Learning To Be Affected Subjetivity Sense and Sensibility Jacobsson 2014

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288 SOCÍety
Animals^.
BRILL brill.com/soan
Learning to Be Affected: Subjectivity, Sense,

and Sensibility in Animal Rights Activism
Niktas Hansson and Kerstin Jacobsson

University of Gothenburg
niklas.hansson@cß(.gu.se; kerstirLjacobsson@gu.se
Abstract
Becoming an animal rights activist is not just a process of identity change and re-social-
ization but also implies, as this article suggests, a "re-engineering" of affective cognitive
repertoires and processes of "sensibilization" in relation to nonhuman animals. Activists
thereby develop their mental responsiveness and awareness and refine their embodied
sensitivity and capacity for sensing. The article proposes a theoretical perspective for
understanding these processes. Empirically, this article examines the development of
affective dispositions informing activists' subjectivity and embodied sensibilities. It
looks at the ways in which visceral, bodily, or affective responses are cultivated to rein-
force activist commitments. First, the analysis identifies "micro-shocks" and "re-shock-
ing" experiences as mechanisms for sustaining commitment. Second, "emphatic
identification" and "embodied simulation" are highlighted as mechanisms for nurturing
empathy towards animals. Finally, it identifies the role of "affective meat encounters"
and the cultivation of disgust as mechanisms for nurturing sensibilities. The analysis is
based on a case study of animal rights activists in Sweden.
Keywords
affect - animal rights activism - body - disgust - embodied - sensibility - subjectivity
Niktas Hansson has a Ph.D. in Ethnology and he is a senior researcher at Centrefor Consumer
Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Kerstin Jacobsson is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology and Work Science,
University of Gothenburg. She is also affiliated with Södertörn University, Sweden.
We are grateful for funding from the Swedish Research Council (grant 412-2007-8782) and for
the helpful suggestions by Lia Antoniou, Tora Holmberg, and Asa Wettergren.
I KONINKLIJKE BRILL NV, LEIDEN, 2014 | DOI 10.I163/15685306-I2341327

LEARNING TO BE AFFECTED 263
Introduction
Animal rights activism entails strong moral and emotional commitments

to the well-being of nonhuman animals in society. It overrides any clearcut
demarcation between private and public life and has significant implications
for the lifestyle of the individual activist and his or her relations with the sur-
rounding world. As Pallotta (2008, p. 150) has insightfully described, animal
rights activism implies a turning away from dominant cultural ideologies,
and normalizing concern and empathy for animals. It requires, in her view,
a de-socialization in relation to dominant norm and value systems and a
re-socialization into an activist identity (Pallotta, 2005).
Our main claim in this article is that becoming an animal rights activist
involves not just a process of identity change and re-socialization, but also
requires and implies a "re-engineering" of affective cognitive repertoires and
processes of "sensibilization" in relation to animals. Sensibilization refers to
the process whereby activists develop both their mental responsiveness and
awareness and refine their embodied sensitivity and capacity for "sensing." It
involves both perceptive and cognitive capacities. Understanding these pro-
cesses, we propose, requires a theoretical perspective that integrates body,
affect, and cognition.
In our terms, activist-subjects may be thought of as having re-engineered
dispositions. This re-engineering entails an intentional project of reforming,
refining, intensifying, or disciplining the affects, sensibilities, impulses, and
the pushes and pulls that underpin a person's social movement programs,
group affiliations, ideological commitments, and ethical preferences (see also
Bennett & Shapiro, 2002, p. 5). Thus, activism entails intellectual knowledge
and cognitive understanding (cf Eyerman & Jamison, 1991), as well as forms of
embodied sensibility that organize affects into activist dispositions and gener-
ate the motion (motivation) to enact ethical principles and visions.
Following Bennett and Shapiro (2005), ethical principles are not in them-
selves enough to motivate ethical or political action; the right affects are also
necessary. Affect is clearly action-oriented; affects move us. This understand-
ing of activism requires a theorization of the intersection of affective regis-
ters and activist commitments. This calls for a theoretical perspective able to
capture the interplay of social processes and affects in the development of
embodied activist subjectivity.'
1 Following Blackman and Cromby (2007), affects can be seen as bodily needs, intensities, or
impulses that originate outside of awareness but nevertheless structure activity; to the extent
that we experience affects phenomenologically, we experience them as feelings. Feelings,
SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

264 HANSSON AND JACOBSSON
The aim of this article, then, is to suggest a theoretical perspective for

understanding the ways in which animal rights activism impacts activists'
subjectivity, sense, and sensibility. More precisely, our interest is in investigat-
ing affective dispositions informing activist subjectivity and embodied sensi-
bilities. We understand affects and sensibilities in terms of their relation to
subjectivity; for example, visceral, bodily, or emotional responses cultivated
in activist commitments and programs in relation to animal rights and ethi-
cal veganism. The production and reproduction of activist subjectivity is in
this perspective a continuous process, requiring active effort, which involves a
number of techniques.
Drawing on interviews from a study of animal rights activists in Sweden,
the article illustrates how in a variety of ways activists "learn to be affected."
This entails the development of affective cognitive repertoires and processes
of sensibilization. While previous research has indicated that activists learn
to feel in specific ways or display legitimate feelings (Groves, 1995), our claim
is that activists develop their mental responsiveness and awareness as well as
refine their embodied sensitivity and capacity for "sensing."
Our work responds to three gaps identified in the social movement litera-
ture: a call for the return of emotions as a key topic of study in social move-
ment studies (Goodwin et al., 2001; Flam & King, 2005; cf. Jasper, 2011), the use
of activist biographies for a better understanding of activist subjectivity as a
key dimension of social movements (Flacks, 2004; Gaarder, 2008; Jasper, 1997;
Pallotta, 2005), and a focus on bodies for understanding the activist experi-
ence. While some studies look at activists' use of their bodies to "body forth"
a message (Peterson, 2001; see also Hohle, 2009, 2010), studies of embodied
subjectivity and activist experience are scarce.
For instance, the plentiful research on the role of emotions in social move-
ments seldom connects emotions explicitly to corporeal registers. As a result,
in social movement research, emotions tend to appear as disembodied, ren-
dering the body invisible. Our work contributes directly to filling this gap in the
literature. Additionally, the study adds to the small number of empirical studies
that focus on the life worlds and life experiences of animal rights activists (e.g.,
Herzog, 1993; Jasper, 1997; Pallotta, 2005; Shapiro, 1994), as well as to the limited
scholarly field that considers subjectivity framed through the lens of "ethical
veganism" and the process of learning to become vegan (McDonald, 2000).
thus, can be defined as the momentary experience of phenomenological states of the

body-brain system (see also Cromby, 2007). Emotions, then, are relatively stable, culturally
recognized configurations of affect and feeling, patterned body-brain responses normatively
tied to local moral orders and to expectations of expression and activity.

