Postnational Globalization and en Gendered Meat Production in Ruth L. Ozeki S My Year of Meats

Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory
ISSN: 1043-6928 (Print) 1545-5866 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/glit20
Postnational globalization and (en)gendered meat

production in Ruth L. Ozeki's my year of meats
Monica Chiu
To cite this article: Monica Chiu (2001) Postnational globalization and (en)gendered meat
production in Ruth L. Ozeki's my year of meats , Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 12:1,
99-128, DOI: 10.1080/10436920108580283
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10436920108580283
Published online: 30 Jun 2008.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 963
View related articles
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=glit20
LIT, Vol. 12, pp. 9<M28 © 2001 OPA (OV*T«MS Publishers Association) N.V.
Reprints available directly from the publisher Published by license under
Photocopying permitted by license only the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint,
part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group.
Postnational Globalization and

(En)Gendered Meat Production in
Ruth L. Ozeki's My Year of Meats
Monica Chiu
Many Americans may acknowledge, with chagrin, "a new McDonald's

openfing] somewhere in the world every three hours" (Watson 3).
And others will be loath to hear that "[tjhroughout Asia [...] fast
food is not simply a commodity; it is also a representation of 'the
West' or 'America.'" (Ohnuki-Tierney 161). Despite such negative
reactions to the overwhelming success of McDonald's cheap, high-
fat meals, its boon stems neither from rigorous standardization—
offering a uniform product to homogenous populations world
wide1—nor from mere good fortune. Rather, in a world of rapid
corporate globalization, the restaurant chain has adapted to cultural
preferences and demands much to its financial advantage: vegetable
McNuggets and mutton burgers grace menus in India, while Japan,
Hong Kong, and Taiwan offer the ever-popular teriyaki burger
(Watson 23-24). In the Philippines, McSpaghetti is regularly dished
up, and Ronald McDonald is joined by Aunt McDonald at Beijing
birthday parties as a nod to China's emphasis on "family values"
(24,19). McDonald's successful globalization therefore proves that
"Itjhe process of localization is a two-way street" (37).
Such cultural savvy is hardly the case for character Joichi Ueno,
whose insistence that "Beef is best" in Ruth L. Ozeki's novel My
Year of Meats (1998) begins contentious debates over representations
of America, of women, and of beef marketing and production, all
within globalized capitalism (12). Ozeki's plot revolves around two
female protagonists who are an ocean apart—Jane Takagi-Little and
Joichi's wife Akiko Ueno—and whose introduction arises through
Joichi and through beef. Born in Quam, Minnesota, Jane is the
99
100 M. Chiu
product of a Japanese mother and an Anglo American father. While

agonizing over how to afford her East Village, New York apartment,
she is invited to coordinate My American Wife!, a televised document-
ary series promoting American beef to Japan-based consumers.
Meanwhile, the Tokyo-based program producer Joichi demands
that his wife Akiko rate the shows for "deliciousness of the meats"
and "wholesomeness and authenticity" of the program's families (21);
their disagreements over the series' reality provoke him to verbally,
physically, and sexually abuse his wife, more so when he is frequently
drunk. Akiko is expected to dutifully prepare the featured meals in
order to "put some meat on her bones" and, sooner rather than later,
provide a family heir, preferably a male one. Meanwhile, Jane is
diagnosed with a damaged fallopian tube—she will never provide
biological progeny. And beef, she discovers, is the culprit: while
pregnant with Jane, her mother was prescribed vitamins containing
growth hormones that were initially developed to fatten cattle
quickly at the trough. Thought to prevent women from miscarry-
ing, they were later linked to in vitro birth defects. Through Jane's
and Akiko's struggles with beef, meat production foreshadows
a figurative consumption of women who battle both men and infer-
tility, the former agents in an international beef-for-capital campaign,
the latter the unfortunate result of contaminated meat ingestion,
manifesting itself in uterine cancers, deformities, and often infertility.
The novel uncovers the female protagonists' growing awareness of the
inextricability of men and meat and how this culturally sanctioned
alliance often marginalizes women and poor minorities.
Ozeki's humorous text traces the uses and more serious abuses of
the global [beef] product through the TV series My American Wife!,
a convenient forum for staging the mutually exclusive agendas of
contemporary cultural agents Jane and Joichi. With the series well
underway, for example, Jane often suggests exaggeratedly radical
program ideas to counter the underlying sexist and racist (or exag-
geratedly conservative) content that Joichi promotes. Thus, they
both may work for the same company—the United States's Beef
Export and Trade Syndicate (BEEF-EX)—but never for the same
cause as they wrestle with who and what is "typically American"
and "typically female." Unlike the flexible evolution of an accom-
modating McDonald's across East Asia, Joichi, united with BEEF-EX,
runs roughshod over American (ethnic and gendered) cultural
markers and markets in a Japanese consumer arena while Jane presents
a postnational image of America that does little to rectify the damage
Ozeki's My Year of Meats 201
done. Steeped in conservative stereotypes of America, Joichi bristles

at Jane's cinematic forays into other less "appropriate" angles of
America, which eventually reveal the hidden and horrible world of
American beef production, from pharmaceutical farming methods
that taint beef and sicken humans to the suffering of animals in
abattoirs. Amid their two competing narratives, the overdetermined
My American Wife! insists that the two countries' agents inevitably
fracture and constantly define "America" according to their own
interpretations of culturally affecting modalities. David Palumbo-
Liu speaks to a form of the global that is necessarily influenced by
"issues of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, and class, and other
differential modes of identification, [which] complicate the pro-
duction, consumption, and functioning of culture" ("Introduction:
Unhabituated Habituses" 3).2 Ozeki's novel adheres to such con-
temporary and ubiquitous notions of globalization, addressing the
inherent worldliness, changeability, difference, and unpredictability
of the term itself as ideas or products, such as beef, crisscross inter-
national borders. So much so that no clear delineation of oppositions
exists, problematizing simplistic labels such as "typical" (American
wife) or "representative" (of East and West). Such a conclusion,
however, overlooks the text's subtle privileging of already uneasy
distinctions in its (unsuccessful) attempts to destabilize "nation."
The novel's upshot more readily reflects what Frederick Buell calls
a "reconstitution of U.S. cultural nationalism in an interesting, new,
'postnational' form" (551). For while beef's many incarnations
(pun intended) in My Year of Meats map the indeterminate results
of globalization on the one hand—as they affect international
beef sales—they slyly conceal, on the other hand, a subversive
narrative extolling predetermined, white, nationalist, and patriarchal
agendas.3 The invisible, national (read: multicultural) ideology
that the novel creates—a type of overculture—reconstitutes the
very localized, national framework that it initially attempts to
subvert.4
Such a reading demolishes Ozeki's carefully constructed ideology
that touts an acceptance of racial minorities and women. For Jane's
insistence on multicultural rhetoric and images is less an acceptance
of difference than an internationalization of metaphors in a constant
mediation of constructions. America has always viewed itself and
been viewed by others—constructed itself and been constructed—
through fictions, as in the American Dream, characterized by
erroneous notions of opportunity, freedom, and expansiveness.
W2 M. Chin
Take the American ranching tradition (as it inheres in beef and in

the novel) which traditionally suggested notions of the West, of
unlimited and expansive land, of freedom, of Manifest Destiny,5
and of individuality and independence as it is bound up in "home on
the range."6 Yet home has been inflected with the domestication of
women—to which Joichi attempts to moor My American Wife!—
begging the question, to whose independence and self-expansion
does this "West" refer? Furthermore, Jane's final documentary is
itself a mediation of images construed according to her particular
agenda: the hybrid construction of beef illustrates how natural
herbivores become carnivores7 in their consumption of slaughter-
house waste products-cum-cattle feed; the linguistic term "cow"
(psychologically inedible in such a "raw" form) becomes "beef" for
our plates and palates.8 In such a manner, the novel implicitly
addresses the acts of duplicity inherent in both linguistically and
visually establishing ideas of "the West" and of "independence,"
bound up in the idea of "the" American Dream (only one?), and
therefore criticizes the impossibility of destroying such fatuous
notions in their endless mediation. "Truth wasn't stranger than
fiction," Jane discovers by novel's end, "it was fiction" (360). My
reading will suggest that Ozeki's female characters—even though
they are sans men and meat—become re-domesticated (read: dis-
abled, non(re)productive) despite Jane's efforts otherwise, exemplify-
ing the work of multiple/transnational constructions and their
agents on women and minorities. In both preglobal and postnational
places, women continue to embody the work of patriarchy whether
through the physical damages of beef consumption, through the
emotional burdens inflicted by transnational corporations (TNCs)
and the meat-eating men affiliated with their capitalist practices, or
through the text's unsuccessful attempt to unhinge an adherence to
"nation" and its concomitant patriarchy amid globalization.
A GLOBALIZATION OF MEAT
Joichi, a hearty beef lover who advocates meat's superiority over the
so-called lesser grains, bread, and rice, ignores the history of Japan's
hesitant acceptance of beef in his television marketing campaigns.
That is, beef was initially forbidden by sixth-century Japanese
Buddhism in adherence to "the doctrine of mercy for all living beings."
Much later, the Japanese regarded the product, quite derogatorily,
as Western and therefore barbaric. Yet with the rise of modernization

and Westernization, and the American occupation of (and influence
within) Japan after the Second World War, the Japanese accepted,
even revered, beef. In fact, a dish dubbed "a civilized bowl of rice"
contained beef or pork slices (Ohnuki-Tierney 166-67).
Unlike its lesser status in the East, meat has always enjoyed a
favorable position in the West. Historically, meat (pork and lard in
particular) was prioritized over bread in Western European countries
as a "valued element of human nutrition" (Montanari 13). The aristo-
cracy viewed meat as "a symbol of power, a tool for generating
vigour, physical energy, and the ability to do combat, qualities
which constituted the primary legitimation of power. On the other
hand, rejecting meat constituted a sign of humility and of marginal-
ization [... ] from the society of the strong" (14-15). Montanari traces
the decline of meat consumption among the poor during population
increases, restrictions against animals in cities, and the usurpation of
agricultural land for other purposes (104-105). This did little to hier-
archize bread and grains above meat (145); rather, it re-emphasized
the assumed superiority of the aristocracy over those classes that
were unable to afford meat (153-54). Vast improvements in feedlot,
packaging, and transportation technologies, according to Montanari,
prompted an increase in beef consumption despite "the first English
vegetarian society" in 1847 that rallied against eating meat in a "new
humanitarian concern" for animals (154).
Joichi continues to overlook the fact that despite beef's current
growing popularity among Japanese youth, meat (and therefore
McDonald's) still takes a back seat to the Japanese staple, rice (168).
In the heavily meat-eating West, however, rice is tantamount to
bread: the latter may be privileged as a national staple, but it lacks
the prestige afforded to beef. Carol J. Adams reports how, historic-
ally, "intellectually superior" people (men in general and white men
in particular) have been urged to eat meat (31). And consider
expressions coupling strength and virility with beef, such as "beefing
something up" or "getting to the meat of the matter" (26, 36). It is
no wonder that in many stateside locations, the luxury of consuming
a piece of bloody meat is prized far above consuming a loaf of bread
(albeit many vegetarians would disagree).
In a broader context, food serves as a cultural signifier. When
speaking of race relations, food often embodies the palatable side of
an "other," a side that many Americans find easier to "digest"
than these so-called others' religious, familial, and social practices.9
204 M. Chiu
Imbibing what others eat is to embody a cultural difference in its

most simplistic sense, sating the necessity to exert a more concerted
effort toward knowing a particular group of people outside of
frequenting a Chinese or Mexican or Indian restaurant for one's
weekly fill of culture. Furthermore, beef, to vegetarians and animal
activists, represents unnecessary cruelty to animals and has sparked
debates over animal rights in research laboratories. The revelation
of meafs gruesome production, vividly discussed in Upton
Sinclair's The Jungle and illustrated in the latter portion of Ozeki's
novel, codifies larger issues surrounding the rise of unions and
prohibitions against child labor, as well as more recent laws
concerning safe and sanitary working conditions and the standard-
ization of hygienic food processing. Because beef is marked in
these varied ways, the aggressive and culturally flummoxed global
marketing and distribution of American beef in Ozeki's novel
inheres in issues of ethnicity, feminism, and ethics, specifically over
Jane's concerns about genetically engineered cattle and its relation
to (in)fertility.
In order to trace beef's capitalist trail within the novel, I reference
a transnational circulation of "cultural capital as cultural objects,"
birthed and defined within one arena until faced with potential
transformation via a network of interpreters in another—specifically
international—arena (Palumbo-Liu 11). Subsequently, definitions
surrounding the creation of a cultural icon can be affected and
transmuted by the gender, class, ethnic affiliation, and operating
ideologies of those at the "field of origin" as well as those at the
"field of destination" (11), in which a field designates a web of social
interrelations ("economics, culture, education, politics") and its
products (Johnson 7). n The changing articulations of "differential
social power" and the "dispositions" and "inclinations" of agents
who inhabit this field inadvertently flatten out or extend changes in
cultural icons (Bourdieu 30). Given the innumerable avenues by
which cultural capital might be inflected with connotations, it may
be difficult, perhaps impossible, to theorize end results across global
terrain. Perhaps we can only "name culture retroactively," Palumbo-
Liu suggests, as the culmination of its crossings, its re-labeling, and
its numerous effects (20-21 ).12 One must recognize, however, that
such a concept allows culture to be both defined and to remain
undefined.
Jane's often inane redefinitions of Joichi's static ideas concerning
race and gender, as well as America's concern over politically correct
representations, magnifies the effects of media's agents influenced

by webs of social and political meaning. Ozeki herself regards media
as the "obfuscating and bizarre world of commercially-sponsored
television and the cross-cultural misunderstanding that such media
engenders" ("There and Back Again" 42). Under the monetary aus-
pices of BEEF-EX, for example, the series My American Wife! depends
heavily upon the buying habits of Japanese women, underscoring
what Ozeki deems an "ethics of TV production" as well as "the rela-
tionship between mediamaker and audience." As a case in point,
the series evolves "to foster among Japanese housewives a proper
understanding of the wholesomeness of U.S. meats" (10), not to
directly promote the consumers' good health, but to increase America's
wealth. Japanese consumers are encouraged to use beef "properly"
(can it be used improperly?), ironically underscoring what Jane
eventually discovers to be America's improper beef production and
advertisement. The latter illustrates how cultural capital (beef) can
be commercially pitched as it gains and loses value in shifting mar-
kets. According to Jane's research, for example, the FDA discovered
in 1959 that the synthetic hormone diethylstilbestrol (or DES) showed
"signs of feminization" in "low-income families in the South [...]
after [they ate] cheap chicken parts and wastes from processing
plants." It subsequently was banned from use in poultry, but still
approved for use in cattle. At the same time, DES was approved as
a vitamin for pregnant women, even advertised in the prestigious
medical Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecohgy. Despite initial warn-
ings, the drug-as-vitamin sold rampantly, boasting "an estimated five
million" prescriptions. But in 1971, a group of Boston-based physi-
cians terminated its use after discovering that young women whose
mothers took DES often developed forms of uterine cancer as well as
"irregular menstrual cycles, difficult pregnancies, and structural
mutations of the vagina, uterus, and cervix." The male progeny of
DES-prescribed women battled against congenital disorders that
increased their own "risk of testicular cancer and infertility." Despite
a DES ban, Jane discovers, the continued though illegal use of DES
in feedlot animals—a usage as high as 95 percent—regularly finds
its way onto America's dinner tables and into American bodies.
According to her research, when Europe banned U.S. beef imports
in 1989 for its high hormone levels, a new trade agreement was
struck in 1990 between the U.S. and Japan (124-126).13 Given the
1991 production of My American Wife!, Jane can only surmise that
the U.S. had taken its defectively dangerous product to another
106 M. Chiu
overseas market—Japan—and promoted its superior qualities,

thereby illuminating, as Palumbo-Liu suggests, the unpredictability
of what meanings are appended to cultural capital in transit and
marking its fluctuating cultural value.
In Ozeki's text, circulating such capital becomes a euphemism for
prostitution between TNCs (pimps) and the women who become
vehicles of sale, promoting masculine American beef to female
Japanese consumers.14 The hybrid Jane admits her suitability as
a "cultural pimp" in the marketing arena, being "half" herself, but
is thoroughly disgusted with the series' prescriptive "all-American
values" (9). The debut of My American Wife!—whose individual
episodes sport Japlish-sounding titles such as "My Hobby" or
"Lady Gossip" or even "Pretty Home"15—features Suzy Flowers,
who leads the audience on a tour of home and family before
showcasing a quick 'n' easy Coca-Cola rump roast (27). The debut
results in the rapid depletion of rump roasts and Coca-Cola from
Japanese grocery stores, subsequently ensuring that "the commer-
cials were to bleed into the documentaries, and documentaries
were to function as commercials" (41). The real-life Suzy, however,
is inadvertently prostituted, for while BEEF-EX and Coca-Cola are
monetarily rewarded, Suzy hardly profits: the on-screen romance,
garnished by meat, becomes an off-screen heartache, for Suzy
accidentally discovers—in mid filming—her husband's affair with
a cocktail waitress. Joichi, who is patently indifferent to Suzy's
troubles, revels in the Flowers' on-screen depiction of a 1950's
fantasy family world reminiscent of television shows such as Father
Knows Best or Leave It to Beaver. Once Suzy has been used, she
is conveniently tossed aside, covertly concealing a side of this
American domestic "tranquility" from Japanese housewives. In
buying this fantasy via meat—conveniently "getting a taste" of
America16—beef consumption requires wholesale visual consump-
tion of media images, which in turn consume their least suspecting
victims, like Suzy.
This said, the women featured (even duped) on My American Wife!
must be endowed with ideas that Joichi perceives as most palatable
to his Japanese, female audience: "warm personalities]," "docile
husbandfs]," "obedient children" and "attractive friends & neighbors"
(11-12). Such a construction reduces American women to stereo-
types at the same time that it assumes Japanese women's inability
to separate fact from fiction. Akiko, however, regards Joichi's
hand-picked episodes as highly inauthentic: "[The Thayers] were so
[...] perfect, you know?" Akiko laments of the Becky Thayer show.
Becky, wife and mother in a heterosexual, white, two-child family,
is "a gourmet cook and an antiques collector" whose hobby involves
running a bed and breakfast. "[T]hey just didn't feel like a real
family to me," Akiko admits (128-29). Joichi berates her in a manner
exposing his complicity in the concocted representation: "You just
don't get it. The whole point is to show perfect families. We don't
want families with flaws" (129, emphasis in text).17 Jane, enraged at
such a narrow scope of vision, chronicles the lives of the Martinez
family, Mexican American immigrants, in order "to widen the audi-
ence's understanding of what it is to be American [...] to introduce
the quirky, rich diversity" of this country. The series revolves
around their specialty, Beefy Burritos (64). However, beef becomes
secondary to Alberto Martinez's narrative explaining how he lost
his hand in a farming accident, and how he eventually fulfilled his
wife's dream of producing an American son, Bobby. Thus, remarks
Jane, "Bert [Alberto] paid for her dream with his hand," subtly
evoking the violence by which immigrants become "American"
(58). Bobby, dressed in baggy pants and his father's felt hat, happily
poses in the parting shot with his "4-H project piglet" he has ironic-
ally named "Supper." Each successive image in this game of
one-upmanship only iterates the endless circularity of the novel's
images: beef is coupled with American Dream families, subsequently
undercut by "real" immigrant families whose stories—advocating
a "pull-themselves-up-by-their-bootstraps" mentality—and their
pig-cum-pork suppers become re-imagined fodder for overseas
consumption. Essentially, nothing has been revised in order to
promote a more thoughtful understanding of a diverse (and often
embattled) America.
Jane, hardly ignorant of this vicious cycle, suggests rebuttals to
Joichi's whitewashed ideas for My American Wife! that more readily
reveal tongue-in-cheek gibes at his agenda than humble apologies
for overriding his approved (if racist and sexist) programs. For
example, she offers to host an afternoon of Beef Fudge making
gleaned from Mrs. Payne's cookbook Best O'Beef (183), or to feature
authentic meat specialties like Bunny Dunn's "Scrambled Brains
'n' Eggs," "Simmered Heart," "Pan-Fried Oysters," or bulls' testicles
(208).18 As an added barb, Jane continues, "[Background to this
attractive [featured] family and their abundant beef [... is] the
Colorado setting [... which] conforms perfectly to Japanese
people's preconceptions of America's 'Big Rugged Nature,' replete
108 M. Chili
with [w]ide-open prairies, snow-capped mountains." She adds that

the region's "many interesting examples of 'Wild West' stories"
include "one [...] about a cannibal named Alfred Packer, who
killed five traveling companions and ate their remains during a par-
ticularly cold winter in 1874" (230-31), subtly linking human canni-
balism to the contemporary practice of creating carnivores out of
grass-eating cows through animal feed created from other animals'
remains. Such a practice has resulted in Bovine Spongiform Enceph-
alopathy (BCE) or "mad cow disease," in which reproducing proteins,
called prions, attack healthy proteins and slowly damage neural tis-
sue.19 The fact that prions cannot be eliminated even after reducing
consumable meat to ash illustrates, again through meat, the sickening
cycle of consumption and pathology to which Ozeki's novel points.
As Jane and joichi's light sparring eventually becomes an ideolo-
gical battle, globalization is hardly global. Rather, a burgeoning
postnational project quietly and insidiously establishes itself as
a nearly invisible, but ultimately unavoidable, national narrative.
On many levels, the novel expects that its readers will sympathize
with and support Jane's efforts at televising America's "difference."
They are supposed to revel in Joichi's provocation to anger when
Jane films the beautiful and angelic Christina Bukowsky, who
has been paralyzed from the waist down by a wayward Wal-Mart
delivery truck but eventually comes to consciousness whispering
"lamb chops," her favorite dish. The featured meat, declares an
enraged Joichi, is not only unAmerican but also supplied by the
rival export country of Australia (132-35). Eventually, he threatens
to fire Jane over filming the vegetarian, mixed-race, lesbian couple
Dyann (who is black) and Lara (who is white) who raise two adopted
daughters (one black and one white). Jane slyly admits to highlight-
ing "a truly affirming message about sexuality and race and the
many faces of motherhood to Japanese women" (212). 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 differ-
ence, 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. If Ozeki's novel delivers a globalization of
difference, its underlying overculture, or ur-text, reiterates nothing
less than a postnational (or a white American) agenda. "I wanted to
make programs with documentary integrity, and at first I believed
in a truth that existed," states Jane. "But slowly, as my skills

improved and I learned about editing and camera angles and the
effect that music can have on meaning, I realized that truth was
like race and could be measured only in ever-diminishing approx-
imations" (176).
Thus, the truths that she learns stabilize a hegemony revolving
around women and minorities.21 Take Akiko's impressions of
America, influenced by Jane's televised personalities (the Martinez
family, the Bukowskis, Dyann and Lara). When she leaves Joichi
and travels to the United States, she embarks on a pleasure train trip
through the South to visit the Boudreaux, a My American Wife!
family. She revels in the beautiful landscape, "its deep-blue
swamplands cloaked in tattered mists," but is suddenly taken aback
when a curve in the track reveals the "mangy dogs" of shanty-like
neighborhoods where children play amid the rusty wrecks of
"skeletal cars." "She'd never thought of Americans as poor [...].
Not in real life" (136-37). Akiko's reactions illuminate Jane's nor-
malizing of difference, an inclusion of diversity that concomitantly
excludes the violence of racial tensions and the poverty of so many
minorities. While Akiko is initially dumbstruck at recognizing how
TV has softened America's harsher realities, she is immediately
swept into a celebration of diversity: the attendant in the black-
occupied train car in which she rides notices her difference, or her
Japanese features. Suddenly showered with attention, Akiko
becomes one of "them," a poor minority in a second-class car, and she
"shivered with excitement." "This is America! [...] She clapped her
hands and then hugged herself with delight," munching on fried
chicken legs as she is "absorbed into a massive body" of singing,
laughing black people (339, emphasis in text), a blatant throwback
to the happy-go-lucky "coon," the dancing "Jim Crow." Akiko can
afford to ignore the mean view outside her window, for she is merely
a visitor passing through, a cinematic eye like a television camera
that can record one story but tell another through what is filmed
and what is forgotten. The forgotten story denies Jane's "celebratory"
series of a happy, multicultural America. So much so that Akiko,
mesmerized by scenes of poverty outside her window, can express
deep sorrow one moment and sheer excitement the next, an inher-
ent contradiction that erases one view in order to offer a more
acceptable, yet wholly fictional, substitute. In addition, it is with
humor and irony that this My American Wife! family of the Boudr-
eaux—who boast two biological and 10 adopted children, some of
110 M. Chiu
whom are Amerasian war orphans with cleft palates or emotional

problems and others who are South American children missing fin-
gers or exhibiting psychosomatic abnormalities—occupy a renov-
ated Southern plantation, with one of their more sulky teenagers
moving into the slave quarters. Here again, the novel gestures
toward an endless circulation of meaning in which the latest "other"
inhabits the former house of slavery, now touted by Jane as a habita-
tion of happy multiculturalism, meanings completely lost on both
Jane and Joichi. The foundation of contemporary diversity is built
on the soil of somebody else's sorrow. While Joichi grumbles at
their pork-based Cajun Baby Back Ribs, which both he and BEEF-EX
view as second-class meat, he is more readily irritated by the
Boudreaux, a so-called second-class family whose mixed-race children
represent "dirty" blots in his attempt to portray a "pure" America.
Ozeki's text presents simultaneously an emphasis on and an indif-
ference to difference.
Akiko's divided reactions exemplify not only the capitalist work
of TNCs—feeding one population at the physical expense of
another—but that of Ozeki's text itself, criticizing one facet of the
American Dream only to bolster other facets. For in spite of Jane's
resounding criticisms of Joichi's TV choices, America becomes the
idealized location (West over East) where women, specifically, can
live their dreams. Jane, for example, is once employed in Tokyo,
but she produces such a smashingly successful documentary in the
states that eventually every major American network clamors for
rights to the slaughterhouse footage she has filmed, which reveals
how commercial growth hormones in cattle can accelerate human
sexual maturation. But the novel's hierarchization of America over
Japan collapses under the revelation of a subtext created by TNCs.
Japanese citizen Joichi, for example, serves the goals of the Amer-
ican company BEEF-EX which sells U.S. beef to Japan through its
American, Japanese, and "hybrid" staff in New York City. Nothing
remains as neatly categorized as "West" and "East" or "American"
and "Japanese." In fact, American men are cast as pawns who
perform BEEF-EX's dirty work for a heavy price. Gale Dunn and
his American Dunn & Son feedlot hands circulate debilitating
chemicals through their market-bound cattle claiming that their
actions are sanctioned by ignorance: "It's medicine to keep' em
disease free," states one feedlot hand regarding the fluid Jane sees
him injecting into the animals. "[Makes] good clean meat for you
city folks. That's all I know" (266). Gale can effortlessly recite the
scientific names and contents for each injection and their sub-
sequent effects on his cattle, yet he remains wholly unaware of the
destruction these chemicals wreak on human bodies. When told
that five-year-old Rosie Dunn, his stepsister, is afflicted with
premature thelarche caused by inhaling airborne chemicals used
on the feedlot or by ingesting them through the popsicles that Gale
offers her as daily treats, Gale cries with anguish, "I never knew
[... ] you gotta believe me I never knew" (357). John Dunn, Gale's
father, suspects foul play by pharmaceutical companies: "You're
just throwin' your money at these big pharmacooticals [...]. Them
scientists of yers, they git their paychecks from the Pharmacoot-
icals, and they're all in cahoots with the gov'ment" (263). But he
refuses any action that would jeopardize his hefty income, such as
investigating the causes and subsequently prohibiting cattle injec-
tions. Thus, while the text seemingly elevates America over Japan,
the reader forgets that both terms are always already contextual-
ized or mediated. Take the pathological connections forged
between meat and poor minorities, in which Joichi demands
that My American Wife! contain no "synergistic association with
deformities. Like race. Or poverty" (57). Consequently, Jane recalls a
puzzling shoot with the Dawes family. According to Purcell Dawes,
many poor blacks like himself often purchase chicken parts
such as necks and chitterlings, which are less expensive than
breasts or thighs. However, after continued consumption, Purcell
noticed visible breast development and audible voice changes
occurring from the ingestion of hormones injected into market-
produced birds and settling in their necks and livers. Purcell hails
from Harmony, Mississippi, ironically named in light of the tragic
disharmony between human corporeal development and hormone-
infected meat. These discoveries besmirch Joichi's illusions of the
American Dream even as BEEF-EX upholds them. Such contradic-
tions between marketing and actuality (that is, Joichi's rejection of
race in a product that literally pathologizes race and poverty) are
nothing more than "discourses" that mask what Buell terms "a new
breed of cultural nationalism." Despite globalization, "nothing
essentially has changed" (550, 580). I suggest, then, that despite
Ozeki's gesture toward multiculturalism, the American Dream is
reserved for those who set the parameters of consumption, not for
those consumed in the process. The drive for profit detrimentally
affects the production of minorities as well as the reproductive use
of women's bodies, as outlined below.
Ill M. Chiu
MEAT AND MASCULINITY: SEI SHONACON'S THE PILLOW BOOK AS

A GLOBAL, FEMINIST BRIDGE
The text's insinuation of a fractured America readily bleeds into

a mutually exclusive depiction of women, divided or commodified
between two extremes: the domesticated housewife (Akiko) and the
unmarried, sexually active, and "dangerous" woman (Jane). Despite
their dichotomous positioning, they may be figuratively consumed
by either the men or the institutions that control them. According to
a BEEF-EX fax, My American Wife! must "culminate in the celebra-
tion of a featured meat, climaxing in its glorious consumption. It's
the meat (not the Mrs.) who's the star of our show!" But the following
lines debunk this initial assertion as the fax continues, "Of course,
the 'Wife of the Week' is important too. She must be attractive,
appetizing, and ail-American. She is the Meat Made Manifest:
ample, robust, yet never tough or hard to digest" (8). This televised
American wife, supposedly representative of American wives, meta-
morphoses into meat incarnate, readily digestible. Women, like
butchered animals, says Adams, are "packaged" for consumption,
or objectified (a form of anesthetization) in preparation "to be made
consumable in a patriarchal world" (Sexual Politics 55). The series
climaxes in the so-called edible "Mrs," encouraging viewers to
"buy" into the televised images through purchasing U.S.-produced
beef.22
Ozeki's characters are presented challenges in the international-
ization of female imagemaking as they are bound to a system of
male domination.23 They rise to the occasion, exemplifying Palumbo-
Liu's theory that globalization can empower those, like women,
who may often lack "accepted" forms of cultural, social, and
political knowledge (7-8). In fact, the novel advocates a growing
awareness in the two female protagonists of the inextricability of
men and meat and how this culturally sanctioned alliance often
marginalizes women and the poor, instigating a feminist bent from
the novel's very masculine connotations of meat. If man/patriarchy
is to meat as woman is to vegetable, then "vegetable," Adams
suggests, "represents the least desirable characteristics" in society,
denoting the paralyzed Christina Bukowski and other patients
deemed brain dead as "vegetables," lacking in virility and vigor. As
well, a vegetable is a "symbol of feminine passivity" in society's
preference for the masculine and its bias against vegetarians (36).24
Those men in Ozeki's text who do eat and promote meat are almost
Ozcki's My Year of Meats 113
all patently unattractive, whether physically or morally. Take Gale,

cast with animal-like features: his "reddened wattles bunched up"
around his collar as he twitched uncomfortably in his suit; his
nervous blue eyes resembled those of a "newly farrowed sow"
(255). The discovery that he fondles his stepsister Rosie creates
a sexual sadist from this seemingly harmless man. His father John
is a lecherous man; his racist feedlot hands are ignorant; and the
crude slaughterhouse workers decorate their office walls with
"a large poster of a young blond Amazon in jungle bikini, who
overlooked the meat-cutting operations below" (53). Jane addresses
her Japanese crew of Oh and Suzuki (who remain without first
names throughout the book) as "boys" and never as men (89).
Jane's lover Sloan Rankin—whose name resonates with the "rank-
ness" of rotting meat—is, not ironically, a man "cadaverously" thin,
"an exquisite corpse," who sporadically appears in and out of Jane's
hotel bedrooms (54, 55). Because his apartment has no soft angles,
Jane equates it to an abattoir, suggesting that it is she who has come
to be slaughtered (220). Unlike Jane, who desires intimacy, Sloan
searches for a "perfectly safe" partner: "He wanted a simple answer
to a nagging question, like scratching an itch," Jane says. "I wanted
something else [...]. I wanted more" (161). His initial reaction to
her surprising pregnancy (given that she has been medically
confirmed as infertile due to her mother's DES use) is to abort the
baby, which has less to do with the added responsibility of being
a father than with his anger at Jane's inability to keep her promise
about safety without birth control. Sloan's tears render little sym-
pathy when he eventually weeps over the miscarried fetus. That the
status of their relationship is decidedly ambiguous at the conclusion
underscores the novel's wary stance toward men and the impossib-
ility of a harmonious and workable heterosexual relationship.
Ozeki is criticizing the inextricable link between men and
domination that creates the inevitable rifts in the novel's relation-
ships. Men in this novel who are associated with TNCs and global
capital are invested with power, often negatively so. These same
men create spurious images of women, expect particular behavior
from them, and wreak emotional or physical damage with impunity.
Take Joichi, the text's aggressor, antagonist, and womanizer who
shamelessly beats his wife; deep in the heart of Texan clubs, he
drains shots of whiskey, his "carrion breath" repulsive as he bounces
"big-breasted American women" on his lap (43,42). As well, Joichi
confines Akiko to the meat recipes of his liking, allowing My American
174 M. Chili
Wife! to limit her to repressive cooking patterns that are wedded

to his imposing patriarchal ideology. That is, cooking, which is
a traditionally feminine task, is tied to fertility in Joichi's desire to
fatten his wife for reproduction, which remains a masculine and
lineage-directed notion in Joichi's yearning for a male heir over
a female one. During their first few years of marriage, when con-
ceiving is a low priority, Akiko once presses a "Mandom SuperPlus
[condom wrapper... ] carefully between the pages of the cooking
magazine she'd been studying," illustrating her inextricability from
Joichi's "sexual appetite" in her everyday routine (45). Dissatisfied
in her marriage, though, Akiko has lost a taste for both food and sex.
When John announces that they should work toward conception,
Akiko's periods have already ceased from chronic bulimia: "like an
animal alive [... meat] would climb its way back up her gullet, until
it burst from the back of her throat" (37). Thus she concludes: "She
could not keep any life down inside her," whether "beast" or baby
(38). Incensed at what John deems as her inability to conceive—
never questioning his potential infertility—he beats her, most often
after a My American VWft'.'-inspired dinner.25 O/eki effectively deflates
his character when Jane dubs him John Wayno (as "Ueno" is pro-
nounced) after the celebrated cowboy John Wayne (41). Both char-
acters possess attitudes that advertise racism: Wayne killed Indians
while Wayno/Ueno regards blacks, Mexicans, and children of mixed
racial heritage as unAmerican. As well, they both promote sexism:
Wayne, the bachelor riding alone into the sunset, seeks women only
for enjoyment while Wayno/Ueno finds gratification in spousal
abuse, rendering this beef eater a veritable animal in the bedroom,
much to Akiko's endangerment.26 Wayne exudes a reputation of
rough bravado and attractive indifference; in contrast, Wayno/Ueno
is characterized as an ineffectual cowboy, a Japlish-speaking effem-
inate Asian "other" whose only power resides in subordinating his
wife to his sexual demands. Other male characters are similarly
punished by Ozeki, from the insipid Gale with his destructive
ignorance to his greedy and lecherous wheelchair-bound father.
Even though Jane's Japanese film crew of Oh and Suzuki no longer
entertain themselves, at novel's end, by shooting out the crotches of
poster "girls" with an air gun (53), and even though they heroically
salvage Dunn & Son slaughterhouse footage from Joichi's destruct-
ive wrath, they are nevertheless minor characters whose eventual
goodwill cannot erase the weightier collection of physically and
emotionally unattractive men.
Men may retain an unknowingly heavy hand in a nefarious beef

