Food and the Two Faces of America: Benevolence and Violence in Fox Girl

Scholars have analyzed Nora Okja Keller's Fox Girl (2002) for its critique of the United States military as an imperialist force complicit in sexually exploiting Korean women and children. However, past studies have not thoroughly explored the function of food in the novel. The novel's emphasis on food is neither incidental nor merely a product of the author's imagination but grounded in Korea's history of scarcity and the critical role food has played in sustaining imperial power. I argue that Fox Girl exposes American food products as a key imperial infrastructure. The novel captures the ways the US military utilizes American food products to project and uphold an image of American benevolence in Korea, though Keller subverts this infrastructure by using food imagery to produce what I call a resistant culinary aesthetic. First, by entwining American food items with scenes of venereal disease, chemical poisoning, and sexual assault, she turns them into unsettling metaphors that expose the US military's violence against Korean sex workers. Second, she scales back food imagery to mirror the protagonist's deepening disillusionment with the US. Finally, she mobilizes food imagery to underscore the historical continuity of abuse against Korean women and to mark the transpacific reach of the US empire.