Another Person’s Peril: Proximity Risk, Peanut Allergy, and the Cultural Politics of Shared Spaces

• In Event: 2211 - Open Topic on Consumers and Consumption

Abstract

In the United States and several other Western countries, peanut allergy is being called a new health epidemic. While only a small percentage of the population is estimated to have peanut allergy, reactions can be severe, even life-threatening, and some institutions are responding accordingly. In this paper, we interrogate how peanut allergy has been positioned as a modern but contentious risk in shared semi-public spaces. Afflicted individuals are those who bear the burden of proof for our novel theoretical concept of “proximity risk,” arguing that simply being near the food – or in a space where it was recently – places them in peril. Our primary analysis is of a place where eating peanuts is considered a modal activity, for some even a tradition: airplanes. We analyze public comments from a failed 2010 proposal by the Department of Transportation to prohibit peanuts on airlines and situate these data within media reports about ongoing tensions between peanut allergic passengers and airlines. Our concept of “proximity risk” extends literatures on risk culture and space/place as a way to rethink evolving relationships among individual agency, the social construction of fear, moralized consumption, liability, and medical uncertainty. Our paper contributes to knowledge of how objects can affect multi-level social interactions regarding safety, wellbeing, and risk in shared contexts. Moreover, it taps into two “hot button” conversations: first, the pitting of individualist against collectivist narratives about responsibility for health and, second, public attention to airline cabins as spaces of heightened dread, panic, and the callous treatment of passengers.

Authors

• Michaela DeSoucey, North Carolina State University

• Miranda R. Waggoner, Florida State University