Cut and Shoot: A Documentarian’s Story of Meat in Ozeki’s "My Year of Meats"

“Truth lies in layers,” thought Jane, “each of them thin and barely opaque, like skin, resisting the tug to be told. As a documentarian, I think about this a lot” (Ozeki 175). These words were published in a novel My Year of Meats by Ruth L. Ozeki in 1998.

The story is told in two perspectives. There is Jane Takagi-Little, a half-Japanese and half-American documentarian who is part of a team that produces a show called My American Wife! The second perspective is by a viewer of the program, Akiko Ueno, a Japanese housewife married to an abusive husband who also works on the show with Jane. The story takes place on two sides of the globe with Jane filming in America and Akiko viewing in Japan. Events unfold for Jane as she films various families in the search for the most “authentic” American family with John Ueno constantly pestering her on what is and is not authentic. Jane ends up getting pregnant, risking her job to film her definition of truth, and the baby dies while still inside her stomach. Meanwhile Akiko is on the other side of the world consuming Jane’s media, American recipes, and faces constant oppressions by Mr. Ueno who is obsessed with her having his baby. She eventually gets pregnant and with hope gained by watching families on Jane’s show, and runs away to America to start a new life without her abusive husband. By the end of the story, Jane publishes a film on the danger of a hormone put into beef called DES, and gets fired. She ends the novel with, “So here it is. My Year of Meats. Not so easy. But done.” Her ending note gives the impression that she is self-aware of her own narrative.

Jane Takegi-Little is a character worth focusing on. She is a documentarian who hunts down, shoots, and captures people’s lives. She then cuts them up and cooks them into a visual episode to be consumed by the public. The power of narrative is a force in the novel that raises questions about not only the complex ethics of meat, but of the use of story itself. In Adams, we learn the “story of meat” (Adams, 49) that is told to justify killing animals. Narrative is everywhere to the point that it is nowhere because everyone is inside both their own and other narrative structures. In Ozeki, storytelling is a weapon and an unbeatable system that creates truth for its characters and readers. In “In Search of Authenticity” we learn that truth is subjective, and the authenticity My American Wife” quests for is nothing but a social construction used in marketing during a time of globalization (Peterson 1083-1098). Jane seeks authenticity in meat and in people, putting both in the same structure, both in the same narrative. In stories, people are just the same as meat. People are made meat under the camera lens. We see this system take place in the construction of Jane’s character, her sexual relationship with Sloan, her postcolonial searches for authenticity, her racist tendencies, her haunted feelings in the editing room, half-epiphanies, using the camera as a weapon, and in the excerpts from Shonagon’s Pillow Book. We will cover how Jane turned women into meat through her narrative.

The best place to begin is how Jane turned people into meat through her narrative. Rewinding to the quote, “Truth lies in layers, each of them thin and barely opaque, like skin, resisting the tug to be told. As a documentarian, I think about this a lot” (Ozeki 175), we witness a fleshy description of truth as Jane is in the editing room. This is probably the most important quote when thinking about narrative, meat, and meaning. Firstly, it’s interesting that “truth lies” is used. While “lies” is not used as in something that is not truth in this context, it bears a special binary parallel with the “truth” before it. This is a subconscious hint towards the blurriness of the authenticity that Jane seeks to capture. She describes truth to be hiding under “skin” which is something both meaty and possesses the possibility of being human. She describes truth as hidden under a piece of a body that resists being tugged. In other words, Jane seems to believe the skin should be pulled open like meat. In search for this truth or authenticity, Jane films American families and their cooking of meat. Using her own metaphor for truth, Jane is pulling layer after layer of skin off in order to seek authenticity. This carnivorous image of the documentarian uproots the predatory nature of the camera. Jane seeks truth in people, thus they are meat to her.

It’s important to first examine the term “authentic,” as it is used by nearly every character in the novel at some point. To begin with, it must be put to attention that authenticity is a social construction (Peterson 1083-1098). In other words, one cannot factually defend the authenticity of something without relating to human meanings that relate to our own values and ideas of what we think of history. What authenticity is used for is most often a marketing strategy. When someone calls something authentic, consumers often find the deal more real and seek it out instead. Why? With globalization on the rise, the search for authenticity grows more prevalent with trying to assign value to objects, places, and/or people. Globalization is an enormous theme in My Year of Meats, as John and Akiko seek to “Americanize” themselves, leaving behind their Japanese identities such as John’s original name and Akiko leaving Japan for an American life. Jane’s show My American Wife! is about bringing authentic American wives and their cooking to Japanese viewers. The market value of authenticity also explains why Jane is pushed by John and her company to seek out the concept of authenticity. This may also play into Jane’s obsession with revealing the hidden truth. She believes that the truth is in layers, maybe buried under globalization which has blurred the lines of authenticity.

