CANNIBAL FEMINISM

Ana Abril / Sao Paulo, Brazil; Jaen, Spain; Utrecht, The Netherlands — Jul 3, 2018

Ana Abril, CANNIBAL FEMINISM, »Refiguring the Feminist Future«, 2018

Concept Text:

The social imaginary around the cannibal situates them as a pre-colonial savage who used their bows and arrows to annihilate colonizers, instead of killing them with firearms, to later prepare them for rituals in which their flesh was eaten. However, the cannibal has been constructed under a colonial gaze and their cosmologies and history have been superficially considered. In the 1920s, in Brazil, a group of intellectuals wanted to revisit and resignify the cannibalistic rituals of the Tupi indigenous people. In so doing, the antropophaghia arose as an artistic and intellectual movement, considered as the Brazilian modernism, which consisted in eating the European and Indigenous culture to, thus, vomit an unique Brazilian cultural identity. Despite its powerful and innovative insights, the antropophaghia still does not consider indigenous cosmologies in its theorization or the power relations between the intellectuality of the movement and the material conditions of the Brazilian population. Moreover, the antropophaghia does not address basic questions of gender, class and race and still falls in the traps of reproducing binarisms. Despite the antropophaghia has been an artistic movement, the aesthetics of the cannibal themselves has never been considered. For that reason, a theory, politics and arts (a cannibal feminism) starting from the antropophaghia but also doing a revisionist project of it appears as an interesting way of rethink questions of subjectivity and identity. Along all the research, I will experiment around the biological and material processes of eating (human flesh), digesting, defecating and puking through the digital aesthetics of the cannibal.

Bio:

I am a cannibal feminist eating, digesting, puking and defecating theory, arts and politics. Currently, I am in my second year of a Mst in Gender and Queer Studies. Despite I entered the academic universe, I do not stop doing my artistic experimentation with video and digital images. I also have a political active life. I used to be journalist, movie maker, maker of movie subtitles, and syndicalist. I am still some of those things. I am a white queer femme (yes, identity politics can be important when grants are at stake).

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