production, but are irrelevant when it comes to emotional produc-
tion, even conception. No viable relationship, whether heterosexual
or homosexual, exists by the novel's conclusion except that of
lesbians Lara and Dyann. Ozeki hints, as well, at Akiko's burgeon-
ing homosexuality when, in the hospital after Joichi's most brutal
beating, she is taken under the protective wing of Nurse Tomoko,
concerned about and attracted to the hospitalized victim. At Akiko's
invitation two days before leaving for America, Tomoko arrives for
dinner when the two share a kiss. "Are you a lesbian?" Akiko asks
her. "I don't know [... ] I've never thought about it," she answers.
"I have," says Akiko, "[...] but I don't know either" (318-19).
Even this conclusion questions the feasibility of any successful
relationship for either Jane or Akiko. Battles between men and
women, like the book's embattled representations of America,
become products forged by BEEF-EX, whose operational agenda
resides in boosting American beef exports for American financial
gain. However global in their transactions, TNC's final investment
is always in America.27 Buell describes this postnational structure
as a "paradoxical reconstitution of an American national identity for
postnational circumstances" (554).
It is no wonder that ties between women are strengthened and
sustained through pre-chapter excerpts from Sei Shonagon's The
Pillow Book.28 This eleventh-century text, mainly a collection of
impressions about Heian court life, is a favorite of both Jane and
Akiko, readers at opposite sides of the globe, uniting them at the
same time that it divides them from meat and men. Shonagon, circa
965, claims to have been given a sheaf of paper from the Minister of
the Center while serving as a lady in waiting for Empress Sadako.29
She creates from it The Pillow Book, named for its insertion in
a drawer within a Japanese pillow, usually a block of wood on which
women rested their ornately styled hair. The tenth century heralded
a plethora of Japanese women writers, including Murasaki Shikibu,
author of the mid-Heian psychological novel The Tale of Genji. Like
many women of the court, Shonagon entertained lovers, scheduling
midnight rendezvous through a series of notes brushed in haiku
and hidden in the long sleeves of men's and women's robes for
discreet delivery. Shonagon, known for her lists of likes and dislikes,
includes the proper and improper behavior of such nocturnal
visitors: "A good lover will behave as elegantly at dawn as at any
other time," writes Shonagon, describing how his morning attentions
116 M. Chiu
should be as gentle and loving as those of the night before. He must

whisper sweet phrases that will buoy his lover until the next visit,
and if so, then "this moment of parting will remain among her most
charming memories." However, "when he jumps out of bed, scurries
about the room, tightly fastens his trouser-sash, rolls up the sleeves
of his Court cloak, over-robe, or hunting costume [... ] one really
begins to hate him" (Ozeki 49-50). With such an underlying feminist
bent, and the fact that Shonagon wrote in the standard literary form
reserved for male scholars (Chinese characters), she is considered
a bold woman for her time. In fact, Murasaki remarked that despite
Shonagon's "gifted" nature, her desire to give "free rein" to her
emotions would prove "frivolous." "How can things turn out
well for such a woman?" asks Murasaki (Shonagon 9-10). Akiko,
a casual reader of The Pillow Book, is impressed with Shonagon's
confidence and her writing ability, so much so that she begins her
own collection of impressions.
Jane, on the other hand, who formally studied Shonagon at Kyoto
University, is inspired to become a documentarian, "to be different,"
to create shows that would educate Japanese women about America
(Ozeki 15). But to be different in Ozeki's textual world is to be
pathological. Lamenting a former "floundering [in Japan and
America] in a miasma of misinformation about culture and race,"
Jane, as the coordinator for My American Wife!, attempts to document
a relatively unknown side of America's meat industry (27). She has
gleaned, first of all, that Dunn & Son regularly used a legal, manu-
factured feed additive—or an "exotic feed"—that might have consisted
of any of the following: "recycled cardboard and newspaper [... ]
by-products from potato chips, breweries, liquor distilleries, saw-
dust, wood chips," and cement, all of which add bulk at consider-
ably lower prices than pure grain feed; plastic pellets, which expand
on ingestion; or cow feces—literally, a recycled product from those
animals who eat and eliminate plastic, which is then reused. Such
"factory farms" fatten livestock more quickly and easily at the feeding
troughs, eliminating the use of large tracts of grazing land and
saving ranchers thousands of dollars on feed. In addition, all of the
Dunns' cattle are given "a prophylactic dose of Aureomycin," Gale
claims, "and then [we] implant 'em with Syvonex as a growth
supplement" (257).30 Secondly, as aforementioned, she learns of
young Rosie's thelarche (premature maturation), a result of ingesting
airborne growth stimulants. Jane's findings—a shocking window
into the clandestine feeding and slaughter of cattle—resonate with
the meticulous documentation that Shonagon leaves of Heian court

life. For while little is known of her life after court service, her
list-like impressions are now invaluable documents for twentieth-
century scholars' understanding of the aristocratic lifestyles of both
men and women in tenth-century Japan.
Never in the novel, however, do Akiko and Jane discover the other's
affection for this author. Rather, the novel relies upon Pillow Book
excerpts to collapse the distance between the tenth and twentieth
centuries as well as to narrow the gap between Akiko in Tokyo and
Jane in New York City. Ozeki's frequent Shonagon quotations at
chapter headings foreshadow the novel's feminism. Take those
quotes on the life of Japanese female pearl divers. Even though the
"sea is a frightening thing at the best of times," writes Shonagon,
these divers continue to plunge into its dark waters "for their
livelihood." While immersed, with ropes about their waists, accom-
panying men relax in their boats, singing. "It is an amazing sight,"
Shonagon exclaims, "for they [the men] do not show the slightest
concern about the risks the woman is taking." When the diver is
spent of breath, she pulls on a cord attached to a cork that floats on
the water's surface, and the men pull her up with great rapidity,
where she "cling[s] to the side of the boat, her breath coming in
painful gasps. The sight is enough to make even an outsider feel the
brine dripping. I can hardly imagine this is a job that anyone would
covet" (85-86). Shonagon laments that these women's lifelines (the
rope and the cork) are intimately intertwined with the dangers of
their work, fostering a dependence on men. Akiko, disgusted by
dependency on Joichi and her sorry state of cowering domesticity,
balks at My American Wifel's "perfect" Becky Thayer, echoing
Shonagon, who writes, "When I make myself imagine what it is like
to be one of those women who live at home, faithfully serving their
husbands—women who have not a single exciting prospect in life yet
who believe they are perfectly happy—I am filled with scorn" (17).
Finally, the interconnected and opposing themes of conception
and infertility bridge the global distance, and enforce solidarity,
between Akiko and Jane. While Joichi attempts to use meat to fatten
Akiko for pregnancy, Jane blames meat for terminating her unex-
pected pregnancy. At the same time that they are united by men,
they are divided by them: Akiko is liberated from Joichi by leaving
him, and Jane, converting to vegetarianism, is freed from meat.
Once Akiko accepts her body by rejecting Joichi's abuse of it—that
is, once she leaves after a particularly brutal beating and a rape in
118 M. Chin
which he forces himself into her anus as she crouches on all fours
like an animal—she discovers that she has conceived. This is twofold:
she conceives of herself as a valued human being; and she claims to
have "conceived, in her mind"—and not necessarily through sexual
relations with Joichi—the fertilization, division, and continued
development of an egg. Akiko's own personal pillow book traces
her transformation from a weak, "barren" "girl" to a more independ-
ent, pregnant woman. As a matter of fact, as long as she remains
with Joichi she fills the pages with bleak images. "It is night and
one is feigning sleep," she writes. "One becomes aware of his
critical mind grazing one's sparrow ribs, considering the cavity of
one's pelvis, fingering the knob of one's spine, disdaining one's
breasts. Suddenly one is startled by the sound of his deep snoring"
(Ozeki 62). While this smacks of Shonagon's style, it also speaks to
the innermost anxieties of an abused woman, perpetually under
surveillance by a critical partner. At the same time, it mocks the
male figure in the poem as she renders his frightening disdain (read:
potential violence) a mere comical snore. When she leaves Joichi,
however, her prose becomes exuberant, fluid, and exhibits a style
much different than Shonagon's and inflected with a new confid-
ence. She writes, "a whip-tailed armada!/zona pellucida, penetrated,
now/a small round egg made lively, and/propelled downstream
on ciliary currents through the darkness" (305-06). If earlier she
could not fathom a certainty like Shonagon's ("Akiko could not
imagine what such certainty would feel like" [39]), she defies this
seeming inability in imagining, with certitude, her own pregnancy.
A coming to consciousness of a different sort occurs simultan-
eously to Jane when she awakens in a hospital to find that her fetus
is dead after Jane suffers an injury at the slaughterhouse where she
has been filming. Earlier, when she is flabbergasted that she has
defied her medically confirmed infertility after unprotected sex with
Sloan, she now finds it equally inconceivable that the pregnancy has
disappeared as quickly as it appeared. The physician states that the
fetus had died a week before the accident, the latter therefore con-
tributing nothing toward terminating her pregnancy. Jane can
hardly agree. As a matter of fact, beef has everything to do with her
twisted fallopian tubes, her initial difficulty in conceiving, the death
of the fetus, and the unlikelihood of ever conceiving again. Jane's
infertility, the result of growth hormones once approved for pregnant
women and now used only in cattle, contrasts with five-year-old
Rosie's growth hormone-induced early maturity: pubic hair, enlarged
breasts, even the commencement of menstruation. The visible signs

