Starving into Being: Eating Disorders, Embodied Resistance, and the Psychiatric Imagination in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

Abstract

This article examines Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2007) through the interdisciplinary lens of the medical humanities, drawing on psychoanalysis and cultural psychiatry to interrogate how the novel represents the boundaries between pathology and protest. I argue that Yeong-hye’s refusal of food is not a manifestation of illness but an act of embodied dissent against the patriarchal and psychiatric orders that seek to discipline her. Rather than a descent into madness, her starvation becomes a radical assertion of subjectivity that unsettles the classificatory power of diagnosis itself. Situating the analysis within the ICD-11 framework for feeding and eating disorders, the study exposes how clinical taxonomies both reflect and obscure cultural assumptions about body, morality, and control in East Asian contexts. A psychoanalytic reading, informed by Lacanian and Kristevan theory, illuminates Yeong-hye’s retreat from the Symbolic as a paradoxical gesture of autonomy and purification. A comparative reflection with West African narratives: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Yejide Kilanko’s Daughters Who Walk This Path (2012), and Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter (1989) reveals that hunger, silence, and protest acquire distinct moral and cultural meanings across postcolonial literatures. The article concludes by advancing the concept of literary psychiatry, an interpretive practice that reads the body as a site of ethical testimony, resists reductive clinical labelling, and foregrounds the cultural variability of suffering and resistance.