Anthropocentrism, Ecological Crisis, and the Centrality of Flesh in Twenty-First Century Fictional Meat Futures

Anthropogenic ecological crisis casts a shadow over the future of meat, from anxiety about resource depletion to unease about meat-eating as a manifestation of anthropocentrism. This thesis explores relations between human and nonhuman animals in depictions of meat futures in twenty-first century speculative and science fiction (sf) from Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Nascent scholarship on representations of animals in sf, like the work of Sherryl Vint and Nora Castle, often embraces the genre’s capacity to transform human-nonhuman relations. This thesis explores both this transformative potential and the enduring anthropocentrism of sf, drawing on a range of literary case studies from established authors such as Margaret Atwood and Jean-Christophe Rufin to emerging names like Becky Chambers, Joseph D’Lacey, Elizabeth Dougherty, and Vincent Message. This thesis produces a theoretical framework that juxtaposes theorists of difference like Matthew Calarco and Jacques Derrida, thinkers of entanglement such as Eva Haifa Giraud and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and scholars of biopolitics and capitalism including Nicole Shukin and Dinesh Wadiwel. These animal studies approaches are complemented by the work of food anthropologists like Nick Fiddes, Claude Fischler, and Noëlie Vialles. Through this framework, this thesis interrogates four fictional meat futures: the chapter on plant-based meat substitutes asks how these products may (re)produce the carnist logic of their meaty forerunner; the analysis of in vitro meat explores the anthropocentric structure of narratives of surviving ecological crisis; insect meats are used to consider normative exclusions at the borders of multispecies communities; and depictions of human flesh provide the opportunity to question how to denaturalise the violence of industrial animal agriculture. Together, the chapters build a complex picture of the relationship between anthropocentrism and eating practices in twenty-first century fictional meat futures and highlight the difficulties of displacing the importance of meat in the West.