Cultural Cannibalism: Society's Consumption of a Woman's Body in Han Kang's The Vegetarian

Abstract

This study focuses on The Vegetarian (2015) by Han Kang to explore how the book is a literary expression of cultural cannibalism the symbolic feeding of the woman on the patriarchal society by social control, moral discipline, and mental control. The paper explores the way the novel reveals the violence inherent in normative femininity and uses the framework of social psychology, and gender performativity created by Judith Butler to explain the bodily transformation of Yeong -hye and her opposition to these patriarchal spaces. the research uses a qualitative research design and thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006). The results indicate that The Vegetarian depicts food, body, and silence as both the power of repression and subversion. The decision of Yeong-hye not to eat meat is a moral and corporeal resistance that dislodges the performativity of patriarchy, the repetitive social practices that constitute and imprison womanhood. The novel depicts the consumption of the female identity by the society in the form of scenes of familial violence, medical intervention and aesthetic objectification through the pretext of order and sanity. The undoing gender as presented by Butler gives a critical perspective of interpreting the gradual loss of language, appetite, and human identity that Yeong-hye engages in as a extreme form of nonconformity to the societal norm. This final metamorphosis of her into a tree is the breaking of the gender performativity as a symbol of emancipation and destruction. The study concludes that The Vegetarian is an allegory of the reliance of the gendered social order on the female sacrifice. It reveals how the patriarchal culture is perpetuated by cannibalizing the obedience of women, and Yeong-hye self-erasing as a person tells us of the predatory nature of the consumption that results in self-denial. The interdisciplinary work is relevant to the feminist literary studies research by combining the social-psychological theory proposed by Butler and the thematic literature analysis, as it provides a new understanding of the intersection of body, gender, and resistance in the East Asian feminist literature.