This movie poster is so great and cheesy, I just had to blow it up.

In my last post, I took issue with a recent NYTimes Dining article fawning over hip, young butchers “with their swinging scabbards.” However strange such “butcher love” might be, it turns out it’s nothing new.

A little trolling through Google books turned up an ancient and persistent association of butchers with a primitive and bestial sexuality. What it all comes down to is meat and blood, the blood in the meat, the blood drained from the meat, and the control of this passage.

As Deborah Lupton writes in Food, the Body and the Self,

Since the ancient Greeks, it has been believed that meat eating is associated with aggressiveness and a violent personality. The Greek scholar Porphyry wrote in the third century AD: “It is not from those who have lived on innocent foods that murderers, tyrants, robbers and sycophants have come, but from eaters of flesh.” The killing and eating of animals is coded with the attributes of virility, aggression and power, which are also coded as masculine. In the past, when women were in their most overt bodily state of femininity – in pregnancy or as lactating mothers – they were advised to avoid “strong” foods such as red meat. (107-8)

And, specifically about the butcher, she writes,

Working with dead animals is constructed as a masculine, and emphatically a non-feminine occupation, because of its linkage with strength, blood, brutality and death: “Butchers have not only a masculine but also a sinister presence: they work at the boundaries of life and death, of human and animal, of bodies and carcasses.” The liminality of this profession is thus a source of both fascination and horror… Blood associated with women’s bodies, therefore, signifies fertility and motherhood, the giving of life, whereas the masculine meanings of blood are strongly linked with violence and death. The bloodied female butcher is thus a culturally ambiguous figure. (108)

This analysis is indebted to Julia Kristeva’s 1982 essay on abjection, “Powers of Horror.” In this essay, she traces “the introduction of meat diet” to the Biblical permission to eat “every moving thing that liveth” (Genesis 9:3), which is given “only after the Flood“:

Far from being a reward, such permission is accompanied by an acknowledgment of essential evil, and it includes a negative, incriminating connotation with respect to man: “For the imagination of man’s heart is evil” (Genesis 8:21). As if there had been an acknowledgment of a bent toward murder essential to human beings and the authorization for a meat diet was the recognition of that ineradicable “death drive,” seen here under its most primordial or archaic aspect–devouring. (96)

But, Kristeva writes, the initial Biblical distinction between vegetable foods reserved for man and animal foods reserved for God (as sacrifice) gets reiterated as a new distinction, written in blood:

On the one hand there is bloodless flesh (destined for man) and on the other, blood (destined for God). Blood, indicating the impure, takes on the “animal” seme of the previous opposition and inherits the propensity for murder of which man must cleanse himself. But blood, as a vital element, also refers to women, fertility, and the assurance of fecundation. It thus becomes a fascinating semantic crossroads, the propitious place for abjection where death and femininity, murder and procreation, cessation of life and vitality all come together. “But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat” (Genesis 9:4).

Looking more closely at “the logic of dietary abomination” spelled out in Leviticus, Kristeva tries to tease out the unarticulated connections between the blood of animals that must be avoided and the blood of parturition that renders women “unclean” or “impure” (Leviticus 12). In her view, this ritualistic regulation of blood, represents an attempt to create an identity (individual, psychological, and cultural) by separating oneself from, controlling or dominating, a more primordial power, “the phantasmatic power of the mother, that archaic Mother Goddess who actually haunted the imagination of a nation at war with the surrounding polytheism” (100). In this phantasmatic scheme, butchery would be the quotidian, ritual enactment of an ancient, fundamental power grab: the assertion of a male/priestly power and control over the liminal fluid that crosses the boundaries between life and death, man and God.

If Kristeva’s analysis is right, then the butcher who drains the blood from the meat and ensures that it is kosher or halal is a primeval player in an ancient and fabulous structure of male domination. In this case, “butcher love,” insofar as it’s a fantasy of being dominated by the big, burly guy with the bloodstained apron (muscles and blood are the features the NYTimes article dwells on), would represent a kind of squaring or doubling down of one’s domination, a strange desire to worship at the bloody altar of one’s utter abjection.

Tags: butchering

This entry was posted on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 7:05 am and is filed under Curiosities, Feature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.