i love you so much i could eat you (an essay on cannibalism)
...weird girls assemble!
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Media and literature are increasingly captivated by cannibalism, but what does it signify? Often interpreted as the ultimate metaphor for love by fans, cannibalism can represent themes of class conflict, bodily autonomy, revenge, and even queerness.
Cannibalism appears in literature as far back as Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, where a character kills his enemy's sons, bakes them into a pie, and feeds it to their mother. According to GlutenbergBible, in many performances of the play, the mother continues eating the pie even after learning what it is, "in order to try to protect them, she eats them to return them to the safety of her body".1 Cannibalism has been used in stories and in real life as a funerary ritual to honour life and represent its never-ending cycle.
Mentions and acts of cannibalism in media are becoming increasingly female. Chelsea G. Summers, author of A Certain Hunger, explains that in her novel and in cult classics like Jennifer's Body or Yellowjackets, the act of consumption isn’t simply about sexual desire or desperation. According to Summers, "so much about femininity centres on consumption […] what we can eat, how much we can eat, how to present yourself as appealing, and how those questions are inextricably intertwined".2 Cannibalism is used to show women reclaiming the body and challenging societal expectations. As Summers notes, "horror belongs to women because we understand, on a gut-punch level, how it feels to be viewed as a monster […] as well as how it feels to be reduced to body parts".3
While cannibalism can represent reclaiming power or coping with grief, it can also simply be a method of murder and a violation of boundaries. Cannibalism can signify "the other" in stories. Lola Sebastian examined how new media can highlight the political and colonial roots of cannibalism, beginning with Christopher Columbus' false accusations of Indigenous people eating one another, which was used to dehumanise people of colour. According to Vincent Woodward’s The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture, it was actually Europeans and white Americans who were doing the eating.
Dr. Nicola Welsh Burke says, "What is a greater expression of love than eating someone else or wanting to consume and have that person in a way that no one else can have?"4 Dr. Burke explores the intersection of food, eating, and sexuality, discussing the metaphorical use of cannibalism in literature and the societal taboos and fascinations with the concept. The conversation touches upon various themes such as erotic vampirism, werewolf lore, and incorrect eating and how these elements explore deeper human desires and fears.
There's a strong association between literal and metaphorical consumption, and the language around cannibalism and consumption can enhance depictions of sex and sexuality. Much of the language of sex is caught up with the language of food. There is the idea of absorbing or incorporating within. What is more romantic than consuming someone, so they'll be with you forever?
There's the permanency of the two becoming one, and a lot of it has to do with negotiating the internal and external. With eating and incorporation, what are you allowing yourself to consume? There's the deviance of letting something unacceptable in or the thrill/rebelliousness of consuming something not traditional, whether through a deviant sex act or through incorrect eating. Cannibalism is obviously very incorrect eating morally and legally.
Vampirism also raises the question of where to start classifying something as cannibalistic. It is the consumption of another person's body fluids, but is this an eroticised sex act or a cannibalistic act? Vampirism is a way that one can explore consumption, incorporation, and closeness in a way that's renewable.
Cannibalism has existed within Western society as well. In ancient Egypt, people in the Victorian era would find mummies and make them into medicine and eat them. Endo-cannibalism is cannibalism within your own community that can be ritualistic or part of funerary rites, and it involves someone that you know, someone close, someone important to you. Western society often uses cannibalism as a shorthand for a lack of civility or to demonise the other.
According to Dr. Nicola Welsh-Burke, erotic cannibalism had a bit of a moment on TikTok a while ago.5 People were discovering it as a romantic idea. Erotic cannibalism doesn't have to be literally cutting someone's limb off and eating it; it can be vampire-based. Thinking of romantic narratives, there's the exposure and intimacy of these vulnerable places. There's the consent to be incorporated, but there's also a desire to consume. Much of figurative language in sexual acts sounds very much like cannibalism, like tasting or enveloping another's body part in a mouth or an orifice of some kind.
There has frequently been descriptions or representations of food, acts of eating, and preparation as a placeholder or replacement for sex acts and sex scenes. Incorrect eating is tied in with an incorrect expression of sexuality. The best way to be able to explore your sexuality in these novels is to become a werewolf or a cannibal because then you're allowed to get a bit weird with it.
Cannibalism has become an increasingly popular metaphor used by film and TV to represent love. Jonathan Lisco, one of the Yellowjackets writers, posits that “the eating of a person is the ultimate way to dignify that person and keep her with you forever, while at the same time destroy her and dominate her”.6 This gives some insight into the love/hate dynamic and the ways in which cannibalism can become an act of love. In Bones and All, consumption portrays love between two young cannibals. Lee demands that Maren feed on his flesh as he dies, insisting “it’s beautiful, it’s the easiest thing, Maren, love – just love me and eat”. By physically consuming Lee, Maren is embracing him wholly and accepting all of him, bones and all. Despite the violence, cannibalism becomes an extended metaphor for love and acceptance between two people who have been pushed to the margins of society.
Cannibalism is such a taboo of the civilized world that it becomes “a great language for expressing how it feels when your completely natural way of being intimate [as a member of the LGBTQ+ community] is judged as morally violent and socially destructive".7 In Hannibal, Hannibal's capacity to love runs parallel to his need for violence. Hannibal’s queer love for Will affords humanity to a villain whose queerness has previously been used to emphasise his monstrosity.
