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.
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Document Number: D06819
Notes:
Pages 107-117 in Massimo Ragnedda and Glenn W. Muschert (eds.), The digital divide: the internet and social inequalities in international perspective. Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, Abingdon, Oxon, UK. 324 pages.