Abstract
This chapter examines Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood to understand the novel’s intersection of queer theory and animal studies. Despite the overlap between ve(getari)ans and the queer community, Nightwood aligns queerness with an animalistic hunger that Robin, one of the two lesbian protagonists, must struggle with quite literally at the end of the novel. Nightwood, and especially the novel’s final scene, raises complicated questions about the relationship between queerness and ve(getari)anism that have implications for how we understand the space between these two marginalized identities. The chapter explores the nuanced and often contradictory dynamic between these positionalities in Barnes’ novel and offer conclusions about her work’s impact on these communities today.
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Notes
- 1.
I myself eat meat on occasion, and while I agree with Adams’ argument about the role of meat-eating in reproducing structures of oppression, I also acknowledge that a vega(tari)an diet is not accessible for all.
- 2.
See also: Blake; Barbara Green, “Spectacular Confessions: ‘How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed,’” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 3 (1993): 70–88; Karen Kaivola, “The ‘Beast Turning Human’: Constructions of the ‘Primitive’ in Nightwood,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 3 (1993): 172–185.
- 3.
For more, see Dalton.
- 4.
For more on American modernism and the virtualizing effects of language, see Katherine Biers, Virtual Modernism: Writing and Technology in the Progressive Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
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Mann, M. (2021). Queer Hunger: Human and Animal Bodies in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. In: Hanganu-Bresch, C., Kondrlik, K. (eds) Veg(etari)an Arguments in Culture, History, and Practice. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53280-2_8
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