Dual Essentialism in Wet Market Discourse: Toward an Intersectional Posthumanist Analysis of Race, Species, and Power

This thesis examines how Western Reddit discourse on wet markets during the COVID-19 pandemic enacted interspecies intersectionality, the co-constitution of animal and racial stigmatization. Drawing on Bénédicte Boisseron's (2018) framework that race and species must be analyzed as "true combination rather than succession," I demonstrate that pan-demic discourse simultaneously reduced animals to "disease vectors" and racialized people as "culturally backward," with each reduction enabling the other. Using a mixed-methods approach, I analyze 91,938 Reddit comments (2018–2024), supplemented by semi-structured interviews with 10 Chinese wet market users. Quantitatively, racialized framing nearly doubled from 30.8% in 2018 to 54.1% in 2020, while dual essentialism, the co-occurrence of animal biologization and racialized framing, increased thirty-two-fold. Comments exhibiting dual essentialism received 2.3× higher engagement than non-stigmatizing content, constituting a social premium of stigma. Qualitatively, discourse operated through three interlocking mechanisms: temporal Orientalism ("still," "medieval," "backward"), purity politics ("breeding ground," "unsanitary"), and colonial hygiene ("poor sanitation"), each providing apparent independent evidence while operating through circular reinforcement. Interview data reveal what in this discourse is unspoken: embodied ecological knowledge (seasonality, freshness assessment), social infrastructure (community formation, reciprocity networks), and ongoing state-led modernization rendered invisible by Western frameworks. This constitutes dual essentialism: not separate stigmatizations but mutually constitutive reductions wherein animal biologization licenses racial othering, and racial othering licenses animal biologization. The theoretical contribution lies in specifying how race-species entanglement operates linguistically and quantitatively, advancing Boisseron's framework through large-scale empirical demonstration. Neither animal liberation nor racial justice can succeed separately; both require coalitional analysis that refuses civilizational hierarchies.