•  Ruth Cruickshank, "Not About Eating: Deconstructing Eating Disorder Science with Annie Ernaux’s Mémoire de fille/A Girl’s Story (2016)" 

Derrida’s ‘eating well’ is not about eating. Instead, his figure raises the question of how subjects may reject patriarchal, totalizing and anthropocentric principles of consumption. It asks how to embrace the irreducible alterity of both self and other in an effort to consume others well. And how to be open, likewise, to being consumed well, without setting up binaries or boundaries. For the author and critics alike, Annie Ernaux’s Mémoire de fille is not about an eating disorder. Critical and narrative focus are on the challenges of revealing and re-telling the enduringly traumatic experiences and consequences of  a young girl being consumed by sexual, social and class shame. This includes a self-misdiagnosis of bulimia, represented as a symptomatic response contained within a two-year temporal and bodily boundary, an obsession which ends on resolving to become a writer. 

Although described as a quest to ‘deconstruct the girl’, Ernaux’s text constructs binaries and boundaries that risk perpetuating myths of eating disorders as about skinny white adolescent girls seeking control. Yet, as far as we know (and science still does not know what causes them)  eating disorders are experienced right across identities, communities, ages, genders, ethnicities and body shapes. They are not just about control, or about (not) eating. 

Ernaux’s affecting representations of disordered eating and her narrative’s reflections on itself with its ‘perpetually missing piece, always postponed. The unqualifiable hole’ are read by entangling the question of ‘eating well’ and the questioning of constructs from the scientific literature of eating disorders. The paper identifies boundaries and binaries resonating with Ernaux’s text: thin/fat; young/later life; focussing on minority diagnoses like anorexia and bulimia and overlooking majority diagnoses like OSFED (other specified feeding or eating disorder); privileging  blunt diagnostic thresholds of BMI and behavioural patterns over emotional and functional impacts. Disrupting patriarchal, totalizing and anthropocentric principles of consumption in Mémoire de fille and in examples of the biomedical constructs that fail the girl and the writer (and the growing number of folks experiencing eating disorders) the paper suggests that reading scientific and creative literatures can open up questions of construction, diagnosis and prevalence - and of the unqualifiedness - of eating disorder.

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Dr Ruth Cruickshank is an Associate Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her background is in contemporary French literature exploring constructs of crisis and  leftover meanings in representations of food and drink in fiction and thought. From that springboard, she now draws on expertise in Comparative Literature,  Food Studies, Critical Medical Humanities and her own lived experience of eating disorders - notably OSFED (other specified eating or feeding disorder) - to bring unique interdisciplinary perspectives into  eating disorder research and understanding. As the only academic in the Humanities working on OSFED Ruth reads scientific eating disorder research, reports and diagnostic criteria as constructs, showing how what might look like scientific truths overlook gaps in evidence and experiences of folks who do not fit into diagnostic criteria  enduring stereotypes or what we think we know about eating disorders. She works with major UK eating disorder charity Beat and an interdisciplinary team of researchers to explore - and crucially, to challenge - why OSFED, despite being the most common eating disorder, is systemically overlooked, and why  BMI and behavioural thresholds overshadow the severe emotional and daily-life impacts experienced right across the eating disorder spectrum.

• Vanja Qvardfordt, "Bulimic Filmmaking as Feminist Methodology: Reimagining Eating Disorders Through Experimental Film Practice"

This paper proposes bulimic filmmaking as a feminist artistic methodology emerging from my ongoing film project DiS. Rather than illustrating eating disorders through psychological explanation or narrative resolution, bulimic filmmaking approaches bulimia as compositional form itself. By articulating bulimia as method rather than metaphor, this presentation argues that embodied conditions can generate formal innovation in contemporary art–transforming stigmatised experience into critical filmic strategy.

