Food That Matters: Food Figurations in Contemporary Anglophone Feminist Dystopias

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how contemporary Anglophone feminist critical dystopias use food not merely as metaphor, but as figuration: a material-discursive site through which gendered oppression, embodiment, and resistance are negotiated. Situated at the intersection of feminist utopian studies, feminist new materialisms, and literary analysis, the project argues that food functions as an active agent capable of destabilizing the dualistic structures underpinning patriarchal and anthropocentric systems of domination. Rather than serving as a passive symbol, food emerges as a transformative force that reshapes bodies, environments, and subjectivities. The dissertation analyzes seven Anglophone feminist critical dystopias published between 2008 and 2020: Bernardine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots, Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours, Jennie Melamed’s Gather the Daughters, Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From, Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness, Sarah Rose Etter’s The Book of X, and Emma Glass’s Peach. Through a diffractive methodology inspired by Karen Barad’s concept of diffraction, the project traces recurring patterns in the way food figurations configure relations between bodies, power, matter, and meaning across the corpus. Drawing on theorists such as Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett, Ruth Levitas, Raffaella Baccolini, and Ildney Cavalcanti, the dissertation conceptualizes food as “vibrant matter” that participates in the production of embodied subjectivities and social relations. Feminist critical dystopias are interpreted not as narratives devoid of hope, but as literary spaces where dystopian oppression coexists with situated possibilities for resistance and transformation. Food becomes central to this dynamic because it simultaneously belongs to the material and symbolic dimensions of life, thereby troubling Cartesian binaries such as body/mind, nature/culture, and matter/meaning. A central contribution of the dissertation is the development of the concept of doing-with food, adapted from Haraway’s notion of “becoming-with.” This concept identifies recurring practices through which oppressed characters materially and affectively reconfigure their relationships to food. In the analyzed texts, food initially functions as an instrument of social control through hunger, rationing, forced diets, and controlled consumption. At the same time, food becomes a medium through which characters reclaim agency and resist oppression. Through acts such as refusal, sharing, cultivation, preparation, and pleasure, protagonists transform food into a site of resistance that destabilizes the dualistic logic sustaining dystopian systems. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that food figurations enact a politics of transformation grounded in relationality, embodiment, and material agency, suggesting alternative forms of coexistence based on care, interdependence, and resistance even within dystopian conditions.