





































Under the fragmented conditions of modernity, the 

means of industrialized production are hidden and 

instead food is associated with a neatly separated do-

mesticity. This paper considers how Ruth Ozeki’s novel 

My Year of Meats resists this exclusionary logic as part 

of the novel’s wider concern for disrupting normative 

binaries that separate self from other—woman from 

man, animal from human, inside from outside. While 

this concern operates on many levels in the novel, this 

paper focuses on how this notion of distinct categories 

and boundaries which uphold patriarchal, capitalist vi-

olence, coalesce at the level of the body, particularly 

women’s and animal’s bodies. The related, but diver-

gent, processes of embodied abjection and toxic con-

tamination, are two ways Ozeki conceptualizes how 

eating meat draws the body into a social and material 

entanglement with that previously occluded in a way 

that troubles our understanding of cleanly distinct cate-

gories. Instead, the abject and the toxic make clear the 

messy entanglements at the heart of modern meat.

In Ruth Ozeki’s novel My Year of Meats (1998), 
meat is so much more than what’s for dinner. 
The novel traces the story of Jane Takagi-Little, 
a Japanese-American filmmaker hired to make a 
documentary entitled “My American Wife!.” The 
documentary is sponsored by the United States’s 
Beef Export and Trade Syndicate, BEEF-EX, with 
the goal of drumming up beef sales in Japan by 
depicting various wives sharing family recipes 
based around beef. This mission is overseen by 
Joichi Ueno, the Japanese producer of the docu-
mentary, characterized as a vile misogynist and 
abuser of his wife Akiko, who suffers bulimia and 
as such is currently infertile. Sell the American 
dream, sell more meat in Asia, or so the logic 
goes. Yet, through the unfolding layers of the 
narrative, My Year of Meats shifts drastically from 
this tidy image of food as connected to culture 
and domesticity. By the novel’s close, Jane cre-
ates an exposé of the profit driven, exploitative 
and violent processes of meat production, expos-
ing the violence of factory abattoirs and the use 
of dangerous hormones like DES in animal feed

for cost-cutting and profit-maximization.
 The novel makes clear the modern dissonance between food production and consumption symp-
tomatic of the fragmented conditions of a globalized, capitalistic world. This distinction is figured within 
a wider logic of a world predicated on a system of binaries, which inevitably lead to exclusion, such 
as inside-outside; private-public; self-other; safety-threat. In this paper, I examine how these concerns 
coalesce and flow through the body in the novel through the material and conceptual processes of 
abjection and toxicity. Thinking with abject bodies and toxic flows radically disrupts the material and 
conceptual borders of bodies and showcases how the novel makes us think critically about a world char-
acterized by such simplistic binaries, including the way we think and consume food.

“Things that Give an Unclean Feeling” (Shōnagon):
Meat Consumption, Abject Bodies, and Toxic Flows 

in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats

Hannah Salih, University of Amsterdam

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Salih | 18



 My Year of Meats critically exposes a world characterized by these boundaries that separate what 

is allowed in from what is not. For environmental philosopher Timothy Morton, this “inside-outside 

manifold is fundamental for thinking the environment as a metaphysical, closed system” (274). Morton’s 

view is echoed widely within the realm of the environmental humanities and stems from the Europe-

an Enlightenment. It is highly relevant here because it demonstrates a wider system of thought, which 

privileges a way of being in the world that is contained and clean, and which sees the human in funda-

mentally the same way—autonomous and sovereign. In this system, the processes of mass meat produc-

tion are cast to an outside, an elsewhere meant to stay hidden from the consumer and the public. It is 

also this very notion that leads to oppressive, hierarchical systems of society, excluding those deemed 

“other” racially, sexually, or on a more planetary scale of the environment. As we hurtle to the cliff edge 

of climate catastrophe, any discussion of cultural reimagining of these reified binaries is important as it 

allows us to think differently about how we might exist in and relate to the world.

