C'est Grave: Raw, cannibalism and the racializing logic of white feminism

Rosalind Galt; Annette-Carina van der Zaag

doi:10.1177/14704129221112972

C'est Grave: Raw, cannibalism and the racializing logic of white feminism

Rosalind Galt, Annette-Carina van der Zaag

Film Studies

Birkbeck, University of London

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

This article addresses the racializing logic of white feminism and its alignment with white heteronormative registers of human life. It does so by considering Julia Ducournau’s (2017) film Raw in relation to cannibalism’s intersections of gender, sexuality and race. The film invokes feminist pleasures, centring on female desire and pitting Justine’s compulsive appetites against an inflexible social hierarchy of gender and species. However, its articulation of cannibal consumption and female subjectivity is dangerously ambivalent. By focusing on the colonial history and racializing logic of the cannibal, this article reads Raw as symptomatic of the subjective formations and social violence of white feminism. Raw portrays cannibalism as a feminist practice of posthuman resistance, but its seductive appeal also produces a troubling ambivalence around non-white and queer bodies, which resonates with black critiques of posthumanism’s reproduction of whiteness.

Original language	English
Journal	Journal of Visual Culture
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/14704129221112972
Publication status	Published - 1 Dec 2022

Keywords

horror
film studies
French cinema
race and racism
feminism

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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10.1177/14704129221112972

Cite this

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C'est Grave: Raw, cannibalism and the racializing logic of white feminism

Abstract

Keywords

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