Books cannibalism Tender Is the Flesh-Eating: The Literary Cannibal as Exploitation and Desire Wen-yi Lee examines the teeth of fictional cannibalism By Wen-yi Lee | Published on November 11, 2025 “Saturn Devouring His Son” by Francisco de Goya Comment 0 Share New Share “Saturn Devouring His Son” by Francisco de Goya What’s up with all the cannibals right now? Yellowjackets just saw its third season. Timothee Chalamet (Bones and All) and Sebastian Stan (Fresh) both recently played cannibals. Monika Kim’s Asian girl serial killer horror The Eyes Are The Best Part just got picked up for adaptation by Greta Lee and there’s been a whole slew of other books about people-eaters, including Olivie Blake getting literal with Girl Dinner and Caitlin Starling serving up a particular feast to The Starving Saints.  Eating other humans is an intrinsic taboo. Think of the classic trope of serving your unwitting enemy their partner/children/family members, or in the Greek case of Tantalus, serving your enemy your own son. Cannibalism, as in Silence of the Lambs, was once used to display extremities of evil or primitive barbarism. But consider the contemporary cannibal as metaphor. My fascination with the literary cannibal and their storytelling potential is one of those topics that I pull out only with the right audience—some friends that I told about this essay merely nodded politely. But there’s a long artistic tradition of using physical appetite to symbolise emotional appetite, and this is merely the next step along. As a literary device, I think cannibalism is the perfect mechanism to explore different wants to possess a body: be it wanting to exploit, wanting to enact revenge, or wanting as loving desire.  Bleeding me dry: Eating as exploitation Before the cannibals, though, we have to talk about vampires, which have absolutely been so back. (See: Sinners, Interview with the Vampire, Nosferatu, Dracula and Carmilla retellings, recent New York Times bestsellers Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, Immortal Dark, This Ravenous Fate,  Blood Moon, or Bride, just as a sampling…) Vampires are cannibals’ precursors, in a way. They draw on a lot of the same imagery–a puncturing of flesh with teeth, the drawing out of the vital insides, the simultaneous viscera and intimacy. They’ve also long been used in media as symbols of leeching from another. Historically, they might represent fears of the Other (see: the Eastern European vampire lurking amongst the civilities of Victorian England). As a class, they could represent the gluttonous and immortal wealthy. They’re also often stand-ins or literalizations for destructive relationships (see: P.H. Lee’s Locus-nominated short story “The V*mpire”, or the titular song by Olivia Rodrigo).  Cannibalism just takes it a step further. Instead of merely draining their lover, the cannibal—as in Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter album—kills and eats her, his freezer bride. Cain’s cannibalism is almost folkloric, a Southern gothic matched in tone if not location by the dark fairytale of Lucy Rose’s The Lamb, in which a little girl in the isolated English mountains helps her mother lure “strays” into their cabin and eat them. It’s an abusive story: about a mother who consumes because she feels entitled to possess, a narcissism that includes the daughter she sees as an extension of herself, upon whom she’s imposed her own appetite—and upon whom she will inflict violence when the girl starts rejecting her. For the love of her mother, this Gretel has been taught to return to the oven again and again.  On the flipside there’s Kerstin Hall’s Star Eater, where daughter witches consume their dead mothers in order to inherit their power. Possession, codependency, and what one gives the other are common conflicts in toxic maternal stories; to grow in a womb is to literally be made within and from pieces of the mother. It’s only a step further to reunite the two via the digestive track. To replace the umbilical cord with intestine. But in both these coming-of-ages, the protagonists must grapple with the forming of their own desires, and the social consequences when these desires aren’t the same as the ones they were raised with.  