of sexual maturation illuminate Jane's hidden infertility. Ozeki
concludes by condemning a meat industry that is perpetuated by
ignorant male pawns or ineffective lackeys whose misuse of growth
hormones and whose abuse of women indelibly scar the novel's
central female characters.
CONCLUSIONS: A YEAR OF FICTIONS
Japanese beef consumers become advocates of American myths

distributed globally via mediums such as television, Jane concludes.
Yet every creation and its subsequent re-creation contain elements
of both fiction and fact. Meanwhile, global consumers choose to
ignore stories concerning what, in fact, pharmaceutical farms
embed in consumable meat and how they produce pathologies in
poor minorities by endorsing agricultural chemicals that offer
"plump [chicken] breasts and succulent meats," perfect for Amer-
ica's dinner tables (124). I repeat Jane's discovery that "truth wasn't
stranger than fiction; it was fiction" (360). Her final documentary
reveals a truth for those who eat cattle but prefer ignorance of its
transformation into meat for their plates and their palates. She
refers to the documented case of Yoshihiro Hattori and Rodney
Dwayne Peairs, the former a Japanese exchange student who was
"accidentally" shot by Peairs in Louisana, to illustrate that at the
heart of this controversy lies a national obsession with self, with an
American identity. While the Japanese media exaggerated America's
dependence on guns following the event, as news cameras panned
Wal-Mart's racks of guns, Jane knows that "Hattori was killed
because Peairs had a gun, and because Hattori looked different.
Peairs had a gun because here in America we fancy that ours is still
a frontier culture, where our homes must be defended by a deadly
force from people who look different" (89). (Jane cannot help but
wryly point out that Peairs was a meat packer at a "Winn Dixie
supermarket" [88].) "Guns, race, meat, and Manifest Destiny all
collided in a single explosion of violent, dehumanized activity."
Violence, says Jane, is one of those American narratives that makes
us a "grisly nation" (89). Is the meat industry, Jane wonders, not
similarly grisly in the transformation of a bloody, embattled process
to its neat, clean packaging at the grocery store? Such a question
strikes at the heart of Ozeki's novel as she addresses the mediated
120 M. Chin
nature of products and persons alike through the rubric of con-

sumption: patterns of ingestion for beef and for humans, attendant
consumer culture, and the work of this culture on the American
Dream. If the literal process of meat production is "grisly" and
"embattled," as Ozeki suggests, so too is that of an acceptance of
others, which has always been marked with a regeneration of viol-
ence.31 Note that even though America may be privileged as a haven
for specifically female successes by the novel's conclusion, such
privileging only propels its physically and psychologically damaged
characters so far: Jane's reproductive capacities have been severely
inhibited by beef production, as have her mother's, who was only
capable of bearing one child although she yearned for more; Akiko
has been traumatized by emotional and physical abuse at Joichi's
hand; Rosie, whose name advertises the color of healthful youth, is
maturing physically beyond her years. And finally, Rosie's mother
(rancher John Dunn's wife) Bunny, whose name represents the
typical subservient woman at the heart of Joichi's American fantas-
ies, must suffer a parent's anguish over her daughter's condition.
So what of the "American Dream," the expansiveness of ranch life
which, here, is reduced to the limitations of a pathology? In many
ways, these women are still consumed by the products and processes
upheld by capitalist TNCs and by patriarchy.
In protecting itself from "difference," the novel's ur-text becomes
a renewal of just the national paradigms it purports to subvert amid
the globalization of beef.32 In his "A Borderless World?" Masao
Miyoshi concludes that "TNCs continue colonialism [...]" (96) and
Palumbo-Liu states that "literary representations of borderlessness
[... ] recover and reinstate national borders, east and west binarisms,
and recuperate a specific western individual at the core of reality"
(Asian/American 339). This "individual" in Ozeki's work is BEEF-
EX, whose faceless operations conveniently render nobody to blame
for discrimination against women and minorities. The book elucid-
ates tension between what is fabricated in a globalized overculture
and what arises in a postnational grounding. Ozeki's comic novel
demands a serious rethinking of globalization's end results. It alerts
its readers to a fragmentation of culture and of bodies, specifically
those of women, minorities, and, I might add, animals. Whether Jane
is "straddl[ingl this blessed, ever-shrinking world" (15) or Akiko is
"sneaking through the desolate corners of her own life, stealing
back moments and pieces of herself" (37), the "truth" is always only
"ever-diminishing approximations" (176).
MONICA CHIU is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. She
teaches courses in American literature, Asian American literature and film, and literature
and the body. She has published essays in MELUS and the Journal of American Studies, as
well as in edited collections, and is presently working on a book addressing pathologies and
pathogens in Asian American literature.
NOTES
1. Lunching beneath any of the worldwide Golden Arches is "relatively predictable,"