Through screening excerpts of How Would You Like Your Bulimic Film Served?–a trilogy comprising chapters 32: Rare, 33: Medium, and 34: Well Done–I examine how bulimia functions not only as subject matter but as a structuring principle within experimental film practice. Repetition, rupture, concealment, excess, rehearsal, and obsessive self-observation become compositional strategies shaping image, sound, editing, and duration. Specific formal techniques include: superimposition of archival Super-8 footage creating temporal layering that mirrors binge-purge cycles; live reflection during filming exposing explicit content and reliving provoked episodes; deliberate re-editing sequences that resist linear narrative progression; and durational choices that embody the disorder's affective temporality. These strategies ensure the films are not merely representational but actively enact the disorder's temporal, psychological, and material logic from within. The camera was directed toward spaces of bulimic episodes, while sound recordings captured both lived experience and critical reflection. Filmed without predetermined structure, the process responds directly to embodied experience.

I will situate bulimic filmmaking within feminist experimental film traditions that engage the body as both material and site of knowledge and resistance. This work problematises compulsory wellness paradigms by proposing an alternative visual regime grounded in vulnerability rather than coherence. The presentation addresses ethics of working with intergenerational archives shaped by stigma and silence, asking how a method grounded in disorder can challenge dominant visual regimes demanding coherence, productivity, and linear recovery narratives. My work addresses how eating is gendered and policed as we are being watched and judged constantly. Bulimic filmmaking leans into the disordered stategies that others want to hide or fix. In doing so, it resists the idea that food choices are simply about personal responsibility or health.

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Stockholm-based artist, MFA Fine Art, HDK-Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg. My ongoing artist film project, Discovery in Silence (DiS) 2022–, interrogates decades of Super-8 films to examine an history of bulimia nervosa affecting three generations of women in my family. Structured as an evolving artistic research in 36 chapters, each chapter marks a moment of discovery. Individual films, screenings, discussions, and workshops function as conceptual gateways within the project’s broader development. Methodological questions include: how can bulimia function as an artistic method, address how to life write for the screen, and how can experimental fine art film generate knowledge on bulimia nervosa by innovating methods that make visible the disorder's colonisation of the carrier? The project has catalysed funding; screenings; exhibitions; seminars and public clinician dialogues; peer-reviewed papers (Journal of Feminist Art and Research: Cosmos, 2026) and conference papers (EDRS, Vienna, 2026).

• Francesca Calamita, "Between Food and the Body: The Complex Relationship of Italian Women with Eating, Embodiment, and Self-Image in Ti trovo cambiata [You have changed] (2026)"

Throughout Western history, the relationship between women and food has functioned as a metaphor through which broader questions of femininity, sexuality, and social conformity are articulated. From the biblical narrative of Eve and the apple to contemporary representations of women’s bodies and eating practices, female consumption has rarely been understood as an act of nourishment. Rather, women’s relationships with food have associated with desire, temptation, self-control, and transgression. At the same time, the preparation of food within the family have been aligned with socially prescribed forms of feminine care. As a consequence, the consumption, rejection, or restriction of food operate as a form of symbolic communication, enabling women to express emotions that remain difficult to articulate verbally. Eating—and refusing to eat—can thus become a means through which affection, anger, frustration, autonomy, and resistance are negotiated.

One chapter of my recent monograph, Ti trovo cambiata [You Have Changed], examines the relationship between women and food in contemporary Italy from a sociological perspective. This complex relationship has constituted a central theme of my academic research throughout my career. Situating the analysis within a contemporary context characterised by the persistent prevalence of eating disorders, the increasing visibility of orthorexia and other forms of regulated eating, and a renewed cultural emphasis on food as a source of pleasure, this paper draws upon both quantitative data and personal narratives collected for the volume. By bringing these forms of evidence into dialogue, it explores the ways in which broader cultural expectations surrounding femininity, health, self-discipline, and the body are negotiated through everyday food practices.

How do contemporary Italian women negotiate their relationships with food and their bodies?

 
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Bio: Coming Soon

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• Josephine Taylor, "Hyperfemininity, Cars, and Consumption Politics in Women’s Contemporary Pop Music"

“All objects, cars included, become women in order to be bought”

(Baudrillard 2006)

The coalescence of cars, women, and a sexual politics of meat and consumption in popular music is omnipresent across twenty first century music videos and lyrics. Car iconography and the imagery of petroculture in music is often immersed in a gaze of masculine sexual appetite in which, as something like Justin Timberlake and Timberland’s “Carry it Out” music video displays: takeout food, women, and cars, as interchangeable commodities to be consumed and/or ridden.

