Rape Culture and Diet Culture As Explored in Recent YA Novels by Margaret A. Robbins, PhD

​I hope you are having a great summer. I know that I am. One of the things that makes it great is the opportunity to curate blog post from my contributors. Once again we have another great post, this time from Margaret Robbins. I continue to learn and gain new perspectives every time I talk with Margaret. I loved her last blog post in February of 2018. It was a remberance of Ursula Le Guin  at her passing.  I hope you check it out again. This time Margaret talks a bit about how rape and diet culture are evident in YA Novels on two, Shout and Asking For it and, to conclude, she suggests a few others that are worth reading as well. Thanks Margaret.

Rape Culture and Diet Culture As Explored in Recent YA Novels
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“Where there is power, there is also resistance.” --Michel Foucault   

​YA authors are speaking out against sexual assault and the control of women’s bodies through their compelling stories. I’ve recently studied two compelling YA novels, Asking for It by Louise O’Neill and Shout by Laurie Halse Anderson, that serve as activist literature. Asking for It was released two years before the #metoo movement, and Shout was released two years after the #metoo movement began and 20 years after Anderson’s first novel about sexual assault, Speak. Speak was a work of fiction loosely based on Halse Anderson’s own survival of sexual assault as a young teenage girl. In response to the #metoo movement, Shout gives a more brutally honest poetic memoir account based on Halse Anderson’s real life rape, events leading up to it, and the aftermath; she decided that rather than speaking out, sometimes one must shout. Through their use of language, both novels point to the power differentials between women and men that instigate rape culture. Additionally, I would argue that both novels have passages that refer to the relationship between rape culture and diet culture. In my opinion, diet culture is a topic that needs more discussion in YA literature. 

Both novels involve people using language and texts, either consciously or not, to belittle women and to send women the message that their bodies are objects designed to please men. The diet culture, as part of patriarchal society, encourages women to be small, and unfortunately, this pressure to be thin also causes women to feel smaller psychologically. Both novels deconstruct these power relationships and the ideological state apparatuses (Althusser, 1971), such as small town culture and church teachings, that lead to these power differentials. Although the focus on diet culture in both novels is secondary to the issue of rape, it is nonetheless important to discuss, as the language surrounding both diet culure and rape culture leads to the subjugation and disempowerment of women, which can lead to sexual assault and violence.  

​Asking for It
In Asking For It (2016), the eighteen-year-old main character Emma experiences gang rape at a friend’s party. While getting ready for the party at which the novel’s pivotal incidents occur, Emma conveys thoughts about food that are unhealthy. Her brother says, “Is that all you’re going to eat? Mam left dinner for us.” Her response is, “eating is cheating” (p. 55). Her brother Bryan laughs off the comment, but later, he becomes eerily aware at how body obsession eventually comes to harm his younger sister. As feminist scholar Susan Bordo (1993) noted, “feminism imagined the human body as itself a politically inscribed entity, its physiology and morphology shaped by histories and practice of containment and control,” which manifests in such areas as corseting to shrink the size of the human body, rape, and unwanted pregnancy (p. 21). Slut shaming and fat shaming are both aspects of social control that are imposed upon women to maintain the status quo of male dominance. One cultural message that many women get is that we must remain small, not only in our physical bodies, but also in our ability to assert ourselves and to speak up when we are being mistreated. The quote “eating is cheating” shows that Emma has gained messages about discipline of the body in a punishing tone, akin to Marx and Foucault’s ideas on the “‘direct grip’ that culture has on our bodies” (Bordo, 1993, p. 16).  

Shout
Like Asking for It, Shout (2019) references the pressure for women to stay small through thinness. In the poem entitled “hippos,” the speaker notes that paralleling the magazine covers “of skeletal white privilege like the Kennedys” her parents “smothered/my hunger/by pinching my hips/grabbing the fat under my chin” starting when she was only eight, all the way through her twenties (p. 29). They called her Baby Hippo in an “insult disguised as love” and warned her that people would make fun of her “for being fat/so I might as well/get used to it” (p. 29). Scarring insults related to the body, which most women face at some point, can lead to negative feelings about the body. When the speaker was first raped, she did not tell anyone about it, perhaps in part due to the language surrounding shame she experienced as related to her body throughout her childhood. 

​Interestingly enough, this scene in Shout also points to the issue of privilege and weight. The Kennedy’s were able to embody the image of beauty in part because of their social capital and socioeconomic privilege. The speaker’s family was not well off, yet they were trying to uphold the media images of attractiveness. The parents’ possibly well-intentioned, but misguided encouragement of the speaker to look more like media images led her to feel disempowered in her own body, and media images and societal pressures have this impact on many women. Various forms of media serve as ideological state apparatuses that pressure women to uphold smaller physical appearances and demure demeanors. Although social media did not exist in the 1970s, television and written magazines contained advertisements that exerted the same pressure over women that social media now exerts on us today: We have an image to uphold, one that pleases the male gaze.  

​Diet culture and rape culture are not one and the same, but both involve the shaming of women. Therefore, I believe it’s pertinent that both Asking for It and Shout address the issue within a larger conversation about rape culture. Within classroom settings, feminist literature surrounding diet culture and encouraging women to remain small can be useful to discuss in relationship to YA literature, particularly YA literature related to rape culture. Perhaps, if women are no longer forced to remain small, we will feel more free to speak and shout our feelings to avoid and report incidents of sexual violence.   

Need more options? Try these as well:

1. Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu 
2. 52 Likes by Medeia Sharif 
3. Sadie by Courtney Summers (also, All the Rage by the same author) 
4. The Nowhere Girls by Amy Reed 
5. Speak: The Graphic Novel by Laurie Halse Anderson and Emily Carroll 
6. Sold by Patricia McCormick 
7. The Female of the Species by Mindy McGinnis
8. Go Ask Alice by Beatrice Sparks (Anonymous) 
9. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold 
10. Just Listen by Sarah Dessen 
11. The Gospel of Winter by Brendan Kiely 
12. The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton 

References

Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (Notes towards an
investigation). In Louis Althusser, Lenin and philosophy and other essays (Ben Brewster,
Trans.) (pp. 127-186). New York: Monthly Review Press. (Reprinted from La Pensée,
1970).

Anderson, L.H. (2019). Shout (Advanced Readers’ Edition). New York, NY: Viking.

Bordo, S. (1993/2003). Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body.

Berkely, CA: University of California Press.
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O’Neill, L. (2016). Asking for It. New York, NY: Quercus.