The Militant Vegan

ABSTRACT

The Militant Vegan is a mid-nineties underground zine with ongoing international influence. Founded to redress ‘media blackout in the US on direct action on behalf of enslaved animals’, its pages document actions of economic sabotage against animal exploitation, with an emphasis on those claimed under Animal Liberation Front (ALF) guidelines. The zine offers ‘for informational purposes only’ a repository of activist tactics, communicated journalistically, through didactic graphic narratives, and visually within the page layout. The Militant Vegan is a timely counterpoint to contemporary attempts to distance veganism from ecopolitical militancy through plant-based capitalism, as well as showing throughlines to tactics currently used by groups such as Animal Rebellion/Animal Rising dubbed ‘militant vegans’ by the press. What follows is a playful index of The Militant Vegan, which takes the form of a collage that recirculates its radical print culture, articulating an alphabet of ecotage to counter the suffering of animal exploitation.

KEYWORDS:

• The Militant Vegan, 1993-1995
• Animal Rights Direct Action
• Ecosocial Justice
• Veganarchism
• Climate Crisis
• Research As Practice

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the editors and the anonymous reviewer for their energising engagement with shaping this work for publication, and all who have created positive conditions for its development.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Natalie Joelle

Natalie Joelle is completing a transdisciplinary environmental humanities doctoral study of gleaning and lean culture at the intersection of theory and practice at Birkbeck, University of London, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Fund for Women Graduates.

Her critical and creative work is informed by a vegan commitment and can be found in ISLE, The Goose, Plumwood Mountain as part of the Routledge Environmental Humanities and Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature series, including Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture: Towards a Vegan Theory ed. by Emelia Quinn and Benjamin Westwood (2018). Her latest article is ‘radical gleaning: Doing Prac Crip’ (Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 2021).

Natalie is a recent Fellow of the Kluge Center, Library of Congress and serves on the Research Advisory Committee for the UK Vegan Society.

She is currently working on the manuscripts of her first monograph Gleaning Lean Culture: On Gleanologics, a collection gLeans, a pamphlet detail orientations, and an artist’s book featuring an alphabet of gleaners playfully called twentysix g lean stations. This article is part of a new series of ‘collecotages’ that collage, collect and remake documented vegan ecological sabotage for our age. www.gleaning.info