The Post-Human Masquerade of Diseased Meat

Abstract

If a prime cut of steak infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) underwent the talking cure, what may it have to say? Diary of a Steak, an experimental text by Booker Prize-nominated author Deborah Levy, ostensibly answers this absurd question, offering an anthropomorphizing performance of the voice of a piece of meat languishing in a supermarket freezer during the BSE crisis. Yet, playing upon the dual valence of the British slang term ‘mad cow’, the narrator concurrently positions herself in a lineage of patients canonized in historical accounts of feminized madness. Knotting together the voices of BSE-infected meat and the female hysteric, Diary of a Steak has been seen to construct a protesting agency on behalf of these two mad cows. This article argues that to attribute a didactic message to the text obscures the seductive danger of the narrator’s voice, which oscillates from human to animal while remaining simultaneously both. Instead, the article reads the narrator as an interspecies femme fatale, drawing out the animality of this feminine archetype to both stimulate and thwart the desire to penetrate her narrative. Diary of a Steak thus offers a textual performance of post-human masquerade, entwining the hermeneutically compelling bodies of BSE-meat and hysteric in a knot of danger and desire that evokes both the historical co-construction of animality, femininity and madness and the contradictory ideals governing industrialized meat.