriously? But I think that's a mistake to not take seriously. When people take these ideas seriously, like Lauren said earlier, this is a symptom of something that many people want to believe this that many people are distrustful of science, that many people are distrustful of science, that many people are distrustful of what governments say is a symptom of something you know. That's not to say the world is actually flat, but it does tell us something about the nature of our world. All right, folks, let me see if I've got any other questions lined up here. So I mentioned primal lifestyles, which I think we've definitely spoken about, and the connection between masculinity and diet. Do you see the same kind of media runaway ideas happening with regards to women and diet at all? Femininity and diet what kind of traction has that got?

S Marek Muller:

Oh well, I mean, obviously, like when you talk about mediated relationships between femininity and food. I mean it's hard not to think about that, especially with regard to the changes that you know, the ideal woman's appearance, with regard to the absence of food that so permeated a lot of late 1990s, early 2000s. But of course, we can also talk about the idea of soy or vegetables, or just the absence of meat, as seemingly an inherently feminine way of being that is at odds with this idealized masculinity that is often forwarding a lot of these ideas, of these carnivore diets. You don't want to be a soy boy beta cock, because to be a soy boy beta cock would be to be a man who is a bat woman but so we don't have any like sort of equivalents of a liver king for woman, a liver queen, or is there?

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

is there any sort of like gaining of traction about this carnival diet among women that are like? Are there any personalities that are gaining traction in that space?

S Marek Muller:

Well, liver King does have a liver queen his wife. But the idea behind a liver queen isn't necessarily to be the hunter but to be sort of the idealized partner to the liver king.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

It kind of reminds me of the trad wife movement a little bit. And are animals featured at all in these kinds of other than as meats? Do animals feature in these?

David Rooney:

discourses at all about what the idealized man should be, not for the liver king but, I know, for the raw egg nationalist and I think this is a kind of current in this new relationship to meat is they mobilize some anti-anthropocentric attitudes selectively. So the Rawick Nationalist is infamous for posting, for example, a video of a Chinese woman cutting a rabbit to be made into soup, and he'll post something about the barbarism of China or Chinese culture or what have you. But then you know his followers will say well, don't you eat rabbit? Aren't you pro hunting? I go hunting and eat rabbit in Yorkshire, whoever I am, and he goes yeah, actually I have eaten rabbit.

David Rooney:

So and I think we've seen this in a host of these carnivore influencers they selectively rally, for example, against factory farming, although the vast, vast, vast majority of meat comes from factory farming. I think Garrett Broad kind of calls this out as like they have to get meat in some way, but they hate factory farming, but they end up eating it anyway. So I think they selectively incorporate these pro-animal attitudes, if only to leverage them against marginalized humans that they see, as you know, also holding the sign of animality. And I think, for example, something that's happening in the UK right now is there's a lot of discourse about halal slaughter and other types of animal slaughter, and Merrick and I have done a bit of work in this area in terms of anti-Semitic tropes of kosher slaughter during Nazi Germany and how Nazis use particular types of pro-animal attitudes, maybe even vegetarian attitudes, in order to solidify the idea that Jewish populations were animalistic. So I think there is a bit more of a complicated relationship to animality than purely dominance over them. They're very selectively used as well.

Lauren Corman:

Thinking about this through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic, what some animal geographers have called animal-linked racialization seems to be playing out so distinctly even within the animal movements, which was really sad to see.

Lauren Corman:

That the kind of racialization against people in Wuhan, chinese people, east Asian people in general, was about the, about the wet markets, which were often misunderstood.

Lauren Corman:

What a wet market was, but that people were eating bats, and so this sort of becomes a scapegoat, both the bat themselves, the bats themselves as well as the people who are I think, david, I think you said the kind of bear the signifier of the animal.

Lauren Corman:

Right, they're signified as animal and even within the sort of rhetorical strategies of the North American dominant white movement, there was these sorts of appeals to end pandemics through closing down of wet markets, like through people like Brian Adams positioning those who are consuming bats and other animals not regarded as food animals within North America that they were seen as savage and barbaric again, that they've stepped outside of the frame of the fully human, civilized subject and have become animal like themselves or are are animal-like themselves because of the kinds of animal practices that they engage, where they engage those practices and then which animals are consumed that are not in alignment with what the West considers, within its capitalist food production, as food animals, and so this is just one example in the mix of this sort of other conversation that we're having about meat consumption and the specificities of it that was playing out right alongside the rise of this sort of manosphere, meat consumption primal rhetorics that we're talking about.

