Bare Life and Vegetarian Refusal: Patriarchal Biopolitics and Posthuman Ecofeminist Ethics in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

Abstract

This article offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian through posthumanist, ecofeminist, and feminist ethical frameworks, arguing that Yeong-hye’s refusal of meat and her progressive vegetal identification constitute a radical challenge to patriarchal biopolitics, anthropocentric ontology, and normative regimes of sanity. Situating food practices, female embodiment, and madness as key sites of biopolitical regulation, the study demonstrates how Yeong-hye’s ethical abstention is pathologized within a cultural order that equates femininity with compliance, consumption, and domestic conformity. Drawing on Carol J. Adams’s feminist-vegetarian theory, meat consumption is examined as a symbolic technology of masculine domination, while Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection elucidates the cultural revulsion provoked by Yeong-hye’s bodily refusal. Michel Foucault’s analyses of madness and discipline frame her institutionalization as a mechanism through which ethical dissent is converted into medicalized deviance. The article further mobilizes Val Plumwood’s ecofeminist critique of dualism and Joan W. Scott’s theorization of gender as a primary modality of power to expose the structural alignment between women’s subjugation and the domination of nonhuman life. Donna Haraway’s multispecies ethics and Jane Bennett’s concept of vibrant matter illuminate Yeong-hye’s vegetal becoming as an ethical reorientation toward interspecies relationality, while Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman subjectivity situates her transformation beyond humanist individualism. Liah Greenfeld’s notion of the acting self clarifies Yeong-hye’s withdrawal as an existential response to the collapse of culturally sanctioned agency, and Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life exposes how her body is reduced to biological survival under sovereign control. Ultimately, The Vegetarian emerges as a profound ethical and ecological intervention that reimagines female autonomy, dismantles human exceptionalism, and articulates a post-anthropocentric vision of coexistence.