“Our Hunger Was Different”: Queer Cannibals, Veganism, Feminism and Ravenous (1999).
Trigger warnings: discussions of SA and rape, violence against women, cannibalism, and colonialism
Antonia Bird’s 1999 Western cannibal comedy-horror, Ravenous, is extremely gay. Robert Carlyle (F. W. Colqhoun/Colonel Ives) doesn’t shy away from the homoeroticism of his character’s cannibalistic desire, explaining in an interview that “[Ives] doesn’t just want to eat Guy Pearce, he’s going to have Guy Pearce at the same time”, and the scene in which Ives sniffs at the blood coating his fingers before putting them in his mouth, all the while making eye contact with Captain Boyd (Guy Pearce), is nothing short of pornographic. But Ravenous’ queerness is not limited to representing the transgression of homoerotic desire in a heteronormative culture through the cannibal; Ravenous destabilises the very binary upon which Western heteronormative culture depends on, embracing the queer “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances” (Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies).
Om Nom (hetero)Norm:
The cannibal has, for a long time, occupied the cultural imagination as the embodied cultural ‘Other’; from the cannibalistic cyclops, Polyphemus, and Achilles’ cannibalistic divine rage in the Iliad in antiquity, to colonial mythologies legitimising the ‘moralising’ Empire, to NBC’s Hannibal and the homoeroticism of the “murder husbands”, Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter. The cannibal provides Western culture with a monster to define itself in opposition to; everything the cannibal is – monstrous, ‘savage’ , queer – the American or Western ‘Self’ is decidedly not. The cannibal in Ravenous is defined in relation to the Wendigo of Algonquian folklore, emphasising the racialisation of the ‘Other’. Although Edward Said conceptualises the West’s relationship to the East, the Eastern ‘Other’ as “a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (Said, Orientalism) offers a parallel to the American settler’s relation to the indigenous populations. The American ‘Self’ must locate the cannibal outside of its own culture to define itself in opposition; in Ravenous, the white settlers turn to the culture of the two Native Americans at Fort Spencer to source the monster, racialising the cannibal as the Wendigo. Yet even as George (Joseph Runningfox), one of two Native Americans at Fort Spencer, draws attention to the Wendigo as the monstrous ‘Other’, he begins to disturb the separation of the ‘Self’ from the ‘Other’, observing that “White man eats the body of Jesus Christ every Sunday”. The racialised ‘Other’ becomes “surrogate and even underground self” (Said, Orientalism) for the displacement of everything the American ‘Self’ seeks to distance itself from, highlighting the whiteness at the centre of this identity; everything it is not includes a notion of racialising, thus defining whiteness as an absence of race. Race becomes a further binary in addition to the ‘Self’ against the ‘Other’ as whiteness is conceptualised as the absence of race in opposition to the racialised body. Whiteness, in other words, becomes the norm, another binary assumed by heteronormativity. Ravenous, however, commits itself to the disrupting of such binaries. Just as George calls attention to the naturalised cannibalism of white Christian culture, Colqhoun/Ives’ character further embodies the collapsing of the white ‘Self’ as antithetical to the racialised ‘Other’. As Wendigo, Colqhoun/Ives embodies the cultural ‘Other’, but also brings the racialised Wendigo ‘Other’ into direct contact with the self through his white body. This contact is furthered in the construction of the cannibal as a metaphorical representation of Manifest Destiny, of Westward expansion and settlement, and the capitalism at the heart of the American identity. As the Eucharist is made a naturalised cannibalism, the functions of a capitalist American culture are likewise represented as processes of naturalised yet transgressive consumption.
Cannibalism and veganism probably don’t come to mind as a likely pairing, but Ravenous makes a good case for cannibalism as vegan propaganda – veganism being used here as antithetical to carnism. Boyd is emasculated as he seeks to distance himself from the consumption of meat. The opening scene cuts to the title screen after Boyd vomits after being faced with a plate of meat at a military victory dinner. Where Colonel Ives embodies an exemplary American masculinity, Boyd is repeatedly characterised as a coward despite his promotion to captain after making it behind enemy lines; “You’re no hero, Boyd,” General Slauson (John Spencer) chastises, “I want you as far from my company as possible”. Boyd’s revulsion towards meat is quickly replaced by his resistance to Ives, and his cannibalistic hunger: “It’s not courage to resist me, Boyd. It’s courage to accept me”. As meat and the human body become synonymous, Ravenous exposes the fallacy of carnism; the distinction made between the bodies of animals and the bodies of humans, the differentiation between the normalised consumption of animal meat and the taboo of cannibalism, begins to break down. In Ravenous, meat is just meat, and the consumption of meat is made power: “A man eats the flesh of another, he steals his strength. He absorbs the other man’s spirit”. Boyd’s veganism underlines his distance from the heteronormative construct of masculinity predicated on power and the domination of ‘Other’ bodies. Boyd, therefore, acts as a mirror to Ives, being made ‘Other’ to the masculine ‘Self’ that Ives embodies, but again like Ives, finding identification with the American ‘Self’ in his resistance to cannibalism. Questioning Boyd on his resistance to his cannibalistic hunger, Ives mocks the sense of morality cited by Boyd, and equates the morality identified with the ‘Self’ to the cowardice distancing Boyd from this ‘Self’: “Ah, morality. The last bastion of a coward”.
