ABSTRACT
In the 1970s, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures subsequently collected in Abnormal. As the title of the collection suggests, his subject is “abnormality”, or what is perceived as such. In these lectures, Foucault argued that the figure of the abnormal individual is traceable back to the figure of the “monster”, which he defined as a being that deviates from natural and societal norms, and proceeded to identify two of its historical forms: the “sexual monster” and the “alimentary monster” (Foucault 2003, esp. 98–104). Foucault’s identification of the former monster would not exactly surprise those familiar with his work, as one of its prominent preoccupations is, of course, sexuality. The same, however, cannot be said of his identification of the latter monster, the alimentary, and there is good reason for this. As Chloe Taylor has observed in “Abnormal Appetites”, while Foucault elaborates at length on the sexual monster, tracing its mutation into the figure of the sexually abnormal individual in the nineteenth century, he forgets all about the alimentary monster after introducing it (2012, 130). This chapter follows Taylor’s lead and takes up Foucault’s forgotten alimentary monster, transposing it onto the twenty-first century; specifically, it uses it as a conceptual framework within which to critically consider the presence of an alimentary ‘monstrosity’ in contemporary fiction – namely, genetically modified food.
