Young Greens invite Tom Holder to speak about Vivisection

Yesterday saw a historic moment in our little town of Cambridge, a town that houses a university which prides itself on the crimes that are committed within the walls of its laboratories. Torture in the form of starvation, forced drug addiction as well as sensory and social deprivation are just some of the examples that come to mind when I think of the science emerging from Cambridge University.

Why we won't support debates on vivisection

Yesterday the Young Greens (the young branch of the Green Party) hosted a debate between the pro-and anti-vivisection camps. Although it makes sense to fill the audience of these sort of events with animal rights people, we decided not to attend. We have a few problems with debates in general. This tradition of debating is held up by many elite universities, but more often than not is it a mere spectacle, where everything is practiced and staged to the last detail so that it can be crammed into a very rigid frame. Most people get a kick out of the controversy that these events live off or they attend because they think they can show up or humiliate the opposing party with their questions. These debates don't invite conversation or dialogue and most people have made up their mind about the subject before attending. I don't see real change being implemented through debating.

Giving a platform to speciesist hate speech is not politically correct

Another reason we didn't attend is perhaps a form of protest. We decided not to give our time and attention to someone who actively advocates for crimes against animals. We don't believe that these people should be given a platform.

Most of us, who are social justice advocates, would agree immediately that it would be absurd to have a debate between any other oppressive group and a representative of those they oppress. So why are animal liberation activists still so concerned about giving animal abusers a voice? To show that we are the bigger person, that we have nothing to hide, that we are open to debate? I don't get it. All it does is validate the voice of the oppressor.

A friend of ours suggested it would make much more sense to have a debate between representatives of a range of scientific models that do not use animals for research. Which -if we advocate dismantling the system from within and with its own tools-  is the only option that actually helps the animals.

Safer Space Agreement - Women's Anti-Speciesist Reading Group

Here is the safer space agreement I drafted for the reading group I'm part of. I feel like this will be a good tool to empower all participants to hold one another and oneself accountable but I am also aware that sometimes these agreements can simply be used as an excuse not to act against violence. I thought it might be useful to share this as it is still not very common in activist circles to create safer spaces and this is one tool to support it. I myself found the AFem2014 Safer Space Agreement, which inspired this one.

Courtesy of Agata :)

Safer Spaces Agreement 

We want this group to be a space in which all who self-define as women can feel safe sharing their experiences and knowledge, without being the target of gender oppression including sexism, misogyny, transmisogyny, transphobia, cissexism and binarism and prejudice based on gender presentation. 

We acknowledge that all of us have experienced some form of gender oppression and perhaps additionally another form of oppression, such as discrimination against people who identify within the MOGAI (Marginalised Orientations, Gender Identities and Intersex) spectrum, ableism, ageism, racism, and prejudice based on ethnicity, nationality, class, language, asylum status or religious affiliation. 

Specifically as women we are also targets to the everyday 'subtitles' of these oppressions which surface in the form of bodyshaming, slutshaming, victim blaming, whorephobia and other often undetected crimes intrinsic to the patriarchal order. 

We recognise that all of us make use of and benefit from some forms of oppressive structures. If not in any of the forms described above, then at least through speciesism. With human privilege we always benefit from our place in the species hierarchy and thus we cannot stand outside the oppression of our non-human brothers and sisters. Additionally to the intersections that we might suffer from, we also want to recognise the privileges that enable our autonomous existence. 

To make this group as safe as possible we ask all participants to agree to abide by the following guidelines, remembering that we are all here to listen and learn and to support one another in our personal journeys to total liberation. Together we want to learn to recognise and dismantle the oppressive power structures that we are all part of.


>>>TRIGGER WARNING: THE FOLLOWING GUIDELINES CONTAIN DESCRIPTIONS OF OPPRESSIVE BEHAVIOUR.<<<

Guidelines 

These guidelines are always a work in progress.
The term 'expression' in the guidelines refers to a person's active or passive expression, be it within language, gestures and mimics, behaviour, an action or non-action.

We agree to:

1. give a trigger warning / learn when to give a trigger warning.