On a broader scale, human consumption is a great vehicle to explore exploitation, consumerism, and the real systems of inequality that feed off some in service of others. Hozier’s “Eat Your Young”, which implores “Puttin’ food on the table, sellin’ bombs and guns/It’s quicker and easier to eat your young”, is allegedly a reference to Jonathan Swift’s 1729 satirical essay A Modest Proposal, suggesting that the Irish poor could ease their burdens by selling their children as food to the wealthy, particularly colonial Britain. Meanwhile, Agustina Bazterrica’s terribly unflinching Tender is the Flesh depicts a dystopia where plague has killed off animals and turned society towards alternative forms of meat, starting, unsurprisingly, with the most vulnerable. “In some countries,” the narrator notes, “immigrants began to disappear en masse. Immigrants, the marginalized, the poor”. Even after human meat becomes a regulated industry, with people bred specifically for consumption, gradients of violence remain: White skins are prized more than darker ones. Women’s bodies exist not just as flesh, but as vessels to produce more flesh. Limbs are optional. But at the same time, there are different classes of women, too; see the head of the experimentation lab nicknamed Doctor Mengele, or the heiress turned female butcher entrepreneur. The fact that a woman ran the shop put everyone at ease, the narrator says. She also has the money to ensure she’s not eaten in turn when she dies. In Star Eater it’s men who’ve been infected by plague, and reproduction occurs via coercive conception with magically enslaved male convicts. Just as the bodily desires for food and sex are considered base and intertwined (Freudian theory calls this collective life drive Eros, as in, the root of erotic—more on that later), so are these commentaries about how a society that controls one controls the other.  A lot of violence stems from objectification: reducing the other to something separate from and lower than yourself. A biological food chain in which consumption is not only justified but natural. In The Lamb there is mother and daughter, and there are strays. In Tender is the Flesh, there are humans and there are products, heads, merchandise. (“Another word that obscures the world”, admits the narrator, who is troubled but complicit in the slaughterhouse all the same, for the sake of earning a living.) These stories use cannibalism as an exaggerated mirror of society’s existing inequality and selfish violence: how easily people can justify destroying others for the quest of their own survival, and how much these fragile systems can be disrupted simply by someone challenging the division between diner and meal. “Since the world began,” Tender posits, “we’ve been eating each other.” As readers we have to ask: whose ugly appetites should we actually be worried about? And perhaps, is there a point where they should be worried in return?  Eat the rich: Devouring as revenge Said Rousseau for the French Revolution: “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich”. One of the most classic cannibal stories, in fact, is ultimately about class revenge: Sweeney Todd, despite his rather problematic sins of murdering his barber clients and turning them into meat pies, turns out to be the story’s tragic antihero in the slums of Victorian England, victim of a wealthy judge who abused the law in order to exile Sweeney, rape his wife, and then claim his daughter. No one quips like Sondheim: “How gratifying for once to know/that those above will serve those down below!”  Or take, perhaps, august clarke’s upcoming The Felicity Complex, in which six women lab-grown to serve billionaires in a luxury fallout shelter rebel against their programming and eat their one-percenter guests instead. There’s a whole separate essay on the trope of the attendant female cyborg, an entanglement of femininity, disembodiment, and subservience that extends to why all your helpful robot assistants are coded female. (Hey, Siri. Hey, Alexa.) For now, we can focus on the fact that whittled down to its bones, eating is about survival, and those who glut while others starve deserve, perhaps, to be in for a shock when they realize the concierge has teeth, too.  Cannibalism media has even managed to lure Tony Leung: he’s in the 2004 Hong Kong horror film Dumplings, in which an aging female starlet begins consuming dumplings containing fetuses in order to retain her beauty—and thus the love of her cheating and abusive husband (Leung), who has his own appetite for younger women. Exploring the objectification of women, sexual violence, and possibly even wider cultural anxieties surrounding pregnancy (the film highlights abortion being illegal in Hong Kong at the time), it similarly uses the grotesqueness of cannibalism as a reflection for other marginalized, often gendered, bodies. And cannibalism, ultimately, is so much about the body. Girl dinner: On the female cannibal and repressed desire On the topic of dehumanization, controlling bodies, and flipping the script, there’s a ten-dollar word I love pulling out: carnophallagocentrism. Carno as in carnivory; phalla as in phallic; centrism as in something that orders everything around it. It’s a theory developed by Jacques Derrida linking human eating of animals to patriarchal ordering of people, specifically the way both bodies are objectified and thus more easily consumed. (For the more contemporary manifesto, see Carol J. Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory.) I was introduced to the concept while studying Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, in which a Korean woman starts refusing to eat meat, to the increasing abuse of her husband and his family.  The Vegetarian isn’t a cannibal book (it just sounds like it should be) but it illustrates a particular relationship to meat and gender. The problem wasn’t that she wasn’t eating; it was that she wasn’t eating the way they wanted her to. Ultimately it’s about the behaviour society expects, and abuse as the expected consequence for straying from it. The personal desires of wives and mothers are so often suppressed in favour of those they’re expected to serve. Hunger, literal and metaphorical, is demonized. Our bodies are often sites of violence inflicted upon ourselves—all my teen girl friends and I flirted with eating disorders. I have a friend who, years later, can still ballpark the calories of a dish just by looking at it. You never think about something as much as when you hate it. There’s something about becoming obsessed with the thing you’re holding yourself back from.  Enter the female cannibal. Indulger of all forbidden desires, sometimes the female cannibal skips the tortured moral grappling. She is a satirical wish fulfilment taken to an extreme, reversing the experience of who typically gets consumed, and who’s allowed to consume with abandon (i.e. not women). The literal man eater trope can just be fun: see Chelsea G Summers’ A Certain Hunger, where an acclaimed and unabashedly sexual female food critic starts indulging more of her fleshy appetites, or Olivie Blake’s aforementioned Girl Dinner, which grapples with the performance of womanhood through an exclusive sorority that has a secret to its sisters’ gleaming perfection.  You’re killing people? Amanda Seyfried’s Needy asks in Jennifer’s Body.  No, Jennifer replies, I’m killing boys. But other times, the female cannibal is grappling with this increasingly undeniable desire the same way she is with all her other suppressed urges, and all her other obligations to be a nice girl for society; this cannibal story is about anger, suffocated feelings, and cathartic outburst. Monika Kim’s The Eyes are the Best Part, in which a Korean American girl entering college develops a taste for blue eyes—specifically, those of her mother’s creepy white boyfriend—simmers with rage about misogyny and the fetishization of Asian women. Catherine Dang’s What Hunger, about a Vietnamese American girl who begins craving human meat after being assaulted at a party, gives body to the abstract monster that is haunting trauma, both from the assault and from her parents’ history with the Vietnam War.   For obvious reasons, I’m personally invested in Asian daughter cannibal stories. But it’s interesting in general to think about intersectional cannibal stories and the different ways the trope can be used to dissect cultures around propriety, desire, consumption, and repression. The monstrous feminine, ultimately is about the vicious freedom in being unshackled from prettiness and propriety.  Admittedly, I tend to find male cannibals less subversive, and less interesting. But admittedly, issues of restrictive eating and body dysmorphia under the male gaze don’t only affect women. Luke Dumas’ upcoming novel Nothing Tastes As Good follows an obese gay man who starts a trial drug for drastic weight loss and finally turns his life around, gaining the approval of his family and getting a boyfriend, even as he starts to have cannibalistic cravings. A theme here, I suppose, is grappling with your body in relation to others’ harmful desire, and what it feels like to seemingly only have worth as good meat.      Eating is ultimately about power: who gets to take and who is being taken from, and sometimes the dehumanisation of certain bodies and certain hungers. But sometimes, that ultimate giving is consensual… I just want to taste you: Eating as eroticism and connection Back to Eros: the language of cannibalism overlaps heavily with the language of eroticism. Savoring the body. Merging two into one. Taking the best parts of someone else into yourself. Love being all-consuming. Want being all-consuming. If consumption is about power, the surrendering of one’s self for the primal need of another is a jackpot for sensuality. The Catholics kind of had it right with transubstantiation—it’s quite the religious act, making someone’s flesh symbolic of their essence and craving it so much that you want it, well, inside of you.  (Double entendres abound. “I dipped these fingers inside her skull, and for the first time something filled the emptiness inside me,” says The Lamb’s Mama to her female lover, about the first woman she ate; her lover whispers back about the thigh she’ll have for dinner.) (Or, as Preacher Boy says in Sinners: I just want to taste you.) When has forbidden fruit not been alluring? This is a metaphor intrinsically drawing on taboo and secrecy, so it packs an extra punch when entwined with a queer story. (As in The Lamb, Yellowjackets, or Monstrilio, mentioned below.) At the core of both cannibalism and homoeroticism is also the base desire to partake in those just like you. It’s the overlapping thematic playground of literary fiction-writing dreams.  The yearning doesn’t always have to be horny. A metaphor for eating allows a metaphor for starvation. So many of these cannibals are lonely, terrible creatures—Tender’s Marcos roams an abandoned zoo after the death of his son, The Lamb’s women are alone in the woods and can never satiate their hunger–and perhaps sublimated flesh is the closest approximation they can get to the connections they desperately yearn for, deep down. You are, after all, what you eat. Hannibal (2013) blends the grotesque and the ecstatic from the onset: Hannibal Lecter’s serial-killer crime scenes are intricate tableaus of body parts entwined with nature, and as a chef, he prepares his human meat with artisanal delicacy. It’s an easy tonal step from there into his charged relationship with FBI profiler Will Graham, who must grapple with realizing that he’s more like Hannibal than he thinks. The sense of taboo is triplefold: Will might be drawn to a man, Will might be drawn to a cannibal, Will might be drawn to a serial killer. Yet they’re each other’s only equals, and cannot exist without the other. In Jennifer’s Body, meanwhile, the high school boys getting eaten are merely tangential to Jennifer’s actual emotional core: her intense friendship with Needy (at some point they kiss, and then Jennifer tells Needy she goes both ways before attempting to eat her, too).  And then there’s the actually religious, but significantly unorthodox, minor cult that is Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series, in which a key part of the magical bond between necromancer and their sworn-sword involves consuming a part of the cavalier (and in which, at some point, there is a feeding of soup containing unethically sourced bone marrow). It’s a series where grief, love, and power all are deeply embedded in exchanges and vesselages of the physical body. Insert joke about lesbian entanglement and codependency here. My favourite line to pull out in the spiritual coding of cannibalism is, in fact, biblical: This is my body, broken for you, said Jesus at the First Communion shortly before crucifixion, eat this in remembrance of me.  In that way, cannibalism also functions as a demonstration of memory: honoring and taking a piece of someone so you can always carry them with you. In Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrilio, this fixation comes from overwhelming grief. Here, a mother carves a piece of lung from her deceased eleven-year-old son, and nurtures it until it becomes a new creature. In Choi Jin-young’s Hunger, meanwhile, a woman consumes her lover’s corpse after finding him murdered, unravelling a story that’s also about the deadliness of capitalism and class inequality–and in which retaining your lover by any means necessary feels like an act of subversive agency.  This version of the metaphor desires intimacy so pervasive and devotion so desperate that no external closeness is enough. It resonates, perhaps, with anyone who’s ever mused about how far they might go for connection–and who wants someone to go that far to keep them. On cannibals for the modern age The world has felt increasingly disembodied in recent years. So much of our relationships with other people—and our sense of self—are mediated online; via the internet, we are exposed to a brain-breaking surplus of human beings that we simultaneously cannot touch or interact with in a real way. Our ideas of sexuality and intimacy have been slowly reconfigured.  Cannibalism forces story to grapple with humanity in its rawest, most vulnerable form, and so I find its metaphor almost relieving—a return to fundamentals, primal and physical. Amidst overconsumption of increasingly flimsy and unsatisfying objects, maybe we crave to sink our teeth into something dense and real. Governed by fleeting, often unkind, and often lonely digital worlds, maybe we crave visceral intimacy.  And overwhelmed by the world without being able to pinpoint exactly why, maybe we’re relieved by picturing the invisible monster finally taking clear form: we feel consumed just trying to stay alive, we feel like we have become the product to be exploited; here, you’re not crazy—here is the thing eating you.[end-mark] Buy the Book When They Burned the Butterfly Wen-yi-Lee Buy Book When They Burned the Butterfly Wen-yi-Lee Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The post Tender Is the Flesh-Eating: The Literary Cannibal as Exploitation and Desire appeared first on Reactor.