"Tai, you ate her face"
Girls Gone Wild — the Yellowjackets edition
Editors’ note: Our MEAT issue is here. Like a well-cooked slab of animal flesh, it’s simultaneously tender, juicy, enjoyable (potentially in the case of meat, hopefully in the case of our magazine), confronting, and achingly complex. We have stories, podcasts, and poetry coming on cannibalism, queer Black barbecuing, Indigenous Zambian connections to animals, a historical view of the meat-masculinity nexus, the future of alternative proteins, and much, much more.
Our pilot episode, so to speak, coincidentally opens with a scene from the pilot episode of Yellowjackets, a thriller television series where members of a girls’ soccer team find themselves stranded deep in a Canadian forest. That they consume each other before the wilderness consumes them speaks to the gendered dynamics and expectations related to consumption — who we consume, why, and how — and who these paradigms might serve.
With MEAT, and as always, we’re striving to bring you a blend of the personal, the cultural, and the political. Like MILK, this issue reminds us that the brackish waters in which these forces intersect are where potent new perspectives generate, and we ask that you come into MEAT with an open mind. Or, as writer Sadie Barker notes below on engaging with Yellowjackets, “To access this world, viewers, too, must cross a threshold, enter the wilderness, and be open to possibility.” See you there.
By Sadie Barker | Premium subscribers have access to an audio reading of this piece on our podcast.
Warning: Contains spoilers for Season 1 and 2 of Yellowjackets.
In “Edible Complex”, the seventh episode of season two of Showtime’s Yellowjackets, the girls sit down to an unexpected feast. Featuring candles, grapes, urns, togas, and wreaths, the scene — recalling, perhaps, Giovanni Bellini and Titian’s “Feast of the Gods” or a Greco-Roman bacchanalia — evokes the bounty of the harvest. It is a rare moment of abundance in a show about scarcity. The series depicts a girls' soccer team who, when their plane crashes in the Ontario wilderness, must find a way to survive the relentless winter and human-hungry wolves while they await rescue.
The scene, though, should be taken with a grain of salt. The interspersed flashes of an alternate reality, one far darker and more violent, suggest what any regular consumer of Yellowjackets already knows: the feast is riddled with subtext, and the table holds not a sumptuous meal but something grisly. The girls’ team captain, Jackie — who froze in the wilderness — is now roasted on a spit, being devoured by her suburban teenage friends.
Yellowjackets had hinted at cannibalism from its initial episode. In its 90-second opening scene, a girl runs through the snow barefoot, pursued by something. She falls into a deep trap, its base filled with sticks. She dies there. Her hunter appears to peer over the ledge, taking an unexpected form: small, anonymously covered in animal skins, and sporting Converse sneakers. It’s an unusual set of circumstances: two girls in the woods, too young to be there alone, one hunting the other. So unusual, in fact, we might assume they were once acquaintances, or perhaps, friends. It’s a relationship, we might also infer, that has ended abruptly, with one adopting a more ruthlessly individualistic approach to survival than the other. The moral schism grows as we watch the hunter drag the hunted from the hole, hang her from a tree, and then serve her fresh meat ceremonially around a fire.
For the entire first season, the show failed to return to this opening scene. Cannibalism is a difficult subject — one might be excused for avoiding it. Yet, the pilot had instilled an expectation in viewers that wouldn’t relent, and by the end of Season 1, Reddit commentators were getting hangry.
“I hope we get some actual cannibalism in Season 2!” BigL54 exclaims.
Bellsbeach counters: “Any foreshadowing of cannibalism was a red herring… Just got people to tune in”.
Bellsbeach may have been onto something: a cannibalistic horizon captivates, and Yellowjackets’ pilot seems to know this. But cannibalism in Yellowjackets is not just a red herring, nor a provocative hook. Rather, it’s an encompassing theme. Throughout the episodes, the girls are each plagued by impulses — to butcher and eat animals, to be ruthless, to self-sabotage and spiral, to be assertive and controlling, to be violent, and to, at times, be deeply selfish — impulses that defy expectations of girlhood and later, womanhood. In this way, taboo seemingly accompanies the show’s wider feminist exploration. Sometimes referred to as the “darkness” the “wilderness” or just “it”, it’s an incessant pull that compels the girls to misbehave, to refuse, to be impure and unlikeable. All the while, the spectre of cannibalism — as “one of the strongest taboos”, if not the “ultimate taboo” — looms.
