White Skin, Red Meat: Analyzing Representations of Meat Consumption for their Racialized, Gendered, and Colonial Connotations

Abstract

This thesis extrapolates upon theoretical examinations of meat consumption as linked to masculinity in order to consider how meat consumption may also be connected to dominant themes in Canada’s national foundation as marked by whiteness, multiculturalism, and post-coloniality. I investigate two sets of advertisements – Maple Leaf Canada’s “Feeding the Country” commercial, and Alberta Beef Producer’s Raised Right online campaign – through employing multimodal critical discourse analysis and tenets of Stuart Hall’s theories of representations. In doing so, I argue that meat consumption is depicted in advertising as an ideologically and symbolically loaded practice that seizes upon and re-articulates greater themes of Canadian national identity in a way that denotes the nation as having overcome its racial tensions and colonial history.