Culture, Disgust, and Eating Disorder: A Study of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

Recent considerations on the impact of culture on eating disorders have challenged the purely medical model where eating disorders are seen as clinical diseases. This paper draws from these considerations and focuses on disgust as a cultural phenomenon and its role in eating disorders in twenty-first-century South Korean fiction. Disgust is situated within a culture and works on the principle of avoidance. South Korea is a meat-eating society with its roots in patriarchy and no room for deviance. This paper explores The Vegetarian (2015) by Han Kang, and the main character Yeong-hye’s disgust towards meat-eating as a repudiation of societal norms and its accompanying violence. It situates her eating disorder as an attempt at emancipating herself from the prescriptive roles that society ascribes to her and attaining control over herself; Yeong-hye’s anorexia is associated with the trauma she experiences. Through the application of Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, this paper interrogates the ideas of disgust in The Vegetarian. The paper also contributes to the existing research in the medical realm by underlining the role of culture in diseases and disorders in women.