Meat!: A Transnational Analysis

by Sushmita Chatterjee (Editor), Banu Subramaniam (Editor)

Overview

What is meat? Is it simply food to consume, or a metaphor for our own bodies? Can “bloody” vegan burgers, petri dish beef, live animals, or human milk be categorized as meat? In pursuing these questions, the contributors to Meat! trace the shifting boundaries of the meanings of meat across time, geography, and cultures. In studies of chicken, fish, milk, barbecue, fake meat, animal sacrifice, cannibalism, exotic meat, frozen meat, and other manifestations of meat, they highlight meat's entanglements with race, gender, sexuality, and disability. From the imperial politics embedded in labeling canned white tuna as “the chicken of the sea” to the relationship between beef bans, yoga, and bodily purity in Hindu nationalist politics, the contributors demonstrate how meat is an ideal vantage point from which to better understand transnational circuits of power and ideology as well as the histories of colonialism, ableism, and sexism.

Contributors. Neel Ahuja, Irina Aristarkhova, Sushmita Chatterjee, Mel Y. Chen, Kim Q. Hall, Jennifer A. Hamilton, Anita Mannur, Elspeth Probyn, Parama Roy, Banu Subramaniam, Angela Willey, Psyche Williams-Forson

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478012481
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	02/15/2021
Series:	ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	16 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Sushmita Chatterjee is Associate Professor of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at Appalachian State University.

Banu Subramaniam is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. How to Think with Meat / Sushmita Chatterjee and Banu Subramaniam  1
1. When Fish Is Meat: Transnational Entanglements / Elspeth Probyn  17
2. Eating the Mother / Irina Aristarkhova  39
3. Reindeer and Woolly Mammoths: The Imperial Transit of Frozen Meat from the North American Arctic / Jennifer A. Hamilton  61
4. Beefing Yoga: Meat, Corporeality, and Politics / Sushmita Chatterjee  96
5. Eating after Chernobyl: Slow Violence and Reindeer Consumption in the Postnuclear Age / Anita Mannur  121
6. Romancing the Pig: A Queer Crip Tale from Barbeque to Xenotransplantation / Kim Q. Hall  139
7. On Being Meat: Three Parables on Sacrifice and Violence / Parama Roy  162
8. "I Hide in Plain Sight": Food and Black Masculinity in Vince Gilligan's Breaking Bad / Psyche Williams-Forson  194
9. On Phooka: Beef, Milk, and the Framing of Animal Cruelty in Late Colonial Bengal / Neel Ahuja  213
10. Fake Meat: A Queer Commentary / Angela Willey  241
11. The Ethical Impurative: Elemental Frontiers of Technologized Meat / Banu Subramaniam  254
12. Fire and Ash / Mel Y. Chen  279
About the Contributors  293
Index  293

Editorial Reviews

“Meat is power, meat is politics. By expanding the definitional terrain of the word, the authors in this collection also reimagine the scope of food and animal studies and provide much-needed connective tissue (pun not intended) for future work in the field. This book is a game changer. Period.”

-- Sharon Patricia Holland, author of The Erotic Life of Racism

“A new and provocative engagement with the material and symbolic dimensions of meat within a transnational frame, this collection exfoliates meat's various layers, not to uncover an essential truth, but to examine meat as a dynamic, multiple, and unstable category. It is less about what meat is than it is about what meat does. It is precisely this dimension that renders Meat! an important scholarly advance in cultural studies, food studies, and gender, women, queer, and feminist studies.”

-- Martin F. Manalansan IV, coeditor of Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader

"In provocative and playful essays, diverse authors draw on established experts in such fields as colonial and postcolonial studies, transnational analysis, feminist science studies, queer theory, critical race theory, animal rights studies, and disability studies. . . . Most essays cross boundaries, too, in subject matter, disciplinary orientation, and methodology (such as moving from discursive to practical analysis), requiring proficiency with context-switching, making this both a challenging and rewarding read. Recommended. Graduate students and faculty."

-- S. M. Weiss Choice

“Few books assemble critical writings from a transnational, intersectional, and postcolonial perspective. Meat! fills this gap.... Feminist scholars will no doubt find this edited volume useful and interesting.”

-- Élisabeth Abergel Atlantis

“The uniqueness of Meat! resides in reuniting scholars, many of them working on regions outside the Euro-Western world, in order to provocatively push the boundaries of what ethical practices and lives entail.”

-- Valeria Meiller ISLE

From the Publisher