Women’s contemporary pop music, however, such as Charli XCX or Kim Petras presents this absurd glamorous hyperfeminine performance embroiled with the speed of the automobile and the agency it provides as a way of owning and thus denaturalising such politics of consumption, a marker of both meat and oil culture. What becomes apparent in this feminine automobile accelerationism is both nuanced critique yet endorsement of the life of crude-oil enabled. 

I present an exploration of this overt hyperfemininity in women’s pop music as a mode of eating and consuming well in the domain of sexual and gender politics. The paper addresses the petrocultural femininity of Kim Petras music and how, although perhaps not consciously, toys and plays with ideas of Adams infamous work, The Sexual Politics of Meat, alongside the gendered dimensions of car culture. Sophie Lewis poignantly notes ‘When certain feminist first turned against girly things, it was a giant error in Western women’s liberatory history.’ I present a celebration of this sexual excessive hyper-femininity within this type of pop music as a way of celebrating femme sexual agency Kim Petras songs such as ‘Treat me Like a Slut’ and the ‘Need for Speed.’ Both songs are immersed in petrocultural, sexual consumptive politics of women as meat and car objects but alternatively present a subversion of the male gaze, in which hyper-femininity can be seen as empowering, denaturalised, and agential. 

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Bio: Coming Soon

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• Claire Chambers, "Textual and Culinary Collection: Anthologizing the Forgotten Foods and Desi Delicacies of Muslim South Asia"

In this paper I will discuss the two literary collections about food I have been a (co-)editor for: Desi Delicacies (2021) and Forgotten Foods (2023). Both books bring together essays, anecdotes, recipes, and reflections on food from South Asia, particularly from Muslim South Asia, in order to provide a unique perspective on the history and culture of food. They include contributions from authors, historians, chefs, and researchers, as well as little-known ingredients, life writing, and stories. The collections emerged from a Global Challenges research and public engagement project entitled ‘Forgotten Food: Culinary Memories, Local Heritage and Lost Agricultural Varieties in India’. Taken together, the anthologies discuss the cooking, serving, and eating of food, waste, servitude, and the supply chain in order to think through political issues. The curated essays focus on understanding personal experiences, reviving and preserving culinary traditions, and exploring the delicious diversity of regional cuisines. The essay collections are a celebration of gustatory culture, providing a way to bridge populations and create a new textual archive of food memories.

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Claire Chambers is Professor of Global Literature at the University of York, where she teaches contemporary writing in English from South Asia, the Arab world, and their diasporas. She is the author of British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers, co-editor of Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora and Translation and Decolonisation: Interdisciplinary Approaches, and co-author of Storying Relationships: Young British Muslims Speak and Write About Sex and Love. She published two paired monographs, Britain Through Muslim Eyes: Literary Representations, 1780−1988 and Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels. Together these books narrate a literary history of Muslim writing in Britain from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Claire has also brought out such anthologies as Rivers of Ink, A Match Made in Heaven, Desi Delicacies, and Forgotten Foods. Her forthcoming monograph is Decolonizing Disease: Pandemics, Public Health, and Pathogenic Novels (Liverpool University Press, 2026). Claire’s research has been supported by funding from HEFCE, the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Leverhulme Trust. She publishes widely in such journals as Interventions and Contemporary Women’s Writing, and for over a decade acted as Editor-in-Chief of JCL: Literature, Critique, and Empire Today. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

• Valentine Lacoste, "The Cook, the Writer, and the Painter: Women’s Creative Practices in the Bloomsbury Group"

Criticism on food in Virginia Woolf’s work has long focused on the dinner scene in To the Lighthouse (1927). The famous meal is often read as the culmination of Mrs Ramsay’s “triumph” as hostess, yet Woolf also attributes artistic value to the dish itself, describing the boeuf en daube as the cook Mildred’s “masterpiece.” Moreover, as Harriet Blodgett has

 rgued (1997), Woolf’s description of the dish invites an impressionistic mode of looking, suggesting unexpected affinities between cooking, painting and literary composition. My talk takes these converging forms of creation as a point of departure for exploring the figure of the cook across literary, visual, and archival Bloomsbury.