 I first briefly trace how the novel formulates cleanliness as a trope that tries to maintain norma-

tive order and resist anything that troubles the narrative, the body, or the world. The prologue of My 

Year of Meats depicts Suzie Flowers, the first American wife and the supposed epitome of white, mid-

dle-class, heteronormative America sat in her immaculately clean home. Anything that troubles the neat 

definitions and the border of the home is framed as dangerous because it troubles the idea of uncon-

taminated, bounded categories, which are necessary for upholding systems of oppression. This is most 

clear when Jane recalls the true case of Yoshihiro Hattori, a sixteen-year-old shot by the butcher Rod-

ney Peairs, who was then acquitted on the grounds of defending his home. Jane adds that “in America, 

we fancy ours a frontier culture, where our homes must be defended by deadly force from people who 

look different” (107). This is intimately bound with the novels view of “hearth and home” (12) and the 

domestic, which is framed as contained and closed. As the novel progresses, I argue that Ozeki strives 

to demonstrate that the reality is far messier and that such a closed system is a fallacy. The framing of 

cleanliness thus becomes the backdrop against which the messy, abject, toxic flows and connections are 

rendered both disruptive and demonstrative of wider systems of violence.

 As laid out in two lists from Shonagon—“Things That Give a Clean Feeling” (48) and the reverse 

“Things That Give an Unclean Feeling” (49)—cleansing is inextricably bound in abjection. If a home or 

a body is to be clean, something must be purged and forced outside. At the most explicit level, what is 

purged and abjected in the novel is women and animals and through that the discrepancy between the 

production and consumption of meat. Following the ideas of Carol J. Adams in her landmark book The 

Sexual Politics of Meat (1990), women’s studies scholar Laura Anh Williams conceptualizes this in her 

article “Gender, Race, and an Epistemology of the Abattoir in My Year of Meats.” Williams puts forward 

the notion of an epistemology of the abattoir, a structure of thinking food production that “occludes 

images of violence, of killing, or even of animals is the most direct product of an epistemology of the 

abattoir,” which, following Adams, keeps “our ‘meat’ separate from any idea that she or he was once an 

animal who was butchered […] a subject” (Adams qtd. in Williams 253). This idea of separation is crit-

ical. In some sense, the equivalencies between female and animal bodies in the novel begins to trouble 

normative boundaries by framing the animals in a less hierarchical relation to the human, whereby both 

are caught in the systemic hierarchies of masculine-capitalist violence. The initial aim of “My American

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19 | Salih

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Wife!” is “explicitly gastropornographic; the program’s celebration of meat, ‘climaxing’ in its consump-

tion, suggests both the gastronomic and sexualized consumption of the attractive wife. Woman is ren-

dered as meat, and vice versa” (Williams 255). This ethical, political equivalency essentially connects 

eating meat with patriarchal virility and a heavily gendered mode of oppression. In many ways, My Year 

of Meats narrativizes Adams’s argument. Jane describes a moment in a bar with the Japanese producer 

of the documentary, Joichi. In the bar, a group of “Texas beauties” “[straddle] his tenderloin and offer[s] 

up her round rump for inspection” (54). There is, however, something overly on-the-nose about this 

line. How easily this comparison can be made makes it tempting to uncritically accept this as Ozeki’s 

main political message. Indeed, this comparison is crucial to much of the scholarship engaging with 

this novel, reading the narrative and thematic equivalencies Ozeki draws in portraying her message. 

Certainly, Jane’s own uncovering of the “truth” of global meat production is largely based on revealing 

equivalences, on lifting the veil and exposing the structures beneath. What interests me, however, is not 

this operation of revelation but rather how the novel tackles this separation between meat consumption 

and production not just as an epistemological delineation but also as a material, ontological one. Food 

also functions within this visceral, embodied space in the novel, not just as a signifier for contemporary 

systems. Thinking in this way allows us to understand both the equivalencies and the messy in-betweens, 

the process of transgression that disrupts the notion of sovereign human/hegemonic subjects and not just 

the revelation of previously “occlude[d] images of violence” (Williams 253).

 However, framing relationality as itself predicated on the very globalized systems that have led 

to the oppression of all those deemed “other,” ensures that it is not effectively transgressive or radically 

troubling these binaries. This is, in my view, somewhat fundamental to both Adams and Williams’s work. 

Even after Jane learns of the conditions of production, she still says she “craves the taste and texture 

of animal between my teeth” (246). The focus here on the visceral materiality of eating meat is just as 

critical to the novel’s treatment of food. Through food, the systems of capital and violence are inevitably 

brought into the home and into the body. This demonstrates that such an easy mental occlusion is espe-

cially flawed in relation to meat consumption because we are so materially entangled in these networks 

through food.