S Marek Muller:

To your point, lauren. I know it's now crazily enough 10 years ago, but a very similar pattern happened during the West Africa Ebola outbreak in 2014 to 2016 with regard to the practice of consuming big, scary bushmeat and the over-reliance on bushmeat as a vector of Ebola, even though that wasn't even close to the case, with the fear that these big, scary people were going to go out, kill a monkey, eat the monkey and suddenly Ebola was going to not only spread throughout West Africa but to the United States.

Lauren Corman:

Yeah, it's about enlisting animals in the animalization of certain groups of people.

David Rooney:

In the vein of that conversation, something that I'm thinking about is the recent conspiracy in the United States spread by Donald Trump, jd Vance, that Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating cats and dogs and, in particular, people's pets. And when we think about animalization there, I think something that's very important is we can sometimes take animal as a unified category, that animals are sort of a general subjugation or marginalized group, but when we look at that specific scenario and we ask about, you know where does animality a bit closer as extensions of the white domestic home, proto-human status, almost separated above other animals and even above these Haitian migrants to not blur these things together but not to also rely on strict boundaries between what is happening and, in particular, I'm a bit worried of animals being too closely attached as a universal category for these beings that are marginalized in different ways.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Hmm, that's a really great point. I mean also just to complicate pet status. Right To be a pet is also to be a very particular type of captive, but, of course, a captive that particular humans really, really adore and love and get very upset about. So to this idea of consumption that some animals can be farmed and others can't, that when people find out that there are dog festivals and dog meat eating and that folks in the US can get outraged that other people are eating meat, eating dog meat, while at the same time eating cow or pig meat, it's completely it doesn't fly. You don't get to be critical of others eating dog meat if you yourself are eating cow or pig meat. I'm sorry, that's my firm status on it, because at the end of the day, those practices are very similar. They've just culturally manifested in different ways in different parts of the world.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

And I just I find it very problematic when folks can look at other cultures and say, well, look at how they eat meat, while at the same time not looking at factory farming, which is not only causing harm to the animals who are being slaughtered on the factory farms, but the massive tracts of land that are required to have these farms operate in the first place. People think that it's soy production that is destroying the Amazon, which I know all of you know. No, the soy production is going to be fed to domesticated and farmed animals. It's not for soy milk and vegans fridges, as folks would have you believe. Which sorry, going to my little tirade there, but it is extremely frustrating how people can position themselves as somehow being better and above other groups when it comes to the consumption of meat, that some other form of consumption of meat is more barbaric or less barbaric than what we do, because it's out of sight, out of mind or differently cultured.

Lauren Corman:

So yeah to David's point about, I think specificity and not flattening the idea of the animal or when we're talking about the animal, is so important. Darren Chang and I explored this in an article called Taxonomies of Power. Was it Taxonomies of Power? Oh no, it's called Multispecies, disability, taxonomies of power in a global pandemic, in the wet markets and that, in the sort of North American or Eurocentric consciousness in terms of dominant construction, is vermin. They're at the kind of the bottom of the hierarchy. And then they were mobilized in a particular kind of way alongside these constructions of East Asians, chinese people in particular, within American colonialism and as vermin. They were perceived as vermin within the body politic through American colonialism.

Lauren Corman:

And so the striking thing is, when we're talking about sort of the animal movements and more generally as well, people rendering certain peoples as being savage and barbaric, they don't necessarily see the speciesism as well, as you know, obviously, the racism that is at the heart of those sorts of claims.

