Agustina Bazterrica’s Dobbsian Vision of Dystopia in Tender Is the Flesh
The US Supreme Court’s ruling last summer in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, overturning the rulings of two other federal courts to strike down Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act due to its extreme restrictions on women’s control over their bodies, has incited fierce outrage and distress about the erosion of reproductive freedom and democracy throughout America. The Court’s decision, supporting the Mississippi law purportedly aimed at “protecting the life of the unborn” also invalidated the landmark precedent of Roe based on Justice Alito’s assertion that “procuring and abortion is not a fundamental constitutional right.” Thus, in Dobbs, conservative justices have made their long-hoped aim of re-imposing control over the bodies (and lives) of women a reality.
For a country literally built out of the injustices of native land theft and chattel slavery, the Court’s endorsement of oppressive social policies couched in the assertion as the reinstatement of “authority…to the people” is nothing new. Beyond the scope of American history and the anticanon of the Supreme Court, the Dobbs decision recalls an uncanny resemblance to the kind of tyranny imposed by the ruling patriarchal theocracy of the Republic of Gilead in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel (and Hulu series) The Handmaiden’s Tale.
The persistence of menacing forms of sexism and gendered violence is an urgent concern that has been increasingly taken up by women writers from Ivy Pochoda’s These Women, Maggie Shen King’s An Excess Male, Claire Legrand’s Sawkill Girls and Selah Saterstrom’s Rancher. Further, native writers including Frances Washburn in Elsie’s Business, Louise Erdrich in The Round House, and Andrea L. Rogers in Man Made Monsters, offer powerful literary interventions that expose an ongoing epidemic of violence against native and indigenous women throughout North America.
For those who claim a fidelity to the principles of freedom and justice there is an inherent responsibility to speak out against these and other forms of oppression, for as the lifelong civil rights activist Dolores Huerta reminds, “If we are going to have a true democracy, everyone needs to participate. You can’t just have a few people making the rules, making the laws." Although knowledge and freedom are ubiquitous concerns within our current social discourse, an essential element in making the principles at the core of these words impactful, and thus meaningful, is an ability to recognize one’s positionality within the complex matrices of oppression, privilege and power.
With this commitment comes a willingness to interrogate and acknowledge the privilege and power implicit with being male. As such, all men have a responsibility to strive for the achievement of a greater understanding of the ways sexism and gender bias manifest and operate in the world. And while I can express my own frustration and anger at Alito’s claim that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start” as an ideology that imposes a new era of criminalized abortion, as well as for the impact it will have on women’s control over their own bodies, such responses will always fall short of the expression of fearless speech distinguished by Michel Foucault as “parrhesia,” requiring “courage in the face of danger.” That is, to put oneself at risk for speaking.
Within a social environment whereby American politics has become ever more partisan, debased and toxic due to the continued advancement of anti-democratic tactics from gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the perversion of America’s legal systems, along with the intensification of incendiary rhetoric and calls to political violence, the kind of courageous speech Foucault discussed as it relates to women’s reproductive rights lies exclusively with women. And especially with those speaking out to resist gendered violence.
Considered alongside Dobbs, we must also remember that the impositions of power, coercion and violence are not merely implied by the Court’s decision. As reports of women fleeing from states with pending restrictions or bans on abortion already in place, the effects are both serious and immediate. Such is the nature of real-life dystopian social oppression and institutional violence in contemporary America.
Agustina Bazterrica is another writer who has extrapolated structures and practices of our contemporary world as the basis for a bleak dystopian vision. In her 2017 Argentinean apocalypse novel, Cadáver exquisito, translated in 2020 into English as Tender Is the Flesh, her vision of dystopia involves the horror of legalized cannibalism. As she asserts in an interview, Tender Is the Flesh develops a vision that she sees as an extension of our modern “capitalist, consumerist society” whereby “we devour each other.” Although Bazterrica addresses many of the same themes of violence and oppression found in Atwood’s fiction, she does so in a more direct and horrific way. At the same time, she evokes many of the core themes central to the dystopian genre and found in the works of writers like Thomas Huxley, George Orwell, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia E. Butler.
Within historical contexts of extreme social and political oppression, the flexibility of the dystopian form, along with the genre of apocalyptic literature, have proven to be particularly effective, and maybe even essential, to writers seeking to explore the moral and ethical dimensions their nations or environment. Although Tender Is the Flesh is firmly situated as dystopian fiction, given the current reality in which the ongoing suppression of women’s rights and the control of their bodies forming a crisis that is global in scope, the message Bazterrica articulates remains urgent.
The novel’s framing is made even more affective as the narrative hinges on an event known in the story as the “Transition,” which can encapsulate any structural change in society. Readers quickly learn just what this refers to through the main character, Señor Marcos, the manager of a venture known as the Cypress Processing Plant, “he knows that transition is a word that doesn’t convey how quick and ruthless the process was. One word to sum up and classify the unfathomable. An empty word. Change, transformation, shift: synonyms that appear to mean the same thing…They’ve all normalized cannibalism, he thinks.”
