Devouring Jackie: Cannibalism, colonialism, and the power of female transformation by Aly Laube
1300 words, ~6 minutes reading time
Issue 6 (Fall 2024)
A pack of girls tear voraciously into the corpse of their former leader, sliding meat off phalanges, nibbling morsels off ribs, and gnashing sinew between bloodied lips. They slip in and out of reality, shivering around a smothered pyre one moment and indulging in an abundant Greco-Roman feast the next. In actuality, it’s winter in the Canadian wilderness, where the group has been stranded since the plane transporting their girls’ soccer team went down months ago. When they are done dining, almost nothing is left, bare bones gleaming against snow.
This moment from the second season of Yellowjackets offers a fresh take on cannibalism, eschewing shock value for something more resonant and impactful.
Women eating other women is rare, both onscreen and off (Vamvounis), and here it’s used “as a potent tool for critiquing gender dynamics, power imbalances, dehumanization, and the commodification of bodies” (Gonzalez and Sachar).
The body being consumed belongs to Jackie, the team’s former captain and embodiment of societal ideals. Back home, her leadership, beauty, and social capital were unassailable. That her remains are devoured like all-you-can-eat-barbecue underscores how shallow these qualities are in the face of survival.
Shauna’s dynamic with Jackie is a mix of obsession, competition, and genuine love. She sleeps with her boyfriend and lies to her face about it but continues to idolize and attempt to control Jackie, who doesn’t take kindly to it. This conflict ultimately comes to a head with their final fight, ending in Jackie’s death via hypothermia. Shauna struggles to let go, spending months with her icy corpse and snacking on her friend’s frozen ear post-mortem.
Yet, it is Shauna who ultimately urges her teammates to cannibalize Jackie’s corpse, with a stomach gurgle and the hollow suggestion that “she would want [them] to.” Through consuming her, Shauna strives not only to feed herself, but to connect with her lost friend (Tejada 2023) and traverse the grieving process. As the digestion process continues, Jackie will move through her, creating perceived closeness and a physical ritual to represent an emotional and spiritual experience. In this way, cannibalism can aid in digesting change and loss.
By eating her, Shauna also gets rid of a visual reminder of her friend's passing: "A corpse-in-being, whether buried or not, [offers] a constant reminder of loss, a focus for all the memories that [prolong] the period of grieving," writes Nathan Constantine of an anthropological case study of ritualistic cannibalism. "Eating the corpse [is] eating the grief."
The scene is not overtly sexual, but its mingling of mouths, fruit, and flesh carries an erotic charge. Similarly, though the characters aren’t all canonically queer, I argue the nature of the scene posits it under the umbrella of cannibalistic queer cinema. Cannibalism in queer cinema often symbolizes intimacy, penetration, and control—though traditionally with a focus on gay men (Vamvounis). By exploring these themes through women, Yellowjackets expands representation within survival and cannibal horror.
As we watch them whet their appetites, we must ask ourselves if their actions are forgivable. Is it justifiable if it arises out of a need rather than a want? To answer that, we must explore the morality of cannibalism, which often begins with colonialist narratives.
Cannibalism is historically framed in the West as monstrous and uncivilized, contrasting sharply with some Indigenous practices that treat it as a way to honor the dead. In such contexts, eating another is born of duty and affection, not desperation (Constantine). For some, it’s preferable to burial; one tribesman remarked that it was “better to be inside a warm friend than buried in the cold earth” (Beaver).
Western media often demonizes these traditions, reinforcing white supremacy by portraying Indigenous cultures as savage. The very term “cannibal” stems from Christopher Columbus’ mispronunciation of a Caribbean tribe’s name (Ostrosky and Ardila). Ironically, Europeans had practiced cannibalism themselves—though often as a last resort—long before “discovering” it elsewhere.