I will move between three kinds of material. The first is Woolf’s writings: her representation of two fictional cooks, Mildred in To the Lighthouse and Mrs Sands in Between the Acts (1941), as well as two little-known sketches, “The Cook” and the “Cook Sketch” (Dick 1997; Jones 2014), which help trace the shifting voice and place Woolf gives the cook. The second is Vanessa Bell’s paintings, with a focus on that of Grace Higgens, the cook at Charleston Farmhouse. The third is the traces we have of the Bloomsbury cooks themselves: Higgens, whose papers are held at the British Library, as well as Sophia Farrell, Nellie Boxall, and Louie Mayer, documented in portraits and memoirs, and in Alison Light’s Mrs Woolf and the Servants (2007).

Taken together, this corpus reveals a network of women whose engagements with food unfolded across different media and class positions, yet were connected by a shared attention to food as something to make, observe, discuss, learn, and teach. I therefore propose to read cooking, writing, and painting as interconnected practices of making, revealing a continuum of women’s creative work that complicates conventional distinctions between intellectual and manual labour, the symbolic and the material, and ultimately between art and craft.

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Valentine Lacoste is a doctoral student at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. She graduated in English literature and is an alumna of Ferrandi, the French school of gastronomy. She has worked as an assistant editor on cookbooks and as a researcher at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, contributing blog entries dedicated to its gastronomic collections. Her doctoral research investigates the role of food in twentieth-century British literature, with a particular focus on the works of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, and explores the culinary as a critical site of materiality, politics, and aesthetics. She has published on representations of fish as food in Virginia Woolf’s work in Sillages Critiques and is currently working on Forster’s contributions to the gastronomic periodical Wine and Food.

• Sohni Chakrabarti, "Preserving memories of resistance: The politics of 'eating well' in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night"

Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night chronicles the intergenerational impact of the Indian indentured system. In this lecture, I will focus on the representations of preservation and fermentation to discuss the tropes of marginalization, displacement, and dispossession. This lecture situates consumption of pickles and preserves within broader discourses of “eating well,” especially when it pertains to displaced and marginalized subjectivities. My lecture thinks through the notion of “eating well” for Indentured women subjects whose food practices reflect the intergenerational memories of colonial trauma and survival. In the novel, pickles and condiments are used to flesh out affective memories of home and belonging, while reinforcing a sense of space, place, and time in a marginalizing postcolonial landscape. By foregrounding traditional fermentation and preservation practices, this lecture explores the ways in which Indentured women’s food practices can perform a crucial postcolonial feminist resistance to the intersecting violences of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. Through a focus on food and memory I conceptualize what I call a reparative nostalgia, where food memories help to preserve multiple and multifarious versions of the past, disrupting essentialist notions of identity, home, and belonging. 

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Bio

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• Shweta Ramsay, "What Food Can—and Cannot—Fix: Care, Displacement and Female Agency in Ladies Coupé (Margaret’s story) and 'Mrs. Sen’s'"

Food is often associated with care, comfort and well-being. Yet the injunction to “eat well” raises a more complicated question: what does it mean to be well, and for whom? This paper explores the gap between eating well and being well through Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupé (Chapter “Oil of Vitriol”) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Mrs. Sen’s,” focusing on two women whose relationships with food are closely tied to marriage, displacement, care and agency. 

In both texts, cooking and feeding appear to offer care and connection, while also revealing conditions that prevent the women from being fully “well.” In Margaret’s story, feeding her husband becomes a form of agency. The elaborate meals she prepares seem to fulfil the expectations of a dutiful wife, yet her culinary knowledge allows her to turn feeding into a means of resistance against a controlling and self-centred husband who seeks to dictate the terms of their marriage. The kitchen becomes both the stage for her domestic performance and the means of her rebellion. 