So what is authentic about America to Japan? Karen Kelsky, who wrote Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western dreams, examined Occidentalism. Occidentalism is the opposite of Orientalism. It is the stereotyped and sometimes dehumanizing view of the western world. It is an explanation for how Japanese people may romanticize the west due to media portrayal such as with Jane’s My American Wife! John Ueno exemplifies a lot of Occidentalist behavior, having a stereotyped preference for America as a place of blonde Texan babes, cowboys, and southern cooking. Outside of My Year of Meats, about twice the numbers of Japanese women study abroad in comparison to men (Kelsky 103). Akiko fit into this, who ends up completely romanticizing the American dream to the point that she leaves John to move there. Due to globalization, fewer Japanese women are having children, more are moving to cities, and fewer are getting married (Kelsky 12). Due to American media such as My American Wife! and globalization, Japanese women are rejecting what was traditional. This fits into Akiko’s development to break away from her husband and travel to America. This also helps understand John, who is obsessed with authenticity. He wants Akiko to be the authentic Japanese wife who is about child-rearing and passivity but he also likes American authenticity which is meant to be a meaty Texan cowboy culture like the Wild West movies. John wants Jane’s camera to capture that true American culture.

The language around the camera shares the same words as one would use in a hunt. Jane herself describes the hunt with semantics such as, “Their lives are sealed in your box of tapes,” (Ozeki 36) and “While you are shooting them, they are your entire world and you live in the warm, beating heart of their domestic narratives” (Ozeki 35). She describes those she films as “opening their lives up” (Ozeki 35) for her and the filming team. “Opening” gives the impression that the lives were closed in the first place, and to be opened gives the image that they must have been twisted, sliced, and/or pulled to get open. There is also a generous use of the word “cut” to stop filming a scene and “shoot” to film.

The camera does not just serve as a tool of dominance in My Year of Meats: it is also a lens that Jane uses to separate herself from the situation. In Adams’ Sister Species, Karen Davis described a disturbing story of baby seals getting clubbed to death in New Brunswick, Canada. She said, “A retired oilman from Oklahoma had brought a tripod to set up on the ice to film the slaughter for his friends back home as a form of entertainment” (Davis 133). Davis’ example is one of many. Journalists constantly struggle with the ethics of when and when not to get involved due to their desire for authenticity. Self-inserting oneself into a situation is to risk the “truth” or “authenticity” of a scene, though sometimes journalists self-insert for the purpose of creating a fake truth. For example, Davis described knowing a photographer, Bill, whose first assignment for National Geographic was to cover a beaver colony. His editor disliked his photographs and asked him to wreck the beaver colony in order to “procure a certain story angle” (Davis 133). Stories like Bill’s and the one of seals getting beaten are shown to distort ideas of truth and the self’s position. In the text, when filming Suzie Flowers, the crew had to adapt similarly when Suzie’s Coca-Cola Roast did not possess enough steps for the show. They decided to take lots of different footage of the same steps over and over again. Suzie also had only enough ingredients to make the roast once, so she and the crew went out to the grocery store and bought a dozen Pepsi bottles. “Unfortunately they couldn’t find another rump roast that looked the same, and in between each take, Suzie had to wash off the raw meat in the sink and pat it dry with paper towels and make it look new again” (Ozeki 25). In order to create the truth they desire, the crew has to manipulate the environment they are filming. Jane struggles with her role and self-involvement when she seeks out authentic families. In that journey, she lies to the lesbian vegetarians as to what her show was about, tries to avoid Suzie Flowers after done filming her, and secretly meets with Bunny to film her daughter, Rose’s, body.

Jane’s entire character can be viewed as a structured frame of what narration and story-telling stands for. This is not just in terms of her job as a documentarian. Jane is half Japanese, half American, which gives her a narrative advantage, having each foot in one half of the world. Jane herself even recognizes that narrative advantage, saying, “Halved as I am, I was born doubled. By the time I wrote the pitch for My American Wife! my talent for speaking out of both sides of my mouth was already honed” (Ozeki 176). She is connected to America as well as Japan which are the two major locations in the novel.

Jane is also tall, which means she literally can see over everyone and look down on them. To be a story-teller is to play God and look down on everyone. Jane, as a documentarian, plays God looking down on people’s lives with the camera; Jane being tall fits her physically in the construction of story-teller.

The pitch Jane wrote for My American Wife! is a frame by which we can see the concepts Jane begins her journey with. “Meat is the Message,” she wrote. “It’s the meat (not the Mrs.) who’s the star of our show” (Ozeki 8). Meat is the main focus, not the women. Though we do get some foreshadowing of Jane’s change of character by the end of the novel when she writes in her pitch, “She [the wives] is the Meat Made Manifest: ample, robust, yet never tough or hard to digest” (Ozeki 8). Jane outright compares women to meat, going so far as to describe digesting them in this quotation. As we further through the novel, we’ll see that Jane slowly moves away from meat to women’s bodies in her search for authenticity.

Probably most importantly, Jane speaks in first person. This is a contrast to Akiko whose story is in the third person and remains there throughout the whole novel despite her development. This is because Jane is the one playing God, the one who captures people’s lives. We experience our lives in first person while characters and the “other” experience their lives in third to us. Jane is at the center while everyone else is “other” through third person narratives. This provides a deeper meaning that we the readers experience our lives as storytellers like Jane.

Jane is often described as indomitable, as she describes on page 90, “Few men could make me feel diminutive” and “I never felt submissive and certainly I never lost control” (Ozeki 90). She describes her body as a “continent” (Ozeki 90) that men ultimately could not conquer. She also mentioned finding the sexual affairs to feel “distant.’ So why could Sloan please Jane in bed? He was a storyteller. Jane said herself, “He was a masterful storyteller” (Ozeki 90). The word “masterful” is mentioned twice with Sloan, once for his ability in storytelling, and again in how he is in bed. This fits into the construction that storytelling is an act of dominance in My Year of Meats. Jane mentions, “In life, I am the most competent person I know…But Sloan was such a master of sex that my competence in life was irrelevant. He relieved me of choice” (Ozeki 90). To tell a story is all about choices, such as in how Jane seeks and chooses who to film and what to cut and capture. To be part of a story, on the other hand, is a loss of choice as the people who Jane film have their private lives made vulnerable, chopped up, and redistributed. For Jane to describe her sexual experience with Sloan to be “relieved of choice” is to show us that with Sloan she is not the dominant documentarian figure anymore because for her, Sloan is the “masterful” storyteller. To dominate in My Year of Meats is to conquer through the power of narrative. To be the storyteller is to put oneself above others. Besides Sloan, Jane puts everyone else beneath her through not just her camera, but through her concepts of people as well.

Jane shows racist tendencies in the novel. For example, when talking to Helen on the phone, Helen mentions that white people have never been inside her church before. Jane corrects Helen, stating “We’re Japanese, so really we’re mostly yellow…” (Ozeki 102). Being half Japanese and half American puts Jane in an interesting position where she doesn’t feel like she either belongs in either category or that she belongs in both. This ends up with her ultimately othering both. In other words, she distances herself from both the Japanese and the American. As a young girl, Jane finds an anthropological nightmare of a book in the Quam Public Library. The book possessed very problematic views of other cultures such as seeing development of culture as a linear path that eventually lead to what western nations were. The book othered and homogenized all cultures that were non-western and non-white. Jane specifically recalled it saying, “The people of the yellow race living on the islands of Japan have made more progress than any other branch of the race. They are eager to learn how the white men do all kinds of work, and they have been wise enough to adopt many of the customs of the white race…” (Ozeki 150). Jane concludes that even as a child she knew there was something problematic about the book. Despite her telling us this, her behavior throughout the novel seems to stem from this narrative of culture. Firstly she calls herself and her Japanese colleagues “yellow.” Secondly and more importantly, she pitched a TV show, My American Wife! which is all about importing American customs to Japan for them to adopt. Jane recognizes something is wrong but she appears to have no epiphany, no development in her actions in spite of this experience. She becomes a follower of the societal narrative, even after she critiques it.

Distancing a little from Jane, The Pillow Book excerpts between every chapter echo what is going to happen in the chapter to come, but that is not all. Shonagon and Jane are similar because Shonagon, like Jane and her TV show, tried to capture life. Unlike Jane, Shonagon did not use a camera, but pen and page to take snapshots of emotion, thoughts, and events. Also a big difference between Jane and Shonagon was that Jane meant for her narrative to be made public, while Shonagon’s Pillow Book was meant to be personal before it got discovered by the court.

