Fall 2025 - Vol. 22, Issue 4

My stomach is a trash can. For years I said this, half-jokingly, to everyone around me during those awkward and self-conscious days of early adolescence. Back when self deprecation was my primary mode of communication. Back when I wanted people to like me so badly that I was willing to put myself down in return for a modicum of social harmony and acceptance.

“Are you done with that?” I’d ask before my companion had even taken the fork out of their mouth. Last bites, last sips—all of it went to me; I was a veritable food vacuum, a raccoon half-hidden in the alley waiting with a beady glint in her eye. I had all my normal daytime meals like breakfast and lunch, but the true feasting wouldn’t begin until I returned home from school at the end of the day. I had my after-school snack and dinner, of course, but also second dinner, midnight meal, witching-hour soup, before-bed bites, and if I happened to wake up in the middle of the night, I would sneak out into the kitchen for a nibble of cheese and ham like a little house mouse.

My hunger was an unexplained mystery for many years, chalked up to puberty and the normal milestones of childhood development. But then everything else began. Nosebleeds, insomnia, hot flashes, heart palpitations, mood swings. My grades tanked, and I was irritable and uncomfortable all the time. This baffled my family, who generously herded me from doctor to doctor. This process was tedious. Doctors said everything appeared to be functioning normally. “You just have really dry skin. Apply Vaseline to your nostrils before bed,” they’d advise. But the nose bleeds persisted, as did everything else.

This went on until I finally received an official diagnosis on my twelfth birthday: I had Graves’ Disease, an ominously named autoimmune disorder where the thyroid gland over-produces hormones also known as hyperthyroidism. I had been experiencing obvious symptoms for at least two years but likely had it for much longer. Yearbook pictures from the fourth grade indicated that by then I had already developed a goiter, an irregular enlargement of the thyroid gland where the throat looks puffed out, thick and inflamed. No wonder I was so hungry. So angry. The signs were there.

In the first scene of Jennifer’s Body where we see the titular character post-demonic-possession, she stands in her best friend’s (Anita, a.k.a. “Needy’s”) kitchen half-hidden in the dark, clothes soaked through with blood. Her eyes are hazy and unfocused. Needy tentatively calls out to her, to which Jennifer gives a chilling smile in turn, her teeth, lips, and chin stained red. She then abruptly turns and stumbles over to the fridge in a daze, rummaging through its contents before alighting upon something that interests her–a rotisserie chicken. Jennifer squats on the floor, gargoyle-like, and tears open the container to reveal the half eaten chicken. She makes quick work of it. She pulls the carcass apart easily, shreds the meat with her bare hands, and stuffs pieces into her mouth in a mad frenzy. Needy tries to talk her friend out of it (“My mom got that at Boston Market”). In place of an answer, Jennifer’s eyes flash darkly, and she lets out a deafening and inhuman roar, before proceeding to projectile vomit a stream of viscous black liquid that pools onto the kitchen tiles.

There is a similar kitchen scene in Raw, the 2016 coming-of-age body horror film by French director, Julia Ducournau. The film follows Justine, a young girl who embarks on her first year of veterinary school. Justine was raised as a strict vegetarian, but everything changes when she goes through a hazing ritual in which she is coerced into eating a rabbit kidney alongside the rest of her fellow first-years. Soon after, she develops an insatiable craving for meat that becomes increasingly uncontrollable.

Some time after the initiation ceremony, Justine awakens in the middle of the night. She is starving. She sneaks over to the dorm room mini fridge, trying to be as quiet as possible, and rifles desperately through it. But then, footsteps. Her roommate walks in on her. Justine jumps. The fridge door swings partially closed, concealing what she’s holding. “Breakfast,” she explains when her roommate questions her. Though unconvinced, he eventually relents and leaves her alone. The camera pans closer to Justine. Her face, illuminated by the eerie light of the fridge, morphs from a tight and shameful panic into hesitation, then desperation. She pulls a package of raw chicken out. Relief and hunger flood her face. She presses the fillet to her nose, inhaling deeply, and then bites off a chunk of meat, chewing with relish.

There is something secretive and shameful about both of these scenes from Jennifer’s Body and Raw, though this is more pronounced in the latter. The darkness of the room, the low conspiratorial glow of the refrigerator, the hunched over body of the hungry girl. Then, the wild abandon of feasting. The pure thoughtless delight of it. The girl is reduced to primal instinct. Pure animal. Pure desire. But there is also the alienation of this hunger: those who bear witness are repelled, disgusted, and sometimes, frightened. We the movie viewers become witnesses too, bystanders to this moment of intimacy as we watch (with revulsion/interest) the starving girl crouched in the kitchen. We can’t turn away. In fact, the camera zooms in so that we get a front-seat view of the hunger from up close. We can see the texture of the meat, how she delights in eating, stray strips dangling from her lips.

In Julia Kristeva’s seminal work, Powers of Horror, she introduces her theory of abjection–the physical and psychological reaction of revulsion/disgust/fascination that arises when we are met with something that threatens our sense of self, which ranges from the sight of blood and vomit to death and childbirth. Kristeva opens her essay with the example of curdled milk: the moment your lips touch the skin on the surface of the milk and you immediately recoil and gag. Other examples include vomit, fecal matter, and corpses.

The abject is subversive and transgressive. It pushes boundaries and exists within the liminal space between self and other, life and death, subject and object. It is through these distinctions and boundaries that we construct our sense of identity, according to Kristeva. The abject disrupts these borders and destabilizes the structures that we have (logic, meaning, law), reminding us of their fragility. All that transgresses the border must be excluded in service of identity preservation. The boundary must hold. Thus, our response to the abject: revulsion, nausea, disgust.

But abjection covers a wide range. Not only is it the cadaver that fills us with dread through its reminder of our proximity to death, nor is it simply that which inspires disgust. The abject has a dual effect; alongside horror, it draws out a sense of awe (awesomeness/awfulness), wonder, and irresistibility. There is something of the sublime within the abject. It is the inability to take our eyes off of the horrible event: witnessing a car accident or watching a young woman devour raw meat. There is dread as well as rapt fascination because we recognize ourselves in the abject. It is compelling precisely because of its blurred lines between simultaneous familiarity and unfamiliarity.

If the abject repels and compels us, then the girl who incorporates the abject into her own being is one who willingly erases that border (or in Jennifer’s case, very literally, as she hovers between human and demon, both alive and dead). With fascination, we watch the girl who is not only not averse to the abject, but desires it, hungers for it, and wishes to re-incorporate and re-constitute the abject into herself, dissolving her identity within the social and symbolic order with glee. In this process, she becomes that which is abject.

It is, of course, the girls’ meat-craving itself that is unsettling, but it is also their act of unrestrained animalistic consumption within the context of a society that demands restriction, rigidity, and self-control from women. On the surface of it, there couldn’t be any other reason for this behavior besides disorder. The girl who unthinkingly devours must be unwell, possessed, sick, or all of the above. We are revolted but we can’t turn away. So we watch: with horror, in awe. And perhaps for these films’ female audiences, there is a sense of horrified envy as well.

It was quite the marvel for those who knew me during those years before my hyperthyroidism was brought under control. I was ravenous, constantly. On more than one occasion, I was the girl hunched beneath the dim glow of the fridge at ungodly hours, tearing a rotisserie chicken to shreds. I was exhausted and perpetually depleted, often angry for no discernible reason; I would fly into blinding rages that ended in bloody noses, vomiting, sobbing spells. To some extent my anger could be physiologically explained (rapid heart beat, high blood pressure, heat intolerance), but much of it felt distinctly unexplainable. I felt both within and without my body, floating somewhere above myself as I lost control of my words and actions.

But truthfully, I never consciously experienced any sense of disconnect from myself or

my body. The hunger and rage didn’t feel foreign. They were all I’d ever known. Everyone’s

worries about me felt overblown. How could they not see that I was fine. Better than that, I felt

good. Because secretly there was a part of me that enjoyed it: the hunger, the anger, the ability to

excuse my behavior. There was power in this. Anger provided me with strength, just as it

alienated me–not from myself, but from others.

The rage I felt was self-directed but projected outwards, and I gnashed my teeth because I was angry at myself and the world. I couldn’t articulate it into something intelligible. I was lonely and an outsider, a mystery of discordant emotions and behaviors, so I channeled all of this into something I, and everyone else, could understand. Anger was visible; it allowed me to be heard and seen in a way that nothing else seemed capable of. If I was different, then so be it. I would make it everyone else’s problem.

It soon becomes clear that Jennifer’s and Justine’s hunger extend beyond pre-packaged grocery store meat: they crave human flesh. Jennifer embraces this, channeling her already-existing beauty with her new seductive supernatural powers to lure boys and devour them; she is a literal maneater. After feeding, she is all the more beautiful, radiant in a way that seems to drain the life out of everything else around her. When she hasn’t eaten, it shows. A hungry Jennifer stalks through the high school halls, her face drawn and sallow, eyes ringed in dark circles, lips chapped, leeched of life. She chooses another target and so the cycle begins again. For Jennifer, her hunger and the boys’ fear of her are sources of power. Power that is destructive and ultimately self-effacing, certainly, but power nonetheless. She doesn’t care about the collateral damage. It is a sort of revenge, even if not obvious.

Justine takes comparatively longer to give in to her hunger–she does so in starts and stops, nibbles here and there when she can’t resist, but the desire is sheathed when possible. Until it isn’t. Stealing meat from the cafeteria doesn’t cut it anymore, and the harder she resists, the greater the temptations grow. Throughout the movie, the stakes increasingly raise: she bites off someone’s lips while making out, she nibbles on her sister’s severed finger, until finally, in one of the film’s last scenes, we see Justine lying in bed with her dead roommate, large bloody chunks bitten off from his thighs. But Justine truly fights against herself at every turn. She refuses and denies her malformed desires, riding the waves of each withdrawal symptom that manifests. She is utterly at odds with herself and there is so much self hatred, self fear, and self denial. She snaps at her roommate (prior to his death, of course) and gets into a nasty and very public fist fight with her sister. Language is stoppered and replaced by pure unbridled anger.

There is abjection in female rage, too. Something monstrous about a woman who fights and yells and eats voraciously. Something to be subdued and tamed.

I finally had my thyroid removed in 2013, about two years after diagnosis. When I came to, the doctors showed me my excised thyroid: a fat red lump of organic material nearly the size of a fist. My first thought was that it looked like a heart: my heart. I could imagine it pulsing and throbbing, pumping blood through a body that it was no longer a part of, a monstrous creature that had taken on a life of its own now that it was outside of my body. This was the thing that had dictated and controlled my life so completely just hours ago. A parasitic organ, yes; but it was mine. I was revolted and fascinated. This pound of flesh that was once mine, now no longer. I had been turned inside out.

My body held onto this reality longer than it took my brain to process it. My body, like that disembodied thyroid, became something at once alien and familiar to me. Two small plastic canisters were hooked up by tubes to the incision site to capture blood and fluids that drained from my wound. Everything I ate, I threw up almost immediately. My body turned inside out, again and again.

Given that abjection is a process, removing the abject should theoretically stop this process. In Jennifer’s Body and Raw however, the abjection is never fully brought to an end. Like a communicable disease shared amongst those closest, by the final scenes of both films it is clear that abjection has simply been transferred: Jennifer’s best friend kills her but in doing so receives some of her demonic powers; we learn that Justine’s “condition” is matrilineally hereditary and shared by both her mother and sister (and likely any future female progeny Justine may have). The horror multiplies. Continues. Perhaps endlessly.

The first time I finished watching Jennifer’s Body and Raw, I felt overcome by a great sense of satisfaction. Something like contentment, too. It somehow felt right that the anger and abjection didn’t stop with Jennifer or Justine. That their legacies would continue and their marks on would remain, wounds that healed over and reopened and oozed fresh blood. Because abjection is a process of repetition. Newly powerful and enraged, Needy kills the people responsible for Justine’s possession, and we are left with snapshots of bloody hotel room scenes. In Raw’s ending, Justine’s father removes his shirt to reveal his mottled back, the ripped flesh and bloody lines that his wife had chewed off of him. How many more times will this happen? How many more generations? Open endings, I learned, had their own kind of finality to them. Scars held the stories of both the past and the future.

I developed a keloid scar after my operation. It was a thick ridge of raised skin that slashed across my neck, an angry red color that drew attention to it everywhere I went. For years, strangers would ask me about it. Faux concern. Sometimes genuine. Often curious and well-intentioned. I created an index of silly responses I could give (“shark attack,” “you should see the other guy”). To this day, there is still the shadow of Graves’ that remains. A curved sickle of a smile, soft pink, barely noticeable now. My body no longer produces thyroid hormones on its own, so I take medicine for it every day and will continue to for the rest of my life. The ghost of abjection lingers. People don’t ask me about it much anymore, though it does still happen. But from time to time, I come across people with the same scar or similar ones. I remember the thrill of the first time and the quick bond it made of us.

There is something deeply cathartic about witnessing the abject on screen, a special kinship that I found with these hungry and angry women. Their uncontrollability, the insatiability. These women are fucking ravenous, and they are utterly alone because of it. I understood that. But there is also power and kinship in it, a sort of community of abjection that forms in the end. I know that well, too. And if I do decide and am able to have children someday, I hope that they will forgive me for their inheritance.