For Mrs. Sen, food becomes a way of negotiating her sense of alienation. Her efforts to obtain fresh fish, prepare familiar dishes and recreate communal eating allow her to preserve fragments of a remembered home in the United States. Yet these practices also reveal her loneliness and difficulty adapting to her new surroundings. The kitchen becomes both a refuge from her alienation and a space in which that alienation is made visible.

Through comparative close reading, I examine how cooking, feeding and eating intersect with domesticity, mobility, belonging and emotional well-being. I argue that food in these texts operates simultaneously as care, cultural memory and a means of negotiating agency, while also exposing the limits of what food can do to make women “well.”

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Shweta Ramsay is a third-year PhD candidate in Anglophone Studies at Université Paul Valéry Montpellier, where she is supervised by Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak. Her research in English Literature lies at the intersection of postcolonial studies, migration, and food studies, exploring food and mobility and their wider social, cultural, and political dimensions. She holds a Master’s degree in Teaching English from Université Savoie Mont Blanc, France, and a Bachelor’s degree in Mass Media, with a specialisation in Advertising, from the University of Mumbai, India. 

• Emma Flynn, "‘I watch them all devour my demon and I join in’: Sexual violence, the victim-cannibal and #MeToo"

Peach is a vegetarian. She is made of ‘orange fuzz and flesh’, her blood ‘sugar-syrup-tasting juice’; her boyfriend, Green, tastes of twigs with a mouth ‘smooth like sanded wood’. Peach is raped by a stranger while walking home – Peach (2018) by Emma Glass opens in the aftermath. Peach discovers that her rapist is Lincoln, a greasy and phallic ‘demon’ who torments her with oil-soaked “love” letters and attacks on her family and friends. She takes revenge: after killing him, she moulds his flesh into sausages to be barbecued and voraciously enjoyed at a party.

Consumption, particularly that of meat and flesh, has a storied relationship to gender and violence in literature and in cultural production more broadly. The tale of Philomela echoes in Peach (although, in the Ovidian rendering it is the rapist Tereus who is punished by being tricked into eating his son); Richard Hilliard (1990) argues that the ritual sacrifice of Clarissa in Samuel Richardson’s early rape novel is dependent on a logic of cannibalism. For Louise Flockhart (2019), representations of cannibalism frequently offer a critique of patriarchy and resistance to it while illustrating its limited ability to engender structural change. Peach offers a way in to exploring the relationship between sexual violence and cannibalism in cultural production—I argue that these representations cannot be abstracted from the cultural and chronological context, from the conjuncture, in which they emerge.

I therefore examine not only the textual representations of rape and cannibalism in Peach, but the context in which these representations take place. How are victimhood and perpetration made legible through gastronomic metaphor? What configurations does a victim-cannibal take on in the #MeToo moment?  What does eating one’s rapist suggest about the futility of justice, criminal and social, in the long 2010s? 

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Bio

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• Poulomi Choudhury

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Bio

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• Katarina Labudová, "Survival Appetites: Women's Dystopian Writing and Contemporary Catastrophe"

In contemporary dystopian women's writing, appetite emerges as both a biological necessity and a political language through which ecological crisis, war, pandemic, and social precarity are experienced. Food, hunger, and consumption become central to narratives that examine how bodies endure catastrophe while negotiating care, desire, reproduction, and environmental collapse. Rather than treating eating as a private act, these texts reveal it as deeply entangled with systems of power, inequality, and ecological interdependence.

I examine representations of food and appetite in contemporary fiction, memoir, and autofiction by women writers working across dystopian, climate fiction, pandemic, and speculative genres. Drawing on feminist food studies, biopolitics, and ecofeminist theory, it considers how acts of feeding, fasting, scarcity, and communal eating challenge dominant narratives of resilience and individual responsibility. The seminar argues that women's catastrophe writing reimagines eating as an ethical and political practice that exposes the fragile connections between human bodies and damaged environments.

