Marco Reggio is a leading critical voice in the grassroots animal liberation movement in Italy. This introduction offers English-speaking readers an overview of his activism and research in the fields of animal resistance, animal advocacy, and vegan studies, with a particular focus on the intersections of anti-speciesism, queer and trans-feminist theory, and disability studies. This introduction accompanies our translation of the first chapter of Reggio’s 2022 book Cospirazione animale (Animal Conspiracy), published in this issue of Humanimalia.

The chapter, entitled “‘Happy’ Goats, or: Taking Embarrassment Seriously”, centres on the femicide of Agitu Ideo Gudeta, an anti-colonial environmentalist who fled Ethiopia in 2010 after facing prosecution for her political activism against land grabbing by foreign corporations. In Italy, Gudeta became a successful conservationist and goat herder, but in 2020 she was raped and murdered by a co-worker, who was also a migrant. At the time, Reggio was in the same region, Trentino, working with the intersectional collective Assemblea Antispecista (Anti-Speciesist Assembly) to oppose the politics of the local administration affiliated with the xenophobic, right-wing Lega Nord (Northern League). Trentino’s president at the time, Maurizio Fugatti, was ordering the killing and imprisonment of wild bears accused of causing economic damage to the surrounding farmland — a brutal, simplistic solution meant to appease affected farmers and reassure citizens worried about the large, wild animals on the increasingly urbanized mountain landscapes.¹

In the first chapter of his book, as elsewhere in his work, Reggio invites us to take a situated position in these struggles, remaining attentive to the complexities and contradictions of uneven postcolonial geographies. He expresses deep solidarity with Gudeta, an activist who struggled against colonial, racist, and sexist violence. At the same time, drawing on Judith Butler’s call to explore the political uses of embarrassment, Reggio reflects on his own discomfort in voicing opposition to animal farming in the context of such tragic circumstances: in life, Gudeta refused to send adult goats to slaughter, yet in order to produce milk, the goats had to be made to bear kids — newborns who were then killed.

In 2011, Reggio co-founded Bioviolenza, a collective that critiques and opposes the rhetoric of “happy meat” and so-called ethical animal farming.² The group exposed the contradictions inherent in farming practices like Gudeta’s and those of many other small-scale, organic farmers who, while recognizing the agency and value of nonhuman animals, still condone their killing and the exploitation of their reproductive lives.³ Against this backdrop, Reggio asks, how can one express solidarity with Gudeta’s anti-colonial and feminist struggle without abandoning the political principles of multispecies justice and liberation — and without endorsing animal husbandry?

In the following chapters of Cospirazione animale, Reggio explores other issues that emerged at the crossroads of his activism and theoretical reflection. Chapter 2 deals with the connections between mental illness and animality, covering the historical pathologization of animal advocates — labelled insane since the early days of the anti-vivisection movement — and the role the disabled community has played in the disputes over animal testing. Chapter 3 investigates the paradox of “naturality” as it shapes perceptions of race, species, ability, gender, and sexuality. Reggio emphasizes the role of performativity in identity formation, taking as his guide the protagonist of Indra Sinha’s 2007 novel Animal’s People — a young man who became disabled during the ecocidal Bhopal disaster, who, because of his folded body and marginalized status, identifies as nonhuman.⁴ Chapter 4 engages with the problem of speaking for (nonhuman) others. Drawing from stories of animal resistance — animals exercising their agency and directly opposing their enslavement — and from the insights of activists like bell hooks, Reggio rejects the notion that animal advocates speak “for the voiceless”. Instead, he argues that animals have voices that are systematically silenced by the ideological and infrastructural machinery of speciesism. The final chapter confronts the conflict between environmentalism and anti-speciesism, namely that the former tends to view humans as individuals while reduces other beings to mere “species”. Reggio proposes that resolving this conflict — made ever more urgent by the climate crisis — begins with recognizing that the Anthropocene is not the product of a species (Anthropos, or Homo sapiens), but of a ruling class within that species.⁵

In all five chapters — which Reggio calls dérives in reference to the Situationist method — he does not seek to formulate a new, exhaustive theory of anti-speciesism, nor to offer definitive answers to the problems he raises. Instead, he offers a lucid and profound reflection on moments when the human, colonial, patriarchal, and other privileges collide, in order to refine our understanding of these entanglements. To move forward (or to move at all), he suggests, we must learn how to live with the discomfort, or embarrassment, that arises when different liberation struggles intersect — an intersection that is empowering and, at the same time, full of contradictions and obstructions. In the absence of simple solutions, resisting speciesism implies embracing an attitude of queerness and provisionality.

The present introduction is accompanied by a near-exhaustive bibliography of Reggio’s writings, which played a key role in bringing the critical insights of gender and disability studies into the Italian debate on animality. In 2015, with Massimo Filippi, perhaps Italy’s leading critical animal studies theorist, Reggio co-edited Corpi che non contano (Bodies that Don’t Matter), a collection that explored Judith Butler’s theory of performativity in relation to animal studies and included an interview with Butler. For many years, until 2018, Reggio served on the editorial board of Liberazioni: Rivista di critica antispecista (Liberations: Journal of Anti-Speciesist Critique), focusing on the intersection between gender and animal studies.⁶ In his role at Liberazioni, Reggio advanced discussions on the necessity of solidarity between disability, queer, and multispecies liberation struggles. His writings on these intersections probe the intertwined and oppressive processes of experimentation and spectacularization that render these groups “monstrous” — and thus available for exploitation and violence.⁷ Together with feminoska, militant animal liberation thinker and translator, Reggio curated the Italian editions of Sunaura Taylor’s Beasts of Burden (2017) and Dawn Prince-Hughes’s Songs of the Gorilla Nation (2004), two foundational works on the intersections of animality and disability. These texts, like Cospirazione animale, challenge ableist and speciesist devaluations of life, making way for the possibilities of care and coalition by shedding light on these entanglements. Working at the intersection of feminism, anti-racism, anti-speciesism, and the deconstruction of binarism, Reggio wrote a preface to the Italian edition of Laura Fernández Aguilera’s Hacia mundos más animales (Towards more Animal Worlds, 2018), translated by feminoska as Mondi animali. Corpi non umani e binarismo ontologico (2024).

