De gados e homens: processed meat in Ana Paula Maia’s novel

Abstract

De gados e homens (2013), by Ana Paula Maia, invites us to reflect on the consumption of meat in a modern capitalist society. From the meat of precarious workers in the slaughterhouse, in which such bodies are molded in the work process to the slaughter of meat-producing animals destined for hamburger factories. From this perspective, the literary text allows us to think about the environmental and social impacts generated by slaughterhouses. In the context where the growth of hunger coincides with a peak in beef exports, Maia’s novel emerges as a current work in the country. Therefore, this work aims at examining the interaction between nature and human action in the narrative, seeking to understand the various complexities that permeate it. In thoughts proposed in her writing, it is possible to recognize that the explicit flesh in Maia’s work is crossed by political and cultural inscriptions. In this sense, under the bias of animal studies in the literary text, theis paper is based on the contributions by Vânia Márcia Damasceno Nogueira (2012), Peter Singer (2013), Gabriel Giorgi (2015), and Carol J. Adams (2018).