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Making Sense of ‘Food’ Animals pp 185–217Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Feelings of Meat

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Abstract

Chapter 7 homes in on instances where participants’ emotional associations are intense enough to disrupt their meaty practices to greater and lesser degrees. With reference to certain ‘emotions of distinction’, identified as a second Foucauldian mechanism of power, it first explores when meat and food animals transgress emotional boundaries to become inedible, how ‘proper’ emotions are re-associated, and how potentially transgressive emotional trajectories are continually policed. It then focuses on the opposite transgression—where ‘bad’ or unethical meat and food animals become edible. Both transgressive cases foreground the power exercised through the normalised, multi-sensory, and embodied nexus of edible orders, whereby animals are persistently constrained within anthroparchal cartographies of meat. They also reveal a third mechanism of power supporting animals’ domination, defined as an ethico-aesthetic.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Implicit in these discourses is the idea that the ‘normal’ manner of their death in slaughterhouses is otherwise sporting and what the majority of the non-heroes deserve.

  2. 2.

    These are, of course, not discrete bundles of practices with their own associated systems of knowledge and emotional rules. That is not how social practices operate (Shove et al. 2012) and so there are inevitable overlaps and synergies between them.

  3. 3.

    Yum cha is known in Australia as a traditional Chinese brunch involving varied dishes of small steamed or fried savoury dumplings. In Europe and North America, people more commonly speak of going for ‘dim sum’ which refers to the range of small dishes served at a yum cha.

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  1. Department of Social Sciences Centre for Human Animal Studies (CfHAS), Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK

    Paula Arcari

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  1. Paula Arcari
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Arcari, P. (2020). Feelings of Meat. In: Making Sense of ‘Food’ Animals. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9585-7_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9585-7_7

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