2. become aware of our own privilege and the power dynamics within the group, i.e. assessing how much space we take up with our gestures and voices and pay attention to others who might take up less space but have something to contribute, too.

3. not make assumptions about other people's experiences; listen to them and give them the space to
articulate their point of view if they would like to; not assume that they owe us a justification of their person.

4. when bearing witness to an account of violence, abstain from apologism, victim-blaming and gaslighting.

5. be sensitive towards discussion topics that might deal with a traumatic subject.

6. invite questions rather than speak in an absolute manner; use accessible language; also share audio/visual materials that would accompany discussions of literature, bearing in mind that not everybody has the possibility to read the literature.

7. refrain from sexist, transphobic, binaristic, homophobic, biphobic, anti-asexual and anti-queer expression; refrain from racist and xenophobic expression; refrain from cultural appropriation; refrain from judging a person's religious identification; refrain from ableist expression and be aware of our own role in the room's layout and accessibility; refrain from ageist expression; refrain from body shaming, slutshaming and whorephobia.

8. avoid making assumptions about people's preferred pronouns; we all define as women which encompasses a wide range of identities and she/her might not always be appropriate; ask rather than guess.

9. refrain from outing people who identify on the MOGAI spectrum, or who identify as disabled/diffabled, as well as survivors of violence.

10. treat all information (e.g. if someone discloses details about their identity, or details about a traumatic experience or the details about their abuser) with confidentiality and do not discuss them outside the meeting without the person's consent.

11. share the burden of calling out any behaviour that might not comply with any of the above mentioned points; call out oppressive expression, even if not personally affected; support anyone who has the courage to call out oppressive behaviour. This can be done by turning to a person of trust within the group, or to the person who has violated the guidelines, or by drawing everybody's attention to it, e.g. through expressing that something uncomfortable, triggering or violent occurred/is occurring, even if it cannot be pinpointed or articulated.

12. learn from our mistakes and become aware of our expressions and the way they influence others.

13. sign this agreement and work on it together by adding more points that might become relevant in the future.

If your abuser is attending our meetings without your consent/permission and/or an agreement between you both that you are comfortable and happy with, please speak to a person/people you trust within the group and you're abuser will be removed. If you feel you cannot express yourself within the group because you have experienced violence/harassment within the group or from someone affiliated to anybody in the group, please also share this feeling with a person/people you trust.


Click here to access a copy of the file in pdf format.

Feminism, feminism, feminism, can't you talk about anything else?

Nope. I would like to. But I can't.
Unfortunately feminism is the only tool I have to protect myself in a world that recognises the able white masculine cis-male voice, one that I don't fully have, as the only valid and legitimate voice.

Before I came to animal activism I 'tried out' some other general social justice groups. I never really felt I fit in. I knew I wanted to be active and that I belonged somewhere on the left of the political spectrum but it was too confusing to see so many different 'lefts' and none that I would feel at home with. In fact, I didn't know what was so alienating to me in all those activist groups I tried to join but failed, until I started reading feminist literature, which I had to actively seek out - unless I picked a module at uni that was taught by a woman - although some of them were still very masculine.

It's explicitly identifying with feminism that enabled me to see the whole picture. Having always been a feminist, not knowing that it does not go without saying for most people, I didn't realise until my late teens that I need to actively seek others out who share the same values as me. Finding 'my kind' of feminism was a huge journey for me. After I discovered TERFS (Trans-exclusionary feminists) I got a bit of a reality check once again, realising that feminism doesn't equal feminism and I still needed to dig deeper to find what exactly I want to fight for/against.

Feminism lead me to activism, as feminism for me meant the total rejection of discrimination based on the socially constructed categories we give each other and everything around us. Feminism quickly equalled anarchism for me. Then logically, those two ideologies combined lead me to veganism. I had the biggest epiphany of my life when I realised that what we do to animals is the same evil that we perpetrate against other humans who we somehow categorise as lesser based on their gender/sexuality/age/ability/race/natonality etc or in fact, their species. It was not so much that I first had a strong feeling of solidarity with non-human women, but rather that I logically understood that I am oppressing these women the same way that patriarchy oppresses me. Out of that conclusion arose the deep empathy to my animal sisters (and brothers). 