The reality hidden behind this innocuously-named firm is key in the novel’s larger social critique as this business is a “slaughterhouse…the word that speaks to an implacable truth behind a beautiful building.” As we find in other dystopian tales such as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the status of words and their relation to meaning, along with relevant historical associations and the truth claims they evoke, are intentionally altered and supplanted. This occurs frequently in Tender Is the Flesh through euphemism and doublespeak, as well as erasure.
An intolerance to facts and a hostility to truth, especially in a way that destabilizes previously accepted meaning, is a common element of authoritarian thought. These are also devices that have become ever more prevalent in American society over the last several decades, most recently, in the form of so-called “fake news” and “alternative facts.” A version of such disagreement over what constitutes truth and knowledge is powerfully articulated by Bazterrica in the novel’s opening lines in relation to Marcos, whereby “words appear in his head and strike him down. Destroy him.”
One of the primary ways language becomes a tool to reshape reality is through ideology and propaganda, which often take the form of representations deployed to render people into mere ‘things.’ In the world Bazterrica summons, this form of epistemological violence is extended through the guises of law and marketing, with human flesh renamed as “special meat” and within a system of meaning whereby “technical words” are employed “to refer to what is a human but will never be a person, to what is always a product.” As such, words become emptied of meaning like a hanging carcass drained of blood, and then reshaped so to be utilized in the insidious reinscription of a reality grounded in convenient “euphemisms that nullified all horror.”
Bazterrica’s interrogation of language represents just one of the ways we are given access to the scenes of graphic and horrific violence that abound throughout Tender Is the Flesh. This includes detailed descriptions of the slaughter and the vivisection of human beings that are rooted in the control of knowledge.
More lurid yet, however, is a chapter detailing the operation of a game reserve in which humans are the target of sport. Elaborating on the connection between socioeconomic inequality and oppression, the reserve is owned by a sadistic aristocrat named Urlet who justifies its existence as the way “we accept our excesses, that we normalize them, that we embrace our primitive essence.” The abuse of words and meaning is central to the kind of normalization he exploits, of course, in which previous patterns of thought are altered to make violence against targeted groups acceptable.
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Described in monstrous, vampiric terms as an ageless man from Romania who has been engaged in the hunting of humans long before the Transition, Urlet’s motives are further joined to the linguistic refrain of the narrative through his portrayal as one who “collects words in addition to trophies.” Rationalizing his sadistic amusement to Marcos, he asserts that killing for sport and the acts of cannibalism that follow have a long history: “after all, since the world began, we’ve been eating each other. If not symbolically, then we’ve been literally gorging on each other. The Transition has enabled us to be less hypocritical.”
That such violence was prevalent in the past, as Urlet’s reasoning goes, echoes the Court’s justification for its overruling of Roe in the claim that criminal restrictions on abortion are “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” Such a regressive and amoral logic, while dismissing the long struggle for justice and equality that typifies America’s civil rights movements, could also embolden other similarly grotesque claims relating to historic impositions of racial discrimination and forms of wage slavery, along with the genocidal policies perpetrated against native peoples. In many ways, it seems that a return to some romanticized past rife with exploitation, injustice and oppression is precisely what some want. This is a theme Bazterrica consistently reinforces through Urlet’s thoughts and actions, and those of other male characters.
The disregard and elimination of common legal norms and standards of individual and collective human rights represent a major feature of dystopian societies. No doubt influenced by the global rise of nationalism and white supremacy, the dystopian stories being told today increasingly extend beyond the realm of mere speculation to warn of a host of impending threats to freedom and looming disasters. Considering Dobbs, for American women that future [dystopia] imagined by writers such as Atwood is now closer to reality than many thought possible just a few years ago.
With its focus on the workings of slaughterhouses and meat processing plants, in addition to exposing the cruelty of vivisection and trophy hunting, Tender Is the Flesh has also been read as an allegory on humanity’s ill treatment of animals. Although such concerns are clearly reflected in the text, Bazterrica has thoughtfully shared her reflections on the development of the topic. Hailing from a country where meat is such a dominant staple, she states, “my view of meat consumption was completely changed. To me, a steak is now a piece of a corpse.”
Instead of prompting her to write on her society’s treatment of animals, however, she describes how these observations led her to a consideration of cannibalism: “one day I was walking by a butcher’s shop and all I saw were bodies of animals hanging down and I thought, ‘Why can’t those be human corpses? After all we are animals, we are flesh.’ And that’s how the idea for the novel emerged.”
From here it isn’t a far leap, especially as an Argentinian female writer, to reflect on how such cultural practices might impact the treatment of women and other disempowered groups as she says, “I am part of a society that eats meat and unflinchingly accepts animal cruelty with the same brutal indifference shown towards vulnerable groups such as the poor, indigenous populations and women. We are a country that also murders its women. There is one femicide every eighteen hours and there are no statistics for deaths related to clandestine abortions since in Argentina it is a crime (abortion was legalized in Argentina in 2021).”
