Document Type : Research Paper

Author

• Mehrgan Rezaeian

English department, Faculty of foreign languages and literatures, University of Tehran

Abstract

This paper examines Han Kang’s The Vegetarian through the lens of disability studies, employing Alison Kafer’s and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s theoretical frameworks to reinterpret Yeong-hye’s (the protagonist) bodily refusal as a process of social disablement rather than psychological collapse. Yeong-hye actively refuses to consume animal products due to a dream and her determination which leads to her demise profoundly unsettles her family members. Shunned by everyone, she merely requests sunlight as her sole source of life and ultimately, she identifies as a plant. Kafer’s concepts of the curative imaginary and crip time illuminate Yeong-hye’s rejection of compulsory health, productivity, and futurity. Garland-Thomson’s theories of the normate and the spectacle of the extraordinary body clarify how the novel’s gaze disables Yeong-hye by turning her difference into visual excess. Together these frameworks reveal how Han Kang exposes the violence of normalization: Yeong-hye is expelled from the normate category, thus rendered a disabled individual, objectified through familial and medical stares, and temporally displaced into crip time. The study concludes that The Vegetarian reimagines disability as both a personal and a political resistance. Her rebellion is an ethical refusal of the curative imagination and an unsettling invitation to envision non-normative futures in a patriarchal, ableist societal structure.

Keywords

• Curative Time
• Disability Studies
• Feminism
• Normative Futurism
• The Vegetarian
• Visual Rhetoric

Main Subjects

• Research in Contemporary World Literature