Cooking Up a Movement? 'Skinny Bitch' and the Neoliberal Logics of Post-Feminist Veganism

• In Event: De/Re-stabilizing Rhetoric and Contemporary Social Movements

Abstract

With the release of "Skinny Bitch" in 2005 and the subsequent media fanfare that has greeted the arrival of other books in the series (including the new "Skinny Bastard" targeted at men), authors Kim Barnouin and Rory Freedman have perhaps done more to provoke a sustained (and contested) conversation about veganism and feminism than PETA's perennial ad campaigns. Marketed as a weight loss program for women, these books (and subsequent cookbooks, journals, and DVDs) have reignited questions about animal rights/welfare in ways that both connect with and complicate the traditional strategies and tactics used by advocates participating within this social movement for the past decade in the U.S. This paper offers a close reading of several works within this popular series and examines how these discourses work to "move the social" in ways that invite scholars to rethink how we study the rhetorics of contemporary social movements.

Author

• Cindy Spurlock, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill