Refusal as Resistance: Food and the Distorted Self in Han Kang's The Vegetarian

In most cultures, food transcends its role as a basic requirement and acts as a symbolic language threaded through identity, memory, and cognitive experience. Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian portrays food as a cultural marker of conventionality, femininity, and social conditioning, where it becomes a medium through which society imposes power and dominance. This paper aims to explore the convergences of food, psyche, and gender issues in Korean culture as represented in Kang's text. It also examines how these factors perpetuate patriarchal control, while Yeong-hye’s subversive choices challenge these norms. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, this article mainly elevates food as a symbol of gendered regulation as well as Yeong-hye’s resistance to the structured roles constructed by society. It also reveals how the body and its relationship to food articulate trauma and repression.