Cannibal Appetites

Cannibal Appetites is the fifth seminar of "Eating Well in Women's Creative Arts Bodies, Politics, Ecologies", a series of eight online seminars that together explore eating disorders, consumption and patriarchy, food cultures and placemaking, cannibalism, ecological crisis, multispecies worlds, and the politics of meat-eating. See our website for further details.

Date: Wednesday, 10 March, 5:00-6:30 PM GMT/ 4:00-5:30 PM CET
Location: Online

Speakers, Abstracts & Bio:

Emma Flynn, University of Glasgow: "'I watch them all devour my demon and I join in': Sexual Violence, the Victim Cannibal and #MeToo"

Abstract: Peach is a vegetarian. She is made of ‘orange fuzz and flesh’, her blood ‘sugar-syrup-tasting juice’; her boyfriend, Green, tastes of twigs with a mouth ‘smooth like sanded wood’. Peach is raped by a stranger while walking home – Peach (2018) by Emma Glass opens in the aftermath. Peach discovers that her rapist is Lincoln, a greasy and phallic ‘demon’ who torments her with oil-soaked “love” letters and attacks on her family and friends. She takes revenge: after killing him, she moulds his flesh into sausages to be barbecued and voraciously enjoyed at a party.

Consumption, particularly that of meat and flesh, has a storied relationship to gender and violence in literature and in cultural production more broadly. The tale of Philomela echoes in Peach (although, in the Ovidian rendering it is the rapist Tereus who is punished by being tricked into eating his son); Richard Hilliard (1990) argues that the ritual sacrifice of Clarissa in Samuel Richardson’s early rape novel is dependent on a logic of cannibalism. For Louise Flockhart (2019), representations of cannibalism frequently offer a critique of patriarchy and resistance to it while illustrating its limited ability to engender structural change. Peach offers a way in to exploring the relationship between sexual violence and cannibalism in cultural production—I argue that these representations cannot be abstracted from the cultural and chronological context, from the conjuncture, in which they emerge.

I therefore examine not only the textual representations of rape and cannibalism in Peach, but the context in which these representations take place. How are victimhood and perpetration made legible through gastronomic metaphor? What configurations does a victim-cannibal take on in the #MeToo moment? What does eating one’s rapist suggest about the futility of justice, criminal and social, in the long 2010s?

Biography: Coming Soon

Poulomi Choudhury, University College Dublin: Coming Soon

Abstract: Coming Soon

Biography: Coming Soon

Organisers
This seminar series is organised by Phoebe Chetwynd (CY Cergy Paris Université) and Poulomi Choudhury (University College Dublin), with thanks to Héritages: culture/s, patrimoine/s, création/s.

Cover image by Alexander Krivitskiy on Unsplash, free to use under the Unsplash License.