 Through Ozeki’s material, corporeal handling of meat is how we can trace our entanglements 

in a manner outside global flows of capital and which helps us think beyond identarian categories of 

male-female or animal-human, although as I shall show, this is not unproblematic in the novel. Given 

how concerned the novel is not just with meat production, but with its consumption too, I argue that 

thinking about bodies not just as signifiers of wider social systems but as bodies which bleed, vomit, 

digest, eat, have sex, morph and move is critical to this novel’s desire to transgress normative boundaries 

and disrupt hegemony. Turning back to abjection here, but as an embodied process, is critical to how 

the novel conceptualizes this concern.

 For Julia Kristeva, abjection is a process of becoming, which comes into being between the sub-

ject and object. The abject is of the subject, “I,” yet because it is expelled from the self, it’s never fully 

assimilated into the subject. It is also not fully other or object because it “does not cease challenging 

its master” (Kristeva 2). In this sense, abjection unsettles and transgresses the strict boundary of self and 

other. It is both horrifying through its association with the “annihilation” of the self and a “safeguard”

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(Kristeva 2). Akiko, as Joichi’s wife, is made to cook and eat every meaty meal on the documentary in 

an attempt to restore her fertility. Her visceral reaction to the American meat dishes she cooks evokes 

the abject: “She’d start to feel the meat. It began in her stomach, like an animal alive, and would climb 

its way back up her gullet, until it burst from the back of her throat. She could not contain it. She could 

not keep any life down inside her” (48). Akiko’s body becomes the agent of containment in this sec-

tion, but in her failure to be the perfect vessel for life, her need to vomit and reject the meat results in 

an image of overflow and ejection. By describing the meat as being alive, it essentially resurrects the 

animal and seemingly grants the food a sense of agency. In his phenomenological study of the anorexic 

subject, Fredrik Svenaeus identifies how anorexia is often experienced as an uncanny condition, as it is 

triggered by and manifests as “bodily alienation in which the body is perceived to be foreign” (81). The 

image of the animal climbing out of her body is a similarly alien experience, which dissociates her act 

of vomiting from the physicality of her body. It is only later in the novel when Akiko sees with absolute 

clarity the insemination of her egg, following her rape by her husband, that her sense of her embodiment 

returns. Akiko expresses this through the poetic form: “my pretty / gash. / Run, / river run” (206). The 

enjambment creates a transgressive and unstoppable flow of energy.

 In comparison, while abject, the absolute rejection of the meat she eats seems almost clean. 

Akiko’s body refuses to digest the meat and assimilate it into her body. On the one hand, this suggests 

a sense of resistance to the oppressive structures in which the meat is bound. On the other, it evokes 

other moments where abject bodily processes are figured within the language of cleanliness that leaves 

no traces. For example, Jane’s mother states, “better you throw his baby away” (188), and Jane’s doctor 

makes a flippant comment that her post-miscarriage womb is “spick-and-span” (351) with nothing left 

behind. This deviates from Kristeva’s conceptualization of the abject. If the process is so clean, what 

boundaries are being troubled? I would suggest then that abject processes do not inherently present as 

dissolving the boundaries they move across. Instead, Ozeki uses the abject to highlight the power struc-

tures that benefit from there being a delineation between, for example, inside and outside. By frequently 

occluding the messiness of these material, embodied experiences, the abject is not consistently radically 

transgressive within the novel.

 It’s in the portrayal of Akiko’s rape and the abattoir that the most grotesquely abject moments 

occur. As part of the exposé, Jane and her crew visit an abattoir where we witness the killing of a cow: 

“the cow was breathing hard, raspy breath […] and from time to time she let out a strangled cry” (332). 

Further, “He bent down and looked straight into her bugging eye […] he used the upward movement of 

his body to sink the knife deep into her throat […] the blood gushes out in rhythmic spurts” (333). This 

is mirrored in the descriptions of the bodily harm inflicted on Akiko by Joichi after he discovers Akiko 

has been in touch with Jane, mentioning his abuse, that her periods have restarted, and her love for the 

lesbian couple Jane shows in one episode. In response, he viciously anally rapes Akiko: “he lifted her by 

the shoulders and pounded her against the floor, over and over” (282), causing her severe damage and 

the novel describes her bleeding, ruptured, and violated body in painful detail. Unlike the portrayal of 

Akiko’s rejection of the meat, these moments seem like pure horror. In this moment, both the cow and 

Akiko are objects of consumption for men and their agencies are stripped in the most horrifying ways. 

