The Inverted Fable: Meat Fiction in the Spanish Contemporary Short Narrative

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7203/KAM.20.25473

Keywords:

narrative, inverted fable, short stories, critical animal studies, animal, meat, livestock, farms, violence, biopolitics, patriarchy, speciesism, anthropocentrism, animalization, Cristina Jurado, Izaskun Gracia

Abstract

The trend towards the depiction of animal rights issues in contemporary literature is framed by a growing societal sensitivity towards non-human otherness. With a focus on the meat industry, this paper aims to investigate how contemporary Spanish short narrative uses the animalization of human figures to effect a shift from the ontological animal-human binomial to the biopolitical bíos-zoé binomial, in the words of Agamben. The animalized human figure, when considered physiological life intended for consumption, paradoxically, restores the absent figure of the animal in meat consumption culture. Thus, in this type of narrative fiction —inverted fables— the animal itself is considered, rather than the animal as a means to access the human. This paper is compiled of fifteen short stories published from 2014 to the present that question meat consumption culture through the animalization of human figures, followed by an analysis of two of these stories: “El Pastor”, by Cristina Jurado, and “La Granja”, by Izaskun Gracia. Furthermore, the link between patriarchal violence and speciesist violence raised in literary fictions is also explored from a gender-based perspective.

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Published

2022-12-15

How to Cite

Pallardó Azorín, B. (2022). The Inverted Fable: Meat Fiction in the Spanish Contemporary Short Narrative. Kamchatka. Revista De análisis Cultural., (20), 357–379. https://doi.org/10.7203/KAM.20.25473
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Issue

No. 20 (2022): Violencias de frontera en México. Ecología política y praxis cultural

Section

Miscellany: topics, poetics and issues of contemporary culture

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