Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies

Special Issue Call: “Meat Narratives”

This special issue focuses on narratives created and constructed around meat. Meat is a peculiar item of food. The fact that meat products were once living beings has always activated connections to surprising fields. Meat may be considered as sacrality, corpse, blood, a precious source of energy, sin, sacrifice, dirt, cleanness, animal death (not in its cultivated version) or human life; as such, it has engaged in relationships with religion, nation-building, revolution, urban planning, robotics (see the robotized farms), sci-fi, political communication, philosophy (the relationships Nature/Culture), gender divide, dictatorship, psychology, education and many others.

Meat is a part of social, historical and cultural life that may be proudly supported or passionately rejected. For butchers and anti-meat activists alike, meat is never meaningless.  

Meat is at the center of many stories we tell and are told in our daily lives. It provides a convenient reference point for communication and understanding in the most surprising of situations: many vegetarian and vegan foods, for example, use animal-based words in their product names, including sausage, hamburger and even legs and breasts. Narrative forms of expression very frequently adopt meat (or meat eaters/objectors) as protagonists, antagonists, or relevant characters in their stories. Literature, painting, documentaries, TV, cinema, theatre, fairy tales, oral narrative, social media accounts, photography, websites and so on have turned meat into a narrative matter. From Upton Sinclair's The Jungle to Simon Amstell's Carnage, meat is on the stage.

However, we know that these forms of expression do not have the trademark on telling stories. Narratives of meat are embedded in cultural, social, political, historical and economic values. Places, religions, philosophy, politics and other fields of our societies adopt narrative strategies to communicate and shape themselves, and in so doing they tell stories. Here, meat is on the stage again. Slaughterhouses or butcher's shops have changed throughout the years in their location, architecture, relationships to the public, etc., and their history tells fascinating stories regarding the people who have worked there, their customers, the perspectives on them and the urban areas where they were or are; religions have regulated meat eating/abstention through stories conveying precise values and beliefs; politics has (ab)used meat to support ideologies extraneous to steaks or hamburgers.

This special issue is interested in narratives of meat across disciplines and theories, including but not limited to:

• human-animal studies
• digital narratives
• postcolonial and anticolonial narratives
• ecological and environmental humanities
• (critical) medical and health humanities
• theatre, film and non-text media
• world literatures
• queer theory
• education and pedagogy
• image and graphic novels
• geography and urban planning studies
• religious studies across ages and cultures
• gender studies

The editor of “Meat Narratives” is a meat reductionist but this does not affect this special issue: positive accounts of meat are welcomed. The final aim is to obtain a wide range of perspectives on meat narratives and the roles that meat plays in them.

The working language is English. Please send queries or an abstract of up to 300 words plus a short biography to Professor Francesco Buscemi at francesco.buscemi@unicatt.it.

Deadline for abstracts: September 30, 2024

Notification of acceptance: October 31, 2024

Submission of articles (6.000-8.000 words): April 30, 2025