This essay is based on a lecture given by Dr. Cheryl J. Fish at
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“Environmental Justice Made Manifest: Toxic Comedy, Documentary, and Ecofeminist Resistance in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats “
By Cheryl J. Fish
It’s
the winter of discontent for Jane Takagi-Little, the protagonist of Ruth L.
Ozeki’s 1998 novel My Year of Meats.
In fact, as this ideologically and politically charged novel reveals, the failure to make connections between consuming and desiring, whether it’s the food we eat or the images we exoticize, is dangerously naïve; there’s a direct and insidious relationship between meat production and public health issues, especially for women, children, persons of color, and the poor.[1] Ozeki links corrupt market forces to the destructive deployment of stereotypes and power relations based on gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality. In My Year of Meats, Jane narrates her “accidental” and yet uncanny discovery of the widespread use and dangers of hormones, such as DES (diethylstilbestrol) which have been easy fixes in the hands of the medical establishment who once prescribed it to pregnant women even after they knew it didn’t prevent miscarriages, and ranchers who illegally inject the hormone on feedlots. With pathos and humor, Ozeki’s work suggests the necessity of environmental justice as a collective movement in a global economy that uses gender stereotyping, animals, marketing, and media manipulation to feed the insatiable modern desire to consume and appropriate otherness for profit and power. In this paper, I shall focus on this novel as a recent example of a powerful hybrid text that draws on and may be read through discourses of environmental justice and ecofeminsm, while also deploying muckraking journalism, satire, literary allusion, history, current events, and embedded non-fiction to offer a critique of certain aspects of globalization. The term “globalization” has lately referred to “a series of cultural, informational, and commodity flows in which the loci of power are difficult to detect, and, on the other hand, a ‘neo-liberal’ finance-driven form of corporate capitalism that subordinates competing institutions, including nation states, to a ‘new world order’” (Susser and Schneider 2). [2] Ozeki’s is one of the new voices of emerging biracial and bicultural Asian American literature that takes on the toxic body politic as one of the major repercussions of a reckless form of globalization while also mining person, cultural, and racial configurations; Lisa Lowe calls the writings of these authors “an unclosed, unfixed body of works whose centers and orthodoxies shift as the make-up of the Asian-origin constituency” (Lowe 53)..[3]
Here I want to
briefly discuss environmental justice in the
In Ozeki’s hands the layers include embedded faxes, journal entries, “documentary interludes,” footnoted secondary sources, Jane’s shocking footage of a five year old girl who is prematurely developed with breasts and menstrual periods as a result of hormone poisoning, and grisly scenes from a working slaughter house. The characters in the novel represent different races, classes, cultures and interests—which in Ozeki’s world are presented as various versions of Donna Haraway’s situated knowledges, where partial perspective is valued over universality, and claims are based on people’s lives and bodies. The embodied partials add up to uncover the lies and absurdities of various individual and corporate interests that Ozeki aims to expose, question, and in the process, encourages readers to do the same, even if they are uncomfortable. “Our lives are part of an enormous web of interconnected spheres, where the workings of the larger social, political, and corporate machinery impact something as private and intimate as the descent of an egg through a woman’s fallopian tube” (Conversation 8). In My Year of Meats, the global and the intimate are intertwined and these connections become useful locations from which to challenge the meat trust represented in the novel by BEEF-EX and the ranchers and marketers they work with. Ozeki’s novel also politicizes female reproduction and forges a loose collective of what Shameem Black calls cosmofeminism— “ a form of resistance to the individual, patriarchal, and corporate agents that endanger women’s bodies and attack their sexuality worldwide” (230).
This essay and work-in-progress engages with an expanding environmental justice framework as scholar/teachers in various disciplines push the boundaries of a movement that has been identified with grassroots actions, largely by people of color. As Julie Sze argues, we need to build upon and integrate existing and new methodological, theoretical and historical perspectives on environmental justice while maintaining a political commitment to urgent conflicts over environmental and human needs. Feminist studies, ethnic and cultural studies and literary analysis offer tools through which we can understand the symbolic and social meanings and significant re-envisioning of harmful practices and policies this literature aims to expose. Many of the artists and writers whose work I shall examine in a larger study figure themselves as activists and civic environmentalists, which according to William Shutkin, is based on the idea “that environmental quality and economic and social health are mutually constitutive”(14).