Lauren Corman:

But it's drawing on these very specific, very specific ways that certain kinds of animals have been used, as, as Kim argues, in the production of racial difference. It's not just the animal, as David's pointing to, it's specific kinds of animals and then specific kinds of racial differences are produced, as Claire Jean Kim says, yeah, not incidental, but are integral to the production of racial difference. So I just wanted to highlight that point because I do think it's a very important one that, as animal scholars, to have that specificity but also to turn towards the animal movements that deployed understandings of barbarism and savagery without, I think, looking more critically at how those are undergirded by speciesist ideas about the human and who counts as animal and those sorts of things. So it's like out there you know, the sort of dominant culture, but also within the animal movements between racialization and animalization also playing out, with the kinds of activism and rhetorics that people are using that are really based in these sorts of problematic constructions.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

And I mean to your point, who we consider to be human today. Quote unquote wasn't always the case, right, like women only gained personhood status, depending on which country you're looking at. You know, within the last, in some countries they still don't have personhood status today. You know whether some humans were property, whether you were talking about children or black people or women we were property at some point in history and now we're more considered humans or persons. So it's not as clear cut as somehow your species and your biology determines what is human versus what is animal. So I hear you, david, and Lauren here in terms of just thinking more with regards to how the discourse of animality and humanity are mobilized to serve specific groups. Okay, so, david, we're going to go to you and then we're going to, I think, turn over to talking about the quotes.

David Rooney:

That's how I was going to ask if I could read my quote, because it's quite a trip, oh yeah, well then let's start with you.

David Rooney:

So my quote comes from Derrida, who extremely very long sentences. I tried to trim this as much as possible, but in the short it comes from the Animal, the. Therefore I Am page 31 of the book. It follows that one will never have the right to take animals to be the species of a kind that would be named the animal or animal in general. So what he's getting at here, I think, is what our conversation about is that animality, or the animal or animal in general, is not innate to these things that we call animal. They may share a special historical relationship with that idea, but it also figures these relations with other entities, human and non, and I've mentioned, for example, machines.

David Rooney:

And I wanted to point to a work that I think Lauren mentioned, Becoming Human, by Zakiya Jackson, in which she asked the question when Enlightenment thinkers say, for example, that African is an animal, what happens to animal studies if we take that sentence seriously? And I think Claire Jean Kim has a piece on the killing of Harambe, the gorilla murder and mattering in Harambe's house, in which he says apeness and blackness were hammered out together, not as a figure for one another and I think sometimes there can be a tendency and for people who are interested in animals or animal studies or animal activism, to think of race as a byproduct of an originary violence against animals. And I think, if we take seriously that the animal or animality is something much bigger than animals and that animals maybe can be positioned above humans, maybe other animals, it kind of complicates this whole question and I'm I'm worried of that species level distinction or definition of animal which we've been talking about.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

I think super powerful. That's really great. And I think it just speaks to the practice of these things. Like we sometimes think about categories as somehow being like static objects or things, but actually it's something that's performed and practiced or expected somehow. You're expected to behave in X way or Y way. Really, really interesting. And, marek, do you have your quote ready for us?

S Marek Muller:

I do. My quote is by Carrie Packwood Freeman. I want to say she's been on your show before.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

She'll be part of this season, so she'll be in the episode on. So um she'll be in the the episode on, or she is in the episode on misrepresentation, yep awesome.

S Marek Muller:

So this is actually a quote, a condensed quote. I took a big quote and condensed it a little bit, but I this is one of the quotes I read while I was in mongolia uh, that actually sort of encouraged uh, pursue uh this, this field of study. Um, and the quote, a condensed quote, is scholars and advocates should begin to ask how all species are unified and what ways primary differences can be viewed as strengths. And acknowledgement of difference does not have to equate with an admission of inferiority. And I think the reason that I really value this quote is because it's acknowledgement of the value of alterity and the value that comes from knowing that some experiences are unknowable, explain that non-given animals are entitled to rights and consideration by virtue of all the ways that they are sufficiently similar to my lived experience or your lived experience. And it makes a lot of sense, because empathy often comes from the idea that I can imagine myself being in your shoes.

S Marek Muller:

But if we take the idea of weak anthropocentrism seriously, that is to say that there is no way for us to fully understand that which is not us, and the fact that that doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing an acknowledgement of differences as a position of strength and a position of something worthy of respect might lead to a deeper consideration of what it means to be more than human, in a way that decenters the human productively and allows for us to think through the extent of which it can be valuable to know things that I can't know. The example I have is my dog in the background here. Her nose functions at a level so much stronger than my own nose that I can't even imagine the extent to which her world shifts through her olfactory performance, and so I don't believe that I should be entitled to more or less rights than my dog by virtue of her sensorial superiority with her nose, but I believe that she has value in the way that she can contribute to this world or understand the world in this way that I cannot.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Yeah, it's not a question of complexity or intelligence or it's a question of difference, and difference that matters to them, right?