The section of The Pillow Book used to open the epilogue of My Year of Meats was most significant because it is an entry in which Shonagon feels guilt about her narrative getting discovered. She wrote, “Since much of it might appear malicious and even harmful to other people, I was careful to keep my book hidden. But now it has become public, which is the last thing I expected…Whatever people may think of my book, I still regret that it ever came to light” (Ozeki 354). This excerpt gives evidence that the power of story-telling may not be all rainbows and sunshine, but actually a heavy responsibility that effects other people’s lives. Real people such as readers, TV viewers, and those families in the reality TV show My American Wife! are all absent referents. Adams describes the absent referent on page 13 in her book “The Sexual Politics of Meat” as “that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product.” In this case of story-telling, people separate what they write and film from the actual people they are writing and filming about. Shonagon and Jane did not think about the consequences to their art. Jane’s show greatly effected people who were beyond the lens of her camera such as Akiko leaving her husband, Bunny taking Rosie away from the meat factory, and Ms. Flower’s finding out about her husband cheating on her.

A detail that is fascinating about the use of The Pillow Book in My Year of Meats is that The Pillow Book itself became a victim of My Year of Meats’ discourse of narration. Shonagon’s narrative was viewed by Ozeki, cut into pieces to be manipulated, and rearranged throughout her own book. Ozeki even mashed two different excerpts together to make a single one for the meaning in her epilogue. “But it has become public, which is the last thing I expected” is not actually followed by “Whatever people may think of my book, I still regret that it ever came to light.” Those two pieces are far separate from each other in Shonagon’s book. Like Jane, Ozeki edited The Pillow Book like scenes, framing it to make any meaning she desired.

Another interesting point to make about Jane’s search for authenticity is how she finds feminine bodies that are usually invisible to the usual media. In Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility, a sociological text on bodies made invisible in the eyes of society, one learns that invisible bodies usually consist of those who are disabled, minorities, and lower class. Jane purposefully seeks these kinds of families out. She actively tries to find those who are typically invisible to film such as Christina who was in a wheelchair, Rosie who suffered from deformity, Helen who was black, and Lara and Dyann who were lesbians. Jane actively seeks out these missing bodies in search of authenticity and truth. Jane believes the truth is hidden, so she hunts through bodies that are not normally seen on regular reality TV. Missing Bodies uses a functionalist perspective though, which means it sees the stratification of women’s bodies as part of a body in a social system. In other words, making certain women invisible to the public is a function that makes society work the way it does. These women are normally powerless because of their statuses as a woman, disabled person, or a minority, and the power is thus in the hands of the white, normative bodied man. This may be why John is so against Jane’s method of seeking authenticity, because it takes away his masculine power.

While Jane filming these typically invisible bodies may seem as progressive, there are some drawbacks.

A problematic part of the system of story-telling is the search for authenticity. Jane is constantly pushed to find “real Americans” (Ozeki 57). Jane says, “The Network is always complaining that the shows aren’t authentic enough. Well, I’ve been saying if only they’d let me direct, I’d show them some real Americans.”

But what makes something authentic? Anthropologists have struggled with this word since their school of study was founded. What is a “real” American? John seeks out a vision of white nuclear families while Jane seeks out difference such as in lesbians and minorities. Both John and Jane are falling into the problematic part of story-telling that supports postcolonial discrimination. In one of the essays in Sister Species, compartmentalization is discussed. “I see it (compartmentalization) as the root of all evil; the labeling and compartmentalization of life have contributed enormously to discrimination” (Newkirk 2011). While Newkirk is discussing meat in her essay, what she said about compartmentalization can be used for many examples, one such being Jane and John’s compartmentalization of American families.

Jane eventually starts having a sort of epiphany. She finds herself haunted by the women she has been filming; she describes them as, “Suzie Flowers. Miss Helen Dawes. Certain women stuck to me, flickering around the edges of thought” (Ozeki 176). She gets very close to feeling guilt for having filmed their lives. She thinks, “But the fact is that I forced my way into her (Helen’s) life, overcame her reservations, and I will never forget her wistful acquiescence when I had to cancel the shoot” (Ozeki 176). She even gets as far as to reveal the camera as a weapon with Suzie Flowers, saying “It was her life and I had no part in its making. Still, the worn fabric of her life tore like tissue under the harsh exposure of my camera; I watched it happen, took aim, exposed her, then shot her in the heart” (Ozeki 177). Despite this epiphany, Jane does not change. She continues on with her powers of narrative, chopping up “authentic” captured lives.