These writers
claim words as a weapon of choice to transform and heal. For instance,
poet/essayist/activist June Jordan narrated her own development as a
writer/activist by informing us that: “back in 1964, I resolved not to run on
hatred, but instead to use what I loved, words for the sake of the people I
loved.” (3).
Audre Lorde, in
her autopathography Cancer Journal , gives voice to another emotion that
often emergences out of the reality of the toxicity of everyday life: fear.
“When I use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less
important whether or not I am unafraid (15). We are living in a world that has
at least for the past century been marked not only by literal toxic hazards but
by a “toxic discourse” that exemplifies
and signifies very real danger, which as Lawrence Buell argues, has manifested in many forms of literature
and “actual incidents and their subsequent history in the postindustrial
imagination that have ensured that the environmental apocalypticism triggered
by Hiroshima and Nagasaki would outlast the cold war…from Dickens and Thoreau
to Silent Spring, Love Canal, Bhopal,
Chernobyl and the Exxon Valdez (642).. Accounts of such toxic discourse
engender “an awakening or stage of knowledge that ruptures the so-called
innocence of the environmental imagination; followed by responses of outrage,
acquiescence, impotence, denial, and desperation (646). However, I am interested in examining the
responses of those who venture beyond despair – who render visible and through
the use of the visual the false, count themselves among the
participant/witnesses, investigate and blow whistles to address the ethical
whats and hows of environmental toxicities, often with brazenness in the face
of fear, as well as with pragmatism, acceptance of contradiction, and even
humor to move to sustainability that is both social and environmental. They
create and encourage us to take up the mantle of what artist/environmental
educator Cinder Hypki calls “geographies of hope” (quoted in Di Chiro
306). They propose counter narratives
and embodied actions to move the reader/viewer beyond complacency based on
experience and from evidence presented by multiple sources, necessary in this
age of rampant cover ups. The voices
included in their works range from scientists to victims to activists, perhaps
to shock others out of complacency, to document and break the silence as did
Rachel Carson in 1962’s Silent Spring when she exposed the “grim
specter” that had “crept upon us almost unnoticed”(3). But science can’t be trusted, notes Sandra
Steingraber, one of
In the works I shall examine, personal history, outrage, and humor intersect with the need to ethically document and represent empirically those silenced and distorted realities to counter injustice, indifference and manipulation. Thus the “lethal consequences” of everyday life may be reckoned with in today’s climate of consummate consumption, hyper reality, and dazzling denial. We may be willing to acknowledge our fear if we can also laugh even as we consider what to do with the vast amount of disturbing information we shall receive. And if the main characters are also learning as they go along, then readers more readily identify with the process and begin to assess how we might change our habits or challenge the status quo to make a difference. The postmodern pastiche and parody in Ruth Ozeki’s novel breaks up the monotony of reading a plain treatise on meat.. In addition, a companion piece that I often read along with it is the 2002 documentary film “Blue Vinyl,” by Judith Helfand and Daniel B. Gold.
