The Female Cannibal: Contemporary Portrayals of Feminine Rage and Hunger

Aarna Dixit

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The female body and feminine identity has been distorted and pulled apart in countless manner in contemporary media and literature. The female body is a form of mediation in itself, gazed upon, constructed, and deconstructed in many ways. There are many different portrayals of the female body and identity, sexualized and objectified in different manners. But the hungry, enraged female body is a unique portrayal in contemporary media. Recently, there has been a plethora of books about women and hunger. Books about feminist cannibals to books about women reckoning with their complicated relationship with food and pleasure. Nightbitch, A Certain Hunger, Woman Eating and Supperclub are just a few of these books that tackle themes of care based labor, female rage, cannibalism and the hunger for more. 

Nightbitch is a surrealist fiction about a new mother who starts believing she's a dog as she reckons with her new maternal role. Woman Eating is about a biracial vampire who struggles with her ‘monstrous’ identity and her family lineage. Supperclub follows a group of women and their leader as they meet to feast together and indulge in food. A Certain Hunger is the story of the serial killer Dorothy Daniels, a successful food writer who also eats men. These books are part of a larger sociocultural phenomena of the portrayal of female rage and hunger, and the dialectic between the monstrous and the maternal, the sacred and the profane. 

Where do these ideas of rage and hunger rise from?  Perhaps they may function as a metaphor for a women’s deprivation of agency, oppressive starvation and fatigue leading to this rage-filled hunger to claim space and visibility. Women have been denied their most basic rights and agency, and have been for far too long disempowered in their own bodies. Thus there's this idea of the bubbling rage and hunger growing inside the frustrated and fatigued female body. We've had enough. We're enraged. We're claiming what is ours, taking charge of all indulges and desires. According to Kate Robertson, in an article for the Atlantic, “Cannibal women in pop culture tend to reflect deep and persistent social fears about female autonomy. Freed of so many “normal” inhibitions, these cannibal women are also free to—in the parlance of female empowerment—truly become themselves”. These fears about female autonomy have all the more been augmented in recent years with the rollback of reproductive rights and justice. Women’s bodies continue to be distorted and exploited in the media. But the metaphorical figure of the cannibal provides an opportunity to subvert heteropatriarchal expectations of the female body. 

Many of these books, Nightbitch and Woman Eating in particular, reflect upon themes of bodily hunger and rage, specifically relating to the female body and its experience. The unnamed protagonist of Nightbitch reflects that “she likes the idea of being a dog, because she can bark and snarl and not have to justify it. She can run free if she wants. She can be a body and an instinct and an urge. She can be hunger and rage, thirst and fear, nothing more. She can revert to a pure throbbing state (Nightbitch)”. This innate freedom, uninhibited movie=ment and agency is something women haven’t always had, and have craved and fought for. Women have for far too long been controlled and restricted, told to behave normatively. This essence of hunger and rage arises in subversion and opposition to this normative femininity. “It was her goal to wreak havoc, to leave a mess, to wrest from her form all of the rage and sadness and insanity of these years since her son was born. She had been storing it all in the puckered dough of her thighs, the sad paunch hanging around her middle (Nightbitch)”. This visual of the female body physically storing rage is quite poignant. The female body is objected to various oppressions and abuses since it is brought into this world. The result of these oppressions and abuses are these pockets and pouches of suffering and rage within the female body. “She was instinct and anger. She knew nothing but the weight of her body and the pull of the earth against it” (Nightbitch). Nightbitch is evokes the female body as this primal entity, imbued with rage and carnal energy. The female body has been sexualized and naturalized way differently than the male. In general, the woman is associated more with the body and body politic than the man (of course this is speaking within the framework of the gender binary, but nevertheless). This idea of the primal, carnal woman is pervasive in all literature that adopts themes of female hunger and cannibalism. In, Woman Eating,  a biracial vampire reflects upon “whether I'm a monster, or whether I'm just a woman, or both” (Woman Eating). There are so many archetypes of the female in literature, but this archetype of the rage-filled, monstrous female, but through an almost empowering, favoring lens, is quite recent. 

When it comes to the female body, its relationship with food and hunger as portrayed in popular media is one interesting to explore. In Supperclub, a group of women gather regularly to feast, and nothing else. For them, “Junk food was rebellion, rebellion was femininity, femininity was junk (Supperclub).” The female body has been imposed with various standards of beauty and sex, creating an often complicated relationship between the female body and hunger, For a woman to truly indulge in hunger and desire was a form of rebellion, “because there’s nothing more terrifying than a woman who eats and fucks with abandon (supper club)”.  Supperclub continued to navigate this dialectic of eating and claiming space with abandon, loudly and proudly. “There lies something fundamentally yet delectably disgusting, some squirmy, sinewy, oozing, greasy, sticky, glutinous, mushy, fatty, chewy viscous thing that compels. The line between pleasure and revulsion can seem so very thin, if it even exists at all (supper club)”. There is a carnality present in this female hunger, this ambition towards food and desire. Too often has women’s agency and power over her own body been suppressed, built with this simple act of eating and feasting with abandon, there is a sense of reclaiming the carnal female body. “Now my eating, my bottomless, yearning hunger, was a horror. I felt monstrous, shoveling in the amount of food I wanted to, more anxious with every bite. Cooking became the buffer: an act of civility before the carnage ensued (supper club)”. This sense of yearning, of this ambitious hunger is evocative of the feminist fight and hunger for more; more rights, more agency, more visibility. The ravaging and raged female in literature is seen through lenses both monstrous and sacred. Nightbitch describes the act of feasting as “some sort of worship, the mother with head bowed, taking the foodstuffs directly into her body. There was a purity to such an act” (Nightbitch)”.  Conversely, the hunger portrayed in Nightbitch is “a hunger that filled up every space inside her until she was nearly crazed” (Nightbitch). This dialectic of the pure and the profane in the context of female hunger is quite fascinating to explore. The mother nourishes herself as the raged female ravages her feast. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of purity and profanity is quite relevant within the context of the female archetype: the virgin and the whore being the prime dialectic. Feminist has the myth of being both sacred and profane, women having the pressure to be both erotic and modest. In these senses, femininity is an experience of contradictions and double standards. A woman’s relationship with hunger, her body and rage is no different.

What makes a cannibal such an interesting figure with respect to which to explore femininity? Cannibalism evokes an idea of ultimate agency and power, utmost audacity. A cannibal indulges freely in what they want, taking claim of their deepest, darkest desires. Women have been denied the most basic rights, let alone the ability to indulge in all their ambitions and desires. As such, the metaphorical figure of the cannibal becomes sort of aligned to the identity of feminine rage and undulated power.  

These books and their metaphors of the cannibal address important discourses about the sexualized nature of the female, essentialized femininity, and how ideas of hunger and rage go against the maternal images of femininity that prevail in society. The archetype of the hungry, angry female isn’t necessarily new. Especially in the Global South, figures like the goddesses Kali and Durga are perceived as embodying female rage. But contemporary portrayals of female rage and hunger in mainstream media, specifically through this lens of cannibalism, has been more pervasive recently. Examining these portrayals of femininity allows us to reflect upon what suppressed roles of femininity and the subversion of these normative roles. What are these contemporary portrayals of femininity signifying about the shifts in how we perceive the female body and identity? How do we reconcile the sacred and the profane, especially when it comes to the feminine? The answer to these questions lies within contemporary literature with the prodigal female cannibal.