ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the transformation of hunger into a spectacle of starvation supporting specific aesthetico-political. It takes up the notion of hunger performance as a middle-ground between the aesthetic and the political, where the fraught body communicates its condition and challenges traditional notions of deformity and monstrosity. From Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" to David Nebreda's abject anorexic art and on to David Blaine's hunger stunts, the chapter presents a series of textual, visual and performative examples which delineate types of deformities and monstrosities related to hunger as a physical condition and/or art form while underlining how the mechanics of (self-)disgust and abjection question the myth of the self-contained body. Special attention is given to Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" as a hunger narrative which forces us to think about the body as something which belongs to the unthinkably revolting while reflecting the author's more general sense of disgust with orality and sexuality.
