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Abstract

This ecocritical study, grounded within contemporary concerns of animal welfare and climate violence, will dissect how human and non-human binary constructions negatively affect our shared environments. More specifically, I will evaluate how Joseph D’Lacey’s Meat (2009), Wu Ming-Yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes (2011) and Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh (2020) portray repressive constructions of gender identity and cultural practice through dystopian and apocalyptic prose and how this, in turn, challenges traditional binary notions of human and non-human relations. Analysis of these texts reveals how key anthropocentric concerns, such as the persecution of the female body, classism and capitalist economics are manifested parallel in the portrayal of the non-human body which in turn, stabilise rigid hierarchies that subjugate that which is constructed as ‘animal’. Each text challenges how society defines the non-human in human terms and how this has led to a direct link between physical environmental degradation and societal collapse; ultimately suggesting that anthropocentric models are incompatible with harmonious, non-exploitative human and non-human relations. Ultimately, this dissertation serves to dismantle the rigidity of anthropocentric paradigms, calling for a revised sociological framework that promotes sustainable relationships with the non-human; rejecting the subordination of the ‘other’ as a fundamental human convention.

Course: English Literature - BA (Hons) - C0995

Date Deposited: 2024-01-22

URI/permalink: https://library.port.ac.uk/dissert/dis14302.html