For the Good of the Species: Gary Francione and the Omnipresence of Eugenics in Animal Rights Rhetoric

Abstract

By bringing critical animal studies into conversation with communication, this article completes 3 tasks: First, it complicates the communication discipline’s understanding of the animal rights movement by presenting its oft-ignored tensions and conflicting paradigms; second, it reveals how eugenical rhetoric has been foundational both in defending human/animal exploitation and in developing prototypical animal advocacy practices; third, using a critical public address–inspired approach, it deconstructs vegan abolitionist Gary Francione’s purportedly ultraradical rhetoric, revealing its problematic eugenical underpinnings. This revelation not only complicates Francione’s radical status but also questions the ethical legitimacies of a conventional, Western rights-based paradigm of animal rights.

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