The fight for animal liberation symbolised the ultimate fight for me, the one that would free us all. The one thing that needed fixing so that we all could live happily ever after. When I found my way to animal activism, I once again was in for disillusionment on a big scale. I thought, this must be the place where people already have figured out how discrimination and oppression work. I will learn so much! Wrong again (well, wrong about how everybody will have made the same conclusions as me, not wrong about the fact that I am learning a lot). My first animal rights protest had ladies in their underwear with 'blood' all over their bodies, 'but ok' I thought, 'they are doing this voluntarily, their bodies their rules. I admire their courage'. Then, the further I looked and the deeper I got into the Animal Rights community (world wide a rather small network), the more I saw racism, ableism, nationalism, sexism and especially misogyny popping up everywhere, in AR communities in all cities and all countries. 

This put me in an awkward situation, as by critiquing animal liberationists and vegans I felt I am betraying my comrades, who just like me face ridicule, shame and harassment every day for their choice not to eat animals and to speak out for their rights. Recognising that all of us, no matter how oppressed we are, still benefit from human privilege I tried to suppress being affected by the many micro- and macro-violences produced within my new family, against me and others. We had common enemies that I would rather focus on, appreciating all efforts to save our non-human friends*.

It took me about a year to figure out which spaces are safe and which ones aren't within this community. I am still figuring that out actually. And I only now figured out, that it is ok for me to build my own space and establish my own rules. I am still working on not feeling that I need to justify myself for the decisions I make but thanks to a growing feminist vegan community who recognises the same faults with not only the sexual politics of meat but also the sexual politics of veganism and animal liberation (which are both an expression of patriarchy) I feel more empowered every time I overcome a setback.


So, it looks like I'll have to continue talking about feminism as long as I live. I will never cease to speak the language of feminism until we are all free and there won't be the need to call it 'feminism' anymore. Even if it means that I need to stand up to people who demand I be held accountable for suggesting these unreasonable and uncomfortable ideas I have, I will continue to do so. That is the most valuable thing I've learned from animal rights, actually, how to stand up for the things you believe in. It is frustrating and it takes out a lot but there are people who will support you and you need to surround yourself with your kind of people. Jennai Bandock is one such incredibly strong person, who does her own thing because she knows she is right. For anybody who is frustrated by announcing, explaining and justifying yourself, I recommend her speech with the title 'The Hidden Cost of Patriarchy'. Absolutely empowering!

I will leave you with some of my favourite written lines ever, arisen from the brilliant mind that is Luce Irigaray**: 'It is still better to speak only in riddles, allusions, hints, parables. Even if asked to clarify a few points. Even if people plead that they just don't understand. After all, they have never understood'.

If anybody ever gives you shit for standing up against oppression, remember that.



*I just now noticed that I am writing in the past tense, as if I have left all of this behind me. In fact these developments in my thinking are so fresh and they hit me so quickly that I am still working through them.

**Irigaray is a brilliant old school feminist but not vegan as far as I know and I am not sure how far she extents her thoughts on liberation with regards to gender issues either.

The Beginning of Something Great - Our Women's Group

It's official. After a month of gathering interest online, we had our first Cambridge Women's Anti-Speciesist Reading Group meeting. And it was AMZING.

If you define yourself as a woman and are willing to sign our safer space agreement, you are more than welcome to join this group.

We are meeting every other Thursday. Here are the upcoming dates (location to be confirmed)

30.10. Reading: Chapter 2 of Carol Adams the Sexual Politics of Meat.
13.11.
27.11.
11.12.

It was very interesting for me to realise after the meeting how much groups like these are needed. This is one of the projects that I took up, out of the inspiration and frustration that I brought back home from this years International Animal Rights Conference (IARC). I've climbed quite a steep feminist learning curve last summer. When I heard about IARC I wanted to be part of it. When I saw that there were already three confirmed feminist speakers (out of perhaps 70/80 total), I thought: They will never take me, as there are already people covering the ground for 'us' (as in us feminists/women). After I had sent in my abstract, Heiko, the organiser, responded with the friendliest email explicitly stating that it is urgent to have more feminist speakers present. I was baffled, this has never happened to me before. I was so used to having one token feminist speaker at any gathering and it never occurred to me that I never questioned this before.

Although most participants were women at IARC (in fact the animal liberation movement consists mostly of women), most speakers were men. This is by no means a critique of the organisation, as I know that the organisers value intersectionality and marginalised experiences to a great extent. Rather, is it a fault of the system, a system in which a woman who has a lot to say, thinks that because there is one other woman speaking about women's issues, everything that anyone will want to hear about this will be said for her. So she might not even apply to speak.

Thank fuck that I tried despite thinking I wouldn't be wanted. The experience I took away from meeting people from all walks of life and exchanging ideas and experiences in this almost utopian setting was overwhelming. It is there that the feminist friends I met, suggested to open an all women's group. An idea that would have never occurred to me!

My first question was: How will I explain the purpose of this group to anybody? The answer I got to this was that I don't have to explain anything. I don't owe anybody any justification. If they join, they will see why the group is valuable.

And despite the fact that up until the first meeting I only got good feedback, lots of support and a shitload of gratitude (even though I hadn't done anything except said: hey girls, let's meet up) I kept having imaginary conversations in my head with someone, anyone, no one really, in which I would justify the crap out of my group and keep explaining my frustration with patriarchy as well as animal rights, as part of this culture.

So the moment came. I was sitting in the room. Nervous and anxious about whether anybody would actually turn up. The clock hit five to six. The first person came in and I died inside from happiness and relief. The person left again to take a phone call and didn't return until much later. I was alone in the room with my symmetrically arranged snacks and drinks on the table where I planned to seat about 10 people. At five past six then a group of 5 people flooded into the room and I the euphoria took over me.

After the meeting, when saying our goodbyes for the night, two people subtly acknowledged how nervous I must have been, saying that they have been there, they know exactly how it feels, which again surprised me, because I just thought that in my anxiety I was just being dramatic without even knowing what was causing it.

Another friend, 1000 kilometres away from here, went through exactly the same agony up until yesterday, when she invited women only to regularly meet up. This got me thinking about what a draining (but also exciting) experience it is for a woman to say: I want to have a women's only space in a world where most spaces are dominated by men.

There were points, leading up to our first meeting, during which I questioned the activism of the group. What's so active about a bunch of people getting together and reading a book? What is this going to change in the world? And I realised very quickly, that it will actually change a lot. Our mere collective presence means that we are re-learning how to be, so as not to exist only in response to the dominant culture but to live as ourselves. Yes, it is about not living a live dictated by patriarchy, a demand we share (to a small extent) with the demand of animal liberation, the emancipation of our animal sisters and brothers from the same patriarchy that oppresses us.

The Language of Patriarchy: Phallogocentrism

My presentation from the International Animal Rights Conference 2014 is finally up!

The title seems really bloated, but I try my best to unpack phal-logo-centrism in the presentation. It is a concept that helped me so much in understanding patriarchy and it revealed the urgency for vegan anarcha-feminist activism to me.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

P.S. After this presentation I have adjusted some things on the slides (e.g. instead of intersectionality I now talk about liberation - but my understanding of liberation could be the topic of another post)

DIY Spontaneous Activism

 In this post we just quickly wanted to show you how easily you can go from vegan to animal activist. On August 23rd for example, we celebrated vegan outreach day and although we were stuck at home working, we used the possibility to use the library books we had at home as leaflet carriers.

Just order or print out a bunch of leaflets from Animal Aid or Viva! and put them in the books you borrow from the library. If you are one of those people who writes notes into library books or underlines and highlights sections in them, consider leaving notes such as "www.earthlings.com" or "Youtube Best Speech Ever Gary Yourofski", or "Youtube Melanie Joy Carnism", etc.

These are also the things you can write on Sidewalks and the street with a piece of chalk.

Another easy thing to do is when you are sending postcards to people, leave a bit of room for a sticker, like we did last time when we sent postcards from Germany.

If you are good at overcoming your fear of public speaking you could also consider what our good friend Sophie - a person who truly only lives for the animals - pulled off the other day in Cambridge.

Check out her spontaneous one-woman protest here:

Post by Sophie Kennerley.

Rupturing the classism of food politics.

Last week one of my favorite blogs, Everyday Feminism (if you're unfamiliar with this page, beware of speciesism in some posts, but remind yourself of how it used to be before you knew speciesism was a thing) published a post with the title: ‘Why Judging People for Buying Unhealthy Food is Classist'.

Although the article is flawed with speciesism and wrong nutritional assumptions, about milk for example (portraying it as a healthy option), it got me thinking about how, when we consciously consume, we always perpetuate the class system. Especially by deciding to resist or oppose certain acts of food consumption in a capitalist market economy we contribute to class segregation.

We often speak of consumer choices. We go to the supermarket and we have a range of products to chose from. Similarly, we look at the menu of a take away place or restaurant and we chose one of the many options. It is easy to forget that actually, these are not choices we make. To make a choice implies to make an informed decision and to have a variety of alternatives to pick from. In this hyper-mediated world however, it is a luxury to have access to a variety of possibilities.

Trying not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, I want to stress, that this is all part of a well thought out system of propaganda and subliminal stimuli that construct our identities from the moment we are put into this world. There is this brilliant BBC documentary, called 'The Century of the Self: Happiness Machines' (click here to watch it), which traces the system of advertising and spin back to its roots in psychoanalysis. Turns out, we have very little chance to resist the machine.

Our abilities to oppose capitalist food culture very much depend on our access to other consumer products such as employment, education and health care. These are all socially constructed products of neoliberalism that are sold to us as universal human rights, granting us all an equal start into our lives. We all know however, that they aren't natural nor always accessible, like the air that we breath (pf...not even the air is safe from pollution by capitalist poison). The most basic rights like shelter, health care and freedom from starvation are turned into products that we have to buy with our labour. Even if we all had equal economic opportunities to begin with, we would have very diverse mental and physical capabilities which would make us excel at certain things and fail at others. In this society however, we aren't even granted the right to find an enjoyable, appropriate and healthy way of living that suits our individual needs. We are forced to play by the rules to gain access to the things that allow us to survive. The better we are at obeying these rules the more access are we granted to the world. And this is not due to our own rigour or persistence, as the American Dream version of capitalism has us believe, but rather mostly due to chance of the circumstances we are placed in.

When I say we gain access to the world, I mean that we discover alternatives and if we have gained enough privilege we just might understand what is wrong with the way we are taught to consume. This knowledge is not always the result of privilege, it can equally be the result of disillusionment due to the lack of privilege.

To bring the focus back to food choices, it is only the first step to reject the mainstream, convenient and easy to find products, whilst the second step would be to acknowledge that boycotting certain foods whilst investing into others still feeds the system. Organic and GMO, omni and vegan foods, vivisection goods and cruelty-free products, slave labour and fair trade produce, they are all part of the very same system. They are all sold by the same capitalism that perpetuates the hierarchy which places junk foods at the bottom of what is to be desired.

Instead of putting our efforts into judging those who buy unhealthy or cruel products, we should focus on making cruelty-free consumption possibilities more visible and accessible.
This can only happen with the absolute disapproval of capitalism and the organisation of non-profit economies within our communities. We are not going to make the world a better place by buying into 'certified' stuff, instead we need to create our own stuff. We need to learn to be independent of the machine that promises to supply us with everything we need.

There are many great possibilities everywhere, dumpster diving, food 'waste' festivals, transition towns, permacultural living, clothes swaps etc. We need to embrace these events and make them our lifestyles, as I firmly believe we cannot change anything from inside because every step forwards for us within this system always means that someone else is being stepped on by us. We need to stop judging what is happening inside the system as well as tweaking it with our 'better choices', and instead we need to organise from the outside until we are big enough to devour the whole thing in one bite!

I hope it's clear that with regards to cruelty-free consumer choices, I am not inferring in this post, that it is hard to be vegan or that veganism is not for everyone. And by no means am I justifying people's inabilities to be vegan or saying we should tolerate their choice. On the contrary - I think veganism, although first an foremost a choice I made for animals, is the only way to emancipation for humans. But that can be the topic for another time.