Food and the Two faces of America: Benevolence and Violence in Fox Girl

Abstract

Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl has been critically analyzed for its critique of the US military as an imperialist force complicit in sexually exploiting Korean women and children. However, past studies have not thoroughly explored the function of food in the novel, an emphasis that is neither incidental nor merely a product of the author’s imagination but grounded in Korea’s history of scarcity and the critical role food plays in upholding imperial power. I argue that Fox Girl exposes and subverts American food products as a key imperial infrastructure. The novel captures the ways the US military utilizes American food products to project and uphold an image of American benevolence in Korea, while Keller subverts this infrastructure through food imagery through what I call a “resistant culinary aesthetic.” First, through weaving American food items into scenes of sexual disease, chemical poisoning, and sexual assault, she turns them into chilling metaphors that expose the US military’s violence on Korean sex workers. Second, she sequences food images from more to less, which parallels the protagonist’s growing disillusionment with the US. Finally, she uses food imagery to highlight the historical continuity of abuse against Korean women and to emphasize the transpacific reach of the US empire.