The question of the female body in the neoliberal era of choice, postcapitalism, and consumption has been widely debated within the field of gender and women’s studies, with scholars and cultural critics such as Susan Bordo, Melissa A. Goldthwaite, and Andi Zeisler resisting mainstream feminism’s emphasis on the body as a site for autonomous self-construction free from patriarchal control. However, such critiques have not adequately addressed the ways in which fictionalized accounts of female struggles with food highlight the abjection that underlies the contemporary woman’s relationship with her biological body. This paper addresses the issue of meat consumption in modern literature and film with special attention to the role of female carnivorism and cannibalism. Specifically, I look at Alexandra Kleeman’s 2017 short story “Lobster Dinner,” Han Kang’s 2016 novel The Vegetarian, and the 2016 film Raw in order to show how grotesque tales of meat eating critique the postfeminist narratives of female choice and economic consumption. I will discuss the connections between meat consumption and expressions of female sexuality and juxtapose them against postfeminist assumptions concerning choice and sexual agency as the hallmarks of gender equality in order to demonstrate how these works reveal such narratives as delusory presumptions that ignore the material and societal constraints on female consumption. I argue that these works employ hyperbolically gory accounts of women devouring meat products, whether animal or human, as an allegory for female carnality and sexual agency in order to excoriate mainstream, neoliberal, and postcapitalist assumptions concerning female embodiment and the freedom of commercial choice. In conclusion, this project, by closely examining the relationship between meat consumption, sexual appetites, and consumerism, sheds new light on the little examined ways in which contemporary accounts of female appetites critique the illusion of choice that characterizes mainstream feminism.
About the presenterEmily Naser-Hall
Emily Naser-Hall is a second-year Ph.D student in the Department of English at the University of Kentucky. She earned a BA from Tulane University, a Juris Doctor from DePaul College of Law, and LL.M. in National Security Law from Georgetown, and an MA in Literature from Northwestern University. Her research interests include the postmodern American gothic, experimental postmodernism, feminist narratives, and spectrality and horror studies.