왜곡된 채식주의-페미니즘 이원론에 대항하는 “여성의 육식” –영화 Raw 분석을 중심으로

Abstract

Human beings eat to survive but also for pleasure. We occasionally share our days with supper. In terms of gender politics, however, an act of eating meat is rather exclusive to men, while excluding, marginalizing, or even ‘animalizing’ women. Ecofeminist, therefore, relates discrimination against women to violence against animals, searching social structure beneath them to fight back. Still, this idea, as well as the old gender politics, risks polarizing and distorting reality. Namely, it may reinforce patriarchal discourse, tieing vegetarianism up with femininity: weak, soft, conforming. As a result, femininity, along with vegetarianism, ends up to be a fringe. Considerable amount of theoretical data and statements sees vegetarian diet as something feminine, consequently sets aside women who eat meat, and lets them be unaccountable. This paper aims to explore such omission by examining Raw(2016), a feature film presenting a female character who has been a vegetarian and soon turns out to be a cannibal, to answer the following question: How should we portray women having carnivorous diet? In the film, the character, who has been a vegetarian and an outcast, begins to eat meat and crave human flesh ever since she started to defy patriarchal norms and culture inside or outside of her school. It, hence, dismantled the former binary idea which tends to segregate women from carnivorous diets and refuted the way such idea represents them, as well as violence and regulations against them. The text where we can unearth a novel insight into women’s eating habits allows us to challenge long standing dynamics between gender politics and diets. It refuses to relate femininity to vegetarianism, labeling them as a fringe. It rather gives us an opportunity to elaborate on women and their carnivorous diets, deriving unorthodox discourses.