In the remainder of this article, we first present our theoretical perspective

and locate it in relation to existing scholarship on emotions in social move-
ment activism. We then introduce the empirical material on which the arti-
cle is based. Three empirical sections then follow. First, we present affective
"re-shocking" experiences as part of respondents' motivational pulls for sus-
tained animal rights activism, and put forward our concept of "micro-shocks."
Second, "proto-emphatic identification" and "embodied simulation" are iden-
tified as mechanisms for nurturing empathy towards animals. Third, we argue
that a particular form of "affective meat experiences" curbs activist percep-
tions and mobilizes sensibilities through emotional responses, including
disgust-imbued response patterns towards animal others and the fate of ani-
mals as food.
In conclusion, we propose understanding these experiences as part of ani-
mal rights activists' particular ways of learning to be affected by animal others,
and argue that these sorts of learning process include bodily dimensions. Our
research then highlights embodied sensibilities, connecting bodily, emotional,
and cognitive dimensions in a novel way.
Emotions, Sensibility, and Social Movement Activism
Emotions have made a strong comeback in research on social movements

(e.g., Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta, 2001; Flam & King, 2005; Gould, 2009; Jasper,
2oii;Jacobsson & Lindblom, 2013). The importance of affects and emotions in
mobilizing activists to action and in bringing about changes in thinking and
behavior is widely recognized, as is the role of emotions in "awakening" moral
sensibilities and thus in recruiting for social movement activism (e.g., Shapiro,
1994; Jasper & Poulsen, 1995; Jasper, 1997; Pallotta, 2005, 2008). By considering
the roles of emotion and affect we better understand what pushes and pulls
activists. Emotions drive activists, including emotions as diverse as guilt and
shame (e.g.. Groves, 1997; Jacobsson & Lindblom, 2012), righteous anger, indig-
nation, empathy, or compassion (for a chart of protest-relevant emotions, see
Jasper, 1997, p. 116).
However, in viewing public protests as the primary sites where emotions
and affects come into play, previous research has tended to overlook the fact
that many movement-relevant practices in everyday life, such as following
a vegan diet or rejecting the company of meat-eaters, also have emotional
implications and require emotion management (for an exception to this over-
look, see Jacobsson & Lindblom, 2013). As Melucci (1989) pointed out, public
manifestations or protests are only the manifest side of a social movement;

its latent side, the activists' practices and social relationships in everyday life,
is equally important in the life of a social movement. As we illustrate below,
such micro-political practices are hugely significant for the development of
activist subjectivity.
Moreover, while previous research has shown that exposure to moral
shocks can be an important factor in explaining why people join animal rights
movement(s) (e.g., Jasper & Poulsen, 1995; Jasper, 1997), our main concern
here is to investigate how animal rights activism becomes a primary source of
relating to the surrounding environment after an original conversion to activ-
ism. How do animal rights activists then develop and deepen the relationship
between humans and nonhumans via their inclusion of animals as a human
concern and responsibility? Our study focuses on the capacities of activists to
be affected by animals and their fate as something that develops over time. The
importance of emotions in such processes is less well researched than the role
of emotions in recruitment and subsequent mobilization to action. In other
words, we investigated how affect tends to direct action, perception, sensibil-
ity, and judgments over time.
In addition, much of the literature on emotions in social movements under-
plays the fact that emotions are bodily grounded. This is, for instance, true of
studies concerned with the narrative and symbolic aspects of social movement
activism, including the rich literature on the framing of movement claims (cf.
Benford & Snow, 2000).^ However, affect, body, and cognition are closely inter-
twined. Moral sensibilities are embodied: they require perceptive and affective
capacities—functions that are bodily grounded while being socially shaped.
What is needed, we suggest, is a theorization of how affect, cognition, and
bodily reactions work in their proper registers, not simply as "discursive fram-
ings" of emotions and body behavior or as emotion talk (cf. Groves, 2001) but
in their particular contribution to subjectivity.
Experiences have a corporeal dimension in addition to the cultural norms
and meanings attached to them, and affects and body states are not always
consciously registered but rely on embodied reaction. For example, people
are often guided by intuitive "gut feelings" in their reaction to certain objects
2 Hohle (2009,2010) studies embodied performances as the "disciplining" of emotion, affective

responses and the affective self; emotions are here seen as "political devices" for presenting
an image to the public. However, disciplining does not capture the variety of ways in which
the corporeal and bodily registers can be intentionally affected by training, affect modula-
tion, noticing, monitoring, managing, growing, and embodying sensibilities.

or people they deeply dislike, albeit without being consciously aware of this.^
Nevertheless, visceral responses are culturally "tuned" or learned; in other
words, they work in tandem with cultural standards and norms, which means
that actions and reasons are co-constituted by bodily reactions and cultural
impact. Body, psyche, and culture work in an integrated way to sbape orga-
nized patterns of affective, cognitive responses. Thus, episodic experiences—
of marching, protesting, actions, meat resistance and so on—are woven
into a fabric that is more durable tban a single action or an occasional
activist experience.
The responses of a political program or social movement campaign are
dependent on affective encounters that work on embodied registers. Tbis is
also in line witb findings in neuroscience, which show that the origin of feel-
ings is experience, and that feelings influence our decision-making in social
settings. However, the embodied mechanisms contributing to tbe function-
ing of feelings are somatic (Damasio, 1994). Our memories include not only
perceptual information about events and situations, but also the feelings and
bodily states tbat accompany them. Accordingly, people learn through experi-
ence to classify events as positive, negative, or neutral.
The point here is that bodily and emotional states are activated as people
experience a situation. It is important for a conceptualization of embodied
activist-subjectivity to have the external set of circumstances that the individ-
ual encounters include not only entities or events, but also social conventions
and ethical rules. That is why we prefer to speak of embodied and embedded
activist subjectivity. As Protevi (2010) puts it: "Tbe embodied and tbe embed-
ded aspects of our being intersect—we are bodies whose capacities form in
social interaction. And it's in this intersection of the social and the somatic
that subjectivity and selfbood emerge" (p. 173). Tbe idea of "embedded,
embodied subjectivity" provides room for a notion of a somatically grounded
subjectivity, albeit one sensitive to the social and cultural impact on
subjectivity.
Drawing on novel work in psychology and neuroscience, Jasper (2011) has recently included
definitions of emotions as a form of information processing, often operating faster than our
conscious minds do, and how they run through various parts of the brain, just as cognitions
do. Jasper (2011) describes the sub-personal, neuro-body-brain activity of emotions prior to
entering into conscious thought and reflection: "They can be observed in fMRl scans, just as
more formal thoughts can. They help humans negotiate the world around them" (p. 289).