Cannibalism can portray an intimate and uncomfortable look at love while illustrating the idea of ‘the other’ to tell stories about marginalised groups of people. Cannibalism and consumption can viscerally depict the agony of loving someone and the torment of being consumed by them while wanting so desperately to be consumed.
Lee and Maren in "Bones and All" want to be consumed and devour one another so desperately that it torments them. According to Mary Wild, Freudian psychoanalyst, cannibalism is ‘as a longing for intimacy, a longing for psychological or emotional closeness, that is actually taking the form of a physical reunion or keeping that person as close to you as possible.’8
The main cannibals in 21st-century media tend to be women, and there is an erotic undertone in all of these fictional portrayals. Female pleasure is still a deeply taboo topic to explore, so when we see the Female Cannibal on screen, we are excited as she is having her desires met; she wants to eat, consequences be damned, she finds pleasure, satisfaction, fulfillment and any other synonym you can think of by devouring human flesh.
Just as a cannibal consumes flesh, Shauna in Yellowjackets wants to consume everything about Jackie—her thoughts, her emotions, and her sense of self. Shauna wants to consume and be consumed in the most literal way possible; she would have gladly let Jackie take a bite out of her, even if it’s never explicitly said. Maybe by eating Jackie, Shauna felt she was able to hold onto Jackie together, a savage marriage ceremony of sorts, where instead of intermingling blood or fasting hands, they consumed flesh instead – that way, Jackie would be a part of her forever.
Cannibalism is not about partaking in cannibalism, but rather relating to the innately primary desire for an unrestrained, all-consuming love. The Cannibal is divorced entirely from supernatural elements, making it the most human and horrifying monster. It’s unruly and unsavoury, repulsive yet compelling, beautiful and horrific in equal measure. Society has a deep curiosity about the act itself.
The idea of cannibalism as a metaphor of love has moved forward through literature in diverse ways. Popular music artists such as Mitski and Ethel Cain relate their lyrics to the idea of cannibalism. There are also examples of cannibalism in television and film, making it apparent that this expression of morbid devotion carries forward in the emotions of common day people just as closely as it was held to people in the past.
The discourse of cannibalism became a defining feature of the colonial experience in the New World, especially in the Pacific. The representation of the cannibal as the cultural "other" was soon to be a theme for a wide array of studies. The image of the cannibal is said to have had a tendency to overrun its own borders until nothing coherent, nothing literal, is left either of the behavior, or the flesh that is its nominal object.
Even among sceptics, cannibalism is acknowledged in several forms. The current surge of interest in cannibalism has also fed salacious newspaper and television reports of cannibalism as psychopathology, aberrant behavior considered to be an indicator of severe personality disorder or psychosis. Cannibalism, similar to incest, aggression, the nuclear family, and other phenomena of universal human import, appears to be a concept on which to exercise certain theoretical programs. As indicated earlier, the topic of cannibalism has recently provided lifeblood for postcolonial and cultural studies.
Setting aside the racist and at times gendered inflection of the language, cannibalism in Western eyes is viewed as a transgressive form of consumption. Mele Pesti asks if cannibalism can be seen as an act of love, and which is more barbaric - cannibalism or war? Pesti writes, "ritual cannibalism or anthropophagy is seen as a metaphor for cultural exchange: they were fugitives from a civilization we are eating, because we are strong and vindictive".9 It should be noted that anthropophagy is not always aggressive.
The Eaten Heart is a narrative motif that appears repeatedly in medieval French literature. It describes a love story with a morbid end where a jealous husband takes revenge on his adulterous wife by killing her lover, having his heart and occasionally other body parts cooked and feeding it to her. The tale also glorifies erotic love, through the sacrifice of the lovers, and thus the message of the tale seems ambiguous. From sexual communion to alimentary ingestion, cannibalism in the context of erotic love might teach us something about how to relate to the other as no different from the self.
Simon Gaunt’s psychoanalytic reading of the tale underlines how the lover “wants to be devoured since incorporation is the ultimate sign of love, while she proves that she loves him enough to eat him”.10 Desire thus finds an ethical solution and resolution in the tale, one that is only possible, however, in the world of the fictionalised life of the male poet. In classical narratives that include acts of anthropophagy, both characters pay for their crime by unwittingly eating something that belongs to them or is the same as them, their progeny.
The cannibalistic act, as a metaphor for reading, encourages the reader to imagine her desire fulfilled, while the poet, who offers himself to her, also reads her, reads her desire, amplified by the twelve female protagonists of the tale who all lament, writing their own lai of satisfied desire and loss.
As a metaphor for love, the act of cannibalism gives voice to the wordless acts of physical love and intimate exchange that are difficult if not impossible to describe, and thus articulates the possibility of unity between two desiring subjects.
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these are all good points but sometimes I wonder if the rise of the interest in cannibalism isn't a sign that audiences have kind of grown too bored of more conventional stories because of how much media is available and long for something gruesome and shocking to evoke any kind of feeling in their numb hearts (or maybe im catastrophoizing idkk)
reading this feels like biting into a forbidden apple—sweet, dark, and thrilling. Every word drips with a weird tenderness, like love gnashing its teeth in the moonlight. I'm hooked.