Meat:Woman

What is the relationship between the consumption of meat and the objectification of the female body? A literary conversation about women, flesh and women's flesh.

Information

Date and time Thursday 16 June 2022 20:55 tot 21:55 uur
Location Paard Kleine Zaal
Price 29,50
15,- (CJP, Students, Ooievaarspas)

Women, meat and women's flesh - with Agustina Bazterrica, Roanne van Voorst, Elianne van Elderen and Gwen Stok

What is the connection between women's bodies and flesh? Both are widely objectified - in advertising, film and language use. Is there also, then, a possible link between the consumption of meat and the objectification of the female body? Argentinian author Agustina Bazterrica and Dutch anthropologiest and writer Roanne van Voorst have both written highly intriguing books about this connection. During Meat:Woman they discussed this with each other.

Agustina Bazterrica makes the connection between woman and meat in her novel Tender is the Flesh. In a dystopian Argentina, cannibalism is legal and people eat their fellows - those that are least visible, anyway. Roanne van Vorst wrote Ooit aten we dieren (Once Upon a Time We Ate Animals), an investigation into the future of food that's a must-read for vegetarians, vegans and meat-eaters; in Van Voorst's future, we no longer eat any meat at all. Two totally different narratives, yet we'll discover whether the authors are perhaps driven by the same impulse.

Commissioned by Winternachten Festival, new talent Elianne van Elderen got inspired by the work of illustrator Gwen Stok, who made three extra drawings with reference to Bazterrica's work. 
Want to get in the mood? Listen to the podcast Short guide to: Meat, in which programmer Joëlle Koorneef talks to Ruth Ozeki, the Japanese-American author who has written about meat like no other. My Year of Meats is a humorous yet highly critical novel about the meat industry, among other subjets, which made a huge impact in 2000. 

English spoken.

Line-up

Gwen Stok

(Netherlands, 1983) studied at the Willem de Kooning Academy and creates illustrations and comics that provide insight into human nature with philosophical playfulness. She has been published in various magazines and turned Toon Tellegen's animal stories Een Verre Reis (A Long Journey, 2017) into an app of the same title and De Genezing van de Krekel (The Healing of the Cricket, 2019) into a graphic novel. The app won two Lovie Awards, a Gold Guppy and a Special Mention at the Bologna Ragazzi Digital Award. During the pandemic, the City Archive and Centre for Visual Arts of Rotterdam named her "special city artist" for her depiction of developments during the winter lockdown: the repetitiveness, isolation and powerlessness, but also the increasing amount of postal workers bearing mounds of packages, and bike couriers. In Memoir of a Jellyfish (2021), Stok investigates what happens when gravity disappears and the path of existence is no longer linear. The result is a picture story in the form of A5-sized cards with an augmented-reality layer. Together with Bruno Ferro Xavier da Silva she also creates ink and wall drawings under the name Trompette de la Mort.
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Agustina Bazterrica

(Argentina, 1974) won the important Premio Clarín Novela in 2017 for her second novel, Cadáver Exquisito (translated into English as Tender Is the Flesh). The jury unanimously chose her book from 494 submitted manuscripts. It's a dystopian novel about Marcos Tejo, manager of a large meat-processing plant at a time when animal flesh is unfit for consumption because of a virus. He's one of few people who can recall that meat once came from cows, pigs and poultry. Marcos grieves for his dead son and the departure of his wife, cares for his sick father and is almost on a war footing with his sister. The day comes when he receives a living gift from a meat supplier. Tender Is the Flesh is about grief and dehumanization and offers surprisingly credible and gruesome solutions to pressing global problems. Bazterrica's novel paints a mercilessly critical and chilling picture of a morally bankrupt society.


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Roanne van Voorst

(Utrecht, 1983) is a dr. in anthropology, writer, investigative journalist, (TEDx) speaker and university lecturer. She has written seven books, both fiction and non-fiction. Her latest book, Six in Bed, explores the future of love and friendship. Her work has been translated into several languages ​​and some of her books are published internationally. As an 'anthropologist of the future', her research focuses on what a sustainable and desirable future of our world could be. She mainly thinks about what she calls 'sustainable humanity': how do we keep hope in an era characterized by climate change and 'fake news'? What keeps us human, in times of robotization? Will we soon fall in love with robots, dine with avatars, and leave our work tasks to algorithms? What is the effect of this on our society, and on our individual happiness and well-being? And which skills do we need to teach ourselves in order to remain successful, both humanly and professionally, in a high-tech future?
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Elianne van Elderen

(1997) graduated in Creative Writing from ArtEZ with the collection Geef geen namen aan koeien die je van plan bent te slachten (Don't Name Cows That You Plan to Slaughter). The volume consists of poems, fragments, short stories, catalogues, route descriptions and lists. While she mainly writes poetry and short stories (about children who murder their guinea pigs, glow-in-the-dark minigolf courses, the time she tried to draw Stephen Hawking on someone's plaster cast, and bike rides along the meat-processing plant in her native village in Brabant), she also experiments with combining text, image and other art forms. She researched whether it is possible to teach yourself to be obsessive, for which she spent 80 hours embroidering a text on a tent, resulting in an art installation that was exhibited at a poetry event. She also regularly appears on (literary) stages at festivals and events throughout the Netherlands. In 2020 she came in second in Write Now! and third in De (Turing) Poetry Contest.
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