Learning to Be Affected
Shapiro (1994) argues that animal rights activists develop a caring attitude
toward nonhuman animals:
[S]uch an attitude is a pervasive personal style—a habitual way of expe-

riencing and expressing the world through the body. Caring about nonhu-
man animals is such an attitude. It means being attentive to them in a
watchful and concerned way. More than just curiosity or interest, it is a
positive inclining or leaning toward them, sympathy for them and their
needs. A caring attitude is one of continuous sensitivity and respon-
siveness, not a transitory awareness or a momentary concern, (p. 149,
our italics)
To develop such an attitude involves both reflective capacities and emotional

repertoires, organized as a long-standing habitual way of experiencing the
world through the body. Shapiro (1994) favors a biographical perspective on
the development of this attitude, which includes a conceptualization of how
historical, cultural, and emotional processes co-constitute activist subjectivi-
ties. However, he does not recognize the importance of technical artifacts or
the role of somatic registers in the "subjectivity work" of activists, and through
which they develop an embodied, embedded way of relating to the environ-
ment as skillful agents.
Expanding on Shapiro's work, it is therefore useftil to consider Latour's
(2004) theorization of the ways in which a body's interaction with any kind
of setup, such as social institutions, technologies, artifacts, cultural norms of
practice, etc., is a body's way of learning to be affected and cultivating sensi-
bilities. The concept of setup is a general term connoting ways in which indi-
viduals interact with their environment by being linked with, and to, different
setups, including physical, technical, and cultural resources. A setup can be
broad enough to include an urban upbringing where a child-body learns to be
affected. The theoretical importance granted to nonhuman entities and bodies
as outcomes of "heterogeneous collectives" in Latour's theory is an advantage
compared to theories focusing only on the role of norms, values, beliefs, and
other cultural forces."*
4 Following a biocultural notion of subject formation, we arrive at a processual view on

embodiment without the rather harsh determinism of Bourdieu (cf. DeLanda, 2006). Power
relations or "subjectivation processes" are productive of particular embodied characteristics
(habitus, embodied dispositions, non-reflective aspects of subjectivity) but are not—as with

Following Latour, animal rights activists acquire special bodies and capaci-
ties; examples of these include brains (for thinking, reasoning, representing),
perceptive sensibilities, and affective repertoires connected to experiences.
An "activist body" learns, for example, how a confiict feels, how to differenti-
ate power structures, and how to represent a different social future. In other
words, an activist-subject embodies a repertoire of feeling and thinking while
accumulating experience. Moral sensibility, as well as perceptive and affective
dispositions, are here intertwined—and embodied—and serve as guides for
navigating in the world.
In summary, then, animal rights activists must not only re-engineer an
explicit discursive relationship towards animals, but also re-dispose them-
selves "feelingly," for example, by developing the capacity for empathy.
Re-engineering dispositions includes altering both the corporeal and emo-
tional registers. After introducing the data and the method used in our empiri-
cal study, we illustrate this empirically.
Method and Data
The empirical material for the study consisted of 18 qualitative interviews with
animal rights activists in Sweden, all of whom lived in the two largest cities in
Sweden, Stockholm and Gothenburg. Ten of the interviews were conducted in
2004 with activists engaged in Animal Rights Sweden. This is the oldest and
largest animal rights organization in Sweden, with a membership of approxi-
mately 35,000 in 2012. It was founded in 1882, and its name change in 1999 from
the Nordic Society Against Painful Experiments on Animals to Animal Rights
Sweden refiects a widening of its agenda and a radicalization of its claims over
recent decades. Its official policy is to work within the boundaries of exist-
ing laws, using traditional public opinion and lobby work and informational
campaigns, including campaigns against animal experiments, flir farms, the
industrial production of meat, etc.
Bourdieu—internalized at an early age and reproduced forever, but ongoing processes of

power relationships that operate through particular bodies and minds (cf Protevi, 2009). The
ongoing, interactional character of embodiment and formation of activist subjectivity needs
to be stressed, and notions of steady state social reproduction processes need to be ques-
tioned. Othenvise, it becomes hard to theorize deviant, resistant, or struggling subjectivities.
The vidLy in which Latour (2004) theorizes the body as the relational outcome of practices is
therefore closer to the view taken in this article.

Additionally, eight interviews were conducted in 2010 with activists belong-

ing to the Animal Rights Alliance and a local network of animal rights activists
in Gothenburg. The Animal Rights Alliance was started in 2005 as a more activ-
ist and radical network than Animal Rights Sweden. It is mostly known for its
undercover filming of animal farms (pigs, mink). Its preferred form of action
is public opinion work; however, it also explicitly gives moral support to illegal
actions. The local Gothenburg network has a similar ideological leaning.
The activists interviewed, however, tend to be members of several different
groups, not limiting their commitment only to one group. There is a lot of over-
lap between the networks and between high- and low-risk activism. Several of
the informants had also been engaged in illegal action, some under the frame-
work of the Animal Liberation Front (undercover action), while others had fol-
lowed Gandhian principles of civil disobedience (conducted openly and being
prepared to face the legal consequences). In this article, the preferred forms of
action are not the focus of analysis, but rather the life worlds and subjectivities
of the activists, which tend to be common to all the activists interviewed. This
reasoning lead to our treating all informants as one group.
A condition for participating in the study was that participants were actively
engaged in animal rights activism and follow a vegan diet. The exclusion of
passive movement members and supporters ensured that the study partici-
pants shared a distinct activist identity, where activism was a key priority in
their lives at the moment, and where they were strongly committed to the ani-
mal rights cause. As such, some of the participants were more radical than the
official policy of the organization in which they were members. Animal Rights
Sweden tries to combine animal-welfare activism (pleading for a humane
treatment of animals and focused on improving animal protection) with more
radical animal-rights claims (challenging animal oppression and human supe-
riority in a more fundamental way), while all our informants identified with
the animal rights agenda.
The sample included the key activists in the group at the time of the study,
either those who held formal leadership positions or fiinctioned as infor-
mal leaders. The remainder of the participants was recruited through snow-
ball sampling, with the aim of securing diversity in terms of age and gender.
A total of 11 women and 7 men, aged between 20 and 60, with an average
age of around 30 years old, were interviewed. Most of them worked profes-
sionally, although some of the younger ones were students and a few were
unemployed or on sick leave. We used open-ended, in-depth interviews,
ranging from 90 min to 5 hr; interviews were recorded and transcribed, and
the data were anonymized. The interviews focused on the activists' narra-
tives, life stories, and accounts of experiences of activism and of the way