Both Ozeki and Helfand offer protagonists who use “toxic humor” to get their activist messages across, illustrating the connections between public and work place health issues, toxins in food and in housing materials, testing toxins on animals and on workers, and the role of family and community bonds across national and ethnic stereotypes. Both Ozeki and Helfand offer protagonists who are willing to show their fallibility in going up against powerful entities—from their bosses and corporate P.R. executives, to institutionalized giants (such as Wal-Mart, one nemesis in Ozeki’s novel) that have enormous money, power, and cache. Both protagonists are DES daughters. Their mothers took a so-called “miracle drug” of the 1950s and early 60s, and they have now developed cancer and/or infertility as a result of toxic border crossings between the womb and the forces of science, capital, medicine, and ideology. Helfand developed cancer and had a hysterectomy at age 25 and Ozeki’s fictional protagonist Jane miscarries a fetus because of a misshapen uterus and faces the possible threat of cancer that is a result of the DES. That we can laugh as they perform and poke fun at themselves makes them tremendously likeable heroines who enable viewers to identify with their dilemmas, their quest for knowledge and their transformative empowerment that emerges out of their compromised health.[5] DES represents an exposure crossing the womb from mother to child reminding of us how the miracle drug of the past comes back to haunt the future; Jane’s mother had not known about the connections between the drug she took and her daughter’s infertility, and Jane decides not to tell her; as the rifts between them are cultural, generational, and full of old misunderstandings. Helfand’s first film, A Healthy Baby Girl, centered largely on healing her relationship with her mother based on the anger and guilt that circulates between them because of DES and its results.
When gendered health and sexual and political agency are conjoined they become key sites of resistance that can’t help but be influenced by one’s own cultural, ethnic, and familial histories. Ozeki, who was born in the U.S., mined the multiple meanings of her Japanese ancestry in the documentary film Halving the Bones, which explored three generations of Japanese American women on her mother’s side of the family. In that film, Ruth’s mother’s tumor “is evoked by Ruth to understand how race is constructed as malignancy—but a malignancy generative of ironic consciousness” (Zyrd 122). We see in Meats that toxicity, like malignancy, generates irony, paradox, and rage. As a documentarian turned novelist, she brings a consciousness of the compromise and the shadow/act involved in representing “reality” in a market that thrives on mastering manipulation. The novel’s “documentary interludes” incorporate “constructions of social reality” (Nichols 10) and give narrative form to an editing process that creates “truth” through perceptual as well as time/space illusions. For instance, the 1991 Gulf War and its “video game” erasure of bodies is part of the background soundtrack for the novel’s opening “shot,” in which a Japanese crew directs a kiss between American wife Suzie Flowers and her cheating husband . The “as seen on TV” version replaces his infidelity (which had been revealed to Suzie during the filming)with the family tensely dining on Coca-cola rump roast. A recipe that combines meat and Coca Cola, or “rumpu rossuto” as Japanese housewife Akiko Ueno calls it, gives readers a taste of Ozeki’s talent for blending brand name essence, linguistic pidgins, and oxymoronic conceits. The recipes (i.e. beef fudge, Hallelujah lamb chops) and the twisted cruelty of American mall culture combine kitsch with the grotesque; while some may laugh, none of it proves harmless. For instance, members of Jane’s Japanese crew get drunk on Jack Daniels and shoot out the tits and crotches of Hustler pinups with airguns they bought from Wal-Mart; other characters exhibit a lack of respect for women , minorities, and animals which feeds the casual and pathological acceptance of violence and the deadening of empathy.
While not explicitly ecofeminist or advocating a politics of environmental justice per se, Ozeki’s novel makes clear the connections between sexism and environmental exploitation, and the upholding of a number exploitative labor practices as they intersect with gender, ethnicity, and social class. The status of meat is a metaphor and manifestation of these issues. “People with power have always eaten meat,” writes Carol Adams. “Dietary habits proclaim class distinction, but they proclaim patricarchal distinctions as well. Women, second class citizens, are more likely to eat what are considered to be second class foods in a patriarchal culture: vegetables, fruit, and grains (26). Thus I might ask only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, if the resurgence of the meat- dependent Atkins diet, a return of a Beef Trust, factory farms and the threat of Mad Cow disease, contemporary anti-labor and anti-environmental policies of the U.S and other nations seem to be invoking, albeit in differently forms, the injustices, and horrors that Upton Sinclair portrayed in his muckraking novel of the early 20th Century, The Jungle. In readings and discussions of My Year of Meats in my classes, we also raise the issue of how toxins such as Agent Orange, and pesticides used on crops, would also expose soldiers and agricultural workers to cancers and disease and how and why it’s important to form alliances with victims of these various exposures in order to connect webs of misinformation, power, and vulnerability.
