Power must rest in the body : stereotypes, disability, reproduction and rhetorical tools in my year of meats by Ruth L. Ozeki and Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

How can power be incorporated in the body? Katherine Dunn's Geek Love and Ruth L. Ozeki's My Year of Meats attempt to answer this question. This thesis sets out to explore cultural stereotypes and normative images in the two novels' fictional cultures. Masculine control masked as stereotypes is inscribed upon women's bodies in the forms of disorder and disability. These definitions limit and subjugate the female characters in the novels to the extent that they have difficulties establishing their individual identities. For some of the female characters, the inscription of male control leads to destroyed bodies, disintegration, even death. In the two novels in question, consumerism and capitalism are powerful forces which control how stereotypical images of women and other oppressed groups are defined and described in societies. Motherhood becomes a locus of control for the patriarchal powers, as controlling reproduction equals having control over both bodies and minds. By using disability theories, rhetorical theories and feminist theories I investigate how Dunn and Ozeki present their female characters in a battle against the subjugating stereotypes. Motherhood and disorder become forces which can prove to overturn the impact of stigma and disability, and which, through the power of otherness, can open up the prevailing subjugating discourse to a rhetorical universe where women are in power over their own bodies. Dunn and Ozeki partake in a larger feminist discourse, which, I argue, moves beyond fiction and into real life. At the same time, the authors question the fluidity of human expressions which form and shape stereotypes and therefore the human body. Textual universes become in this sense both potentially harmful, at the same time as they can aid in the reconceptualisation of identity, with the result that power can be asserted in individual bodies