Eimear Mc Loughlin
Department: Sociology, Philosophy, and Anthropology
Discipline: Sociology and Philosophy
Project Summary
Displaying Animal Death: The Politics of Transparency and the Production of National Identity in Industrial Pig Agriculture and Zookeeping in Denmark
The visibility of animal slaughter in Denmark contrasts starkly with the modes of concealment typical of slaughterhouses in industrialised societies. Members of the public can enter a pig slaughterhouse and participate in a tour of the facility, tracking the animal from the slaughterhouse gate to the dinner plate. Interestingly, Denmark boasts one of the highest meat consumption rates in the world. This transparency of animal slaughter transcends the slaughterhouse to other arenas of animal consumption. Visit my website to read more about my work or follow me on Twitter.
Supervisory Team
Lecturer in Anthropology (Education and Research)
Research Expertise
Human-animal interactions, East Asia (Korea and Japan), Visual Anthropology and Philosophy.
Professor of (More-than) Human Geography
Head of Geography
Research Expertise
Animal Geographies, Rural Geography, Agriculture and Environmental Policy.
Professor of Anthropology
Head of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology
Research Expertise
Political Anthropology, Anthropology of Food, Farming and Agrarian Society.
Wider Research Interests
Previous/Ongoing Projects
Knowing Cows: Transformative Mobilisations of Human and Nonhuman Bodies in the Slaughterhouse
In an 'emotionography' of the slaughterhouse, I explored how emotions are negotiated and neutralised within the confines of the slaughterhouse walls. Benefiting from the literature on dirty work and the sociology of emotion, I studied how bovine bodies are differentially constructed by workers and farmers both within and beyond the slaughterhouse gates through participant observation, semi-structured interviews and visual methodologies.
#SaveBenjy: Sexuality, Queer Animals and Ireland
Benjy the gay bull rose to global notoriety in November 2014 when he failed to impregnate the heifers he was purchased to inseminate and thus, Benjy’s only fate was the slaughterhouse. A crowdfunding petition led by an animal rights organisation and a gay rights network saved Benjy from certain slaughter on the basis that Benjy should be gree to be gay, entwining narratives of sexual autonomy with animal rights discourse. #SaveBenjy was a remarkable phenomenon for a number of reasons, from its timeliness, whereby his plight emerged in the months prior to the historic same-sex marriage referendum in Ireland, to the recognition of non-human animal non-normative sexuality being respected, protected and celebrated. In my published article, I employ queer theory to explore Benjy’s rise to fame amidst an Irish cultural landscape in flux.
http://www.depauw.edu/humanimalia/issue%2013/pdfs/mcloughlin-pdf.pdf
Research Interests
- Anthrozoology
- Environmental Anthropology
- Sociology of Emotion
- Queer Animals
- Human-Animal Relations
- Anthropology of the Senses
- Multimodal Anthropology
- Nordic Anthropology
- Ireland
Authored Publications/Reports
McLoughlin, Eimear (1st October 2015) #SaveBenjy: Sexuality, Queer Animals, and Ireland, Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies, 7:1, 109-122
McLoughlin, E. (7th May 2018) Knowing Cows: Transformative Mobilisations of Human and Nonhuman Bodies in an Emotionography of the Slaughterhouse, Gender, Work and Organisation, Special Issue, 1-21
McLoughlin, E. (2022) On ‘Finishing’: A Visual Memoir of Care and Death on an Irish Cattle Farm, Visual Anthropology Review
Mc Loughlin, E. (2021) Porcine Words: Making Words of Worlds and the Tragedy of Multispecies Ethnography, Anthropology and Humanism
Mc Loughlin, E. (2022) Being Existed by Another through the Sensory: The Spectacular Death of Industrial Pigs in Slaughterhouse Tours, New Perspectives on Urban Deathscapes: Continuity, Change, and Contestation, Edward Elgar Publications