Environmental
justice and ecofeminist discourse emerge as important interventions and
necessary alliances to counter abuses by the meat industry and medical
establishment, and through the recognition of the toxic and hormonal poisonings
to workers and consumers, links them to women’s struggle for sexual and
reproductive freedom and health in the
Furthermore, the conflicts Jane faces as a Asian American and woman director in a traditionally white male profession become central to her emerging embrace of environmental justice. As she discovers gross abuses committed in the raising and slaughtering of cattle and their widespread repercussions to consumers, workers, and local communities, her ethics of accountability in a public space take on increasing importance. The drive to expose corruption based on forms of hierarchy, dichotomy, and deceptive simplification—humans over animals, men over women, adults over children, whites over those of color, making money verses doing ethical work, exhibit the ecofeminist rejection of and environmental justice intervention that questions nature/culture dualisms and the impact of “development” and repercussions of exploitive labor (Gaard, 6). As Richard Hofrichter points out in the introduction to Toxic Struggles: The Theory and Practice of Environmental Justice, “women, especially those whose health and survival have always been particularly affected by ecological deterioration because of gender inequalities, are rapidly becoming more politicized every year…”(3). Furthermore, women are actively connecting environmental justice and economic and democratic advancements globally. For instance, The 2004 Nobel Peace Prize went to Wangari Maathai, for the work she has done in bringing together land ownership and economic distribution issues in Kenya and Africa, using the Green Belt movement in which thousands of groups, primarily women, have planted 30 million trees across Kenya. With the pay they receive for this work, they are improving their income as well as their environment and in the larger picture, the movement has been the conduit from which to advocate multiparty democracy, public education, political advocacy, and free and fair elections in Kenya.
Jane’s politicization is the result of a chain reaction and a sisterhood that illustrates the importance of knowledge/power relations, agency and acceptance of others from different perspectives. Jane is the catalyst that moves former Texas rodeo queen and stripper Bunny Dunne, who had been covering up her daughter’s hormonal poisoning, to confess to Jane and allows her to film and therefore prove the grotesquely overdeveloped body of the sleeping five-year-old is a result of hormone poisoning from exposure to illegal chemicals on the lot. A vegetarian lesbian couple comprised of an African American and white woman who are raising two bi-racial children in Northampton, Mass., who appear the episode of her show that causes Jane to be fired, help to educate and enlighten Jane. Dyann Stone’s report on “Beef Junkies” embedded in the novel informs readers that “in America, 95 percent of cattle routinely receive estradiol, testosterone, progesterone, an anabolic steroids, not to mention huge doses of antibiotics needed to control disease in feedlots, where cattle are crammed into pens, standing knee deep in urine, feces, and mud with no place to move” (206). The truth is “out there” and Jane conducts fieldwork by meeting and listening to Americans from various geographical, ethnic, and social locations to (re)cast each episode of My American Wife, going against her bosses white-washed versions by introducing diversity in race and lifestyle choices—from couples with adopted Korean children, to a Southern African-American family that is eventually vetoed-- in selecting the families for the show. Once Jane is empowered with knowledge of hormonal and chemical exposure, she decides where to point the camera and how to document her findings, transforming the phallic gun of western law-and-order into the bi-racial, postmodern, ecofeminist expose.