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Your dog's noise matters to her, brings meaning.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

I had Carol Gugliotti on the show and the key thing for her in thinking through animal creativity was that the ways in which animals express themselves and the things that they do brings meaning to them. That's important, and oftentimes we view how other animals move through the worlds and the things they do and we try to bend it to thinking how could this be understood by us, right? So how could we understand dogs' smell through our frame? And I mean Alexander Horowitz, famously, kind of you know, says that dogs see the world through smell, which is just mind bending, like I can't even get my brain to comprehend that, but to kind of just respect that. That's how they move through the world and that's what brings meaning to them, kind of shifts a little bit, how you could possibly interact with your dog and take their world seriously. What makes you think about this, because it mentioned inferiority there what makes you think about this quote in relation to thinking about supremacy and media? How do you think that this could play out when thinking about media?

S Marek Muller:

Well, I think a difficulty that often comes with pro-animal movements is the extent to which animals advocating for themselves often is not seen through the same lens as to how humans are often able to leverage media to that same extent to self-advocate.

S Marek Muller:

And a of recent innovations in documentary um has been like to show animals in a position of struggle. So, for example, on blackfish, uh, there's been research and media studies done looking at scenes of tilikum thrashing as an example of animals advocating for themselves on film, albeit not in the same exact way that a human might do so, but I think it speaks to the fact that there's such an alterity in the way that animals communicate and thus advocate for their needs that, no matter how many technological advances we might have to communicate for ourselves, a lot of the times trying to speak on behalf of an animal is going to be animal. Human attempts to translate, human attempts to leverage media to spread that translation and the hope that somebody's going to do something with it, which I think is one of the huge challenges that comes from trying to combat anthropocentrism, which is the fact that even the basis of advocacy is so different.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

It makes me think a little bit about what we were talking earlier with regards to kind of the fragmentation of media and how it can cut you off, and part of perhaps seeing that animals are advocating for themselves is to actually see it. Part of perhaps seeing that animals are advocating for themselves is to actually see it. But social media has also created opportunities to see that resistance in ways that previously wasn't available. Right, A cow decides to break from a farm and goes running down the streets, it makes it into the news, but it also makes it onto social media and people are starting to see, I think, footage of the actual violences much more than historically. Whether that actually translates into any sort of action is a different question, or if it's just another site of consumption where you get to say, oh, shame poor animal and you keep scrolling up. I mean, you guys are the communication people.

S Marek Muller:

Yeah, I think research is demonstrating like. Obviously it's not a unified fact, but the moral shock that does come from seeing some of these videos does lead many people, although certainly not all, to pursue more pro-animal activities.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

But of course, again, it's not a unified experience activities, but of course, again, it's not a unified experience. Yeah, I'm always amazed when I hear people that like watched Earthlings or read a book and then they went vegan the next day. I'm like wow, it took me a long time to kind of have that worldview really crack open and act differently. And there's no telling how media played a role in that right, how all of these small interventions and videos altered my view over time. I mean, I know the final crack was from an online video, but obviously there were loads of things in the lead up to that. All right, lauren, we've come to your quote.

Lauren Corman:

I just wanted to say, merrick, how much I appreciated and really resonated with what you shared. So much of my work is also trying to think in different ways, but beyond what Tamey Bryant calls the similarity argument or the sort of appeals to sameness, and this is why I've sort of increasingly located some of my work within the multi-species justice sort of folks and their analyses, and it makes me think about a clip that I often play in my classes, what you shared, merrick, where you have Judith Butler walking with Sonora Taylor and they're talking. This is in a philosophy documentary called An Exam in Life and they're talking about disability and gender and at the end Judith Butler says you know, I think what we're really getting at here is like rethinking the human as a site of interdependence, and we spend like half of the class often kind of talking about what Butler's getting at there. But I think that in this kind of imagining, as like all of us engaging in a kind of world, making a world, building projects that for me, projects that for me, the contribution that I'm hoping, that I'm making and that the quote hopefully is resonating with, as well as kind of undoing who like the constitution of the human in like, in pretty radical ways, to reformulate or to rethink or to or to draw on traditions that are not doing this kind of the kind of liberal humanism that has been so damaging and its interminglings with capitalism and colonialism that point towards difference as being the site of our respect, responsibility, ethics in relation to each other. So I just really wanted to say this kind of turn towards difference, when we think about not only non-human animals but our relations with others as well, I think is so important in imagining something outside of this liberal humanist frame. So I wanted to also read a condensed quote.

