‘Males and Females the Girl Consumes!’: Food, Desire and Unstable Gender Expression in Zinaid Meeran’s Saracen at the Gates

Abstract

This article analyses the ways in which food discourse is employed to destabilise essentialised notions of culture and gender in South African author Zinaid Meeran’s début novel, Saracen at the Gates (2009). The article explains how Meeran disrupts stratified conceptions of culture through his alimentary cartograph, and how food is used to disrupt religious identification. His depiction of the desiring queer body is interpreted as that which ruptures the limits of control and excess associated with appetite through analysing his representation of desire as simultaneously fluid, culturally specific and material. The article concludes that Meeran’s alimentary cartography allows for the creation of alternative constructions of identity that coalesce around the gustatory.

Keywords

• food
• desire
• Zinaid Meeran
• queer bodies
• South African literature