The vegan myth The rhetoric of online anti-veganism

Abstract

This chapter explores how the public posts on the Facebook group pages El mito del veganismo (The Vegan Myth), Reich Animalista (Animal Activist Reich), and Vida Naturopatética (Naturopatheic Life) try to debunk and ridicule veganism, as well as legitimize an anti-vegan discourse through the use of images (and the corresponding matching captions) framed and biased toward the building up of a narrative that presents veganism as an unnatural and, as a consequence, unhealthy life option.

To carry out this task, we have analyzed 100 images posted on the Facebook group page during the first months of 2019, using as theoretical framework a combination of multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001; Machin and Mayr, 2012), (Ledin and Machin, 2017), Social-Semiotics (Hodge and Kress, 1988) as well as Visual Framing (Fahmi 2004; Rodríguez and Dimitrova 2011) in order to identify the ideologies and political interests as they are overtly or covertly articulated in discourse (van Dijk, 1995).