Slaughterhouse tours in Denmark: Affective nationalism in the making of citizen-consumers and the industrial slaughter of happy pigs

Abstract

This article examines how tours of an industrial pig slaughterhouse reinforce the continued enfoldment of Danish pigs into the fabrication of Danish national identity, an enfoldment that underpins the formulation of subjects, human as well as more-than-human. A discourse analysis that weaves ethnographic moments from the tours and tour narratives along with historical and literary influences on Danish national identity and current debates on “Danishness” explores how narrativizing industrial slaughter is a means of formulating subjects that are sustained by agricultural histories, existential texts, and fairy tales. Through “humanizing” slaughterhouse conditions, tour guides are performing a kind of affective and pedagogical labor that produces modernist subjects, from the citizen-consumer to that of the happy pig. In consuming happy Danish pigs, citizen-consumers consolidate what it means to be Danish as they tacitly accept the industrial sacrifice of pigs, whose lives are worthy of living but crucially, also, worthy of taking. This work demonstrates how a multispecies awareness can enrich our understanding of the complex, unstable, and inseparable emergence of value production, nationhood, and capitalist subjects.