Eating, Cleaning, and Writing: Female Abjection and Subjectivity in Margaret Atwood’s ＂The Blind Assassin＂

This paper attempts to explicate women's emergence from the shade of abjection to the stage of subjectivity, with a focus on the physical and textual boundaries in Margaret Atwood's ”The Blind Assassin”.The first part of this paper centers on the power dynamics of eating and food, particularly on three issues: anorexia as a protest on behalf of bodily autonomy, eating as a demonstration of power, and sexist stereotypes of women through culinary metaphors. The second part analyzes Iris's and Laura's hygienic habits, aiming to answer the question: why can Iris outgrow her anorexia, but Laura cannot? The third part shifts the focus from women's physical boundary (eating and cleaning) to the textual one (writing), culminating in an exploration of female writing in the novel. Where anorexia and obsessive showers help women characters claim their subjectivity by negatively draw a line between self and other, female writing shapes subjects that do not simply counter the other but negotiate with it. While the first two parts of the essay rely on Julia Kristeva's concept of ”abjection” to draw the bodily boundary between self and other, the last part leans on Hélène Cixous's idea(l)s of écriture féminine to reimagine, reconstruct, and re(dis)cover the self/other dialectic by ”flying” across textual boundaries.