The Derridian Sexual Politics of My Year of Meats

Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats weaves an intricate web of the effects of meat eating and the meat industry on various pockets of the global population. By focusing specifically on American meat eating families, Ozeki, and consequently Jane, creates a cultural study of the politics, both sexual and otherwise, of meat eating. By invoking the arguments put forth in Carol J. Adam’s innovative text, The Sexual Politics of Meat, I will attempt to expose and analyze the different instances of the doubling of animal mistreatment and the objectification and mistreatment of women in today’s society.

In order to properly frame my year of meats with the arguments put forth in The Sexual Politics of Meat, the reader first has to understand the notion of the Absent Referent. The Absent Referent is rooted in the Derridian instability of the sign. French Philosopher, Jacques Derrida, put forth the theory of the instability between signifier and signified in his seminal text On Grammatology. The “sign” in language is composed of a signifier, which is the sign, the word, or sound image, and the signified, which is the sign’s meaning. Derrida argued that a single signifier can have an unstable relationship with it’s signified, or meaning, and can in fact have a number of different relational meanings. The notion of the Absent Referent is that the signified, in the relationship with the sign, is absent. An example of this is the word meat. Meat is what is on your plate. The sign, the word and sound image for meat, only brings to mind the image of a foodstuff, a steak or a filet. What is absent in the word meat is are the animals and their lives that precede and enable the existence of meat.

The Absent Referent is applicable to the objectification and sexualization of women. “Metaphorically, the absent referent can be anything whose original meaning is undercut as it is absorbed into a different hierarchy of meaning” (Adams, 67). Women and animals, through various associations and absences of the precedents of their lives, are objectified and made consumable. Adams argues that meat eating is a patriarchal and speciesist; “In many ways gender equality is built into the species inequality that meat eating proclaims, because for most cultures obtaining meat was performed by men” (Adams 58). This idea of the value of work is also reflected in Adams’ claims about the characteristics of economies dependent mainly on the processing of animals for food, in that the is an apparent sexual segregation of work activities, with women doing more work than men, but work that is less valued. This notion speaks directly to Jane’s experiences working on My American Wife! with Beef-Ex and John Ueno.

This notion of meat eating paralleling the fallacies of masculinity are directly and subtly addressed in My Years of Meats. Adams goes so far as to describe male meat eater as the “John Wayne type epitome of the masculine meat eater” (Adams 63), which seems to be a notion explicitly referenced by Ozeki in her choice to name her antagonist “John Way-no”. What is interesting about the masculine notion of meat eating is that it is directly associated with virility. However, the effects of eating meat, as depicted in My Year of Meats, deemed many women infertile. The irony here is that John Ueno covets a round rump like Dawn’s, but the meat he believes makes a strong childbearing woman is actually deeming these women infertile. Ueno’s desire for a crossbred “vigor-baby” is perpetuating the power fallacy of economies dependent mainly on the processing of animals for food. By perpetuating one of these forms of oppression, there is an assurance that the other form will continue to exist.