Lauren Corman:

This is from Andal Gosain's work, who I draw on heavily in the article that I've been discussing primarily here, and this is from a book that he wrote called Nature's Wild Love, sex and Law in the Caribbean, and he says some people get to embrace their animality more than others, depending on the context in which they live. The sons of elites can indulge in a kind of visceral animality that others cannot, because they would receive no second chances. Trump's persistent lying in his self-interest and absence of sophisticated analytical skill about most pressing issues were read as authentic for his single-term presidency. Privileges of masculinity, able-bodiedness, class, heterosexuality and whiteness allow some people, to quote, get on like animals without consequences. That would be terminal for marginalized subjects.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

I mean, so wait, I take your point with this quote. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier with regards to some people are given kind of the space or the privilege to be brazen, be animal be you didn't use the word ridiculous earlier when we're talking about Jacob Chansley but that because their whiteness kind of protects them from kind of being viewed as subhuman in these contexts. But sometimes when I hear these quotes, I feel like folks are sometimes being also a bit unfaithful to the animals involved. Because what animals are lying the way Trump lies? But I'm just being flippant here, I'm sorry, I'm just being kind of flippant. What do you think? What was your reason for using this quote, lauren?

Lauren Corman:

and kind of flipping. What do you think? What was your reason for using this quote line? I think it's about the way that animality is troped.

Lauren Corman:

So he's talking about who gets to take on those signifiers of animality.

Lauren Corman:

I don't think he's saying this is what constitutes animality, which is so much more explosively diverse than this, could you know, than than what is captured by people who are kind of playing in this terrain.

Lauren Corman:

But he's talking about how this, the kind of signifiers of animality in these dominant constructions, how people some people get to step into those and then others don't get to step into those as easily, because if they do step into those they are very aware that they will be subjected to potentially terminal violence, that they are already read as not fully human through liberal humanism. And then to intentionally take on the kinds of tropes of animality would be to place oneself in an even more vulnerable position, which is part of the reason why Andal's book is so controversial, because at the end he says, as a matter of kind of environmental healing, in this moment it's so important that we turn towards the animal and animality as a way of healing this sort of the, these ruptures and the tearing of these ecological relationships and the way that the animal is mobilized in service of colonial projects. So he's ultimately talking about turning towards the animal and of course we know that is like a complicated and what that means. But he's saying in this particular the animal, and of course we know that is like a complicated and what that means. But he's saying in this particular moment, he's, of course, writing before Trump has elected again, that those people that are playing in this kind of symbolic terrain, they are insulated from the charge of animality, which is a charge of to be subhuman, which is to be rendered as vulnerable to and kind of without recourse, the kinds of violences that capitalism and colonialism produces. So like, who gets to step in to that?

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

But I guess part of my question is isn't Trump just being exceedingly human here? Couldn't I also frame it in that way? Do you know what? I mean that? What he's doing? This kind of brazen and this is a much bigger conversation but this kind of like brazen bullshitting, not giving a care about any of the environmental consequences or who it impacts. I mean, this comes to those primal. I mean, he's a great example of some of the primal rhetorics you were speaking of earlier. But what makes is this not just a different kind of mobilizing of animals as a metaphor to make a point when you could say that this type of behavior is exceedingly human? What is it about this behavior that leads to people to calling that animal behavior, to calling that animal behavior? And I know and maybe I'm just missing the point here, but it seems to me that this is some sort of mobilizing of animals again, but in a different shade.

David Rooney:

Yeah, this is something I'm working on in my dissertation the difference between tropes of animals and animals themselves, and I think it's worth revisiting.

David Rooney:

Probably the most influential paradigm here is Descartes set up the Cartesian dualism and the human being separate from the animal in a way rigorous way that others had yet to do, and his argument was animals are indistinguishable from machines, such that even if a machine could say something like an answering machine, it would not be saying something as such, it would be programmatic, and this is why he says animals are functionally machines.