Both Akiko and the cow are captured in the violent shift from being (semi) agential subjects to meat/food

21 | Salih

Essay



through the application of violence. This is not food that nourishes, but “food” that is ravenously and 

pornographically consumed. Monica Chiu highlights this stating, “the novel advocates a growing aware-

ness in the two female protagonists of the inextricability of men and meat and how this culturally sanc-

tioned alliance often marginalizes women and the poor, instigating a feminist bent from the novel’s very 

masculine connotations of meat” (112). The explicitly, bodily descriptions in both these moments also 

pertains to the notion of the abject as their incredibly “unclean” nature makes it far more difficult to 

uphold the strict boundaries of the body. Jane, after being knocked out by a stunned cow in the abattoir, 

finds herself questioning on her way to the hospital whether she is covered in her blood or the blood of 

a cow. In that moment human and animal, typically distinct beings, are brought together in the shared 

violence inflicted upon them.

 This is a dynamic that Laura Williams raises, but her argument lands more strongly on the ideo-

logical and structural similarities between women and meat. In this vein, Monica Chiu offers more of a 

critique of the novel as she identifies an essential circularity to the manner in which Jane’s documentari-

an practices trouble the normativity she supposedly resists. Chiu argues:

 

 The text’s irony lies between rejecting Joichi’s ridiculous allusions to a so-called American dream  

 and accepting Jane’s multicultural, nonhegemonic re-visions, invested with an American-style 

 romance with difference, of which the nation’s primary acceptance has arisen through ethnic  

 food. Such a flattening and homogenizing of difference veers little from Joichi’s approach. Thus,  

 Jane can be accused, like Joichi, of cleansing her images. (120)

I agree with Chiu’s assertion here that at the level of the narrative, the novel is less transgressive than 

it appears. As I argued earlier in my reading of Akiko’s bulimia, the force with which that image of the 

meat clawing its way out is so charged with a socio-political symbolism that it negates the food from 

being just that—a material thing consumed through a body. Chiu highlights how the novel struggles to 

escape the frameworks it seeks to resist; however, I argue that focusing on the moments of embodied 

consumption of food, and not just on food as a cultural symbol, reveals a more fully actualized imag-

ining of a messy, unclean entanglement, which forces us to think not just about connections to food 

through the circulatory objects of capital (meat, food, and, in the novel, women) but in physical, mate-

rial connections, which challenges our understandings of closed binaries more radically. Thus, we begin 

to move towards the way Ozeki imagines human and non-human entanglements as ontological that is as 

a way of being both materially and existentially in the world.

 However, in My Year of Meats, even in those most abject moments, there is still some sense that 

we could return to a clean state: Jane can wash off the blood and Akiko can re-envision the pregnancy 

that stems from her rape as being instead “conceived, in her mind” and “not necessarily through sexual 

relations with Joichi” (Chiu 118). To be sure, I’m not suggesting these are not necessary trauma respons-

es, more that they are typical of a will in the novel, which Chiu also identifies, to tidy things up. In this 

sense, the abject moments of consumption reveal equivalencies between human and animal at the same 

time that they transgress bodily borders. However, there is still a sense of reversibility, which offers a 

way to separate into distinct categories once more by casting out the other. Turning instead to the novel’s

Salih | 22

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depiction of toxicity, we can see a more radical dissolution of reifying boundaries between normative 

binaries, disrupting the idea of the impermeable human further.

 Within the new materialist school of thought, there is a group of work that deeply considers the 

bodily connections to the material world. For feminist scholar Stacy Alaimo, she distils this idea into the 

concept of trans-corporeality, which is predicated on the fact that as “flesh, substance, matter, we are 

permeable and, in fact, require the continual input of other forms of matter— air, water, food” (78). In 

Ozeki’s novel, this unfortunately extends to the consumption of toxic substances via food. The consump-

tion of food becomes bound to not just harmful social structures but to a physical harm caused by hor-

mones given to animals in the U.S. The Purcell family, one of Jane’s subjects, jokingly note that “‘some 

medicines they was usin’ in the chickens that got into the necks that we was eatin’…. An’ that medicine, 

well, if it didn’t start to make me sound just like a woman!’” (139). Ozeki shows how toxicity radical-

ly dissolves the boundaries of the body and draws people into an entanglement of matter. Mr. Purcell’s 

body has physically changed, who he becomes is now inseparably connected to what he consumes. 

