Att känna med varandra i kampen mot speciesism. En analys av vad känslor gör utifrån en diffraktiv förståelse av kroppar.

Abstract

This essay is a qualitative study of what feelings do based on empirical material gathered through focus groups with vegans and vegetarians. The aim is to explore what feelings do with us based on the phenomenologically rooted presentation of emotions by Sara Ahmed (2004). By showing the movie Djurfabriken (The Animal Factory), an investigation of the Swedish animal industry, I tried to mobilize feelings among my participants. How does groups of vegans and vegetarians speak about their feelings and what can we learn from it? By analyzing the vegetarians different explanations of why they were not vegan (a question I never asked) I tried to unravel which feelings were made possible and which were made impossible to feel. Through what was said during the focus groups sessions I could grasp a norm which are making us numbed. I understand the tendency to mobilize political action through identity positions to be a great problem which risk to create feelings of shame. Feelings which could block the mobilization of feelings to non-human animals. My suggestion is to work more with approaches and attitudes rather than identity, and to understand speciesism in terms of a structural form of oppression. I understand it to be very important for political action to be with others in their pain, both non-human and human animals. I want to embrace a diffractive way of being in the world in resistance to a dichotomous way of thinking, based on domination and hierarchy. We have to be with each other in the struggle against speciesism.