Willed Arboreality: Feminist Worldmaking in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

This essay argues that Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian offers a model of radical non-mastery and transnational feminist world-being through protagonist Yeong-hye’s will to arboreality and Kang’s immersive aesthetics. I begin by drawing on feminist new materialisms to establish the philosophical and formal significance of Yeong-hye’s willed arboreality and the model of sociality it thus establishes. I turn then to show how Yeong-hye’s will to tree-life is propelled by her subjugation under both localized and globalized patriarchies, which Kang establishes as a constitutive influence on Yeong-hye. Finally, I define the political stakes of The Vegetarian’s immersive aesthetics by revealing the influence of feminist painter Yayoi Kusama. Much like Kusama’s paintings, Kang’s novel enacts feminist, non-dominative, radically pacific principles, and in the process establishes a slow reorientation toward being otherwise. The Vegetarian’s immersive aesthetics put its theoretical commitments into effect, affirming the urgency of a coalitional feminism that undermines the logic of mastery that can only be associated with violence.