If Jane epitomizes a mobile feminist American of mixed-race parentage who embraces Western multiculturalism, Akiko Ueno, the wife of Jane’s “defacto” boss, BEEF EX marketing executive Joichi (John) Ueno (Wayno), is her Japanese alter ego or double. Introverted, isolated and confined in her role as consumer /evaluator/ of each episode of Wife, Akiko is expected to be compliantly testsing each of the American wives’ meat recipes and to produce a male heir for the unbearable Ueno. Unknown to each other, but linked through shifting narrative sections told from each one’s point of view, both Akiko and Jane are “sick,” experiencing their bodies as deformed in the so-called “female” arenas of reproduction and food consumption. Akiko is a bulimic, an orphan who had taken pleasure in her job at a manga publishing house, writing copy for comic books and studying classics before she misguidedly marries Ueno as a result of a match made by her boss. Jane is a DES daughter with a misshapen uterus, probable infertility and possible cancer, the result of hormone treatments given to her mother in the hopes of preventing miscarriage. Both Akiko and Jane have an inkling that patriarchal power structures, market forces, and the infantilization of women are at the heart of their malady; both take refuge in The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, the ur-text of this novel. Shonagon, as Jane explains, was a great Japanese female documentarian. Describing her life and her lovers at the end of the first millennium, Shonagon wrote using Chinese characters, dabbling “in the male tongue” (15) and inspiring Jane to become a documentarian and speak men’s Japanese. For Akiko, reading Shonagon and keeping her own pillow book is a way to document her pain and express her submerged creativity, which she must hide from John as she hides her vomiting and the loss of her menstrual period; she is also brutally beaten by her husband, who had also attempted to rape Jane when he showed up in the U.S. to scrutinize and supervise her work on the show. The parallel format between Jane and Akiko, “seeks to identify recurring agents of violence…while attending to the diverse ways that women experience and respond to such violence” (Black 238).
While the historical and metaphorical links with Sei Shonagon are quite satisfying, that reference from the past is one of the few positive examples of Japanese culture in a novel that includes Orientalist images of Asian characters even as it problematizes such representations. [6] It’s unfortunate that Ozeki chose to split her characters in a way that polarizes national and gendered stereotypes of Asian and Asian-American women. Although Akiko emerges out of her shell once she escapes her husband and her country, finding refuge in a feminist and lesbian community in Northampton , once pregnant, she becomes what I’d consider an “essentialized “ earth mother with a mystical ability to see, feel, and know every stage of her unborn baby’ s growth.[7] This romanticized version of rescue and idealized motherhood as an outcome of rape seems to reduce the complex character of Akiko whose development as an individual we have witnessed. She becomes sentimentalized and accepts a fantasy version of life in the U.S. based on country music and train ride through the Southern U.S. in which strange racial nostalgia is evoked in her interactions with African Americans. Also, Ozeki minimizes the live interaction between the two protagonists considering the interesting long-distance alliance they had formed. Akiko has in effect, been the Japanese housewife Jane had hoped to reach, one who would be empowered by Jane’s emphasis on multicultural, alterative families, and not-limited-to-beef version of “My American Wife.” Akiko’s awakenings through Jane’s representations reveal the potential libratory affects of the media—even with potential conflicts of interest-- to encourage and lead in envisioning counter-hegemonic ideology.
The most unabashedly evil character in the novel is Joichi Ueno, who in his embrace of American “might” takes to calling himself John Wayno,. He is a Japanese man who is violent, racist, and sexist, and uncritically believes in the superiority of meat and of American “vigor”; he is the novel’s major beef . Ozeki might have done more to link his need to dominate and punish women to the relations between constructions of masculinity, access to power, blindness to environmental and ethical violations, and national identity; as a Japanese man who works and travels frequently in the U.S., it would have been instructive to explore how Orientalist misrepresentations conceivably become his internalized self-representations (Ma, intro, xiii). Instead Ozeki claims Ueno is merely caught “between American bosses, Japanese corporate culture and two highly subversive women” (Conversation 11). His toxic masculinity is brought home most powerfully when he attempts to rape Jane one night when he is drunk, and later in the novel, rapes and sodomizes Akiko when he learns she has begun to get her periods, and has faxed Jane to warn of his attempt to censor an episode of the show that will expose graphic and corrupt practices on cattle feedlots and in slaughterhouses. The novel’s general hierarchy of American over Japan collapses (Chin 110) when rancher Gale Dunn embraces the recent changes in the beef industry documented in detail by Eric Schlosser in his best selling expose, Fast Food Nation. “Ranchers followed the advice of agribusiness firms and gave their cattle growth hormones…”And even when ranchers suspected foul play, “many were afraid to testify against the large meatpacking companies, fearing retaliation and ‘economic ruin’,” (142-143) Gale Dunn epitomizes a man who is compromised by these and other market-driven policies; in his attempts to maximize profits, he uses illegal hormones on his feedlots, believes wholeheartedly in “frontier justice” and the objectification of animals and women; his office sports a “wood paneled panopticon decorated with a larger poster of a young blond Amazon in a jungle bikini” (280) alluding to the Foucaultian symbol of an all powerful surveillance system used in prisons to isolate inmates from each other, here connected to the casual objectification of women . Most tellingly, he fails to grasp the dangerous poisoning that has caused his five year old step-sister Rosie Dunn to develop full breasts and pubic hair, as she has been afflicted with premature thelarche caused by inhaling airborne chemicals and ingesting Popsicles from his feedlot fridge. In fact, as Jane’s film crew astutely notices in freeze framing their footage, Gale seems to be fondling the little girl.