Boyd and Ives are able to queer the ‘Self’ in destabilising the binary that holds the ‘Other’ as ideologically oppositional. Heteronormative culture is dependent on the organisation of bodies, producing fixed and infallible categories in discourse on gender and sexuality, but to be queer is to disrupt such a narrative. To be queer, as Kosofsky Sedgwick writes, is to resist being made “to signify monolithically” (Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies), to challenge the notion that the categories designed to impose order upon bodies are not fixed, nor rigid. In disrupting the notion of the ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ as two wholly distinct and contradictory categories of being, Boyd and Ives’ characters challenge the very organisation of Western culture that enables the production of heteronormativity.
You Are Who You Eat:
The familial unit acts as a microcosmic representation of heteronormativity, and so this too takes a queer form in Ravenous. The family of cannibals at Fort Spencer – Ives, Boyd, and Colonel Hart (Jeffrey Jones) – obscure the differentiation between the chosen family and the blood family. Ives chooses both Hart and Boyd to be “[brought] into the fold” , into his family, yet these bonds are forged in blood as they are faced with the choice to eat or to die.
It would be easy to suggest the queerness of the family at Fort Spencer lay in its androcentric organisation, and to an extent much of its queerness is in its displacement of women. The one woman at Fort Spencer, Martha (Sheila Tousey), is literally displaced from the screen in an exit both recalling and rejecting the trope of the final girl, appearing blood-soaked in the window before walking away, rejecting any involvement in the cycles of violence at Fort Spencer. But Martha is also displaced from the family emerging here. Where the heteronormative family and its (re)production is predicated on the feminine body, Ives never seems to even consider Martha as a candidate for his construction of family. The entire system of (re)producing the cannibal displaces the need for the feminine body entirely as the act of cannibalism – in Ravenous, Ives offering the ultimatum to “either famine or feast. Live or die” – brings bodies into the familial unit. But this displacement of women and feminine bodies seems to, almost paradoxically, provides a feminist critique of the heteronormative family. Ives is very conscious that the unit he is creating at Fort Spencer resembles that of the family, satirising it, even: “We won’t kill indiscriminately […] Good God… we don’t want to break up families. Of course, we’ve no wish to recruit everyone. We’ve enough mouths to feed as it is. We just need a home”. The family created by Ives seems to be wholly distinct from that of heteronormativity, but Ives’ domestic language betrays a closeness to the nuclear family. Ives, instead, creates the family at its most extreme, exposing the naturalised systems of violence predicated by the heteronormative family.
Heteronormativity necessitates, and is simultaneously necessitated by, patriarchy, with heterosexuality acting as “the traffic of women […] the use of women as exchangeable, perhaps symbolic, property for the primary purpose of cementing the bonds of men with men” (Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire). This “traffic of women” is reduced, in Ravenous, to its most simple: the traffic of bodies as meat. The bodies of women, exchanged as objects between father and husband, become the bodies consumed by Hart and Boyd, the bodies given by Ives. It’s hard to not see the undertones of sexual violence in Ives’ feeding of Hart and Boyd; the mouth, already an eroticised space, is penetrated whilst neither of the men can fully consent, with Hart waking up to Ives feeding him, and Boyd being coerced. With marital rape only being criminalised in the UK in 1991 and nationwide across the USA in 1993, within the decade of Ravenous’ production and release, the processes of naturalisation and institutionalisation of sexual violence within the family and its (re)production would not have been absent from Western collective consciousness. Ravenous produces a satire of the heteronormative family within which “the traffic of women” , the exchange of feminine bodies as commerce between men, becomes the traffic of bodies as meat, and the sexualised violence that reproduction necessitates, the symbolic rape of Hart and Boyd to generate the cannibal. The (re)production of family in Ravenous repeats the same processes of violence against women upon masculine bodies, violence extremified in the cannibal, highlighting the naturalisation of this gendered violence in heteronormative culture. Ravenous takes the patriarchal organisation, turns it on its head, and forces its audience to confront the horror of the violence against women stripped of its guise of normalcy produced by the familial institution.
To be queer is to disturb, and perhaps this is why, as queer audiences, we are so drawn to horror as a genre. Horror seeks to disturb through its destabilising of the culture it is produced within; in the West, to disturb binary constructions of gender and of the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’, and the institutions which produce and sustain such a cultural organisation. The cannibal in Ravenous is queer in a way that extends far beyond sexuality; the horror of the cannibal is located in its destabilising power, in its position as a figure in direct opposition to heteronormativity. The cannibal simultaneously embodies the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’, participating in mechanisms constituting the ‘Self’ of Western culture – violent masculinity, consumption of meat, the trading of bodies, domination of landscapes and bodies – yet at the same time representing the ‘Otherness’ that such culture insists on its distinction from. Ravenous embraces queerness as a radical political worldview, one that imagines restructured culture beyond the heteronorm and the institutions it both necessitates and depends upon. The quote from Nietzsche suggests that “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he does not become a monster” (emphasis added), but Ravenous suggests that the monster was perhaps the ‘Self’ all along.
Sources:
Ravenous (1999), dir. Antonia Bird
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985)
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (1993)
