The Vegetarian
by Han Kang
She stopped eating meat. Everyone decided it was their problem.
For you if
you want to understand female bodily autonomy as a political act through its most extreme and quiet expression
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Yeong-hye decides to stop eating meat after a violent dream. Her husband, her father, her brother-in-law — the men around her treat this as a crisis to be managed, a defiance to be corrected, a symptom to be treated. Han Kang uses a woman's refusal to eat as a dispatch from inside the female body as contested territory — what it means to assert ownership over the most basic physical act in a society that has decided women's bodies are not their own. Booker Prize winner. One of the most formally unsettling novels on this shelf.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- South Korea • East Asia
- Voice
- Written by a South Korean author
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Like Water for Chocolate(1992)
dir. Alfonso Arau
Forbidden love, served through food.
In early-1900s Mexico, Tita is forbidden by family tradition from marrying the man she loves, so she pours her longing into the food she cooks — food that carries her emotions, sometimes literally, into everyone who eats it. Adapted from Laura Esquivel's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in making a kitchen the site of rebellion — Tita's cooking becomes the one language her mother can't control or silence. Pedagogical in showing how inherited "duty" polices women's desire generation after generation, and what it costs to break that chain.
Miss Representation(2011)
dir. Jennifer Siebel Newsom
Media's role in shrinking what power looks like.
Interviews with journalists, politicians, and media figures examine how narrow media portrayals of women connect to their underrepresentation in positions of power.
Why it’s here: Assembles an unusually wide range of women across politics, journalism, and entertainment to make one plain argument: the narrowness of how women get shown is not incidental to how few end up in power. Direct and unfussy, built to be shown and discussed, not just watched.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
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Flip the lens
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For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
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