What is it about?
This paper is based on fieldwork in a slaughterhouse where I spent time with workers who shared their experience of working on the line. This study details the emotional toll of killing animals and how workers dealt with daily challenges by distancing themselves from the act of killing and the animals they kill. By drawing on stereotypical traits of masculinity, workers reduce the emotional cost of killing but this results in careful emotion management on the line. The animals who are herded through the slaughterhouse are accounted for through vivid descriptions and worker observations which results in a portrayal of slaughtering animals that attends to both human and nonhuman experiences.
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Why is it important?
Industrial slaughter practices are typically concealed from view. This concealment means that the experiences of human and nonhuman animals are obscured from public consciousness. This paper shows the emotional cost that is placed on workers and how worker-animal interactions defy gender norms and are emotionally-charged encounters. Through an ethnography of slaughtering animals, the toll that is placed on both human and nonhuman animals is not only communicated to wider audiences but is an affecting account of industrial slaughter today.
Perspectives
This paper stands out amongst other slaughterhouse ethnographies as the emotional experiences of the workers is explored through the frame of gender norms and expectations but also because the paper provides a space for the experience of the nonhuman animal to be present. I hope that readers of this article will feel with the workers and the animals in this piece and consider how the concealment of industrial slaughter is effectively concealing the lives of human and nonhuman animals from view. This paper points towards new ethical relations in the food production process
Eimear McLoughlin
University of Exeter
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Knowing cows: Transformative mobilizations of human and non-human bodies in an emotionography of the slaughterhouse, Gender Work and Organization, May 2018, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/gwao.12247.
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