Alan Hollinghurst and Monstrous Vegan Camp

Abstract

Chapter 5 turns to the manifestation of the monstrous vegan trope in two works by the British novelist Alan Hollinghurst: The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) and The Sparsholt Affair (2017). In order to establish the reparative potential of Hollinghurst’s vegan monsters, this chapter establishes the concept of ‘vegan camp’. Vegan camp is defined as a political aesthetic that transforms the trauma of recognizing the exploitation of animals into witty commentary on anthropocentric attitudes. Vegan camp offers the possibility of enjoying that which one is expected to repudiate, a queer mode of being and desiring that hyperbolically performs its failure to stand outside of existing structures of pleasure. Hollinghurst’s novels are seen to offer the potential of embracing derogatory vegan stereotypes as a means of challenging normative scripts of desire. Reading Hollinghurst’s novels through the lens of vegan camp offers a mode of asserting vegan agency.