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Bio

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• Méliné Kasparian-Le Fèvre, "'What does loss taste like?' Recovering Traditional Food and Ecological Knowledge"

As Kathryn Yusoff writes, “[t]he Anthropocene might seem to offer a dystopic future that laments the end of the world, but imperialism and ongoing (settler) colonialisms have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence.” Indigenous peoples have already faced catastrophic world endings through colonialism: the loss of land, of culture, but also of food, through the destruction of ecosystems, forced displacement, or the banning of foodstuffs. For example, in the 16 th century, Spanish colonizers banned the use of amaranth, a plant that was not only very nutritious but also integral in Aztec spirituality. This loss of access to traditional foods threatened not only the physical well-being of indigenous communities, but also the very survival of their cultures. Today, a movement to recover ancestral foods, recipes and techniques, or to “decolonize food” has gained momentum, as exemplified by the “Sioux chef” (Sean Sherman) who seeks to preserve and popularize traditional Sioux recipes.

This paper would study a similar dynamic in the works of contemporary Indigenous women poets, who also focus on traditional foodways and the impact of colonization on Indigenous food systems and cultures. Reading authors such as Sarah Biscarra Diley, Megan Dorame and Deborah A. Miranda through the framework of decolonial ecology reveals how their poetry about ancestral foods denounces the intertwined ecological and cultural losses caused by colonization, in the past and in the present. The paper will argue that their poems act both as mourning sites and as repositories of traditional ecological knowledge, in which food is tied to a sense of collective responsibility as well as to a message of hope, conveyed through botanical poetics. Through their poetry of ancestral foods, these authors defend environmental justice and promote sustainability by turning towards knowledge from the past, not future technosolutions.

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Méliné Kasparian completed a PhD in American literature at Université Bordeaux Montaigne, focusing on the writing of food in the works of contemporary Mexican American women writers. She has contributed to edited volumes such as Consumption and the Literary Cookbook (2020), and Significant Food: Critical Readings to Nourish American Literature (2024). Her main research interests include food in literature, women’s writing, ecocriticism, and ecofeminism.

• Liza B. Bauer, "'You Are Not the Friend of Those Who Turn You into a Smelly Bone': Reconfiguring Dining Table Constellations in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam" 

Dr. Liza B. Bauer will join us to provide insights on the affordances of science and speculative fiction (sf) texts in negotiating ideas on not/eating other animals through a lens that expands on Derrida’s eating well. From an animal studies perspective, the cultural norm of eating other animals but never human ones can be understood as a crucial performance that secures the so-called anthropological difference: the belief in a fundamental distinction between humans and all other animals. Reading Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy, Dr. Bauer considers the narrative tropes and strategies sf texts apply in order to de- and reconstruct eating practices, such as, reversing human-animal hierarchies, suspending the anthropological difference, or playing with the narrative perspective, thereby imagining dinner table constellations differently and alienating readers from familiar patterns. Building on Derrida’s critique of carnophallogocentrism—the construction of the “human” along the model of a carnivorous, masculine, and language-using subject—the talk suggests that Atwood’s fiction moves beyond asking what not to eat, or what and how to eat, toward the question: with whom to negotiate the terms of eating and living well in multispecies worlds. 

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Dr. Liza B. Bauer is a postdoctoral researcher at the Endowed Professorship for HumanAnimal Studies at Justus Liebig University Giessen and has co-directed the Human-Animal Studies research section at the same university’s Graduate Centre for the Social Sciences, Business, Economics and Law since 2018. Her postdoctoral project critically examines technology-assisted research into animal communication. From 2022 to 2025, she served as Scientific Manager of a transdisciplinary think tank, the Panel on Planetary Thinking. A collaborative monograph, Our Planetary Condition: Foundations for a Politics with the Earth (MIT Press), co-authored with Frederic Hanusch, Claus Leggewie, and Clemens Finkelstein, will appear in late 2026. Her award-winning dissertation was published in 2024 as Livestock and Literature: Reimagining Postanimal Companion Species (Palgrave). Alongside numerous publications in literary studies and animal studies, she has contributed to the edited collection Animals and Science Fiction (Palgrave, 2024), Multispecies Futures: New Approaches to Teaching Human-Animal Studies (Neofelis, 2022), and spoken twice on Josh Milburn’s Knowing Animals podcast.

