Food and women’s bodies in Anglophone feminist critical dystopias: from text to context following the pattern of the “hyper-materialization”

Autori

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.54103/2035-7680/23073

Parole chiave:

Anglophone literature; feminist critical dystopia; 21st century; USA; United Kingdom; food; women’s bodies

Abstract

Food is a theme of crucial importance in contemporary feminist critical dystopias, functioning as a symbol of both household hierarchization and market dynamics of production and consumption. As such, food can be a useful interpretative key to connect dystopian fiction to the state of the world outside the literary text. In order to explore this connection, I will argue that food is exploited by dystopian systems of organization through a process which I term “hyper-materialization”: reducing women to their (re)productive roles through both a metaphorical and a concrete association with food, women’s agency is stifled and their productivity is maximized. Following these premises, many of the potentially positive endings characterizing the genre can be framed as a recovery of food’s immaterial dimensions of desire, pleasure and affection. It will be argued that these can be interpreted as the analytical way out of the dystopian novel, compelling readers to bring such resistant practices into their material and situated contexts. To demonstrate the diachronic permanence of this pattern across geographic divides, my analysis will consider The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985) along with two contemporary texts from the United Kingdom: Sweet Fruit, Sour Land (Rebecca Ley, 2018) and The Water Cure (Sophie Mackintosh, 2018).

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Biografia autore

Marta Olivi, University of Bologna

Marta Olivi is attending the 37th cycle of the Doctorate in Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bologna (EDGES curriculum—Women’s and Gender Studies), within a joint degree program with the University of Utrecht (Netherlands). After graduating cum laude from her master’s degree with a thesis devoted to the thematic and symbolic connections between food and women’s bodies in four contemporary critical dystopias, she is continuing her research on the theme of food, focusing on the applications of posthuman and neo-materialist theories in the literary sphere. She is now investigating the Anglophone feminist dystopias of the last twenty years, with particular attention to experimental works that break the conventions of the dystopian genre. She has published in AltreModernità and Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research. She is a member of AtGender and AIA, and she is also a literary translator; she translated and edited the Italian edition of Mark Bould’s L’Antropocene Inconscio (Giulio Perrone Editore, 2022).

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Pubblicato

2024-06-01

Come citare

Olivi, Marta. 2024. «Food and women’s Bodies in Anglophone Feminist Critical Dystopias: From Text to Context Following the Pattern of the “hyper-materialization”». Altre Modernità, n. 31 (giugno):103-18. https://doi.org/10.54103/2035-7680/23073.

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Saggi Ensayos Essais Essays