1. Ritual Communication and Use Value: The South Central Farm and the Political Economy of Place
- Collection:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center (ACDC)
- Contributers:
- Broad, Garrett M. (author)
- Format:
- Online journal article
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Published:
- International Communication Association
- Location:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 99 Document Number: D10866
- Journal Title:
- Communication, Culture & Critique
- Journal Title Details:
- 6(1):20-40
- Notes:
- 21 pages., via online journal., This article offers a critical rhetorical ecofeminist analysis of the Meatless Monday campaign, a U.S.-based meat reduction initiative focused on public health and the environment. By examining the campaign's online discourse, the study sheds light on vegetarian advocacy defined by an apolitical small-steps strategy and identifies constraints on the campaign's significant empowerment potential. Extending past scholarship on how some vegetarian discourses resist and reproduce meat-eating culture's hegemonic norms of gender, race/ethnicity, class, and human–nonhuman relations, I develop and demonstrate what I call the critique of neoliberal backgrounding as an intersectional ecofeminist heuristic. I conclude that the campaign should address the meaningful consequences that its affirmation of neoliberalism has for its targeted areas of concern and for interconnected societal problems.