Othering Mushrooms: Migratism and its racist entanglements in the Brexit campaign

Abstract

Mushrooms have long occupied a highly ambivalent position in the cultural imagination, inciting disgust and fear, as well as wonder and fascination. Neither plants, nor animals, they grow up unexpectedly but also in regular lines or circles. Some of them are medicinal and edible, whereas others are toxic or even poisonous. Sometimes they are both. Employing the ambivalence of mushrooms as an analytic lens, this article interrogates the processes of othering through which certain bodies are more susceptible to be othered than other bodies. Mobilising Sara Ahmed’s analytic framework on othering as an embodied process, this transnational ecofeminist intervention provides an insight into how forests, mushrooms and their foragers have been deployed in the Brexit campaign’s migratism and explores its racist entanglements. The article argues that research into social and environmental histories of how meaning is constructed and embodied in human and non-human bodies and the places they inhabit is vital for contesting the re-emergence of the right-wing populism that, in Europe, is exemplified by events such as Brexit.