跨國賤斥：從賤斥邊緣談尾關《食肉之年》中食物及影像的生產與消費

Transnational Abjection: Producing and Consuming Food and Images from the Abject Borders in Ruth L. Ozeki's My Year of Meats

本文從跨國賤斥的角度來討論尾關（Ruth L. Ozeki）的小說《食肉之年》（My Year of Meats, 1998），藉著指出跨太平洋文化交流及經濟交換體系內部的壓迫與抗爭，以回應德立克（Arif Dirlik）和黃秀玲對亞裔離散研究所表達的憂慮及不滿。文章先討論美日之間的跨國食物（牛肉）和影像交流，以及此種交流所促銷的品味和生活方式，如何強化一種大國家主義式的種族及性別身體概念。跨國機器一方面動員亞洲／亞美主體，及其他的社會弱勢者，將他們置放在食物和影像的生產者、中介者、翻譯者、和消費者的位置上，同時也在觀念上排除他們的族裔、階級、性別、和性意識身體，使他們淪為賤斥者。但賤斥處境卻激勵來自零星在地地點的抗爭與聯盟，在亞美與亞裔離散的歷史交錯點上形成一個跨在地聯盟。

Responding to Arif Dirlik's and Sau-ling C. Wong's discontent with Asian Diaspora studies, this article reads Ruth L. Ozeki's novel My Year of Meats (1998) from the perspective of transnational abjects to discern and identify the heterogeneous sites of oppression and resistance in transpacific cultural and economic flows. The article starts with a discussion of the global transmission of food (beef) and images between America and Japan to perceive tastes and lifestyle nourishing and are nourished by the nationalist ideology concerning the proper racial and gender body. While the transnational meat machine contains and positions Asian/American subjects to serve as its producers, mediators, cultural translators, and consumers, it simultaneously renders them into abject beings by conceptually expulsing their gender and class specificities from the system. Using ethnicity and gender as the common ground on which the two heroines-one Japanese woman, one Japanese American woman-ally to challenge the transnational mechanism, My Year of Meats traces the two women's different positions of abjection on the transnational borders, and the ways in which they strive to disrupt the system from within by means of a progressive form of cultural translation and cultural reception.