Another focus of Reggio’s research and activism are the cultural and political aspects of veganism, in particular avenues of resistance to its commercialization as a movement. Reggio has examined the ridicule and discrimination directed at vegans and vegetarians — “vegephobia”⁸ — arguing that vegephobia helps sustain animal oppression by discouraging alternatives to meat consumption. Between 2008 and 2011, he contributed to the Italian editions of Veggie Pride, an initiative that originated in France as part of the Mouvement pour l’abolition de la viande, an international movement for meat abolition which adopts the tactics of Gay Pride. Coming out as vegan, Reggio argues, can threaten one’s gender identity and heteronormativity, given the strong link between meat-eating and masculinity. This “coming-out” can provoke conflict within traditional families, in ways comparable to LGBTQ+ coming out. This parallel is the subject of Rasmus Rahbek Simonsen’s A Queer Vegan Manifesto, which Filippi and Reggio translated, edited, and published in 2014.⁹ Within essentialist paradigms, the naturalization of killing animals goes hand in hand with the naturalization of the inferiority of women and the privileging of the heterosexual nuclear family and other oppressive hierarchies which are all mutually reinforcing. Likewise, species, gender, and racial identities are treated as immutable biological facts. Reggio suggests that, like queerness, anti-speciesism — as the negation of “species” as a social construct — subverts these fixed, oppressive roles imposed on human and nonhuman animals alike.¹⁰ In his most recent book, Vegan Antispecista, Reggio reflects on public perceptions of veganism, which is often framed either as dangerously unhealthy, bordering on orthorexia, or as an obsession for health and fitness fanatics that borders on fatphobia. He argues that mainstream white veganism uses fatphobia to promote vegan diets, subsuming veganism into the diet industry and reducing it to moralizing consumerism that privileges thin, non-disabled bodies.

In 2019, with sociologist Niccolò Bertuzzi, Reggio co-edited Smontare la gabbia (Dismantling the Cage), a volume focused on the animal advocacy movement in Italy. Their co-authored essay in the volume revisits a topic that Reggio has long been interested in: the far-right, xenophobic appropriation of animal advocacy, and the exploitation of pet culture to promote nationalist, bourgeois narratives that cast non-Western and formerly colonized cultures as backward and abusive to animals.¹¹ Fascist groups have infiltrated vegan and animal advocacy spaces, framing their activism around the need to preserve natural resources for the “autochthonous” (white) Europeans. This reproduction of racist, colonial hierarchies reinforces Reggio’s call for an anti-imperialist grounding in animal advocacy and for constant self-reflexivity regarding one’s own position in the global North.

Reggio himself comes from the tradition of Italian anarchism, playing an active role in several animal liberation collectives. In 2010, he participated in campaigns against vivisection and the fur industry. Like many members of Liberazioni at that time, he was active in Oltre la Specie (Beyond the Species), a group that sought to politicize the animal issue, build bridges with other liberatory struggles, and to enrich the abolitionist discourse with insights from continental philosophy. Rejecting Peter Singer’s (ableist) definition of speciesism as merely a flawed moral principle, these groups grounded their theory in the material realities of animal exploitation — the practical conditions that give rise to the ideology of speciesism as a justification for confinement and killing.

Perhaps the most significant facet in Reggio’s work is his role in Resistenza Animale (Animal Resistance), a collective dedicated to archiving instances of nonhuman rebellion: animal subjects evading captivity, resisting oppression, or dismantling hostile architecture designed to exclude them from spaces appropriated by the human. Reggio was one of the first and most influential promoters of the concept of animal resistance in Italy.¹² In 2017, together with feminoska, he published a translation of Sarat Colling’s master’s thesis, “Animals without Borders”.¹³ Colling — who tragically passed away earlier this year — later revised and expanded her thesis into a monograph, published under the title Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era.¹⁴ In dialogue with Colling, Reggio’s work highlights the multiscalar geographies and spatial relations that sustain antispeciesist struggle and animal resistance. In Italy, the discourse of animal resistance is closely tied to sanctuaries — spaces where individuals rescued from exploitative industries receive care and hospitality. In 2023, police stormed Cuori Liberi (Free Hearts), an animal sanctuary near Milan, to cull the sheltered animals as part of efforts to contain the swine flu epidemic that has swept through Northern Italy and led to the killing of hundreds of thousands of pigs. Under police protection, state veterinarians killed the last pigs at the refuge, pigs who had survived the epidemic. Reggio joined the national mobilization that followed, writing that animal sanctuaries are not only spaces of asylum but also as sites for cultivating anti-speciesist consciousness.¹⁵

At a time of intensifying political and ecological crises, the potential for animal liberation collectives to contribute to broader movements for systemic change depends on their capacity to regroup and form new alliances — particularly around spaces like animal sanctuaries, where refugees can find safety and alternative economies of relation can be built. A recent shift toward a politicized approaches is prompting new organizers to see themselves not simply as single-issue animal advocates but as participants in a wider emancipatory movement. Yet bridging the gaps between different struggles is not without its challenges. Embracing a mindset of honesty and openness, along with a theoretical culture rooted in intersectionality — as Reggio suggests — could foster more genuine connections and coalitions between movements that often regard themselves as separate — and help them to confront the tensions that inevitably arise when they try to unite and integrate their perspectives.