Bazterrica brings all these themes together in Tender Is the Flesh through a scene in which Marcos visits a so-called breeding center that the owner, a character named El Gringo, refers to as “a great living warehouse of meat.” The grotesque nature of this society and the monstrous procedures of the functioning of various institutions and business are revealed to readers from a perspective conveyed through Marcos’ constantly vacillating and conflicted perspective in “words he feels mix with others that are incomprehensible, the mechanical word spoken by an artificial voice, a voice that doesn’t know that all these words can conceal him, even suffocate him.”
What’s so striking about such scenes is that the people specifically subjected to the horrific treatment at the core of the novel have themselves been divested of their humanity, and the rights that attend. In the world after the Transition, the people used for human consumption have been officially designated as “heads” in another act of reinscription, for it is “prohibited” that they even be called human. Their inherent being is further obscured and denied in words and meaning through the deprivation of the capacity of speech and personal expression by having their “vocal cords removed so they’re easier to control.”
Reading against our contemporary context, we might also view the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs as a different kind of official language articulated in the voice of authoritarian power and ideology, functioning similarly to silence the voices of so many American women in our society.
The next morning, Marcos receives a gift from El Gringo that the deliveryman identifies as “a female FGP.” Similar to the classifications of beef and pork by the USDA, this abbreviation signifies, “First Generation Pure,” referring to “head born and bred in captivity.” Although Marcos is initially appalled by what is an illegal gift and contemplates returning the woman, he eventually accepts the gesture after considering the consequences of rebuffing a man of more power and authority.
Despite Marcos’ misgivings, which seem due more to the burdens the situation brings to care for the nameless woman, along the fear he harbors about the possibility of being caught in possession of an unauthorized “head,” his acceptance of the ‘gift’ marks his complicity in the crime. This becomes clear in a scene where Marcos creates a living space for the woman in a barn on his property. Bazterrica then slowly reveals the repulsive trajectory of his thoughts and intentions as his treatment of her becomes more caring and tender, a response culminating with Marcos bringing her into his house to live. The final act of transgression, and one that damns Marcos to the status shared by all the other cruel, selfish and sadistic characters in the novel, comes, ironically, in his act of bestowing her with the name of “Jasmine.”
It is within these scenes, which Marcos rationalizes to himself as acts of humanity, that he naturalizes the presence of the captive woman and annuls her designation as a ‘head,’ yet only within his psyche and for the satisfaction of his own selfish desires and purposes. These acts lead to the horrific culmination Bazterrica masterfully emplots, while supplying her protagonist additional cover in the details around his son’s death at a young age—an event that triggered the collapse of his marriage and separation from his wife. Thus, the very site wherein lies the most reprehensible results of the insidious violations in which he is complicit emerge through the construct of the nuclear family, and stemming from the original Biblical union of Adam and Eve that forms the foundation of Western culture and society.
In states with bans and restrictions on abortion in place or planned, especially without exceptions for rape and incest, it is difficult to overlook the oppressive impulse at the core of such directives. An implicit set of motives reflecting the patriarchal subjugation of women and the primacy of male reproduction becomes clear when considering the gross neglect within legal systems of sufficient protections and lack of appropriate penalties to deter the motives that often drives such abuse and violence.
While there is no need here to relate the details of how the interactions between Marcos and Jasmine, along with his estranged wife, culminate, the depiction in the concluding sections of the rape and the eventual birth of a resulting child—without the woman’s choice or consent—can just as easily be seen as an expected outcome of the Dobbs decision in a world that continues its slouching towards dystopia. By the novel’s end, readers are struck, not so much by the weight of the enabling catastrophe (the poisoning of animal life is given as the cause for the Transition in the novel) leading to the normalization of cannibalism, but in its more subtle and discrete reflections on the oppression of woman and the control of their bodies, agency and freedom.
This is, after all, the flittering nature of an uncanny world lying just beneath the surface of so much of the brutality and inhumanity depicted in Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh. Such is also the quality of so many of the most affective and haunting stories of apocalypse and dystopia, but isn’t the point?
To make us perceive more soberly what stands before us, and with new eyes. This, much more than merely serving up an illustration of some foreign or alien world to shock and astonish, while otherwise being seen as unimaginable. But then to append something more onto these stories through the unvarnished presentation of aspects and elements drawn from our own tangled realities that retain the chance of becoming…Finally, of manifesting a fragment of those selfsame dreams and nightmares that in our waking we can so easily dismiss and push away, but only ever into the next night and at the risk of our lives. A venture and a stake that necessarily and inevitably leaves the hazard to us, as it should and must be as a viewer, a reader and in life.
The opinions expressed here are solely the author's and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the Hollywood Progressive.
