The Queer Bite: Cannibalism, Gendered Subjectivity, and Postmemory in Yellowjackets

Yellowjackets is a complex cultural text wherein cannibalism functions not merely as a survival mechanism but as a richly symbolic terrain through which the series interrogates collective trauma, embodied memory, queer relationality, and the destabilisation of normative femininity. Set within an intergenerational, dual-timeline structure, the series reframes acts of cannibalism as ritualised performances of abjection that fracture hegemonic constructs of civility, gender, and identity. Drawing on the psychoanalytic frameworks of Julia Kristeva and Melanie Klein, as well as Victor Turner’s theories of liminality and ritual process, cannibalism emerges as a transgressive rite of passage; a mechanism through which the adolescent survivors transition into a feral, sovereign subjectivity, outside the symbolic order. Informed by feminist theory, including Barbara Creed’s ‘monstrous-feminine’ and Carol Clover’s ‘final girl’ paradigm, the research critiques the gendered coding of horror, positioning the female body as a site of both rupture and reconstitution. Through this lens, cannibalism operates not as a sensational trope, but as a semiotic matrix that deconstructs the binaries of human/inhuman, sacred/profane, and feminine/monstrous.