A Rising Sense of Disgust: The Use of Emotions in Antispeciesist Collective Action in France and Quebec

In France and Quebec, collective action in the antispeciesist movement - which denounces the domination exercised by humans over animals - is mostly based on emotion. Animal rights activists try to expose animal exploitation and raise public awareness by arousing emotions, in particular disgust and horror. To arouse these emotions, they employ original awareness-raising devices (Traïni, 2011) designed to break down what they conceive to be “cognitive dissonance” among outsiders. In this sense, how do anti-species activists view these awareness-raising devices as generators of “moral shocks” (Jasper, 1997)?

Drawing on material gathered during an ethnographic survey of the French and Quebec antispeciesist movements, and on data from a corpus of around 100 interviews, the paper will show how activists try to create a sense of horror and disgust among outsiders to encourage them to become vegans. Then, it will attempt to show that this conception of collective action as an enterprise of moral shock is not unrelated to the way in which activists themselves have been sensitized to the cause. In other words, to better understand the devices employed in the cause and the way activists mobilize emotions, we also propose to look back at the social dispositions that prepared these actors' own moral shocks and the way they have built up their disgust for animal exploitation.