ABSTRACT
The intertextuality of anthroparchal practices and representations across the social institutions of the family, education system, mass and digital media weaves a thick comfort blanket of affectivity that simultaneously cloaks violence and exploitation. The empirical analyses in chapters 5–8 have documented an ‘ideal’ process through which a child can grow to feel emotionally attached to animals while simultaneously enjoying the vicarious privileges of their domination through consuming their bodies, their bodily secretions and the objectifying knowledge extracted from them. However, the socialization of anthroparchal relations is a precarious process; the tight weave of the comfort blanket is necessitated by the irrationality and buried emotional trauma resulting from ‘loving’ one's victims in the animal-industrial complex (see Luke 1996). It is therefore always at risk of fraying, unravelling or in some cases, being entirely cast aside; children can and do go vegan (Amato and Partridge 1989). Veganism is understood here as a process that synthesizes a value-rational, rather than instrumental-rational, orientation towards other animals with socio-emotional healing and reintegration consequent to the renunciation of violence and exploitation; the renunciation of anthroparchal socialization. This understanding of veganism is at odds with that which is generally evident in popular culture. For instance, a content analysis of coverage of veganism in UK national newspapers showed that they tend to represent veganism as ridiculous, impossible to sustain, pleasure-denying, faddish or even as a repository of embittered hostility (Cole and Morgan 2011b). This is unsurprising if we consider veganism as a threat to a fundamental aspect of the hegemonic socialization process in the contemporary West, which we have documented in this book. When veganism is partially rehabilitated in mainstream culture, it tends to be as a faddish quirk of consumer culture (Cole and Morgan 2011a, Cole and Morgan 2011b), i.e. its presence is at the cost of the defusing of its radical threat to anthroparchal relations. Veganism is notably absent in the examples of children's culture discussed in chapters 5–8, but vegan cultural resources for children are increasingly available, tugging at the threads of Figure 2.1. In this chapter, these cultural resources are considered as constituting a counter-discourse, which repositions other animals in Figure 2.1 and furthermore, destabilizes its entire ‘logic’ and in so doing, promises the fulfilment of a Weberian dream of the re-enchantment of human–nonhuman animal relations: both humans and other animals are thereby offered a way out, or at least the beginnings of a way out, of Figure 2.1. We begin this chapter with situating vegan children's culture in its anthroparchal context; this is key to understanding the apparent ‘failure’ of veganism to take hold on a mass scale in the contemporary West to date, as being because it is tacitly and relentlessly opposed and marginalized by anthroparchal culture. We then move on to consider vegan literature as a rich and exemplary site for the contestation of anthroparchal culture through foregrounding an ethical reconfiguration of both human–other animal relations for children, and children's understanding of human ontology itself.
