"Without the Muslims, We'd be out of a Job" Deconstructing Narratives and Hierarchies of Race, Whiteness, Nation and Class in England's Sheep Slaught

随着英国脱欧的临近，英国还没有准备好养活自己的国民。粮食生产模式、法规及其社会和经济影响尚不清楚。收入最高的食品行业是肉类；屠宰场在这条商品链中是必不可少的，尽管是看不见的。在英国，屠宰场的工人主要是白人、男性和工人阶级。由于被剥夺选举权的英国退欧选民转而攻击技术官僚、城市精英，这一人口结构人手不足，他们站在监管和市场变革的前沿。矛盾的是，通过地方性和透明度来重视的传统肉类生产正在获得文化资本，怀旧地回到工业化前、屠场前的过去。在现代的项目中，为了掩盖肉的残忍和残留的动物来源，屠宰已经被渲染成一个文化盲点（Young-Lee:2008）。工业化的力量进一步将生产集中到城外区域化的屠宰场。为了应对贸易、疾病和消费者的愤怒而制定的欧盟法规，对所有屠宰场进行了单方面的监管，而不管所生产的肉类是“工业化的”还是“传统的”。屠宰场在文化上仍然被忽视；以国家和超国家组织为代表，通过科学或动物福利通知法规，在联合国关于全球肉类供应的报告中被省略，而传统肉类的叙述从农场跳到屠宰场。我的硕士课程是在英国的屠宰场进行田野调查。工人是爱国的，对移民有明确的敌意，尽管移民工人的存在微不足道。相反，他们对国际贸易感到自豪，对各国执行的欧盟法规的价值感到矛盾，本能地将经济、国家和民族身份区分开来。他们挑战公共话语，将白人工人阶级描述为一律被剥夺公民权的人。在这个遗产、阶级和性别影响着国家地位广泛表达的紧迫时刻，这项研究提出了这样一个问题：隐藏的屠宰场揭示了后工业时代英国工人阶级男子气概的哪些方面？随着传统肉类生产的做法被推广为全球化食物链的纠正措施，不一致的主权概念与英国养活自己的人民产生了共鸣。未来的遗产经济将如何与工业化经济相互作用，并塑造其中工作人员的性别和阶级划分？政策如何加剧或缓和这些分歧？这项研究旨在阐明政策、监管和遗产经济的社会影响，因为它们可能会扩大社会分化，使国家概念复杂化。多地点的实地考察将在坎布里亚郡、诺福克郡、伦敦和苏格兰的工业化和传统屠宰场进行，以将跨国和复杂的区域镜头纳入英国的生产力。研究方法将结合参与者观察、非正式和半结构化的工人访谈。这将与政策和法规的详细话语分析相结合。

As Brexit approaches, Britain is unprepared to feed its people. Modes of food productivity, regulations and the social and economic impacts of these are unknown. The highest revenue food industry is meat; abattoirs are an essential, albeit unseen moment in this commodity chain. In the UK, abattoir workers are predominantly white, male and working class. This demographic, shorthanded as disenfranchised Brexit voters who turned on a technocratic, urban elite, stand at the frontline of changes to regulations and market. Paradoxically, heritage meat production, valued through locality and transparency is gaining cultural capital, nostalgically harking back to a pre-industrial, pre-abattoir past. In the project of modernity to conceal the brutality and residue of meat's animal origins, slaughter has been rendered into a cultural blind spot (Young-Lee:2008). Forces of industrialisation have further centralised production to out-of-town regionalised abattoirs. EU regulations, produced in response to trade, disease and consumer outrage, regulate all abattoirs unilaterally, regardless of whether the meat produced is "industrialised" or "heritage." Abattoirs remain culturally ignored; represented by state and supranational organisations through science or animal welfare informed regulations and omitted from UN reports on global meat supply , whilst heritage meat narratives jump from farm to butchers block. My masters fieldwork was located in British abattoirs. Workers were patriotic and explicitly hostile about immigrants, despite negligible presence of immigrant workers. Conversely, they were proud of international trade and ambivalent about the values of nationally enforced EU regulations, reflexively differentiating economy, state and nationhood. They challenged public discourses scripting the white working class as homogeneously disenfranchised. At this urgent moment where heritage, class and gender inform broad articulations of nationhood, this research asks, what does the concealed abattoir reveal about working class masculinities in post-industrial Britain? As practices of heritage meat production are promoted as corrective to globalised food chains, incongruent notions of sovereignty resonate with Britain feeding its own people. How will future heritage economies interplay with industrialised economies and shape divisions in gender and class of those working within them? How could policy exacerbate or temper these divisions? This research aims to articulate the social effects of policy, regulation and heritage economies as potentially amplifying social divisions, complicating notions of nationhood. Multi-sited fieldwork will take place at industrialised and heritage abattoirs in Cumbria, Norfolk, London and Scotland to encompass a cross-national and complex regional lens into British productivity. Research methods will combine participant-observation, informal and semi-structured interviews with workers. This will be combined with a detailed discourse analysis of policy and regulation.