![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
Abstract
Nonhuman Animal rights activists are sometimes dismissed as ‘crazy’ or irrational by countermovements seeking to protect status quo social structures. Social movements themselves often utilize disability narratives in their claims-making as well. In this article, we argue that Nonhuman Animal exploitation and Nonhuman Animal rights activism are sometimes medicalized in frame disputes. The contestation over mental ability ultimately exploits humans with disabilities. The medicalization of Nonhuman Animal rights activism diminishes activists’ social justice claims, but the movement’s medicalization of Nonhuman Animal use unfairly otherizes its target population and treats disability identity as a pejorative. Utilizing a content analysis of major newspapers and anti-speciesist activist blogs published between 2009 and 2013, it is argued that disability has been incorporated into the tactical repertoires of the Nonhuman Animal rights movement and countermovements, becoming a site of frame contestation. The findings could have implications for a number of other social movements that also negatively utilize disability narratives.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the helpful suggestions from anonymous reviewers regarding appropriate disability language as well as the theory of narrative prosthesis.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Nonhuman Animals is capitalized to indicate their status as an oppressed group.
2. Euphemisms like ‘meat’ and ‘fur’ are placed in quotations.
3. Carol J. Adams (Citation2000) first applied this concept to the exploitation of women and Nonhuman Animals.
4. This statement introduced an article covering the story of a woman who supposedly tried to hire a hit man to kill someone wearing Nonhuman Animal hair. While Murdoch suggests later in the piece that the woman was not representative of Nonhuman Animal rights activism (‘[…] it’s pretty clear that Lowell is unstable and didn’t have a super clear grasp of the magnitude of what she was plotting.’), her opening statement with regards to all Nonhuman Animal activists seeks to conflate one person’s crime with the behavior of an entire movement.
7. On one occasion, she was tried for feeding free-living bears on her property. On another, she had ‘interfered’ with state conservation offers by standing between the officers and a free-living bear they were attempting to dart.
8. See the work of Gary Francione (Citation1996), who suggests that PETA is not, in fact, a ‘rights’ organization, but rather a welfare organization that often enacts policies which are either directly or indirectly responsible for Nonhuman Animal suffering and death.
9. Hoarding is a somewhat of a newly identified mental health concern; its profile and diagnosis is currently debated and it evades clear classification (Mataix-Cols et al. Citation2010; Saxena Citation2007).
10. While language has been a major source of discrimination for the disabled community, there has been some pushback. The disabled people’s movement has engaged the tactic of ‘cripping,’ meaning that some seemingly offensive words are actually an intentional attempt to reclaim discriminatory language (Hutcheon and Wolbring Citation2013). As a reviewer suggested, these political efforts demonstrate that language can be creative and relational. While reclaimed language of this kind was not evidenced in the data, it is important to acknowledge that the power of developing and enforcing language is not one-sided.
11. The search term ‘animal terrorist’ did not produce any results.
12. One blog, The Academic Abolitionist Vegan, was omitted because it is a blog managed by the primary author and this could allow for bias or a conflict of interest. This left us with a total of 50 blogs.
13. From The Vegan Feed website: http://veganfeed.com/about.php.
14. Some entries from Our Hen House were excluded from the search because they were members only and therefore not meant to be viewed by the general public.
15. Three hundred and nineteen (59%) of these occurrences are attributed to our outlier blog, Gary Francione’s Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach. When this outlier is controlled for, the occurrences between newspaper headlines and vegan blogs in our sample are much closer at 229 and 218 respectively. Recall, however, that the datasets are very different in terms of scale, audience, and distribution; newspaper headlines recognized by LexisNexis and blog entries recognized by The Vegan Feed are not especially comparable.
16. Coders utilized the keyword search to determine the presence of our variables. For eight blogs, this was the only means of access to older posts. Without a sitemap or a calendar of updates, tallying the total number of posts from these blogs is not possible.
17. Although it could also have been included in the consumption, food, and nutrition category,
VegNews Daily was included in the non-profit category. This decision is based on its identity as an organization with an anti-speciesist focus, but it is not a non-profit.
18. Blogs that contain no ableist words in the sample are omitted from the graph.