ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 connects human activism and the actual lives of animals within elongated spatio-temporal networks through different feelings of, performances of, recurring, and disturbances of ‘truth.’ These constructions of vegan ‘truth’ allow for shared vocabularies and worlds which are not fixed but constantly remade within veganism, and in relation to non-vegan society. In this chapter, through interviews with vegans and activists based in Britain, the relationship between veganism and ‘truth’ before, during, and after veganism as changing and transforming in everyday lives and spaces is explored as evolving. Attending to navigations of their relationships with themselves, their friends, and family, and the world itself, this vegan ‘truth’ is proposed as a narrative for dealing with past violence, transforming themselves as a project of veganism, and a geographical practice of re-imagining the future. Embodied knowledges are entangled with vegan truths and ‘feeling wrong’ is explored as encompassing variously a sense of injustice, a disturbed sense of place, and distressing (bodily) implications of pain and death in veganism. This role of embodiment is understood as uniquely emphasised in contemporary veganism, and entangled with feminist and other social justice movements, that separates contemporary practices from earlier iterations of rational veganism.
