The Neoliberal Production of Cultural Citizenship in Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats

Abstract

This essay draws together theories of neoliberalism and immigration to examine their shared interest in individual agency and the power of the nation-state. Though both theoretical perspectives tend to separate subject and object positions, this essay argues that Ruth L. Ozeki’s novel My Year of Meats (1998) problematizes such a bifurcated understanding of subjectivity by narrating the complex political and economic positionality known as cultural citizenship—that is, a subject’s self-determination within the state even as the state’s normative structures influence the subject. Through Akiko Ueno, a Japanese housewife, Ozeki shows how an immigrant’s subject and object positions cannot be separated from one another within the transnational framework of neoliberalism. The narrative foregrounds the simultaneity of these experiences to suggest that opportunities for freedom and agency are, paradoxically, both possible and impossible. This essay contends that My Year of Meats envisions forms of substantive individual and communal resistance to neoliberal values while also identifying how socially-produced cultural citizenship still places immigrants within the purview of the neoliberal nation-state.