• Phoebe Chetwynd, "Veg*ns Living Through Ecocollapse: Interdependence and Survival in Rachel Atalla’s Thirsty Animals (2023) and Alison Layland’s After the Clearances (2025)"

Anthropogenic ecological crisis has highlighted the ethical and environmental consequences of industrial animal agriculture, making experimentation with alternative eating practices ever more urgent. Because of the genre’s capacity to take critical distance from society, speculative and science fiction (sf) should have a critical role in the experimentation with new modes of being and eating (Castle and McDonald 2022). Yet, since the mid-twentieth century, speculative and science fiction (sf) has largely endorsed meat-eating – and, particularly, hunting and pastoral agriculture – as both necessary and natural (Bulleid 2023).

This paper explores the relationship between anthropocentrism, meat-eating and subjectivity through Rachel Atalla’s Thirsty Animals (2023) and Alison Layland’s After the Clearances (2025). In the former, extreme drought sweeps the United Kingdom and the vegetarian Aida is forced to return to her family farm in Scotland. In the latter, a Welsh eco-nationalist community attempts to build new, sustainable relations with the more-than-human world on an isolated island. I thus introduce two new novels to the flourishing body of work at the intersection of animal and sf studies, pursuing reflections on eating practices in times of ecological crisis. 

I open with a discussion of the ways in which ecocollapse challenges anthropocentric subjectivity in the novels, throwing human dependence on ecosystems into stark relief. Water plays an important role here: water binds human and more-than-human worlds together while water shortages threaten the survival of plants, nonhuman animals, and humans alike. Through their veg*n characters, both novels also explore the role of eating practices in environmental activism and in building new relations with the more-than-human world. At the same time, however, all the characters ultimately consume nonhuman animal flesh at some point in the novels: as food and water supplies dwindle, Aida eats meat with her family while the hardline vegan inhabitants of the eco-nationalist community are derided as puritanical and unrealist. Depictions of pastoral agriculture and hunting affirm meat-eating as necessary and natural, pointing to the anthropocentric limits of the sf imagination.

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Phoebe Chetwynd is a lecturer in British literature and translation at CY Cergy Paris Université, specialising in animal studies, food studies, and speculative and science fiction (sf). She received her PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2025: this innovative research looked at anthropocentrism and ideologies of meat-eating in representations of the future(s) of meat in twenty-first century sf. She is currently working on a monograph based on this research, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. In 2025, she published an article on biopolitics and language in Joseph D’Lacey and Vincent Message’s anthropophagic slaughterhouses in Extrapolation. She also published an article on entomophagy and entanglement in Becky Chambers’ extraterrestrial multispecies communities in e-Rea the same year. Her review of Sarah McFarland (2021) appeared in Configurations in 2026, and she has spoken at conferences across France, Holland, and the United Kingdom. 

• Gabrielle Pozzo di Borgo, "The power granted by meat: eating flesh and physical prowess in a fantasy world"

This talk will address the link between eating and physical prowess, and power in general. In the novel I am currently writing, eating meat from certain animals confers certain magical abilities. At the start of the novel, it is believed that only meat can grant these abilities, so my heroine forces herself to eat meat, even though she is disgusted by it after witnessing the killing of an animal as a child. This act grants her power on two levels: a physical level, where she is able to wield a certain type of magic; and a symbolic level, which is apparent in the control and coercion humans exert on farm animals, whom they then kill to obtain the meat. In a sense, the act of eating meat in this fantasy world could be read as a form of "stealing" the animals' own physical abilities, since the more powerful an animal is, the more power his or her meat will grant. I think another aspect that might be interesting to cover is the temporary character of the abilities granted by meat (they fade after digestion is complete), which in turn determines the permanence of animal farming. Because the effects meat grants are temporary, then animals must remain in a constant state of subjugation. It is not a "drink the potion once and it shall grant you power" type of situation. This power is elusive, conditioned on the death of animals, and needs to be seeked at every meal. This fantastical situation echoes a real-world preoccupation: the idea that only meat/animal products can help build muscle or facilitate physical performance. 

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Bio coming soon

• Emelia Quinn, "Vegetarianism and Veganism in Literature and Culture"

Abstract and Bio coming soon