For Jane, epiphany comes gradually; she learns in the course of her travels and in scouting characters and locations for “My American Wife,” that antibiotics that mimic estrogens and other hormones injected into animals affect human sperm count, that those who are poor and eat cheaper cuts of meats like chicken necks, including many minorities have their health put at risk. In her journal, Jane writes “a massive rift has occurred between the seat of my so-called intelligence and my dumb, stunned body. With my mind I am studying meat…I am reading chilling descriptions of the slaughterhouse, the caked filth, blood coursing down the cement kill floor, the death screams of a slaughtered lamb (exactly like a human baby)going on and on, long after the lamb’s throat has been cut. And yet…my body still craves the taste and texture of animal between my teeth..”(207).
The acknowledgement of a rift between Jane’s mind and body is powerful, suggesting that Jane’s stunned body is like the cattle about to be slaughtered, but her physical and psychological desires cannot or won’t transcend the anthropomorphic view, just as Ueno and Dunn have troubled overcoming their androcentrism. The desire for meat is shown to be a combination of cultural, intellectual, biological, and habitual conditioning.
We see Jane engage in collective bargaining with herself in a number of instances. She realizes her own complicity as an agent of the media that generally fails to make the connections we see in environmental justice “connections to a broad definition of environment that includes issues of civil rights, housing, employment, the quality of urban life, or policies of global corporations” (Hofrichter, 6). “I need this job,” Jane writes. “On the other hand, I can’t continue making the kind of programs Ueno wants” (210). The environmental justice and ecofeminist movements, each with its own history and emerging debates, raise similar questions of agency and power, such as “who will decide what to produce for whom?” (Hofrichter 5) and when we discuss sustainability, for whom do we mean? Her struggles are further complicated by the fact that Jane, who believed she was infertile because of her misshapen uterus and failed attempts to conceive with her African-American ex-husband, becomes pregnant as a result of an affair with her lover, musician Sloan Rankin.
Jane is ambivalent about motherhood and her relationship with the sexy but elusive Sloan; she fears the uncertainty and what she considers under the circumstances of their casual on the road affair to be impending loss. Meanwhile Akiko has been raped and sodomized by her husband while crouching on all fours like an animal; once she leaves him, with the help of a kind Japanese nurse and faxes and calls from Jane, she discovers she too is pregnant and finally has the power to leave her husband. “She conceives herself as a valued human being; and she claims to have ‘conceived in her mind’ and not necessarily through sexual relations with Joichi…the opposing themes of conception and infertility bridge the global distance and enforce solidarity between Akiko and Jane” (Chin 117-118).
