Cross-Cultural Communication
Negotiating the Abject: Body and Identity in Hiromi Goto’s “Stinky Girl”
Abstract
In Japanese-Canadian writer Hiromi Goto’s short story “Stinky Girl”, the concept of the abject body underpins the stinky girl’s journey in understanding her racial identity. This essay focuses on the representations and roots of the abjection, as well as how the abject body enables resistance against racial discrimination. I contend that the stinky girl’s abject body is exemplified by her derogatory perception of herself, which is intimately entangled with animal imagery. Her experience of abjection stems both from historical racial discrimination and its lingering effects. Through a combined mental and corporeal resistance, the stinky girl not only liberates herself from abjection but also reconstructs her racial subjectivity.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Almeida, S. R. G. (2009). Strangers in the night: Hiromi Goto’s abject bodies and hopeful monsters. Contemporary Women’s Writing, 3(1), 47–63.
Anderson, E. N. (2005). Everyone eats: understanding food and culture. New York: New York University Press.
Beauregard, G. (1995/1996). Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms and the politics of writing diaspora. West Coast Line: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Criticism, 29(3), 47–62.
Burt, J. (2005). Rat. London: Reaktion Books.
Butler, J. (2003). Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge.
Chow, R. (2002). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. New York: Praeger.
Ewara, E. (2021). The psychic life of horror: abjection and racialization in Butler’s thought. In A. Halsema, et al. (Eds.), Bodies that still matter: resonances of the work of Judith Butler (pp. 31–41). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Farb, P., & Armelagos, G. (1980). Consuming passions: the anthropology of eating. New York: Washington Square Press.
Fischler, C. (1988). Food, self and identity. Social Science Information, 27(2), 275–292.
Fowler, A. (2012). Literary names: personal names in English literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goto, H. (1998). Alien texts, alien seductions: the context of colour full writing. In C. Verduyn (Ed.), Literary Pluralities (pp. 264–269). Ontario: Broadview Press.
Goto, H. (2002). Cross-cultural creatures: Hiromi Goto brings magic into everyday life (Interview with Debbie Notkin). The Women’s Review of Books, 19(10/11), 17–18.
Goto, H. (2004). Hopeful Monsters: Stories. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.
Goto, H. (n.d.). Press kit. Hiromi Goto. Retrieved July 30, 2025, from https://www.hiromigoto.com/press-kit/
Harris, L. (2008). Eating’s a part of being after all: (un)gendering foodways in the work of Sallie Tisdale, Ruth Ozeki, and Hiromi Goto [Master’s thesis. University of British Columbia.] https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0070797
Holtzman, J. D. (2006). Food and Memory. Annual Review of Anthropology, 35, 361–378.
Huber, J. (2011). Queering bodies, queering boundaries: localizing identity in and of the body in Hiromi Goto’s “The Kappa Child”. Review of International American Studies, 5(1–2), 135–163.
Kelley, N., & Trebilcock, M. (1998). The making of the mosaic: A history of Canadian immigration policy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Kittler, p.G., & Sucher, K. P. (2001). Food and culture (4th ed.). Belmont: Wadsworth.
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror (L. S. Roudiez, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.
Ku, R. J. S., Manalansan, M. F., & Mannur, A. (Eds.). (2013). Eating Asian America: a food studies reader. New York: New York University Press.
Liben, M. (2001). “Some of my best friends”: befriending the racialized fiction of Hiromi Goto. Essays on Canadian Writing, 73, 93–121.
Liu, Z. (2022). Trans-poetics in Hiromi Goto’s novels. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 57(1), 186–202.
Pearson, W. G. (2007). “Whatever that is”: Hiromi Goto’s body politic/s. Studies in Canadian Literature, 32(2), 75–96.
Stunkard, A. J. (2002). Night eating syndrome. In C. G. Fairburn & K. D. Brownell (Eds.), Eating disorders and obesity: a comprehensive handbook (pp. 183–187). New York: The Guilford Press.
Turner, B. S. (1996). The body and society: explorations in social theory. London: Sage Publications.
Worrell, F. C. (2019). Ethnic and cultural identity. In S. Hupp & J. Jewell (Eds.), The encyclopedia of child and adolescent development (pp. 1–10). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119171492.wecad455
Zarranz, L. G. (2017). Unruly corporealities: Hiromi Goto’s hopeful fictions. In L. G. Zarranz (Ed.), TransCanadian feminist fictions: new cross-border ethics (pp. 35–45). Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/13950
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
Copyright (c) 2026 Cross-Cultural Communication
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Share us to: 
Remind
We are currently accepting submissions via email only.
The registration and online submission functions have been disabled.
Please send your manuscripts to ccc@cscanada.net，or ccc@cscanada.org for consideration. We look forward to receiving your work.
Articles published in Cross-Cultural Communication are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).
CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION Editorial Office
Address: 1055 Rue Lucien-L'Allier, Unit #772, Montreal, QC H3G 3C4, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org
E-mail:caooc@hotmail.com; office@cscanada.net
Copyright © Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture 