Cannibalism, when chosen rather than forced, can be “about creation and love as much as it is about containment and destruction” (Vamvounis). By depicting Jackie’s consumption as both horrifying and tender, Yellowjackets challenges the West’s moral absolutism. Replacing media portrayals that serve colonial and oppressive aims is part of the slow change needed to create greater societal shifts. Eating Jackie disrupts the dominant narrative of cannibalism as depravity.
As a symbol of patriarchal control, Coach Scott would probably disagree. The lone adult man in the situation is a fitting representation of “normal Western society," which includes all the misogynistic ideals that would have limited the girls and benefited him. He, as a horrified witness to the cannibalization of Jackie, continues to impose these oppressive standards on the group, deeming them irredeemable monsters when he could have made an attempt to understand or be helpful to suffering youth. His inability to adapt to the girls’ evolving perspectives mirrors society’s broader resistance to dismantling traditional power structures. In this new reality, his moral rigidity becomes a liability.
Jonathan Liscoe, the episode’s writer, noted how this period of survival allowed the girls to exist outside societal expectations: “Despite the terrible trauma… this was weirdly one of the freest times they’ll ever have in their life” (Hadadi),” he said.
“The idea that he abstains now has the potential to weaponize the young women against him, because in-group/out-group politics develop. Because he abstained, he must think he’s superior to them. He must think what they did was awful and evil, and they feel judged by that.”
The act of eating Jackie is not just survival; it’s a shared rite of passage, a testament to their resilience and solidarity. It’s an act of collective liberation and transformation that doesn’t need to be framed as inherently wrong, even though the surviving members continue to carry shame for their actions.
How they will continue to react remains to be seen. As the next season approaches, set to debut Valentine’s Day 2025, we can only hope for another convention-defying exploration of survival, grief, and transformation—perhaps with another memorable cannibalism scene to dig into. Bon appetite!
Sources
1. Beaver, Dan. “Flesh or fantasy: Cannibalism and the meanings of violence.” Ethnohistory, vol. 49, no. 3, 1 July 2002, pp. 671–685
2. Collin, Peter. “You Are Who You Eat: Cannibalism As A Symbol Of Family Breakdown In The Horror Film.” The Projector, vol. 13, no. 2, 2013, pp. 64–95.
3. Constantine, Nathan. A History of Cannibalism: From Ancient Cultures to Survival Stories. Arcturus Publishing, 2006.
4. Gonzalez, Carlos, and Sachar, Cassandra. “Goremands: Human Cannibalism and Eating the Other in Contemporary Fiction.” No More Haunted Dolls: Horror Fiction That Transcends the Tropes, Vernon Press, 2024, pp. 23–40
5. Hadadi, Roxana. “‘Who’s Gonna Throw Up First?’ ‘Edible Complex’ Writer Jonathan Lisco Dissects Yellowjackets’ Long-Awaited Feast.’” Vulture, 31 Mar. 2023
6. Kerstin Knopf. “‘The Exquisite Horror of Their Reality’: Native and ‘White’ Cannibals in American and Canadian Historiography and Literature .” F(e)Asting Fitness? Cultural Images, Social Practices, and Histories of Food and Health, Trier, 2013, pp. 19–36, Accessed 20 Nov. 2024.
7. Murphy, Bernice M. “Backwoods Nightmares: The Rural Poor as Monstrous Other.” The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture, 2013, pp. 133–134.
8. Ostrosky, Feggy, and Alfredo Ardila. “Cannibalism.” Neuropsychology of Criminal Behavior, 1st ed., Routledge, 2017, p. 9
9. Tejada, Anastasia M. “Your Master Butcher: The Rhetoric of Consent in Cannibalism.” University of Nevada, Reno ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, May 2023, pp. 1–75.
10. Vamvounis, Sarah Mallory. “Devoted, Desiring, Devouring: Cannibalistic Queer Female Intimacies.” Rutgers University Community Repository, RUcore, rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/72581/. Accessed 20 Nov. 2024.
11. Wiegand, Erin E. “Who Can Be Eaten?” What’s Eating You: Food and Horror on Screen, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017, pp. 253–255.