Body of Rebellion: Patriarchal Law, Gender Violence and The Vegetarian

To be female in today’s world is to know that one belongs to the near-50% of the population who are subject to gender violence and abuse in war, in peace, in the home, on the screen and the page. Despite decades of movements and declarations of hope in seemingly liberating ‘advances’ from CEDAW (Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women—see https://www.ohchr.org/en/treaty-bodies/cedaw) to the #Metoo movement (2. https://metoomvmt.org/), women continue to be subject to femicide, domestic violence, discrimination, misogyny and rape – as a weapon of war and of peace. Domestic violence around the world continues to increase, social media and the dark web reveals ever more violent forms of abuse and the case of Dobbs v Jackson (2022) (3.Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022)) reverberates throughout the Western world as a further indication that ‘civilisation’ and the rights gained under its laws are as easily overturned as the dark dawn in The Handmaid’s Tale(Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Random House, 1985). In The Vegetarian (The Vegetarian, Han Kang, Changbi Publishers, South Korea (2007); Portobello Books (now Granta Publications) London, UK (2015))—the 2024 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Han Kang reflects the surreal burden this environment imposes upon the female psyche as she depicts a woman whose dream leads her to renounce not only meat eating as symbol of violence, but over time, her domestic identity, family identity, social identity, the wearing of clothes and eventually, all food as she aligns more and more with plants and trees in their quest for sunlight. Rich in psychoanalytic meaning, the symbolism of the text—the dream, the body as a site of subjectivity, sexuality, struggle, anorexia, the withdrawal from social and cultural norms (norms which constrain men too) the implicit and explicit violence abuse and voyeurism towards women, the body as contested site and sign in a world where only breasts can be trusted as ‘hand, foot, tongue, gaze, all weapons from which nothing is safe’ (The Vegetarian, 2018: 33)—is a rebuke to the failure of the global order, of humankind itself: as Luce Irigaray suggested many years ago, ‘In the absence of such an order, many people are nowadays looking for an identity-space other than the human one’ (Je, Tu, Nous, 1993i: 83).