Laurie Penny: Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · body, cannibalism, capitalism, feminism, sexuality, women
“A feminist dissection of women’s bodies as the fleshy fulcrum of capitalist cannibalism, whereby women are both consumers and consumed.
Modern culture is obsessed with controlling women’s bodies. Our societies are saturated with images of unreal, idealised female beauty whilst real female bodies and the women who inhabit them are alienated from their own personal and political potential. Under modern capitalism, women are both consumers and consumed: Meat Market offers strategies for resisting this gory cycle of consumption, exposing how the trade in female flesh extends into every part of women’s political selfhood. Touching on sexuality, prostitution, hunger, consumption, eating disorders, housework, transsexualism and the global trade in the signs and signifiers of femininity, Meat Market is a thin, bloody sliver of feminist dialectic, dissecting women’s bodies as the fleshy fulcrum of capitalist cannibalism.”
Publisher ZerO Books, an imprint of John Hunt Publishing, 2011
ISBN 1846945216, 9781846945212
79 pages
interview with the author, cont. (Maeve McKeown, New Left Project)
review (Abby O’Reilly, The Independent)
review (Zoe May Sullivan, The Oxonian Review)
author’s columns: The Guardian, New Statesman, The New Inquiry