Animal Studies Journal Volume 10 Number 1 Article 7 2021 The Contagion of Slow Violence: The Slaughterhouse and COVID-19 Kelly Struthers Montford Ryerson University Tessa Wotherspoon University of British Columbia Okanagan Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/asj Part of the Agricultural and Resource Economics Commons, Animal Studies Commons, Art and Design Commons, Art Practice Commons, Australian Studies Commons, Communication Commons, Creative Writing Commons, Digital Humanities Commons, Education Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Legal Studies Commons, Linguistics Commons, Philosophy Commons, Political Science Commons, Public Health Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons, Sociology Commons, and the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons Recommended Citation Struthers Montford, Kelly and Wotherspoon, Tessa, The Contagion of Slow Violence: The Slaughterhouse and COVID-19, Animal Studies Journal, 10(1), 2021, 80-113. Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/asj/vol10/iss1/7 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library:
[email protected] The Contagion of Slow Violence: The Slaughterhouse and COVID-19 Abstract COVID-19 has brought to the fore the violence faced by slaughterhouse workers and those they are charged with slaughtering. This article argues that COVID-19 has wrought an acceleration of the slow violence of state organized race crime (Nixon, Ward), in spreading rapidly through the slaughterhouse and to surrounding racialized communities. We show that zoonotic pandemics are the result of state organized race crime, and that abattoirs are locations of inseparable animal and racial violence.