LEARNING TO BE AFFECTED 27I
human beings oppress animals, thus embedding their political perceptions

in their lives in situ.
A methodological remark is necessary here: we relied on interview data,
which by definition, captures discursive and socially interpreted reconstruc-
tions of phenomena or processes, including the culturally specific emotions
of the animal rights activist community. However, in contrast to most socio-
logical studies, we gave attention not only to the discursive or conscious level,
but also to sense perception and the embodied experience of animal rights
activism. This means that the interviews can only be indicative of such experi-
ences, since they are—to some extent—beyond our awareness. Nonetheless,
we can interpret interview statements as indications of embodied experience.
Moreover, our instinctive or gut reactions to objects or pictures, for instance,
are "qualified" in various ways—learned, organized, modified or manipulated,
filtered, etc.—via cognitive, sometimes conscious, processes and factors, such
as personal experience or cultural or social impact, which interviews can actu-
ally capture. Below, we illustrate empirically how somatic and social processes
interplay in the production of animal rights subjectivity.
Micro-Shocking
First, we discuss affective re-shocking experiences and introduce the concept

of micro-shocks, which are based on film or image consumption and which
are part of our respondents' motivational pulls for sustained animal rights
activism. We propose understanding such experiences as part of animal rights
activists' particular ways of being affected and argue that these processes are
bodily grounded.
Jasper and Poulsen (1995) have introduced the concept of "moral shock"
to explain how people can be morally awakened and thus recruited into ani-
mal rights activism, for instance by encountering horrific information about
animal suffering. According to Jasper and Poulsen, moral shock is a mecha-
nism of movement recruitment, besides recruitment through social networks.
Others have argued that using moral shock as a recruitment strategy can have
the reverse effect since moral shocks can be off-putting to people and alienate
the intended audience (Mika, 2006); for instance, pictures evoking disgust are
more likely to tum away than to capture people's attention (Nabi, 2009).
Jacobsson and Lindblom (2013) have argued that for a moral shock to be
effective, the potential recruit must already, at least to some extent, share the
social movement's moral ideal. This is why for neo-Nazi activists, for instance, it
is much more difficult to employ moral shocks as a tactic. Our primary interest

in this article is not in recruitment, but in the process taking place after recruit-
ment. Nevertheless, our data emphasizes the importance of moral shocking in
that most of our informants can point to concrete and overwhelming "cata-
lytical experiences," to use McDonald's (2000) term, whereby their eyes were
opened to the suffering of animals. It seems that some of them were favorably
predisposed to animals already, for instance after having had a close relation-
ship to a companion animal during childhood (see also Pallotta, 2005,2008).
However, some of our male informants stressed that they never even liked
animals but have learned to feel compassion for animals (which will be further
discussed below).^ Awakening compassion and empathy through the use of
visual images is viewed by our informants as more effective than using philo-
sophical arguments in penetrating through "the media noise that exists out
there," as one respondent put it. However, the activists try to mitigate the pos-
sible negative effects of using moral shocks, by combining them with provid-
ing positive information about what can be done concretely to achieve change
or by serving vegan food for free.
The concept of moral shock effectively captures the interrelatedness of moral-
ity, cognition, and emotion, as illustrated in the following interview excerpts:
Excerpt 1
There were films from SHAC [Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty] with ani-
mal testing [...] and images remain inside here [points towards chest].
M. [fellow activist] showed the film Earthlings that covers all (industry,
animal testing, etc). So for me it was the pictures and having a dialogue
with others who talked about tbeir life as animal rights activists and veg-
ans. Sharing these films... I felt so incredibly bad and it was emotional.
Tbere are things that just stay and I can never go back. It was like it was so
amazingly profound and I was really sad. And when you see it there with
their eyes, these pigs' eyes are totally different from other pigs' eyes. Like
pigs going to slaughter. Or living in large [industrial] buildings. 1 still have
those pictures, it is the eyes of some animals [...] it took some time after
5 Tom Regan has described three paths to animal rights activism, which were explicitly referred
to by two of our informants in their self-descriptions. These three paths correspond well to
the different life stories of our informants; The DaVincians (after Leonardo DaVinci), who are
bom with a sensitivity to animals they never lose; the Damascans (after the apostle Paul),
who experience eye-opening events and thus conversion; and the muddlers, for whom devel-
oping an animal consciousness is a process of slow growth (Vaughan, 2012). Of course, the
three can be combined; for instance, a predisposition of empathy towards animal others may
facilitate later receptiveness to moral shock (see Pallotta, 2005).

I entered the animal rights movement to learn and gain knowledge about
animal's feelings [...] how the clothing industry works.
Excerpt 2
We were going to the ICA store for groceries and I spotted a poster from
Animal Rights Sweden. It was a disgusting picture of a monkey with a
syringe in its neck. I reacted really strongly and could almost feel the physi-
cal pain. [...] afterwards I ordered magazines for more information.
Experiencing such extraordinary moments brought the moral order of

human-animal relations to the fore. The effects on our respondents were not
due to the meaning of those experiences alone, but also to the affective force
of the event: shocking experiences tended to stick in the respondent's mem-
ory. For the second informant, it was an almost physical experience. "When it
comes to pictures, they go straight into you," as another one of our respondents
put it. Lorimer (2010) explains the evocative power of the visual in terms of how
images seep through the skin, illustrating how images work in multi-modal
ways on the receiver (i.e., affecting the senses and, by extension, the body too)
and affect people in ways that bypass conscious reflection.
This is supported by recent research on emotions that argues that empathie
concerns for (animal and human) others display people's embodied capacities
for "automatic" affective identification. Culture, through collective norms and
values, works to curb or channel a fundamental capacity for developing deeper
affiliations toward others. The development of such attachments is grounded
in people's perceptions of the suffering of others and how they "feel" others
either through direct perceptions or embodied simulations (see Protevi, 2009,
p. 27; Gállese, 2010; Virno, 2008, p. 177; cf. Sontag, 2003). We revisit embodied
simulations again below.
In our interviews with activists, film or photo experiences involved unas-
similated affective intensity. At the first encounter, previous ways of thinking
did not allow the respondents to make sense of, or process, what they had just
seen or experienced. They were bluntly and viscerally affected by the shock
provoked by certain images. Their immediate reactions involved on the one
hand, repulsion and disgust, and on the other hand, intimate sensations
providing moments of identification with individual animals; that is, a produc-
tion of feelings of empathy for another's pain.
While recruitment through moral shocking is much discussed in the litera-
ture, we know less about how it can be used to strengthen the commitment of
those already participating in a social movement (see, however, Gould, 2009;
Lindblom & Jacobsson, 2013). Through the concept of re-shocking—that is.

exposing oneself repeatedly to micro-shocks—we capture vital components of

this process. We suggest that re-shocking, or micro-shock, experiences sensitize
and motivate those already committed to animal rights activism by connect-
ing the body, emotions, and ethical motivations. Several of our our respondents
spoke of the need for, or practice of, being re-shocked in order to sustain a moti-
vational "pull" toward animal rights activism. To avoid the risk of routinization
and in order to ignite in oneself "the righteous anger that puts fire in the belly
and iron in the soul" (Gamson, 1992, p. 32), they direct the micro-shocks not to
others but to themselves. Here we hear the voices of four different activists:
Excerpt 1
I have a friend who starts his mornings with videos of animal oppression
in order to sort of kickstart. He tells me he gets pissed off and angry and
comes alive.
Excerpt 2
One has to look at animal rights films [...] And sometimes there are new
animal rights films and so on. New undercover [films] in fiir farms, et
cetera and that's what I look at to remind myself of why I'm standing
outside for example Astra Seneca in Mölndal and screaming. This is why
I do this. Not to forget. I think that is what many do if you stop hanging
out with only vegans, and start hanging out with only meaters, then you
forget. You do not look at animal rights movies, hang out with vegans, do
not have an active dialogue about what you are doing. Then you are lost.
Maybe you just sit there. Interest fades any way.
Excerpt 3
Daily shocks are needed. It is not enough only with one.
Excerpt 4
When I see those pictures, then the fire is lit and there is no other way
to go.
In the second quote, the activist describes how re-shocking experiences

"format" her subjectivity and reaífirm her commitment to animal rights
activism—affectively as well as reflectively—implying that she is on the right
track, again and again, working as a motor. It is also a matter of monitoring the
intensity of commitment toward the political program of animal rights (low
vs. high intensity). Re-shocking is basically a matter of reinforcing the intensity
of the belief in the cause of animal rights and is not actually about the shock's

abstract content. The activist quoted above, in much the same way as several
others in our sample, learned to trust, intensify, and re-trigger feelings emerg-
ing from image consumption. Without the re-shocking experiences and inter-
action with others in the movement, activists feared they would "de-intensify"
their commitments. Thus, intensifying affective experiences underpin activist
and ideological commitment.^
Re-shocking was often related to horrific images, experiences, and testimo-
nials of animal cruelty that provided respondents with a sense of "co-feeling,"
which was mobilized through the abilities to have animals touch them, to
mimic what the animal felt, and to simulate their living conditions. In doing
so, they sensed what the animal must have felt and were moved by observing,
sensing, and feeling. Lorimer (2010) has discussed the formative role of "affect
images" in the following manner:
[T]he practical, sensual and affective dimensions to human-nonhuman

interactions [...] involve [...] refiections on the processes of "learning
to be affected" in the field (broadly defined) and creative, mimetic tech-
niques for sensing the world differently through the body of another.
(P- 239)
Lorimer (2010) argues that animal rights movements have made good use
of these corporeal capacities to be affected by animal images—images that
trigger mimetic responses and produce (nonconscious) responses both from
public audiences and movement members (Lorimer, 2010, p. 240; see also
Rokotnitz, 2008). Thus, images and affect connect with political means/ends,
but the connection between images and affect needs to be cultivated for the
purpose of intensifying commitment. Not only are people in general able to
erase certain feelings that haunt them—such as visceral hatred and disgust
experienced toward other people, behavior, objects, or animals—but they
are also able to cultivate new ways of feeling and experiencing. Animal rights
activists tend to do precisely that—cultivate novel dispositions.
6 Micro-shocking is used in periods when activists wish to intensify their commitment.

In other periods, activists may need to de-intensily their commitment, which is also a
form of modulation of affective responses. The risk of getting burned out from activism
is well documented in previous research (McDonald, 2000; Pallotta, 2005; Gaarder, 2008;
Jacobsson & Lindblom, 2012) and also present in our interviews. For that reason, activ-
ists need to actively perform emotion work (Jacobsson & Lindblom, 2013) and/or develop
trauma-management strategies (Taimie, 2006). For instance, several of our informants
have attended trauma-management trainings at international activist camps.

Embodied Simulation
Re-shocking understood through the lens of a sensational and emotional reg-

ister hits a blind spot in the application of moral shock theory as developed
by Jasper and Poulsen (1995). The shocking experience is one of awakening,
yes, but not only in (self) refiective thinking and (self) evaluation, but also in
mimetic capacities, which involves an active process of emotional sensibilities.
Recent research within cognitive science and neuropsychology, in particular
strands of cultural theory on emotions (Connolly, 2002; Virno, 2008; Protevi,
2009), maintain that empathie concerns for (animal and human) others
include embodied capacities for sensing or simulating someone else's feeling
state—in this case, that of the animal-other.
As put by one interviewee, "If I picture myself in the situation of the animals
I feel such a pain in my body that I can't just ignore that feeling." Here she takes
on the role of the animal-other (cf. Pallotta, 2005), while also experiencing a
mobilization of her embodied capacities and simulating what she perceives
the animal must have felt, resulting in an almost physical pain.
Research in neuroscience has identified an embodied basif; for empathie
identification with others—the "mirror neuron system"—mediated through
visually observing others, allowing people to immediately recognize the "emo-
tive tonalities" of others to infer the aim of their actions (cf Gállese et al.,
2001; Rokotnitz, 2008; Virno, 2008). While you cannot teach someone mimetic
capacity (because it's "hardwired" in the mimetic area of the brain in us all),
people can learn to deny, ignore, or devalue it. Further, you can also value and
encourage it, place people in situations where it is re-triggered, acknowledge
its importance, etc.
We suggest that this is what our informants do as they become part of an
activist community, including sharing norms, ethics, and values concerning
the status of animals in society. Our respondents simulated the states of living
animal others, including incidents of dying, slaughtering, killing, feeling, and
sensing, and they were infused in their personal memories and inscribed in
their beings to the extent that they could even feel the pain. One responent
expressed that it is as if she has "the heart outside of the body" and that she
"feels so much as to make it painful."
Our innate capacity for empathie identification does not in itself lead
to sympathy for the other, or an ethical outlook, but needs to be learned or
"refined." One of the respondents told us that he did not initially even like ani-
mals but that he had developed empathy toward animals, and bodily experi-
ences of touching animals were important for developing this disposition:

These actions when I have rescued hens have been important to me. I
have carried the hens in my own hands, and have experienced directly
what their lives in the cages are like. I have taken them to good homes to
get a good life. These experiences have led me to feel that I have bonds
to animals. I am linked to tbose oppressed animals and tbeir fate. I have
developed a tenderness in relation to animals that I did not have before.
For this learning to be affected by an animal's fate, verbal exchange with fellow
movement members is likely crucial. Several activists described their routes as
organized forms of animal rights activism, finding "a home of likeminded peo-
ple" or even "going to movement school." As McDonald (2000) has pointed out,
animal rights activists are "self-directed" and "goal-directed learners" (p. 12),
and their teachers tend to be other fellow activists (see also Pallotta, 2005, on
the role of the activist network in secondary socialization into an animal rights
activist identity).
This points to the importance of collective efforts for aligning any first-time
intensive shock with more long-term activism and embodied animal rights eth-
ics. Animal rights activists thus learned to be affected in a way tbat expanded
tbeir empatby to include animals. Tbe "automatic" co-feeling or "embodied
simulation" was followed and encouraged by an affirmative animal rights
group that tapped into these empathie encounters.
In the context of the animal rights movement in general, it is no accident
that the screen—websites, images, and media—is an object around which
activists tend to gather. The film Earthlings was mentioned by several respon-
dents as a motivational source for entering organized animal rigbts activism.
In the movie, renowned actor Joaquin Phoenix discusses widespread animal
abuse. Phoenix refers to the famous Shakespeare play King Lear. "King Lear
asked Glauster 'How do you see the world?' and the blind Glauster answered:
'I see it feelingly'." He affirms tbe movie's affective imperatives, its capacity to
move the audience to feel for the animals depicted.
Film techniques of sound, image, footage, and character, and the use of
famous artists align with and boost the informational and documentary tech-
niques of the film, such as the sensitive footage of shelters, pet stores, puppy
mills, factory farms, slaughterhouses, the fur trade, circuses, and research labs.
Often these resources are footage with a documentary feel to them. They con-
stitute movement products; that is, animal rights activists record and produce
images and campaign materials that become part of tbe movements' cam-
paigns as well as educational resources for internal use by members in some of
the ways described above. Although animal images do not exclusively appear

within the horror genre, and also include sentimental, pretty, and sweet ani-
mals (puppies, rabbits, and other animals), exposing the conditions in which
animals live in farms and labs often involves utilizing this particular genre.
Arguably, as activist-watchers become participants (in the sense of being
film consumers), moving with and being moved by the animals depicted, they
embody the meaning without words that these films and images convey. This
happens beneath the political message, expressing meaning to be read or
interpreted in lines of moral principles or animal rights ethics. Images do more
than tell stories about something. As (embodied) animal image consumers,
many activists were—and continually become—profoundly moved. In our
terms, they are re-shocked and affectively modulated, by the means of film,
images, activist witness stories, etc. Images have the power to seep in through
activists' skins and modulate behavior as well as thought—hence, the affective
force or evocative power of images.
The setup of videos and image techniques, movie cuts, databases, websites,
and animal imagery work through affective modulation constitutive of activist
sensibilities; they go from a numb or distanced relationship to an intensified or
intimate one that affects their actions in terms of encouraging them to main-
tain their activism. Following Latour (2004), who defined a setup as consist-
ing of a heterogeneous collection of components, bodies are acquired through
repetitive actions within such assemblages.
Again following Latour (2004), we suggest that activists, by engaging
in re-shocking experiments, grew novel body parts: eyes and senses were
extended as socio-technical devices permeating their experiential orbits.
Media and images extended the culturally contextualized human beings by
allowing them to participate or witness events at places in the world where
they were not present; the "mediality" of media consists of extending human
bodies and senses. Activists' thinking has arguably been more impacted by the
advent of the Internet and film; they grow "new brains" through tapping into
mechanisms of the mimetic brain. In this way, distance is not a problem for
developing empathy with others.
The (new) technologies and forms of animal communication significantly
help to transform and re-engineer embodied experience and the nature of
(activist) cognition (e.g., Ivakhiv, 2010). Such mediation may also be needed
since with modern, industrial food production, the exploitation of animals
has become increasingly invisible, enabling a dissociation of food from dead
animal bodies. However, animal images or videos alone do not produce
acute perception, but for people with learned capacities of imagination and
embodied sensibilities, images foster a richer awareness than might have
been present before as they mediate the expression and exchange of feelings
and emotions.

With time, the empathy toward animals becomes for the activist an increas-
ingly habitual way of experiencing the world through the body (Shapiro, 1994,
p. 149). As put by one of our interviewees, "After a while activism becomes part
of one's structure of character [...] If activism is part of your personality it is so
much easier to be engaged because it is so self-evident."
Affective Meat Encounters and the Cultivation of Disgust
We proceed now with a discussion of the role of "affective meat experiences"

in nurturing activists' sensibilities, involving visceral emotions such as disgust.
Affective "image events" working through the simulation of pain and shock
are not tbe only catalysts shaping activists' responses to animals. Several of
our respondents also described their passion for animal rights activism as pro-
voked by what we term affective meat experiences. These experiences work
to curb activists' perceptions and mobilize sensibilities through emotional
responses, including disgust and other similar response patterns, toward ani-
mal others and the fate of animals as food. In other words, we discuss the role
of affective meat encounters in ethical rejection and the cultivation of disgust
for understanding the subjectivity of animal rights activism.
Such experiences were linked to tbe relationship between animal bodies,
food, and eating practices. During their childhood years, activists became
painfully aware of how the meat they had always been eating was formerly
living beings, made of flesh and blood like humans, who had been killed and
slaughtered in order to end up on tbeir dinner tables. Meat became a referent
for formerly living animals as well as a symbol of torture, rape, killing, and sys-
tematized apathy representative of a speciesist and meat-normative society.
I remember when I understood that shoes were made of skin, and blood
pudding of blood and that chicken wasn't just a name but really was a
chicken. Then I thought that it was really unpleasant. I lived with it for
maybe a year. When I was four or five years old, what could I do? [...]
then I started school and there was no one who made sure I got special
meals at school so nothing came of it until I was 13 and I started thinking
about it again. [...] But this has always felt totally natural [...] It was as
if I had always understood there are also problems with eggs and milk.
In the excerpt, the activist details how speciesist customs and meat-eating
practices were "naturalized" at school and at home, but her emotional disso-
nance and her appreciation of unpleasant feelings in the proximity of blood
and flesh—the thought of ingesting them—assured her about the naturalness

28o HANSSON AND JACOBSSON
of feeling for animals. Even "bad" feelings such as disgust and repulsion are
part of animal rights activists' cultivation of affective dispositions. The activist
quoted above learned to trust her gut instincts, which pushed her in an animal
rights direction before she was even familiar with the concept.
Many respondents reported that their budding interest in animals' fates
was thwarted by an apathetic meat-normative social environment (see also
Pallotta, 2005,2008). Even the most routine dinner conversation could end up
as an explosive negative experience as animal bodies moved to the forefront
of conversation. Amato and Partridge (1989) discussed similar experiences in
terms of "meat insight experiences," while Pallotta (2008) calls them "meat
epiphanies" in her analysis of recruitment narratives among animal rights
activists (see also Gaarder, 2008). In his book Deep Vegetarianism, Michael
Allen Fox (1999) writes about similar experiences:
[They] spring from basic emotional reactions and evidently bypass any
conscious thinking process that could transform them into reasons for
the agents concerned (although we—and they—might retrospectively
so identify them) [...] apparently very directly and quite independently
of the sort of logical deliberation and choice that, for philosophers at any
rate, generally serves as a model of self consciously rational behaviour,
(cited in Pallotta, 2005, p. 59)
Fox (1999) also mentions compassion, disgust, and squeamishness working as

"automatic" (nondeliberate) response mechanisms. These accounts make vis-
ible the connection between socio-moral sensibilities in relation to food and
animal byproducts and burgeoning activist affective dispositions. The seem-
ingly automatic response of the activist in her story is consistent with research
on how disgust or perceived threats might work to curb perception and inform
particular ethical or moral outlooks.^ Our respondents described a variety of
events, situations, and objects involved in "affective meat experiences":
7 See, for example. Miller's exposé on disgust (1997). That disgust impacts people's decision to
become vegetarian or animal rights activists is well known (Rozin et al., 1997). Previous stud-
ies suggest that morally committed meat rejecters associate meat with animal cruelty (Fessier
et al., 2003), and that moral vegetarians tend to find meat to be disgusting (Pallotta, 2005;
Rozin et al., 1997) and may perceive meat eating as immoral, thereby fostering a view of meat
as disgusting. Also, animal remainders, such as blood, have been documented mobilizing
disgust (Fessier et al., 2003). Herzog and Golden (2009) found that animal rights activists
tend to be more sensitive to visceral disgust in general than people who approve of animal use.

LEARNING TO BE AFFECTED 28l
When you are vegan and have this 'thought for animals' it constantly
clashes with the meat- and egg-normative world out there, outside of my
vegan bubble. Those clashes occur all the time, everything from when I
worked for the home service for the elderly and I had to go to the homes
of care clients and serve food... to being at a class get-together with the
school and grilling, and when I and X [female fellow activist] sit there
with our own little vegan grill and I feel like the demanding and tiresome
one who always ends up in some sort of difficulty or a bit outside [...]
To me all that is so emotional somehow. It is something that really goes
deep. I get so dreadfiiUy badly affected by people who are not vegans and
consume what I see as sensitive living beings [...] It is really hard for me
to sit next to someone who doesn't eat vegan stuff.
The animal rights activists we interviewed encountered threats, denial, and

defensiveness from people representing institutionalized speciesism as the
norm. The excerpt below illustrates that what represents good taste, smell, and
sensation for some represents an utterly disgusting experience for others. This
experience is linked to both collective activist discourse (vegan thinking) and
individually simulated scenes of a "meat frenzy" society:
It feels like this all the time [...] I think about the journey I have taken
[to becoming a vegan as well as becoming involved in the animal rights
movement] and about how other people think. I see it all the time.
Things that people who aren't vegan don't think about. There is some-
thing all the time. You also see the oppression in that. And it's difficult to
deal with. It's everything from what you eat, the smells you sense [...] the
smell when people eat meat, heat up their food, someone tosses half of
a grilled chicken on the table. [...] There is such a meat frenzy in society
all the time. [...] It affects nearly everything. Clothes, food and pets and
it's all right in front of you.
Rejecting what to others represents the great taste of meat or fashionable

clothes, including animal byproducts, is dependent on a body that is able to
"distaste" it; that is, feel repulsed by it. This capacity does not come naturally.
In line with Latour (2004), we suggest that practices and capacities relating to
tasting, eating, and rejecting certain foodstuffs improve with training; in other
words, they require effort.
From our interviews, we see how concrete social contexts are created where
the animal rights activists are encouraged to talk about what is distasteful
and disgusting and should therefore be rejected. Thus, the disgusted body

(and morally judging individual) is not a natural state but rather a learned
one involving the ability to be disgusted and to reject. Nature and culture are
intertwined, or to put it anotber way, sensations are situated in historically and
culturally specific practices. Another long-term activist, a woman in her early
thirties, described similar experiences of encounters with mainstream society
as those detailed above:
It can be painful. [...] It can be hard to sit there during lunch when some-
one is talking about meat and they have made bacon or meat, or tbey
migbt have wrapped bacon around it and fish and lamb 'Oh, that was so
good!' etc. To me, they are talking about individuals, but it has become so
normalized.
We propose reading tbese excerpts as experiences of encounters with a

meat-normative world full of dead animal bodies, sights and smells associated
with flesh, and talk of dead animals. We argue these are indications of how
sensations (including smell, sight, disgust, etc.) can overwhelm bodies and
how people gradually learn to "attune to" such sensations. In our interviews,
olfactory sensations, like those of disgust wben in contact with, or at the sight
of, dead animals prepared as food, were prominent sensations that activists
had learned to appreciate. The educated activist body was able to sense, to
reject, and to be disgusted, but not as a singular and isolated body—the body
was linked to others and the world. One such linkage to others is by talking.
Talking about disgusting episodes witb fellow activists provided individual
activists with linguistic repertoires that also helped to refine their ability to
differentiate between sensations, for instance "meaters" as a word connoting
disgusting practices and people tbat preferred to eat meat. By doing so, they
found out which sensations and feelings combine into an activist affective
cognitive repertoire representable to oneself and to others. Thus, the embod-
ied activist was socially embedded, mainly through others involved in animal
rights groups, and had learned a particular affective cognitive repertoire from
others also attenuated to animal rights.
To begin to unpack this, it may help to focus on activists' stories and their
use of words like "meat frenzy," "meat- and egg-normative society," "that smell
of people eating meat," and even words like "killing innocent animals," "indus-
trialized murder," "institutionalized animal rape," etc. These words speak
deeper to someone who is already attuned to them. They presume a sensitive
activist-subject. This begs the question as to how activists learn to appreciate
what goes on in the world. Again, such training depends on activist compan-
ions. It involves talking, exchanging stories, and memorable situations (see

also Gaarder, 2008; McDonald, 2000; Pallotta, 2005). This may include anything
from appeals to animal rights to affective and shocking as well as informative
animal rights documentaries.
There are physical aspects to the training as well. Some activists came to feel
solidarity with animals, such as companion animals, with whom they shared
homes during childhood. Others were struck by encountering animals from
laboratories, animal parts in clothing, or animals at local zoos or mink farms.
Any encounter with the previously anonymous "animal other" may touch the
soul of the activist. This calls for the inclusion of disgust mechanisms, along
with affective and empathie responses related to embodied mirror neurons
and the simulation and mimicking processes as discussed above.
Also, television, the Internet, animal rights films and footage, and phi-
losophy books all play roles in the development of this activist disposition
(cf. Filippi, 2010). An animal rights activist does not silence her/his body or
emotions, but instead learns to listen to them. Animal rights activists going
through an affective meat experience do notjudge from the outside, but (selec-
tively) open up to the world that they sense and let themselves be affected by
it. In encountering animal flesh, the activists studied tended not to maintain a
safe distance, but rather allowed themselves to be altered or affected by what
others digested.
This implies that judging is perhaps an inadequate term for the embodied
animal rights normativity involved in affective meat encounters; rather, activ-
ists make sense of such experiences. Parallels can be drawn to how members
of the old bourgeoisie tended to develop a sensitive nose toward the smells of
the working class and thus learned to register particular sensations as odors of
the lower classes (cf. Smith, 2007, p. 66). Similarly, the animal rights activists
in our study nurtured sensitive noses and grew new retinas that became sensi-
tive to "threat signals" or "disgust triggers," such as smelling odors from cook-
ing, eating heated animal flesh, or seeing animal carcasses. Nurtured noses and
cultivated retinas—novel body parts—as features of activist-subjectivity are
embodied features for everyday functioning (cf Latour, 2004).
Activists' gradual training was dependent on activist companions and spir-
ited conversations about animal rights. Mutual learning was at work, and activ-
ists' sensations and affective repertoires were continuously adapted. Affective
meat experiences became sites of intense visceral and cultural differences.
The opening of lunch boxes; the sight of animal bodies; smells of meat; and
meat-normative institutions like barbecues, family dinners, etc. were encoun-
tered by our informants as instances of animal oppression and speciesist
customs considered perfectly normal by mainstream society. They became
expressions of human control over animals' bodies that circumscribed and

