VEGAN IDENTITIES AND THE VEGAN MOVEMENT IN TURKEY

Date

2023-3-31

Author

Tunç, Ahmet

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Veganism emerged in the 20th century as an anti-systemic movement and has become more common in the last two decades. It stands out from other rights-based movements as it involves everyday practices such as a specific diet and avoiding the use of animal-tested products. More importantly, the subject of the struggle -animals- are not the ones who are involved in the movement. The identification of vegans with the movement, therefore, differs from other rights-based movements. However, there may be commonalities in the identifications and motivations of the members of these movements. In this thesis, I explore how vegans identify themselves in terms of their political tendencies, gender and sexual identities, and their activist presence in other movements. In that sense, I try to draw a picture of the vegans and the vegan movement in Turkey by showing the connections between the vegan movement and other political movements, such as the feminist, LGBTQAI+ and labour movements in Turkey. I hypothesise that vegans’ motivations and their definition of veganism are related to other identities that they have and that there is a connection between vegan identifications and other identifications. With this study, I aim to understand the dynamics of the movement and the identifications and motivations of vegans. Looking at the identity formation and movement dynamics, I argue that the vegan movement in Turkey shares the characteristics of new social movements pursuing identity politics. I conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 self-identified vegans living in Turkey.

Subject Keywords

Veganism in Turkey, Social Movements, Political Movements, Political Identity, New Social Movements

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/102785

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis