Turning the tables: reimagining ideologies and discourse of meat and nonhuman others for climate activism in Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy and The Wachowskis' The Matrix

Factory farming is not only the top contributor to global warming, it is the greatest cause of environmental and biodiversity destruction. To meet Paris Agreement climate goals of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, a shift in meat and dairy production and consumption must be on the table but this dietary change is rarely discussed in climate conversations and in our daily conversations at the table. Science fiction, as this thesis explores, is an ideal vehicle to expose the hidden mechanisms of the dominant political system—meat-eating dominant culture—that contributes to social and ecological oppression. Approaching fictional and philosophical devices in literature from a vegan perspective allows us to imagine better possibilities of food and agriculture and relations of animals beyond the existing anthropocentric ideology of meat eating that causes environmental destruction. The purpose of this thesis is to analyse ideological processes and discourse of meat, using a veganism lens within The Wachowskis’ The Matrix (1999) and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, to change our conceptions to underline and advocate for systemic change that challenges the political, economic, and social structure of society with the goal of reducing and ending animal exploitation as part of solving the climate emergency. The Matrix’s approach to ideology and illusion, under veganism lens, also allows us to uncover nonhuman animal ideologies represented in other texts and in real life. While Atwood’s central focus in the MaddAddam trilogy is about questioning ethical values and moral norms of animal-eating culture through the use of power relations in discourse. Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra concepts, among other scholars including Carol J. Adams and her concept of the absent referent, can enable us to explore the ways in which the societal dynamics or ideologies of meat are influenced and controlled by the meat industry. While some writers imagine the changes in the future societies and humanity itself, the texts of Wachowskis and Atwood take another step further in a posthuman stance focus on human–nonhuman entanglements into the social constructions that shape the thoughts of humans—ones that both pose an apocalyptic threat to humanity and ones that can save us. Adapting the methods of discourse studies in order to combine perspective from posthumanism and veganism with a particular focus on human–nonhuman relationships can push readers to consider how discourse beyond human boundaries acknowledges nonhuman subjectivity as actors in their own right to form new relationships with nonhuman species who we share the planet with, and this can bring us better opportunities to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all beings under climate catastrophe.In The Matrix under the veganism lens, animal eating ideology and illusion are connected. Baudrillard expressively links his concept of people’s detachment from the origin of food or the reality of the meat industry through mass production, media and culture. The meat of animals has become just a symbolic of fragmented representation—a hyperreal simulation of the real. Baudrillard’s theory on consumption as a form of human’s relationship to the society and the world pervades the MaddAddam trilogy and this broken relationship has destroyed the foundations of human beings as the trilogy reveals. Rethinking the relationship between human beings and nonhuman others in both The Matrix and Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy enables us to explore the question of ethics in anthropocentrism and address ourselves from a non-anthropocentric perspective and carefully interrogate humanity’s ethics. In order to disempower the dominant animal-eating culture, Atwood’s literary work is also an act of activism by reimagining the ideology and discourse in the narrative to destabilise and reset ideology and discourse for more ethical consumerism, a better food system for a livable future of climate resilience for all lives, not just human beings.