entrenched ethical inequality and the bloody practices of torture and slaugh-
ter. As a result of such affective encounters, unease often surfaced among
activists who were dedicated to the ethical vegan animal rights lifestyle.
Affective meat experiences were occasions of rejection of others' way of life;
these events made explicit an irreconcilable ethical difference in terms of the
relationship with animal others. In turn, this relationship was reliant on the
smells, tastes, and sights of animal reminders, as well as discussions about such
experiences. The moral rejection of meat consumption and commenting on
others' pleasure and taste of meat were ways of distinguishing oneself Meat
eaters were scorned and rejected by activists while the vegan community, in
contrast, provided a nurturing environment and a relief from a meat-centric
world. But food preferences and revulsion were not simply symbolic, they were
also visceral; the very thought of ingesting nonbuman flesh evoked disgust.
Maybe more than any other emotion, disgust is a gut reaction, a feeling
that involves visceral sensibilities (see e.g.. Miller, 1997). Recent psychological
research as well as cultural theory concerned with the intersections between
culture, the body, and the brain (e.g., Connolly, 2002) confirm that olfaction
and the visceral function are connected to emotions and help recall memories
of smell. Such experiences can be used by individuals or, rather, be useful to
individuals and help them remember where they were at a particular moment
and who they were with. Some people might even remember smells, noises,
and tastes and associate certain experiences with these tastes or smells; there-
fore, these experiences also work in a preparative way and guide future action.
For instance, our informants reported shunning certain environments they
already knew would negatively affect them.
Feelings of disgust fit particularly well into approaches that consider emo-
tion and cognition as fundamentally embodied. Disgust, as a gut feeling, thus
promotes the sense of natural or automatic and self-evident reactions, as indi-
cated in several of the interview excerpts. Moreover, because of its link to nau-
sea, disgust may be the most effective emotion at triggering the gastro-enteric
nervous system. It also fits well with theoretical perspectives, such as ours, that
stress the bodily character of feelings and how affective experiences work out-
side strictly rational or conscious control. These flashes of affect then guide
behavior and judgement.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that animal rights activism is informed by a rather abstract

and philosophical discourse including ethical principles regarding humans'

responsibilities toward animals, infiuenced by pioneers of animal ethics such

as Tom Regan and Peter Singer. Ethics operate in the realm of ideas and val-
ues. The everyday experience of being animal rights activists, as discussed in
this article, on the other hand, is a representation of ethics linked to every-
day routine or practice. As we have illustrated, it is closely connected to
affective dispositions, which function on a semi-visceral level. In this article,
we have explored the primary medium by which the body's infiuence upon
subjectivity manifests: feelings and sensibilities that orient and motivate ani-
mal rights activism.
Animal rights activists not only re-engineer an explicit discursive-norma-
tive relationship with animals, but also re-dispose themselves feelingly. We
have suggested that activists undergo a continuous "sensibilization," a fine
tuning through deeper associations between experiences, whereby they learn
to focus and isolate sensations (disgust, outrage, empathy) and emotions
through modification, modulation, and self-monitoring. Furthermore, we
have argued that the affective dispositions are both embodied and embed-
ded, continuously developed in and by individual and collective practice. The
affective events invoke shared experiences, emotions, and feelings that are
anchored in a sense of self and community and are bodily grounded. Through
social interaction, specific visceral, bodily, and emotional response patterns
are "installed" in the activist-subject, and, hence, animal rights activist sub-
jectivity is produced and reproduced in a continuous interplay of social and
somatic processes.
Addressing mechanisms, such as proto-empathic identification triggered by
someone else's state of pain and the cultivation of disgust or other visceral
responses toward "meat affective encounters," suggest that activist subjectivity
need not be theorized in the social-constructionist register alone. Rather, it
suggests that culture and norms tap into somatically-grounded response pat-
terns, and that moral feelings enable ethical frameworks to be intensively felt.
Ethical programs like animal rights work in a reciprocal fashion, tuning sensi-
bilities and affects.
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SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288 SOCÍety

Learning to Be Affected: Subjectivity, Sense,

Niktas Hansson and Kerstin Jacobsson

affect - animal rights activism - body - disgust - embodied - sensibility - subjectivity

I KONINKLIJKE BRILL NV, LEIDEN, 2014 | DOI 10.I163/15685306-I2341327

Animal rights activism entails strong moral and emotional commitments

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

The aim of this article, then, is to suggest a theoretical perspective for

thus, can be defined as the momentary experience of phenomenological states of the

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

In the remainder of this article, we first present our theoretical perspective

Emotions, Sensibility, and Social Movement Activism

Emotions have made a strong comeback in research on social movements

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

2 Hohle (2009,2010) studies embodied performances as the "disciplining" of emotion, affective

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

[S]uch an attitude is a pervasive personal style—a habitual way of expe-

To develop such an attitude involves both reflective capacities and emotional

4 Following a biocultural notion of subject formation, we arrive at a processual view on

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

Method and Data

Bourdieu—internalized at an early age and reproduced forever, but ongoing processes of

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

Additionally, eight interviews were conducted in 2010 with activists belong-

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

human beings oppress animals, thus embedding their political perceptions

First, we discuss affective re-shocking experiences and introduce the concept

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

Experiencing such extraordinary moments brought the moral order of

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

exposing oneself repeatedly to micro-shocks—we capture vital components of

In the second quote, the activist describes how re-shocking experiences

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

[T]he practical, sensual and affective dimensions to human-nonhuman

6 Micro-shocking is used in periods when activists wish to intensify their commitment.

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

Re-shocking understood through the lens of a sensational and emotional reg-

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

Affective Meat Encounters and the Cultivation of Disgust

We proceed now with a discussion of the role of "affective meat experiences"

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

Fox (1999) also mentions compassion, disgust, and squeamishness working as

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

The animal rights activists we interviewed encountered threats, denial, and

Rejecting what to others represents the great taste of meat or fashionable

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

We propose reading tbese excerpts as experiences of encounters with a

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

There is no doubt that animal rights activism is informed by a rather abstract

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

responsibilities toward animals, infiuenced by pioneers of animal ethics such

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

Pallotta, N. (2005). Becoming an animal rights activist: An exploration of culture, social-

SOCIETY & ANIMALS (2014) 262-288

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