“I Was A Woman of Appetites, A Growling Beast”: On Subversive Female Hunger in Butter and Milk Fed

Food and eating, as Sarah Sceats notes, have long been central to women’s writing, with alimentary concerns linked to sexual politics, gender identity, and structures of power. Examining the female protagonists of Asako Yuzuki’s Butter and Milk Fed by Melissa Broder, we argue that to feed and be fed function as the complementary means through which women are able to contest their marginality, refuse small acts of disappearance, and insist on both agency and presence. These novels explore how gastronomic concerns operate as gendered mechanisms of control – over the bodies of others as well as those self-imposed practices of denial – as well as offering the potential for subversion, by consuming beyond expected or accepted norms and practices. Food and eating, we contend, thus always exist in a state of tension for female protagonists, who are often trapped within liminal spaces of restriction and indulgence, struggling to disconnect from the complexities of abjection, transgression, and fear.