Empowerment and Exploitation: Sexual Dynamics in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

ABSTRACT: This essay examines the complexities and fallacies of individual sexual resistance and empowerment in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian through an analysis of the sexual scenes between protagonist Yeong-hye and her artist brother-in-law in the second section. While the first and final sections have received more critical attention for depicting Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism as a radical form of political activism, the sexual dynamics in the second part have been comparatively under-analyzed. Unlike Yeong-hye’s other encounters with sexually gendered violence, the agency she exerts and the sense of liberation she experiences in the second part allow for a reading of the scene as empowering. However, this essay argues that the dynamics of individualized sexual empowerment portrayed in these scenes align with the structural gendered violence that pervades the rest of the book. It examines the novel’s blurring of boundaries between the artistic expression of the erotic and a male-controlled discourse of the erotic within the context of world literature, exploring the question of sexual autonomy through a global and transnational framework.