Milkflower & Refusing meat/ness 

: Feminist approaches to meat, gender, and power in contemporary women’s fiction

Abstract

This thesis is broken into two parts. The first and larger component is the novel, Milkflower, a work of feminist-speculative literary fiction. Set some hundred years in the future, Milkflower follows Pond, a young woman who escapes her cult-like community and discovers the secrets of an experimental botanist, a lonely billionaire, and a sentient, toxic plant. This plant, Milkflower, is the world’s last remaining natural food source. The critical component is ‘Refusing Meat/ness: Feminist Approaches to Meat, Gender, and Power in Contemporary Women’s Fiction’. It seeks to explore representations of meat in contemporary women’s fiction and what they reveal about gender and power, first by offering a background into the field, exploring and analysing texts such as Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (1969) and its legacy in contemporary fiction, then using Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, translated to English from the Korean by Deborah Smith (2015), as a case study to explore themes of gender and power in representations of meat in fiction.

Thesis is embargoed until 31 December 2029.

Date of Award	Dec 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Sponsors	Queen's University Belfast
Supervisor	Nick Laird (Supervisor), Fran Brearton (Supervisor) & Daniel Roberts (Supervisor)