This paper reads Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat alongside Han Kang’s The Vegetarian to explore how gendered bodies, eating practices and representational economies of meat converge in both theory and fiction. Adams’s feminist-vegetarian framework argues that meat-eating is bound up with patriarchal constructions of masculinity and female objectification, employing concepts such as the “absent referent” to reveal how animals and women are similarly commodified and consumed. Her theoretical lens offers a powerful conceptual frame for understanding protagonist Yeong-hye’s refusal of meat as a radical, embodied protest that exposes domestic violence, militarized masculinity, colonial histories and the objectifying male gaze within contemporary Korean society. The analysis demonstrates how The Vegetarian dramatizes Adams’s core arguments while also complicating them through cultural specificity, psychological depth and mystical dimensions. Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism functions as an embodied critique of patriarchal modernity, yet her subsequent transformation and self-starvation reveal the tragic limits of ethical purity under conditions of totalizing social control. The paper examines multiple layers of resistance and domination: the enforcement of meat culture as patriarchal discipline, the connection between animal consumption and colonial modernization in postwar Korea, the medicalization of female dissent and the appropriation of ecological consciousness through the eroticizing male gaze. Additionally, the analysis considers ecofeminist, posthuman and intersectional implications of dietary refusal, interrogating the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, visibility and empathy, individual resistance and collective transformation. Ultimately, the paper argues that The Vegetarian not only enacts Adams’s thesis but significantly extends it – showing that resistance through the body is simultaneously political, ecological, metaphysical and deeply shaped by cultural and historical contexts that Western feminist theory cannot fully address.
Sebastian et al. (Thu,) studied this question.