Yagmur Su Kolsal ABSTRACT

“The Vegan Politics of the Carnivorous Feminist in Fiction”

Yagmur Su Kolsal, University of Münster, Germany

 

34 years after the publication of The Sexual Politics of Meat  by Carol J. Adams and the translation of Jacques Derrida’s “Eating Well” into English, the predominance of a form of carno-phallogecentrism that associates meat-eating with manliness, and draws cultural parallels between the objectification of women and various forms of animal exploitation, remains mostly unchallenged in popular imagination. However, in the recent years, feminist portrayals of meat consumption as a means of reclaiming lost agency and suppressed desires have been gracing our screens and book pages. While Ginger Snaps (2000), Jennifer’s Body (2009), The Lure (2015), and Raw (2016) are earlier 21st century examples of the portrayal of carnivorous and cannibalistic consumption as feminist tools in film, in the first half of the 2020s, literary works that utilize similar consumption habits as central metaphors have gained relative popularity.

 

This article interprets this recourse to “animal flesh” as an attempt at establishing female subjecthood in an era of increasing individualism. Through an analysis of the employment of the carnivorous feral woman in Chelsea G. Summer’s A Certain Hunger (2019), Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch (2021), and Lottie Hazell’s Piglet (2024), this article argues that rather than offering an alternative to contemporary carnist and patriarchal ideologies, these works remain positioned within the dominant carnist discourse that can imagine feminist resistance only in terms of a reversal of roles without the dismantling of the sexual politics of meat that has necessitated the emergence of this trope in the first place.

 

Keywords: the female cannibal, carnophallogocentrism, carnism, contemporary fiction, food