Martina Davidson is an activist scholar based at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They identify as non-binary, neurodivergent, lesbian who works with the intersections of gender, species, disability, race, capitalism, coloniality, sizeism, and more. “It has a lot to do with my own perception as a non-binary lesbian person living here in Brazil,” explains Davidson, “I’m speaking from a place where this intersection crosses through my body, my existence, my performances, my line of work in the university and out of it. The whole process of coming out, which we know happens many times and never really ends, led me to think about my body as a political territory, […] a strange monstrous and disruptive space in my own dissident existence.”
Inspired by the poetic work of Argentine trans artist Suzy Shock regarding the “right to be monstrous,” Davidson felt moved to embrace their unique identity: “I began to feel that humanity as a category didn’t belong to me.” This was quickly combined with their vegetarian and later vegan practice, and they report beginning to feel “a little more animal and a little less human.” For Davidson, animality is key. “I’m not able to see them as separate things,” they say of gender and species, as “being truly human, truly morally important, means being straight, cisgender, white, et cetera. How can animality be separated from this analytical and practical point? From being queer?”
These connections may be obvious for Davidson, but perhaps not so much for mainstream social justice spaces. “The dominance of Eurocentric white middle class perspectives within both the feminist and vegan movements are […] barriers here. I think this also resulted in an exclusionary approach that failed a lot to consider the lived experiences of racialized, Indigenous, trans, disabled, Latin American, [and] working-class communities.” The feminist movement has failed to seriously accommodate anti-speciesist claimsmaking, Davidson clarifies, claiming it to be a distraction from “real political issues.” Davidson also considers if this exclusion of nonhuman animals might overlap with the exclusion of trans folks who are also “not seen as legitimate subjects” of feminist protest.
The animal rights movement, meanwhile, is overly individualistic, they argue, and prioritizes a consumerist theory of change that does not address capitalism. Furthermore, Davidson argues that a monolithic critique of feminism and veganism is not possible given the regional specificities of oppression: “When we speak about Brazil, we’re talking about a country with urgent gender and racial issues marked by multiple forms of violence. […] In many cases, survival itself is not considered central within certain feminist vegan perspectives.” Moralistic perspectives, they add, proliferate, and this:
excludes and creates new barriers based on race, gender and social class. So, a very specific image of what a true vegan feminist looks like, its constructed. So, the question becomes, who is allowed to be a vegan feminist activist here in Latin America?
Davidson also points to a long history of colonization in Latin America. Domesticated nonhuman animals, they note, were strategically used to expand colonial territories. “They were instrumentalized as a form of violence Indigenous peoples and cultures,” they summarize. Animal agriculture, to this day, continues to dominate Latin American economies and politics. Protests for climate, food, Indigenous, environmental, and animal justice are often met with extremely violent retribution from the animal industrial complex. Activists, in fact, are often murdered. Cattle industries, Davidson affirms, “have a lot of power here,” including structural and political power, “so they are allowed to be violent.” Subsequently, they emphasize: “Activism in Latin America operates under very different conditions compared to the Global North.”
Given the inequalities in Brazil, the vegan message often falls flat, they add, because “eating meat here is a sign of class ascension. Being able to eat meat, it’s a privilege.” In fact, veganism can seem “disattached from reality” and may be interpreted as a form of social control among the lower classes and racialized groups, as though it were inhibiting social progress. Although there are several grassroots vegan organizations in Brazil that attend to issues of colonialism and reclaiming ancestral eating, the large, professionalized organizations dominate and generally fail to acknowledge intersectionality of oppression.
The Brazilian government, meanwhile, offers contradictory messages by promoting campaigns to protect the environment and Indigenous lands while simultaneously encouraging widespread industrial exploitation of the land and animals to protect meat and dairy production, one of the country’s leading forms of economic wealth. Thus, Brazil today remains a major global player in animal agriculture, and for Davidson, this is indicative of greenwashing. The largeness of Brazil, they also consider, hides some of the structural, government-sanctioned violence, making it all the more difficult to document and challenge.
Davidson is involved in a number of scholar-activist campaigns, including local multispecies justice reading groups, anarchistic and anti-capitalist organizing in Rio de Janeiro, and the Latin American journal for critical animal studies, Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios Críticos Animales. Of course, they add, by simply existing as a person who resists categories and conformity in a civilized society, their lived experience is political activism:
For me to exist–as a vegan lesbian nonbinary neurodivergent [person] within civil society, academic spaces and activist circles–is itself a form of resistance and activism, especially in a context where normativity kills here in Brazil. So, this way of living, of persisting in dissonance with systems that try to erase us as well as our nonhuman kin is also a form of campaigning for liberation.
For Davidson, activism must be decolonial and intersectional, prioritizing “wild alliances with other movements and causes” as well as fellow animals and the environment. In other words, it must be direct action that reclaims that which “colonizers tried to erase.” Specifically, Davidson and their colleague Anahí Gabriela González call for a radical acknowledgement of “shared animality” that is “rooted in our bodies” and validates emotions, be they righteously angry or loving. It might also draw on the “queer art” of making space for failure, imperfection, and doubt in strategizing for social change. Thus, for Davidson, to be a vegan feminist is “friction”:
It’s a form of living and thinking and feeling that emerges in the ruins of colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, [and] speciesism. And it’s not a clean alternative, but a messy and situated and vulnerable practice. […] It’s about weaving connections where others build hierarchies. […] It’s also about surviving systems that were not built for us.
Martina Davidson can be found on Instagram. Their work with the Instituto Latinoamericano de Estudios Criticos Animales (Latin American Institute for Critical Animal Studies) and the associated journal can be found online.
This interview took place on July 14, 2025.