Jane is similarly entangled with the toxic. Following the Purcell’s revelation, Jane shares with the reader 

reams of information about DES, a growth hormone used in American meat production and prescribed to 

pregnant women, once again drawing the two together under the industrial pharma-meat complex. Yet, 

unlike thinking the abject, or thinking about the epistemological and social connections, Jane confronts 

the fact that the toxic is inextricably part of her sense of self, of “me.” We can read this as embodying 

Alaimo’s notion of trans-corporeality as it places Jane in a web of “intra-active agencies” (127) that flow 

through and transgresses the body, ultimately “dissolving the outline of the subject” (112) in a far more 

complex way than abject flows.

 The dissolving nature of toxicity also shapes the narrative. Jane spends much of the novel trying 

to piece together the chronology of her exposure to DES. Toxicity also dissolves temporal boundaries in 

the novel as past events only materialize at a later date. After Jane loses her baby, she says it was “may-

be not one thing, but a combination” (347). Try as she might, she cannot pinpoint the single cause or 

exact moment of loss, so we can see how the toxic is always deferred. Thinking about food, this again 

becomes a matter of consumption because it is distinctly and specifically an embodied entanglement, 

but it also shows how this concern fundamentally presses upon the novel’s narrative form as well as 

its thematic concerns. Gender scholar Mel Chen’s reading of toxicity neatly summarizes how the toxic 

queers (hetero)normative bounds and animates non-human and human agents through the “[collapse 

of] object distinctions between animate and inanimate” (209). This is evidently the case in My Year of 

Meats, as meat in all its toxic contamination becomes intimately entangled with the novel’s own form, 

animating and shaping it. This disrupts those binaries even further than Williams first articulates. Jane 

ultimately realizes she is unable to unravel herself from the toxic and so is unable to unravel herself 

fully from the processes of industrialized meat production. As such, through meat consumption within 

the home, Ozeki’s novel constructs the notion that food consumption inevitably brings the fragmented 

processes of modern, globalized, industrial capitalism and exploitation to bear on our 

embodied experiences.

 In one moment of the novel, Jane reads from Fry’s geography book, pondering the book’s inten-

tion “to present the earth as the home of man” (185) in an essential man versus nature type battle. It’s

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23 | Salih



clear that this viewpoint delineates and abjects nature from man. It is this system of thought which 

allows for the awful treatment of both women and cows in the novel. Abjection and toxicity are related 

but divergent embodied experiences in the novel that reveal how American food production and con-

sumption contaminates across the scales of the environment, the transnational and the body, disrupting 

our understanding of closed-systems and a distinction between woman and nature on the way. Moments 

of bodily abjection do offer a transgression of these idealized notions of a bounded body. However, their 

repeated association with cleanliness shows its limitations. Toxins in the body are dangerous and Ozeki 

works to expose this. Yet, by showing how Jane’s material body is so deeply enmeshed with the toxic, it 

doesn’t just transgress but radically dissolves the distinction between her and her environment. Perhaps 

we might then see toxicity as a mode of thinking within the novel, which allows Ozeki to more effec-

tively confront this problem of man versus nature. As the meat is consumed, it brings us into contact 

with categories, ideas and, materials, which have been cast out. The damage caused by meat production 

is typically occluded, but by tracing the processes of abjection and toxicity in the novel, I hope to have 

shown how thinking about the embodied consumption of meat as realized in the novel makes visible the 

multifarious connections that mean meat is, under the conditions of globalized modernity, never simply 

what’s for dinner.

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Salih | 24



Works Cited

Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. University of 

 Minnesota Press, 2016.

Chen, Mel. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Duke University Press, 2012.

Chiu, Monica. “Postnational globalization and (en) gendered meat production in Ruth L. Ozeki’s my 

 year of meats.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, vol. 12, no. 1, 2001, pp. 99-128.

Kristeva, Julia and Leon Samuel Roudiez. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University  

 Press, 1982.

Morton, Timothy. “Guest Column: Queer Ecology.” PMLA, vol. 125, no. 2, 2010, pp. 273-282. 

Svenaeus, Fredrik. “Anorexia Nervosa and the Body Uncanny: A Phenomenological Approach.” 

 Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, vol. 20 no. 1, 2013, pp. 81-91.  

Ozeki, Ruth. My Year of Meats. Canongate, 2013.

Williams, Laura Anh. “Gender, Race, and an Epistemology of the Abattoir in My Year of Meats.” Feminist  

 Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 2014, pp. 244-272. 

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