20 research outputs found
Constructing the eastern european other: The horsemeat scandal and the migrant other
The Horsemeat scandal in the UK in 2013 ignited a furore about
consumer deception and the bodily transgression of consuming
something so alien to the British psyche. The imagination of the
horse as a noble and mythic figure in British history and sociological
imagination was invoked to construct the consumption of horsemeat
as a social taboo and an immoral proposition in the British media
debates. This paper traces the horsemeat scandal and its media framing
in the UK. Much of the aversion to horsemeat was intertextually
bound with discourses of immigration, the expansion of the EU and
the threat in tandem to the UK. Food as a social and cultural artefact
laden with symbolic meaning and national pride became a platform
to construct the ‘Other’ – in this case the Eastern European Other. The
media debates on the horsemeat scandal interwove the opening up of
the EU and particularly UK to the influx of Eastern European migration.
The horsemeat controversy in implicating the Eastern Europeans for
the contamination of the supply chain became a means to not just
construct the ‘Other’ but also to entwine contemporary policy debates
about immigration. This temporal framing of contemporary debates
enables a nation to renew and contemporise its notions of ‘otherness’
while sustaining an historic social imaginary of itself
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