The Crisis of Regeneration in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats and All Over Creation

Abstract

Abstract Ruth Ozeki’s first two novels, My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2002), bring into focus the crisis of regeneration that humans, animals, and plants face alike. My Year of Meats exposes and indicts the global meat industry for its association with contamination, deformity, disease, and violence, all of which impact life’s fertility. All Over Creation explores the conflicts of biodiversity versus monoculture and fecundity versus biotechnological control by presenting the quandaries regarding genetically modified potatoes in Idaho. In these contexts, Ozeki creates women characters who bear the sorrow and despair of being childless due to their exposure to toxins and other environmental contaminations. Her portrayals of meat and potato farming catalog the devastating assaults of patriarchy and capitalism against Earth and its inhabitants. This essay focuswa on the subject of infertility in these two novels. Moving from the juxtaposition of animal farming with women’s infertility to that of potato farming with women’s infertility, these two novels represent their author’s unswerving endeavor to deconstruct patriarchal dualism and to unite humans and Earth in their common crisis of regeneration. Hence, this essay argues that by drawing trans-species parallels between women and animals, women and plants, Ozeki exposes and condemns patriarchal and capitalist violence that is putting life’s regeneration in peril.