David Rooney:

So I'd say, if we're thinking about animality, not particular animals, because, as we talked about with that quote, the animal doesn't really exist, it's kind of a fantasy. We're talking about a mechanistic, reactive existence and it's defined by the primacy of the body over the soul, instinct over intentionality, reaction over measured rational response. One is captured by their environment and they can't rise above it. They're subsumed by sexual instinct rather than measured response, and this is why I think this is something that I find very interesting in Jackson is why you see, for example, people like Hegel talking about the Americas and indigenous people saying the crocodiles and the lions of the Americas have the same inferiority of the indigenous peoples, that they are subsumed by their environment and that they are too reactive. So animality, I think, is a trope that exceeds animals in those particular types of ways. But, like I said, because it's so attached to this history of the mechanic, it's never been proper to the animal. So of course humans do these animalistic things all the time, perhaps more, even so, than animals.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Okay, but if I understand it correctly then here, how Trump is being pulled into the equation here is because he's not viewed as kind of being a high order human or using rational thoughts or this kind of idea of what we were talking about civilized or whatever that he's. He just gets to be flagrantly uncivilized and not. So. This is the animal trope or animality trope that's being mobilized here. So it's not. It's actually got nothing to do with animals. Really. It's got to do with an idea of animals being, um, being basic, and somehow people saying trump is basic and it's that kind of basic. He's operating on a basic instinct and, uh, and that's what makes him okay. I think I'm following now, um, merrick yeah, I was gonna say um.

S Marek Muller:

It makes me think of a narrative idea of archetypes, uh, where there's certain ideas of certain characters that possess certain characteristics, whether or not that's like legitimately how someone exists in the world. It's a collection of traits that we understand in a story that's being told, and perhaps in this narrative it's it's less of the archetype that trump is, but more of the archetype that trump is not, which is the over emphasis on decorum, fake, um, over civilized archetype of the politician wherein, because trump is not that, trump exemplifies whatever this archetype of the brutish, more authentic and thus more animalistic because he is not utilizing fake, stabilized decorum, uh, animal it's so interesting how it's both romantic about animals and really horrible about animals at exactly the same time.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

So somehow, like animals, are these pure of heart, beautiful things that are basic and daft. It's um and I know you mentioned that at the beginning so the kind of ways in which the rhetoric you guys are experts on rhetoric is mobilized to to understand, uh, um, context, really interesting. I thank you. We've been at it for almost two hours. I can't, as our experts on rhetoric is mobilized to understand context. Really interesting, thank you, we've been at it for almost two hours. I can't believe it. I will do some minor editing and take out some of my bizarre ramblings.

Lauren Corman:

Oh, just before we close, I just wanted to give a kind of example to hopefully make this the point that I think that we're getting at around sort of the troping here. Angle Gosine is writing specifically about the Caribbean and colonialism in the Caribbean, and I write about this in the article that how the experience of people being subjugated to colonization were demanded, civilization were demanded. They were forced to perform in ways that the colonialists decided would constitute, like a civilized dress, for example. They had to dress in order to assert their humanity, which was attached to this notion of civilization, and that Gosain makes the argument that they never get to arrive. They always have to continue to perform this over and over again in order to prove themselves as human and not animal, as he argues. But they never arrive, right, because that's how colonialism continues to perpetuate itself.

Lauren Corman:

So we think about someone like Trump arriving in that context, who would not have to be. He would not be subject to having to perform to prove his humanness, to prove that he is civilized. He can step outside of that demand in the colonial context. This is talking about the kind of colonial machination of animality and how it's mobilized. He would be able to play and in fact step outside of it, flaunt it, disregard it, whatever in order to, in its own way, then reassert his own humanity and white supremacy Because he's not subject to the same logics as a white person in that colonial context.

Lauren Corman:

I think that's what Gozine says. He's not talking about animals per se and their suffering, and he puts in quotes who gets to get on like animals. He's not saying that is the animal, he's. That is the colonial machination of animality and then its mobilization in order to continue to prop up a notion of a civilized human and people who are not subjected to those logics in terms of being like subjugated and oppressed by them, get to get to flaunt them, disregard them as a very, as their very act of reasserting their subjectivity and their whiteness through the flaunting of those tropes.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Yeah too, like when someone says, stop being like, stop acting like an animal. It's actually got nothing to do with any material, physical, real animal out there. It's got to do with some sort of idea and maintaining this divide between the idea of the human and the idea of the animal.

