Meat Market: Female flesh under capitalism

Modern culture is obsessed with controlling women's bodies. Our societies are saturated with images of unreal, idealised female beauty whilst real female bodies and the women who inhabit them are alienated from their own personal and political potential. Under modern capitalism, women are both consumers and consumed: Meat Market offers strategies for resisting this gory cycle of consumption, exposing how the trade in female flesh extends into every part of women's political selfhood. Touching on sexuality, prostitution, hunger, consumption, eating disorders, housework, transsexualism and the global trade in the signs and signifiers of femininity, Meat Market is a thin, bloody sliver of feminist dialectic, dissecting women's bodies as the fleshy fulcrum of capitalist cannibalism.

Author(s): | Laurie Penny |

Laurie Penny is an up-and-coming feminist journalist, and has already gained a substantial following both on and offline for her radical writings on politics and pop culture. As well as being a regular columnist for the New Statesman, she has had features published in The Guardian, The Times, the Evening Standard and many national magazines, and writes a popular blog, Penny Red (http://pennyred.blogspot.com), which attracts upwards of 2,000 hits per day and is amongst the most prominent political blogs in the UK. Laurie was shortlisted for the Orwell prize for political writing in 2010, and also makes regular speaking appearances at feminist and political events and on national and regional radio.

Laurie Penny was born in London in 1986 and grew up in Brighton. She has a full CV of acceptably interesting life experience, including long-term inpatient care within the mental health system, working as a burlesque dancer, and being a founding member of the new feminist activist scene in the UK, all of which will provide a backdrop for Meat Market.