Literary Meat Works

Abstract In Agustina Bazterrica's novel Tender Is the Flesh (2020), a virus has ripped through every animal on the planet. All animals are massacred. No more dogs, cows, pigs, or birds. Some people refused to send their companions to the killing squads. Still, they died. At first, “expendable” humans were sold as black-market substitutes for animal protein, but now cannibalism has been legitimized—though it is, in fact, illegal to use the correct terms for what goes on in the Municipal Slaughterhouse. This article looks to Tender Is the Flesh to understand how language and narrative form can be worked in ways that articulate and “unwrite” multispecies injustices. The article argues for the value of literature that responds to culturally suppressed realities of abattoirs by imagining how it might feel to be subjected to these realities. The question whether such imaginative work can expand the possibilities of multispecies justice is examined.