Lauren Corman:

Which is related to power and the continuation of these forms of power.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Fantastic.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

I think this is a great point and place to end a conversation on supremacy, because supremacy and power are good bedfellows.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

So thank you so much, all three of you, for your time today and your thoughts and views on what's a really complex and challenging conversation in many ways to engage with. But thank you so much for really detailed examples. I think it really helped me to just unpack and think through one, this relationship between supremacy and animality and humanity, but also how this is connected to the media in both really material ways, in terms of how people move through the world, the ways in which they make networks so beyond just representation, actually how people move through the world, the ways in which they make networks so beyond just representation, actually how people are meeting one another and using media representations to actually facilitate change in the world, whether that's change we agree with or not. So before we close, perhaps each of you could just tell me a little bit about what you're working on now and if people are interested in learning more. So you've mentioned a book project and there are some things happening. Just briefly mention what you're currently working on now and then we'll call it a day.

David Rooney:

So our book is expanding this article that you've read on Deliver King, the Rog, nationalists and Primal Rhetorical Networks into a variety of different areas, and this includes I mentioned briefly conspiracy theories that environmentalists are going to take away meat, the banning of cultured meat in the United States and in Italy, and, broadly. What we're interested in is expanding and deepening our analysis of primal rhetorical networks in order to make sense of how meat is becoming attached to new concepts, and I'll give two brief iterations. Is that generally although not the case of the scholars here, because they're wonderful, but generally meat and masculinity have been the primary vectors for thinking. Meat is masculinity and more recently it's also been connected to ideas about race that are becoming more forefront perhaps than masculinity itself. So that's something that we're exploring and we're also seeing.

David Rooney:

One chapter in particular talks about Cracker Barrel's introduction of an impossible sausage option and then the backlash to that, in which we find there's an antagonism towards transgender people that animates this fear of consuming soy-based products. So it's not just about a fear of femininity or womanhood in a strict cis-sexual sense. They're taking on new, responding to political issues of the day of the day. Increasingly we see soy-based or plant-based products tied to vaccines after COVID-19, that experience and the increasing awareness or politicization of transgender rights also infiltrated into that space. So that's the short and long of the book. It's called Soy Boy Beta Cook. Oh, what's the second half of it? The Primal Rhetorical Networks and the Rise.

S Marek Muller:

Primal Rhetoric and the Rise of Right. The primal rhetorical networks and the rise. Primal rhetoric and the rise of right-wing carnivorism yes, right-wing carnivorism.

David Rooney:

Sorry, that was a bit of a ramble. The other thing that I'm doing that will come out, hopefully as well. I'll be defending my dissertation, which deals very centrally with a lot of what we've been talking about today, about the tropes of the animal and what, for example, Donna Haraway calls actual animals and the tensions and difficulties there. And this is called Animal Machine because I revisit these interconnections, how AI, the environment, race are all caught up in this. So one of my chapters is on the eating the cats and dogs conspiracy as well. So hopefully that will be out and y'all can read it at some point.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Fascinating and good luck. Good luck with the exam. It's a lot of fun. I know it's nerve-wracking in the lead up to it, but your exam is going to be a lot of fun, no doubt. Merrick, do you have anything to add?

S Marek Muller:

I would say that Soyboy Betacook is definitely the central project that I am working on right now. Dave and I are also in the finalizing process of working on a piece actually about something we don't talk about enough Neo-Nazi Vegans, which do exist and, shockingly enough, draw upon some of those same tropes we just spent the past few hours discussing. Shockingly enough draw upon some of those same tropes we just spent the past few hours discussing. So this is actually not a situation that is just restricted to people who really like eating meat. Depending on your orientation toward the world, it is very, very easy to combine a lot of the same arguments we often use in favor of veganism to those issues of white nationalism.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Well, I mean, one of people's favorite facts to throw is that Hitler was a vegetarian. Right, like everyone loves to point that out, that Hitler was a vegetarian. And not to mention the challenges going on in India, where it's vegetarianism that's at the top of the hierarchy there with regards to looking at inequality and violence perpetuated in that country. It's done by and on behalf of a vegetarian ideal. So really interesting. Sorry to interrupt you there.

