| dc.description.abstract | This thesis is concerned with the ways in which Whiteness, race, nationhood and class are discursively constructed through narratives which call on purity and morality in Britain. It explores how white British belonging, racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and classism are manifest, their intersections, consequences, and shared imperial genealogies. It is based on multi-sited, comparative, fieldwork at three independent sheep slaughterhouses in England, including two sites which practice halal slaughter. The ethnography focusses on an amorphous group of white, British, “working-class” itinerant skilled slaughtermen who labour between them, the white British owners, and their relations with the local white British, British South Asian, Pakistani, and Polish workers at each site. These white British slaughtermen’s livelihoods are sustained by mobility, skill, migrations to, and Muslims in, Britain. They challenge media, political and academic discourses which have claimed that white working-class men have been “left behind” through a confluence of deindustrialisation, deskilling, multiculturalism, and immigration. Through a close ethnography which traces their stories, dialogue, and narrative, and then deconstructs them through critical race theory, narrative analysis, postcolonial studies, and feminist approaches to abjection and belonging, I analyse how these workers resist their own classed stigma by asserting their Whiteness, nationhood, and morality into “hierarchies of belonging.” These hierarchies are manifest by discursively constructing racialised, national, and moral differences and boundaries in relation to their co-workers, their skill, workers’ bodies, the meat they produce, the sheep they slaughter, and the religious and state which laws which govern their labour. Yet, in these fleshy, fluid slaughterhouses, claims of British purity and morality are fragile, imaginative and do not represent stable material, historic or ethical realities. As such, I trouble simplistic analyses which have legitimised white, classed racism as a reaction to socio-economic factors or cultural difference. Rather, I address the status and function of narratives at both national and personal scales and argue that their imaginative qualities are a central modality through which exclusionary forms of Whiteness and Britishness are reproduced as morally superior. More broadly, I connect these moralising narratives to imperial and colonial logics to draw out the long-standing fundamental instabilities of a pure, moral Whiteness or Britishness and the hierarchies which are reproduced through class and race. | en_GB |
