Alimentary Temporalities: Queer Food, Asexuality, and the Global Culinary-Roman

This essay explores the queer temporalities figured within “culinary-romane”: those contemporary, coming-of-age novels that use food to interrogate the literary construct of the female journey. In opposition to the female Bildungsroman, which maps maturation via hegemonic temporal structures—historical, narrative, reproductive—the culinary-roman cleaves development from heteropatriarchal time. Instead, it conceives anti-normative models of female development via “alimentary temporalities”: atemporal narrative spaces constructed through recipes, food nightmares, family meals, and magical cooking and eating. Using Han Kang’s surrealist allegory The Vegetarian (2007) as a case study, this essay uncovers the ways strange alimentary temporalities in Han’s novel formally decenter sexual attraction as a marker of modern subject formation, uncovering the Bildungsroman’s structural perpetuation of compulsory sexuality and its attendant abuses. Through its food-driven, double frame-tale narration, The Vegetarian unsettles received notions of narrative coherence, generic classification, and the relationship between sexuality and subjectivity.