As Stephanie Rutherford notes, cannibalism is often used as “a shorthand for monstrousness”. But Yellowjacket’s pilot, in introducing its characters through this shorthand, seems to ask viewers to withhold judgment: To access this world, viewers, too, must cross a threshold, enter the wilderness, and be open to possibility. Nested within the show’s clear allegiance to the tropes of horror — the blood, grit, and grime of a ruthless quest for survival — is the show’s reframing of cannibalism as not a horrific endpoint but an ambivalent entry point. It’s a structure that asks its viewers: What if, in this world, the politics of consumption are not quietly subtextual but the explicit terms of human (and all) relationships? When we proceed with the understanding that all relations are power-laden, what then does the world look like, and how do we ethically move through it?
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Cannibalism and its long legacy as a taboo in Western thought, is responsible, in part, for the buzz that the pilot of Yellowjackets ignited. Taboo is a cultural phenomenon that often tells us less about the abject thing or taboo itself and more about the systems of governance that render it so. Take Kim Scott’s novel, Taboo — its exploration of crime- and sex-related taboos reveals that the ultimate taboo is, in fact, speaking truths about Australia’s ongoing colonial history. Taboo is marked by rejection from the governing norms of the every day and yet is intimately interwoven with them. Anticolonial, critical race, Indigenous, and feminist thinkers have consistently shown us the real, material, imaginative, and storied forms of governance upholding the so-called West, and the ways that heterosexist, racist, anthropocentric, and capitalist logics form its scaffolding. Which is to say: if cannibalism appears at the grotesque fringe of Western storytelling, it is no coincidence.
Western storytelling has long been married to expansion, and colonialism has long relied on the construction of monstrous “Others.” Gananath Obeyesekere notes that Western writers’ tendency to exaggerate cannibalism during colonial expansion reflected their investment in acquiring land and resources. Colonizers who arrived in South America, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific assumed that most of the peoples they encountered engaged in the practice, and their writings institutionalized these assumptions. Take Caliban, the Native Islander in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. His name evokes the practice of same-species flesh-eating, which follows The Tempest’s ongoing representation of Caliban as immoral and irredeemable. And yet, as Obeyesekere’s framework reminds us, Caliban stood on the threshold of something desired: land. That The Tempest was written during Britain’s conquest of the so-called New World, suggests Caliban’s implied cannibalism is maybe less about Caliban and more about The Tempest’s ideological stake in the geopolitical encroachments underway.
Consider also the colonial history of Yellowjacket’s particular setting. Based on the plane crash — which we know occurred somewhere in northern Ontario — the girls are likely stranded in Anishinaabe, Cree, or Métis territory. Cannibalism’s complex political legacy haunts this space. It stalks one of the show’s main characters in particular: the wolf. Wolves are a fearful presence in the show, at one point ravaging one of the girls; however, the animal bears its own history of subjugation. As Rutherford outlines, wolves’ tendencies to occasionally cannibalize their kin “catapult[ed] them to a whole new level of degradation and irredeemability” in the eyes of early settlers. Yet, this perception was not without political subtext: Wolves were configured as “biopolitical threats to the emergence of the nation white settlers were attempting to make” and as such, the “only response to their brazen presence on the landscape was annihilation”. Like Caliban, the wolf is strategically configured against the consumption of its own kin’s flesh; in this way, “monstrosity” is utilized within colonial storytelling to legitimize acquisition and control.
Alongside being a specific phenomenon, cannibalism then presents a framework by which to consider power relations generally. It reflects the power-laden politics of colonial, racial, and geopolitical consumption — the ways regions take over regions, communities take over communities, and bodies take over bodies. These politics of consumption illuminate the potential relevance of cannibalism to anticolonial projects, and also how feminism and cannibalism might find each other as accomplices, or at least acquaintances, too.
