Nobody’s Meat: Cannibalism as a Symbol for Female Sexuality in Contemporary Literature

Abstract

Throughout Christian-colonial history cannibalism has embodied the basest human proclivities, recognized as “the other”. In this paper, the unleashing of women’s sexuality is depicted in three vastly different representations of cannibalism, thus illustrating the misogynistic misconception of female sexual desires. Highlighting the deep-rooted undercurrents of misogyny within a capitalistic system and how it has influenced and affected women and their relationships with sex, has, as of late, led feminist writers to explore the most daring side of female sexuality: Cannibalism. In this article I will be analysing the motif of sexual cannibalism through three feminist texts: “The Company of Wolves” from Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979), The Edible Woman (1969) by Margaret Atwood, and A Certain Hunger (2020) by Chelsea G. Summers. In this paper, I will seek to further investigate and understand how each author broaches the subject of women’s sexual desire, and cannibalism as a symbol for female sexuality