J. M. Coetzee and Monstrous Vegan Performativity

Chapter 4 turns to the work of J. M. Coetzee, establishing a reparative means of confronting violence against the nonhuman. Framed in relation to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of paranoid and reparative reading, this chapter suggests what might be done with our identification of the monstrous vegan as a pervasive literary trope. Focusing on Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello texts, this chapter reads Costello as a performative enactment of the monstrous vegan. The staging of veganism as performance is seen to enable a reclamation of joy, pleasure, and optimism: affective states often abandoned in order to bear witness to violence against nonhuman animals. The chapter argues that the literary staging of veganism as monstrous performance provides an important framework for re-investing in the possibilities of vegan identity: offering a mode of detachment that refuses moral purity or the claim of ‘the beautiful soul’ by acknowledging self-interest and an entanglement in the violence of representational strategies.