Archive | 2021
Abject bodies and toxic flows in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats
Abstract
means of industrialized production are hidden and instead food is associated with a neatly separated domesticity. This paper considers how Ruth Ozeki’s novel My Year of Meats resists this exclusionary logic as part of the novel’s wider concern for disrupting normative binaries that separate self from other—woman from man, animal from human, inside from outside. While this concern operates on many levels in the novel, this paper focuses on how this notion of distinct categories and boundaries which uphold patriarchal, capitalist violence, coalesce at the level of the body, particularly women’s and animal’s bodies. The related, but divergent, processes of embodied abjection and toxic contamination, are two ways Ozeki conceptualizes how eating meat draws the body into a social and material entanglement with that previously occluded in a way that troubles our understanding of cleanly distinct categories. Instead, the abject and the toxic make clear the messy entanglements at the heart of modern meat. In Ruth Ozeki’s novel My Year of Meats (1998), meat is so much more than what’s for dinner. The novel traces the story of Jane Takagi-Little, a Japanese-American filmmaker hired to make a documentary entitled “My American Wife!.” The documentary is sponsored by the United States’s Beef Export and Trade Syndicate, BEEF-EX, with the goal of drumming up beef sales in Japan by depicting various wives sharing family recipes based around beef. This mission is overseen by Joichi Ueno, the Japanese producer of the documentary, characterized as a vile misogynist and abuser of his wife Akiko, who suffers bulimia and as such is currently infertile. Sell the American dream, sell more meat in Asia, or so the logic goes. Yet, through the unfolding layers of the narrative, My Year of Meats shifts drastically from this tidy image of food as connected to culture and domesticity. By the novel’s close, Jane creates an exposé of the profit driven, exploitative and violent processes of meat production, exposing the violence of factory abattoirs and the use of dangerous hormones like DES in animal feed for cost-cutting and profit-maximization. The novel makes clear the modern dissonance between food production and consumption symptomatic of the fragmented conditions of a globalized, capitalistic world. This distinction is figured within a wider logic of a world predicated on a system of binaries, which inevitably lead to exclusion, such as inside-outside; private-public; self-other; safety-threat. In this paper, I examine how these concerns coalesce and flow through the body in the novel through the material and conceptual processes of abjection and toxicity. Thinking with abject bodies and toxic flows radically disrupts the material and conceptual borders of bodies and showcases how the novel makes us think critically about a world characterized by such simplistic binaries, including the way we think and consume food. “Things that Give an Unclean Feeling” (Shōnagon): Meat Consumption, Abject Bodies, and Toxic Flows in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats