October 15 - 18, 2008 

“I Laid My Hands on a Gorgeous Cannibal Woman:”: Cannibalism, Gender, and Sex in the “Discovery” of the Americas

Kelly Watson

Department of History/American Culture Studies

Bowling Green State University

Estados Unidos

This project interrogates the intersections of gender and cannibalism through an examination of images and texts dating from the sixteenth century that were produced in response to the “discovery” of the Americas. It examines a variety of writings about the New World from the English, French, and Spanish empires. Together, these sources reveal a pattern of interpretation that links both the lands and their inhabitants with femininity and cannibalism. I argue that in the early years of exploration and conquest of the Americas, the figure of the cannibal did not conform to later interpretations of cannibalism as the outlet of hyper-masculine, warrior societies. The early American cannibal was sexualized rather than sexually threatening. This sexualization carried with it an association with the maternal as both miraculous and frightening. Thus, early texts represent the cannibal as an object of desire, eliciting both attraction and repulsion.

Early European texts about the Americas contain vast numbers of references to the practice of cannibalism among the indigenous peoples of the New World. In such accounts, women feature prominently as active participants and instigators of anthropophagus acts. It is not until some time later that the paradigmatic cannibal becomes a virile, masculine warrior (though women still played an important role). While modern historians and anthropologists question the extent of, and indeed the very existence of, American cannibalism, early modern European writings nonetheless maintain at a minimum their discursive existence. Cannibalism represented the utmost savagery and was thoroughly opposed to the civilization project Europeans forcefully imposed in the Americas. Yet, the cannibal was as much a source of fascination as of fear. The peoples of the Americas were linked with cannibalism just as the lands were associated to the bodies of women; landscapes and continents were feminized spaces upon which the masculine process of civilization could be imposed. Thus, the lands of the Americas were feminized and inextricably connected with cannibalism. In these moments of encounter, we can witness an association between the bodies of women, as both consumer and consumed, and cannibalism.

While early modern gender and cannibalism have each been theorized separately, I contend that by linking the two, we can begin to explore new approaches to subaltern history. By examining these boundaries of historical subjectivity, we gain a deeper understanding of how the construction of the colonized, through the concurrent use of the tropes of femininity and cannibalism, lent to the construction of subaltern identities and helped to legitimize European conquest. The early association between cannibalism and women runs parallel to the discourse of the male discoverer charting/conquering female territories as well as the violence exerted on the bodies of Indigenous women. Ultimately, for the “cannibals” of the New World, their presumed savagery led to their destruction. For Europeans, however, cannibalism served as a justification for conquest and a model for dealing with Otherness which had a profound impact on future imperial practices.

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