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Blooming against Meat: Silence, Starvation, and Arboreal Subjectivity in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

2022; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 64; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00111619.2022.2106819

1939-9138

Yi-Peng Lai,

Culinary Culture and Tourism

Divided into three main sections, each narrated from the perspective of the protagonist’s ex-husband, brother-in-law, or sister, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian introduces a woman whose choice of eating (and non-eating) is conditioned by the inherent violence of a patriarchal society. However, throughout the novel, the woman is given little space to voice for herself. This article examines her voicelessness, both as an oppressed female object of patriarchy and a human-turned-into-tree, to consider the politics of voice and performativity in this context. Referencing “the patriarchal texts of meat,” this study examines the protagonist’s transformation from meat-eater to vegetarian and eventually to tree, contextualizing the sexual politics of meat, vegetarianism, and arboreal metamorphosis. The latter part of this article turns to the questions of art, diet/hunger, performativity, and their intricate interconnectedness, to consider the protagonist’s meat-refusing body as a performative text against an overwhelming patriarchal power structure and her arborealized identity as the phantasmatic performance of the “unreal.”