Title: Animal Incorporated: From Cruel Gastro-Aesthetics to Vegetarian Ethics of Taste
Abstract: Repetitive everyday activities as banal as eating bring together a tripartite tension and alliance: biological, aesthetic, and moral.2 To eat is biologically imperative, sensuously pleasurable, and at the same time gruesomely violent. In the twenty-first century, gastronomy, or eating as aesthetic praxis, which not only seeks to "hide the banal necessity and the barbaric compulsion of eating," (Coff 12) can also serve as a camouflage for neoliberalist greed. This article aims to invert the role of the aesthetics by turning to the ethical potential of aesthetics, especially in the realm of animal advocacy. In redressing the contentious relationship, I focus on eating—one of the most mundane and primitive activities and common ways of “incorporating” nonhuman animals—as an example for engaging critical gastro-aesthetics and animal ethics. I first discuss current Chinese and Western discourse on gastro-aesthetics and critical animal studies,3 and then examine prevalent cultural phenomena in contemporary food and entertainment cultures, the ones that aestheticize cruelty in both contemporary neoliberal capitalist Western and Chinese societies. I use this as a case to argue that animal voices have long been neglected in both media representation and the popular discourse of gastronomy. Here live animals are transformed into what Carol J. Adams calls the “absent referent” (66–67) in this domain of cruel gastro-aesthetics that is found in many global societies.
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-08-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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