The climax of the story centers on little Rosie, the five-year-old of the Dunn family who grew breasts due to the hormone, DES, that is used on the cattle ranch. While many may think the climax takes place in the slaughter house, the moment when Jane begins to film Rosie is when her camera’s gaze turns away from the meat, and turns to the naked body of a little girl. Jane does this as an act of rebellion. It is her definition of authenticity. As mentioned before, Jane believes the truth is hidden under layers of skin. She believes the truth is something to be fought for, something that needs to be cut into, something to be hunted rather than something that is simply there. Rosie’s body is exactly what Jane has been looking for. It was concealed and then hunted down. Jane cornered Bunny and confronted her about Rosie and, like she did with others, got Bunny to “open up” for the camera. Rosie could not be more vulnerable when filmed. She is five-years-old, naked, and sleeping because Bunny slipped half a sleeping pill to her before bed. We as the readers don’t even know if Rosie herself is aware of her abnormality and she is so young that Jane does not think of what the child may say to being filmed naked and sleeping. As far as the audience knows, Rosie is completely ignorant to her situation. In defense of Rosie’s privacy, Bunny does tell Jane to not film Rosie’s face though she later states, “Oh, what the hell. It’s not like it’s her fault. And with a body like that, who’s gonna be looking at her face right?” (Ozeki 276). What Bunny says about her own daughter is important because in that one quote, she turns her daughter into meat. Bunny realizes that Rosie’s identity didn’t matter in connection to her deformed body, thus turning her to meat in the camera lens.

When Jane corners Bunny about Rosie’s condition, Bunny tells Jane, “It’s none of your business you know” (Ozeki 274). What Bunny said reflects back on Jane’s epiphany of guilt about going into people’s lives and exploiting them through the camera. Despite this accusation, Jane defends herself with the fact that her uterus has been deformed by hormones. This puts Jane in a similar condition to Rosie. It was on this note that Bunny opened up for Jane to capture on film. Jane used her own narrative as a pass to Rosie’s, much like how she uses her identity as half-American and half-Japanese to produce My American Wife! It is almost like a wolf in sheep’s clothing trick. While all the above about Jane is in fact true, she is still the one holding all the power through the camera. There is no film or evidence of her uterus being deformed. She uses Rosie almost as a tool to tell her own story without exploiting herself.

Jane gains a second near-epiphany similar to her first when editing the film of Rosie. Similar language is used, and not just by Jane but by Bunny in the edited film as well. “’Secrets are like ghosts’ she says. ‘It’s like livin’ with ghosts’” (Ozeki 327). Jane mentions feeling haunted, “Words that haunt, slice open my own abscesses of shame and dread” (Ozeki 327). Both ghosts and haunted feelings were mentioned in the first epiphany as well. Jane mentioned ghosts when thinking of Suzie Flowers and Helen Dawes, “In the dim, inchoate hours of the morning, when I woke up to pee, they’d insinuate themselves like tapered ghosts into my sleep-addled brain” (Ozeki 176). Though the word “haunted” is not used, Jane also describes what is feels to be haunted, she painted a picture with, “They worked like ammonia, delivering a jolt of clearheaded dread. My skin prickled and my skin leached sweat” (Ozeki 176). An important note is that Jane discusses how in Japan, ghosts are “often wronged women who are not even dead yet” (Ozeki 176). This is worth noting because all of these “ghosts” that haunt Jane are women who are alive. Various cultures had once believed cameras to steal souls. For example: At first, many Native Americans were wary of having their photographs taken because they believed that the process could steal a person's soul and disrespected the spiritual world. Jane being haunted by those she has filmed bears special significance in this context. It also plays into the exploitative nature of filming these women. In her second epiphany, like the first, Jane describes names of women haunting her, “Names leak into the air, hang around like a refrain. My litany: Suzie Flowers. Helen Dawes. Lara, Dyann” (Ozeki 327). Despite all these uneasy feelings though, like the first epiphany, Jane still does not change. She finishes editing the film and produces it for the world to see.

