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Darrieussecq’s scandal-provoking Truismes/Pig Tales (1996), set in a near-future, neo-fascist France, involves much eating, drinking and consumption of others, whilst deliberately chewing up literary, political and feminist discourses. The naïve first-person narrator (as unaware of being a sex worker as she is of the intertexts which feed her retrospective account written in porcine form) experiences a metamorphosis oscillating between sex worker, submissive lover and sow, the flux marked by being consumed physically by food cravings and sexually by male abusers. Until momentarily fueled by acorns and truffles, self-expression through writing and eating involves danger, exemplifying the implications of the squandering of excess. Ambivalent traces of meaning in food-related truisms bring into question the possibility of countering patriarchal, capitalist violence – structural and overt. Carno-phallogocentric, cannibalistic, food- and sex-fueled soirées and the ‘others’ who serve and are sacrificed at them evoke the trauma of colonialism, the Holocaust (and French co-implication in it); excesses in turn linked to late capitalism. With the opposite of nurturing mother’s milk, and countering expectations of feminist readings, re-thinking representations of eating and drinking in Truismes raises questions of the conditions of production for and the consequences of (un)critical writing about gender, race and contemporary modes of consumption.

This chapter finds that the male chauvinist pig was easy to spot but hard to define. It offers an exploration of the various incarnations of male chauvinist piggery and provides insight into the confusion surrounding many people’s encounters with feminists, the Women’s Liberation Movement via the mass media and in daily life. The media continued to trivialize feminism and the women’s liberation movement, using headlines and content to turn serious struggles into an ongoing joke about the Female Chauvinist Pig. Meanwhile interviews, surveys, and personal testimonies often revealed through humor that the male chauvinist could possess a mixed political consciousness that was far from settled. In much the way scholars have come to understand feminisms as complicated through the lens of intersectionality, chauvinism was not a singular concept but a set of fluid sometimes contradictory ideas, attitudes, and moods. Even self-declared male chauvinists had reactions sometimes surprisingly similar to their feminist adversaries. In fact, there was little agreement on who or what defined a male chauvinist pig and although he could be an asshole, he was more complex than a simple stereotype.

Chapter 5 presents the results of surveys and excavations accomplished at El Chorro de Maíta initiated in 2006. These investigations refined the dimensions of te area over which the archaeological materials were dispersed, and study of the character of domestic contexts that surround the burial zone. The investigation of these areas and of the materials previously encountered there under the direction of José M. Guarch Delmonte, indicate the existence of mixed strata of indigenous and European materials located on top of strata with only indigenous materials, as well as a chronology of occupation for the site that extended from the 13th century up to the middle of the 16th century. Located and identified was a significant quantity of ceramic fragments of European origin concentrated in and near the cemetery. However, the presence of Spanish material or their indigenous management was moderate, reflecting continued local cultural patterns during the period of interaction with the Europeans.

Mandel takes a brief reference to an anticlerical novel made by one of the characters in A Farewell to Arms and explores the historical and ideological basis for its presence in the novel. In a novel where the Priest is such an important figure, the discussion of the Catholic Church and the way that soldiers would regard religion becomes an important thematic examination. Mandel traces her exploration of this topic, the translation of this obscure novel, and her subsequent revelations, in a way that makes this chapter a study in scholarship and the excavation of an arcane reference.

For all that was historic about the presidential election of 2016, the way it boiled down to a competition between a second-wave feminist (Hillary Clinton) and an old-school misogynist (Donald Trump) may strike a familiar chord to those who remember the 1970s. As the Women’s Liberation Movement gathered strength, a new opponent rose to oppose it—the Male Chauvinist Pig. Beginning as an epithet designed to put men in their place, the label soon became a badge of honor—a brand that the resurgent Right embraced. To understand the popularity of the male chauvinist pig and how a rich playboy, who relied on racist tropes and misogynist jokes, beat an over-qualified second-wave feminist, the introduction explores humor’s relationship to power. Scholars have taken a serious look at Modern Conservatism, but they have paid far less attention to humor studies. With an intersectional lens, the intro explores how and why the male chauvinist pig, armed with a biting sense of humor, became such a popular icon.

Following its local workshops in the late 1960s, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) began to create self-help community programs. This chapter focuses on NCNW's programs in Mississippi--a pig bank for Fannie Lou Hamer's Sunflower County Freedom Farm; low-income home ownership (also known as Turnkey III); and childcare centers in Okolona, Ruleville, and Jackson. To fund these programs, the NCNW utilized financial support from public sources--such as the federal government--and private sources--such as foundations, businesses, and voluntary organizations. Drawing upon its new concept of grassroots expertise as well as the War on Poverty concept of "maximum feasible participation" of the poor, the NCNW recruited local civil rights women such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Unita Blackwell to lead these programs that provided black communities with much-needed food, housing, and childcare. The NCNW's efforts boosted Mississippi women's interest in the larger national organization.

In many settings, formal meals serve as a ritual instrument through which the social order is reproduced and reinforced, for example, by differentiated seating patterns and distributions of valued foods. When the hierarchy is put on display in this fashion, however, it is put at risk and violent contestation sometimes results. This chapter gives examples including the “Champion’s portion” of Homeric epic and the Feast of Tara in medieval Ireland. The Sublime Society of Beef Steaks provides an example of an apparent but unreal egalitarianism within the context of feasting, in which the hierarchic order is simultaneously denied and reasserted.

This chapter focuses on analogy (since all neologisms are modeled on prior knowledge), creativity, and imagination. Types of language play discussed range from puns to games like Pig Latin, spoonerisms, Homer Simpson’s -ma- infixation, and expletive insertion. The domain for all of these involves the prosodic properties of output words. In figures of speech and rhetorical devices, motivated properties of words are extended to larger units of speech. Our final examples derive from verbal art. One is the playful creation of novel words, another includes innovations in the use of stacked prepositions.

Charles Lamb’s work communicates both his frustrated wish to study classics and the Orientalist atmosphere of his employment at East India House. ‘A Dissertation upon Roast Pig’ envisions the discovery of cooking in China but—although it has correspondences with Thomas Manning’s travels—the source is Porphyry’s treatise on vegetarianism. ‘Old China’ is an ekphrastic treatment of an imaginary crockery set in the chinoiserie aesthetic, but the primary influence is Keats’s ‘Grecian Urn’. Lamb’s and Joanna Baillie’s responses to chinoiserie chart fluctuations in British opinion on China, and interrogate whether crockery was a gendered interest. Via Mark Lemon, Lamb’s writing on China has had lasting influence on narratives that arose about the Willow pattern popularized by Wedgwood and Spode. The Willow pattern imitated Chinese aesthetics, but the Willow narrative is Ovidian rather than Chinese.