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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how White British slaughterhouse workers navigate stigma, reproducing discursive racialised hierarchies about Asian and Polish co-workers and the halal sheep meat they produce, connecting localised configurations of white Britishness to imperial constructions of national purity.

Paper long abstract:

After the Brexit referendum, moral panics emerged in political narratives about the future of British sheep and the presence halal slaughter in Britain, making rhetorical claims about who and what belongs in a coherant, healthy nation: sheep had a native blood and soil belonging; slaughterhouses were abject zones where “British” people didn’t want to work, and that halal slaughter was an abject foreign practice, rendering Muslims as culturally incompatible to civilised “British” ways of life. However, these narratives silenced how the British sheep industry is shaped by both the mobiltities of Britain's colonial past and post-colonial present, and imperial narratives of purity and abjection.

This paper explores how White British slaughterhouse workers, whose livlihoods are dependent on the demand for halal meat, navigate the stigma of their labour as uncivilised and un-British by reproducing discursive racialised hierarchies about their Asian and Polish co-workers and the halal meat they produce. Drawing on criticial race and feminist theories of abjection, I explore how "whiteness" and "Britishness" are locally constructed as both persistent and fragile. In these fleshy material sites of physical labour, I make the case that it is dialogue and narratives often rooted in Empire and British exceptionalism which are employed as pertinent discursive strategies of inclusion and exclusion, even though they do not relate to material, physical, or economic realities.