While Akiko is empowered by her connection to her fetus, Jane refuses to let her vulnerability to miscarriage stop her from entering the slaughterhouse. Despite advice by her doctor, her boyfriend and her own desire to “go back to the motel and get perfectly clean and then curl up in cool sheets and hug my belly for the next few months until it was huge and viable” (265) she leads the crew to the feedlot and the slaughterhouse, to be accountable to what she feels is justice and to the community she has come to know, to her belief in empirical truth, and perhaps to gratify her ego. This difficulty in taking care of oneself and compromising the health of the unborn is faced by factory and migrant workers on a daily basis. While Jane doesn’t acknowledge this, the public and private are blurred as women must face difficult choices in taking care of themselves and their families to survive and thrive in a world that abuses society’s resources for profit. It is here where what Noel Sturgeon calls the “third position” of ecofeminsm, offers analytical insights as it connects the relations of women to nature by drawing on historical, cross-cultural and material analysis of women’s work. (29). Ozeki’s description of Jane’s footage of the slaughterhouse echoes that of Eric Schlosser’s and Upton Sinclair’s in The Jungle except the emphasis here is on the evidence of hormones, which fits the novel’s recurring motif:
walking through an invisible wall to hell..Steam hissed, metal screeched against metal,….splitting the ear…chains, pulleys, iron hooks whipped around us with unbearable speed, and as far as the eye can see, conveyors snaked into the distance, heaped with skinned heads and steaming hearts. Overhead a continuous rail system laced the ceiling, from which swung mammoth sides of beef, dripping and heavy with speed as they rattled towards us…I looked into a cart filled with hundreds of livers, spotted with blood and oozing a viscous yellow liquid….Dave pointed. ‘Hormones’ he hollered (281-2).
Jane’s intention is to find and record the truth of the slaughterhouse—one of the sights that are usually off limits for the consumer, therefore helping to reinforce a particular mystique and also cover up real and continued dangers— not only are consumers affected, but workers in today’s version of Chicago’s Union Stockyards, mostly Mexican, Central American, and Southeast Asian immigrants work in meatpacking where the injury rate at slaughterhouses is “three times higher than the rate in a typical American factory” (Schlosser 172). These giant corporate-controlled factories, many of which consolidated through mergers during the Reagan 80s, had left Chicago in the 1950s and 60s, gradually moving to rural areas traditionally resistant to unionization. Management used the threat of plant closings to obtain lucrative subsidies and also pit one regionally depressed area against the other, creating no allegiance to place or to worker. Communities adjacent to these plants not only stink literally, but have acquired poverty, toxicity, poor and unhealthy living conditions, and the use and sale of illegal substances. Thus, the “New York” cut of steak may have traveled a long and distasteful path by the time it reaches the consumer’s stomach.
Jane’s desire to capture the scene is as strong or stronger than the one to isolate and to try to protect herself and her fetus; she is sent sprawling into the path of an oncoming carcass as a gushing stream of blood from an animal’s slit throat forces the cameramen to back into her. In a more just society where health, family life, work and environment are seen as worthy of support and balance, I like to think Jane might have been able to consider ways to take precautions and get more help from her crew and others so that she could get the material on tape without risking injury. She might have been able to have it both ways.
When Jane loses the baby, she blames herself for doing the shoot, only to find out the fetus had probably died before that, but the doctor is unable to determine the exact cause. “Possibly your uterus was too small…possibly the placenta failed (298). She feels saddened by the loss and still lives with the reality that she someday might develop cancer as a result of the DES her mother once took in her desperate attempts to have a child. Jane transforms her own “psychic numbing that characterizes the end of the millennium” by forcing herself to get out of the “perpetual state of repressed panic” (334) and by “spreading the word” of what truths she has realized. Her documentary creates a stir in the media in the U.S. and Japan and elsewhere, but Jane, in her characteristic skepticism and admiration of Shonagon, notes “ I got a small but critical piece of information about the corruption of meats in America out to the world, possible even saved a little girl’s life in the process….I am haunted by all the things—big things, and little things, Splendid things, and Squalid things—that threaten to slip through the cracks, untold, out of history” (360). Jane is right to be haunted, as so much history and does slip through the cracks, or is forgotten in large bouts of cultural amnesia. She realizes that a happy ending is a little too easy, but that your truths, which have elements of fiction, can alter outcomes. And in the course of the novel, a lot of outcomes have been altered; mostly for the better and through the community that Jane has built. Incidently Ozeki’s second novel, All Over Creation also makes clear that a network of support and collective action is necessary to development the resistance needed to challenge global forces, this time around biotechnology and genetically modified agriculture.