S Marek Muller:

No, that's all right. That's pretty much a lot of that is at the crux of what we'll be talking about. We're hoping that that will be released soon. We're working on that with another great author, Zane McNeill.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Fascinating. Well, so you're doing such interesting work, Lauren. How about you?

Lauren Corman:

I am working on a paper for the special issue of politics and animals that I'll be co -editing with Stefan Dahlgert here in political science, and this comes out of the Animal Agency Symposium which I tried to snag you to be part of, Claudia, but too far away. But it's based on scholars in Niagara and in Ontario and in New York as well, to think about turning towards difference, to Merrick's point that we've all been kind of circling back to and trying to think about the different ways that animal scholars right now are conceptualizing agency and resistance. And so I'm going to be looking at my paper, the models like by Jason Reibel, Surat Kaling around animal resistance, as a way of starting to kind of tease out these sort of different conceptualization of resistance. And then Dinesh Wadwal and others work on a kind of workerist model of animal resistance in which we think about the kinds of technologies that animal industries, for example, employ to contain animals or to trap animals and how those technologies themselves actually speak to the active resistance and agency of non-human animals.

Lauren Corman:

And so I am thinking about a kind of model of animal agency that is combining these as well as maybe working with them in different kinds of ways where we think about agency as efforts by non-human animals to make life more livable.

Lauren Corman:

To make a more livable life animal activists talk about like the voice of the voiceless, like how much that needs unpacking there and that.

Lauren Corman:

How do we sort of dislocate sort of the dominant human lens on animal behavior and turn towards the animals themselves as communicating to us about their lives and their dizzying diversity, and all that stuff could be a site of respect. So this image that I go back to and I'm sorry, Claudia, if I've already talked about this in our previous interview was the image that for me that was kind of an anchor throughout my dissertation, which is two macaques holding each other at the back of a vivisection cage, a laboratory cage, and do we consider that an act of resistance or agency, this sort of sociality, this attempt to comfort each other, to survive absolutely atrocious conditions? And so I'm interested in thinking about resistance as making more livable life, even in circumstances like that. How do animals perhaps resist and have agencies, agency that is not fully fleshed out or captured through these primary models that we have right now within sort of animal scholarships, not to deny their usefulness, but how to build on them, hopefully in useful ways?

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Well, I look forward to that. It sounds brilliant and I'm really happy that you helped us end, actually, with the note on resistance, because it's one thing to focus on supremacy and the negative, but it's one thing to focus on supremacy and the negative, but it's also important to remember that just because there are claims to power and authoritarian and totalitarian regimes and actions being played out there, it doesn't mean that there isn't also resistance happening, both by a whole host of different beings that are resisting and saying that what is happening is not okay. So, thank you so much for your time today and for joining me, and I look forward to seeing you in Atlanta for the symposium and talking a bit more about this. So, thank you, thank you, thank you Wonderful.

Lauren Corman:

Thank you, Claudia. Thank you Merrick and David, Wonderful to meet you and be in conversation.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

Thank you so much to Marek, david and Lauren for being wonderful guests and for indulging me in my range of questions and moments when I was struggling to get and understand what was happening. Just a reminder that this season is part of a broader project which included a symposium and a special issue on the topic of media, race and animals, headed by natalie kazal, tobias linder and enem gosevsky. In turn, this season was jointly sponsored by the pollination project, the school of modern language for ivan allen college of liberal arts, the school of literature, media and communication at georgia tech university, as well as our long-time sponsor, animals and philosophy, politics more and ethics. Thank you also to Jeremy John for the logo and Gordon Clark for the beard music, as well as the work of Hera and Rebecca behind the scenes, who helped me do a little bit of the kind of dissemination, whether it's through images or through the writing of blog posts. It's great to see the animal turn and growing, so thank you both of you for your work there.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

This episode was hosted, edited and produced by myself. This is the Animal Turn with me. Visit iRulePodcom.

Lauren Corman:

That's.

Claudia Hirtenfelder:

I-R-O-A-R-P-O-D dot com.

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Comme un poisson dans l'eau Artwork

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