English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

In this article, we explore the discourse around the Lone Star tick, predominately through the platform of Twitter, in order to highlight the way the tick is imagined as a potential tool for increasing veganism, as the Lone Star tick’s bite has been found to cause allergies to a carbohydrate found in red meat. In particular, the article questions why the notion of tick-asvegan-technology is so widespread and easily called forward. In order to explain this pattern, we turn to Sunaura Taylor’s monograph, Beasts of Burden and Jasbir Puar’s notion of debility. Taylor’s monograph provides a framework for analyzing the imbrications of power between ableism and speciesism. Puar’s debility helps articulate how the imagination of widespread red meat allergies is an imagination of decapacitation. Puar’s analysis of the invisibilizing of debility also helps reveal how both ticks and humans are debilitated and instrumentalized in this articulated fantasy. We argue that the governance impulse in these discourses reflect a continued alignment with biopolitical forces that always designate some lives as worthy of care and others as useable, which is fundamentally at odds with broader goals of animal liberation.

Tricky Ticks and Vegan Quips: The Lone Star Tick and Logics of Debility