Ozeki and others who write and make films that engage with environmental justice perspectives have shown us a world where individuals make a difference, but not without struggle and contestation of the meaning of truth and fiction—in relation to gender, ethnicity, community, economics, and nation, as well as the relationship between nature and culture, of illness to well being, of environment to place and production. However, this body of work ideally goes beyond acknowledging risk and generating fear; rather it creates an embodied dialogue through which environmental justice and its links to economic and social processes becomes a focal point to create alliances and alternatives, and enables us to see the complicated nexus of resistance, compromise, “progress,” and identity, as toxins in our lands and cities impact us differently, but affect us all.
NOTES
[1] Risk assessment shows that certain chemical exposures are more likely to damage women’s immune systems, and that they may be more susceptible to PCSs, dioxins, and other chemicals that accumulate in fatty tissue. See Robert Verchick, “Feminist Theory and Environmental Justice,” in New Perspectives in Environmental Justice. Ed. Rachel Stein. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 70.
[2] This project is elaborated upon in my essay “The Toxic Body (Politic)
in Environmental Justice Feminism: Literature, Film and the Intimate Public
Critique of Housing and Food Production,” under review for publication in Women’s
Studies Quarterly.
[3] Halving the Bones is a documentary which uses fiction to further its investigation of Ozeki’s own personal history, the three generations of Japanese American women on her mother’s side of the family, including her grandmother Matsuye, who was born in Japan but arrived in Hawaii through an arranged marriage to a poet/photographer there. “Matsuye is diagnosed with an ovarian tumor and returns to Japan for medical treatment; it turns out she is in fact pregnant with Masako,” Ruth’s mother. Michael Zyrd, “Ironic Identity Frames and Autobiographical Documentary: Ruth L. Ozeki’s Halving the Bones and My Year of Meat,” in Literary Research/Recherche litteraire, Vol. 18 no 35 Spring-Smmer 2001.
[5] Both protagonists also show
the intersection between class and race where environmental injustice is
concerned: for instance, Helfand’s middle class suburban Long Island family has
the luxury of contemplating what if any materials would be an apt replacement
for the blue vinyl siding that won’t offend their suburban community, while an
African American family displaced by poison water from the polyvinyl chloride
plant outside Lake Charles, La., can’t sell their house and move the humble
shelter onto a truck to relocate. The link continues between these
environmental injustices and epidemiological toxicity as Helfand uses what she
calls her “uterus money” from the lawsuit against Eli Lily Pharmaceuticals to fund Blue Vinyl and to pay for the reconstituted wood that
eventually replaces the siding her parents reluctantly agree to remove. Her journey into the manufacturing and use of
polyvinyl chlorides (PVCs) takes her from Louisiana to Italy, where she finds
devastating health affects on workers involved in various stages of production.
The film uses animation, interspersed interviews and flashbacks to tell the
emerging story across continents, race, and class to uncover the impact of
vinyl manufacturing and disposal on the atmosphere, the food chain, and on
humans. Throughout the film, the Helfand persona carries with her—through
airport security, into confrontational interviews and at the opening of an all
vinyl home built by Habitat for Humanitiy-- a single shingle of vinyl siding
from her parent’s house.
[6] For instance, Akiko, according to an interview with Ruth Ozeki, represents “my little introvert,” while Jane “is my extroverted self” who has similar “exterior identities and experiences” with the author (“Conversation with Ozeki,” 10).
7 Essentialist notions hold that all women are “closer” to nature than men and that indigenous women or women of color are viewed that way because of their cultural traditions or stereotypes that have persisted about them. Thus, women may be defined or stereotyped in limiting ways.
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