states Watson, for these reasons: interior color schemes and general floor plans
remain constant the world over (22); McDonald's burgers and fries, assembled
according to "Fordist methods of food production" where "[n]othing is left to
chance," taste remarkably similar from nation to nation (25); friendly service is
a restaurant "hallmark" (31); and good hygiene (especially the chain's insistence
on clean restrooms) remains a sanitary standard for other chains to emulate (33).
2. All quotations from and references to Palumbo-Liu are taken from his "Introduc-
tion: Unhabituated Habituses" unless otherwise stated.
3. Palumbo-Liu alludes to this very concept in the introduction to his edited collection
The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions: "[C]ertain 'texts' deemed
worthy of representing the 'ethnic experience' are set forth, yet the critical and
pedagogical discourses that convey these texts into the classroom and present
them I . . . ] may well mimic and reproduce the ideological underpinnings of the
dominant canon" (2).
4. I am indebted to John Ernest, University of New Hampshire, for elucidating how
I could emphasize an overculture or what he deemed a "superculture" (personal
correspondence, Durham, NH, January 1999).
5. This vision of Manifest Destiny, according to Palumbo-Liu, includes traversing the
Pacific, setting American sights on Eastern shores, "carrying forward" an "ideology
of western civilization" and "expansion." He catalogues the continued work of
American imperialism, or its "Pacific identity," from the 1893 "coup d'etat" in Hawai'i,
the seizure of the Philippines, and U.S. engagement in the Korean and Vietnam
wars (Asian/America 339-340).
6. I thank Carole Doreski for her astute reading of an earlier draft of this essay: she
points out the importance of "the endlessly vanishing perspectives on commodity"
regarding the West, beef, ranching, land, "nutritional imperialism," and "the multiply
mediated quality of [the] documentary" and its inherent "duplicity". Her sugges-
tions have informed many of my insights in this section of the essay. (August
1, 2000, private correspondence).
7. In "'Mad Cows and Englishmen': Gender implications of news reporting on the
British beef crisis," Rod Brookes and Beverley Holbrook write, "As the [mad cow]
disease originated in cattle through the feeding of the remains of one species to
another, the transformation of herbivores into carnivores has been represented as
a crime against nature" (177).
8. Once slaughtered, a formerly living animal is linguistically recreated in order to
conceal its former existence as a life form: "animal," "cow" or "chicken," denoting
living beings, literally and linguistically become "food-producing unit[s]" or "edible
122 M. Chin
parts," all suggesting things. These "protein harvesters" are then butchered or
fragmented on the assembly line, packaged for shipment, and most importantly,
renamed "to obscure the fact that these were once animals" (Ozeki 55). They
become beef, pork, and sausage for inevitable consumption.
9. See Sau-Ling C. Wong's chapter "Big Eaters, Treat Lovers, 'Food Prostitutes,'
'Food Pomographers/ and Doughnut Makers" for a thorough explanation of
what food means in Asian American literature (18-76).
10. Again, I thank Carole Doreski for raising these issues.
11. Palumbo-Liu's arguments articulating the definition and the work of "culture"
originate from Pierre Bourdieu's notions of a habitus and a field.
12. As his example, Palumbo-Liu points to a Newsweek magazine photo captioned
"This is not America," in which a Korean American youth is carrying a gun. The
young man wears a Malcom X t-shirt sporting the phrase "By any means neces-
sary," which is situated above the imprint of a suited black man with a rifle. To
unpack such a photo, suggests Palumbo-Liu, is to reveal the complexity of cul-
tural icons in transit: Why, Palumbo-Liu asks, does a particular clothing company
portray Malcolm X with a rifle? What compels the pictured youth to purchase the
t-shirt (and the gun, for that matter)? What effect does Newsweek anticipate in
captioning the photo "This is not America" when a background street sign clearly
speaks to its U.S. location? Through this transmigration of objects, Palumbo-Liu
questions how the objects are to be deciphered, suggesting that their meanings
remain hidden and that they demand an extensive formal de-coding. This creates
what Mike Featherstone might call "emerging sets of 'third cultures' [. . . ]
conduits for all sorts of diverse cultural flows which cannot be merely under-
stood as the product of bilateral exchanges between nation-states" (1).
13. Ozeki includes a short bibliography citing her sources about DES and its cancer-
causing properties and also provides addresses for the DES Cancer Network and
DES Action U.S.A.
14. In The Sexual Politics of Meat, Adams divides her first chapter, called "The Patri-
archal Texts of Meat," into subsections such as "Male Identification and Meat
Eating," "Meat: For the Man Only," "Meat is King," "The Male Language of Meat
Eating," and "Meat as a Symbol of Patriarchy" (23-38). I will return to the relation-
ship between men/masculinity and meat later in this essay.
15. "Japlish" describes the syntactical and grammatical errors that arise when one
translates directly from Japanese into English, attempting to convey not only the
meaning of the translated word or phrase, but the Japanese sentiment or idea as
well: "We at Tokyo Office wish you all have nice holiday season. Now [. . . ] we
ask your hard work in making exciting My American Wife! Let's persevere with
new Program series!" (Ozeki 11). Such "speak" is frequently found on Japanese
stationery, t-shirts, shopping bags, lunch sacks, baseball caps, and food pack-
aging.
16. Such values have been propagated by television through comedies such as Father
Knows Best, in which American families were predominantly white as well as
middle class and in which gendered roles confined mother to the domestic realm
and father to a world of employment beyond that realm. A genealogy of repres-
entations of the "other" is recorded in such television shows as Good Times, The
Jeffersons, Diffrent Strokes, Happy Days, The Cosby Show, All-American Girl, The
Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Golden Girls, Rosanne, and In Living Color, to name only
a few. Articles and books discussing issues of race, class, and gender in contem-
Ozcki's My Year of Meats 123
porary TV sitcoms are too numerous to list. I will mention here only those that I
consulted for this article: Herman Gray's Watching Race: Television and the Struggle
for "Blackness"; Darrell Y. Hamamoto's Monitored Peril: Asian Americans and the
Politics of TV Representation; Tania Modleski's Studies in Entertainment: Critical
Approaches to Mass Culture; Darby Li Po Price's "'All American Girl' and the
American Dream"; June M. Frazer and Timothy C. Frazer's '"Father Knows Best'
and The Cosby Show': Nostalgia and the Sitcom Tradition"; John D. H. Downing's
"The Cosby Show' and American Racial Discourse."
17. If Joichi's and BEEF-EX's insistence upon "all-American values" echo what Buell
would call the "fundamentalists" of the culture wars—the George Wills and
President Bushes who spout a "rhetoric of endangered national foundations"—
then Jane's reconfigurations express a multiculturalism torn between "separ-
atists" and "relativists" (Buell 555).
18. Given that these "oysters" are considered American delicacies by some, it is not
without irony that a slaughterhouse employee derogatorily asks Jane if "gooks"
like her eat cows' "assholes and everything" (266).
19. This information was gleaned from PBS Nova's "The Brain Eater."
20. It is at this juncture that Jane's and Joichi's ideas concerning America and its
global representation evoke Palumbo-Liu's and Buell's theoretical conclusions
about cultural capital in transit. Generated locally and eventually commodified,
in toto nationally, Bourdieu's definitions, according to Palumbo-Liu, suggest
a uniformity and homogeneity of those at the "field of destination" (11). So
Palumbo-Liu questions how the meanings and uses of culture might evolve
differently when traced through international (nonhegemonic) importation and
exportation in order to investigate how mutations at the global level may
empower those (whether at the "field of destination" or those at the "field of
origin") lacking a homogeneous/national concept of "cultural knowledge and
social power." However, Buell argues that despite the seeming diversity and
heterogeneity of globalization, its upshot always reflects national limitations,
grounding meanings within national borders. As such, he refutes Arjun Appadurai's
claim that "the nation-state [. . . ] is on its last legs" or Fredric Jameson's belief
that "postmodern culture" represents "the cultural logic of the new global
economy" (Buell 550-51). In a similar vein, postcolonial studies, according to
some U.S.-based scholars, hierarchize Westerncentric venues even though the
field purports to investigates global issues. At a time when Asian American
studies is attempting to "denationalize" its borders, laments Sheng-mei Ma, over-
seas student literature by Taiwanese expatriates or former American students—
literature that addresses Asian identity issues as they occur on American soil—
is relegated to Asian studies departments, not Asian American studies. See
Sheng-mei Ma, Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Liter-
atures.
Additionally, in his text Ethnic Canons, Palumbo-Liu alerts readers to the ways
in which "multiculturalism" as an idea and an ideal can be abused in capitalist
America, such as when U.S. companies that require employees to attend sensitiv-
ity training seminars shroud an ulterior motive—that of training the work force,
whether multicultural or not, in "American" values. As such, his conclusions
here resonate with Buell's, for the multiethnic component in American schools
or companies becomes a decidedly and cleverly concealed non-ethnic, pro-
"American" (read: white) agenda.
124 M. Chin
21. Buell speaks similarly of the division that Asian Americans created between
themselves and Asians wherein "cultural nationalism replicated what it resisted,
positing an identity which, in effect, marginalized many of its own" (556). Or,
modernization, here the seeming acceptance of ethnic others, becomes veiled
Westernization in which the other is eventually subsumed, once again, under the
majority. I borrow from Immanuel Wallerstein, who questions the use of "culture"
by examining how, within "the capitalist world-economy," "a case of moderniza-
tion" is ultimately one of "Westernization" (36).
22. Adams records that rape victims often claim feeling "like a piece of meat,"
prompting her to question the connection "between being entered against one's
will and being eaten" (54). She points to a particular rape and murder case in
which pieces of a woman's body are discovered simmering in several pots on the
stove and in the oven. Moreover, three women who are chained in the basement
have been forced to eat the dead woman's arms and legs (40).
23. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, in her introduction to Third World Women and the
Politics of Feminism, speaks of a so-called "imagined" community of third world
women who struggle under similar and "systematic" "forms of domination" that
strengthen their own political solidarity against oppression (4). In "Si(gh)ting
Asian/American Women As Transnational Labor," Laura Hyun Yi Kang discusses
the "skewed 'political cosmology' of global capitalism" when Asian countries
and their so-called "'cheap' labor force—mostly young and female"—are blamed
for high "domestic unemployment" while vindicating TNCs (transnational corpora-
tions) which invest heavily overseas, utilizing this "cheap" labor force for profit
(416-17). Cynthia Enloe, in Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of
International Politics, records "how relations between governments depend not
only on capital and weaponry, but also on the control of women as symbols,
consumers, workers and emotional comforters" (xi). In mapping how women
are often "used by the makers of the international political system," some more
willing and often better compensated than others, Enloe's challenge includes out-
lining a more complete (read: feminist) understanding of international politics (2).
24. See chapter one, "The Patriarchal Texts of Meat," in Adams and Donovan's
Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations.
25. The dysfunctional relationship between Joichi and Akiko parallels that in
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," a short story outlining
the perverse results of a physician's pathologization of his unnamed wife.
Akiko calls Joichi "John," demarcated by quotation marks in the novel, in the
same manner that Gilman's unnamed protagonist refers to her husband.
"John," the paternal figure in the latter, privileges his medical knowledge
about the health and welfare of his wife's sentient experiences, attempting to
demarcate and medically legislate what cannot be conclusively diagnosed.
While Gilman's John demands that his "scribbling" wife retire her writing
instruments until she is well, Joichi prohibits his wife from writing about
anything except maternity issues even though she once studied classics in
college and subsequently wrote copy for "action-adventure" manga or Japanese
comics often filled with sexually violent acts (37). Gilman's text suggests that
the female character suffers from postpartum depression; Akiko laments an
inability to become pregnant. Both women are forcibly confined, one in a colo-
nial mansion and the other in a danchi (Japanese for "apartment building") to
conceal the ills that their husbands have encouraged. While Gilman's character is
prohibited from visitors, Akiko is forbidden to leave the apartment until the
visible signs of the physical violence that her husband has wreaked upon her
have healed.
Because so many articles about Gilman's protagonist have been written through
the lens of white American feminism since Feminist Press's 1973 re-publication of
the short story, according to Susan Lanser, the text's interpretations remain
as stagnant and "confined" as the protagonist trapped in her room of yellow
wallpaper. Lanser claims the existence of another interpretation "repressed"
amid twenty years of feminist readings or "patterns" (421-22). Lanser proposes
that Gilman's racist sentiments, appearing in her later work, obviate a "psychic
geography" of American racial attitudes at the turn of the century (425). This
geography informs her reading of the "yellow" in the wallpaper, referencing
turn-of-the-century ideas about Asian immigrants as "yellow perils," about
unassimilable "aliens" and non-Aryan "grotesques." Lanser provocatively asks,
"In a cultural moment when immigrant peoples and African Americans were
being widely caricatured in the popular press through distorted facial and bodily
images, might the 'interminable grotesques' [. . .] of The Yellow Wallpaper'—
with their lolling necks and 'bulbous eyes' [. . .] with their 'peculiar odor' and
'yellow smell' [. . .] figure the Asians and Jews, the Italians and Poles, the long
list of 'aliens' whom the narrator (and perhaps Gilman herself) might want at
once to rescue and to flee?" (429). Consider that in the slaughterhouse, Jane
discovers yellow pus oozing from a cart of eviscerated livers—evidence of hor-
monal injections—which eventually become insidious invaders of the physical
and social body. Given this image, as well as a history of racial aggression in
America in which people of various Asian nationalities were considered invasive
"yellow perils" at differing political junctures, one may wonder who is invading
whom and with what?
If we consider Joichi's biases against the American poor, against African
Americans and Hispanic Americans, lesbians, the handicapped, and anybody
else who unsettles his idea of the "perfect" white American, then both the
earlier feminist readings of Gilman's short piece as well as Lanser's interpretation
of the yellow/racialized wallpaper inform My Year of Meats. On the one hand,
Akiko is literally confined to her danchi (especially after suffering visible bruises
at Joichi's brutal hand) as well as figuratively trapped within the cooking
"patterns" offered by My American Wife! insofar as deviation from meat-based
recipes provokes her husband's wrath, subsequent bruises, and continued con-
finement. On the other hand, because Joichi practices staunch racism as the TV
show's producer, his calculated choices of the program's offerings readily
exhibit his personal preferences, which are sublated through Jane's attempt to
re-humanize the program. In effect, the program becomes Joichi's and Jane's
unconscious which, as Lanser says of Gilman's protagonist's unconscious, is
replete with "unspeakable fears and desires," rendering the show nothing less
than political. Yet, if both these agendas eventually promote a prejudiced,
postnational end, then the TV show, like Gilman's wallpaper, acts as a repress-
ive agent. Lanser suggests that it is "impossible for the narrator to get 'that top
pattern [. . . ] off from the under one.'" If that underlying paper-as-text points
to prejudice in My Year of Meats, then all of Ozeki's characters fail, like
Gilman's protagonist, to crawl out from beneath an oppressive ideology
(Lanser 424-425).
126 M. Chin
26. While actual cows/animals are linguistically transformed into terms such as beef
and meat for consumption, Joichi's ingestion of such products renders his humanity
animal, further exhibiting the novel's endless circulation of mediated images.
27. Such conclusions resonate with a critique of NAFTA, for example: created to
bring employment to Mexico while simultaneously strengthening trade relations
between the U.S. and its southern neighbor, it more readily exploits Mexican
workers and ignites anger among laid-off Americans who watch their jobs go
south.
28. Peter Greenaway's 1996 film The Pillow Book, loosely based on Shonagon's text,
employs male bodies as canvases on which the protagonist writes such beautiful
poetry that these "texts" become valuable commodities to a publisher who once
blackmailed her father, forcing sexual favors from him. In My Year of Meats, beef,
too, "writes" itself on the human body, leaving its indelible mark through patho-
logical conditions.
29. While Ozeki provides similar facts about Shonagon and Murasaki (14-15), I have
gleaned mine from the introduction to Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book, translated
by Ivan Morris.
30. Ozeki cites Sue Coe's Dead Meat for information about cattle feed additives. Coe,
an illustrator and essayist, has visited numerous slaughterhouses in the United
States and England. Because cameras and other filming devices are prohibited in
abbattoirs, denying what Coe regards as public access to the horrors of meat
production, she illustrates and publishes the sorrow and sufferings she finds,
making her work accessible to those who are interested. However, if cameras are
prohibited in an abbattoir, then it seems highly contrived that Jane and her crew,
openly laden with visual and audio recording devices, could have gained entry
into the slaughterhouse so easily.
31. I am referencing hero mythmaking from Richard Slotkin's Regeneration Through
Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860.
32. Compare this to Priscilla Wald's conclusion about American studies' romance
with globalization when she says, of four texts under review, that they "explore
their own unwitting complicity, as academics or people affiliated in some way
with Western academies (mainly, but not exclusively, in the US), in perpetuating
some of the very inequities against which they speak and write—and they ask the
reader to do the same" (206).
WORKS CITED
Adams, Carol J. and Josephine Donovan, eds. Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical
Explorations. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.
. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York:
Continuum, 1991.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed.
Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.
"Brain Eater, The." Nova. WMEB/PBS. 3 October, 2000.
Brookes, Rod, and Beverley Holbrook. "'Mad cows and Englishmen': Gender implica-
tions of news reporting on the British beef crisis." News, Gender and Power. Ed.
Cynthia Carter et al. New York: Routledge, 1998. 174-185.
Buell, Frederick. "Nationalist Postnationalisms: Globalist Discourse in Con-

