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(In)digestion in Literature and Film: A Transcultural Approach is a collection of essays spanning diverse geographic areas such as Brazil, Eastern Europe, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States. Despite this geographic variance, they all question disordered eating practices represented in literary and filmic works. The collection ultimately redefines disorder, removing the pathology and stigma assigned to acts of non-normative eating. In so doing, the essays deem taboo practices of food consumption, rejection and avoidance as expressions of resistance and defiance in the face of restrictive sociocultural, political, and economic normativities. As a result, disorder no longer equates to "out of order", implying a sense of brokenness, but is instead envisioned as an act against the dominant of order of operations. The collection therefore shifts critical focus from the eater as the embodiment of disorder to the problematic norms that defines behaviors as such.
List of contents
Introduction
Section One: Theoretical and Formal Contours
- Suckling Pig or Potatoes? Class Politics and Food Symbolism in
Eastern European Film
Elena Popan
- Haptic for Gourmets: Cinema, Gastronomy, and Strategic Exoticism
in Eat Drink Man Woman and Tortilla Soup
Aida Roldán-García
- Pro-Ana and Mia Blogs and Care of the Self
Jenny Platz
Section Two: Disordered Eating Beyond the West
- White Pigs and Black Pigs, Wild Boar and Monkey Meat: Cannibalism and
War Victimhood in Japanese Cinema
Kenta McGrath
- "Such a Thin Slice of Watermelon!" Fat and Thin in Macabéa’s
Malnourished World
Benjamin Legg
- Multiplicities of Identities and Meanings Behind Devouring Characters in
Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away
Katsuya Izumi
- The Dangerous Vegan: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and the Anti-Feminist
Rhetoric of Disordered Eating
Laura Wright
Section Three: Disordered Eating in the West
- Dietary Perversions and Subversion of Nature in Huysmans’s
Against Nature
Romain Peter
- Eating the Dead: Transgressive Hungers and the Grotesque
Body in Ulysses
Wilson Taylor
- Hungry for Honey: Desire in Dacia Maraini’s Il treno per Helsinki
Eilis Kierans
- "Identica a loro?": (In)digesting Food and Identity in Igiaba
Scego’s "Salsicce"
Francesca Calamita
- From Bartholomew Fair to Bridesmaids: Ben Jonson’s Fecopoetics
and Gendered American Pop Culture
Emily Gruber Keck
About the author
Niki Kiviat is a PhD candidate in Italian Studies at Columbia University, where her research interests include food studies; Italy’s food and material culture as manifest in films of the Economic Miracle; star studies; and the legacy of neorealist film, which was the subject of her Master’s thesis, also from Columbia. Her essay, "From Pizzaiola to Phenom: Viewing Sophia Loren Through Food," will be published in the edited volume Eve’s Sinful Bite: Foodscapes in Italian Women’s Writing, Culture, and Society (forthcoming, Bloomsbury).
Serena J. Rivera is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh where she teaches the language, literatures and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world. Her research interests concern the intersections of food, gender, race, and sexuality throughout Luso/Hispanophone cultural production. She has published on the topics of food metaphors in Mozambican and Cape Verdean literatures as well as the teaching of Portuguese language in the US. She has also translated Alberto Pena-Rodriguez’s News on the American Dream: A History of the Portuguese Press in the United States (forthcoming, Tagus Press). She is currently working on several article manuscripts that explore the use of food in (post)colonial nationalist rhetoric in Mozambique as well as the linkages between the abject and racial identity in late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century Brazilian literature. Her monograph project comparatively examines the intersections of masculinity, food, and nation in Brazilian, Cape Verdean and Mozambican literatures.
Summary
This is a collection of essays representative of diverse geographies, all of which underscore moments of disordered eating. The volume removes the pathology and stigma surrounding non-normative eating, highlighting these acts as expressions of resistance against the sociopolitical order of operations.