It is perhaps an appreciation for the dynamics of consumption that motivated the “Edible Complex” episode’s opting for metaphor. After all, people, usually women, are objectified as “pieces of meat,” “spoiled” or “used goods”; sexual encounters are relaid as having “had (someone)”. The choice to partially sub-in Jackie’s corpse for a Greco-Roman banquet, to partially trade in the scene’s horror for sumptuous, somewhat erotic, revelry, seems to manufacture awareness of the fact that images are never full. While the show has been well-received as a feminist claim to survival horror and its generic images, part of that claim rests on the show’s interrogation of the power of the image itself, and how easily one can be consumed and objectified by it. There is something strikingly agential about the girls finding joy and arousal in a scene that should ostensibly be grim, shameful, and depraved. That the girls, in this alternate reality of bacchanal festivity, seem to like eating their friend — so much so that the morning after, one of the girls reminds her now-amnesiac friend: “Tai, you ate her face” — is a strong rebuttal to the terms of monstrosity they are subjected to. The scene, as it inverts the expectations of viewers, encourages us to remember that Jackie wasn’t killed. She died — under socially fraught circumstances, yes, but ultimately, of hypothermic conditions. And the girls are starving.
As some critics have suggested, the show’s choice to not only explicitly, but symbolically show the girls eating Jackie, might be intended to mirror the disassociation the girls are likely feeling while eating her. But it is also possible that the feast was not about dissociation so much as a head-on encounter. Cannibalism has a strong presence in Greek mythology, and the toga-clad dinnerwear inspires a return to one of cannibalism’s earliest documented origins. Zeus, the god of sky and thunder, survived his father Cronus’ propensity to cannibalize his children thanks only to his mother’s foresight. Lamia, following her affair with Zeus, and the loss of her children, went on a campaign of child-eating — an act that compelled her to develop the lower body of a snake, transforming from goddess to monster. Yellowjackets’ Jackie-feast is an homage to this lineage. But it is also a recognition of the complex relations between feminism, the monstrous, and the godly. Was Lamia a horrible woman because she ate children? Well, yes. But Cronus ate five of his own and was hardly crucified for it. “Edible Complex” thus seems to ask: Should these girls, too, be prohibited from the kingdom?
Yellowjackets responds to this question by presenting cannibals with whom we come to empathize. Before feasting on Jackie, Shauna, her best friend, offers the eulogy: “I don’t even know where you end, and I begin.” It seems true of their relationship, in which Shauna would shrink and Jackie would grow; they kept secrets from each other, carried guilt and thus one another’s weight; they fed on and off one another, giving and taking, at times starving the other out and at others satiating them with love and attention. It seems true of many relationships. In this moment, Shauna is a cannibal — and a deeply relatable one. More than casting her as irredeemable, Yellowjackets invites viewers to see Shauna as a lost girl in the wilderness, the subject of deeply complicated relationships and deeply compromised conditions.
And therein, perhaps, lies Yellowjackets’ feminist claim to cannibalism: It’s not just a matter of subversively inhabiting the tropes that render bodies mere meat and matter. Maybe it’s about provoking the terms by which bodies as meat come to matter, and what that means for ideas of monstrosity. If the girls of Yellowjackets have been prohibited from the kingdom, the show reflects the dubious architecture of the kingdom itself: how easily one can be prohibited from it, and potentially constrained, objectified, and silenced, within it. The unsavoury, unsettling, and contrarian impulses of these girls have always been there — they just took hold in the wilderness.
Perhaps this is why, when the girls are rescued and granted re-entrance into their “civilized” lives, the darkness seemingly fails to let up – at least in the case of the characters the show follows most closely. Shauna, now a housewife in her forties, takes uneasy pleasure in killing and butchering rabbits, hunted fresh off her manicured lawn. Tai eats dirt and climbs trees at night, a tendency that threatens to exacerbate the public scrutiny she endures as a woman of colour running for State Senator. Another character simply spirals, induced by drugs, alcohol, and a sense of reckless abandon. Despite their efforts to embody expectations — to be a happy housewife, to weather sexist attacks with professional grace, and to clean up their act — these women, now inhabiting “normal lives,” are, it seems, still lost in the wilderness.
Perhaps, this is because of what happened “out there.” As the survivors are reminded, regularly, by colleagues, family, and journalists, they survived an unimaginable trauma. Surely, it would leave anyone scarred and haunted.
Yet it’s also, perhaps, because the better lives these girls are returned to have failed to uphold. Indeed, if anything, Yellowjackets’ scene of cannibalistic feasting gestures to a world where young women are surviving — scrappily taking charge in less-than-favourable circumstances — free of judgement.
Perhaps, Yellowjackets suggests, the wilderness is not such a bad place to be.
Sadie Barker is a student and cultural worker, situated in the field and interests of decolonial cultural studies, and the co-editor of the journal Refractions. Her website is available here.
Further reading
Rutherford, Stephanie. Villain, Vermin, Icon, Kin: Wolves and the Making of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022.