| This dissertation seeks enhanced understanding of cross-border circulation of capital, people, symbols, and practices in the meat industry within a global, postmodern nexus of intersecting cultural layers. The crisis of mad cow disease provides a vehicle to ask larger questions about the production and circulation of bodies as food and about the construction of subjectivity through biopower.; Given the stratified and diffused nature of this semiotic space, the chapters of the dissertation employ literary, journalistic, and ethnographic data to map this “terrain” across factory farming, meat advertising, border conflicts concerning ranchers in the southwest, and the confluence of food production, medical treatment, and the individual body. Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, and Arjun Appadurai provide the theoretical framework for an excavation of interlocking layers of cultural discourse. Carole Counihan's feminist anthropological perspective inspires this project and provides it with a methodological model within contemporary food studies work. The resulting critical insights critique the medical-scientific model of knowledge and the body it crafts. Most significantly, the archeological framework posits a linguistic continuity between local and global—the very dynamics of globalization.; Chapter One reads the symbolic values of the meat industry through the commercial advertisement campaign “Beef: It's What's For Dinner.” Chapter Two investigates how racial tensions along the Arizona-Mexico border erupt into violence and how such events fit into the crisis of mad cow disease and the legacy of abjection in the borderlands. The third chapter critiques allopathic medicine, connecting the food industry to the medical industry through a group of contemporary novels given the name “toxic-body writing.” Chapter Four specifies the implications of mad cow disease for questions of subjectivity, the perspective it offers on globalization, particularly the grassroots globalization of “natural” beef producers. The closing chapter returns to mad cow disease to re-examine questions of the body, subjectivity, and globalization. Given the multi-layered and interactive play of empowered cultural discourses to construct bodies and constitute subjects, the outcome of this examination suggests the need to reclaim food systems, to cure dis-eases spawned in corrupt capital-industrial practices, and to scrutinize globalized, mechanized views of social and natural systems. |