temporary American Culture." American Quarterly 50.3 (September 1998):
548-591.
Coe, Sue. Dead Meat. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995.
Downing, John D. H. "The Cosby Show' and American Racial Discourse." Discourse
and Discrimination. Ed. Geneva Smitherman-Donaldson and Teun A. van Dijk.
Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988. 46-73.
Enloe, Cynthia. Bananas, Benches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International
Politics. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.
Featherstone, Mike, ed. Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity:
Newbury Park, California: Sage, 1990.
Frazer, June M. and Timothy C. Frazer. "'Father Knows Best' and The Cosby Show':
Nostalgia and the Sitcom Tradition." Journal of Popular Culture 27.3 (Winter
1993): 163-72.
Gray, Herman. Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for "Blackness." Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1995.
Hamamoto, Darrell Y. Monitored Peril: Asian Americans and the Politics of TV Repres-
entation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.
Johnson, Randal. "Editor's Introduction: Pierre Bourdieu on Art, Literature and
Culture." The Field of Cultural Production. Bourdieu 1-25.
Kang, Kaura Hyun Yi. "Si(gh)ting Asian/American Women As Transnational
Labor." Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 5.2 (Fall 1997): 403-37.
Lanser, Susan. "Feminist Criticism, The Yellow Wallpaper,' and the Politics of Color
in America." Feminist Studies 15.3 (Fall 1989): 415-41.
Ma, Sheng-Mei. Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Litera-
tures. Albany: State U of New York P, 1998.
Miyoshi, Masao. "A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the
Decline of the Nation-State." Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational
Imaginary. Ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.
Modleski, Tania. Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture. Bloom-
ington: Indiana UP, 1986.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, et al., eds. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.
Montanari, Massimo. The Culture of Food. Trans. Carl Ipsen. Cambridge: Blackwell,
1994.
Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. "McDonald's in Japan: Changing Manners and Etiquette."
Golden Arches East. Watson 161-182.
Ozeki, Ruth L. My Year of Meats. New York: Viking, 1998.
. 'There and Back Again." The Independent (October 1998): 40-42.
Palumbo-Liu, David. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stan-
ford: Stanford UP, 1999.
. ed. The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, Interventions. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1995.
. "Introduction: Unhabituated Habituses." Streams of Cultural Capital. Ed.
Palumbo-Liu and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993. 1-21.
Pillow Book, The. Dir. Peter Greenaway. Perf. Vivian Wu and Ewan McGregor. Video-
cassette. CFP Woodline Films, 1998.
Price, Darby Li Po. '"All American Girl' and the American Dream." Hitting Critical
Mass 2.1 (Winter 1994): 129-46.
128 M. Chin
Shonagon, Sei. The Pillow Book. Trans, and ed. Ivan Morris. New York: Columbia UP,
1991.
Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier,
1600-1860. 1973. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2000.
Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1970.
Wald, Priscilla. "Minefields and Meeting Grounds: Transnational Analyses and
American Studies." American Literary History 10.1 (Spring 1998): 199-218.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. "Culture as the Ideological Battleground of the Modern
World-System." Global Culture. Featherstone 31-55.
Watson, James L., ed. Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia. Stanford: Stanford
UP, 1997.
Wong, Sau-ling C. "Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural
Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads." Amerasia 21.1-2 (1995): 1-27.
. "Big Eaters, Treat Lovers, 'Food Prostitutes,' 'Food Pornographers,' and
Doughnut Makers." Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extra-
vagance. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993. 18-76.

Postnational Globalization and en Gendered Meat Production in Ruth L. Ozeki S My Year of Meats

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Postnational Globalization and en Gendered Meat Production in Ruth L. Ozeki S My Year of Meats

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory

ISSN: 1043-6928 (Print) 1545-5866 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/glit20

Postnational globalization and (en)gendered meat

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10436920108580283

Published online: 30 Jun 2008.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 963

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

Postnational Globalization and

Many Americans may acknowledge, with chagrin, "a new McDonald's

product of a Japanese mother and an Anglo American father. While

done. Steeped in conservative stereotypes of America, Joichi bristles

Take the American ranching tradition (as it inheres in beef and in

as Western and therefore barbaric. Yet with the rise of modernization

Imbibing what others eat is to embody a cultural difference in its

representations, magnifies the effects of media's agents influenced

overseas market—Japan—and promoted its superior qualities,

with [w]ide-open prairies, snow-capped mountains." She adds that

in a truth that existed," states Jane. "But slowly, as my skills

whom are Amerasian war orphans with cleft palates or emotional

MEAT AND MASCULINITY: SEI SHONACON'S THE PILLOW BOOK AS

The text's insinuation of a fractured America readily bleeds into

all patently unattractive, whether physically or morally. Take Gale,

Wife! to limit her to repressive cooking patterns that are wedded

Men may retain an unknowingly heavy hand in a nefarious beef

should be as gentle and loving as those of the night before. He must

the meticulous documentation that Shonagon leaves of Heian court

breasts, even the commencement of menstruation. The visible signs

CONCLUSIONS: A YEAR OF FICTIONS

Japanese beef consumers become advocates of American myths

nature of products and persons alike through the rubric of con-

1. Lunching beneath any of the worldwide Golden Arches is "relatively predictable,"

Buell, Frederick. "Nationalist Postnationalisms: Globalist Discourse in Con-

You might also like