It’s not purely coincidence that both these half-epiphanies occur in an editing room. It is in the editing room where the magic happens. The editing room is Jane’s personal slaughterhouse. She reviews what has been shot and captured, cuts it up, and clumps it back in a certain order to create a narrative. She glazes over what she is doing, ending up with haunted feelings and unease, but never has a breakthrough. She never completely understands that she is a consumer and hunter of women and their stories. She doesn’t possess body-mediated knowledge such as a gut feeling so much as a kind of knowledge that only manifests itself through hauntings. She never quite reaches the epiphany that we saw in Shonagon in the epilogue. Shonagon leaves us with the message that she regrets that the book ever got publicized. Then again, we never truly know if Shonagon changed her actions. In the end however, Jane gets just as far as Shonangon, except she goes the opposite direction. By the end Jane concludes that she will make everything public.

The end of My Year of Meats leaves us with Jane who tells us, “Whatever people may think of my book, I will make it public, bring it to light unflinchingly. That is the modern thing to do” (Ozeki 361). What Jane says is an exact opposition to Shonagon who said, “Whatever people may think of my book, I still regret that it ever came to light” (Ozeki 354). Shonagon and Jane who were both capturing people’s lives end up with opposite attitudes on narrative. Their different attitudes come from the epiphany or lack-there-of. Shonagon had the epiphany that she turned people into meat through her Pillow Book. Jane however only had inklings of the epiphany. Instead she concludes that she is unlike Shonagon because she is “modern.” That’s why she says, “That’s the modern thing to do.” She ultimately views the Heian period in which Shonagon lived in as a time of erroneous values, stating, “However, unlike Shonagon, living in the Heian days, for whom modesty, however false, was still a prerequisite, I live at the cusp of the new millennium” (Ozeki 361). Jane scoffs at modesty, believing it is one more obstacle in her hunt for authenticity and truth.

Jane’s very last line after her discussion of how she is different from Shonagon is, “So here it is. My Year of Meats. Not so easy. But done” (Ozeki 361). Why leave the end of the novel here instead of with the, “That’s the modern thing to do” line? The ending leaves off informal, broken apart; in fact, it’s compartmentalized and fragmented, cut into pieces. Jane has spent the entire novel cutting people’s lives, so the cut up tone of her final message reflects her conclusion that she will continue to publicize the truth even if that means exploiting others by capturing them in the camera and cutting them up. Jane also ends with the title of the novel, My Year of Meats. This creates a circle, making the reader step back to the first words they saw when the picked up the book. The circle is actually a cycle, the cycle of narrative. In the end, everything relates back to the narrative. Jane perpetuates story-telling. “My Year of Meats” is not just something she says; it’s a title to her. The fragment is written alone and with upper case letters. She blurts out the title of the novel as her year of meats. Being the character in first person and the documentarian gives her the privilege to take ownership of the story despite Akiko taking up the other half of the novel. Why isn’t it Akiko’s year of meats? It’s because she wasn’t the one holding the camera. It’s no one else’s year of meat, it is only Jane’s year of meat. This is because everyone but Jane is the meat. Everyone on the other side of the camera lens, every other race, sexuality, shorter bodies, children like Rosie, animals, and women of all kinds are meat. Jane’s year of meat was a year of narrative, filming women, cutting them up, and redistributing them to the public.

In the end, is it better to be like Shonagon who values privacy, secrecy, and modesty or Jane who values truth, justice, and speaking out? The truth is that there is no right answer. You can keep tugging the so called “layers” Jane envisioned but in the end you would not find a true answer. While Jane represented people who were normally invisible, she also exploited them. If Shonagon’s Pillow Book had never been revealed, we’d be missing a piece of history, but on the other hand her excerpt in the epilogue sounded like she hurt people in the process. Narrative is everywhere and it is nowhere. The same goes with meat. Jane may have had the power to realize the narrative structure she stood within, but she never realized that she had turned women into meat in the process.

Works Cited

Adams, C. J. (2010). The Sexual Politics of Meat. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing..

Davis, K. (2011). From Hunting Grounds to Chicken Rights. In C.J. Adams, Sister Species (pp. 127-139). Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Kelsky, Karen. Women on the verge: Japanese women, Western dreams. Duke University Press, 2001.

Monica Casper, L. M. (2009). Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility. New York: New York University Press.

Newkirk, I. (2011). Are you waving at me? In C. J. Adams, Sister Species (pp. 65-71). Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Peterson, Richard A. “In Search of Authenticity*.” Journal of Management Studies 42.5 (2005): 1083-1098.